Introduction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE WINDSOR BORDER REGION INTRODUCTION A. VISITORS BEFORE 1700 THIS historical survey is intended to serve as an introduction to a series of documents relating to the exploration and settlement of Canada's southernmost frontier. A glance at the map of Canada suffices to locate that frontier-the Detroit River region.1 At 42° latitude the eye quickly focuses on a 20-by-30-mile rectangular peninsula whose south, west, and north shores are washed by the waters of Lake Erie, the Detroit River, and Lake St. Clair respec- tively. Today this peninsula is Essex County in the Province of Ontario. Local Chambers of Commerce refer to it as the Sun Parlour of Canada. A recent book which records the development of the county and its chief city, Windsor, during the past century is entitled Garden Gateway to Canada. These last two appellations indicate its frontier position, its mild climate, and its fertile fields. The exploration of the Detroit River region was retarded by the warring expeditions of the Father of New France. In 1609 and 1615, when Champlain accompanied Algonquin and Huron Indians on forays against their Iroquois enemies, whose strongholds were located between the Hudson and Genesee rivers in the present State of New York, he sealed the friendship between the French and the Hurons and Algonquins. At the same time, however, he provoked later alignments of the Iroquois with their Dutch and English neighbours of the Atlantic seaboard, because the savages became convinced that the French were the allies of their Indian enemies. Because of this enmity of the Iroquois for the French, for half a century the French explorers and missionaries could not follow the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario in their westward journeys. Instead they paddled and portaged up the Ottawa River to Lake Nipissing, then down the French River into Georgian Bay at a point directly east of the Straits of Mackinac, connecting Lakes Huron and Michigan. As a consequence all the upper lakes were explored before Lake Erie. Despite the Iroquois road-block on the Lake Ontario route to the interior of the continent, the historical beginnings of the strait between Lakes Huron and Erie reach back into the first half of the seventeenth century. By the Ottawa route Father Jean de Brebeuf lThe French word derroit means a strait. The early explorers considered the whole water connection between Lakes Huron and Erie as Le Detroit, Lake St. Clair being only a bulge in the strait. xxix XXX THE WINDSOR BORDER REGION and his companions in 1626 reached the country of the Hurons on the southern shore of Georgian Bay. These Indians had been chosen as the object of the first Jesuit missionary effort in the West because they were less migratory than the other tribes. While striving to evangelize this nation, the blackrobes did not close their eyes to other possible fields of apostolic endeavour which lay beyond the boundaries of Huronia. As early as 1640 they had detailed know- ledge of the territory to the south, where were located the villages of the Neutral nation, 2 and at least a general notion of the strait between Lakes Huron and Erie ( A 1 ) . Where had they obtained this information? Some of it had likely come from Joseph de La Roche d'Aillon, Recollet missionary, who in 1626 had spent some time among the Neutral nation, "of which the interpreter (Brusle) has told wonders."3 Information might also have been supplied by Etienne Brule himself, who is believed to have been the first European to gaze upon the waters of Lake Erie. Moreover, the Relation of 1640-!4 tells of many Frenchmen from Huronia who, in the past, had penetrated into the country of the Neutrals for purposes of trade. On their return these traders were no doubt interrogated and any geographical knowledge thus obtained was entered on maps drawn at the mission headquarters of Ste. Marie among the Hurons.5 These reports about the extent of this nation to the south kindled the zeal of the Jesuits, and in the fall of 1640 Fathers Brebeuf and Chaumonot left the country of the Hurons to spend the winter preaching the Gospel to the Neutrals. The Relation of 1640-1 2Some historians relying mostly on early maps assign to the Neutral nation the whole northern shore of Lake Erie from the Niagara to the Detroit rivers. Others basing their opinion on written documents tend to restrict the villages of the Neutrals to the Niagara district (both sides of the river) and a small area at the western end of Lake Ontario. 3For an account of La Roche d'Aillon's excursion into the Neutral country, see Father Christian Leclerq, First Establishment of the French in New France, I, 263-70. 4The Jesuit missionaries in North America sent every year to their Canadian Superior at Quebec an account of their activities. These letters were combined into a long narrative called a Relation, which was sent to the Provincial in Paris. There they were printed by Sebastien Cramoisy. The Relations proper begin in 1632 and continue to 1673. In 1858 the Dominion government published in French a three-volume edition of these Jesuit Relations. From 1896 to 1901 Reuben Gold Thwaites edited a page-for-page translation of the Relations, to which he added a mass of related documentary material. This imposing publication com- prising seventy-three volumes is known as The Jesuit Relations and Allied Docu- ments, hereafter referred to as Thwaites, Jesuit Relations. 5On the right bank of the River Wye, about three miles east of the town of Midland, Ontario. INTRODUCTION xxxi describes this winter tour of the missionaries, and states that they were well received by a certain strange nation at a village called Khioetoa, 6 which they renamed the Mission of St. Michel ( A 2). On his return to Huronia in March 1641, Chaumonot drew a map of this journey, but no copy can be found today. However, that map very likely served as a basis for two others that were issued within the next two decades. In 1656 Sanson d' Abbeville, geographer to the King, published at Paris a map showing the full extent of Lake Erie and its connection with Lake Huron through what are now known as the Detroit River, Lake St. Clair, and River St. Clair (see Fig. 1). Therefore, as early as 1656, and possibly much earlier, certain persons had explored the strait sufficiently to make a fairly accurate map of the waters and the adjacent land. In 1660 the Jesuit historian Du Creux issued a map which differs only slightly from Sanson's. On both these maps Lake St. Clair is named Lac des Eaux de Mer (Salt Water Lake), which suggests that some of the information had come at least indirectly from the Indians, who were always willing to "oblige" the explorers looking for the South Sea. Information was also derived from the Jesuits, possibly from Chaumonot's map, because on both maps there is marked the location of a number of their missions. The Mission of St. Michel is located on the Canadian side of the Detroit River near the present city of Windsor. Hence we must reckon with the possibility that Fathers Brebeuf and Chaumonot may have reached the Detroit River region in the winter of 1640-1. The Relation of 1641-2 reveals that the Jesuits were withdrawn from such outlying missions as a consequence of Father Lalemant's policy of concentrating all missionary efforts among the Hurons until the entire tribe should be converted. 7 The result of this policy was that some 3,000 persons were baptized in the two years prior to the spring of 1649.8 This was the year of the martyrdom of the Jesuits and the destruction of the Huron villages by the Dutch- armed Iroquois. The remnants of the Hurons fled in every direction. Some three hundred of them, after various sojourns, settled at Lorette near Quebec, and their descendants are there to this day. Others made their way to the islands in Georgian Bay and to the northern shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan and even to Wisconsin. After the 6It is important to note that the village of Khioetoa was inhabited by a strange nation, not by Neutral Indians. Hence its location near the Detroit River cannot be used to establish the extent of the territory of the Neutral nation. 7Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, XXIII, 179-81. 8/bid., XXXIII, 69, 257. xxxii THE WINDSOR BORDER REGION dispersal of the Hurons, the Iroquois carried the terrors of their ferocious prowess southwest to the Petuns or Tobacco nation and then southward to the land of the Neutrals. By 1651 the whole of western Ontario including the Essex County peninsula was nothing but the unpopulated hunting grounds of the Iroquois. In 1666 the Iroquois spirit was temporarily tamed when the Mohawk strongholds were destroyed by the Carignan-Salieres Regiment. The St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario route was now open to the French, and the explorers and missionaries lost little time in taking advantage of it. In 1669 Robert Cavelier de La Salle was preparing near Montreal an expedition to the southwest in order to explore the Ohio River, which was believed to empty into the South Sea, and thereby find a way to China. Governor Remy de Courcelles urged Fran~ois Dollier de Casson, a Sulpician priest, to join the expedition. Rene Brehant de Galinee, a deacon, was sent as Dollier's companion9 and recorded the events of the journey. Galinee's Journal unfolds one of the most interesting stories of early American exploration (A 3 ).