The Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook of Grand River by Mabel Dunham

This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com.

This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE.

This eBook was produced by: John Routh & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks are due to Mr. and Mrs. Hilton Hill, of the Six Nations Reservation, to Mr. and Mrs. G. W. Broomfield, of Brantford, to Mrs. Ethel Bate, of Dunnville, to Mr. Frank I. Abbott, Commissioner of the Canada Company, Toronto, to Mr. R. Thomas Orr, of Stratford, to Dr. J. J. Talman, of the University of Western Ontario, London, to Mrs. S. C. Tolan, of Niagara Falls, and to Mr. Frank McIntyre, of Dundalk, for material help in the preparation of this book.

But above all, an overwhelming debt of gratitude goes to the Kitchener Public Library for the use of its books and facilities.

PEOPLE OF THE LONG HOUSE

A League of Indian Nations

In the long ago, when European explorers discovered the New World, they found a number of aboriginal tribes, whom they called Indians, presuming that they were the inhabitants of India. But ethnologists of a later day, noting the prominence of their cheekbones, the litheness of their bodies and the pigmentation of their skins, have identified them as Mongolians. It is now generally believed that they crossed the narrow Behring straits in prehistoric times and gradually overran the continent.

Of all the Indian people the most intelligent, and the most blood-thirsty, were those who had settled on the banks of the great river which yawns into the Atlantic, and the region of the Finger Lakes, south of Lake Ontario. The French named them the Iroquois, but they called themselves rather boastfully the Men of Men.

To their Indian neighbours, however, they were the People of the Longhouse because they lived, not like most of their race in tents and tepees, but in wooden shanties of great length, so long in fact that as many as a dozen families were sometimes domiciled under a single roof. Several such longhouses comprised a village, which the inhabitants guarded with stockades or palisades of logs. These encampments were usually found on the side of a hill and near a lake or river and the people lived there generation after generation, cultivated their maize until the soil had lost its fertility and fished and hunted until game was scarce. Instinct told them then it was time to move on to a new environment.

The Men of Men who lived in the Finger Lakes region were divided into five strong, independent nations, each of whom had its own more or less well-defined location. Farthest east, the fierce Mohawks, who loved running water, had built their longhouses on the banks of a beautiful river, the Mohawk. The other four had settled on the shores of four lakes, which bear the tribal names to this day. From east to west they were the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas and the Senecas.

Manitou, their God, had taught them how to build their longhouses. He showed them how to bend the pliable saplings of the hickory tree into supporting arches for the structures and how to cover their roofs and walls with slabs of bark so ingeniously lashed together that neither wind nor rain could penetrate. He helped them to make heavy oaken doors to hang at either end of their longhouses and to equip them with wooden latches and hinges. He designed the interiors for their safety and convenience, separating the families with partitions of bark and animal skins and dispersing the smoke from their fireplaces through holes in the roof. A passageway six feet wide connected the doors in the end walls and provided space for storage. Here, too, the people of the household slept in perfect security while the young men, with tomahawks in their hands, stood guard in the end rooms ready to defend the longhouse against any lurking foe.

Their foes were many. The settlement in the Finger Lakes district, at times a peaceful habitation, was oftener a frontier of massacre and devastation. The Men of Men were feared and hated most by their neighbors, the Algonquins in the north country and the Hurons, their cousins, who lived on the southern shore of the water now known as Georgian Bay. When bored by a prolonged peace with these foreign powers, the Men of Men did not hesitate to stir up a diversionary dissension within their own circle of nations. These quarrels were always the bitterest and bloodiest of all.

In spite of their savagery, the Men of Men were people of imagination. They had a remarkable philosophy of life, which the whites have never been able fully to comprehend. They believed that the sun, the moon, and the stars, the mountains, the lakes and rivers, the animals of the forest, the birds in the treetops, yes, and they themselves were all part and parcel of the Great Spirit of the Universe. This All-Being, their Manitou, was the Creator of all Life and the Giver of all Good. He had made the Men of Men in his own likeness; he had engraved his own image on their hearts.

The folklore of the Men of Men is a blending of fact and fiction so delightfully interwoven that it is difficult to distinguish warp from woof. It pictures a world peopled with spirit personalities of both animate and inanimate life. The birds chattered and were understood. Every gushing water-spring revealed the presence of a wood nymph in a fairyland of romance. The language of the People of the Longhouse was vital and surprisingly picturesque. Their legends were facts clothed in the habiliments of fancy.

The greatest of these is concerned with the political union of their five nations, the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas and the Senecas, sometime in the sixteenth century. It is based on the solid rock of historical fact, but like a sheet whose four corners are firmly secured, it has danced in the wind with the fairies.

The scene is laid in the region of the Finger Lakes with a background unspoiled by the white man. There are joint heroes, two great visionaries, who sought only the good of their people. The villain is the powerful chief of the Onondagas, who thought only of his own glory. Good triumphed ultimately over evil, the villain is drawn within the circle of love and the heroes were able to lead the five nations into a lasting confederacy, a family of nations.

Dekanawida enters first. He is old and dejected. Once he had been a proud chief of the Hurons, honoured and respected by his fellowmen. But he carped so continuously about international peace and brotherhood that the Hurons cast him out as a hopeless fanatic.

He came then in disgrace to the People of the Longhouse and attached himself to the fierce Mohawks. But he had not rid himself of his eccentricity. As he had opportunity, he continued to preach the doctrine of goodwill among men and nations. But the Mohawks were not remotely interested in peace. It was their proud boast that their warriors were the fiercest, the most intrepid, east of the Mississippi.

“Peace, indeed,” scoffed the chiefs. “A perpetual alliance, he says. Forget not that this peacemonger is a Huron. He has come to destroy our mighty nation.”

Disappointed, Dekanawida retired finally from public life and spent his life in lonely contemplation. He mourned night and day for the Mohawks and prayed fervently that their hard hearts might be softened.

The old man was sitting one day on the bank of a creek, sorrowful and utterly dejected, when he saw on the surface of the water a strange apparition. A young man, tall and handsome, was approaching in a magic, pure-white, birch-bark canoe. His face glowed with a strange light and from his shoulders hung festoons of white sea-shells like those which filled the bottom of his canoe. Dekanawida rejoiced and took courage, for he knew that among the Men of Men white sea-shells were a token of friendship and good will.

“Light your fires and roast your corn,” he cried to a group of Mohawk women. “Here comes a stranger bearing white shells, the symbol of peace.”

The women only nudged each other and smiled. The old man had such foolish notions.

Dekanawida did not wait for an answer. With beaming face he was advancing to greet the stranger.

Hiawatha was his name, the young man said. He was by birth a Mohawk, though by adoption an Onondaga, and he had incurred the hatred of Atotarho, the chief of the Onondagas, by advocating international peace among all the People of the Longhouse. Driven out by the Onondagas, he had come again to his own people.

Dekanawida saw in all this the hand of Manitou. He knew at once that the All-Being had sent Hiawatha to the Mohawks so that they two might work together, youth and old age, to bring the boon of peace to all the nations of the longhouse.

Hiawatha was, in spite of his youth, a man of broad vision with a deep understanding of life and its perplexities. His heart warmed to Dekanawida, for he saw in him a brother-outcast who had tasted, as he had himself, the bitterness of disillusionment.

But Hiawatha had an assurance which the other did not possess. In an hour of dejection he had been cheered by a voice, that seemed to come out of the nowhere. It must have been Manitou’s, for it spoke to him with unmistakable authority.

“Thou shalt make a silver chain of five links,” it had said. “But go first to the land of the Onondagas and find there a tree whose head is lost in the clouds. Under its shadow shalt thou build a longhouse for the five nations who live between the Mohawk and the Niagara. Its doors shall open, one to the sunrise, the other to the sunset. With a silver chain of five links shalt thou bind the five nations and with a belt of wampum, and every year at an appointed time shalt thou brighten the chain, lest it become dimmed and the house decay and the tree wither. Thou shalt do this forever, that a terrible destruction fall not upon the people of the five nations.”

Dekanawida listened intently, absorbed, fascinated. This was the very message the Great Spirit had tried to impart to him, but he was too old, too dull of intellect to comprehend.

Hiawatha continued: “These shall be the laws of the longhouse, for so the voice did tell me. If any nation submit to the league, there shall be peace with it and its link shall be added to the chain. If any hurt not the league, the league shall hurt it not. But if the hindermost cub of the league shall be snapped at, the wolf pack shall be on the hunter’s scent.”

“Did you tell this to the Chief of the Onondagas?” asked Dekanawida, incredulously.

“In those very words,” replied Hiawatha. “They are engraven on my heart and on my mind. But Atotarho flew into a violent rage, cursed me for a fool and drove me from his presence.”

“Some day we shall go again to Atotarho,” said Dekanawida. “But first let us discuss the plan with the Mohawks. I tried to tell them but I did not understand myself. Besides I am old and I have a stammering tongue. They would not listen to me. You are young, and handsome and ready of speech. They will give heed to you.”

So the two men went together to the Council House of the Mohawks. The chiefs listened attentively while Hiawatha pleaded with inspired words for peace among the nations of the longhouse. They sat then in silent meditation for several hours, as their custom was, before debating the question. The final decision was that while they could never consent to an alliance with the Onondagas, they would be willing to bind themselves by a small silver chain of two links with their neighbours, the inoffensive Oneidas.

This was good news and a fair beginning. The two men journeyed then to the land of the Cayugas and the Senecas, and succeeded in binding those two nations with a small chain of two links.

The news of these unusual proceedings enraged the Onondagas. Atotarho swore that he would break the league over the back of his mountains, for the Onondagas lived on very high land in the very middle of the settlements of the Men of Men.

“Tell Atotarho and all his warriors that our league is higher than the hills of the Onondagas,” retorted Hiawatha.

Both peacemakers knew only too well that they could never form a league of nations by clever repartee. Sooner or later, they must meet Atotarho, unsightly monster though he was, with a hundred fiery serpents sprouting from his head and hanging about his shoulders. There was one for every evil, inhuman thought, his warriors boasted, and they recoiled and hissed venom whenever anger flashed from their master’s face.

The day came when Dekanawida and Hiawatha climbed the mountains to the land of the Onondagas. They found Atotarho in his great chair surrounded by a corps of warriors no less formidable than his reptile guard.

It had been agreed that Dekanawida should be the spokesman. With studied cajolery he soothed the monster’s fiery temper and lulled the serpents to sleep. At a sign from Atotarho the warriors, too, dropped their weapons and listened. They heard Dekanawida promise that if the Onondagas would join the league of nations, the Council should meet every year in their mountains under a pine tree whose head is in the clouds. And Atotarho should be the greatest chief in the Council. It should be his prerogative to light the fire which should summon the chiefs and sachems from afar.

This concession to his power interested Atotarho profoundly. But he scowled suddenly and demanded to know how many chiefs it was proposed to invite to the general council.

“And how many from the Onondagas?” persisted Atotarho. This was a signal for a hundred serpents to hiss in chorus their master’s suspicion and distrust.

The original plan had been to allow each nation to choose ten of its chiefs for the Council, but with a quick glance at Hiawatha, who sat in a corner, Dekanawida answered without a moment’s equivocation: “There shall be nine chiefs from each of the smaller nations, but the Onondagas shall have fourteen.”

At the request of the Chief of the Onondagas, Hiawatha elaborated the proposed form of government.

“The people of the five nations shall live together,” he said, “like five families in a longhouse. The Mohawks and the Senecas shall be the keepers of the dawn and the sunset, for they are mighty nations and able to guard the longhouse from all its enemies. But the Onondagas are mightiest of all. They shall sit in the centre of the Council and they shall be the final judges in all the deliberations of the five nations.”

Atotarho’s satisfaction was now complete. He reached for his calumet, a large pipe of multi-coloured marble. Its long stem was decorated with strands of women’s hair and its bowl was surmounted by a pair of partially-decayed lovebirds. Atotarho puffed for a while then passed the pipe to Dekanawida and, later, to the silent Hiawatha. He was in a generous mood now. He hoped that all animosity among the three of them would be dispelled like smoke lost in the air.

They smoked in turn until the going down of the sun. Then Atotarho reached for his pipe, drew a few perfunctory puffs and returned it carefully to its place in his treasure-chest. “This calumet,” he said, craftily, “shall remain forever in the keeping of the principal Chief.”

So the key link was added to the chain of five and the success of the proposed confederacy of the five nations was assured. When it suited his convenience, Atotarho lighted a fire in his highest mountain and summoned the fifty chiefs to the ceremony of the inauguration of the League of Nations. He was a genial host, welcoming his guests in person and conducting them to a beaver meadow under his tallest pine tree. There he had built a longhouse, which was to be a House of Silence for the meditations of the representatives of the Men of Men.

On six consecutive mornings the chiefs entered the longhouse at sunrise and sat in deep contemplation until evening. On the seventh day all discord had been dispelled. Hiawatha was then able to cement the union with an appropriate ceremony in the presence and with the unqualified approval of all the chiefs. The League of Nations became a reality.

The promoters of agreement had planned meticulously all the details of the organization. They divided each nation into clans, of which there might be eight, the clan of the wolf, the bear, the beaver, the turtle, the deer, the snipe, the heron and the pigeon-hawk. The members of the same clan, both men and women, were to be closer than brothers and sisters, though they belonged to different nations, and marriage was forbidden among them. Children were to inherit the clan affiliations of their mother. By this ingenious method it was proposed to divide the five nations into eight family groups bound together with the iron hands of blood and intermarriage.

The confederacy succeeded beyond the highest hopes of its founders. It functioned so satisfactorily that to this day it is regarded as a most remarkable political structure. Except for the Achaean League of Ten Towns in ancient Greece, of which the Indians had not so much as heard, it was the world’s first adventure in international relations. Its success is attested by the fact that it held five war-minded nations in check from its inception until its enforced dissolution by the Declaration of Independence, in 1776.

The official documentary record of the organization of the Confederacy of the Five Nations is on public exhibition in the New York State Museum, at Albany. It is a strip of wampum called Hiawatha’s Belt, but whether Hiawatha made it, or Dekanawida, or both, nobody knows. The document is unique, for no words are found on it, and no signatures, but it gives, without possibility of misconception, a true representation of the bond by which Hiawatha cemented together the five great nations of the Men of Men.

The belt is made from wampum beads measuring a quarter of an inch in diameter. These had been cut from sea-shells like those which Hiawatha brought in his magic canoe. When strung on twisted threads of slippery elm, thirty-eight rows of dark purple beads were arranged to form a mat twenty-one and a half inches long and ten and a half wide. The colour represented the ill-will and national hostility which had existed among the nations before the time of confederacy.

On this dark background five motifs were worked with pure-white beads, symbols of peace and harmony. These indicate the five nations of the League in their geographical order. On the left are two hollow squares for the western nations, the Senecas and the Cayugas; on the right, two similar squares for the Oneidas and the Mohawks, in the east. A large heart in the centre represents the powerful Onondagas. Two parallel lines of white beads join each motif to the next. Reverse the belt and the location of the nations is not altered, but the symbol for the Onondagas becomes a tree, reminiscent of the great pine tree which witnessed the birth of the Confederacy. In its entirety the belt conveys the idea of love, peace and charity among five nations which have risen above their traditions of hatred, jealousy and constant warfare.

His work accomplished, Hiawatha stepped into his magic canoe, turned its prow to the west and drifted noiselessly away toward the setting sun into the land of the forever. But Hiawatha is not dead. Both he and Dekanawida live to-day as heroes, half gods, half men, in the worshipful hearts of their own people.

The New York State Museum has an interesting collection of models of people of the Five Nations. They are grouped in characteristic poses and they represent the Indians as they were long ago before they were degraded by the vices of the white men and the infusion of white blood. These are said to be the finest ethnological statues in existence. The collection includes several models of Canadian Indians who live, or lived, at the Indian village of Ohsweken, on the Grand River.

The Museum is the custodian of many other priceless belts which belonged to the Five Nations. A few of these were acquired by purchase, but most of them were donated by that Chief of the Onondagas who had been left in possession of all the treasures of the Confederated Nations when the union was dissolved, in 1776. The gift was made in 1898, with the consent of all the nations of the union resident in the United States at that time. The only condition imposed was that they should be kept to all perpetuity in a fire-proof vault.

The Five Nations became The Six Nations when the Tuscaroras came from South Carolina to spread their blanket among the Men of Men. This occurred sometime between 1712 and 1722, according to varying reports. The addition made no change in the organization of the Confederacy, for the Tuscaroras were treated at first as infants. They were compelled to wear swaddling clothes and to perform many menial services before they were considered to have reached maturity in the family of the Six Nations. For several years the only recognition given the Tuscaroras in the Council meetings was an extra cheer at the close of the session. Ultimately, they earned the right to vote and to hold title to their own lands.

The French called the Confederacy of Six Nations by a name which is widely used to this day—the Iroquois, meaning Real Adders. The history of the Indian wars indicates that this appellation was not undeserved.

The Coming of the Palefaces

For all their political ingenuity, the Confederacy were too few in number and too primitive by nature to develop the limitless resources of the immense territory which was theirs by right of possession.

It had never occurred to the Indian people that life might hold for them a fuller, richer experience than their nomadic existence. Had they not all they needed, a roof over their heads, a fertile spot to plant their maize and a near-by hunting ground? Not a day passed but their Manitou sent them a few pigeons, or a good-sized fish from lake or river, and never had they lacked a shank of venison for a tribal feast. They were content.

Their God was a personal and an intimate friend with whom they might communicate every hour of every day. He spoke to them in the swaying of the tree tops, in the chattering of chipmunks and in the calls of the moose. And they, in turn, gave him thanks for every victory over their enemies, for food to eat and raiment to wear. Six times a year they offered him publicly their oblation with feasting and dancing, from the flowing of the sap to the killing of the white dog on the coldest night of the year.

But Manitou had never warned them of the coming of the palefaces. Never had he so much as hinted that he was not pleased with his dark-skinned people, nor that he needed a paleskin race to dig the earth’s treasures of silver, nickel, coal and precious gold. They never dreamed that he would give the palefaces his tallest timbers to build houses and churches, schools and factories and huge boats to carry furs and food on the Great Lakes.

And yet, on the whole, they were not disgruntled about the coming of the palefaces. Manitou must have willed it so. He had invited men to come from the east, to bring to the New World the cream of their culture and the purest of their traditions. “There is room,” he had told them, “room for your thinkers, your men of vision, your lovers of freedom. Come, and I will make of you a great people. Your sons and your daughters shall build here a new nation, a nation that will save the Old World from the destruction of its own vomit and bring in a millennium of peace and goodwill in the earth.”

The people of Europe took up the challenge. Turning their backs upon an unhappy past, thousands found their way to this western land of promise. True, some of them used the boundless resources of the New World wantonly for their own gratification and aggrandizement. They scattered tares in the land. But there were many earnest, purposeful souls who sought the common good through service to others. To these the All-Being whispered the secrets of the universe. He showed them how to use the forests, the ore deposits, the waterpowers and the rich, virgin soil to make life easier and richer for men and for little children everywhere.

No doubt the Indians evinced great surprise and an absorbing interest when they first encountered the white man. There was curiosity, combined perhaps with a twinge of jealousy. James Buchanan, has described in his Sketches of the History, Manners and Customs of the North American Indians (Lond., 1824) his conception of the meeting of the two races.

A group of Indian fishermen saw a strange something at sea, off the Atlantic coast. In the distance it seemed like a monstrous, ill-shapen hulk floating on the surface of the water. An immense fish, perhaps, or a huge shack. No one could say. But it was alive, for with obvious effort it kept moving nearer and nearer to the shore.

Gradually the figures of men became discernible. It was Manitou, the Indians decided. Manitou was coming to visit them. He was bringing with him his house and his servants.

Never had they seen Manitou in the flesh. This would be an occasion long to be remembered. The men left their nets on the shore and ran to their tents to prepare for the coming of the deity. They brought their idols and their images and placed them on exhibition. Manitou must be received with dignity and religious punctiliousness. The women hastened to prepare the meat for the sacrificial offering and the victuals for the celebration of the feast and dance, which would follow the ceremony.

The spectacle was drawing ever nearer to the shore. Every few minutes volunteer runners brought in excited reports of its progress. They could say now with certainty that it was a shack, but such a shack as they had never seen. It was decorated with fabrics of many bright colours and crowded with strange-looking men dressed in curious apparel. One of the runners declared that he had heard them speak in guttural voices. Another said he had seen the owner of the shack. He could be none other than Manitou, for he wore a red garment trimmed with bands of yellow and all his men bowed low when they addressed him.

Nearer and nearer came the apparition, while all the Indians watched its every movement. They saw Manitou’s servants throw heavy canoes into the water and leap to the shore. Frightened, they ran and formed a circle about their religious relics.

Manitou came then and stood before them resplendent in his robes of strange texture. They saw then that he was white. Their Manitou was white! They had supposed that he would be like themselves, dark of skin, for there was a tradition among them that Manitou had made them in his own image. Behind, walked his retinue of attendants. They, too, were white and they wore most unusual clothes. Not a single animal skin among them.

The Indians stood in silence with heads deferentially lowered. Presently the most honourable of all the chiefs approached the deity and bowed low. He pointed to the sacrifice on the altar.

But Manitou and his men did not so much as glance at the idols and the food prepared for the sacrifice. Neither did they intend to stand on ceremony. They stared for a moment at the tongue-tied chief, then broke into a roar of convulsive laughter.

One of the servants had brought with him a heavy gourd and several cups. He poured a little liquid from the gourd into one of the cups and handed it to the Manitou with mock ceremony. The deity gulped it down with gusto to the last drop.

The man with the gourd filled a second cup and offered it to the most honourable of the chiefs. Cautiously, the Indian lifted the cup to his mouth, smelled it, then passed it to his nearest neighbor. Each of the chiefs did the same. The cup passed from hand to hand around the circle until it came again to the honourable chief, who stood beside Manitou.

Valiant warrior though he was, he dared not drink the contents of that cup. He lifted his eyes and glanced awkwardly at Manitou. Would he consider it a discourtesy, he wondered, if none of the Indians would drink the potion from his cup. Would he wreak vengeance upon their innocent heads?

There was a terrible moment of indecision. Then the chief, mighty and well-beloved, stepped out from the ring and stood before the deity. He was willing, he said, to sacrifice his life in the drinking of the cup, if by so doing he might save his brothers from destruction. So saying, he bade his friends a solemn farewell and quaffed the liquor.

Every eye was fixed upon the martyr. In a moment his friends saw him stagger and fall prostrate to the ground. Hurrying to him, they picked him up and mourned over his body.

At this, Manitou’s party subdued their laughter and retired without commotion to their house on the water, leaving only the gourd and the fatal cup.

Presently, as if by some miraculous power, the prostrate chief stirred. Soon he had revived sufficiently to stand before his astonished friends who crowded about him eager to hear what he had to say. Manitou’s water was liquid fire, he told them. It burned his throat, but it brought to him the most delightful experience of his life.

The Indians chuckled, glanced at the gourd and crept away stealthily one by one to drink from the cup. They drank until the gourd was empty, then lay around for two days, like dead men, experiencing their first drunken carousal.

When the effects of the liquor had passed, Manitou and his men returned, this time without the inebriating cup. Instead, they brought and distributed among the Indians a collection of curious presents, beads, stockings, axes, hoes, and many other useful articles, which the recipients promptly turned to strange uses, dangling the implements from their shoulders like ornaments and filling the stockings with tobacco.

Manitou came again the following winter and showed the Indians how to swing an axe, how to hoe their corn and how to cover their legs like civilized men.

The Indians learned in time that the paleface man with the red coat was not their Manitou but the captain of a Dutch ship that had come from over the great water. Yet for many many years they cherished the conviction that Manitou had sent these palefaces to show his Indian people how to live.

For this reason, the palefaces received every consideration at the hands of the Indians. When they were in danger of starvation, the dark-skinned natives brought them vegetables for their broth and seeds from which to grow their own herbs. Nor was the white man above begging for a bit of land in which to plant these seeds. A tiny patch would suffice, no more than could be covered by the hide of a bullock. Assent was readily given. Then the shrewd paleface cut the hide in circular fashion to form a long, narrow strip of leather and with this he enclosed a large plot of fertile land.

The Indians made no comment, but mentally they noted what they were pleased to call the superior wit of the palefaces. After all, there was plenty of land for all the white men who cared to come. Little did they dream then that the whites would never be satisfied until they owned the entire continent. Too late, the Indians observed that the hair and the eyes of the paleface indicate that he belongs to a mixed race and is by nature troublesome.

The whites settled first at the mouths of the rivers. Mariners came from the provinces of Northern France, notably from Britany, to the great river of the north. They named it the St. Lawrence after the Saint on whose day they had first landed and erected a cross and the fleur-de-lis, indicating that they took possession of the territory in the name of Christ, the King, and of his servant, the King of France.

From merry England came the men who settled in the far south at the mouth of a river, which they called James in honour of their king. It was “old muddy Jeems, the famousest river ever found by a Christian.” Sir Walter Raleigh explored this region and named it Virginia, as a tribute to Elizabeth, his much-loved, virgin queen.

The migrations of the Pilgrims from the midlands of Europe were of much greater significance to the Five Nations. Outbound from Plymouth, they spent the winter in Holland and embarked for Virginia in the spring. But a high wind drove them ashore midway between the James and the St. Lawrence. They called their settlement New England and their first village, Plymouth. Soon they pushed their way up the rivers of the country and extended, slowly but surely, the sphere of their influence and the confines of their boundaries.

Many of the early explorers were dominated by an ambition to find a water route westward to China and India. But they found only a vast, impenetrable continent, uninhabited save for a few mystified aborigines. The discovery of the size and the native wealth of the New World revolutionized the civilization of the race. Its magnitude was entirely beyond the comprehension of Europeans. Here was a land whose mountains were clad in eternal snows, a land of incalculable resources hidden in fertile valleys, teeming rivers and mammoth vegetation, a land of glorious sunshine, of length and breadth and utter immensity. And it was theirs for the asking!

As time went by, the Indians encountered not only the Dutch and the English on the Atlantic coast but the French of the St. Lawrence River Valley and found them equally avaricious. The whites always carried with them an array of trinkets, strings of coloured beads, a few embroidered vests and worthless baubles of one kind or another, with which they bought great tracts of timbered lands and priceless pelts of mink and ermine. The poor, deluded Indians did not know the value of their possessions and they allowed the French and the English to increase immeasurably their wealth and prestige, while they themselves slipped back gradually into their present state, which is little short of dependence upon the bounty of the whites.

Then the whites began to haggle over their too-easily-acquired booty. The appropriation of Indian lands in the interior and the extension of their respective spheres of influence made the French and the English unpleasantly aware of each other. Year by year the situation became more and more acute, until the two nations found themselves in open and uncompromising competition for the mastery of the New World.

The bitter, inter-racial wars which ensued involved not only the Europeans but two great Indian nations, the Algonquins, in the far north, and the Hurons, on Georgian Bay, both of whom had succumbed to French influence. It involved as well, the Confederacy of Six Nations, who were disposed to throw in their lot with the English.

The Founder of New France

On the site of the old Algonquin village of Stadacona, on the Lower St. Lawrence River, and under the shadow of a huge rock which dominates the entire valley, Samuel Champlain, a mariner from Britany, built, in 1608, his “habitation,” and founded the French village of Quebec.

This man played an important rôle in the history of the French régime in New France. Although he was at one time Governor of the Province, he was not paramountly interested in politics. Like many other mariners of the day, he was consumed with an ambition to find a western route to the far East, an ambition which he, if any, was in a position to gratify.

Ever since his arrival in the New World, Champlain had been fascinated by Indian stories of rich copper deposits in the land of the setting sun. The Hurons claimed that they knew their location well, and the route that led to them, but they withheld the information from Champlain in the hope of using it as a bribe to secure French aid in their perennial wars with the Six Nations.

Lured by the prospect of an excursion into the west with expert guides, Champlain allied himself with the Hurons against the Six Nations. He agreed to join his new allies and the Algonquins in well obscured lodges at the mouth of the River of the Iroquois, a short distance upstream.

Thousands of warriors were at the trysting place at the appointed time, watching for him with keen interest. Most of the braves had never seen a paleface. When Champlain stepped from his gilded shallop and stood before them in a heavy coat of glittering steel, they were ready to fall at his feet and worship him. With this demi-god as leader, victory was assured.

Champlain took the precaution to enquire about the location of the enemy and the means of reaching them. He learned that a strong detachment of Six Nations warriors was ensconsed in their hunting grounds on the shores of an inland lake and that they could be reached by ascending the River of the Iroquois. Later, the lake was named Champlain and the river, the Richelieu.

Champlain determined, if possible, to take the enemy unawares. But surprise was out of the question with the thousands of impatient, blood-thirsty maniacs, whose canoes crowded the mouth of the river. They made the air hideous with their screaming and quarrelling. Champlain was astute enough to send most of them home before attempting to ascend the river. Then he set out hopefully with a few Frenchmen and a picked horde of natives. But soon the sound of rapids in the distance warned him he must reduce his forces to a minimum. Sending all but two of the Frenchmen back to Quebec in his shallop, and dismissing all but sixty Indians, he advanced cautiously towards the enemy in twenty-eight strong, Algonquin-built canoes.

When they reached the lake they entered into the danger zone. At any moment the Six Nations might be at their throats. Resting by day and paddling at night, they watched every moon-lit clump of trees and scrutinized every inlet along the dark shore. No spoken word disturbed the rhythmic dipping of their paddles.

Suddenly one of the watchers noted a dark shadow on the water ahead. The Six Nations, without a doubt! At that same moment the Six Nations became aware of the presence of the enemy and the welkin resounded with the shrieks and curses of rival Indian warriors.

Preparations were begun immediately for a battle of extermination in the morning. The Six Nations landed hurriedly, drew up their canoes in close formation on the shore and barricaded the encampment. Not a man of them but was spoiling for the fight. And they were not unprepared, for each man wore his coat of armour made from tough boughs interlaced with cotton and a shield of toughest wood. In his hands he carried his tomahawk and his bow and arrows. There were in the party three Mohawk chiefs with heavily-plumed head-dresses and these paraded among the warriors cheering them to the tempo of war. Already they were exulting in the defeat of the marauders.

The Hurons and the Algonquins decided to fight standing in their canoes, which they lashed together with long poles side by side on the shore directly in front of the Six Nations camp. They distributed their champion and the two other steel-clad Frenchmen in separate canoes and concealed them completely under piles of filthy blankets.

The battle broke at the first crack of dawn, after a night made ghastly with whoops and shouts of defiance. Champlain’s men seized the initiative with an attack on the fortifications of the Six Nations, but they were repulsed by a shower of well-aimed arrows. Then the three Mohawk chiefs appeared prematurely, strutting to and fro and boasting of the success of their arms.

Champlain saw his opportunity. Throwing aside the blankets which enveloped him, he stood in full view of the enemy. A very god, he seemed, with his coat of mail gleaming like burnished silver in the early morning sun. Slowly he raised his musket, levelled it at one of the braggarts and killed, not one, but two of them in their tracks. A second Frenchman emerged from another canoe and shot the third.

A wail of despair rent the air. In a single, terrible moment the Six Nations had lost both their leaders and their spirit. Some escaped by flight, but most of them were captured by the Hurons and subjected to inhuman torture.

On that dreadful day of defeat there was born in the hearts of the Six Nations warriors an undying hatred of the French. Let Champlain and his men beware. A day of vengeance would come when, armed with the white man’s weapons, the Men of Men would fall upon their old enemies, the Hurons and their new enemies, the French. Then they would multiply a hundred fold the destruction of that hour.

Champlain returned to Quebec and then to France. When he came to Canada again, in the spring of 1615, he brought with him four Récollet priests, one of whom, Father Le Caron, he proposed to take with him when he journeyed to the land of the Hurons to begin his explorations in the west. For Champlain was an ardent churchman, as well as an intrepid adventurer, and he welcomed an opportunity to serve at the same time both church and state.

So eager was Father Le Caron to begin his missionary work among the Hurons that he did not wait for Champlain but went himself to the fur market at Ville Marie (Montreal) with a body guard of ten French soldiers. He met a number of Hurons at the trading station and succeeded in attaching himself and his guard to a home-bound party. Champlain came two days later with another group. He was accompanied by two Frenchmen, one of whom was Etienne Brûlé, who had lived as an Indian among Indians long enough to become an invaluable interpreter.

The journey home, up the Ottawa River, was by no means easy for the tenderfoot whites. Le Caron got very tired, for it was distinctly understood that every man must bear his own burdens. There were to be no concessions to the cloth. He had to paddle with all his strength day after day and wade a hundred rivers through sludges of mud and over sharp rocks, which lacerated his sandalled feet. His back ached from the double weight of his canoe and his luggage on long portages through the woods, when rapids and cataracts made the waterway impassable. He ate what the Indians had, only a little pounded maize, and he considered himself fortunate if he found a near-by spring so that he could wash it down with water. At night he pulled his canoe over his body and prayed for sleep.

The course which these Frenchmen pursued was later called the Champlain Road. It led four hundred miles, or more, up the Ottawa from Ville Marie to the Mattawa River and then overland by a well-beaten portage-trail to Lake Nipissing. There, a watershed turned the waters in the opposite direction and a beautiful stream, later called the French River, carried them with its current to a great fresh-water lake. From there it was good paddling southward through a nose-gay of islands to the land of the Hurons. With the best of good management, the journey could not be completed in less than twenty-three days.

When Champlain saw the beautiful body of water on whose shores the Hurons were encamped, he called it Mer Douce, or Fresh-Water Lake. This was the first geographical name ever given by any European in that vast hinterland inhabited only by Indians. With this first journey of the explorer into the west begins the fascinating story of the settlement and development of the marvellous inland peninsula which is called Old, or Southern, Ontario. Later, Mer Douce was given an English name, Georgian Bay, in compliment to King George III.

Huronia, the land of the Hurons, was itself a peninsula bounded by the waters of Georgian Bay, the Severn River and Lake Simcoe. Here Father Le Caron began his religious work. Needing shelter, he built with his own hands a cabin in European style. It was a modest building, only twenty-three feet long and twelve, or fifteen, wide. It had only three rooms. But it was significant in that it was the first dwelling erected by a white man in all that vast wilderness west of Ville Marie.

Near this cabin, on the twelfth day of August, 1615, Father Le Caron celebrated mass with much ceremony. It was an occasion designed to stir the religious zeal of the Frenchmen and to kindle the curiosity of the natives. “Outside the palisaded village stood the ripening cornfields hemmed in by the eternal, forest-clad hills. The Frenchmen chanted Te Deum Laudamus, and then to the accompaniment of a salute of guns, the Récollet elevated the Host. Every Frenchman dropped to his knees, from the stalwart, bronze-faced Champlain and the lithe, youthful figure of the interpreter, Brûlé, to the little force of soldiers representing the might and majesty of Imperial France.”

Hundreds of painted Huron warriors in picturesque robes of deerskin and beaver and with plumed head-dresses hanging low on their backs, stood and watched the proceedings in stolid amazement. They gazed in silence through the smoke of their long pipes when, after mass, Champlain erected a cross bearing the royal arms of France and proclaimed that he was taking possession of Huronia in the name of Christ and his king. Since the Hurons did not understand a word of the ceremony, they were in no position to offer any protest.

During his sojourn among the Hurons, Champlain visited eighteen villages and found about ten thousand people living in filth and unspeakable vice. Two thousand half-clad warriors dogged his footsteps demanding an immediate surprise attack on their old enemy, the Six Nations.

Their plan was to swoop down upon the Oneidas from the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Champlain must lead them. He was the invincible hero who had led them before with such phenomenal success. Champlain allowed himself to be persuaded, but he stipulated that when the battle was over, the Hurons should give him safe conduct down the St. Lawrence to Quebec.

The raid on the Oneidas did not terminate as satisfactorily as did the encounter on Lake Champlain. The Six Nations used their bows and arrows so effectively that Champlain himself was disabled and had to be carried from the battlefield in a basket. The disgruntled Hurons immediately forgot their promise and returned at once to Huronia to contemplate on the vulnerability of their idol, whom they had left, alone and helpless, on the banks of the Upper St. Lawrence.

The interpreter, Brûlé, did not always accompany Champlain when he went on the warpath with the Hurons. His duty was to carry messages in foreign tongues to distant nations. On one occasion Champlain sent him southward with a communication to a group of friendly Indians on the banks of the Susquehanna River. The road lay through the land north of Lake Erie and west of Lake Ontario, a stretch of country which, with the possible exception of a few fur traders, no white man had ever seen. A nation called the Attowatians, or Neutrals, lived there in squalor and wickedness unknown even to the Hurons.

But the country of the Neutrals, Brûlé said, was beautiful beyond his powers of description. The soil was remarkably fertile and the climate unbelievably balmy. It is not certain by what route Brûlé travelled, but he may have followed the time-honoured waterways and trails of the Algonquins. If he did, he ascended the Nottawasaga River to its tributary, The Pine, portaged to a branch of the Grand River and drifted down that stream to the land of the Neutrals.

It was probably Brûlé who induced Joseph de la Roche Daillon, a Récollet missionary to the Hurons, to visit the Neutrals. Daillon and two French companions travelled five days before they reached the first Neutral village. The people treated them kindly, offering them venison and cornmeal porridge, and Daillon, in turn, taught them how to lift their eyes to heaven and to pray, making the sign of the cross.

But this friendly relation came to an end when Daillon, with the best of intentions, suggested to the Neutrals that it might be to their advantage to send their furs to Ville Marie by way of the St. Lawrence River instead of through Huronia and the Champlain Road. He did not realize that the Hurons were financially interested in the marketing of the furs of the Neutrals, as well as politically concerned lest this lucrative trade fall into the hands of the Six Nations.

Because of this indiscretion, Daillon lost his opportunity to give religious guidance to the Neutrals. The Hurons poisoned the minds of the Neutrals against the priest, declaring that he was nothing but a sorcerer. With a single blinking of his evil eye he could cause their children to be killed and their villages to be burned. So Daillon was compelled to return to Huronia.

His report on conditions found in the land of the Neutrals was more explicit than that of Brûlé. He said he had visited twenty-eight villages with a total population of about thirty thousand people. The country was more beautiful than any land he had ever seen. Game was abundant, especially black squirrels, raccoons, beaver, turkeys and wild geese. The weather was ideal. Throughout the winter the snow had never been more than two feet deep and on the twenty-sixth of January it had begun to melt. By early March it had disappeared from the clearings and it was consistently fair and warm until the following November.

The Récollets finally withdrew from Huronia and with indefatigable zeal, the Jesuits took up the challenge of bringing to the Hurons the civilization of the white man and the Christian religion. They succeeded so well that thousands of their parishioners renounced their pagan superstitions and besought the priests to administer to them the rite of baptism. The Jesuit Fathers made it a practice to write letters regularly to the head of their Order describing their victories over ignorance and sin and even their disappointments and losses. The Order published them, later, in the hope that they would be an incentive to the missionary endeavours of the churches of France. They are called the Jesuit Relations, and they may be read to-day in English and in French.

The Jesuits, too, heard the Macedonian cry of the dead-in-sin Neutrals. Two seasoned priests, Father Jean de Brébeuf and Father Chaumont, volunteered for this work in 1639-40. Once again the Hurons discredited the missionaries with calumnious reports and soon the Jesuits were compelled to withdraw their mission.

After that, the Jesuits redoubled their efforts in Huronia. In 1639, they established a social service centre, the first of its kind in all the vast interior of the New World, and for its protection they built a row of palisades. The building was to serve many purposes, a store house for provisions, a retreat for those who sought spiritual consolation, a hospital for the sick and a cemetery for the dead. Above all, it was to be a comfortable home for the missionaries and the explorers. Its official name was Fort Ste. Marie, but those who used it most and loved it best called it with affection their Home of Peace.

After July, 1648, there was no peace or rest in all Huronia for the missionaries. Nor, indeed, for the Hurons. The Six Nations were on the warpath. They had not forgotten that Champlain’s Frenchmen were allies of the Hurons. This, their day of vengeance, was long overdue.

With Dutch guns in their hands and plenty of gunpowder in their pouches, the warriors of the Six Nations crept upon the Hurons under cover of the full-grown leaves of summer and fell upon the first of their villages with frenzied battle cries. They killed and burned all they could and left behind them a pitiable scene of desolation.

Drunk with their successes, the infamous marauders went then to the land of the Neutrals, as uninvited guests, and spent the fall and winter months in a gamut of feasting and rioting. As soon as the buds of spring began to sprout, they were off again on a fiendish rampage of Huronia.

It was a raid of extermination, and the Jesuits suffered side by side with the Hurons. With their own hands the priests burned their Home of Peace rather than see it fall into impious hands. Only a few priests escaped to near-by islands, where they witnessed at a safe distance the smouldering ruins of their beloved Huronia.

The Neutrals, horrified at the calamity which had befallen the Hurons, opened their homes and their stores to the fugitives. For this neighbourly act they paid dearly. The Six Nations carried the battle into the Neutral camp. Within a few days four thousand of their warriors were either dead or captured. Women and children by the thousands were massacred in cold blood. Those who escaped joined the fleeing Hurons and were scattered to the four winds of heaven.

The tragic story of the martyrdom of the Jesuit missionaries is written indelibly on the pages of Canadian history. Five of their priests met a violent death in Huronia. Antoine Daniel was apprehended at his altar and his dead body was thrown into the flames of his burning chapel. Gabriel Lalement, who was so young and so gentle, was brutally seized and tortured to death. His companion at the stakes, the lovable Jean de Brébeuf, who had given the Hurons eighteen years of faithful service, suffered hour after hour without complaint. Charles Garnier was slain; Noel Chabanel, tomahawked. Besides these, Isaac Jogues, a missionary to the Six Nations, met a terrible fate when the demons returned to their own country. For thirteen long years he was kept alive and conscious to endure the pangs of intermittent torture.

In 1925, the Pope conferred upon these martyrs the rite of beatification and five years later he canonized them. These were the first Americans to be added to the calendar of saints of the Roman Church.

Within recent years the Church in Canada has immortalized this story of religious persecution by dedicating to their memory a hill which overlooks Fort Ste. Marie and by the consecration of a shrine. Thousands of pilgrims visit the scene of the tragedy every summer, kneeling on the blood-drenched sites and pledging anew their devotion and their service.

Champlain, the founder of Quebec and the promoter of French missions to the Hurons, died on Christmas Day, in 1635. His compatriots erected a life-size statue of him to mark the tercentenary of his coming to Canada. It stands at the eastern end of the famous promenade of Quebec City guarding, like a sentinel, the heights of the city he loved so well. At Orillia, within the confines of Old Huronia, stands another handsome statue representing the greatest figure of the French régime in Canada, Samuel Champlain, the dauntless explorer.

Around the Peninsula

Nine years after the extirpation of the Hurons and the Neutrals by the Six Nations, the beautiful land of squashes and beans had become a wilderness waste. Black squirrels chased each other from limb to limb and from tree to tree, and wolves and raccoons howled through the forests. Millions of pigeons and birds of gayer plumage obscured the sky during the seasons of their migrations. The only disturber of the woodland peace was that industrious, amphibious, woolly-skinned wood-chopper, known as the Canadian beaver.

True, a few Indians roamed about looking for game. This was the hunting ground now of the victorious Six Nations, but it was much too distant from most of their longhouses to be of much consequence to them. The Senecas, however, who lived nearest, had built a few hunting lodges near the head of Lake Ontario. They called their village Tinawatawa. About twenty-five miles due west there was a beautiful river which had its source near the forsaken land of the Hurons and emptied into the Lake of the Eries. This they called the Tinaatoua. Its present name is the Grand.

For nine long years no white man had ever set foot in that paradise of hunters. Then one day Louis Joliet, a Frenchman, stumbled into it quite by accident, trembling no doubt in his very boots.

Talon, the Governor of New France, had heard repeated rumors of rich deposits of copper in the far west near the lake which the French called Superieur, meaning the Upper lake. The ore was said to be so pure that it needed little or no refining. Talon was determined to locate these mines and to use them commercially, but he knew that he must move with great caution, so as not to excite the suspicion of the Indians. He fitted out an ordinary trading expedition at Ville Marie, a single canoe loaded with a consignment of goods for the Ottawas, who lived in the vicinity of the mines. Upon the shoulders of young Joliet, the son of a humble wagon-maker, but Jesuit-trained, he placed the responsibility of delivering the goods and of making what discreet enquiries and investigations he could concerning the copper mines.

Joliet started out under a lucky star. He made the journey over the Champlain Road without incident, reached the distant land of the Ottawas and delivered the merchandise. But try as he would, he failed to glean any significant information about the mine. He was preparing to return to Ville Marie when he fell in with a young Indian brave of the Six Nations, who made a momentous suggestion. If Joliet were going to Ville Marie with an empty canoe, was it necessary that he go by the Champlain Road? He knew a better route to the Upper St. Lawrence, a water route. No portages. All the way with the current. No white man had ever travelled that way, but his own people of the Six Nations knew it well, for they held the shorelines by right of conquest. If Joliet would take him, he would be his guide. Was it a bargain?

Joliet did not need much persuasion, for he was possessed of the indomitable spirit of youth. Soon he and the Indian were coasting along the southern shores of Manitoulin Island and the eastern bounds of the Lake of the Hurons. When they reached the outlet of the lake, they passed through narrower waters and found themselves on the broad expanse of the Lake of the Eries.

Softly their paddles dipped the water, as they hugged the northern shore. All was going well. Then suddenly Joliet noticed that an unusual silence had fallen upon his companion. Soon the fellow was insisting that they must land. He was afraid of the Eries, he said, who lived on the farther shore of the lake, for they were sworn enemies of the Six Nations.

Joliet was at the Indian’s mercy. He dared not risk his life alone in strange waters. They landed at the mouth of a river, now known as Kettle Creek. Joliet had only time to hide his canoe before he started off with his companion on a long tramp through the forest. The Indian travelled with some confidence, for he seemed to know the trails, and Joliet followed with a heavy heart. Was he being led to his death, a cruel death, perhaps, with torture? Stoically, he tramped on and on. Soon they reached the Thames, then the Nith and the river which the Indian called the Tinaatoua. It was near the end of September, the season of the flaming maple, when they came to the Seneca village of Tinawatawa and Joliet could breathe easily again.

Good fortune awaited the young Frenchman there. A group of French explorers were in the vicinity and their leader, Robert Cavalier Sieur de la Salle, having heard of the presence of a young man of his own tongue at Tinawatawa, came to see him. He brought with him his travelling companions, two Sulpician priests, François Dollier de Casson and René de Bréhaut de Galinée, both members of distinguished French families, well-educated and exceedingly agreeable. They were en route, with a party of about twenty men and seven canoes, in a search for the Father of Waters, the Mississippi, with a dual purpose of exploration and missionary endeavour.

The expedition had been splendidly equipped at Ville Marie, Joliet learned. Their canoes were twenty feet long and two feet wide, birch-bark and Algonquin-made. The floors and the gunwhales were constructed of the best cedar, light in weight and easy to manipulate both in the water and on the portages. Each could carry in perfect safety three men and from eight to nine hundred pounds of luggage, although only the thickness of four or five sheets of paper separated them from the dark waters below.

A mutual attraction sprang up at sight between the two young men. They were both in their early twenties. La Salle had no difficulty in persuading Joliet, who was deserted by his Indian guide and alone, to go with him into the great, unexplored west in search of the Mississippi. As for La Salle, he was heartily weary of his black-robed companions, who talked incessantly about the salvation of souls, while he thought only of adventure.

On the pretext of illness, a mild fever, which the astute Galinée attributed to a misstep into a nest of copperheads, La Salle abandoned the Sulpicians and took Joliet in their place. The party divided by mutual consent, half of the canoeists giving their allegiance to La Salle, with the other half sympathizing with the priests. La Salle, and Joliet seized the advantage with the canoes, for they took four of them, leaving only three for the Sulpicians.

The two priests, finding themselves suddenly without destination, determined to carry their mission to the Pottawattamies, an Indian nation whom Joliet had encountered in the far north. Joliet had even suggested the route. The Tinaatoua River would take them to the Lake of the Eries. Somewhere along that shore, at the mouth of a river, they would find his canoe. With four canoes and twelve men they could make the long journey up the Lake of the Hurons, even though they must struggle against the current all the way.

It developed, however, that there were only nine men. Three of the men, a Dutch interpreter and two Shawnee Indians, did not intend to be cooped up, four men to a canoe for even part of the way. They volunteered to go on foot across country to find Joliet’s canoe and promised to await the rest of the party there. The Sulpicians started them off with plenty of provisions and ammunition, but nothing was ever heard of them again. There has always been a suspicion that they forsook religion for adventure and caught up with La Salle’s expedition.

It was the first of October when the priests and the seven remaining men set out from the Seneca Village for the Tinaatoua River. They had three canoes and several hundred pounds of luggage to carry, for a four days’ journey. But the villagers accompanied them all the way, bearing their burdens and cheering their anxious hearts with jokes and merriment.

Frankly, they were disappointed with the river. Galinée, who was the geographer of the party, says that it took them eight days of intermittent portaging, paddling and pushing to get their canoes over the shoal water. Yet there is no suspicion of a lack of current in the name which he gave the river. He called it by its first European name, La Rapide.

When they had reached the Lake of the Eries the party followed the shoreline westward until they came to the site of the present town of Port Dover. During the very severe winter of 1669-1670, they took up residence in a sheltered spot on the Black Creek, near its junction with the Lynn River. There, the priests built a cabin of three rooms on the plan of the Jesuit Home of Peace, with an outer room for entertainment, a second for stores and provisions and a third for a chapel. In that little temporary shack, the Sulpicians held parleys with Indian beaver hunters and three times a week they celebrated mass.

Galinée is loud in his praises of the site they had chosen. It was nothing short of an earthly paradise. “The streams are full of fish and beaver,” he says. “The grapes are as large and as sweet as the finest grown in France, and even more abundant.” Never in all his life had he seen such game, a hundred roebucks, or more, at a counting, and no lack of hinds. The bears of the wildwood seemed fatter and more savoury to the taste than the tenderest porkers in the land of his birth.

As for the climate, it was cold, yet invigorating. Winter did not linger too long in the lap of spring. By Sunday, March 23, the season was far enough advanced to begin to think about continuing the journey.

Before they left the delightful spot, they erected a cross on a high cliff overlooking the lake. At its base they placed the Royal Arms of France and on the crossbeams they hung an inscription proclaiming to the stars that they were the first Europeans to winter there.

In August, 1900, the Norfolk Historical Society identified this spot, and two years later, on July 5, the Sites and Monuments Board of Canada placed a memorial on that same cliff to mark the discovery of the north shore of Lake Erie by Dollier and Galinée. Appropriately enough, it, too, took the form of a cross, and it is a very conspicuous feature of the landscape.

Ten days later, the Sulpicians and their seven boatmen portaged their canoes on ice to the lake, and took their departure. But they had travelled only six or seven leagues when a violent storm compelled them to land. Unfortunately, they did not secure the canoes any too well and Galinée’s was caught by the wind and carried out into the lake. Try as they would, they could not rescue it. His pack, as it happened, was safe. Still it was a serious loss, for it was manifestly impossible to accommodate seven men and their baggage in two canoes. They comforted themselves however, with the hope of finding Joliet’s canoe within a few days.

Having regard for both the safety and the comfort of the men, the Sulpicians put only two of them with half the luggage in each canoe. They themselves and three of the boatmen had to walk, carrying with them the necessary food, a supply of ammunition and a number of exceedingly unwieldy blankets. It was not a pleasing prospect, but the experience was worse. They tramped for miles up swollen rivers before they could cross. One of the streams had widened into a swamp and the unfortunates were kept wading for hours knee-deep in mud, and all to no purpose. A snow storm blinded their eyes and added pounds to the weight of their water-logged boots. Finally, they took a day off to construct a raft, which brought them at last to a safe landing.

Long Point Peninsula lay ahead. Its neck at that time was a ridge of heavily crusted sand, an excellent carrying place. So the canoeists avoided the long stretch of water route and the dangerous rounding of the point, landed there and waited for the pedestrians. They came at last, weary to the point of exhaustion, and there the nine spent together the happy Easter-tide.

West of Long Point, the lake was a sea of broken ice tossed furiously by a raw west wind. Both canoeists and pedestrians kept close to the shore and within call of each other. Most earnestly did they hope and pray to reach the river at whose mouth Joliet had hidden his canoe, and there was great jubilation when at last they found it.

There was room now in the three canoes for all nine of the men and their packs. They took to the water with glad hearts and they made such excellent progress that at sunset of the second day out they had reached Point Pelée. There they decided to spend the night.

The weather was fair, but they took the precaution to draw their canoes well up above the high water mark and they stacked their luggage on the sand. But while they slept a furious storm broke. The angry waves lashed the shore and carried away Dollier’s pack containing not only his provisions, guns and ammunition but his invaluable altar equipment. There wasn’t a sign to be seen of it.

The loss was irreparable, for it meant the postponement of their mission to the Pottawattamies until such time as a new altar could be procured from Ville Marie. The priests were greatly disappointed, but they decided to continue their journey to the north. No doubt, they hoped to profit by a visit to the Jesuit Mission at Mackinac.

It was these Jesuit missionaries who found a reputable guide for the Sulpicians, when they decided to return to Ville Marie by way of the Champlain Road. When this journey was terminated in safety, Dollier de Casson and Galinée, together with their seven lay companions, had the proud distinction of being the first to circumnavigate the peninsula of Southern Ontario. Little did they dream when they set out with La Salle to look for the Mississippi that they would return by another route. This novel experience had lasted three hundred and forty-seven days and their friends had long since given them up for dead.

Galinée presented to the Intendant of New France a map of the lands through which he and Dollier had passed. Reproductions of this may be seen to-day in certain old books.

The Six Nations lost possession of their beaverlands, but how, or when, nobody knows for certain. The Ojibways claim that they took the territory from them in a fierce battle near the present town of Burlington and that peace was later cemented between them by the smoking of pipes and the ceremonial burial of the tomahawk.

It is thought that the Ojibways never possessed the land, but allowed their brothers, the Mississaugas, to use it as a hunting ground, and after many years of continued use, the Mississaugas claimed it by right of possession. But for fully a century after the expedition of the Sulpicians through the Great Lakes, the peninsula slumbered on, undisturbed, in the lap of the ages.

Good Queen Anne

The English and the Dutch who lived on the Atlantic seaboard were wiser in their treatment of the natives than Champlain had been. They realized that the French, and not the Indians, were their rivals for supremacy in the New World and they resolved to use all their powers of strategy to wean the Men of Men from the sphere of French influence and to bind them irrevocably to themselves.

When Colonel Peter Schuyler, a Dutchman, was Mayor of Albany, in 1708, he conceived a plan to use the Great Confederacy to combat the growing influence of the French. He knew that the Five Nations—they were only five at that time—bore a grudge against the French and, if tactfully handled, they might become staunch and powerful allies of the Dutch and English.

His plan was to take five sachems to England to show them the might and power of the English people. He was confident of success, if he could secure the cöoperation both of the Five Nations and of the court of Queen Anne. He counted on the approval of the English. Of the Indians he had high hopes, for he had the confidence of all the nations and he understood their innate love of drama and ceremony and their curiosity about lands and people across the great water.

The Indians fell in enthusiastically with the plan and lost no time in selecting their sachems. Their choice fell upon: Tee Yee Neen Ho Ga Prow, Sa Go Yean Qua Prah Ion, Elow Oh Kaom, Oh Nee Yeath Ion No Prow, and Gan Ah Joh Hore, whose English name was King Hendrick. The delegation set out with great pomp and ceremony, but only four of their number reached England. Sa Go Yean Qua Prah Ion died on the way and was buried at sea.

The news of the coming of the Indian Sachems to be the personal guests of the queen caused a tremendous sensation in London’s political and social circles. Lords and ladies of the realm vied with each other in arranging festivities and novel entertainments. At all costs, this visit must be a gala occasion, for everyone knew that a matter of political importance was carefully camouflaged behind what appeared to be a mere exchange of courtesies between the queen and a group of Indian chiefs.

Unfortunately, the unexpected death of a Danish prince threw the court into mourning before Schuyler and the sachems had arrived in England and the details of the entertainments had to be curtailed at the last minute. The greatest problem was one of apparel. Court etiquette required the wearing of black, and the colourful costumes prepared for the sachems were out of order.

But Queen Anne was understanding and resourceful. If possible, she must contrive to circumvent the Court Order. She consulted with the dressers of her royal theatre and together they evolved a number of magnificent garments for Their Majesties of the New World in which black was to be used only as a background for all the colours of the rainbow. The outer robes, designed to be worn in the manner of the classic toga, were gorgeous mantles of silver-ingrain cloth, edged with gold. Nothing could be more conspicuous. The sachems would certainly wear them with much satisfaction.

From their first hour in London the sachems were delighted with the city and the people. Crowds followed them whenever they appeared in the streets, plucked their rich robes and marvelled at their strange language. The visitors were the lions of the hour. Entertainments were held for them in public places, in the homes of the nobility and at the court, and the sachems accepted these courtesies as tokens of the esteem and friendship of the English people.

A tremendous crowd of fashionably-dressed people attended Haymarket Theatre, when it was announced that the Indians would be present. The performance was Macbeth. The Indians understood little of the play but were inordinately gratified when the leading man reappeared on the stage after the curtain had been run down and recited an epilogue in honour of the visitors from America. The sachems listened attentively when he warned them to beware of any alliance with the French and urged them to drive the French priests from their villages.

Current periodicals reported the evening’s entertainment and gave much information about the visiting Indians. Addison devoted an entire number of his SPECTATOR to the Confederacy of the Five Nations, called Iroquois, describing with some detail their organization and the manners and customs of their people. His contemporary, Sir Richard Steele, used his TATLER to point out the political significance of the visit, declaring that it would be written large in the annals of the nation. Others were of the same opinion, for famous artists were engaged to paint portraits of the visitors in their native costumes and these were to hang permanently in a prominent position in the British Museum.

But the climax of their visit was, for the Indians, their formal presentation to Queen Anne. A belted earl, resplendent with medals, conducted them to the Court of St. James in two glittering coaches drawn by sleek, black horses. The Lord Chamberlain, His Grace the Duke of Shrewsbury, had the honour of ushering them into the Royal Presence.

By common consent, the Mohawk Sachem, Gan Ah Joh Hore, an orator of reputation, read the address which he had prepared on behalf of the Confederacy. This document may be read to-day. It sets forth the attitude of the Five Nations to England and to France and it also expresses the hope that an English missionary be sent to the People of the Longhouse with a view to strengthening the bond which united them to the English.

Queen Anne received these avowals of friendship with evident pleasure. She sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury their request for an English missionary. His Grace referred it to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, with the request that it be given their immediate consideration, since Her Majesty was awaiting the decision.

The Society was pleased to have this opportunity to serve both her Majesty and Britain’s Indian allies, particularly since they would be advancing at the same time the cause of Christ and the Church of England. They promised that in the near future they would build a chapel in the land of the Five Nations. Later, they would send a bishop to preach the Gospel and to instruct their children. As a token of these promises, and as a souvenir of their visit, the Society presented to each of the four sachems a Bible bound in rich leather, turkey-red, and handsomely inscribed with the name of the recipient.

Queen Anne gave assurances of her desire to supplement the benefactions of the Society. As soon as the church was built it would be her pleasure to equip it suitably and to protect it from all enemies with a fort and a row of palisades.

These promises were fulfilled within a few years, and to the letter. In 1710, a church was built in the Mohawk valley and named Queen Anne’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks. That same year, by her royal command, Robert Hunter, Governor of New York, superintended the erection of Fort Hunter around the chapel. It was an impregnable bulwark, with rows of palisades surrounding an enclosure one hundred and fifty feet square. At each corner stood a blockhouse, equipped on all sides with peepholes and providing accommodation for twenty men.

Fort Hunter was destroyed during the War of the American Revolution, but the chapel was still standing in 1820, or thereabouts. For years it had been used as a sheepfold in stormy weather. It was finally levelled to the ground to make way for a canal. The building was no more than twenty-four feet square and ten feet high, a limestone structure, with its entrance facing the Mohawk River and the north. Its shingled roof supported a belfry.

The interior followed the ecclesiastical architecture of the day. The pulpit, reading-desk and sounding-board were placed along the western wall. On the opposite side, a wooden canopy covered two elevated pews, intended for the use of the local aristocracy and visiting dignitaries of church or state.

Queen Anne had furnished it with a lavish hand. Her Majesty’s coat of arms, in rich colours, hung over the door. A carpet covered the floor. Two tablets, one inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer and the other with the Ten Commandments, and both in the Mohawk language, looked down upon the first reed organ west of Albany. The instrument was a never failing source of wonder to the Indians. A negro factotum, resplendent in a gorgeous, scarlet coat, manned the bellows and acted as chief usher on Sundays. On week-days, he was an ordinary, ragged, humdrum caretaker.

A handsome surplice had been provided for the clergyman. On the pulpit lay a large leather-bound Bible and in the pews a dozen octavo Scriptures had been placed for the use of the laity. The altar-cloths were white and immaculate, ready for the Holy Sacrament.

But this was not all. Queen Anne’s most precious gift had been packed in a large walnut box and put in charge of the worthiest matron of the congregation. When she brought it to the chapel and displayed it to public view, behold a double set of communion silver, eight pieces in all. Each piece was engraved with the Royal Arms and bore the inscription:

“The gift of Her Majesty Queen Ann, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland and of her Plantations in North America, Queen of the Indian Chapel of the Mohawk.”

So the Five Nations were won over to the British cause through friendship and good will. During the next half-century of racial rivalry for colonial expansion in the New World, the Indian Confederacy, and especially the Mohawk Nation, stood without equivocation at Britain’s side.

The Indians soon found an occasion to pass on a kindness to others. When the sachems returned from their memorable visit they talked incessantly about the marvellous sights they had seen in London and the unforgettable experiences they had had. Most vivid of all their descriptions of the great city was that of a scene in Blackheath, a wild, barren section in the environs. Blackheath seemed to live in their memories like an ugly smirch of a beautiful panoramic picture of handsome buildings and colourful gardens.

Blackheath! The sun never seemed to shine on Blackheath. A thousand ragged paupers were huddled there in tents and temporary shacks. Their language was foreign, guttural.

The Indians, who had never heard of Germans, were not satisfied until they had heard the sad story of the inhabitants of Blackheath. Once a happy people, they had lived in comfort in the German Palatinate, a land of plenty. But tyrannical overlords had encroached upon their liberties and reduced the peasants to virtual slavery. One terrible day the fiends rode roughshod through the lovely countryside, with flaming torches in their hands and cruel, calculating hearts in their breasts. They burned every wayside house and every barn bursting with grain. When they had gone, the toilers had nothing—nothing but the frustration of their hopes and a heap of charred, unsightly ruins.

There was nowhere to go, except, perhaps, to England. English ships docked at Rotterdam, but they carried only those who could pay their passage. Besides, there was nothing to prevent the merciless tyrants from boarding the ship and dragging the run-aways like rats from their holes.

Escape they must, if not by regular routes, then by stealth and under cover of darkness. Every cloudy night a few slipped away in any tub they could find and drifted precariously for hours over the cold North Sea. Many lost their lives, but some were fortunate enough to reach the shores of England. They came and sat, like beggars, on England’s doorstep. Often there were so many of them that the English were hard put to it to find suitable living quarters and sufficient food for them all.

There was always Blackheath. Even though the place were empty by noon, it was always full again by sunset.

The Mohawk people took the tragic story of Blackheath into their “innermost minds,” and after careful deliberation, they decided to offer the unfortunate Germans a portion of their uninhabited lands between the Mohawk and the St. Lawrence.

The invitation was accepted with heartfelt thanks. British ships carried the distressed, homeless, immigrant people to Atlantic ports in New England and officials of the British Government settled them on both sides of the Upper Mohawk River in the hinterlands of the Province of New York. Many of the descendants of these people live there to-day. One of the largest of the settlements is still called German Flats.

This generosity on the part of the Mohawks bound them all the closer to the English. Nor did they forsake their allies in dark days. With the British they endured the most frightful persecution and privation, even the despoiling of their paternal lands.

From the English they learned that life holds for the race greater values than land and treasure, that man has a duty to his day and generation and that generosity and selflessness are virtues which offer blessings two-fold to him that gives and to him that receives.

A great change had come gradually over the Five Nations. In 1650, they were so steeped in savagery and ignorance as to murder in cold blood two brother nations and six Christian missionaries. Sixty years later, they started on the long road which leads to civilization and good citizenship.

Colonel Schuyler and his policy had been fully vindicated. In recognition of his services, Queen Anne wished to make him a knight of the realm. But he declined the honour, preferring to remain a Dutchman, giving his allegiance to his own Sovereign and to his native Holland.

Lords of the Mohawk Valley

George III came to the throne of England several decades later. He has left to posterity a reputation for singular short-sightedness tantamount to stupidity in affairs of state.

His virtual viceroy in New England was a red-headed Irishman, William Johnson, whose delinquencies in young manhood had driven him to the patronage of his uncle, Sir Peter Warren, of New York. Warren had married a woman of wealth and family and he had secured through her an enviable place in the social register of the city.

Young William did not adapt himself any too well to his uncle’s household. He had no social ambitions. He preferred to work his way up into the Valley of the Mohawk under pretext of operating a trading post in his uncle’s name and he found life in the backwoods so satisfying that no person and no circumstances could ever induce him to so much as visit the city again.

From the first, William Johnson exerted an almost uncanny influence over the Mohawks. They flocked to his standard during the bloody border wars with the French, at Fort Niagara, when that key stronghold of the continent fell to the British, and again at Ticonderoga, where they routed the French and Johnson received, in compensation for a hip wound, a baronetcy and a bag of English gold. Johnson was with the gallant Wolfe, who scaled the heights at Quebec and planted the Union Jack on the Plains of Abraham. In recognition of his part in this achievement, the Chief of the Six Nations gave Johnson the most valuable gift in his possession, his own war club, and welcomed him into the Indian Confederacy under the name of Warraghuay, which means Big Business.

It must be confessed that Sir William’s private life was not above reproach, even in his day of easy moral standards. His first, and perhaps his only legal wife was the orphaned daughter of an obscure German missionary, one of those people who came from the Palatinate to live on Indian lands at the German Flats.

There were three children of this marriage, a son and two daughters. The daughters, Anne and Mary, who were very young when their mother died, were brought up in seclusion by a governess. Anne married Daniel Claus, her father’s secretary and German interpreter. Mary became the wife of her cousin, Guy Johnson, who had come out from Ireland to assist his uncle in his many enterprises.

The son, John, went to England on a visit when he came of age and was knighted by young George III. En route, he had met in New York “the lovely Polly Watts,” a belle of society in the Warrens’ charmed circle, and in the course of time he married her and brought her to live in the Valley of the Mohawk.

Sir William’s second matrimonial venture was with an Indian woman, a daughter of that King Hendrick of the Mohawks who went to England with Colonel Schuyler. She died young and Sir William was again a widower.

At a Mohawk picnic, so the story goes, his roving eye caught and lingered with Molly Brant, a vivacious, young, Mohawk woman, who had just entertained the crowd and risked her own life by springing, with streaming hair and flying blanket, to a seat behind the rider of a spirited horse. Sir William took her to his house and married her in the Indian fashion, it is believed, without benefit of clergy. For the rest of her life she was known as the Brown Lady Johnson or, more colloquially, Miss Molly. This alliance strengthened materially Sir William’s influence with the Indians, and their eight or nine half-breed children were second only to the baronet’s white children in the esteem of the Mohawks.

At the time of his marriage with Molly Brant, Sir William built a lordly mansion of frame sidings in imitation of stone blocks. He called it Johnson Hall. It stands to-day at Johntown, N.Y. There he and “Miss Molly” lived, an incongruous couple, in princely style, half Indian and half white. They were attended by a corps of high officials, a doctor and a lawyer, among others, for each of whom Sir William provided a private residence, and also by a retinue of liveried servants, negro and Indian, whom he domiciled in the cellar.

Sir William spent his declining years in trying to consolidate British influence in the New World. Johnson Hall became the chief meeting-place of the Council of the Mohawks. When the Indians came to discuss the affairs of their nation there, Sir William lost no opportunity to keep burnished and bright the invisible, silver chain which bound their affections to the British.

All too soon, his task became increasingly difficult. War clouds were hanging heavy on the horizon down Boston way, and although they seemed at first of little consequence, they swept up the valley and hung dark and lowering over Johnson Hall. Alarmed, Sir William built two stone blockhouses for the safety of his retinue, one on each side of the Hall. The one on the left is still standing.

The storm in the east broke finally and the insurrection reverberated up and down the valley. Sir William was uneasy about the effect it would have upon the Indians, for he knew how vacillating they were by nature, and he redoubled his efforts to keep the Six Nations loyal.

He sat one day on the grounds of Johnson Hall discussing with the Indians the portentous issues of the day. It was the eleventh of July, 1774, a hot, muggy day. For two hours he had harangued the chiefs, waving his arms and stamping his feet, as his custom was, to add force to his oratory, and he was utterly exhausted.

Suddenly something happened, but reports are rather varied. Some say that he walked into the house and collapsed. Others say that Miss Molly’s young brother, Joseph, whom the Indians called Thayendanegea, saw Sir William slump in his chair and picking him up in his strong arms, carried him into Johnson Hall and that he died in the library. Both sons-in-law had been in attendance at the Council meeting and runners were dispatched to Fort Johnson, a dozen miles distant, to summon Sir John. Before he came, Sir William had ceased to breathe. His last faltering words, spoken with desperate effort, were an admonition to Joseph Brant: “Control your people, Joseph. Control your people. I am—I am going away.”

Sir William’s death brought many changes in the Valley of the Mohawk. With him, set the sun of British influence. Sir John became the head of the family and took up residence at Johnson Hall, but the son could never fill his father’s shoes. He had never cultivated the gracious, affable manner which had made his father so popular with the Indians. He had never dressed in animal skins, nor taken part in a war dance—not Sir John. Consequently he had little influence among the Indians.

Nor did he command any measure of respect and admiration from his white neighbours. Surrounded, as he was, by half-crazed, insurgent mobs who dared to sing and dance about their liberty poles, now that Sir William was no more, the new lord of the manor wrapped himself in his arrogance, doubled the guards at Johnson Hall and strengthened his fortifications. In a few short months he had lost completely the control his father had always exerted over his retainers, as well as any vestige of restraint he should have been able to exercise over the Mohawks.

His brothers-in-law, Daniel Claus and Guy Johnson, were alarmed at Sir John’s impotence and determined to save their own families and the Mohawks before it was too late. The traitors were closing in upon them daily, almost hourly. Another week or two of indecision and the Indians would be scattered to the four winds of heaven and who knew but the Johnsons might be languishing in Sir William’s county gaol awaiting the indignity of a mob trial.

There was still one hope—escape up the river. God grant that it might not be too late. Somewhere in the west was the British fort of Niagara. If they could reach that, its arms would be open to embrace them, as a parent would comfort a frightened child. There they could live in safety for a month or two, for a year, perhaps. Sooner or later, the British would restore law and order in the valley and they could return to their homes on the Mohawk.

Groups of whites and Indians began to retreat unobtrusively up the Mohawk in an effort to get away before the enemy was aware of their movements. Sir John would have nothing to do with the flight, but his sisters and their families were off and away, with a minimum of baggage, under escort of Joseph Brant, his cousin, John Deserontyou, and several hundred dusky warriors. The party proceeded westward by easy stages, with no apparent haste and with little noise. It might have been a pleasure jaunt, but for the absence of pleasure.

The eleventh of July came, the first anniversary of Sir William’s death. The children were crabbed; their parents, tired and nervous with anxiety. If reports were to be believed, the rebellion was getting worse instead of better. The eleventh of July! How happy and secure they had all felt when he was alive. But now, one short year later, they were fleeing for their very lives. They had no prospects and hope was dwindling day by day.

The anniversary had found Mary Johnson desperately ill. She died at Oswego before the day was over. Her husband, Colonel Guy Johnson, paced about with stern countenance and haughty demeanour, wearing his British uniform, topped by a cocked hat over his powdered wig. There was no time for the customary ceremonial mourning, but he ordered the Mohawks to make a coffin of rough boards. Some records say that the Indians carried the body by turns on their shoulders through the forests that lined the southern shore of Lake Ontario, and the Butlers buried it under the shadow of Fort Niagara. Others state that Sir John took the corpse with him to Montreal for burial. All the records agree that the husband died in poverty, in England, thirteen years later.

Meanwhile, the Indians were more concerned than they dared to confess about the fate of their lovely Queen Anne Chapel at Fort Hunter and the safety of the Bible and the precious communion silver. Joseph Brant and John Deserontyou were able to report that they had secured the altar equipment, including the Bible, the linens and the silver, and that they had placed it in a barrel and buried it on the side of a hill in a spot which they alone knew. Their minister, Rev. John Stuart, had approved of this action and had wished them god-speed. He had a premonition that the day was not far off when he, too, would have to flee with his wife and children.

Sir John was still at Johnson Hall, determined, if possible, to keep his finger on the pulse of the political situation and resolved to defend to the last ditch the Johnson estates and the family interests. But the vulgar, pushing crowd kept closing in upon him. Three thousand blood-thirsty champions of this new brand of liberty were now only four miles away. They were whooping like savages and threatening to batter Johnson Hall to the ground. They did not intend to stop until they had carried his infernal lordship to Albany in chains.

By the next day they were parading on the ice of the Mohawk River preparing for the siege. Sir John was thoroughly alarmed at last. He summoned four hundred of his loyal retainers, most of them Macdonell Highlanders, whom Sir William had imported from Scotland for defence purposes, and he proposed that they make a bolt for Montreal.

They were off in a hurry, groping along unknown Indian trails and through the interminable swamp which separated them from their destination. Nineteen days of ravenous hunger, with nothing to eat but leeks and the tender young leaves of the birch trees! Footsore and weary, they stumbled on. Some fell by the wayside, in utter exhaustion, knowing full well that wild animals would devour their flesh and sun and rain would bleach their scattered bones. Others struggled on and on with dogged determination. Sir John himself was a marvel of endurance. He was one of the few who reached Montreal and received the Governor’s welcome.

Lady Johnson’s experiences were no less harrowing. A frenzied mob broke into Johnson Hall, seized the lovely Polly Watts and put her under guard in Albany with her two children and two faithful servants. Her third child was born in that house of detention. But they had a miraculous escape. When the spring freshets came, she and her servants disguised themselves as country wenches and succeeded in escaping from their prison. On floating cakes of ice they reached a boat-house in the swollen Hudson River and persuaded the boatman to row them to the farther shore. Too late, the boatman suspected the identity of his passengers. Sir John met his family on the farther shore and learned that two of his children had not survived the frightful ordeal.

Joseph Brant and Guy Johnson went to England. Brant was determined to see the King in person to explain to him the serious plight of the Mohawks. He intended to ask His Majesty if the loss of their lands was to be their reward for unwavering loyalty to the British.

Brant’s reception at the Court of St. James was no less gratifying than that of his grandfather, Gan Ah Joh Hore, on the occasion of his historic visit to Queen Anne. King George III received him right royally, giving him a watch and a banner to be used, as royalty uses it, to signify his regal presence. Officials were most courteous and scholars sought his company. The great Romney painted his best-known portrait.

His business audiences with the King and his courtiers were most satisfactory. They gave Brant unqualified assurances that if the Indian lands had been invaded and the people molested, as Brant had affirmed, the British Government would recompense the Indians adequately. It was only a matter of patience until the bothersome rebellion had been put under foot.

Brant returned to America with hope and confidence. But when he landed at Boston, he learned that important changes had occurred in his absence. Thirteen of the New England colonies had declared their independence of Britain. Only Quebec, the fourteenth colony, had declined to join the New Republic. The Confederacy of the Longhouse had been dissolved. All the lands of the Mohawks were in the hands of the enemy. The rebels, and not the Johnsons, were the lords of the valley. Joseph Brant, the proud leader of the mighty Mohawks, had to steal his way to Montreal, like a thief in the night. There he joined Butler’s Rangers, a Loyalist regiment recruited from the Mohawk Valley, and raised his battleaxe against the despoilers of his people.

The war lasted seven long years. The Mohawks, trusting implicitly in the King’s promises, fought valiantly with the British. When the peace was negotiated, in 1783, the British acknowledged the independence of the thirteen colonies and ceded to them not only large territories in the vast unexplored interior of the country, but the Indian lands over which they exercised no legal rights whatever.

There remained to the British only Newfoundland; Nova Scotia, which included the present Province of New Brunswick; and the Province of Canada, which is now Quebec. The deepest waters of the Great Lakes were to mark the boundary between the Republic and that vast, uninhabited, inland peninsula, whose only name at that time was Upper Canada.

Thousands of loyalist immigrants had poured into Upper Canada during the war. With the peace, their numbers doubled, trebled. They came with bleeding and bruised feet and with clothes tattered and torn. They crossed into the British dominions only a few feet in advance of their pursuers. Others had boarded over-crowded, leaky ships, which carried them to the desolate shores of Nova Scotia. Nova Scarcity, they called it. A few went to Quebec, to England, or to the British possessions in the West Indies. Those who crossed the St. Lawrence, the Niagara and the Detroit Rivers began a new life, empty-handed, on the virgin soil of Upper Canada. The British Government granted them food and tools and called them by the honourable title of United Empire Loyalists.

News of the peace brought to the Mohawks huddled at Fort Niagara the confirmation of their most terrifying fears. Their allies, the British, whom they had believed to be invincible, had suffered an ignominious defeat. There was now no hope of the restoration of the lands which had belonged from time immemorial to the Six Nations Confederacy. The People of the Longhouse were no longer a strong united people, but pliable as putty in the hands of the whites. If the refugees at Fort Niagara returned to their longhouse, they would live all their lives in subservience to their enemies. If they threw in their lot with the British, their future was problematical in the extreme.

Yet the Mohawks made their decision without equivocation. So long as the buds blossom in the springtime, so long as the birds fly south when the heat of the summer is over, even so long, said they, must the Mohawks sink or swim with the British. Farewell to their lands and their longhouses on the Mohawk! Farewell, forever! Of all their treasures there remained nothing but an old walnut box rescued from its hiding place with its contents, a Bible, eight pieces of communion silver and a heap of moulded linen. This was their Blackheath experience. Homeless and hopeless, they were waiting on the doorstep of Upper Canada.

An unexpected visitor came to them in that dark hour and offered what consolation he could. He was Rev. John Stuart, their “little gentleman,” six feet tall. As soon as he had heard of their plight, he set out from the village of King’s Town—later, Kingston—at the far end of the lake which is called Ontario, and coasted along the northern shore in a row boat. In happier days he had broken to them the Bread of Life in Queen Anne’s Chapel; he was their guide and counsellor in temporal and spiritual matters. He longed to be with his people in their great need, to eat and to drink again with them from the Holy Cup and to offer them the comfort of his prayers. He, too, was an exile, he told them, driven from his parsonage at Fort Hunter by a rebel mob, who desecrated the royal chapel and made of it a tavern for their carousals. These were troublous times. The future was dark and forbidding. Of themselves, they were weak and impotent, but they must learn to put their trembling hands between those of the omnipotent God and to trust Him, as a child trusts an earthly parent. He was confident that the British would not desert them, nor cause them to suffer unduly. Some day the sun would shine again upon those who had suffered, for Britain’s sake, privation, persecution and the loss of earthly possessions.

Brant’s Ford

No sooner had the peace been signed than Brant was off to Quebec to confer with Sir Frederick Haldimand, the Governor of Canada, about the fate of the Mohawks. On their behalf he demanded lands in Upper Canada equivalent to the Six Nation lands which the British had wrongfully ceded to the United States. That, at least, was their right.

The Governor was prepared to make what recompense he could. He suggested that a tract of land lying near the Lachine Rapids might be acceptable to the Mohawks. The Indians explored this land, but found it not to their liking. The Senecas, most of whom had decided to remain in New York State, had objected to the location, pointing out that in case of war in which the Confederacy might be involved, the distance between their two nations would be too great. The Mohawks must not forget that they were the keepers of the eastern door of the Longhouse of the Six Nations.

Joseph Brant, meanwhile, had been making some investigations on his own account. He had seen and had cast a covetous eye on that vast tract of unbroken forest which his people had taken from the Neutrals in the bloody extirpation of 1650. Many years had passed since that time and the land had come into the possession of the Mississaugas, a tribe of the great Ojibway nation, blood brothers of the Algonquins.

Brant had tramped the region and found it good, quite unsuitable, naturally, for tenderfoot whites but ideal as a home and a hunting ground for his Indian people. Three large sweet-water lakes all but surrounded it, Ontario, the Lake of the Eries and the Lake of the Hurons. Game was plentiful and the soil so fertile that, with little or no manual labour, his Mohawks might have an abundant living.

In this beautiful land he had found a river which reminded him of the Mohawk. Brant knew that a river is not as dead as its geographical definition. To him and to his people it was a living entity, a sprightly, wilful, joyous creature that danced in the sunlight and threw a kiss to every passing breeze. There was variety in its every movement and a new dress for every season. If his people were ever to be happy again, they must live beside a river, and more than any other river, this one reminded him of their loved Mohawk.

He took the precaution to approach the Chiefs of the Mississaugas to ask if they would allow the Mohawks to encamp on any part of their lands.

“Brother, the whole country lies before you,” was the reply. “Choose you for your Mohawks a tract that seemeth good. There build your longhouses and plant your corn.”

With this assurance of the goodwill of the Mississaugas, Brant went again to talk with the Governor. But Haldimand had forestalled him. He informed Brant that it was his intention to buy for the Crown as much land as he could from the Mississaugas to provide a future home for the United Empire Loyalists and other white settlers. If Brant would like land in this locality for his Mohawks, he should have first choice, for the whites had shown no greater loyalty to the Empire than his Indians.

All the while Brant held in his heart a picture of the beautiful river of the interior. The Senecas had called it the Tinaatoua, but to the Mississaugas it was the O-es-shin-ne-gun-ing, literally “the one that washes the timber down and carries away the grass and the weeds.” On its waters the Sulpician priests had drifted down to Lake Erie. Galinée had called it La Rapide; to-day it is known as the Grand.

That river was within Brant’s grasp. He intimated to the Governor that if the Mohawks might have six miles on each side of it, from its mouth to its source, they would have their hearts’ desire.

The request was granted. Negotiations were begun at once for the purchase of the land from the Mississaugas. Colonel John Butler, officer in command of Butler’s Rangers, the Loyalist regiment, had the matter in hand, by order of Sir John Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs. He invited representatives of all the Indian tribes and nations in that locality to meet with him at Niagara, on May 22, 1784, to discuss the purchase by the Crown of extensive lands in Upper Canada.

Much depended upon what the Chief of the Mississaugas had to say, for his people had held the land so long by the consent of their brothers, the Ojibways, that they were universally acknowledged to be the owners. For a trivial monetary consideration, he said, the Mississaugas would transfer to the King, their father, and to their brothers of the Six Nations all claim to the valley of the river of their choice, within certain very poorly-defined boundaries. This palaver was quite incomprehensible to Colonel Butler, but he drew up the legal deeds and secured the fingerprints and the totems of all representatives of the nations interested in the transfer of the land.

This happened near the end of Sir Frederick Haldimand’s term of office. On the eve of his departure for England, he left instructions that a Niagara engineer should be employed to accompany Brant to the O-es-shin-ne-ung-ing to help him choose a site for his village and to assist the Indians in the erection of a church, a school and grist and saw mills.

At this juncture, a division arose among the Mohawks. The majority were willing to accept the leadership of Joseph Brant and to follow him into the interior, but Captain John Deserontyou headed a rather vociferous minority, who were determined to take up lands on, or near, the St. Lawrence River. When they had gained the Governor’s permission to settle in the east, they demanded a partition of the nation’s communion silver. Brant gave his consent reluctantly enough, but claimed the Bible and the walnut box because of the numerical superiority of his following.

Deserontyou’s party settled near the Bay of Quinte and called their village Deseronto. Their descendants are to-day in possession of three pieces of Queen Anne’s silver, the fourth, the chalice, having disappeared very mysteriously many years ago.

The Brant party travelled by Indian trails from Niagara along the southern shore of Lake Ontario to the Head of the Lake and proceeded due west from there through the forest to the river. They had little enough to carry. Most of their wampum belts and other national treasures were with their memories in the valley of the Mohawk. The few they had taken with them on their hurried flight to Niagara had been lost. Besides their clothing, they had only the Bible and four pieces of priceless silver in a walnut box. There is a tradition that one of the women carried the silver all the way from Niagara to the Grand River in an innocent-looking bundle of personal clothing slung carelessly over her shoulder.

They came at last to the site which Brant had chosen for the Mohawk village. For the first time they saw the river which their leader had described to them, saw it winding in and out within its wooded banks and sparkling in the sunlight. There was scarcely a cloud in the blue sky overhead and the lovely landscape was reflected in the still water. Yes, it was like their Mohawk and they would learn to love it. It was their river, their home. They called the village Brant’s Ford, because there Brant first threw a boom across the river.

The erection of the promised chapel awakened in Brant a new religious fervour. He placed his tomahawk and all the accoutrements of war on the altar of sacrifice. He was done with them forever. Henceforth his New Testament was to be the standard of his life and the best efforts of his declining years must be spent in furnishing and equipping this new structure which was to replace in the affections of his people Queen Anne’s lovely chapel of the Mohawk.

With the hope of securing donations for the new edifice, Brant went to England again. And not without success, for he brought home with him large sums of gift money and several pieces of ecclesiastical furniture. The British Parliament gave him a church bell stamped with the arms of the reigning House of Hanover. This made Brant extremely happy, for he knew that his heart would beat very fast whenever that bell should call his people to worship in the only chapel in all the wilderness of Upper Canada.

The chapel was completed and ready for dedication in June, 1788. Brant had planned that the service of consecration should be an auspicious occasion. He himself and six of his braves had paddled all the way to Kingston, skirting the north shore of Lake Ontario, and they had brought back with them their missionary, Rev. John Stuart. He was to share their triumph who in past times had so often shared their sorrows.

It was a glorious day, a happy, memorable day, a day of reunion. The church bell pealed joyously and the people crowded into the chapel with thanksgiving. The missionary’s heart was full. The words of comfort which he had spoken with a heavy heart to his disconsolate people at Niagara had been miraculously fulfilled. A wholly unexpected way had opened for the Mohawks. Seven hundred of his former parishioners were settled at last in permanent homes on the banks of another beautiful river. Queen Anne’s chapel was lost to them forever, but he rejoiced with them in the possession of a new royal chapel and he consecrated it and all the worshipping people to the service of the King and the King of Kings.

In 1791, came the joyful news that Upper Canada was to be set apart as a new Province, with a Lieutenant-Governor to rule it. Sir John Johnson had hoped to be exalted to this post, in recognition of his services during the War of the American Revolution, but the appointment went to another veteran, Colonel John Graves Simcoe. That was one more slight to be added to the sum total of the baronet’s bag of resentment. He could not find it in his heart to forgive any one who was in any way responsible for the choice and he nourished an ill-concealed animosity toward his successful rival.

The new Governor was an aristocrat of the first water, yet courteous and beloved for all that. It soon became evident that he was a man of independent opinion and of final decisions. On more than one occasion he presumed to differ with the Governor of Canada, at Quebec, whose subordinate he was. The village of Niagara had been named the capital of the new province, but Simcoe, disapproving of the Indian name, had changed it to Newark. He also criticized the location of the capital. Britain had just relinquished Fort Niagara to the Republic in a boundary adjustment and Simcoe warned that Newark would now be an easy target for the Fort Niagara guns in the event of a war with the United States.

It was the new Governor’s pronounced opinion that the capital of Upper Canada should be located somewhere in the far interior of the Province. He himself favoured a site in the west, at the junction of the two main branches of the Thames. He went so far as to advocate that its name should be Georgina, in compliment to His Majesty, the King.

Simcoe proceeded to act as if he expected immediate compliance with his proposals. In order to acquaint himself fully with the situation, he made a series of exploratory excursions into the woods. He spent a week in January trudging from Newark to the head of Lake Ontario and back. In February he set out again, this time for Detroit, with a small group of intimate friends. The journey was made by sleighs, “but chiefly on foot.”

The first lap of the expedition beyond the Head of the Lake brought them to the Grand, which was to be called The Ouse, by Governor Simcoe’s command. Joseph Brant greeted them at the Indian village with a hurried hoisting of the Union Jack, a salute of guns and a display of war trophies. An imperious clanging of the church bell intimated that the visitors were expected to attend a religious service. After that there were ceremonies of one kind or another, introductions and congratulations.

When the Governor and his friends finally tore themselves away, Brant’s hospitality continued with them. Not only did the great Mohawk accompany them in person for a considerable distance, but he sent twelve of his warriors ahead into the wilderness to cut firewood for the Governor’s party and to erect temporary sheds for their use at night.

On the return trip, the party stopped again at Brant’s Ford. This was an occasion for considerable hilarity, for the Mohawks had had time to plan the entertainment. They had provided an Indian costume for each one of the guests, and with much pomp and ceremonial dancing, they adopted Governor Simcoe and his entire entourage into the Mohawk nation. There was no end of merriment. Dancing continued long into the night and the forests echoed and reechoed with whoops and shrieks of laughter. But the Governor had to pay well for his fun. Before the last farewells had been said, he had obligated his government to build a Council House in the Indian village for his Mohawk brothers.

On another expedition, Governor Simcoe coasted along the northern shore of Lake Ontario and found Toronto, which he renamed York. This village was finally chosen to be the capital of Upper Canada, being a compromise between the Governor’s choice and that of Sir John Johnson, who kept clamouring that Kingston should have the honour.

About this time the western end of the province was opened for settlement, and the road which Simcoe and his cronies broke through the wilderness on their way to Detroit became in time a government highway. In subsequent years it was the means of bringing civilization and culture to Western Ontario.

Smiles mingled with tears when Sir John Johnson came to pay his first visit to the Mohawk people at Brant’s Ford. The once proud lord of Johnson Hall was a pathetic figure now, stooped, ashen pale and prematurely gray. He could talk about nothing but his losses and the insults and indignities he had endured.

But, sad spectacle though he was, his very presence recalled the happy past, Sir John and Joseph Brant, as boys together—they were born in the same year—Miss Molly in her glamorous youth, the bountiful table and the unlatched door at Johnson Hall, Chief Warraghuay within the Council ring on the spacious grounds of the baronial mansion, Sir John’s bride, the lovely Polly Watts, Queen Anne’s Chapel within the palisades of Fort Hunter. These were memories that neither time nor misfortune could efface. They would live on in their hearts forever.

Joseph Brant did not spend all his allotted days at Brant’s Ford. In recognition of his conspicuous services to Britain during the stormy days of the Revolution, he received a royal grant of land at the mouth of Waghguata Creek, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, near the Head of the Lake. On this estate, comprising more than three thousand acres, he built Wellington Square, a somewhat pretentious, two-storied house of red cedar, cut in the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence, and furnished it in elaborate English style. A retinue of negro servants did his bidding, served the members of his household and made his home a delightful rendezvous for titled and cultured visitors, who came from far and near to have an audience with the great Mohawk.

The First Surveys

When Colonel John Butler secured a deed of lands from the Mississaugas, he was acting as agent for the Crown. The Governor, Sir Frederick Haldimand, required the land to provide for thousands of refugee United Empire Loyalists who had flocked into Upper Canada, as well as for the equally loyal Six Nations Indians.

But Sir Frederick had not the remotest idea of the extent of the lands covered by the deed. No more had Colonel Butler. The province was at that time an unexplored wilderness into which very few white men had ever penetrated. The Governor and his parliament lived in the capital City of Quebec, nearly six hundred miles away. Travel was not easy. The only maps of the region were the grossly inaccurate drawings of Champlain, Galinée and others of the early explorers.

Neither did the Mississaugas know exactly what they had conveyed to the government. They knew nothing, and cared less, about the maps and surveys of the palefaces. From time immemorial all the Indian peoples had measured distances by the number of moons required to travel from place to place. They had no deeds, for they owned whatever lands they were able to possess and they moved about at will, having no fixed habitation.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that the deed was couched in obscure phrases and terms. The southern boundary, for example, was, vaguely enough, “the eastern end of Lake Erie and the western end of Lake Ontario.” The western limit to the tract was, roughly, the Thames River “to a point directly north of Catfish Creek, on Lake Erie.”

But the definition of the northern boundary left most to conjecture. It was described as extending “from the mouth of the Waghguata Creek, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, and near the Head of the Lake, westward overland to the La Tranche, or Thames River.” This could mean many things to many minds. It is a marvel that this loose description did not lead to litigation in the courts.

Sir Frederick Haldimand and his advisers realized, in time, that an earnest effort must be made to define the boundaries of the Mississauga Purchase, and particularly the northern one, before the Tract could be opened up for settlement.

This was by no means easy of accomplishment, although the government surveyors did their best. Beginning at the mouth of the Waghguata Creek, near Joseph Brant’s residence, they drew a baseline toward the north-west at an angle of forty-five degrees. When they had advanced twelve miles along this line, they projected a series of radial lines in an effort to reach the Thames, which was obviously west of the Grand. When once they had located the Thames, it would be an easy matter to extend and modify the baseline.

They found a river, which they presumed to be the Thames, and they straightened the line from Lake Ontario to the point at which they had contacted the river. This line running from the environs of Burlington to the Town of Arthur is now the boundary line for several townships in the Counties of Wellington, Halton and Dufferin. It was the first survey line in all the vast interior of Upper Canada.

The first political division of the province was made in 1788. Governor Sir Guy Carleton proclaimed from his seat in Quebec the partition of Upper Canada into four districts. From east to west, they were Lunenburg, Micklenburg, Nassau and Hesse. All this by the authority of an Act of the British Parliament. German names, all of them, and intended, no doubt, to please the King and the Royal House of Hanover.

The deed which Governor Haldimand gave to the Mohawks on October 25, 1784, was the first grant of Crown lands in the history of the province. By this “deed of gift” the Mohawks came into possession of lands extending six miles deep on each side of the Grand River, beginning at the river’s mouth on Lake Erie and continuing at that same width to its problematical source.

The grant was preeminently to the Mohawks, as a mark of recognition of their loyalty and invaluable services to the British at the time of the Revolution. But it was not to them alone. It was expressly stated in the deed that any one, or all, of the other nations of the Six Nations Confederacy were welcome to come and share equally in the Indian Tract.

The time came when it was found necessary to have a clearer statement of the boundaries of the Indian lands. If literally observed, the wording, “six miles on each side of the Grand River,” would provide the Tract with a very jagged and, in season, an exceedingly variable line.

The surveyors were summoned again. Their instructions were to survey the Indian lands, with straight, fixed boundary lines, taking extreme care not to deprive the Indians of any portion of their rightful territory.

To men of their profession, this presented no difficulty. The surveyors selected two fixed points, one at Brant’s Ford and the other at the eastward bend of the river, two miles from its mouth. Between these points they drew a straight line. Then they drew parallel lines six miles on each side of the central line and these became the boundaries of the southern portion of the Six Nations grant.

When Governor Simcoe took the reins of office, in 1791, he decided to have a survey made of the entire province. This was in preparation for a great influx of population which he hoped to encourage by the offer of cheap lands to desirable emigrants from the United States. At the same time he discarded the German names of the districts and renamed them respectively: Eastern, Midland, Home and Western. The Indian lands were in the Home District.

Simcoe’s plans for a complete survey of Upper Canada necessitated more detailed work on the Indian lands. This undertaking was assigned to Augustus Jones, a Welshman by birth, who was the first, and for many years the senior, Government Surveyor of lands in Upper Canada. In his youth he had married the daughter of an Ojibway chief, and he had settled at Stoney Creek near the Head of the Lake, on the Niagara Road. He enjoyed an intimate friendship with Joseph Brant, a friendship which was strengthened by frequent companionship, for a long, sandy beach extended from Stoney Creek to Wellington Square.

Jones began to work with a will. He began in early spring at the mouth of the river and worked northward. By April, he had advanced twenty miles beyond Brant’s Ford.

Then he made a startling discovery. The river which he and his men had contacted with their “baseline” was not the Thames, as he had supposed, but a branch of the Grand, the one which was afterward called the Conestoga. The Thames, he learned, was much farther south. The source of the Grand was fully forty miles north of the baseline. This meant that the baseline did not represent the true boundary of the Mississauga Purchase. It meant, too, that the Indians, whose grant was to extend from the mouth of the Grand to its source, had legal title to thousands of acres of land which the government had not bought.

These revelations caused an unusual flurry in government circles. Jones and his men were at a standstill, until official decisions had been made. Parliament declined to buy more land from the Mississaugas in order to fulfil literally their promise to the Six Nations. Certainly there had been no intention on the part of the legislators to defraud the Indians, for no one concerned in the transaction, not even the Indians themselves, had any knowledge of the extreme length of the river.

The final decision was that the baseline was to stand, and the Indians would have to submit to the unfortunate curtailment of their lands. The northern limit of their territory was fixed at the intersection of the Grand River with the baseline, a short distance above the present Town of Fergus. The Six Nations would still have twelve hundred square miles of land, or 768,000 acres, of the finest land in the country, a considerable estate.

These problems settled, Augustus Jones completed his survey, beginning this time at the baseline and working down stream.

Seventeen townships are included in that first grant of Crown lands to the Six Nations, in 1784. Eight are in Haldimand County: Dunn, Sherbrooke, Moulton, Canborough, North and South Cayuga, Oneida, and Seneca. Brant County has four: Tuscarora, Onondaga, Brantford, and South Dumfries. Three are in Waterloo County: North Dumfries, Waterloo, and Woolwich; and two, Pilkington and Nichol, are in Wellington County.

Thayendanegea’s Last Days

Contrary to expectations, the curtailment of their lands at the headwaters of their river aroused little resentment among the Mohawks. At that moment their displeasure was aroused by their own discovery that their lands were too extensive to meet their agricultural requirements and too circumscribed to provide ideal hunting grounds. These were the complaints that caused the braves to sit on their doorsteps twiddling their thumbs and nursing an unholy temper.

Brant himself was little concerned about that portion of the tract which lay north of the Government Road. He was wholly absorbed in the settlement of the stretch from Brant’s Ford to Lake Erie. In the beginning, only the Mohawks had come to Upper Canada; but when the other nations of the Confederacy realized that the British lands were for them, as well as for the Mohawks, they too came in considerable numbers to stake their claims. It was Brant’s duty, and his pleasure, to settle them in their national groups in their new homeland.

Here was a rare opportunity for Brant to gratify a latent tendency to a lavish generosity. It gave him joy to assign lands to the Indian people. But he did not stop there. With a too-liberal hand, he bestowed large areas of the southern region, as free gifts, or on long-term leases, to his relatives and to his personal friends, most of whom had no claim whatsoever on the land. Many of them were whites. Among others, he invited Butler’s Rangers, with whom the Mohawks had so recently shared the misfortunes of a losing war, to settle near the mouth of the river. As a mere formality, he gave them a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years’ duration.

It was his intention to sell to whites certain parcels of land in that same locality and to share the proceeds with the Senecas who had remained in New York. This was to be an evidence of friendship and brotherly love. Fortunately, government authorities heard of this intention and interfered in time.

White speculators from Niagara and the Head of the Lake soon began to swarm about open-handed Brant like mosquitoes on a summer’s evening. Most of them had little or no financial backing, but that did not disqualify them from turning the gullibility of Brant to their own advantage. From far and near they came to enquire about the disposition of the Indian lands and to offer suggestions on the management of the Indians’ estate. As white men, they had had a wide experience in such matters. When once they had cultivated the friendship of the Great Mohawk, it was not difficult to secure from him, on easy terms, and frequently with no written agreement, fabulously large tracts of choice lands. Brant was happy in the giving. He never dreamed that by his generosity he was laying up for himself and for his people endless litigation in the courts of the white man’s law and much needless trouble and sorrow.

The wiliest of the speculators approached Brant with the suggestion that he sell the Indian lands in that great unexplored region north of the Government Road. The proceeds of the sales could be invested, his consultants said, in government annuities, which would provide financial security for his people without putting them under any obligation to work. The white man’s methods of finance may not have been entirely intelligible to Brant, but they were altogether alluring. Large dividends and no work was a consummation devoutly to be desired by his people.

Under the constant strain of the speculators’ arguments, Brant decided to convert at once into government annuities 352,707 acres of land, more than half the Crown grant, and most of it north of his village. With the help of his new-found white friends, he divided into six “blocks,” or tracts, the lands which he proposed to sell.

Government authorities heard of his foolish intention before it was too late. Realizing the seriousness of the situation and the necessity of finding immediately some means of saving the Indians from the blandishments of the whites, they summoned Brant and put him on the carpet. He was labouring under delusions, they told him, about the title of the Indian lands. It belonged to the Six Nations only so long as they chose to inhabit it. An estate in simple fee in Crown lands, such as the Indians’, could not be conveyed legally either by the Indians themselves, or by their representatives, or even under the official seal of the Governor. In the last analysis, Sir Frederick Haldimand’s “free gift” was nothing but a license of occupation. A title deed to Crown lands could be conveyed only by letters patent under the great seal of England or, at least, by the Province of Canada.

This legal dissertation sounded very learned, but it was quite incomprehensible to Brant. The Indians did not, could not, understand the white man’s laws. Brant protested loudly that the wholehearted loyalty of his people to the British cause and their enormous and irreparable losses, both during an after the war, entitled them to the same privileges as those which the white loyalists enjoyed in regard to the tenure of their lands. So incensed did he become that only with the greatest difficulty was he dissuaded from making a third trip to England to plead the cause of his people in the British House of Commons.

Governor Simcoe was so extremely anxious to avert any possible interference from overseas in the affairs of Upper Canada that he hastened to pour oil on the troubled waters. His government was disposed, he declared, to grant certain concessions to the Indians. He would allow the Six Nations to sell any portion of their lands at any time, if both chiefs and people were of the same mind. But this wish must be expressed at a public meeting called at their Council House for the express purpose of debating the question. If these conditions were observed to the letter, the Crown would agree to circumvent the law in this case and would deed the land to the purchasers approved by the Indians.

The braves considered this proposition long and carefully, and finally decided to accept it. They named Joseph Brant their agent and gave him legal power to negotiate the sale of the Indian lands. He was to be personally and solely responsible for the money which might be derived from any, or all, real estate transactions. Simcoe and his advisers agreed to the placing of this responsibility on Brant’s shoulders, for they believed that he had the welfare of his people at heart. Certainly no one connected with the Six Nations had as good a knowledge as he of the business and legal methods of the whites.

There were some, however, in Government circles who were not so sure that Simcoe had made a wise decision in the matter. They felt that he was taking too great a risk, considering the immense value of the property involved. Lord Dorchester, the Governor of Canada, and Simcoe’s superior in office, was not entirely satisfied with the procedure. He thought the Government should have bought the lands outright from the Indians and sold them, as opportunity afforded, to accredited buyers, and that the government should have assumed full responsibility for the collection and the investment of the money.

Brant himself was supremely happy about Simcoe’s agreement. He was anticipating the pleasure he would have in dickering with prospective buyers. He applied himself diligently to the sale of those lands which were already under consideration pending the final decision of the Government. On February 5, 1798, he announced that he had made full arrangement for the following sales:

Brant surrendered these lands to the government, according to agreement. The attorney for Upper Canada then executed deeds for all the blocks, except No. 4. The papers, signed and ready for delivery, were given to the secretary of Upper Canada to hold until such time as he had secured from the various purchasers receipts signed by the Trustees of the Six Nations.

Now the government had appointed a board of three trustees to control and manage the Indian lands, namely:

Hon. D. W. Smith, Acting Surveyor-General of the Province, a member of the Executive Council and Speaker of the Assembly.

Colonel William Claus, of Niagara, grandson of Sir William Johnson and Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

Alexander Stewart, legal adviser to the Six Nations. His wife was a niece of Joseph Brant.

The choice was not a good one, for Hon. D. W. Smith moved to England soon after his appointment and Stewart journeyed perforce to the land from whose bourne no traveller ever returns. These eventualities left Colonel William Claus as the sole administrator of Indian Affairs. Claus lived in Niagara in a low, rambling house, which to this day is called The Wilderness. On his death, his son, John, took over automatically the duties of this office.

The speculators were adventurers in finance, but they hoped to fill their empty pockets at the Indian roulette table. Their plan was to make a small initial payment on their purchase—the smaller, the better—and to hold the balance indefinitely under a long-term mortgage. Usually they defaulted on every subsequent payment of principal and interest when they fell due.

In these transactions the Indians were invariably the losers, for Colonel Claus worked hand in glove with the speculators. Never, under any circumstances, would he press the laggards for payment, and nothing that the Indians could say or do ever aroused him to a sense of responsibility. So, the unscrupulous land-grabbers went on their way merrily ignoring all their financial obligations to the Indians. Not infrequently they sold these lands under false pretences to honest, unsuspecting people. This practice caused much litigation and untold heartache when, in the fullness of time, the ugly truth was dragged out into the light of a court room.

Two things soon disturbed the Six Nations, the rapid dissipation of their lands and the diminution of expected dividends. The situation grew worse year by year. Finally, the Indians summoned Joseph Brant and John Claus to appear before their Council to answer certain pertinent questions and to give an accounting of their stewardship. Brant had little, or nothing, to say. Claus did not so much as put in an appearance. He had in his possession all his father’s papers on Indian affairs, yet there seemed to be no court of equity which would compel him to surrender them. Since the Six Nations were not a corporate body, they could not bring any legal action against Claus without a court indictment signed by all the individual resident members of the Confederacy, a next-to-impossible procedure.

But these financial entanglements were not the only worries of Brant’s declining years. A dark cloud fell over his domestic life. He had a son, Isaac, a worthless fellow, who was dangerous when he was in his cups. One day when he was in a disgusting state of inebriation, he made a sudden, treacherous lunge at Brant with a dirk. He had every intention of inflicting a mortal wound. The father drew his own weapon in self defence. Both were injured, Brant, inconsequentially, but Isaac, rather badly in the scalp. With ordinary care, however, nature would have healed the wound, but Isaac, willing to sacrifice his own life if only he could wreak vengeance upon his father, neglected it wilfully. Blood poisoning set in and caused Isaac’s premature death.

Joseph made no attempt to conceal the ugly facts of the case. He reported the incident at once to the police, resigned his commission as captain in the army and forfeited at the same time his pay. But neither the police nor the Indians ever brought him before a Justice of the Peace, or into a court of law. He continued to live at Wellington Square in the shadow of the family disgrace, always loved and respected by his people. The years wore on without cessation of trouble, and he died, in November, 1807, before he completed the sixty-fifth year of his eventful life.

The news of his untimely death cast a deep gloom over the settlement of Mohawks on the Grand River. For twenty-four hours the church bell tolled continuously to mark the passing of the flower of their nation, the greatest Indian they had ever known. Six Nation braves and white men prominent in affairs of state came to Wellington Square, stood side by side around his open grave and accorded him honourable burial.

For forty-three years the grass grew over the sacred mound, then in November, 1850, a group of Mohawks came to Wellington Square, disinterred the coffin and carried it on their shoulders, thirty miles through the woods, to a new grave beside the Mohawk Chapel, on the banks of the Grand River. Again the solemn church bell tolled for countless hours, and again the nation’s diplomats and officials came from far and near. The chiefs and warriors of the Six Nations came to the church dressed in deepest mourning. The women wept, slumping in their strouds. Once again the Six Nations contemplated their irreparable loss. Rev. Peter Jones, an Ojibway chief, son of Augustus Jones, the surveyor, conducted the memorial service. He extolled the Great Mohawk for his interest in his own people, for his leadership in temporal and spiritual matters and for the respect and esteem in which he was always held by the whites.

Years later, the Mohawks erected over the grave of their hero a large recumbent tomb and, in 1880, or thereabouts, they surrounded it with a high wrought-iron fence. So, both tomb and grave are protected from the lawless hands of souvenir collectors and other unprincipled vandals.

The life of Joseph Brant was characterized by a purity of private morals, a wholehearted generosity and an unusual hospitality. War leader of a savage people, he was at the same time a sincere exponent of religious truths and a translator of many books and passages from the Bible into the Mohawk language. In his youth he saw nothing incongruous in keeping his tomahawk and his New Testament on the same shelf. As years passed by he was increasingly concerned about the welfare of his people. “Have pity on the poor Indian,” he whispered to his nephew, as he lay on his deathbed. “If you can get any influence with the great, endeavour to do them all the good you can. Oh, my Father, my Father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof.”

John Brant, the son of his third wife, succeeded the great Thayendanegea. He, too, lived in stirring times and made a valuable contribution to the development the Indian people.

In 1811, four years after the death of Joseph Brant, the government was persuaded to appoint a committee to investigate the affairs of the Six Nations, and particularly Brant’s connection with them. But no tangible evidence was found of any irregularity. The committee declared that since no conclusive evidence had been presented to them during the enquiry, they were unable to judge whether or not Brant had done his full duty to the Indians at all times. In the absence of any definite charge of dishonesty, it was only fair to the memory of the great man to assume that he had not wilfully abused the trust his people had placed in him.

The Indians themselves declined to benefit by any mistakes which Brant may have made. They established their honesty by their confirmation of many invalid deeds executed by Brant, knowing full well that they might have repudiated them. From time to time they surrendered to the whites great blocks of land for the benefit of the ever-increasing white population, and as often as not they received no adequate recompense.

Brant’s monument in Victoria Park, in the heart of the City of Brantford, is the most imposing memorial ever erected to an Indian. It is an evidence of the esteem in which the white population held, and still holds, the city’s founder and first citizen. The heroic figure of the great Mohawk, Thayendanegea, surmounts a pedestal and stands moulded in bronze fully nine feet high. Yet his pose is so natural that he seems to be alive and speaking. His robe is thrown back over his shoulder and he is looking with sightless, but strangely expressive eyes in the direction of the river he loved so well.

It was not the intention of the builders of this magnificent memorial to honour Thayendanegea alone. This was to be a testament of esteem for all the people of the Six Nations, a recognition of the splendid part they played in the building of the city and in the development of the province.

With this thought in mind, two groups of three Indians were moulded in brass and placed on two sides of the monument lower than the figure of Brant. In these, the central figure is erect and prominent and supported on each side by another figure in graceful pose. One carries a bow and arrow, another a pipe of peace. All wear moccasins, feathers or other characteristic articles of Indian apparel. Near the base of the monument there are bas-relief pictures of Indian life, and these, too, are cast in bronze.

The design and execution of the monument was the work of Percy Wood, of London, England. His model was selected in open competition with the work of six other sculptors.

The unveiling took place, in 1886, in the presence of a great concourse of interested people. The Indians regarded the occasion not as a day of mourning for their lost Thayendanegea, but rather as a time of exultation in the manifestation of the white man’s recognition of their race. They celebrated the event with a lacrosse match, a feast of roasted ox and a full-dress dance in feathers and war paint.

PEOPLE OF THE SETTLEMENTS

Waterloo

Acting as agent for the Six Nations and with the consent of the Government, Joseph Brant sold to white speculators, on February 5, 1798, six blocks of Indian lands. Of these, Block 2, comprising 94,012 acres, a considerable distance upstream from Brant’s Ford, was the first to be opened for colonization. It became the first white settlement in the far interior of Upper Canada.

Three joint purchasers secured this block, James Wilson, Jean Baptiste Rousseaux and Richard Beasley. The first two lived at Ancaster. It is believed that they came there together, in 1790, and settled on the crest of the escarpment. They built a grist mill on the banks of a creek and when this proved a financial success, they erected a corn mill over on the Grand River to serve the Mohawks and other Indian folk.

Of James Wilson’s background little seems to be known, except that he was a loyalist from Pennsylvania. Rousseaux was of Huguenot descent and he had sufficient knowledge of Indian languages to act as an acceptable interpreter to Joseph Brant. Relatives of the name live in Hamilton, but old John Baptiste was probably buried, as many of his descendants were, in the churchyard of St. John’s Anglican Church, at Ancaster.

The best known, and decidedly the most prominent of the three, was Colonel Richard Beasley, who came to Niagara in 1777, as a Loyalist refugee, when he was only sixteen. He married Henrietta Springer, a fatherless girl of excellent Loyalist stock, whom he had once rescued from Indian kidnappers, and whose brother, Richard, had built the first Methodist Church at the Head of the Lake. Beasley was buried in the churchyard of Christ Church Cathedral, in Hamilton. The inscription on the stone which marks his grave claims for him the distinction of having been “the first settler at the Head of the Lake.”

Colonel Beasley was a man of much personal charm and of no mean ability. His family connections were excellent. Possibly through his cousin, Hon. Richard Cartwright, of Kingston, he became a member of the first parliament of Upper Canada when he was still a young man. In that capacity, he enjoyed an intimate friendship with Governor Simcoe and others in government circles, and he entertained them right royally at his home on the site of Dundurn Park, in Hamilton.

From the day of its purchase, Block 2 was called the Beasley Tract, and it was so named in the legal documents of the day. Beasley conducted all business pertaining to it. He had it surveyed and subdivided into farm lots and he was solely responsible for the payments on the mortgage, principal and interest, a substantial amount, since only £600 had been paid on the £8,887 purchase price of the property.

Beasley soon found himself financially embarrassed. The Indians kept hounding him for payments, which he could not meet. He had other creditors, one of them a man named Horning, whom he persuaded to accept, in lieu of money, a narrow strip of a thousand acres near the centre of the tract. Others could be satisfied only with money, and cash was a commodity which Beasley did not know how to extract from his ninety-four thousand acres on the Grand River, nor, indeed, from lands he had received from the Crown in other parts of Upper Canada, through the influence of friends in the Legislature.

But one day opportunity knocked at his door. Two young Mennonites from Pennsylvania, Joseph Sherk and Samuel Betzner, brothers-in-law, came to see if they could buy from Beasley certain properties up the Grand River. They were on horseback and they said they had just returned from an inspection of the lands of the Beasley Tract. They had brought their families with them all the way from Pennsylvania in huge, oxen-drawn, conestoga wagons, but had left them temporarily with friends at The Twenty (Jordan).

Beasley must have known about The Twenty, for it was a large settlement of “plain” people, Mennonites, on a creek which flowed into Lake Ontario, just twenty miles west of Niagara. He knew, too, that the Mennonites there had an enviable reputation for honesty, sobriety and industry. No colonizer could wish for better immigrants. If he could sell land to Sherk and Betzner, they would not only pay cash immediately but they would bring other cash-paying settlers of their faith, for Mennonites prefer to live among their own people. A colony of these people on the Beasley Tract would solve Beasley’s financial difficulties.

The sale was made. When the Mennonites had paid their money and received their deeds, they returned to The Twenty and prepared to transport their families to their new homes in the wilderness.

A long, wearisome journey lay before them. The trail ran through the Beverley Swamp, an all-but-impenetrable bog, which seemed capable of swallowing both oxen and wagons. Many a time they sank hub-deep into mud and despaired of extricating themselves. When at last they reached the sites they had chosen, they were utterly exhausted by their exertion and distraught by anxiety.

Betzner’s land was on the west side of the river, and Sherk’s on elevated ground, farther north, on the east bank. There they built their humble shacks, the first white men’s homes in all the vast interior. As Beasley surmised, this was the vanguard of a considerable migration of Mennonites, more Betzners, with their neighbours and friends. It looked as though the entire tract would be sold before long and Beasley could see the end of his worries.

The Bricker brothers came in 1802, John, the elder, with his wife and young family, and Sam, single, adventurous, red-headed and short-tempered. They chose land a little south of the Betzner settlement and they began at once to clear the forest and till the soil. It was not an easy undertaking, for the woods were dense and the earth was rooted with underbrush. Fire had to be used with extreme caution, to avoid the destruction of the settlers’ homes and harvests.

Sam Bricker was destined to pay a leading rôle in the dramatic events of that early settlement. He walked over to little Muddy York (Toronto) one day, a distance of more than sixty miles, as the crow flies, and he returned a few days later with the startling announcement that the deeds which Beasley had given them were absolutely worthless.

Sam insisted that he was not. He had convincing evidence to offer. He had spent a night at a tavern in York and he had overheard two men talking in the next room about the terrible predicament the Mennonites were in. Beasley had swindled them. He had gone to the Registry Office in the morning and learned that Beasley was only one of three joint owners of the tract. Moreover, it was covered by a sizeable mortgage.

From York he had gone to the Head of the Lake to confront Beasley with his dishonesty. And Beasley had confessed his guilt and offered to make amends. If the Mennonites would buy the block, or most of it, he would pay off the mortgage with the purchase money and give them a clear title to the land. He was prepared to give them a bargain, sixty thousand acres for twenty thousand dollars. And no hard feelings.

Twenty thousand dollars! That was more than the poor, betrayed people had ever hoped to possess, individually or collectively, in a whole lifetime. It was impossible to entertain such a proposition, even for a moment.

But Sam kept insisting that it was a good bargain. The land was the best to be had in all Upper Canada. If the settlers could not raise the money, would their relatives and friends in Pennsylvania lend it to them?

That was a new suggestion. Their friends could help, they knew, but would they? For weeks they debated this proposal pro and con. They decided, finally, to send Joseph Sherk and Sam Bricker to Pennsylvania to present their problem to the friends in the homeland.

The two men made the journey on horseback and travelled from farm to farm, acquainting their friends with the situation. But nowhere did they receive any encouragement and Sherk, convinced that he had come on a fool’s errand, returned to the Beasley Tract and advised the settlers to pack up and go back home to Pennsylvania. There was nothing else to do.

Troubles did not come singly to John Bricker. While he and his Annie were grieving over the frustration of their hopes, death had come to ten-year-old Johnny. It was hard enough to lose the boy, but unthinkable that they should leave his dear body in that foreign, mortgage-cursed land, which they would never see again. However, there was no alternative. They buried him near the house, on high ground from which they could see the river flowing southward to the homeland and they planted a young sapling to mark the spot. Many years have passed since that day. The sapling became a tree, and the tree died, but its fast-decaying roots may still be seen beside little Johnny’s gravestone in the hill-top cemetery in the village of Blair.

Sam Bricker knew nothing of the misfortune which had befallen his brother. He was still in Pennsylvania, refusing to give up hope of raising twenty thousand dollars to buy sixty thousand acres of the Beasley Tract. He went here and there investigating every bypath that seemed to lead to success. His enthusiasm was boundless, but he met only failure and disappointment.

Then it occurred to him that his cousin, John Eby, of the Hammer Creek community, might be persuaded to help. John was greatly interested when he heard the story, so interested that he decided at once to open his house and give Sam another chance to present his case. He summoned his friends and neighbours to a meeting in his kitchen, for as yet there was no “meeting house” at Hammer Creek.

At the appointed time the “Dachwaegele” began to congregate in front of the Eby mansion. Soon the brethren were seated in the kitchen and Sam stood before them trying to sell his idea. But his oratory did not carry conviction. He saw the brethren shake their heads. He heard them say that it would be a poor investment. Only a fool would spend his hard-earned money on land which he had not so much as seen. Besides, what assurance had they that Beasley, having caught a good-sized mouse, was not at that very moment setting his trap for all the rodents he could bag?

John himself saw the situation in a different light, and he asked permission to present his view. Reaching for his Bible, which always lay on the clock shelf, he leafed over the pages until he found these words:

He that hath pity on the poor lendeth to the Lord, and that which he hath given will He repay him again.

This he announced as a sort of text upon which to base a few observations. He did not think that the brethren had considered Sam’s proposal wisely. Instead of regarding it as a mere speculation to enrich themselves, which in all likelihood it would not do, he preferred to look upon it as a Christian duty to come to the help of their friends in distress. If it yielded them no financial return, they would at least have the satisfaction that they had done what they believed to be right. In any event, the Lord would in his own good time bless their action in His own inimitable way. Leave the matter, John urged, to each man’s conscience. Then there would be no fear of the outcome.

John’s speech turned the tables in Sam’s favour. With one accord, the brethren decided to lend their money to the Lord. Straightway they formed a joint stock company under the name of the German Company. John’s father, Christian Eby, who was awaiting translation to the world beyond, made the initial contribution, the princely sum of two thousand five hundred dollars, one-eighth of the total amount to be raised. It was agreed that this investment should represent one share, the maximum to be subscribed by any individual, and the minimum was set at one-eighth of a share. Benjamin Eby, old Christian’s youngest son, was named Secretary-Treasurer of the new company.

During the winter months the women of the Hammer Creek community sewed up two hundred canvas bags and placed a hundred silver dollars in each. As soon as the roads were passable in the spring, Sam Bricker and a number of jolly young companions packed the bags into the hold of a “leicht plaisir waegele,” built for the purpose, and conveyed the money over the long trail to Upper Canada.

Sam Bricker received a farm and the historic wagon in appreciation of his services to the company. For many years after Sam’s death the vehicle, slowly falling into decay, stood in the driving shed of his home at Chicopee. Recently, the two front wheels have been rescued and placed in the museum of the Waterloo Historical Society.

Two of Sam’s jovial travelling companions were John and Jacob Erb, brothers of John Bricker’s wife, Annie. Because of the heavy investments of their family in the company’s stock, it fell to their lot to take the money to York and to make arrangements for the transfer of sixty thousand acres of the Beasley Tract to the German Company of twenty-five stockholders.

The Erbs engaged William Dickson, a reputable lawyer of Niagara, to protect the interest of the company. For twenty guineas, he made a thorough search of the title of the property, furnished what good legal advice was necessary and drew up the parchment deed. A replica of this document is in the Registry Office, at Kitchener. It bears the date, June 29, 1805, and the signatures of the contracting parties, Richard Beasley, as party of the first part, and John and Jacob Erb, as representatives of the company.

Augustus Jones was employed to make a complete survey of the purchase to send to the owners in far-away Pennsylvania. He divided the sixty thousand acres into one hundred and twenty-eight farms of four hundred and forty acres each, two for each share. The remainder he parcelled into thirty-two small properties of various sizes. The original trails of the settlers were not disturbed in the sections which had been already settled. These short, cross-country cuts from one farm to the next may be traced to-day in the winding, picturesque roads in the older part of Waterloo Township. The survey, when completed, was sent to the shareholders in Pennsylvania, who cast lots for their holdings, in accordance with long-established precedent from the pages of Holy Writ.

The settlers on the Beasley Tract had their belongings packed and were ready to return to Pennsylvania when Sam Bricker and Erbs arrived with the money. There was no need now to go. In 1806 and 1807, they welcomed the sons of the shareholders of the German Company who came to investigate the lands which had fallen by lot to their fathers. So hearty was their greeting that many of the young men remained and became permanent settlers.

The most conspicuous figure among the latest arrivals was Benjamin Eby, the secretary of the Company. So public-spirited was he, and so generous, that he soon became the social, the educational and the religious leader of the people. He was an early teacher and the first bishop of the community. On his land was erected, in 1813, the first meeting-house in the immense, unbroken region from the Mohawk settlement to Georgian Bay. In 1834, a large frame building replaced the original log structure and the First Mennonite Church of Kitchener stands on that same site to-day.

In that modern church, as well as in many of the rural meeting-houses of the township, are practised to this day the ancient, unique religious rites of the Mennonite people. The men occupy the pews on the preacher’s left hand; the women in their quaint, “plain” attire sit on the right. The preaching is fundamental evangelism, based upon a literal interpretation of the Bible. Feet-washing is observed as a religious ceremony. No musical instrument accompanies the congregational singing, no ornate headstones are allowed in the graveyard, and no flowers. A bustling city now surrounds the quiet spot where sleep the rude forefathers of the hamlet. Noisy crowds, automobiles and clanging street cars throng the busy thoroughfare which passes the door. Other days have come and, with them, other ways.

John and Abraham Erb both decided to settle in the township. John came in 1807, built a mill near the junction of the Speed River with the Grand and became the founder of the town of Preston. Abraham arrived in 1816, with a party of forty-eight relatives and friends. They called on John at his mill, then pushed on about ten miles further north to occupy lands which had fallen to their families. Abraham built the second mill of the township and founded a village. Later, he named it Waterloo.

Waterloo was the name which government officials gave to the township of the Mennonites, in 1817. It was intended to commemorate the glorious victory of the British arms against Napoleon. The township included Block 2 in its entirety, that is to say all the land which Beasley purchased from the Indians.

The town of Waterloo has become a beautiful residential community boasting a population approaching ten thousand. It is sometimes called the Hartford of Canada, for the head-offices of three of the largest insurance companies of the province are located there. Its nearest neighbour is Kitchener, the largest municipality in the valley of the Grand, and between the two there is scarcely a barrier save an invisible boundary line and a healthy rivalry. Together they form a community known far and wide as the Twin City.

The phenomenal development of the settlements of the township is due in no small measure to the character of its first settlers. The Mennonites have a record of which they might well be proud, except that they regard pride as an avenue down which mortals travel to their eternal damnation. Martyr blood of the centuries flows in their veins. Here is a people so bound together by religious beliefs and cemented by intermarriage that it has become, through the years, a race distinct and separate from all others. For two centuries these people suffered, during the stormy days of religious controversy in middle Europe, at the hands of both Lutherans and Roman Catholics, persecutions as frightful as the stonings and crucifixions of the first Christians. In The Martyrs Mirror Lancaster, 1814, may be found the most harrowing records of the sufferings of the ancestors of many of the Mennonite families of Waterloo Township.

The Mennonite Church was founded in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1525, and named after one of its leaders, Menno Simons. It is Protestant of the Protestants. Its peculiar doctrines include non-participation in war and violence, not even in self-defence; a disbelief in the efficacy of infant baptism; avoidance of legal oaths, as well as a more or less deliberate shunning of contacts with the people of other faiths and the world in general. Their strict adherence to the “shalt-nots” of the Bible has not helped to make them popular, or even understood, in any country.

In England, people of like religious conviction are called Quakers. They, too, were misunderstood and reviled for conscience’ sake until their leader, William Penn, secured for them a grant of Crown lands in the New World. These lands were first called Penn’s Woods, of which the modern name of Pennsylvania is merely the Latin equivalent. Penn invited the Mennonites to join the Quakers, and soon English ships were carrying both Quakers and Mennonites across the Atlantic. In 1691, the British Parliament set its seal of approval on these non-combatant people. By a special decree, they were allowed the full exercise of their religion and the enjoyment of certain exemptions on religious grounds.

At the close of the American War of Revolution, the “plain” people found themselves citizens of a country which had not granted to them, by statute, the religious concessions which the British had accorded them for nearly a century. For these, and for other purely patriotic reasons, many of the people had no intention of relinquishing their British citizenship. Some of them began to slip away unobtrusively to Upper Canada. Their first settlement in the new country was at The Twenty; the largest, on the Beasley Tract on the Grand River.

The War of 1812 put to the test Britain’s promise of military exemptions to non-combatant people. At the outbreak of hostilities, a British army officer visited the settlement on the Grand River and outlined the government’s policy toward the Mennonites. He required no military service except the conscription of thirteen young men for yeoman duty. They were to report without delay to Colonel Procter, at Detroit, with their horses and conestogas.

The thirteen did not reach Detroit. They came upon Procter’s army when it was engaged in a somewhat precipitous retreat up the Thames River, with General Harrison of the United States army in hot pursuit. They witnessed, under cover of the thickets of a swamp, the inglorious battle of Moraviantown. They saw the waving British line and Procter fleeing ignominiously in his private carriage.

The lads obeyed. Leaving their conestogas to the mercy of the enemy, they plunged into headlong flight, some on horseback and some on shank’s ponies, but all headed for home. One of them was caught and brought before General Harrison for questioning, but his innocence was so patent that he was allowed his freedom.

When the war was over, the Mennonites received full compensation for their losses in horses, wagons and equipment at Moraviantown and in other engagements of the war. This confirmed the confidence of the Mennonites in British honour, a confidence which stands inviolate to-day, in spite of the cataclysms of two World Wars.

The traditional attitude of the Mennonites to war must not be construed to indicate a tacit connivance with the enemy, nor even a desire to save their own skins. As a people, they are deeply sensible of the debt of gratitude they owe to Britain for the right of citizenship extended to them. They are proud of their British affiliations dating back two centuries and a half. It is their boast that they are British, not by accident of birth, but by definite, deliberate choice. At the same time they cannot forget, nor do they wish to conceal, their mid-European ancestry, for most of the families can trace their descent, generation by generation, to some progenitor who lived in Switzerland in the Middle Ages. Their language, which is a dialect of the German, would indicate that they are of Germanic origin.

Not all people of Mennonite extraction observe the traditional taboos of the church in regard to dress and contacts with the world. Sons of Mennonites have gone to war, not as yeomen, but as front-line fighters. Ralph Eby, a direct descendant of Bishop Benjamin Eby, was the first man from Waterloo Township to give his life for the cause of freedom in the First Great War. And Mennonite boys have served their country since on every battlefield of the world.

It is characteristic of Mennonites that they hold in high esteem those of their own blood who have cleared the forests and ploughed the first furrows. A memorial to the pioneers of Waterloo stands in the family graveyard of the Sherk and Betzner Families, on elevated ground overlooking the river and the bonnie village of Doon. It was erected, in 1925, by the voluntary subscriptions of interested people. Built of native stone, it takes the form of a Swiss châlet, supported by a circular tower, whose door faces the south and Pennsylvania. Its weathervane is worthy of note, a miniature Conestoga drawn by two teams of prancing horses.

This monument epitomizes in stone the known history of the Mennonite people of the locality: Switzerland, Pennsylvania, the Conestoga wagon, the Grand River, the graves of the pioneers and a few nameless Indians. All this in a background Of well-cultivated fields and beautiful trees. This is Waterloo.

Dumfries

Block 1 of the Indian lands was twelve miles square, and it lay directly south of the Beasley Tract.

On February 5, 1798, when Joseph Brant sold most of his people’s crown grant to white speculators, Block 1 came into the possession of Philip Stedman, of the Niagara District. The purchase price was £8,841, but Stedman paid no cash. He was fortunate to secure a mortgage for the entire amount.

The agreement of sale, known as the Stedman Deed, is an interesting document, showing the finger prints and the totems of the great Thayendanegea and forty-one other chiefs and sachems of the Six Nations. Reproductions of it may be seen in museums and in certain historical records.

Stedman belonged to a Loyalist family who had become well established as carters to and fro around the cataract at Niagara Falls. He and his brothers used to meet the Lake Erie boats with their heavy wagons, and for a consideration, they transported the merchandise for Lake Ontario to other boats waiting at Queenston. On the return trip they carried goods from Queenston to Chippawa. They operated at first on the east side of the river, but when Fort Niagara was given to the United States by treaty, they moved to the Canadian side. In fifteen years the Stedmans had worked up a good business.

The work was neither easy nor pleasant. All too often their wagons sank into quagmires on the portage route and had to be extricated with great difficulty. Sometimes thieves fell upon the caravan by night and stole the merchandise. That meant a dead loss. Still, they made expenses and a living. It was their boast that theirs was a business with a future, for with an increasing population, commerce would expand year by year. There would always be a carrying place around the Falls.

Philip Stedman died intestate a few years after his nominal purchase of Block 1. He had not made any payment on the mortgage, nor had he sold any portion of the tract. In the absence of direct heirs, his estate passed into the hands of his sister, Mrs. John Sparkman, of Niagara, and she, being unwilling to assume responsibility for a property so large and so encumbered, gave it, with her husband’s consent, to Thomas Clark, a prosperous merchant of Stamford, in the Niagara District. Clark, it is believed, paid no cash, but took over the mortgage.

This Thomas Clark was a man of some prominence in the Niagara District. His cousin, William Dickson, however, exerted a greater influence over the fortunes of Block 1.

Dickson was living in Niagara at the time. Indeed, he was the lawyer whom the Mennonites of Block 2 had engaged to search the title to their lands. He was a native of Dumfries, Scotland, and he had come out at the age of fifteen to enter the employ of two of the greatest commercial magnates of Upper Canada, his relatives, Hon. Richard Cartwright, of Kingston, and Hon. Robert Hamilton, of Queenston. At maturity, he drifted into the study of law and opened an office in Niagara.

As time went by, Dickson became a wealthy man. He built, at Niagara, the first brick house of Upper Canada. During the War of 1812, he was recognized as one of the leading patriots of the village, for he dared to treat with obvious scorn the blatant assurances of the enemy that they were coming to liberate an oppressed people. He paid dearly for his defiance, for in May, 1813, the Americans came to the village in force, took Dickson and other scoffers to Albany in chains and detained them there for two months. When he was allowed to return, on parole, Dickson found his handsome house and his valuable library a heap of charred ruins.

But he soon retrieved his war losses and increased his wealth. He filled several positions of trust in civic and legislative circles, which brought him substantial remunerations, and he had scores of wealthy and influential friends who could always be relied upon to help him put his best foot forward.

Hon. Robert Hamilton died in 1809, and William Dickson, as chief executor, took over the management of the estate. Hamilton’s sons by his first marriage, James and Samuel, were being tutored with the Cartwright boys, at Kingston, by a certain John Strachan, just out from Scotland. This arrangement was to continue, the will stipulated, but the younger sons of his second wife were to be educated in Scotland.

Dickson determined to give his personal attention to this last injunction of his cousin’s will. It would give him much pleasure to take the lads to Scotland, for it would afford him an unexpected opportunity to visit friends and relatives in the homeland whom he had not seen for many a long year.

Arrived in the old land, Dickson remembered that Hon. Robert Hamilton had a sister, with whom he decided to consult before choosing a school for the orphans. The lady was a widow, who lived with her daughter, Mrs. Robert Gourlay, in Wiltshire, England.

Dickson went to England to visit the Gourlays and he stayed much longer than he intended. It was not the charm of the lady that held him, but the conversation of Gourlay, the son-in-law. He was a profound thinker, that man, and well-informed, though a bit of a ranter. How he could dilate on the deplorable state of public affairs in England and Scotland! The fellow was evidently down in his luck, and Dickson tried to cheer him. Come to Upper Canada, he advised. In that wonderland, fortunes in the guise of crown lands were to be had for the asking.

The more he saw of northern England and Scotland, the surer Dickson was that Gourlay was not far wrong about the conditions which prevailed there. It was abundantly evident that not only the Gourlays but many of the Lowlanders of Scotland, some of them his own flesh and blood, had been reduced to a state of deplorable poverty and hopelessness. He learned this with deepest concern, but it was not his responsibility and there was nothing he personally could do about it.

But when he returned to Niagara, he was obsessed with the idea of bringing these people to Upper Canada and giving them a new start in life. Suppose he bought a tract of land for them, could he sell it to them at a price which would allow him a margin of profit? Thomas Clark had talked to him repeatedly about his recently-acquired estate, twelve miles square, over on the Grand River. Suppose he bought that. As yet he had not seen the land, but he had had assurances from Clark, and others, that it would provide an excellent home for industrious, Scottish people.

In 1816, he bought the entire tract from Clark, paying £24,000 cash, liquidating the mortgage and securing undisputed title to the land. He called his new estate Dumfries, the name of his native shire, and he began at once to plan for its development. Naturally, he must build a village with grist and saw mill and a general store. Since he had neither the time nor the ability to undertake personally the development of a pioneer settlement, he was on the look-out for a practical, trustworthy carpenter, upon whose broad shoulders he might shift the burden of responsibility.

He found his man by his own intuition. In his daily life Dickson came in contact with many men in all walks of life. Among his public services, he was a member of a committee authorized to erect a new court house and gaol at Niagara. The specifications had been advertised and tenders called for. It was only a matter of interviewing the contractors and considering their estimates.

Among those who made a bid for the work was a tall, straight, wiry, twenty-two-year-old Pennsylvanian, named Absalom Shade. Dickson recognized in him the man he was looking for and he offered him, without credentials of any kind, the contract for the building and development of his wilderness estate in the west. Shade must have realized that Dickson’s proposition was highly speculative and adventurous, but like a sportsman, he took the chance and accepted the offer.

The bargain sealed, at least tentatively, the two men set out on horseback to see for the first time this land of virgin forests and to explore its possibilities. They travelled from Niagara along the road to the Head of the Lake, and from there westward through Ancaster to Brant’s Ford. That was the end of passable roads and civilization. Beyond lay the wilderness for which Dickson had paid, sight unseen, nearly a hundred thousand dollars, a little more than a dollar an acre. They dared not enter it without an Indian guide, who led them by the redman’s trails on the east bank of the river.

It was, without doubt, a goodly heritage. Through dense, hardwood forests of maple, birch and oak they passed and marvelled. Here was a fortune in lumber alone.

Further north, there were evergreens in abundance. In a delightful cedar grove at the mouth of a gurgling stream, Dickson found what he thought was an ideal location for a village. Evidently some one else had been of the same opinion, for the crumbling ruins of an old mill stood on the spot. A squatter, presumably, who had obtained land from Joseph Brant and who had abandoned the mill when he discovered the illegality of his Indian title. The environment was one of rare charm to both ear and eye; the derelict mill, the rivulet babbling through clumps of dark evergreen, the moon mirrored on the deeper waters of the river, the undulating hills and overhanging shrubbery of the farther shore.

Content with this site for his village, Dickson found his way back to civilization by way of “the Dutch trail,” through the Beverley Swamp. Shade remained to continue his explorations. Later, the two men met at Niagara and confirmed their bargain. Dickson employed Adrian Marlett, of Ancaster, to survey the entire block, and Shade took this opportunity to visit friends in Buffalo before undertaking his prodigious task in the lonesome silences of the wilderness.

When Shade came again to Niagara, he carried a chest of carpenter’s tools slung over his shoulder. In his pocket he had a hundred dollars. He was ready now for action. Soon he was in Dickson’s Dumfries swinging an axe in the heart of the cedar grove, his embryo village. The startled birds cocked their tiny heads and demanded to know what was going on. They watched the disturber of their peace with suspicion, while he reclaimed the forsaken mill and built a bridge across the river. In spite of their protests, he had erected, in a remarkably short time, a row of log shanties on the east bank of the river, along the main thoroughfare of the village that was to be.

There is a tradition that the first purchasers of land in Dumfries were three Scots from Genesee County, in New York State. One of them knew the way there, for he had worked with Marlett on the survey. Dickson and his son were riding along the Governor’s Road on their way to the tract when they overtook the three trudging along on foot, with their packs on their backs. They were on their way to Dumfries, they said, with the intention of taking up land there.

“When you arrive,” Dickson told them, “your deeds will be ready for you.”

They were, too, although the trio arrived long before they were expected. Others of their friends followed. Within a year twenty-eight families of Scottish blood had come from the valley of the Genesee, most of them on foot, to try their luck in another land of promise.

Soon Dickson was ready to introduce his tract to prospective buyers in the land of his birth. He advertised his property in Chamber’s Journal and the Scottish press in general. He wrote personal letters to friends in Old Dumfries and to the fathers of the Edinburgh school friends of his son, William. In these he set forth in detail the advantages he was in a position to offer all young men who stood hopefully on the threshold of life. The price was incredibly low, three dollars an acre.

When these methods did not prove as productive of results as Dickson had hoped, he felt compelled to augment his sales through the efforts of an experienced land agent. He sent a man into Selkirkshire to stimulate interest in the tract and to furnish prospective immigrants with first-hand information about the wonderland of New Dumfries, in the heart of Upper Canada.

Soon the tide of immigration began to roll in. The little village that Absalom Shade had hewn out of a cedar grove began to expand beyond all expectation. Hundreds of new cabins were needed, and a second mill carried on a lucrative trade. Though still in its swaddling clothes, Shade’s Mills, as the village was called, became an important centre of population in Upper Canada. Very early, it boasted a post office, which Dickson named Galt in honour of family friends in Old Dumfries. But the villagers persisted in calling it by its former name, honouring its builder.

In 1827, when Dickson had reached middle life, he came to live more or less permanently at Galt, taking up residence on the west bank of the river in a pretty, little rough-cast cottage, which he called Kirkmichael. A thorn hedge surrounded the house and ran down to the water’s edge. The mighty trees of the forest primeval towered overhead. He was the Honourable William Dickson now, a distinguished member of the aristocratic Legislative Council of Upper Canada, a Tory of the Tories, but his heart was still kindly and he never forgot to wish his neighbours a cheery good-morning.

He was still a resident of Galt, in 1834, when public announcement was made that a travelling menagerie would tour Upper Canada that summer. The progressive business men had seen to it that Galt was to be included in the itinerary.

Long before the day set for the circus, a pleasurable excitement animated the villagers. The good news and the anticipation had spread into the country, within a radius of twenty miles. Here was a rare opportunity to add a touch of vivid colour to their drab pioneer life. Even the sedate Dutch farmers of Waterloo began debating with their consciences whether or not the circus was a thing of iniquity.

At last the portentous day arrived. It was late July, and intolerably hot. At daybreak the people began pouring into Galt from the four corners of Dumfries. A little later the farmers from Waterloo came lumbering in. Every wagon carried its quota of children, full of questions and standing on the tiptoe of expectation, their eager faces illumined with the light of childish delight.

Just before the circus doors began to creak on their hinges, a nasty rumour went the rounds. One of the showmen was sick. It was cholera! The doctor had said so! He had come the night before to set up the tents, poor fellow, and he was lying now in the tavern, violently ill.

But perhaps it wasn’t cholera. Doctors sometimes make mistakes. At least, the business men pooh-poohed the very idea. How were the people to know that they thought only of the gate receipts? On with the show!

Fears and rumours disappeared into thin air when the gates were swung back and the animals appeared in full view. There were bears—real bears—white, black and brown, and a lion that flicked its tufted tail and emitted such a roar that it startled all who heard. As usual, a pair of monkeys, the most fascinating creatures imaginable, stole the show and kept everybody in good humour. Nobody seemed to notice that the animals and their cages were crusted with dirt and reeking with revolting odours. On with the show!

When the circus gates closed for the night, the tavern doors opened and the night air resounded with the noise of carousal.

But even the intoxicated were sobered by the ghastly news of the morning. It was cholera! Asiatic cholera! A virulent type!

The doctor took command of the village, closed the circus doors and ordered everyone home at once. He told the Dutchmen to send their Doctor Scott to Galt with all speed. By nightfall there would be enough work for a dozen doctors.

The coffin maker’s hammer clanged all through the hours of that second night, and in the morning the dead-wagons formed a procession to the burying-ground. In sixty-three hours as many souls had gone to their last resting-place. Nor did the plague abate until fully one-third of the population lay underneath the sod.

Hon. William Dickson and Absalom Shade both survived the cholera epidemic. Shade set to work with renewed vigour to cheer the hearts of the villagers and to rebuild his ravished town. Dickson went to Niagara to spend his declining years among the friends of his youth, leaving his Dumfries interests in the hands of his son, William, who subsequently inherited most of his father’s enormous estate.

The elder Dickson paid his last visit to Galt, in 1839, when he came, by invitation, to be the guest of honour at a public banquet. It was his seventieth birthday and friends and acquaintances flocked into town from every crossroads in Dumfries. Never in all the history of rural Upper Canada had so great a company assembled to do honour to one man. Absalom Shade presided at the dinner table. At his right sat “the father of the township and chief guest,” at his left, Hon. Adam Fergusson, another Scot, who had found property, prosperity and the accruements of politics in the wilds of Upper Canada.

After dinner, Dickson reviewed the growth of the settlement from its beginning. His speech was the swan-song of an old man, who looked back with satisfaction over a well-spent life. He was overcome with the weight of his years, referring constantly to his “advanced age” or “the preparation for the great change which all men must sooner or later submit to.” He rejoiced that he retained health and strength “at this late period” of a life, of which “only a remnant” remained.

This premonition of approaching death caught up with him at Niagara, a few years later. He was buried there in the quaint, old-world cemetery of St. Mark’s.

Absalom Shade died in 1862, surviving his friend and patron by many years. Up until his last illness, his frame was erect and his step, elastic. Always shrewd, industrious and unusually energetic, he did more for Galt and Dumfries than any other man.

On the day of his funeral every place of business in Galt was closed. Crowds of people from town and country stood silent in the streets and watched his bier pass by. Four horses draped with black fringe drew the hearse. A huge concourse of people crowded into the little Anglican Church for the service and, later, followed the cortège to the cemetery. So, did Galt pay deep and grateful respect to its founder.

Of Absalom Shade’s private life little is known. The imposing stone which marks his grave is the only one on the plot. He was not a man of family; he had no children. But he had had two wives. His first was a Mrs. Andrews, of New York State, who brought with her to Galt a son by her previous marriage. When this boy came to maturity he took a lively interest in the business enterprises of his step-father. He was a genial, kind-hearted, capable man, who did much for Galt. Shade’s second wife was a daughter of James Davidson, of Galt, but formerly of the village of Winterbourne.

Although both Dickson and Shade were so steeped in toryism that politics was to them a sort of religion, the people of Galt have generally shown a preference for liberalism. They have exhibited a sturdy independence, too, in matters of religion. They did not forsake the kirk and the singing of psalms because their most prominent townsmen were ardent supporters of the Church of England. More than almost any other town, Galt is known to-day as the home of conservative Presbyterianism.

It is also a city of traditions, culture and wealth without ostentation. It is known far and wide as a city of beautiful stone residences. Here, too, if anywhere, may be heard a bit of the Gaelic on the streets, the low drone of the bagpipes and the swish of kilts. The people know how to sing the lusty songs of Scotland. They delight in square dances and eat scones three meals a day, and at bedtime. There is always haggis on St. Andrew’s Day.

Galt has a memorial to its pioneers, as picturesque as it is unique. It stands on the site of the Auld Kirk, where the Canadian Presbyterian Church was born. Not a stone of the old building survived the years, out a few broken tombstones remained in the churchyard. Thanks to the local chapter of the Daughters of the Empire, this place of desolation has become a beautiful sanctuary. Competent workmen have trimmed and cemented together the old stones, broken and discoloured, as they were, to form a charming pergola, from whose latticed roof and walls hang festoons of vines. Thousands of people come every year to see the quaint memorial and to read the deep-cut names of people who lived and died in Galt more than a hundred years ago.

Woolwich

Block 3, which Brant sold on February 5, 1798, to William Wallace, a carpenter, of Niagara, was called Woolwich in honour of one of the government surveyors. It comprised 86,078 acres. The price was £16,364, but little or no payment was made at the time of purchase.

Wallace had had the property only a short time when he transferred a portion of it to Lieut. Robert Pilkington, of the Royal Engineers, an Englishman who came to Upper Canada, before 1796, and who lived alternately at York and Niagara.

The Pilkington purchase was a rectangular strip of land at the extreme northern end of Block 3, being the full width of the Indian lands, twelve miles, and containing fifteen thousand acres. This territory was called Upper Woolwich until 1852. Then it was incorporated as the Township of Pilkington and attached to Wellington County.

A veil of mystery shrouds the sale of this land to Pilkington, and the terms of the agreement were never made known. Pilkington’s reason for buying the property is incomprehensible to this day. It is said that he signed the agreement without having seen what he was buying. He seems to have made no attempt to speculate with it, but he took a childish delight in talking about his estate and he boasted about the mansion he intended to build there for his old age.

The site of his abortive settlement has been located a short mile south-west of Elora on high land overlooking the cascade. Not only had he planned a village, but he had spent a great deal of money trying to found it. He had sent a corps of workmen up into the woods to dig a foundation for a church and to build grist and saw mills. It was reported that he was operating a lime kiln and a stone quarry, by his usual indirect management, but there is little to confirm this report. There can be no doubt, however, that he had the tract at least partially surveyed and that he widened the old Indian trail along the river and hacked out long, intersecting, corduroy roads.

But he worked against time and nature. Underbrush grew up lank in the unused thoroughfares, and his unfinished buildings stood as monuments to his folly. Much too late, he realized that he could never hope for any return from his investment. He had been blindly following a will-o’-the-wisp into the woods and it had led him to defeat and ruin.

Pilkington was probably greatly relieved when he was ordered to return to his native parish of Weedon, in Northamptonshire, in the heart of England, to superintend the building of a military hospital. He was off in a hurry, and news came soon of rapid promotions. He was Captain, then Major-General and Commandant of the Royal Engineers, then, finally, a full-fledged General. By the time he had reached the age for retirement, an ocean rolled between him and the house of his youthful dreams.

In 1806, William Wallace had an opportunity to sell the major portion of his tract to Mennonites. Benjamin Eby, the Secretary of the German Company and a friend, Henry Brubacher, had come from Pennsylvania to see the Beasley lands which had fallen to their fathers, and George Eby, who lived on the German Company lands, had undertaken to conduct them on a tour of exploration of even the remotest corner of the tract.

Before the young men realized it, they had wandered into William Wallace’s Woolwich. They came upon a swift-flowing stream, which they named the Conestoga, because it resembled a river by that name in the homeland. Continuing their journey, they discovered another beautiful river, to which they gave another Pennsylvanian name, the Canagagigue, an Indian word meaning very, very long. At that time, they had no intimation that both these rivers were tributaries of the Grand.

Benjamin Eby was enamoured of the country. He declared that if this fertile tract was not within the bounds of the German Company land, the Mennonites must buy it. If Wallace was willing to sell, it might be possible to form another joint stock company. This was not merely a passing suggestion, for when Benjamin Eby came the following year to settle, he had succeeded in forming another land company. Moreover, he had brought with him not only a barrel of silver dollars but dozens of prospective settlers, Musselmans, Martins, Hoffmans, and Gingerichs—all of them experienced farmers and honest, industrious people. These men and those who would follow within a year or two would make of Woolwich a land of peace and plenty.

Wallace was willing to sell 45,185 acres of land, considerably more than half the unsold portion of his property. The price agreed upon was a dollar an acre. Eby paid the entire amount to the trustees of the Indians on the first day of May, 1807, receiving the deed and the release of the mortgage. He was particularly careful about the details of the transaction, for he was determined to avoid any possibility of a recurrence of the deceit which had been so successfully practised on the Mennonites of the Waterloo settlement.

During the War of 1812, William Wallace disappeared very mysteriously. It was suspected that he had crossed the international border at Niagara and signed up with the invaders of Upper Canada. At any rate, he was not seen or heard of again.

When all probability of his return had been abandoned, the government instituted an investigation into the affairs of Block 3, and some rather startling discoveries were made. In addition to the registered sales of lands to Pilkington and to the Mennonites, totalling 60,185 acres, a number of “free gifts” had been made, whether before or after the sale of Block 3 to William Wallace could not be ascertained. The gifts included 10,000 acres to Mrs. Daniel Claus, daughter of Sir William Johnson and mother of Colonel William Claus, trustee for the Indians; 5,000 acres to Joseph Brant; and 3,000 acres to Richard Beasley, this last in settlement of an alleged shortage of land in his purchase of Block 2.

About 7,893 acres remained in the name of William Wallace, of which the Crown confiscated 7,000 acres on the ground that it was the property of an enemy alien. The remaining 893 acres came into the possession of James Crooks, of West Flamboro, a native of Scotland, who later became a member of the Legislative Council of Upper Canada. Crooks sold it in small lots to individual buyers, and the village of Winterbourne has been built on the site.

Captain Thomas Smith, of Vermont, was one of the earliest settlers on the Crooks property. For several years he had lived in the Beverley Swamp, saving his money and hoping for the dawn of a better day. In 1807, he came up into Woolwich and settled on that beautiful stretch of level land opposite the mouth of the Conestoga River. There he built a comfortable, two-storied, log house with a fireplace. His fourth child, Priscilla, who was born the following year, is said to have been the first white child born in Woolwich.

The Smiths were kind, hospitable people, who always kept their door on the latch and were willing to share with every chance passerby whatever they had to eat. Many a traveller along the Indian trail stopped there for rest and refreshment and chatted for an hour or two with his host. As often as not, he spent the night on a shake-down before the open fire and in the morning he was off again, lost in the wilderness and soon forgotten.

But sometimes these wayside visits grew into strong and lasting friendships. This was the case when a certain Roswell Matthews, a native of Wales, brought his travel-weary wife and family and knocked at Smith’s door. They were going ten or twelve miles further up the river, Matthews said, to Block 4 of the Indian lands, which had come into the possession of Thomas Clark, of Niagara. He confided his hopes to the Smiths. Clark had bargained with him to build a mill at the foot of a beautiful waterfall up north, on the Grand River, and when the mill was completed, Matthews was to have, as his pay, a hundred acres of land in the vicinity and another hundred for each of his boys. It was a marvellous opportunity, especially for the boys. A few years of hard labour and a competency for the rest of their mortal lives.

The enthusiastic father was eager to move on to his Promised Land, but when he looked at his wife and saw how thin and tired she was and how she seemed to hang on Mrs. Smith’s animated conversation, he was seized with a sudden impulse to ask a favour of the Smiths. Would they keep his wife and the younger children for the winter months? He had not realized until that minute how much she needed a rest. He and the boys would go up into the woods and build a shack. In the spring he would return for the rest of his family.

The Smiths did not, could not, refuse, so long as they had a soup-bone to share. So, Mrs. Matthews spent the winter with the Smiths, storing up health and strength for her unknown future in the woods.

This was pioneer hospitality at its best and worthy of a splendid reward. But a terrible misfortune came instead. The Crooks Estate found some irregularity in Smith’s title and evicted him from his comfortable home. Never again did Captain Smith live under his own roof. But the neighbours were kind. One day when he sat on a high stool in a friend’s kitchen listening to the exhortations of an itinerant Methodist preacher, Captain Smith became unconscious and fell to the floor. He died the following Sunday.

These misfortunes had not as yet befallen the Smiths when, in 1819, they welcomed to their home another group of weary immigrants. These latest arrivals came from the midlands of England, so they said. They were on their way to the Pilkington Tract. He—the Major—had made a right generous promise of a hundred acres of free land to any family that would go and settle on his estate. It was fine property, too, the best in all the world. At least, so the Major had said.

Alas, there were twelve families of them, all caught in the web of Pilkington’s enthusiasm. Life had not been easy for them in the old land; here was a chance to seek their fortunes in the new. By pooling their resources, they had enough to hire a ship to carry them across the Atlantic. With what jubilation they had set out. The women had brought to the boat their best china and linens, treasured bits of family furniture and the miscellaneous gifts which friends and relatives had showered upon them in those last days in England. The men had stored in the hold of the ship their horses and carriages and the best tools and implements they could buy. They were going to meet Dame Fortune with a smile.

But everything was so different from their expectations. What with storms, seasickness and fright, they had a terrible passage, the worst the captain had encountered in all his lifetime on the high seas. For a while they gave up all hope of ever seeing the land of their dreams. Then, after twelve awful weeks in the swells, they had come to the quiet waters of the St. Lawrence. At Quebec they learned to their dismay that Upper Canada was somewhere in the far interior of the continent, at least five hundred miles away. Nobody there had even so much as heard of the Pilkington Estate. People passed them indifferently on the streets, jabbering French. There was no one to listen to their tale of woe; no one to commiserate with them in their sad plight.

They realized now that the Major had deceived them. Upper Canada was not the land of milk and honey he had described to them. If only he had told them how far it was! At least, he might have warned them not to take so much with them. They could not go back, would not, if they could. There was nothing to do but to make the best of their misfortunes, so they hitched up their horses and prepared to drive to Upper Canada.

The journey overland was worse, if possible, than their wretched experiences at sea. Who would ever have dreamed that roads could be so bad? In England they had never even heard of the corduroy variety. Their treasures were soon broken with the lurching of their carriages this way and that and, piece by piece, they lost everything they possessed. At the little backwoods settlement of Shade’s Mills they sold their wobbly vehicles to a wagon-maker and shot their broken-down horses, which nobody wanted at any price. There they were, forty miles, or more, from their destination and at the end of their resources.

From Shade’s Mills they trudged on, one weary mile after another. They were all on foot and each family fended for itself. The first man to reach the Smith’s was overcome by fatigue. His wife was bedraggled and exhausted. The surviving members of seven other families followed. Each had the same pathetic story to tell of blighted hopes and ruined fortunes.

The Smiths opened their house and their hearts to all who came. One poor woman was so ill that Mrs. Smith put her to bed and nursed her until she died, a victim of typhus fever. Her baby girl, born at sea, found a permanent home with the hospitable Smiths and lived to marry a son of the house.

New worries awaited them when at last they reached their destination. They had no tools, no experience with virgin-soil agriculture, no practical ideas, no initiative. Worst of all, they had no deeds, no legal right to the lands they had come to settle. Nothing but the Major’s worthless promises.

Every Sunday afternoon these defeated men congregated to discuss their wretched plight and to curse the day they listened to the Major and his vainglorious twaddle. On one of these occasions they heard, or thought they heard, a continuous chopping in the woods further north. They decided to investigate. For nearly an hour they tramped up the Indian trail along the river. Then they reached a limestone gorge with perpendicular walls cut by the swift-flowing water. When they had rounded a bend, they saw, directly in front of them, a beautiful cascade falling fully forty feet, and on the crest of its declivity hung a flower-pot island, firmly secured on a boulder rock. Here was nature’s fairyland at their very door.

Beyond the waterfall they saw the humble shack which housed Roswell Matthews, his wife and their seven children. Enquiring at the door, they learned that the father and the two eldest boys were out in the woods chopping.

The first question the Pilkington men asked Roswell Matthews was whether he had a deed. He confessed he had none. When he came up into the bush Thomas Clark had promised him a hundred acres for himself and for each of his boys, if he would build a mill there on the Grand River. But he had changed his mind, Clark had, when he learned that Pilkington intended to build one further south. For all that, he and the boys had tried to build a dam, but the current was too strong and they had to give it up.

They had had better success near the mouth of the tributary. There they had built a dam and a grist mill. Almost every year Matthews had been able to grow enough grain to support his family through the winter. One year he had a surplus. Then he and one of the boys hollowed out a pine log, thirty feet long, loaded it with sixteen bags of wheat and paddled twenty miles downstream to Shade’s Mills. There was no other way to go, for the roads were utterly impassable. Shade gave them fifty cents a bushel for their grain. Matthews then sold the dugout for two dollars and a half, and he and the boys tramped home on foot, well pleased with their bargain. The boys were splendid workers—he couldn’t get along without them—but they were becoming a little restless about their hundred-acre farms. He hoped Clark would not forget his promise to them.

Little did Roswell Matthews know how serious was the discontent of Roswell, junior, his third son. The boy was sixteen, big and husky for his years. One day he led his younger brother John, far into the woods, then stopped suddenly and said: “Goodbye, John. You will never see me again.” John could scarcely believe his eyes when Roswell ran down the Indian trail as fast as his legs could carry him. He was off to Buffalo, his parents surmised, where greater opportunities and a fuller life awaited him. It is believed that he became a sailor on the Great Lakes and was lost in a storm.

When General Pilkington died in London, England, in July, 1834, there were repercussions on his Grand River estate. As soon as they heard the news, the settlers pressed for their deeds. But the executor of the estate declined to recognize the claims, on the ground that there was no mention of any Canadian lands in Pilkington’s will.

The people realized that their case was hopeless, but they steadfastly refused to give up the lands which they had settled. If the truth were told, they had neither the will nor the means to go elsewhere. For eight years they lived in a state of deadlock. Finally, in 1842, the government determined to make some agreement with the settlers and sent a commission to the tract with orders to make a complete survey and to evaluate the land. This commission set a price of four dollars an acre, one-fifth of the amount to be paid in cash and the balance in five annual instalments.

This amount, if not exorbitant, was quite out of all proportion to the means of the settlers. Clutching frantically at Pilkington’s promises, the people refused to buy any of the property at any price, and they went so far as to defy the government to dispossess them of their lands.

The people won out in the end, but it was an empty victory. They used the land throughout their lives and by it they earned a precarious living, but not one acre of it did they buy. Life for them was hard and uneventful all their days. The only diversion that remained to them in old age was to recount the hardships, the privations and the losses of earlier years. Pilkington and his unfulfilled promises had overshadowed their lives completely. They cursed him to their dying breath. Time went by. Their sons and daughters, left penniless and homeless by the misfortunes of their fathers, moved away, one by one, from the scene of such flagrant injustice and of so many bitter memories.

Such stories of the victimizing of guileless settlers were all too prevalent in the early days. No one dreamed that such a fate awaited the Woolwich Mennonites. They had bought their lands from William Wallace, in 1807, and their agent, Benjamin Eby, had assured them of the validity of their deeds. Fifty years, and more, had come and gone. The Mennonites had tilled their farms and built their villages. They were doing well in this new country. Then suddenly, as late as 1859, they were called to pass through deep waters. A certain John Washington Wallace, of New York City, entered a claim in the law courts to all the lands in Woolwich, exclusive of the Pilkington Tract. William Wallace, the original purchaser of the land from the Indians, was his father, so he claimed. He denied his father’s signature to the deed given to the Mennonite land company and questioned the legality of the Crooks escheatment.

Fifty reputable farmers were summoned to go to Toronto to defend their property rights. What were they to do? The Mennonites abhor legal proceedings and their chief witness, old Bishop Eby, who had negotiated the purchase of their lands, had been dead for six years. Besides they were busy and they had no money to go gallivanting to Toronto unnecessarily.

In consideration of the objections of the Mennonites, the court ruled that the sittings be held in Berlin, and that a test case should be made, with two men representing the Mennonites and one the people of the Crooks Tract. The choice fell upon John and Andrew Groff and Elisha Hewitt, Jr., respectively.

John Washington Wallace appeared in person. He swore that his father was British, that he had come to Upper Canada in 1773, or 1774, that he had married the daughter of a British subject and that all their children were British born. Reminded of his father’s desertion, in 1812, he declared that his father had not deserted, but had been carried across the border by force and detained even after peace had been restored. Never had he taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. On all these counts, the confiscation of his lands was unjust and illegal.

Since the religion of the Mennonites forbids the swearing of legal oaths, the Groffs affirmed solemnly that they had bought their lands from the Indians and that Wallace merely acted as agent. They had paid their money to the trustees of the Indians on the first day of May, 1807, and they exhibited documents to prove these statements.

The Mennonite reputation for the punctilious payment of debts on either written or verbal agreements added weight to the argument for the defence. On the other hand, Wallace’s claims were discredited by disinterested witnesses from Niagara, who testified that they had never heard that Wallace had crossed the border under compulsion. Wallace was also at a loss to explain satisfactorily why he and other members of the family had waited half a century before taking steps to vindicate their claim to the property.

The jury had no difficulty in deciding that the elder Wallace was an outlaw, and therefore incapable under British law of holding land in Upper Canada. Later, Parliament passed an Act confirming all the landowners of Woolwich in the rightful possession of their lands.

John Washington Wallace returned to New York empty-handed and not a little chagrined. He never showed his face in Woolwich again.

The Germans

The first infiltration of Germans into Upper Canada was coincident with the War of the American Revolution. Indeed, it was a result of the political upheaval of the times. Among the most ardent supporters of the British cause were descendants of those six thousand Palatines who had settled on the Six Nations lands during the reign of Queen Anne. They were hounded from their homes in the New World, as their fathers had been in the Old. They fled through swamp and forest, by lake and river, and found no rest for their feet until they reached the farther shore of the St. Lawrence River. There, in the wilderness, they began a new life under the flag which, for three quarters of a century, they had had every reason to respect and love.

Later, thousands of Germans came into Upper Canada directly from Middle Europe. Most of them came for economic reasons. America was to them a land of hope and promise, a refuge from the militaristic oppressions occasioned by the Napoleonic Wars. It was, above all, a land of plenty where money grew on bushes and where manna fell, as it did in Moses’ time, from heaven.

Of these, the first to arrive was a group of non-combatants, called Amish after their first leader, Jacob Amman. These people were even more conservative that the Mennonites in dress and customs. The women wore their skirts wide and long and adhered strictly to certain specified materials and patterns. The men wore hats with flat crowns and broad brims, and the children are so clothed that they are veritable miniatures of their parents. Regardless of sex or age, they used hooks and eyes instead of buttons, and to this day they regard this custom as an outward manifestation of an inward desire to keep separate and unspotted from the world.

But it was chiefly their inhibition to war that made them unpopular in Germany early in the nineteenth century. Their leader, Christian Naffziger, of Munich, was deeply concerned with the temporal as well as with the spiritual welfare of his people. He knew that, for at least a century, the Swiss Mennonites had been enjoying peace, prosperity and the free exercise of their religion in the New World and he resolved, if possible, to find suitable lands in the same region for his own Amish people.

Naffziger had never travelled far from home, but with laudable determination he worked his way to a seaport town, presumably Le Havre, and took the first ship that was going to America. After tossing many days on a rolling sea, he found himself in New Orleans. There he was, without money and without friends, among people of a strange tongue and a stranger religion. He learned with dismay that there were no Mennonites in the south and that a good thousand miles lay between him and people of a similar faith in Pennsylvania.

There was nothing for him to do but to set out, on foot and alone, for Pennsylvania. He trudged along day after day and week after week and at last he reached the “plain” people of Pennsylvania. Here were brothers in the faith, who could understand his deep concern for his flock.

But when he enquired about free lands for his people, he was told that there were none left. Descendants of Penn’s Mennonites were leaving Pennsylvania to settle on more spacious lands in Maryland. Some were going to a far-away land of virgin forests called Upper Canada.

Christian Naffziger thought that he too would like to go to Upper Canada. The Mennonites gave him a horse and buggy for the journey and put him in care of a group of emigrants. By the time they had reached the Waterloo settlement, the fellow travellers had become such staunch friends that the Mennonites offered to support Naffziger in his request for free lands for his Amish people. There was no reason why they should not be neighbours, for there were large tracts of fertile land lying just west of the German Company lands.

His petition for some of these lands was granted. Fifty acres of land would be given as a gift to every family Naffziger should bring out and if any one of them wanted more, he could buy it on easy terms. It was fertile land lying in the valley of the Nith River, a tributary of the Grand.

Naffziger was overjoyed at the bargain he had made, but a little timorous when he heard of the nefarious practices of Upper Canadian land-grabbers. He must be wary. He did not return to Munich to tell the good news to his friends until he had visited St. James’ Court, in London, England, to get confirmation from the King himself of the terms of the contract and assurances that no deception was contemplated.

It was 1824 before the first group of Amish people came to settle. Naffziger himself came even later. All told, the Amish took up 63,336 acres. In 1825, the tract was incorporated, together with other adjacent lands, as the Township of Wilmot. This was in compliment to Major Samuel Street Wilmot, who was at that time Deputy-Surveyor Of Upper Canada.

Nor were the Amish the only Germans who found life difficult in their native land. Want and uneasiness were universal and the military oppression of the arrogant Prussian overlords was constantly stirring up sedition. Thousands of German people longed to go to America, the magic land of peace and plenty.

But it was next to impossible to get away from their rulers. Certainly it was not a question of sailing down the Rhine and booking passage on a German ship from Hamburg, or Baden. Every seaport of the Fatherland was under strict surveillance, and any unusual movement of the people was noted at once by the police. There was no escape but in flight and no hope but for the stout of heart. It was a case of stealing away, one family at a time, under cover of darkness. If they were fortunate, they might get across the Vosges mountains and reach Le Havre. There, those who could pay their way might board Dutch and English ships outbound for New York.

Of necessity, the flight was planned with consummate care and executed in secrecy. As they had opportunity, the prospective emigrants carried their most treasured possessions to their barns and packed them in their heaviest wagons. Every movement was obscured, and there were no foolish confidences. Not until the very moment of departure were the sleepy children lifted from their beds into the wagon-boxes and secreted among the bundles. They were told to be quiet and to ask no questions.

Then the horses were brought from the stables and hitched to the whiffle-trees. Presently the well-greased wheels began to turn. It was evening twilight. Ostensibly the peasant and his gemuetliche Frau were jaunting over to the neighbouring village to enjoy a night’s frolic with friends. If the ruse worked, they were off and well away, bound for America and the land of their dreams. Their one regret was that they had to leave without farewells.

Once across the Rhine, a long, unknown road led them into northern France and through mountain passes and quiet villages to Le Havre. Discretion warned them to avoid the cities and all crowds. For their lives they dared show no haste, yet there was no time for dallying. The journey lengthened into two, and often three, anxious, eventful weeks before they reached their destination, and wearied as they were to the point of exhaustion, they realized that they little more than begun their long and perilous expedition.

Not a soul to greet them at Le Havre! Not a familiar face in the shops, or on the streets! Before them lay the ocean, dark and unfathomable. Hundreds of other fugitives stood on the wharves, wary and shy. They were all trying either to sell their wagons or to arrange for their transportation to America. Those who were financially able to do so bought, or hired, sailing ships, sharing accommodation and expenses with others. The less fortunate bound themselves to pay for their passage in extended terms of manual labour, if and when they should have landed safe and sound on the farther shore.

Stories have come down by word of mouth from generation to generation of the perils, the weariness and the nausea experienced by these German people during ten or a dozen weeks in a sailing vessel on the broad Atlantic. Some lost rudder, or compass, and drifted to strange shores. They saw icebergs, spouting whales and shark-infested shoals. Some were shipwrecked and left clinging to bits of broken timbers. Those who were fortunate were rescued by fisher folk on the shores of Ireland, or Spain. In their numbed hands they clutched an old clock, a bit of silver, or a stein, the last of all their treasures they had brought from the Fatherland.

Most of these emigrants landed at the port of New York, though they came by various routes. What a nightmare of experiences they had endured! Many were so sick that for days and weeks they were unable to journey further. But they had arrived! The soil beneath their feet was the New World, the western haven for exiled people, the land of freedom and opportunity! Most of these German people remained in the United States, but a few of them preferred Upper Canada, the British province, where land was cheap. These boarded a boat which plied between New York and Albany and they travelled overland, some on foot to Oswego, on Lake Ontario, and others by canal tug to Lockport and on foot to Buffalo.

The Mennonite migration to Waterloo and Woolwich had not yet abated. A ferry had been built to carry passengers and merchandise across the Niagara River at Black Rock, just north of Buffalo, and on it even the heaviest wagons were transported in safety to the Canadian side. The Mennonites always found a corner in their conestogas for pedestrians who might be going their direction, and they took many a German not only across the river but as far into Upper Canada as they cared to go, to Waterloo, or to Woolwich. The Germans then hired themselves to the Mennonites and learned from them the rudiments of new-world agriculture under varying conditions of soil and climate.

The newcomers were quite different from the Pennsylvanians. They understood each other, to be sure, for the Mennonites spoke a dialect of the German language. But the Germans were, for the most part, Lutherans and Roman Catholics and their genius lay in industry rather than in agriculture. Even those who had begun to work on the farms drifted into the mills and the factories, as soon as they saw opportunities in industry.

Emigration from the German States continued, and the time came when the Pennsylvanians in Waterloo, Woolwich, and Wilmot Townships were completely outnumbered. In the land of the Mennonites and the Amish, German villages sprang up and took upon themselves the names of such well-known cities as Baden, Hamburg, Mannheim, Bamburg, Strasbourg and Heidelberg. The German language was spoken in the homes, on the streets, around the schoolyards and from the pulpits, just as it was in the German cities in the Fatherland.

It was Germans who developed the crossroads of Ebytown, the settlement of which Benjamin Eby, the Mennonite bishop, had been the founder and the presiding genius. They became the bricklayers, the carriage-makers and the tavern-keepers. They brought into the little village the first steam engine, dragging it literally all the way from Buffalo that the wheels of industry might turn in Ebytown. Bishop Eby gave financial support and encouragement to the workers. He was so pleased with the new industrial development that he named the place Berlin, in compliment to the newcomers. And Berlin it was, or Busy Berlin, until well on into the twentieth century.

The Germans brought with them their old-world culture, particularly their love of music. Since there were no opportunities in the new Berlin to hear the old German masters, they organized clubs in the villages to encourage the study of music. Of these, the singing-school was by far the most popular, for it was not only a musical but a social centre, where young men and women of German blood could meet on a common footing and under pleasant circumstances. Old timers say that there was plenty of universal courting done at the weekly meetings of the singing-school.

From this developed a revival of the annual competitive festival of singing societies, known in the Fatherland as the Jahresfest, or the Saengerfest. The competition was open to all German choral societies, near and far, and meetings were held in Buffalo, Detroit, Montreal, Toronto, and even in the diminutive German towns of Waterloo County. So, music became the open sesame to travel, to new friendships and not infrequently to glamorous romance.

The greatest Canadian Saengerfest of all time was held in Berlin, in the summer of 1879. The attendance was the highest on record, varying from twelve to twenty thousand, by supposedly reliable computations. And little wonder, for it afforded the people of the larger cities a rare opportunity to hear good music and to spend a few days in a characteristically German town. The fact that the railway offered excursion rates added not a little to the success of the occasion.

For the entire three days of the carnival Berlin was on its tip-toes buzzing with exuberance. There wasn’t an hour, day or night, when the sophisticated city visitors did not parade the gaily-decorated streets waving German flags and singing Die Wacht am Rhein to sun or stars. German bands from the big cities provided a continuous programme of rousing music to the accompaniment of the booming of cannon. The local Little Deutsche band, like little Dan, came last but did its best to keep up with the rest. Noted soloists were present from New York, Chicago, and Detroit, and one from as far as Brazil, to lead the masses of hilariously happy people in the singing of the immortal songs of the Fatherland.

For those three festive days the citizens of Berlin, no matter what their nationality, joined heartily in the fun and attended the social functions planned for the entertainment of the crowd. Picnics in the afternoon and balls in the evening. They were all Germans for the time being. Everyone spoke German, or tried to. German beer flowed like water, and vast quantities of Pretzellen and Frankfurten disappeared as if by magic. This was a German holiday, an occasion to eulogize German people and German traditions in speech and song. German art, literature, science and music—yes, and their beer and Schnapps—were the best in all the wide, wide world. Heil, Deutschland!

The thanks of the community were due to Professor Theodore Zoellner for the excellent training of the local bands and choirs for the competitions. This was the man who taught music in the public schools of Berlin many years before music had a place in the curriculum of any other school in the province, and to him the citizens owe much of their acknowledged appreciation of good music.

During the summer of 1894, Berlin was the locale of another German carnival, called the Kirmes, to which Germans look back with pride, if they can remember the Berlin of the last century. This took the form of a drama, a charity play. The actors were the members of St. Peter’s Lutheran Church. The Berlin-Waterloo Hospital was made the recipient of a generous purse, and the people of the entire countryside enjoyed a week’s hilarious entertainment.

The Kirmes, like so many German holidays, had its roots in old German tradition. In the Low Countries of Europe the annual harvest was the occasion for a semi-religious festival, known as the Kirch, or Church, mass. Later, the celebration was changed in name and nature and the Kirmes became an event of unrestrained jollity.

This first Canadian Kirmes was to be a merry affair, but shrouded in secrecy until the great day of performance. Nobody knew exactly what was going on behind the high board fence of the town park, and nobody who was “in it” dared tell. Between rumours and conjectures, the people were kept in a delightful state of expectancy. Something altogether pleasant and unique was surely going to happen.

The time set for the opening of the Kirmes was the evening of a summer’s day. Promptly at the appointed hour, the ponderous gates swung open to the curious inhabitants. Behold a clever reproduction of an ancient German village, streets lined with houses, quaint public buildings and beautifully decorated booths by the roadside! The villagers were dressed in gay attire. Coy Frauleinen and corpulent Frauen and Maenner thronged the thoroughfare in front of the village church. An air of expectancy hung over them all.

Presently the church bell began to chime merrily. A wedding procession filed through the door. The blushing bride wore a crown of roses and her smile was adorable. The groom was resplendent in knee-breeches, low shoes latched with silver buckles, and a topper. They were both excruciatingly happy. A bevy of little children warbled a wedding song to the accompaniment of the village band, strewing rose petals all the while in the pathway of the bridal pair.

The wedding over, the visitors were beguiled into the wayside booths and invited to spend their money freely. For a few pennies the most delicious coffee could be had in the Kaffegarten. There were at least a dozen varieties of sweets in the Zuckerwarenhaendler’s stall, Kringel Kuchen, Kaisermorsellen, Kirmes hearts of brown cake with a delectable icing and an amorous message for Hans to send to Gretchen. For those who had outlived the hey-day of youthful romance, there were tables of Wienerwurst, Kartoffeln-Salat, Sauerkraut, Pretzellen, Zweibach and Lebkuchen. There were fishponds, too, for luck, dolls for good little girls and fortune-tellers, who could make the fondest dreams come true. Boys and girls played postman, delivered letters for a pittance and waited for the reply. It was a nickel here and a penny there and the proverbial hole in everybody’s pocket.

The most pretentious building in the village was the Rathaus with its clock tower. In front of it stood a watchman, in uniform, dangling his keys and swinging his lantern, as he called the hours. Inside the old mill next door, a dusty miller was grinding his grain. Outside, in the middle of the street, stood a huge Christmas tree loaded with sugary baubles and surmounted by a star. A troop of children hung about it, clapping their chubby hands and singing Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.

That little frame structure on the opposite side of the street, with thatched roof and balconies, is a peasant’s cottage. There are no luxuries in that home, but it is clean as a new pin, attractive and cozy. Peek through the window and see the mother at her spinning wheel. Notice that her daughters are either knitting or embroidering. The hands of good German girls are never idle.

The evening wears on. It is time for the harvesters’ homecoming procession. The Queen of the Harvest sits enthroned on top of the last load of sheaves. All eyes are on her when she lifts from her head her crown of wheat and offers it to the grey-haired owner of the estate. Youth and beauty do obeisance to age and wealth, while both honour an ancient custom.

All too soon the Kirmes bell warns it is time to go home. The procession is lost in the falling darkness and the happy, satisfied crowds pass through the Kirmes gate into the street.

This drama was enacted for the six days of an entire week. Thousands of people came long distances with horse and buggy to see it. Big-city newspapers sent special correspondents to cover it. Premier Mowat and members of the Ontario Cabinet patronized it, making substantial financial contributions. The Lieutenant-Governor of the province, the Honourable George Airly Kirkpatrick, came in company with the Consul-General of the German Empire, and both congratulated the players upon the remarkable accomplishment of the enterprise and lauded the industry and the ingenuity of the German people. It was scarcely credible, they said, that all the handiwork from the architecture to the minutest detail of the costumes had been done by the townspeople and most of it by the members of a single church.

The performers were proud of their accomplishment and of their contribution to the Hospital Fund, but they were prouder still that they were Germans, born in Canada of Canadian-born parents, but Germans nevertheless. German blood coursed through their veins and they gave their hearts’ allegiance to an idealized Fatherland which all true-hearted Germans held to be the greatest country in all the world.

Two years later, the Kirmes was presented again, this time for only three days. Then it dropped into oblivion. To-day it is a grandfather’s tale, a legend of other days, half-fancy, half-true.

Perhaps some great-grandfather can remember that well-known man of his day and generation, Rev. Frederick William Bindemann, who earned the title of the Marrying Parson. He organized the first Lutheran Church in the county and became the shepherd of the first fold, continuing his work until his death, in 1865. His record of marriage ceremonies ran into the thousands. So great was his fame that even English-speaking couples came to him from great distances to hear the mystic German words that made them one.

But even daddy can remember when the German language was taught in the public schools of Berlin and preached in its churches. Perhaps he remembers seeing the German Eagle unfurled over the bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, near the main entrance to the town park, taking precedence over the portly Victoria and her Union Jack.

Those days are gone and gone forever. The German people have been disillusioned. They had always pictured Germany as their fathers and grandfathers had portrayed it, a land of jolly Kirmeses, Christmas trees and Saengerfests. They had forgotten—perhaps they never knew—that some remote ancestor had risked his very life on a hurried flight to Le Havre so that not only he himself but his children and grandchildren might escape the curse of militarism and might live like free men in a free land.

The sudden outbreak of war between Britain and Germany on that lovely August day, in 1914, was the first scene in the drama of the awakening. From that first day of war, the City of Berlin was divided into two camps. There were whisperings, silly prejudices, bitter racial hatred and faults on both sides. Would that those terrible days might be blotted out of the great book of remembrance!

While fathers wrangled, sons donned the King’s uniform. Many a boy from Berlin fought against his own blood brothers, giving his life for Canada and for the Empire’s freedom at Ypres, at Passchendaele and at Vimy Ridge. Their names live forevermore!

Twenty years elapsed between the two Great World Wars, and during that time the conversion of the German people of Waterloo County has been sincere and complete. The doctrines of the demagogue, Hitler, and his Nazis must be forever repugnant to people who have grown to manhood in a land of absolute freedom of thought, expression and religion, a land where people of German blood may read German books and speak the German language openly in the streets and in public buildings. Another generation of youths from Waterloo County have taken up arms in defence of these liberties. They are not Germans this time, but Canadians, and they fight and they die for their country, Canada. There is no divided camp now in the homeland. Canadians of German blood will not cease from their labours until oppression is wiped off the face of the earth and peace and prosperity shall come again to a war-weary world.

The story of the German infiltration into Waterloo County from Europe would not be complete without a record of the coming of the Russian Mennonites, who prefer to be called Germans. Racially, they are Dutch, or, at least, they lived in the Low Countries during the frightful religious persecutions of the Reformation era. While the Swiss Mennonites were emigrating to Pennsylvania, these co-religionists in Holland were negotiating for a tract of land in East Prussia, which belonged at that time to Poland. They were granted waste lands lying south of Danzig, in the vicinity of Marienburg. At the same time, they were guaranteed the free exercise of their Mennonite faith. With diligence and perseverance they converted their arid lands into a veritable garden and in a few decades these people, once so sad and dejected, had become contented and prosperous.

But Poland was partitioned in 1772, and the garden of the Mennonites fell into the ruthless hands of Frederick the Great of Prussia. He promptly withdrew the exemptions guaranteed to the Mennonites and demanded from them military service. They resisted valiantly, however, even under the threat of loss, without compensation, of their well-cultivated fields.

Relief came from a most unexpected quarter, from Catherine II, of Russia, a German by birth. She had heard of the Mennonite experiment with waste lands in Prussia and she knew that what they had done once could be done again. She offered them certain sections of poor land in the Ukraine and in the Crimea area, with the usual inducement of freedom of religion and exemption from military service.

From 1786 to 1803, thousands of Mennonites accepted Catherine’s invitation. They settled in small communal villages for mutual protection and cultivated with great diligence their broad, outlying fields. Within a century they had become a nation within a nation, wealthy people with some claims to German culture. The Russians hated them because of the exemptions which had contributed in so great a measure to their success. Yet they had no redress, for the foreigners were recognized as German subjects living in Russia, by the invitation of their queen.

This political guardianship terminated in 1870, after the Franco-Prussian War, and the Russians took an unholy delight in imposing upon the Mennonites compulsory and universal military service.

The Mennonites straightway fell into a panic, for the Russians hounded them unmercifully. Since there was no hope for them in Europe, they determined to seek lands in America. They chose Bernard Wakentin to be their agent and charged him to investigate for them certain free lands in Canada and in the United States.

The Canadian government was interested in the Russian Mennonites as prospective immigrants. It commissioned Jacob Y. Shantz, a Mennonite of Berlin, to meet Wakentin, to take him by rail and by coach through Detroit, Chicago and Duluth to Manitoba and to show him the valley of the Red River. Wakentin approved of the lands and made preparations at once to bring some of his people there.

There were fully eighty thousand distressed Mennonites in Russia in 1870, about fifteen thousand of whom came to America that year. Nearly half of these chose Manitoba for their home, and they spent the winter on Waterloo County farms learning Canadian methods of agriculture before going into the west.

The migration continued for several years. Shantz made twenty-seven journeys in all, the last in his eighty-fifth year. He carried, in a large, black bag, thousands of dollars at a time for his clients, but never once was he waylaid or molested in any way. He tramped about in the most inclement weather without the least impairment of his health, and he did not cease from his labours until, at eighty-five years of age, he had settled the Mennonites in three colonies in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The migration of these people was financed partly by the Canadian government and partly by the Mennonites of Waterloo County, for the emigrants had been stripped of every vestige of their wealth before they left Russia. Destitute as they were, they began at once to climb again the steep ascent to prosperity by the cultivation of flax. In a remarkably short time they were able to discharge all their financial obligations.

In more recent years Mennonites have continued to come to Canada from Russia, and most of them have preferred to remain in Waterloo County.

The Canada Company

In 1825, the principal settlements in the interior of Upper Canada were in the Townships of Waterloo, Woolwich and Wilmot. The rest was still an almost unbroken wilderness. Not so much as a trail to Lake Huron; not a church-going bell from Ben Eby’s to Georgian Bay.

The people throughout the province were desperately poor. The losses sustained by the early settlers, as a result of the War of 1812, were enormous. Even the conscientious objectors lost horses and wagons, which they could ill afford to lose, and the loyalists on the lakeshores, whose lands the enemy had invaded, suffered irreparable losses in the destruction of their buildings and crops.

Their first impulse was to appeal to the government of Upper Canada for compensation, but the Provincial Treasury, low at any time, was overrun with war debts. Besides, the government was in a position to say that it had not declared war on the United States and it was in no way responsible for their unfortunate hostilities with their neighbours.

No, the War of 1812-14 was Britain’s war, and it seemed only fair that the claims for losses should be met by the House of Commons in London. The government was prepared to petition that august body for damages, if some accredited representative of the province could be found to present the case.

John Galt, of Irvine, Scotland, was chosen to perform this service. William Dickson probably had something to do with the appointment, for Galt belonged to the family in whose honour he named his village in Dumfries. It was thought he would be an acceptable agent, for he was a very versatile man, with an enviable reputation as scholar, author and world traveller.

But John Galt had never been to Upper Canada, and he knew little or nothing about the geographical, political and social conditions of the province. However, he accepted the post and determined to do his duty conscientiously. He had been told that Bishop Macdonell, of Glengarry, had once gone to Montreal for the purpose of settling a colony of Roman Catholic Highlanders in that vicinity, and he turned to Macdonell for advice in the situation which faced him.

The bishop, as it happened, knew a great deal about Upper Canada. Particularly was he conversant with the political situation. In his opinion, a serious mistake had been made in 1791, when Upper Canada was constituted as a separate province, a mistake which was already retarding the economic development of the country and stirring up religious strife. He referred, of course, to the Clergy Reserves. By the Constitutional Act of 1791, one-seventh of the Crown lands of the province had been set apart for the support of the Protestant clergy. This provision was intended to counter-balance a similar land privilege which had been granted previously to the Roman Catholic church in Lower Canada.

So far, so good. But, unfortunately, the Clergy Reserves were scattered here and there throughout the province in small parcels and interspersed between lands which were owned and settled by individuals. In self-interest, the settlers were anxious to cultivate their lands and to keep their roads and fences in good repair. But the Clergy Reserves remained in their wild state, year after year, a detriment to the settlers’ lands and a deterrent to the general development of the province.

That was not all. The Clergy Reserves were stirring up religious contention as well. The Anglicans claimed a monopoly on these lands for the Church of England, presupposing that their church was the state church in Upper Canada, as it was in the Old Country. But the non-conformist bodies, the Presbyterians, and especially the pushing, itinerant Methodist preachers, objected. They reminded the Anglicans that they, too, were Protestants, and stronger numerically than the Church of England.

With this information in mind, Galt wrote to the Lords of the Treasury asking for financial consideration of the war claims of the Upper Canadians. And not without success. The House of Commons agreed to raise a loan for the liquidation of the claims to the value of £100,000, but only on condition that Galt persuade the government of Upper Canada to raise a similar amount.

Galt half-expected that the burden would fall on his shoulders. In his own mind he had been formulating plans to take the Clergy Reserves out of the realm of politics and to make them serve the general development of the country. He reasoned that if the Church of England could be induced to sell the lands to a colonizing agency, and if the government could be persuaded to apply the proceeds to the payment of the war claims of the Upper Canadians, several malevolent birds might be killed with the same stone. Bickering in religious circles would be averted and the people would be cheered by improved conditions of settlement and by the building of good roads and canals throughout the country.

So convincingly did Galt present his plan to the lawmakers in London that it was agreed to organize a land company, under whose direction both Upper and Lower Canada were to be colonized, if suitable lands could be obtained for that purpose. A commission of five was appointed to go to the Canadas to make a thorough study of the resources of the provinces, and if the Commission considered the Clergy Reserves suitable lands for their colonization enterprise, John Galt, as secretary, was authorized to negotiate with Bishop Strachan, of the Church of England, for their purchase.

Of the five-members of the Commission, Galt alone was vitally interested in Upper Canada. He went at once to York, discussed the question of Crown lands with many of the prominent men of the Province and then offered Bishop Strachan three shillings and sixpence an acre for the entire 829,430 acres of the Clergy Reserves. Strachan declined this offer of £145,150 and held out for eight shillings and sixpence an acre. Galt thought this price much too high, and the deal was off.

But Galt was not the man to be discouraged by the first set-back. Since he could not do business with Strachan, he decided to approach the Crown Lands Department of the government with the suggestion that the province sell to the company 1,384,413 acres of Crown lands situated in various sections of Upper and Lower Canada, including the Clergy Reserves, at one shilling and three pence an acre. The Crown Lands Department would have accepted this offer, but for the protests of Bishop Strachan against the sale of the Clergy Reserves.

Galt and Strachan both went to England to finish the battle of wits. A compromise was finally effected. Galt consented to the withdrawal of the Clergy Reserves from the sale on condition that the Huron Tract, a parcel of 1,100,000 acres lying along Lake Huron in a solid block recently purchased from the Indians, be substituted at the price he had offered for the 829,430 acres of Clergy Reserves, namely £145,150. He further agreed to pay three shillings and sixpence an acre for the 1,384,413 acres of Crown lands elsewhere in the Province. The purchase price of the 2,484,413 acres was to be £392,502, a portion of which was to be spent in public works and improvements on the lands, and the balance, slightly over £300,000, was to be met in sixteen annual instalments, all this with the approval of the Government of Upper Canada.

The agreement pleased not only the Canadians but the financial backers of the scheme in London, who undertook at once the raising of the money. In August, 1826, the organization received its charter from the British Parliament with a capital investment of £1,000,000 Sterling. The name was the Canada Company. The directors invited John Galt to return to Upper Canada, as secretary of the company, and gave him power of attorney in the management of its affairs, including the spending of a million pounds of money and the settlement of nearly three million acres of land.

Galt came to Upper Canada and opened an office in Little York. It was only ten feet square, and he paid a dollar a week for rent and acted as his own private secretary. Gradually he acquired a small staff of trusted men, among whom was his old Scottish friend, Dr. William “Tiger” Dunlop, to whom had been given the post of Warden of the Woods and Forests of the Canada Company. This man was one of the most eccentric figures in Canadian history. The surveyor was John MacDonald, and the other officials included, at one time or another, Charles Prior, Major Strickland and John Brant, chief of the Mohawks, son and successor to the great Thayendanegea.

Galt determined to begin his prodigious task by building a village somewhere on the company’s lands. He chose for its site a central location in the Halton Block, a tract of 42,000 acres of level land lying along the eastern boundary of Waterloo Township. Through it ran a stream, a tributary of the Grand, which Galt named the Speed.

Was it curiosity or business acumen that prompted Galt to visit at this time the little village on the Grand which bore his name? He went there from the Head of the Lake, on April 22, 1827, arriving by way of the “Dutch trail,” through the Beverley Swamp. He met there, by appointment, his friend, Dr. Dunlop. No doubt they were entertained by Hon. William Dickson, at Kirkmichael. The three Scots probably sat long into the night with a black bottle before them discussing plans for the development of the Canada Company’s lands, for Dickson was a landowner of some consequence, and he had some very pronounced theories on colonization.

Certainly Galt met Absalom Shade, too, on the occasion of this visit to the Scottish town. Perhaps he came for the express purpose of seeing Shade. He told him that he contemplated opening a road from Dickson’s village to the town that the Canada Company was going to build in the heart of the Halton Block. The shrewd Pennsylvanian lost no time in bargaining for a generous share of the contracts. He got them, too, and in a short time the men of Dumfries were slashing a road eighteen miles through the bush and jingling the company’s coins in their pockets.

The next morning was St. George’s Day. Galt and Dunlop set out early on their eighteen-mile tramp through the bush for the site of the village that was to be. There they were to meet Prior and a group of workmen. It was to be a momentous day, for they were to chop down the first trees on the Canada Company’s site. But Galt and Dunlop soon lost their way and “wandered up and down like two babes with not even the comfort of a blackberry.” Before they found the trail again, it had begun to rain. When they arrived at their destination, the sun was hanging low on the horizon and they were dripping wet. They had to stand before a bonfire to dry their clothes.

Galt had planned that some little ceremony should mark the felling of the first trees. Late as it was, he took with him Dunlop, Prior and two workmen, all of them carrying axes, and he led them to the brow of a hill. There he chose a large maple, and he himself struck the first blow. “The moment,” he says, “was impressive. The silence of the wood that echoed and resounded was as the sight of the solemn genius of the wilderness departing forever.” Dunlop swung his axe and struck the second blow, and Prior, the third. The two workmen came forward then and chopped at the tree until it fell with a reverberating crash. “There was a funereal pause,” says Galt, “when the tree fell, as when a coffin is lowered into a grave.” Then they “drank prosperity to the city,” which Galt named Guelph in honour of the Royal Family, whose surname it was. From the stump of that first maple tree, the streets of the new town were made to radiate like ribs of a fan. The stump itself was levelled later and fitted with a sun dial. This was Guelph’s town clock in the early days.

In a short time the woodmen had hewn out of the wilderness a thoroughfare seven miles long and thirty feet wide. A central location, on a hill, was reserved as a site for a Roman Catholic church, in recognition of the Bishop’s helpful services, another for the Church of England and still another for the Presbyterians. Sites were marked for other public buildings. The company erected, for its own use, a commodious building to serve as an office and as a domicile for the use of immigrant families pending the completion of their own homes. This was called the Priory, in compliment to Charles Prior. This avenue, with its handsome buildings, was to be the nucleus of the most beautiful city in all the world.

One of the workmen was Roswell Matthews, the man who had tried so long, yet without success, to build a dam for Thomas Clark at the waterfall on the Grand River. Hope had revived when he heard of the plans of the Canada Company. Here was another chance to earn a hundred acres of land and a competency for his family.

But misfortune again dogged his footsteps. At Guelph, he was struck by a falling tree and picked up for dead. Suddenly he roused himself, called for his son, John, who had come with him, and sent him to Galt for a doctor.

John was only a half-grown boy, and Galt was eighteen miles away, with only a blazed trail between. But he set out at once, trudged along the trail until at last he stumbled into Galt and found the doctor. While the doctor was hurrying on horseback to the scene of the accident, young John lay tossing in delirium in a strange, too-comfortable bed at the doctor’s home. He dreamed that he was attending his father’s funeral. There, before him was a rough, homemade coffin. The woodmen were digging the grave. In the morning he was conscious, but certain that his father was no more.

The boy was right. Roswell Matthews was laid to rest that very night in Guelph’s first grave. After John left him, his condition had grown steadily worse and his companions, despairing of the arrival of the doctor in time, had allowed an unqualified practitioner, one of their own number, to give what relief he could to the injured man. In ignorance, he gave him the wrong treatment, and the patient died before sundown. Roswell Matthews’ sun had set too, and it was left to his disconsolate son, John, to break the sad news to his widowed mother and fatherless brothers and sisters at home.

The clearing of the town site required several months. By August, one hundred and sixty lots had been sold. Payments were to be made in annual instalments with interest at six per cent.

A faint suspicion that the Board of Directors did not trust him crossed Galt’s mind when he received a preemptory order to change the name of Guelph to Goderich. This was evidently intended to please Lord Goderich, the Secretary for War and the Colonies, who had given valuable assistance to the Canada Company. Galt knew his lordship well and had consulted with him frequently on Canadian affairs. He realized suddenly that he had been thoughtlessly indiscreet, but it was too late to change the name, since numerous deeds had already been issued under the name of Guelph.

He wondered what he could do to make amends. He would build another town on the shores of Lake Huron, he decided. It should be called Goderich and he would connect it with Guelph by a road cut through the wilderness. The Canada Company had recently acquired two tracts of Crown lands in Wilmot Township, in compensation for certain uninhabitable swamp lands in the Huron Tract. Through these, he could reach the boundary line between Wilmot and Waterloo Township. From there it was a short distance through a well settled region to the Galt-Guelph road which the company had built previously.

This was a task for his friend, Dunlop. He commissioned him to find a suitable site for a town on Lake Huron and to assemble a corps of surveyors, trail-blazers, wood-cutters and haulers with teams to build the road. It was a prodigious undertaking. For months at a time the woodmen were compelled to remain in the forest, no matter how inclement the weather. They chopped all day long from dawn till dark. No feather beds to ease their weary bones. Nothing but a shake-down of cedar branches around a campfire. No news of the great world outside; no messages from loved ones at home.

It was Galt’s intention to go himself to Lake Huron to see the site which Dunlop had chosen for his second village. There was as yet no Huron Road and he would have to reach it by a circuitous route. He set out overland to Penetanguishene, on Georgian Bay, which he called “the outermost post that floats the meteor flag of England.” There, the Admiralty placed at his disposal a gun-boat, called the Bee, and in that small craft he skirted “the houseless shores and the shipless seas” of Lake Huron.

When he had rounded Cabot’s Head, he kept scanning the shore through his telescope. Presently he saw a small clearing in the forest and a lonely shack close to the water’s edge. A beautiful river meandered into the lake beside the shack, and standing in a canoe at the mouth of the river, he saw a strange combination of “velveteens and whiskers” and discovered “within the roots of red hair the living features of Dr. Dunlop.”

This, then, was Dunlop’s choice of a site for the future town of Goderich. Galt explored the region up the river and declared himself heartily in accord. He sent the Bee and her commander back to Penetanguishene and announced that he intended to visit Detroit with Dunlop. From there he would return to York by way of Lake Erie.

The only means of transportation from Goderich to Detroit was Dunlop’s scow, the Dismal. Galt did not realize that he took his life in his hands when he piloted her over the treacherous rocks at Kettle Point. Fortunately, there were no untoward experiences on this trip. The two friends spent several happy days in the theatres and concert halls of the city. Then they separated. Dunlop returned to the loneliness of his shack on Lake Huron, and Galt enjoyed a trip by steamer on Lake Erie and a visit to Buffalo before going to his office in York.

Guelph’s first distinguished visitors were Bishop Macdonell and the Provincial Inspector-General, who were attended by a number of Edinburgh friends, including several ladies. John Galt was host on this occasion. He planned a visit to William Dickson, of Galt, and shifted the responsibility of the entertainment on his friend’s more able shoulders.

Dickson requisitioned a scow and took the entire party on a tour of exploration of the Grand River. They embarked at the town bridge, near Kirkmichael, and drifted slowly downstream. The weather was ideal, a July day, with midsummer sunshine and shadows chasing each other over the surface of the placid waters. In his Autobiography, Galt relates how the party amused themselves by naming the islands and the headlands along the course of the river after the political celebrities of the day. When they came to the farmhouse of “one Walter Scott, who came of all places in the world, from Selkirk,” they named the shallow water near his house Abbotsford. At Brantford, Galt withdrew from the party and proceeded alone to York, by way of Ancaster.

The anniversary of the organization of the Canada Company, the twelfth of August, drew near. Galt planned to mark the event by a public dinner in the market-house at Guelph. It was a matter of secondary importance that it was also the birthday of the King and the anniversary of his own wedding.

The jollification was to be on a grand scale. A whole ox was prepared and early in the morning it was set to roast before a huge bonfire. Although the fire was replenished constantly during the day, when the time came for its consumption in the evening, the meat was much too rare, except at the outer edges. Luckily, the potatoes were done to a turn and there were quantities of delicious homemade bread, hemlock tea, the popular drink of the day for women, and huge jugs of whiskey for the men. Laughter and the singing of songs added to the festivity and culminated in the tripping of the light fantastic toe at the Priory, to music furnished by the York band.

Throughout this day of levity John Galt was sad. He realized that the rift between himself and the Directorate of the Canada Company was deepening and widening. He knew that the Londoners complained that he was incompetent, hopelessly visionary and extravagant. He had brought out too few settlers, they claimed, and he had spent too much on them. If he were not curbed, the company would soon be bankrupt.

Galt had no guilty conscience about the matter. He was convinced that these criticisms of his armchair employees across the water were not just. They had no conception of the vast distances of the New World, and no appreciation of the limitations and the difficulties under which he was compelled to work.

From Galt’s point of view, the company was like a greedy landlord demanding rent before his building was constructed. It was his well-grounded conviction that roads must be built before settlements could be made. He would never be a party to a plan which involved the importation of England’s poor to a life of starvation in the wilderness. Better wait, was his advice, until they could find men and women of stamina and intelligence, who with a little help from the company could make their way in the New World. Upper Canada needed people who had the capacity to develop with perseverance and industry the hidden resources of the country. No colonization scheme could ever be anything but a dismal failure, unless the country and the people were mutually benefited. These considerations, not dividends, were his paramount concern.

Matters came to such a pass that Galt decided to resign his position. He employed a competent accountant from New York to examine his books, and he made secret preparations to return to England. At the same time, unknown to Galt, the company sent out a man from England to audit the books and to spy upon their secretary. The fellow had a sorry time of it, for Dr. Dunlop and other members of Galt’s staff held him up to ridicule so effectively that he was glad enough to run away, leaving the company’s books in a hopelessly disorderly state.

This exigency deterred Galt from tendering his resignation immediately. He decided that he would not leave Upper Canada or his post with the Canada Company until he had travelled over the Huron Road and seen with his own eyes, Lake Huron and Goderich, the village of his dreams. It was winter by this time, and the road was passable only by sleigh. When he set out on that long journey alone, “he had plenty of time,” he remarks, “to chew the cud of bitter thought.”

At last he reached Lake Huron and the village which has been called “the pet and the darling of the Canada Company.” Dr. Dunlop had laid it out with a central square, from which eight streets radiated like spokes of a wheel. This is in sharp contrast to Guelph, which was built, like Rome, on seven hills and spread out like a lady’s fan, or a peacock’s tail. Galt was pleased with the development, but grieved that he must leave the work, which was little more than begun. As he stood on the shore and looked out across the great inland sea, he thought that Upper Canada was the most beautiful country in all the world.

On his return to Guelph, Galt announced his retirement. Unfortunately, Mrs. Galt and her sons had arrived from Scotland, without any inkling of the situation. They were living temporarily at the Priory, in Guelph. When the resignation became effective, Galt placed the boys in schools in Lower Canada and took his wife back with him to Scotland.

There, among the banks and braes of his native land, Galt spent the rest of his days, dogged by poverty and haunted by the consciousness of failure in the greatest enterprise of his life. The fever for some new colonization scheme tortured him periodically, but persistently. His literary genius sputtered a little from time to time, but it never gave him the satisfaction he craved. He died, in 1839, and was buried in his native Greenock. He left two monuments, both of them in Upper Canada, Guelph and the Huron Road. His widow came out again to Canada to be with her sons and the family name has been perpetuated in dignity and honour throughout succeeding generations. His son, Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt, was one of the Fathers of Confederation.

The Canada Company has had a worthy history. To its credit be it said that, within the allotted time of sixteen years, it fulfilled to the letter all its contracts with the Government. It has brought to Canada thousands of splendid settlers, notably to Huron and Perth Counties. There, the names of the original directors have been perpetuated to this day in the roll of the townships. It is regrettable that no township bears the name of Superintendent Galt.

The Huron Road still connects Goderich with Guelph. In Waterloo Township, however, local roads connect the Wilmot line with the old Galt-Guelph road. The Grand River was spanned by a bridge, a short distance north of Doon. The village of Preston built it, it is believed, in the hope of drawing trade from across the river. In 1865, it was undermined and carried down the river, but the broken-down abutments may still be seen on either bank of the river.

For the convenience of the labourers, taverns sprang up along the route while the road was under construction, and these were retained during stage-coach days for the accommodation of travellers. The most reputable of these were managed by Germans from Waterloo, Helmer’s at the Wilmot-Waterloo line, Fryfogel’s near Shakespeare and Seebach’s on the long road over the juniper bushes to the lake. Fryfogel’s is the only one still standing. The location of Seebach’s is marked at a crossroad. Many amusing stories are told of the accommodation these taverns afforded. Seebach’s once served for supper “a piece of dirty-looking Indian meal-bread, a large cake of beef tallow and to wash this down, a dish of crust coffee, without either milk or sugar.”

It is not generally known that the Canada Company is still in existence, doing business in real estate from its office on Bay Street, in Toronto. Two commissioners are still employed in its service, although only about fifteen thousand acres of land remain unsold of the original three million. The crest of the company has not changed for well over a century; nor has its motto: Non mutat genus solum.

Nichol

The Township of Nichol was originally Block 4 of the Indian lands, the smallest of the four northern tracts which Joseph Brant sold for the Six Nations, on February 5, 1798. It is a parallelogram in shape, being twelve miles wide and less than four miles deep, and it contains 28,512 acres. Like Pilkington, it is in Wellington County.

There was something mysterious about the purchase of this property, for neither the name of the buyer nor the price paid was revealed at the time. There seems to have been, for some unknown reason, a mere pretence of sale. Nine years later, the government transferred it to Col. Thomas Clark, of Niagara, in recognition, it was said, of conspicuous military services. Colonel Clark is supposed to have given the Indian trustees his bond for £4,564, due in a thousand years, with annual payments of interest. This transaction is understandable only in the light of the fact that the Colonel’s charming wife was a granddaughter of Sir William Johnson and Molly Brant.

Thomas Clark was at one time a clerk in the employ of Hon. Robert Hamilton. He and his wife belonged to the aristocracy of the day. They lived at Clark Hill, a mansion house surrounded by landscaped gardens, on the elevated bank of the Niagara River, a stone’s throw from the mighty cataract. The property was later owned by the late Sir Harry Oakes.

Clark dabbled in trade to keep the wheels of his military and social life running smoothly. He was a merchant, and a very successful one, a member of a group of well-to-do tradesmen who were recognized as magnates in the commercial life of the Niagara District. Most of them were interrelated by blood and marriage. His colleagues included Hon. Robert Hamilton, Hon. William Dickson and Robert Nichol, all of them aristocrats holding, at one time or another, seats in the Legislative Council of the province.

The extensive and lucrative trade which these men had built up was by no means local. They were only a link in a chain of commercialists, whose operations spread out like tentacles throughout the British Provinces in the New World, with centres in Halifax, Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, York and the Niagara District. In a sheltered inlet along the river bank, not far from Fort Erie, they had found and developed a safe anchorage for small sailing vessels navigating the Great Lakes. A government wharf was near the cove, and there the company’s agents received goods arriving from the east and transhipped them to Detroit, and even to far-away Mackinac. The common people called these traders the Shopkeepers’ Aristocracy, or Scotch Peddlars.

To this day it is not clear why the tract which Thomas Clark acquired was not called by his name but by that of his cousin, Robert Nichol. Apparently, Nichol had no interest in the property, although he was associated with Clark in his general speculative schemes.

Robert Nichol was a Scot, a native of Dumfriesshire, and he was related to most of the wealthy and influential men of the day. He had strengthened his social position by his marriage with Theresa Wright, the daughter of a surgeon in the British army and granddaughter of Hon. Alexander Grant, of Amherstburg, in the far western corner of the province. Although Nichol showed great energy and a marked aptitude for commercial life, he was a lawyer by profession and he had an excellent education, and a command both of English and of French.

This young man of much promise had acquired a government grant of four hundred acres at Port Dover, on Lake Erie, and on it he had erected a number of mills and distilleries. In a short time, he had amassed enough money and acquired sufficient political influence to secure for himself a government appointment as a Justice of the Peace and a Commissioner of Roads. He also acted as agent for Colonel Thomas Talbot, a well-known colonizer of early times on the shores of Lake Erie.

Nichol’s position gave him virtual control of the expenditure of a great deal of public money, which Parliament granted, in 1810, for the development of certain highways in lands lying adjacent to the Talbot settlement. Rightfully or wrongfully, he was accused of having appropriated to his own use three hundred pounds of money designed for road construction. Nichol denied the charge so emphatically and so convincingly that his innocence was conceded without question. But he was discourteous, if not altogether insolent, to certain members of the House of Assembly who did not believe his allegations, and for this indiscretion he was apprehended and sentenced to a short term in gaol.

The War of 1812 broke opportunely for Nichol, for it opened the way for him to turn an unsavoury notoriety into personal aggrandizement. He had been a close friend of Sir Isaac Brock, and through him he got his feet on the military ladder by which he climbed rapidly from Commander of a Division to Quarter Master General of the Militia. He was riding now on the crest of a wave of patriotism. Those who distrusted him murmured, but dared say nothing.

Sir Isaac Brock carried on his youthful shoulders the burden of responsibility for the conduct of the war, until his untimely death on Queenston Heights. The Americans began their attack on Upper Canada by an unexpected invasion of the western toe of the province. They were repelled, however, with the loss of Detroit. But the west was still in imminent danger when Brock decided to go himself to Detroit to take command of the forces there. Knowing full well how desperate the situation was, he went by way of Port Dover in order to consult with Robert Nichol on matters of military strategy. He commissioned Nichol to requisition every boat he could command on the waterfront and to transport to the western scene of the conflict, with all possible speed, five hundred men and as much equipment as he could assemble.

Nichol rose nobly to the occasion. He commandeered the Chippawa and the Nancy, two merchant marines, and several large rowboats, and into them he packed as many troops as they could carry. Those who could not be accommodated in the boats he sent by land. He himself took command of the contemptible navy. He piloted and guided the boats with consummate skill, planned the port of disembarkation and superintended the landing of the contingent at Detroit. As a mark of his deep appreciation of this most excellent service, Brock gave Nichol a gold military medal.

When the war was over and the question of compensation for losses was being considered, Nichol presented to Parliament a claim for $27,000, as restitution for damages to his mills and distilleries through the fortunes of war. Not only had his property been ruined, he declared, but he had sacrificed every cent he possessed in the defence of his country. In fact, he was destitute. He had been forced to mortgage his home to keep his wife and children from starvation, and the war had left him head over heels in debt, with no means of earning a livelihood.

The government discounted these claims somewhat, but offered Nichol some measure of compensation in an appointment as Judge of the Surrogate Court. This position necessitated the removal of his family and his household effects to Lundy’s Lane, in the Niagara District, an eventuality which was probably not altogether displeasing to Nichol, inasmuch as it made possible a closer companionship with his intimate friends of the aristocracy of the Niagara District.

But the move proved disastrous. His duties as Judge of the Surrogate Court took him frequently to Niagara. On one occasion when he was returning to his home at Lundy’s Lane after dark, his horse, blinded by a driving snow storm, stumbled and fell headlong over the precipice at Queenston Heights. Both horse and rider were dashed to death and frightful dismemberment on the rocks below.

Next morning Nichol’s mangled body was picked up and buried, some records say, at Stamford, and others, in an unmarked grave in the Hamilton Family Cemetery, at Queenston. His estate was valued at £400, but even that small amount dwindled unbelievably when his principal creditors, Thomas Clark and Rev. Robert Addison, of Ancaster, had been paid. The widow and her four young children were left all but penniless.

Thomas Clark kept the Nichol Block intact until December, 1808, when he sold the southern part of it to a certain Samuel Hatt, of Ancaster. He in turn conveyed it within a short time to Rev. Robert Addison, rector of St. John’s Church of that same village and, later, incumbent of St. Mark’s in Niagara.

On the death of the clergyman, his widow decided to sell the tract. Her banker, Thomas McCormick, of Niagara, advised her to offer it to his friend, Capt. William Gilkison, who was looking for land in a desirable location. Gilkison was a native of Irvine, Scotland, a cousin of John Galt, Secretary and Superintendent of the Canada Company. He was serving at that time as an officer with the fleet on Lake Erie.

In September, 1832, Captain Gilkison bought from Mrs. Addison her entire holding, a rectangular strip of land twelve miles long and less than two miles deep, containing 13,816 acres. The price was seven shillings six pence per acre, payable upon receipt of the deed.

Gilkison was confident from the very first that he had made no mistake in the purchase of this land. The banks of the river in the two miles stretch which he owned were ideal as a site for a village. Few pioneer settlements in all the land could boast of so beautiful a waterfall as his forty-foot cascade, nor of such majestic limestone cliffs. This was land he could sell to good advantage, and he lost no time in employing a surveyor to divide the river banks into a hundred lots of various shapes and sizes.

The only fly in the ointment was the spirit of the unfortunate Roswell Matthews, which seemed to haunt the place. Poor Roswell Matthews! It was sixteen years since he had first staked his claim to the promise of a hundred acres somewhere on that spot. But the promise had never been fulfilled. His widow had left the locality. There stood the abandoned shack, with open door and sagging roof. Gilkison was under no legal obligation to the woman, but he looked her up, found her and gave her three hundred dollars for her goodwill and the shack, which he rebuilt later for his own occasional use.

The Gilkisons were a sea-going family. All the boys had sniffed salt water in their teens. William, the eldest, had left his home in Scotland as early as 1796, and had found his way to America. Through the influence of the multi-millionaire, John Jacob Astor, to whom he bore letters of introduction, he was given a post in the service of the North West Fur Company, as mariner on Lake Erie. In time, he became commander of a schooner which plied between Fort Erie and Detroit carrying furs and other merchandise for the merchants of Niagara. While engaged in this work he became intimate with Hon. Alexander Grant, of Amherstburg, Commander of the British fleet on Lake Erie, and the friendship culminated in his marriage with Grant’s sixth daughter, Isabella. It was a happy union, of which was born a family of many sons.

In 1815, after the birth of his fifth son, Gilkison took his wife and the boys to see his relatives and friends in Scotland. The visit was prolonged year after year, until fifteen years had passed. During that time, six more sons were born, making eleven in all. By a strange coincidence there were eleven daughters in the Grant family.

Mrs. Gilkison died in Scotland at the age of forty-four, and was buried there. In 1832, six years after her death, Captain Gilkison brought several of his elder sons to Upper Canada, leaving the younger boys at school in the Old Land. It was his intention to educate all the boys in Scotland and to bring them out to Upper Canada as they reached maturity. “This Upper Canada,” he used to say, “is the only free country on the face of the globe that I know anything about.”

Captain Gilkison was justifiably pleased with his investment, for it was to provide in the days to come an outlet for the activities of his boys. He regretted that he could not immediately take up permanent residence on the tract, but he employed a capable man, Simon Fraser, to superintend the building of mills and to act as his agent in all matters pertaining to the property and to the general development of the village. His eldest son, David, who lived on the tract, was one of those who witnessed the founding of the Canada Company’s town of Guelph.

Gilkison called his settlement Elora, chiefly because he fancied the sound of the word. One of his sea-faring brothers had told him of a famous Hindu temple by that name. And the little stream which emptied its limpid waters into the Grand just below the waterfall he named the Irvine River, in honour of his native village in the homeland.

Unfortunately, Captain Gilkison did not live long enough to see the development of Elora. Ever since his return to Upper Canada, in November, 1832, he had been living at Oak Bank, a tract of land near the Indian village of Brantford, and from there he superintended the management of Elora. One day early in the following spring—it was on April 23, 1833—he went to Hamilton, at the Head of the Lake, as his custom was, to buy supplies for his village in the north. On his way home he stopped at Onondaga, an Indian village a few miles south of Brantford, to call on his friend, Rev. Abraham Nelles, missionary to the Indians. The visit over, his coachman brought his carriage to the door, but when Gilkison was about to step into it, he was seized with a paralytic stroke. He died almost instantly and was buried at the Mohawk church in an unmarked grave, not far from the tomb of Thayendanegea.

Gilkison’s sudden and untimely death retarded the progress of Elora for more than a decade. His sons were all young and inexperienced, most of them under age. By the terms of the father’s will, executed just previous to his death, his property was to be divided equally among his sons. David, who was already on the tract, fitted himself as well as he could to be the manager of the estate. His brother, Jasper, married a daughter of his father’s friend, Thomas McCormick, the Niagara banker, and, in 1862, he was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

Although progress was slow in the town, large settlements developed rapidly in other parts of the township. In a short time Nichol was as thoroughly Scottish as Dickson’s Dumfries.

The problem of immigration had changed completely since Dickson’s earlier experiment in colonization. There was no need now to advertise Upper Canada in Scotland. The people, and especially those who were dogged by poverty and harassed by unrest, thought of it as a Promised Land across the seas, to which they longed to go, if only a happy chance should open the way. Clubs and societies in Aberdeen and Edinburgh were studying seriously the problems of rural life in Scotland and investigating the conditions of life and the opportunities for improvement they might hope to find in America.

During the winter of 1830-31, the Highland Society of Edinburgh was absorbed in a study of the reverses which had befallen a number of emigrants who had set out for the New World with little or no knowledge of the country. Adam Fergusson, a lawyer, was present at one of these meetings, and he heard a pathetic story. At the next meeting, he made a formal offer to go to Upper Canada, at his own expense, to find out at first hand the conditions that prevailed there and to make a report in due time. Fergusson was not a practical but a “gentleman” farmer, but everyone knew he could be relied upon to bring an honest, unbiased report on the soil, the drainage, the climate and the general practicability of residence in the far-away land. So the offer was accepted with enthusiasm.

Fergusson left Edinburgh, in February, 1831, and embarked at Liverpool for New York. He was well provided with letters of introduction to people of position and social standing in the United States, as well as in Upper Canada. His personality was so genial that he was able to meet key-men socially and to get from them the most illuminating answers to his questions. He spent some time as a guest of Hon. Thomas Clark, at Clark Hill, and he enjoyed many a walk along the tumultuous Niagara from the Falls to Queenston, for he was a good pedestrian and he would ride only when he could not walk. At Clark Hill, he met Dr. “Tiger” Dunlop, who never tired of talking about the colonization schemes of the Canada Company and of his association with John Galt.

Fergusson had not committed himself to any itinerary. He travelled wherever his fancy directed him. Every day he made copious and exceedingly interesting records of his impressions about the land through which he travelled. Especially did he note the waterpowers, the fertility of the soil, the rainfall and the length of the seasons. These were the considerations about which his friends of the Highland Society were most deeply concerned.

By the middle of May, Fergusson found himself in Galt, as guest of Hon. William Dickson. In his diary he tells of a tour of exploration which he and Dickson made on horseback down the river to a settlement called Brant’s Ford. The tavern, he said, was very noisy, but the bedrooms were snug and neat. On Sunday morning they attended the service at the Mohawk Church, and found the Indians very attentive to the admonitions of the preacher and very devout in their worship. They were delighted when two of the chiefs came to them at the close of the service, shook hands with them and said “Welcome Scotchmen.”

Fergusson found the valley of the Grand River a land of pure delight. “It is,” he recorded in his notes, “a land where superior men of character—and a competency—might live an ideal life.”

When he returned to Edinburgh, Fergusson presented to the Highland Society an exhaustive report of his findings in printed form. Nothing had escaped him, it seemed, from great Niagara’s waterpower to the prevailing price of hens’ eggs. The document was so well received that a second edition was published the following year to meet insistent demands.

Fergusson had fulsome praise for Upper Canada. Apparently, he meant every word he had written, for in two years he was back in the country as a prospective purchaser of land. It was his intention to bring out his family of seven sons, he declared, as soon as he could provide a home for them. With him came two young men, James Webster, twenty-five, wealthy and enterprising, and the scholarly Patrick Bell, who was under appointment as tutor to Fergusson’s boys.

These three men were determined to explore the lands which lay upstream from Elora, on the Grand River. In October, 1833, they reached Elora, arriving by way of Guelph. There they met Simon Fraser, Gilkison’s agent, who joined them and travelled with them as far as the baseline which bounds the Township of Nichol and the Indian lands. The soil, they discovered, was good, a deep, black loam, on a foundation of limestone, and when they had torn away the brambles which had overgrown the river, they found that the water was rapid and clear as crystal. This land was all that their hearts could desire. On their return to Elora, they stopped long enough to drink a toast to Fergus, the town which they intended to build on the Grand River in Upper Nichol.

They went at once to Clark Hill and they bought from Colonel Thomas Clark the entire north-east quarter of Nichol, an area of 7,367 acres, extending on both sides of the Grand River. Fergusson then returned to Scotland for his bride, his second wife, and his family of half-grown boys, while Webster went up into Nichol to clear the village site.

The first house in Fergus was erected five days before Christmas. A little later, a corps of workmen came from Elora to help in the work of construction of many shacks for prospective settlers. They hewed streets, too, out of the wilderness and named them after the Royal Family and the patron saints of Great Britain. The centre of the village was a rectangle, which they named James Square, in honour of Webster. The village had already been given an abbreviated form of Fergusson’s name.

The men worked every day from early morning till sundown, but no axes were swung and no hammers sounded on the Sabbath. The traditional hour for public worship found the pioneers of North Nichol on their knees pouring out fervent prayers for Fergus and for the success of their venture.

Soon immigrants began to pour in. They were Lowland Presbyterian Scots, for the most part, and many of them former members of the Highland Society of Edinburgh. By the end of 1834, three thousand acres of land had been sold. There were seventy heads of families in Fergus, most of them men of superior education, including graduates of the famous universities of Scotland.

After four years, the two young men, Webster and Bell, decided to return to Scotland for a visit. The entire village turned out with fife and drum to wish them well. Bell did not return to Upper Canada, but Webster came in due time, laden down with presents for Margaret Wilson, his promised Canadian bride. When the wedding was celebrated the following year, the village again went en fête.

For fifteen years James Webster toiled ceaselessly for the good of the village. Then he was lured into politics. He became a member of the House of Assembly and he spent most of his fortune in elections and lawsuits. Finally, he gave up public life and went to Guelph to recoup his losses in a land boom. In 1859, he became mayor of Guelph and at the time of his death, ten years later, when he was sixty, he was Registrar of the County. It was said of him, as it was of Absalom Shade, that he had done more for the city of his adoption than any other man.

Adam Fergusson did not live permanently at Fergus. Upper Canada had heaped many honours upon him, not the least of which was his appointment to the exclusive Legislative Council of the Province. That he was an ardent Tory goes without saying. He lived latterly at his residence called Woodhill, near Waterdown, on Lake Ontario. There he found infinite delight in entertaining men of distinction and social standing. Of his seven sons, six came to Upper Canada to live, and several of them filled positions of trust and responsibility. Fergusson died in his eighty-second year as the result of a paralytic stroke. He was buried in St. Luke’s cemetery, at Burlington.

Adam Fergusson and his report had breathed over Scotland the spirit of eternal hope. Prospective immigrants pinned their faith to his promise of financial independence to all who could get possession of a farm of a hundred acres in any part of the wonderland of Upper Canada. That was a solid foundation upon which to build their hopes for the future.

The people of the City of Aberdeen were greatly interested in the report, but not quite prepared to put implicit trust in all that Fergusson had said. They demanded corroboration of his statements from the lips of their own kith and kin, Aberdonians, and they laid upon two well-known men, George Elmslie and William Gibbons, the burden of this responsibility. They and their families were to go and see the country for themselves. If they were satisfied with it, they were authorized to make preliminary arrangements for a settlement, but if they were disappointed, a word of warning would suffice to keep the rest at home.

On their arrival at Quebec, Elmslie and Gibbons were delighted to meet two others from Aberdeen, Alexander Watts and John Keith. But there were other circumstances attending the landing which were not so propitious. The ship which had preceded theirs into port had brought Asiatic cholera of so malignant a type that scores of passengers had died at sea. In a matter of hours, people were dying like flies on the streets of Quebec, and the plague was spreading like wild fire up the river to Montreal.

The Aberdeen party took to Durham boats with all speed and tried to outrun the pestilence. But progress was slow. By the time they reached Toronto, the scourge had overtaken them. By some good fortune, they were able to isolate themselves on the upper floor of a house on Adelaide Street, and from their windows they could see and hear the dead-carts clattering down the street, piled high with rough-hewn, unpainted boxes. The procession continued day after day, until it seemed that half the population of the little town must have been summoned in one short week to the land of the hereafter.

The men of the party had no time for window gazing. They were off to call on Governor Colborne and Bishop Strachan, to whom they had letters of introduction. Their mission was to discuss with these men the advantages of settlement in various parts of the province. The people from Aberdeen would require, they explained, a considerable area of good soil, in a community that was being settled by Scottish, or English, people. The land must be well watered, preferably by a stream with a limestone riverbed, and there must be a kirk and a school within easy reach.

The Bishop made several suggestions, none of which suited the men from Aberdeen. Nottawasaga had too many mosquitoes, the Niagara district was beginning to look old and neglected and Zorra, near the Canada Company’s lands, had no limestone stream. Not even in the valley of the Grand River, in Dumfries, Waterloo, Woolwich or Pilkington, did they find any lands which satisfied them entirely.

But when they reached Nichol Township and had spent two happy days exploring the Irvine River, they found their hearts’ desire, good soil, a sparkling river with a limestone bed and a good Scottish name and people of their own blood and religion.

The Gilkison Estate owned part of this desirable land and would sell it at four dollars an acre, less fifty cents, if the settlers would construct the necessary roads and bridges at their own expense. Colonel Thomas Clark no longer held claim to any land in Nichol north of the Grand River. After 1833, it belonged either to the Gilkisons or to Adam Fergusson and his partners.

In the upper room of the house on Adelaide Street they discussed their findings and decided unanimously to recommend the purchase of the valley of the Irvine River, as a suitable habitation for the people of Aberdeen.

With glad hearts, the little party of women and children left their rented quarters in Toronto and began their journey to their new home in the woods. They reached Hamilton by steamboat. There, Gibbons had engaged seven wagons, six for the transportation of their heavy luggage and one to carry the women and children. The men and the boys would have to walk.

They left Hamilton in the early afternoon expecting to travel along the new Brock Road, which would take them to Guelph. But the roadbed was “sticky paste” and when they reached Coote’s Paradise (Dundas), three of the teamsters swore they had had enough of it. If they had to go to Elora, it must be by the old “Dutch” trail to Galt and through Waterloo and Woolwich.

So the caravan was divided. Those who continued on the Brock Road, including the women and children, had a harrowing experience. No sooner had they reached the summit of the incline than they found themselves in the “long woods.” The Brock Road was a new thoroughfare designed to shorten the distance from Hamilton to Guelph, but it turned out to be nothing but a dismal trail through the bush. The roadbed was a succession of holes, which broke the axles of the wagons and endangered their lives in so many near-upsets that they despaired of ever reaching their destination. The food at a wayside tavern was wretched, and the beds, hard as boards.

By one o’clock on the following day, they had reached Guelph, the halfway station. But when they struck out again on the second lap of the journey, their misfortunes multiplied. Five miles out, one of the teams got stuck in the mud, and only a pair of oxen could extricate it. Similar set-backs were experienced throughout the day. They were all worn and weary when the party arrived at Elora at three o’clock on the following day. Two hours later, the long-route party arrived from Woolwich, and Simon Fraser tendered them all, in the name of Elora, a hearty civic welcome.

Winter was on its way. The Irvine River lands had to be cleared and a few shacks erected before the snow fell. But there was generous help available from both Nichol and Woolwich. The buildings were raised within a few days in chill, November weather. The men worked hard all day long, then stayed for a frolic in the evening and slept under coverlets of cedar to be ready for another raising in the morning. On the first Sunday there was worship in John Keith’s shanty. Later, an itinerary of meetings was arranged to include young Gilkison’s home, in Elora. There was always singing and praying and reading of the Scriptures and, occasionally, there was a lay sermon.

So, the Aberdonians established an outpost of civilization on the edge of an unbroken forest which extended eighty-five miles deep to Lake Huron. They found no roads, except a few blazed trails; no bridges save an occasional tree felled across a stream. Not a stick of timber was to be had for their shacks, until they had first hewn it from the forest with their own axes; no shelter, until they found it under their own roofs. This was pioneering in earnest, as late as 1833.

Elmslie sent to his friends in Aberdeen a report on the progress of the settlement. His advice was that they should come out in the spring. If they could bring any axes or farm implements of any kind, so much the better, for it was next to impossible to buy a tool of any sort in the backwoods.

In the spring, twenty families from Aberdeen set out for Nichol in Upper Canada. They had acquired a strange collection of antiquated farm implements, including ploughs and axes, to which their friends had added a few second-rate hand-tools as parting gifts. The women had accumulated household utensils, dishes, pots and pans, linens and bedding, for they had heard that the nearest general store was a dozen miles away.

It was not easy at that time to get passage across the Atlantic. The party had planned to land at Quebec, but they were fortunate to get booking on an empty sailing vessel bound for New York to pick up a cargo of lumber. Nothing was said about the nature and the volume of their luggage. The boatmen assumed that there would be the normal quantity for twenty immigrant families. Half an hour before the “all aboard,” the passengers appeared dragging behind them their heavy iron implements and their unwieldy bundles of bedding and household effects. The boatmen protested loudly, with curses, but finally tossed the trappings into a conglomerate heap in the hold of the vessel and demanded payment of an exorbitant fee for excess baggage.

The imprecations of the crew were bad enough, but much more alarming were their invidious remarks about what the customs officials would say and do when they attempted to take their junk-pile off the boat, on the other side of the water. For seven long weeks, the inexperienced ocean travellers endured cruel taunts and jeers until, seasick and full of misgivings about their luggage, they wished they had never heard of Upper Canada.

Forebodings of evil increased when they sighted land and the vessel entered the port of New York. They saw the dreaded officials come on board, smart in their uniforms. They breathed a sigh of relief when the captain greeted them as long-lost friends and invited them to his cabin. The men of Aberdeen knew this was their opportunity. They rescued their impedimenta from the hold of the vessel and lugged it to the wharf. The crew chuckled and lent a helping hand. They were safe and well away, and no embarrassing questions asked.

It was a tedious, but by no means unpleasant journey by river and canal through the State of New York to Niagara. There is no record of any encounter with His Majesty’s customs officials there.

At Hamilton, however, they fell in with an old acquaintance from Aberdeen, who sounded a discordant note. They must shun Nichol Township, he adjured them, as they would a pest. If they were wise, they would settle down to a life of comfort at the Head of the Lake.

Under ordinary circumstances, this might have been good advice, for Hamilton was a considerable town. But the Aberdonians were not to be dissuaded from their purpose by prospects of a life of ease. They sought out the men who had wagons to move them to the north country, and for the transportation of their scrap-heap they promised cheerfully to pay a dollar a hundredweight.

The spirit of adventure possessed them when they left Hamilton and turned their faces to the silences. There was merriment and laughter, even when the wagons lurched unexpectedly and the women had to hold on for dear life.

Luckily, they arrived in safety, with their precious luggage intact. In anticipation of their coming, Elmslie had imported brand-new implements from Guelph, and with chagrin the newcomers saw the antiquated tools which they had brought with such cost and inconvenience dumped into a corner to rust in the weather.

The Aberdonians called their settlement in Western, or Upper Nichol by the friendly name of Bon Accord. This was significant, for Bon Accord is the motto of old Aberdeen inscribed on all the armourial bearings of the municipality. In Upper Canada the name applies loosely to the entire western section of Upper Nichol, but particularly to the three thousand acres of land which lie along the banks of the Irvine River.

John Keith was one of the earliest settlers of Bon Accord. He was the man who had fallen in unexpectedly with the Elmslie party at Quebec. His land lay along the western bank of the Irvine River, a choice location, near the limestone cliffs at the mouth, and he had built there a beautiful home.

One evening—it was in October, 1844—a stranger knocked at Keith’s door and stated that he had come on a matter of business. He was an odd-looking man, not unlike the Mennonites of Waterloo, though he wore a worldly fur coat. Sem Wissler was his name, and he was a grandson of Bishop Benjamin Eby. He and his brother, John, had come from Pennsylvania, in 1840, and had been operating a mill at Lexington, about ten miles down the Grand River.

The mill was paying well, Sem said, but since his marriage, in 1843, with a Scottish girl, Jane Robertson, who had been a governess to his brother’s children, he had been thinking of buying land in a Scottish community, so that his wife might feel more “to home.” He had an opportunity to buy a property adjoining Keith’s, but nearer Elora, but it did not suit him entirely. He offered to enter into an agreement with Keith, which would be advantageous to both. He would buy the neighbour’s farm, and then exchange half of it for that half of Keith’s farm through which the Irvine River ran. Keith would profit by better soil, and Wissler would have the waterpower he needed for certain industrial enterprises he had under consideration.

The bargain was made, and Sem Wissler came to live in Nichol. Soon he had dammed the river and begun the erection of a number of buildings, a sawmill, a tannery, two large flour mills, a shoe shop and a commodious residence for his lassie. Around the industrial enterprises grew a village, which he called by the biblical name of Salem.

The industries flourished and prospered. In a short time Wissler was carrying on an extensive trade, not only with the people of Elora and Fergus, but with the pioneers of that great hinterland which stretched from Salem to Southampton, on Lake Huron. When the first road was hewn through that wilderness, in 1851, Sem Wissler used to say that he lived on the front street of the world, with traffic passing his door every day from Lake Huron to Lake Ontario. By 1860, he was riding on the crest of the wave. As a token of public esteem, he was elected Reeve of Nichol.

But one day, in 1865, death pricked the bubble of Wissler’s prosperity. While attempting to get out of his bed on that fateful morning, he fell back upon his pillow and died instantly. He was only forty-six years of age, and he had thought of death only as an event of remote futurity. It had never occurred to him that he ought to make a will. And now it was too late.

All the Wissler children were minors and the estate could not be closed until the youngest, still unborn, had attained his majority. In those twenty-odd years Wissler’s industries failed lamentably in the hands of disinterested people and the promising village of Salem dwindled into insignificance. To-day only the ruins of a few of his mills remain, and Salem is an inconsequential crossroad without an industry.

The collapse of Wissler’s fame and fortune was inevitable. It may be that death snatched the industrialist from his own financial ruin. Certainly, the gradual settlement and development of the northland and the clearing of the bushland contributed to the growing difficulty of getting tan bark for the tanners and leather for the shoemakers. Up-country sawmills cut the logs which used to float down the Irvine to Salem in Wissler’s day. There was less grist for the flour mills, when the farmers began to feed grain to their livestock. The clearing of the farms and the removal of trees along the river bank interfered with the constant flow of waterpower, and every spring the Irvine went on a rampage, destroying buildings and carrying away bridges and outhouses. The ruin of Salem and the Wissler enterprises was complete when the Guelph-Elora railway to Alma was detoured through Fergus, instead of following the direct route through Salem.

Sem Wissler was buried in a large, private vault in the cemetery at Elora on land which belonged at that time to his estate.

In that same God’s Acre a small chapel with beautiful stained-glass windows has been erected by public subscription. It is a credit to the townspeople, for it is the only structure of its kind in all the valley of the Grand River. Near by, are the well-kept graves of members of the Elmslie Family and of many others who came to Nichol as pioneers in the thirties and the forties.

Beside the river stands a Grecian cross, which marks the last resting-place of Rev. John Smithurst, cousin and unsuccessful suitor for the hand of Florence Nightingale, the beloved Lady of the Lamp. Smithurst came to Upper Canada to hide, and perhaps to forget, his disappointment, and he served for some time as rector of the Anglican Church, at Elora. In 1852, during the term of his incumbency there, he received as a gift a handsome silver communion service bearing a Latin inscription. No name was attached to the gift, but Smithurst and all the world knew that the anonymous donor was the woman of his heart. Smithurst lived a lonely life and died a victim of an unrequited love. The silver is now the priceless possession of the Church.

Fergus has a monument which recalls another story of sentiment. It is a simple stone, in the graveyard of Old St Andrews, erected to the memory of George Clephane, a wayward remittance man, whose death was caused by a fall from a horse. He would long since have been forgotten, if his sister, in England, had not immortalized him by the writing of a hymn which all the world loves:

South of the Governor’s Road

The Governor’s Road, or the Dundas Road, is now called Highway No. 2. It skirts the southern boundary of Dumfries and crosses the Grand River at Paris. North of it lie Blocks 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the Indian lands, which Joseph Brant sold to white speculators. These represent the settlements of Dumfries, Waterloo, Woolwich, Pilkington, and Nichol. To the south are the Indian settlements of the Six Nations. In this region most of the townships and many of the streets and towns bear Indian names to this day.

In this Indian territory near the mouth of the river are Blocks 5 and 6, which Brant included in his great land sales to white speculators on February 5, 1798. Very little has been written about the white settlements in the south, although their history is interesting and their development considerable.

Block 5 bordered on Lake Erie to the east of the river’s mouth. It comprised 30,800 acres and the price was £5,775. The purchaser, William Jarvis, of Niagara, made an initial payment of £600, covered the balance with a mortgage and forthwith forgot to make any further payments. Some time later, he sold the entire block to Lord Selkirk, the Scottish colonizer, who had set himself the magnanimous task of providing lands in British America for the Highlanders who had been evicted from their homes during the economic revolution in the Scotland of that day.

Lord Selkirk paid William Jarvis the £600 which the latter had invested in the property, and he gave William Claus, the Indian agent, security for £3,475, on which he agreed to pay the interest annually. Selkirk lived up to this agreement, but never reduced the principal. Since his lordship had always enjoyed an enviable reputation for paying his debts, the supposition grew that he suspected Claus of dishonesty in his dealing with the Indians and for this reason he refused to close the deal. He is reported to have said that he would pay everything he owed on this transaction, if he could be secured against possible claims by Claus. The unpaid mortgage for £3,475 is still lying in the Registry Office at Cayuga.

On the death of Lord Selkirk, Block 5, with its obscure title, passed into the hands of Hon. Henry John Boulton, son of Hon. D’Arcy Boulton, one of the Justices of the King’s Bench for the Province. He had come to Upper Canada as a young lawyer in 1816, and had risen to the position of Attorney-General of the Province. In 1833, he went to Newfoundland, where it is said he corrected many abuses. He returned to Upper Canada in 1838, and became a Member of Parliament representing Niagara and, later, Norfolk County.

The Boulton Family was Lincolnshire English. Their country seat was called Moulton, a name which the owner transferred to his new estate at the mouth of the Grand River. In time, Block 5 became the Township of Moulton. Dunnville is the chief town of the township. It was probably so named for John Henry Dunn, who was, in 1824, Receiver-General for the Province of Upper Canada. His name occurs so frequently in records of transfers and surrenders of Indian lands that he may have been for a time a trustee for the Indians.

Block 6 contains only 19,000 acres. It lies north-east of, and contiguous to, Moulton. It was given originally to John Docksteder in trust for his Indian children. Docksteder was a white man, born in the United States, but he had married an Indian woman, and he had by her a number of half-breed children. So popular had he become with his wife’s family that he was adopted into their nation and provision was made for the support of his children.

Twelve years passed by before Docksteder could find a buyer for the property. At last, in 1810, a certain Benjamin Canby approached him to buy the nineteen thousand acres “for as many dollars.” Since this was approximately the amount which Docksteder had hoped to secure for his children, £5,000, he agreed to the sale at that price.

The execution of the deed was left in the hands of William Claus. He gave Canby a clear title to the tract, apparently without either cash payment or mortgage papers. Docksteder protested that he was left without security for the land and without redress in case Canby failed to pay the nineteen thousand dollars. His suspicions seem to have been well founded, for Claus ignored Docksteder and his complaint and suited his own convenience in the matter. The records do not state that Claus realized a commission from the infamous transaction, but they declare that the Docksteder children were never able to collect anything from their father’s estate.

The nineteen thousand acres of Block 6 became the Township of Canboro. It is a low-lying, marshy terrain, which is drained not by the Grand River at its very doors but, for the most part, by the Oswego River, a branch of the Welland.

The settlement of both Moulton and Canboro Townships was delayed until well on into the thirties. And it has never been vigorous, probably because the soil was not conducive to bountiful harvests. Still life jogs along pleasantly at the mouth of the river. The scenery is beautiful and the towns, small and neighbourly. The roads which follow the course of the river are inundated in season, and second-rate all the rest of the year. Pools of water lilies and clumps of bulrushes delight the eye, birds warble their sweetest songs and the air is fresh and sweet, uncontaminated by the smoke and soot of the northern cities.

This completes the record of the lands which Joseph Brant sold to the whites on February 5, 1798, comprising 352,707 acres, more than half the reservation. None of these lands had ever been inhabited by Six Nations Indians.

But Blocks 5 and 6 were not the only settlements of whites along the southern banks of the river. Joseph Brant had distributed among his paleface friends some of the largess which had been intended for his Indian people. He did this with the knowledge and tacit consent of the Council of Six Nations, for the Indians trusted his judgment implicitly, but not always with the approval of the government authorities.

These benefactions took various forms and involved a variety of people. To a brother-in-law and his three daughters he gave outright a thousand acres of land. The wife and four children of Hon. Richard Cartwright each became the possessor of twelve hundred acres. So did John Claus and his mother. No payment was received, in any case. Two thousand acres were set aside for Nancy and Margaret Kerr, Clark’s wife, grandchildren of Molly Brant and Sir William Johnson, because Indian blood flowed in their veins. One man got a lease for ten centuries, less one year. These gifts and agreements were made verbally between friends, and no records were kept of the transactions.

Joseph Brant may not have been wilfully dishonest, and no Indian will believe he was, but such generosity to individuals out of public funds led him and his people into serious land squabbles. When he died, he left to posterity a multitude of obscure and defective land titles.

After Brant’s death the Indians continued the practices of their leader. More than one eminently respectable white citizen was guilty of driving a one-sided bargain with the Indians. Hon. William Dickson persuaded the Council of the Six Nations to grant him a considerable parcel of land lying at the very mouth of the river in prepayment of any legal advice which the Indians might require during his lifetime. This tract is now the Township of Sherbrooke, the smallest in the province. It was named after Sir Coape Sherbrooke, Governor of Canada in 1816, one of the wisest administrators the country ever had. To this day the Six Nations have a copy of the deed which conveyed this land to Dickson, in 1809, with the consent of the crown.

Here and there throughout the region south of Brant’s Ford were great tracts of land called by names of their white recipients, the Sheehan and Earl Tracts in Dunn Township, the Fredenburg Tract in South Cayuga, the Jones and Huff Tracts in North Cayuga, the Nelles and Young Tracts in Seneca and many others. These were settled early but not intensively.

The first settlement in Dunn, aside from that of the Sheehan Tract, was effected on the shores of Lake Erie, near the present village of Port Maitland. Colonel A. P. Farrell is said to have been the first permanent resident of the township. He came out from Ireland, in 1833. At Brantford he bargained for land at the mouth of the river, and employed an Indian to take him to it in a dugout. There he had to buy out a squatter who had settled on his property and cleared a few acres of land. For years, he had no near neighbours and no road to the outside world but lake or river. Other Irishmen and a few Englishmen with some means followed him into the woods and were able to exist until their farms began to furnish them with a subsistence. And some came empty-handed “and after struggling through years of hard labour and pinching poverty found themselves in comfortable circumstances.”

Perry Gifford lived on the Fredenburg Tract, in South Cayuga. He operated the only ferry by which teams could cross the river before the dam was built at Dunnville. Windecker’s Tavern was across the river in North Cayuga and everyone who crossed to it tarried to drink a glass of genuine old rye and to discuss the latest news and a few choice morsels of gossip. That was long ago. Perhaps as long ago as 1830.

The Fairchild Family gave its name to a creek which enters the Grand River from the east, a short distance below Brantford. This family lived in the Mohawk Valley. One day young Benjamin Fairchild went shooting. He was wearing a Confederate soldier’s overcoat, which he had found in an old barrel at his home. Several Mohawks saw the coat, took the wearer prisoner and brought him in chains to the Grand River. They did not release him until the wearing of the coat had been explained to their satisfaction.

Young Fairchild returned to his home with such a glowing description of Upper Canada that his younger brother, Isaac, who had just attained his majority, decided to go and settle there. He came in 1795, married and had fifteen children. He was a staunch friend of Joseph Brant and was present when the great Mohawk, in self-defence, inflicted a mortal wound upon his dissolute son.

There were no whites in the early settlement which Brant and his Mohawks made on the Grand River. In their Council House at Ohsweken the Indians have a painting of their settlement as it was shortly after Brant threw a boom across the river. Mrs. Simcoe has reproduced this picture in her diary. It shows the Mohawk Church at the extreme right, the Council-House at the left and an irregular row of log and frame cabins between. One of these was probably Brant’s home, for it is known that his first Canadian home was a well-constructed, double, frame building near the church.

The infiltration of whites into the Mohawk settlement began as early as 1805, when John Salt built the first white man’s cabin there. By 1818, there were twelve white inhabitants living in humble log shacks with notched ends, clapboarded roofs and plank floors hewn from native timbers. They cooked their food at fireplaces made of clay, or undressed stones, built as often as not on the exterior of the cabin. The doors had wooden latches and hinges; the windows were covered with mica, or oiled paper. Two or three industrious carpenters could erect such a cabin in a single day and equip it with a table, chairs and sleeping bunks.

The Governor’s Road brought to the small white settlement at Brant’s Ford, as well as to the entire white population in the western part of the province, a reflection of the civilization enjoyed by the residents of the cultured Niagara District. The road was narrow enough at first, a mere trail through the wilderness, but it was widened and improved, in 1812 and 1813, to facilitate the movement of troops. Soon crossroads were built and taverns sprang up for the accommodation of those who made and those who used the road. Enterprising settlers built blacksmith and harness repair shops on the street corners of the settlement. This was Brantford in the making. As late as 1826, when Shade’s Mills was a flourishing village, Brant’s Ford consisted of a thin scattering of frame and log shanties set in a swamp of cedars and scrub oak. The Indians, observing with apprehension the invasion of the whites, were beginning to withdraw to their lands farther south.

Trade gave the settlement a much-needed impetus. Commercial firms from the Niagara district, from Ancaster and particularly from Toronto, came to Brantford and established emporia of one kind and another in the village. Young Ignatius Cockshutt came in 1829, at the age of fifteen. Within five years he was conducting a store so successfully that his father abandoned the Toronto store and made Brant’s Ford the residential as well as the business headquarters of the family.

The Wilks Family and the Muirheads came from Niagara, in 1828. The former settled in the heart of the “Grand River Swamp.” A descendant of the latter family became the first Mayor of Brantford. Both of these families would probably have gone to Toronto, had not that city suddenly become sufficiently fire-conscious to restrict the erection of frame buildings in its business section.

By 1830, the village and its activities were so completely in the hands of the whites that the Mohawks were persuaded to surrender to the white population, as a free gift, an area of eight hundred and seven acres, or “a lot a mile square.” This was to be the white man’s village. It is about one-fifth of the area of the present city of Brantford.

This friendly and most commendable gesture of the Mohawks opened the way for an unretarded settlement of whites. The plot was surveyed without delay and all the unappropriated land was put up for sale at auction to bona fide settlers at an “upset” price of ten pounds a lot. The day of the sale, May 14, 1831, was in a real sense Brantford’s birthday. It was on this day that William Dickson and Adam Fergusson came to the Mohawk settlement in quest of adventure and found the whites in a hubbub of noise and excitement.

From its natal day, the village enjoyed phenomenal prosperity. Mills and distilleries sprang up like dandelions in the springtime and soon the community was buzzing with industry and social life. There was not at that time, nor is there to-day, any settlement in the Indian lands south of the Governor’s Road that could rival Brantford in point of population or material prosperity.

Coincident with the development of Brantford was the founding of a white settlement at the Forks of the Grand River, about seven miles upstream from Brantford. Hiram Capron, a native of Vermont, came to Upper Canada seeking adventure and the means of earning a livelihood. He had the good fortune to find both at the junction of the Nith River with the Grand.

When Capron was exploring the environs of Brantford, he discovered that the knolls of the riverbank to the north were lined with rich deposits of gypsum, particularly on the eastern bank, near the Forks. He saw at once that if he could use gypsum to manufacture plaster of Paris, his fortune was assured.

He built a mill near the mouth of the Nith River and equipped it with two runs of stone, one to make lumber from the timbers, which he hoped to float down the two rivers from the far north, the other to manufacture his new product from the gypsum, which he proposed to convey in flat-bottomed boats from near-by deposits. This mill was the first industry of the village which grew up at the Forks of the Grand. Capron named the village Paris and “he earned thereby his right to be called both the father and the godfather of the settlement.”

Paris straddles the boundary line between the townships of South Dumfries and Brantford. It is a hill town of rare natural beauty augmented by a number of very artistic bridges which span the two converging rivers. The Nith flows south-east towards Lower Town, but turns unexpectedly to the north near its mouth and merges with the Grand in Upper Town.

The western bank of the Grand is very steep in the centre of the town, and behind a row of three-storied houses whose rear elevations overlook the river may be seen on wash days a dozen heavily-laden clotheslines swinging precariously over the water. This is as unique a bit of old-world scenery as can be found anywhere in Southern Ontario.

The Six Nations Reservation

As time went by, there was a growing resentment among the Indians at the munificence and the loose business methods of their leaders. More especially did they voice their indignation at the double-dealing of the whites and their continuous encroachments upon the Indian lands. But instead of confronting the wrongdoers with their dishonesty and hailing them into a court of justice, the Indians nursed their hatred and distrust of the white man and laid at his door both the infringements on the rights of the Indians and the debauchery of their morals.

Chief John Brant, who succeeded his father as head of the Mohawk nation, was deeply concerned about the situation. While he resented the invasion of the whites into Indian lands, he was particularly distressed over the baneful influence they were exerting on his people. His braves were drinking firewater to their ruination and reverting gradually to their ancient savagery and superstitions.

Finally, John Brant came to the conclusion that his people needed, more than anything else, a revival of religion. He recollected his father’s well-worn Bible and his deep, religious faith. He remembered his own boyish devotion at the altar of the neglected Mohawk Church and the silver service from which he and all the people used to take holy communion. Time was when the Mohawks had a missionary. Many a story his father had told him of the Rev. John Stuart and his labours with the Indians at Queen Anne’s chapel on the Mohawk. That work was supported, he knew, by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Upon enquiry, he learned that the organization was still functioning under the name of the New England Society, and with high hopes, he applied to it for a substantial grant of money to be spent in directing the minds of his Mohawks once more to religion and education.

The New England Society responded to this appeal. Before long, a missionary came to Brantford with authority to restore the old Mohawk Church, to build a parsonage near the church for his own residence and to establish a boarding-school for the training of Indian boys and girls of all nations of the Confederacy. This school, which was called the Mohawk Institute, has been enlarged and periodically rebuilt to accommodate an ever-increasing number of students. It stands to-day little more than a stone’s throw from the church.

At the same time the New England Society built a church at the Indian village of Onondaga, on the river six or eight miles south of Brantford. Rev. Canon Abraham Nelles became the rector. It was at his rectory that Captain William Gilkison met his sudden death.

Under the influence of religion the Indians became more acquiescent. But the whites continued to encroach upon the Indian lands. Soon the country was flooded with illegal deeds. The whites were wholly responsible for this condition, yet they were infuriated by the results. They kept demanding recognition of their illegal claims and their irregular leases, protesting that they had accepted at par the word of a chief, or that they had destroyed or lost their valid documents. Some thought they had earned a clear title because they had built houses, or otherwise improved the property. Others went so far as to pretend that they were descendants of Indian women, for they knew that Indian property is inherited through the female line.

Such subterfuges enraged the Indians, for they knew by bitter experience that white men had no difficulty in substantiating their claims in a court of law, no matter how absurd the evidence. The Indians had no friend at court. Nor had they any property rights, it seemed, for no sooner did they attempt to sell or to lease their lands to newcomers than they were reminded that their inheritance belonged to them only so long as they chose to occupy it. The government held final rights to all the lands of the Six Nations.

Year after year, the fires of Indian resentment and suspicion smouldered on. They burst into a flame of passion, in 1832, when Chief John Brant’s election to the Legislative Assembly was contested on the grounds of illegality. His rival charged that the majority of those who had cast their ballots for the Indian were not landowners, and therefore had no legal right to the franchise. Brant was disqualified and the election was conceded to his opponent. Two years later, an epidemic of Asiatic cholera swept through the Indian lands and carried both victor and vanquished away from the vain glories of this world.

The agitation occasioned among the Indians by the election affair prompted the government to resort to a new policy in its dealings with the Indians. They proposed to settle the Indians in a small reservation on their original holdings and to segregate them completely from the whites. With this in mind, they tried to buy from the chiefs all the lands which still remained in the hands of the Indians, declaring that it was their intention to sell them to prospective settlers, under direction of the crown, and to invest the money realized from the sales for the benefit of the Indians.

When the Onondagas offered unqualified resistance to this plan, the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir John Colborne, came in person to reason with them. He was attended by Lady Colborne, their sons and aides-de-camp, a colourful procession, on horseback. They came by way of Ancaster and were the guests of Canon Nelles at the Onondaga church.

The conference continued for two days, yet with no apparent success. A bribe of two hundred dollars to be used for the erection of a sawmill on their lands did not move the hardboiled keepers of the campfire. They said openly that they would not trust the government with their investments. They had no faith in the white man’s promises and no desire for his religion and culture. All they asked was to be allowed to live as their fathers had lived, performing their traditional rites on their own sacred grounds.

The situation might have been deadlocked indefinitely, had it not been for John Solomon Hagar’s unpremeditated encounter with a band of infuriated Onondagas. Hagar had bought a piece of land in the Onondaga country, only to learn that part of his purchase was the sacred site on which Indians were accustomed to recite their pagan incantations and kill the traditional white dog.

The enraged Onondagas tried in vain to prevent the sale. Hagar took possession of the property, but a detachment of murderous Onondagas fell upon him one night, struck him with a tomahawk and left him lying prostrate on the ground, presumably dead. Hagar’s terrified family witnessed the scuffle, escaped to the river, crossed it in a canoe and gave the alarm which saved the father’s life.

Hagar then took the case to court and got not only a judgment against his assailants but a patent from the Crown for his lands. This was the first title in simple fee in the Onondaga country, and it carried with it the added boon of peace and security.

With the intimidation of the Onondagas was established law and order. Indian opposition to the government’s plan ended and the sale of Indian lands to government agents was carried to completion.

In 1831, the Cayugas had yielded 20,671 acres of their lands and the balance was surrendered in 1834. That same year the Indians in the Township of Dunn and in parts of Canboro and Moulton had conceded 50,212 acres. In 1835, all surrenders made up to that time were confirmed. In 1841, all other Indian lands not covered in previous surrenders and not required for the proposed permanent reservation for the Indians (more than 220,000 acres) were consigned to the custody of the government. At the same time, at a cost of $36,000, the government bought up all lands cleared by squatters and gave each of the dispossessed families a grant of a hundred acres as a token of goodwill.

This done, the authorities were in a position to set aside a reservation to be a perpetual habitation for all the nations of the Confederacy. They chose for this the Township of Tuscarora, twelve miles square on the west bank of the Grand River. To this they added seventeen lots on the west bank between the Onondaga village and Middleport—1,700 acres, said to be the most fertile land in all the Township of Onondaga.

In addition to the 44,261 acres of the reservation, a strip of land in Oneida Township lying adjacent to Tuscarora and comprising more than seven thousand acres, was set aside to be the possession of a group of Mississaugas, whom the Six Nations had previously invited to share their lands. The followers of Joseph Brant had not forgotten that when they were huddled at Niagara, homeless and forlorn, in 1784, the Mississaugas had offered them lands in their territory.

It appears that the land chosen for the Indian reservation was not entirely acceptable to all the Indians, for Pauline Johnson once described the reservation as “53,000 acres of uninteresting, timberless and, in many cases, marshy land.”

The New England Society continued its religious guardianship of the Six Nations. It built a handsome church in Old English style at Kenyeuch in the heart of the reservation and a parsonage for the resident missionary. As a result of the work of the Church of England, the Methodist preachers and the Baptists, most of the Indians on the reservation to-day profess Christianity. A few of the Cayugas and the Onondagas have perpetuated their faith in the medicine man and worship the All-Being after the manner of their fathers.

Chief G. H. M. Johnson, Onwayonsyshon, grandson of one of Sir William Johnson’s godsons, secured one of the seventeen Onondaga Township lots on the river bank. On it, he built a house, which bears the distinctive name of Chiefswood. Designed to please his English bride, it is a square building two stories high. The chief had intended to have it face the river, the Indian highway, but the lady maintained that it should overlook the road, which would keep them in touch with the white man’s civilization. Willing at least to compromise, he built the house with identical fronts, one towards the river and the other facing the road. A stone fireplace is inside and a hardwood banister, not unlike the beautiful staircase at Johnson Hall, the palatial residence of the chief’s grandparents.

In this house was born Emily Pauline Johnson, the Indian princess and poetess, the youngest of Chief Johnson’s four children. In her girlhood Pauline claimed as her own a square room close to the river, and there she composed much of her poetry. On a cupboard door in this room is inscribed the date of Pauline’s birth, 1861.

Chiefswood is now maintained by the Department of Indian Affairs. Of late years it has unfortunately fallen into a state of disrepair, but the Indian family who live in it keep both house and garden clean and presentable. Perhaps some day the means will be found to restore it to serve as a museum for the preservation and exhibition of Indian relics.

A narrow strip of the primeval forest stands between Chiefswood and the river. Near-by is the landing place of the only Grand River ferry which has survived the years. An Indian who lives on the Tuscarora bank is on call and for a quarter of a dollar, he will convey an automobile and its passengers across the river. The ferry is very primitive, little more than a large raft, operated simply and safely by man power, with the help of an endless chain, a windlass and a crank. If the boatman is disposed to be communicative, the pleasure is enhanced without additional cost.

The sale of the lands which the Indians surrendered to the government netted them more than eight hundred thousand dollars. With the interest on this money, the government maintains for the benefit of the Indians such social services as elementary education, hospitalization, medical and dental care, poor relief, funerals, pensions and such contingencies as repairs to roads, bridges and the Council House. The balance is apportioned individually and semi-annually to the men and women of the Six Nations. The Superintendent of Indian Affairs, an official of the Federal Government, is responsible for the payment of all dividends derived from the investment of Indian money and for the maintenance of a staff of welfare workers on the reservation.

This control by the whites does not prevent the Indians from keeping up a semblance of their traditional forms of government. The Parliament of the Six Nations meets regularly in the Council House of the Village of Ohsweken to deliberate on all questions which affect the well-being of their people. The chiefs control and administer the internal affairs of the Confederacy. The Onondagas are still the fire-keepers and the final judges. They exert their ancient right to sit in the centre of the assembly and to open and close the council meetings, while the Mohawks and the Senecas are accorded their ancient privilege of speaking first.

In 1924, because of violent dissensions among the chiefs, the government curtailed the power of the chiefs by introducing a new system of election to the Indian parliament. Since that time the Council comprises forty-eight chiefs and twelve councillors, two of which were to be chosen from each of the six districts of the reservation. So, the white man’s ideas of political economy and democracy have been blended advantageously with the traditional forms of Indian government.

The reservation has condemned the Indians to a state of isolation. They live in Canada yet they are not amenable to the laws of the land, except in cases of crime or capital offence. No whites live on the reservation except those who have joined the Indian community through marriage with an Indian. An Indian may marry a white woman without sacrificing his annuity, and the wife shares in the distribution of bounty, but the Indian woman who marries a white forfeits her claim to a share in the dividends, for her children as well as for herself. Similarly, the sale of property on the reservation is subject to controls. An Indian may sell to another Indian any property he may possess, even to his share in the dividends, but should he leave the community to live as a white man among whites, he relinquishes all his property on the reservation and all participation in financial benefits.

The Village of Ohsweken is the geographical as well as the political centre of the Township of Tuscarora. It is a community of surprising interest. Its central building, flanked by a row of beautiful shade trees, is the Council House, which is not only the Parliament Building but a museum and art gallery. About it are grouped government offices, a well-equipped hospital, a school and a general store. In the park stands a monument erected to the memory of the men of the Six Nations who lost their lives in the First World War. Lacking the hustle and bustle of white civilization, the village has a charm of novelty, and its people know how to extend even to a white visitor a gracious hospitality.

It cannot be denied that in their circumscribed area the Indians enjoy peace and security. Still they resent the isolation, which carries with it the usual stigma of noncompatibility. They cannot forget that once their fathers roamed at will over lands a thousand times more vast and more beautiful than the narrow confines of flat, uninteresting Tuscarora. The declamations of Thayendanegea still echo in their ears and resentment smoulders in their hearts. They know, and all the world knows, that it is the whites who are guilty, for they stand condemned at the bar of their own consciences, having broken every law of their own civilization. In their utter complacency they have forgotten that Indians have hearts as vulnerable as white men and memories as poignant and as long.

PEOPLE OF ACHIEVEMENT

Agriculture

“They who labour in the soil,” Thomas Jefferson once said, “are the chosen people of God.” God’s first human creation, our father, Adam, was a farmer. Cain was a grower of grain and Abel, a herdsman. Primitive man began his quest for civilization by working intimately with the Divine Being in Heaven’s sunshine and rain. To this day agriculture is the basis upon which is built the world’s culture and refinement. It is the pioneer industry of the ages.

The phenomenal development of Southern Ontario must be ascribed in no small measure to its agriculture. Less than a hundred and fifty years ago the interior of the province was an almost impenetrable wilderness through which roamed the wild beasts. It was generally regarded as a region utterly unsuitable for the habitation of white men. But a few pioneering souls blazed a trail through forest and swamp, visualized the agricultural possibilities of the country and became permanent settlers. They felled the trees and with their primitive ploughs they broke the fertile soil. To-day the descendants of these intrepid pioneers are among the most fortunate people of the universe, for they enjoy every form of luxury known to the modern world.

The province is ideally situated for farming. It reaches down like the toe of a boot into the latitude of the northern states of the great Republic and the cities of Boston and Chicago. There is no country in all the world where the soil is more fertile or well watered, where the air is clearer or the skies sunnier. Upper Canada was manifestly created by nature to be a farmers’ paradise.

The pioneers of Upper Canada were men well able to take up the challenge of the soil and climate. By the sweat of their brows they cleared out the underbrush, chopped down the trees, extricated the unwieldy stumps, burning what they could and using the rest for fences. Then they ploughed the land with their crude implements, sowed their seed by hand, harvested their grain with a sickle, ground it with mortar and pestle and baked it in homemade ovens, made from native clay, or sandstone. Necessity was to them in very truth the mother of invention.

The Mennonites were the first agriculturists to settle in the valley of the Grand River. They did not come empty-handed and unused to farming, as did the fugitive loyalists. These were experienced yeomen, trained to agriculture from a childhood in Pennsylvania on the best farms of the continent. With care and deliberation they chose for their new homes the rich valley of the Grand. They travelled leisurely and comfortably to the northland in large conestoga wagons, and they brought with them the best tools and implements of the day.

The Mennonites lived by the calendar, as well as by the precepts of the Good Book. They knew when it was time to plough and to sow. They had brought their seed grain from the most scientifically cultivated fields on the continent. Like Johnny Appleseed of immortal fame, they planted orchards for future generations. Nor did they forget to provide for flower gardens. Better than any one else, they knew the art of harvesting the grain and of preserving the products of the soil for future use. To knowledge they added industry and thrift. They had the will to work, the physical endurance and the moral fibre so supremely necessary to successful agriculture.

Modern Mennonites in Waterloo County have followed in the footsteps of their fathers. The public markets in Kitchener and Waterloo cannot be surpassed outside of Pennsylvania for quality and variety of offerings. Vendors come long distances, twice a week in the vegetable and fruit seasons, so that they may be ready for their customers when the gong sounds at seven o’clock in the morning. Sweet-faced Mennonite women, with long, ungored skirts and black bonnets, stand till noon behind the counters in the market building in Kitchener, or in the stalls out of doors, adding unconsciously a touch of novelty and charm to the scene. It is the fashion for Twin City women to go to market with commodious baskets on their arms. There they meet and greet their friends informally within range of the strident voice of an auctioneer and in the atmosphere of apple butter and cooked cheese.

In William Dickson’s Township of Dumfries agriculture has been carried on with outstanding success, although the northern part of his estate was not as arable as that chosen by the Mennonites. It is hilly and difficult of cultivation, for the soil is studded with boulders, cobble-stones and dark sandstone, which have proved an inestimable asset in the building of beautiful homes. The region west of Galt has been called, rather eulogistically, perhaps, the Highlands, because the landscape is dotted with small lakes, reminiscent of the lochs of Scotland. In that same locality is a narrow, one-way thoroughfare, scarcely more than a lane, called the Alps, which many people come long distances to see at the turning of the leaves.

South Dumfries lacks the wild beauty of the north, but it is much more fertile. The rich plain between Paris and Glenmorris was first settled by farmers from Scotland, who have made the wilderness blossom like the rose.

The second concession which runs east and west just north of Paris bears the odoriferous name of Keg Lane, inherited from a number of shiftless topers who settled there in the early days. The story is that these men took turns in buying kegs of liquor from the distillery at Paris and depositing these in their own shanties until the time set for the community’s nocturnal carousal. The guzzlers lost their holdings in time to worthier men. The tumble-down shanties gave place to handsome, sandstone houses, and the fertile fields were cultivated so intensively and so scientifically that Keg Lane is now a picture of rural prosperity in the season of ripened grain.

The breeding of livestock was undertaken very early in the valley of the Grand River, for both the soil and the climate in this locality are well adapted to the needs of farm animals. The settlers of the northern lands brought in breeds which they had known in the old country, and Upper Canada proved to be a remarkably healthy home for European cattle.

The first importer of this region was a young Englishman, named Rowland Wingfield, who came to Puslinch Township, near Guelph, in 1831. Having built a cabin and cleared a few acres of land, he returned to England to buy stock. He brought back with him, two years later, the best shorthorns he could purchase, two bulls and six heifers.

Transportation facilities of that day left much to be desired. Having landed at Montreal, he was compelled to drive his beasts up the river as far as the rapids at Lachine. There, he loaded them on a boat for Bytown (Ottawa) and reached Kingston by way of the Rideau Canal. When he had arrived at Hamilton by boat, sailing from one end of Lake Ontario to the other, the only way to get his animals to Puslinch was to drive them thirty miles through the bush. This must have been a harrowing experience. Wingfield’s enthusiasm for livestock soon waned. He sold his stock, and his farm, and returned to England. The descendants of his animals were scattered throughout the county, and Guelph and its vicinity became known far and wide for the superiority of its cattle.

There seems to be complete unanimity of opinion that Adam Fergusson, the founder of Fergus, has done more than any other man in all the countryside to promote the study of scientific agriculture and to raise the standards of livestock. By his own confession, Fergusson knew little about practical farming, but he understood soils and their culture. Besides, he had the means, the leisure and the personality necessary to give leadership and invaluable direction to the initial stages of the agricultural development of the province.

He was responsible for the organization of the Agricultural Association of Upper Canada, in 1846; a society which later became the proud progenitor of that infant prodigy, the Toronto Exhibition, the greatest annual show in the world. At that first exhibition, in the year of its organization, the principal entries were various designs of ploughs, seed-drills and stump-pullers.

Livestock was a hobby with Adam Fergusson. Especially did he delight in his shorthorns. Like Rowland Wingfield, he used to meet his imported cattle at Montreal and transport them by the same route to Hamilton. From there, his herdsmen had to drive the most perverse of all animals through Puslinch and Guelph, and sixteen miles beyond, along the fenceless Brock Road to Fergus.

Fergusson had a much better understanding of the value and the care of his animals than had Wingfield. He made a remarkable contribution in the field of Veterinary Science. Through his efforts, a school for the training of veterinarians was established at Guelph, and at his suggestion Dr. Andrew Black was brought out from Scotland to give a course of lectures on the subject.

This was preliminary to the founding of the Ontario Agricultural College, at Guelph, in 1874, with a corps of professors to teach approved methods of farming, and an Experimental Farm to complement the instruction with practical tests. The college opened modestly with a class of only thirty-one students, but to-day it is recognized as the best equipped and the most practical institution of its kind in the British Empire. For many years it has been affiliated with the University of Toronto, and on the University’s Convocation Day each June, men and women graduates in Agriculture receive their hard-earned and high-sounding degrees of Bachelor of Agricultural Science.

A few years later a notable establishment for the breeding of livestock was being conducted under private auspices, at Bow Park Farm, about four miles south of Brantford. The thousand-acre farm is a peninsula formed by a series of deflections in the Grand River. In shape it resembles an ox’s bow.

About 1876, the proprietor was Hon. George Brown, editor of the Toronto Globe, and one of the leading politicians of the Confederation period. Mrs. Brown, who owned the property, was a sister to William and Thomas Nelson, the famous Edinburgh publishers. She had bought the place as a retreat for her husband from the cares of his busy life.

Like Hon. Adam Fergusson, Brown was a “gentleman” farmer, a race, Byron says, quite worn out. Like Fergusson, too, he had a hobby, livestock, especially shorthorns. He kept at Bow Park Farm at one time as many as three hundred cattle, besides horses, sheep and hogs, and he frequently employed as many as forty men to feed and care for them. His farm was for years the largest establishment for the breeding of livestock on this side of the Atlantic.

But he lacked a personal, practical experience with farm animals, and this fact contributed to the failure of his enterprise. Although he was manager and principal stockholder of the Canada West Farm Stock Association, he was by no means a good judge of animals, and because of ignorance he treated them at times very negligently. It was not enough that he was conversant with the theory of animal husbandry and meticulously careful about the registration of their pedigrees.

His inevitable financial decline was accelerated by a disastrous fire, which swept through the stables. Not only were the buildings destroyed but many of his most valuable animals were trapped in their stalls and burned to death. A second fire within a short time confirmed Brown in the suspicion that both conflagrations had been of incendiary origin.

The knowledge that he had an enemy made the great man weep like a child. The third, not unexpected, attack was a personal one, and not long deferred. A discharged and disgruntled employee of the newspaper followed Brown into the boiler room of the Globe building one day and shot him fatally in the leg.

At no little inconvenience, the Nelson brothers took over Bow Park Farm, rebuilt the house in brick and roofed it with slate. They did not, however, continue to do business in livestock. Later, the property became the possession of a canning company and the flat, well-cultivated fields which used to produce hay and roots for livestock now brought forth fruits and vegetables for human consumption.

The Farmers’ Institute was a development of the Ontario Agricultural College. It was organized in 1884, by Dr. James Mills, President of the college, with the avowed purpose of stimulating reading and discussion on advanced methods of soil cultivation and animal husbandry. To this organization has been attributed the splendid progress made in agriculture during the past sixty years. Besides, the Farmers’ Institute has unified and consolidated rural opinion in respect to many disturbing contemporary issues.

From the Farmers’ Institute has sprung the Women’s Institute, the most popular movement which has yet come out of the Grand River Valley.

The idea originated with Mrs. Adelaide (Hunter) Hoodless, of Hamilton, who was born and reared on her father’s farm near the village of St. George, in South Dumfries. She knew by experience how narrow was the sphere of activity for farm women and how self-centred they often became because of their isolation. When she married and went to live in the city, she began a vigorous and persistent agitation for the emancipation of her old friends and neighbours and for country women everywhere.

In 1896, she received an invitation to present her advanced views on rural economy before a meeting of the Experimental Union, in Guelph. She accepted the invitation, knowing full well that most of the men of her prospective audience thought her a fanatic.

Chairman Lee, however, who presided at the meeting, was kindly disposed toward her. She made the most of her opportunity and spoke with such sincerity and persuasive power that she created a profound impression. Lee was so pleased that he invited her to address a special meeting of the Farmers’ Institutes of South Wentworth, at Stoney Creek, on February 9, 1897. The wives and daughters of the farmers were to be special guests on this occasion.

A full complement of men and more than a hundred curious, excited women and girls found their way to the meeting. Mrs. Hoodless addressed her remarks chiefly to the women. She knew so well the drabness and the narrowness of their lives, but there was no reason, she said, that these conditions should continue. Farm women were just as intelligent as their city cousins and they could be as well-informed, as cultured and as efficient. No matter how circumscribed their lives, it was possible to rise above their limitations and to lead a fuller life. But they must have wider contacts with other women, a broader knowledge and interest in public and world affairs and a different attitude to the drudgery of farm work.

The Farmers’ Institute was doing for the men what a similar women’s organization could do for farm women. If men needed social contacts with other men to oil the machinery of farm life, was it not reasonable to suppose that the same lubricants would ease the burden of home life? So far as she knew, women had the same social instincts as men. She proposed that Women’s departments of the Farmers’ Institutes of South Wellington be organized without delay.

The women listened, thrilled, responsive. Their hearts told them that Mrs. Hoodless had painted a true picture of their uneventful existence. She had drawn back the curtain which had separated them from their rightful heritage, a new and broader experience.

That very year the women of South Wellington organized a Women’s department of most of the local Farmers’ Institutes, with a separate constitution and a slate of women officers. “For home and country” was chosen as the motto of the organization, and its avowed object was “the dissemination of knowledge relating to domestic economy, including household architecture, with special reference to household sanitation, a better understanding of the economic and hygienic value of foods, clothing and fuels, a more scientific care and training of children, with a view to raising the general standard of health and morals of our people.”

From its inception, Mrs. Hoodless gave the movement her personal and constant attention. The enthusiasm she had evoked in South Wellington spread to other rural communities, and she willingly assisted in the organization of similar societies in neighbouring counties, giving to the uninitiated, the benefit of her wide experience.

Meanwhile, her own ideas of the scope of the work she had instituted were being constantly amplified. She approached the heads of the Department of Agriculture and interested them in the project. They made it possible for farm women to study, under the direction of government officials (women who were specialists in their own fields) such subjects as child welfare, the problems of immigration and naturalization, schools and education, public health, home economics and legislation affecting women.

Soon the country women themselves, and not Mrs. Hoodless, were clamouring loudly for facilities which had been accorded previously only to urban women and their families. They were determined to have such advantages as medical and dental inspection in the schools, baby clinics, supervised playgrounds, skating rinks, swimming pools, public libraries and the teaching of music in the schools. Many of these services have not yet materialized for country women and their children, but they are still held up as ideals toward which they strive.

In the meantime farm women are learning to be practical in everyday life. They are getting the maximum of result from the minimum of effort and expense. They are learning the art of making over hats and coats and dresses, and of preparing school lunches, moderate in price yet rich in vitamins. They are beautifying barren school grounds, ugly crossroads, neglected cemeteries and wayside churches. They are exchanging tested recipes for the preservation of food and sharing time-saving devices for the kitchen.

The organization is now called the Women’s Institute. It is by far the largest organization of women in Canada, both in point of numbers and breadth of scope. It tolerates no discrimination because of race, creed or politics. Already it has created a healthy community spirit in many an isolated district, and it has brought to many a woman in a cheerless, sequestered home the joy of companionship with other women and a new interest in the affairs of the nation.

Mrs. Hoodless continued to work with government officials in the interests of rural women, keeping her finger on the controls governing the personnel of the itinerant instructors and on the detail and scope of the courses to be given under the direction of the branch institutes. It was she who persuaded the Department of Education to add the study of Household Science to the programme for both the Secondary and the Normal Schools of the Province.

Through her influence, too, a Women’s department has been added to the Ontario Agricultural College. Sir William MacDonald, of Montreal, exhibited a praiseworthy generosity and an interest in the education of farmers’ daughters when he erected and equipped a school for Household Science on the College grounds. To this he added, later, a magnificent residence for the girls.

In the prime of her life and in the midst of her untiring activity, Mrs. Hoodless was brought face to face with death. She was addressing a women’s club, in Toronto, on the importance of teaching Household Science in the schools when she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died almost instantly.

Her sudden death shocked the members of the thousands of Women’s Institutes throughout Ontario. A committee was immediately formed to make a considered suggestion for a suitable memorial to her. Representative women from each one of the branch organizations decided that the memorial should take the form of an oil painting, which was to hang in MacDonald Institute. In due time, the painting was unveiled in the presence of a large number of personal friends and co-workers.

The women of South Dumfries, and of Brant County generally, felt that Mrs. Hoodless belonged to them in a special way, for she had been born and bred among them and many of them had known her from earliest childhood. They felt that this intimacy warranted some special recognition of her work.

In a tiny, triangular park at a much-travelled intersection, near the village of St. George, the women of Brant County erected a marble slab with the inscription:

The movement which Mrs. Hoodless inaugurated in her native province spread rapidly to the other provinces of the Dominion. Then it crossed the international border and found a welcome in the United States. The women of Belgium heard of it and sent a Commission of Inquiry to Canada. On its return, the Belgian women organized Cercles des Fermières, patterned on the Women’s Institutes of Ontario.

In 1915, Mrs. Alfred Watts, of Victoria, B.C., had the honour of carrying the idea to England. And not without success. Within a few months in the drawing-rooms of the élite and over the backyard fences of the slums, English women were discussing such subjects as the preservation of food, co-operative jam factories and public health. Dealers in kitchen utensils noted a distinct increase in their sales. The family diet was improved and the children were better cared for. Queen Mary became the nominal head of the Sandringham Branch and popularized the movement among the women of the privileged classes. Homes of rich and poor alike became happier and cheerier.

But that was not all. The enlightened and progressive women of the civilized world took up the torch. Institutes were organized in France, in Wales, in Scotland, in New Zealand, in Australia, in India, in South Africa and in Soviet Russia. “For home and country” became the international motto of a world-wide movement which had begun humbly and without pretension in the little Ontario village of Stoney Creek, not far from the mouth of the Grand River.

Some years ago a conference of the Association of the Country Women of the World was held in New York City. It was a remarkable parliament of rural women. Representatives of the Women’s Institutes of Canada met there delegates from the ends of the earth—eager, intelligent, serious-minded, tolerant women, differing widely in race, in creed and in colour, but united in a burning desire to serve their country, as women best can, through the home.

A post-conference trip brought many of the distinguished women to Canada. They crossed the border at Niagara Falls, and Canadian motors conveyed them to the Ontario Agricultural College, at Guelph. But on their way through Ontario they stopped at two unpretentious villages, at Stoney Creek, where the first Women’s Institute was organized, and at St. George, the birthplace of Adelaide Hunter-Hoodless, in whose noble soul glowed a love for womankind.

Industry

It was some prehistoric individual who first stumbled upon the idea that a wheel could be used to ease the burden of man and beast. The invention was a simple contrivance, a pivot with spokes and a circumference, but on that primitive artifice is based the tremendous output of the industrial effort of the modern world.

When it was learned that a wheel could be motived running water, the creation of water power became a reality. The first water wheels were crude affairs, equipped with flat paddles in a swift-flowing stream. If a greater volume of water was needed to produce the required power, it was an easy matter to construct a dam and cause a waterfall. Sometimes the wheel was placed in the stream so as to cause the water to fall on it from above. In this instance the wheel was said to be “overshot.” But when the current was made to pass under the wheel it was “undershot.” These two methods of producing water power are the underlying principles of modern hydraulic engineering.

The ancients learned to perform miracles by the use of the water wheel. By their ingenuity they were able to enlarge the sphere of their activity and their material prosperity and to decrease at the same time their labours. By water power, they ground grain into flour and made lumber from timbers. Marvellous! Men with initiative built mills beside the streams and earned their living by performing these services for others. No need for them to grow their own grain, when they could exact as pay a portion of the flour they milled. Sometimes they built a saw mill on the same site and cut logs for their neighbours’ shanties. So, farmers developed into business men. The metamorphosis was continually going on in the little villages which emerged out of the wilderness.

The pioneers of Upper Canada lived a very primitive existence. Their cabins were crude, hand-made structures equipped with wooden hinges and latches. Their first ploughs were crotched sticks, with wooden teeth. In many of the settlements in the Grand River Valley there were no mills until after the War of 1812. The farmers had no recourse but to pack their grain into sacks and carry it on their backs to the nearest mill at Coote’s Paradise. The miller took one-tenth of the flour and the farmer’s burden was so much the lighter on his way home. Even if he went on horseback, it was a long, tiresome journey, fraught with many dangers, and it entailed the loss of much time and energy.

John Miller, a resident of Niagara, saw an opportunity to turn this inconvenience of the settlers to his own advantage. Having found an ideal mill site, he negotiated illegally with Joseph Brant for the land and built his mill, in 1802, on the site of the present City of Galt.

It did not prove to be a good investment, for he operated his mill only spasmodically and when war broke out, in 1812, he sympathized so openly with the invaders of Upper Canada that he was forced to relinquish his property and flee the country. His mill was the abandoned building which Absalom Shade reconditioned as the cornerstone for Dickson’s village. The Galt Armouries stands on the spot to-day. The merry mill stream still babbles on its way to join the river, but it is seldom seen or heard above the noise of city streets.

John Erb’s venture into the milling industry was more permanent. It was his good fortune that the land which fell to him by lot had a good mill site at the mouth of the Speed River. In 1807, he constructed a dam and built his grist mill. This was the nucleus of the flourishing Town of Preston. The modernized building stands to-day on the same site, and it bears the name of Cambridge Mills. A provincial highway passes its front door and the Speed flows behind.

Abraham Erb emulated his brother’s enterprise by building a grist mill a dozen miles further north. For more than a century it stood at the main intersection of the residential town of Waterloo, a sprawling, old-fashioned landmark, with the date, 1816, cut deep into its cornerstone. The building was demolished recently to make room for modern office buildings and the cornerstone is on exhibition in the museum of the Waterloo Historical Society.

The ruins of the first mill of Doon give the village an air of architectural distinction. The mill was built by Hon. Adam Ferrie, a Montreal financier, for Adam junior, in the second decade of the last century. The property included a saw mill, a distillery, a tavern, a store and a rather pretentious dwelling.

Young Ferrie started out well, operating the mills satisfactorily and superintending the building of cottages for the workmen. But in consequence of a family quarrel, the father transferred the management of all the Doon enterprises to an elder son. Young Adam was brokenhearted. “My brother will not be able to manage the business,” he said. “It will go to ruin.” The boy was right. The business failed utterly under his brother’s management. The mills fell into disuse and tottered to ruin.

Jacob Hespeler came from Germany, about 1835, secured land two miles east of Preston, built mills and founded the town which to-day bears his name. For many years he was an outstanding figure in the business life of the community.

The Goldies, who began their successful milling enterprises with the erection of Greenfield Mills, at Ayr, were of Scottish origin. It was a precarious undertaking, for their capital was borrowed money, and interest rates at that time hovered around sixteen per cent., and hard to get at that. They had many discouragements, including serious losses by fire, but they weathered the gale. One of the brothers bought mills in Guelph, and laid well the foundations of financial success. For many years in the middle of the century the Goldies were progressive, prosperous and highly respected millers.

Improved methods in milling made a name for E. W. B. Snider. When he was very young he operated his father’s mill at Parkway (German Mills), south-west of Berlin, using the traditional methods but keeping his mind open and alert for new ideas.

In his employ was a man who had had practical milling experience in Germany and Austria. From him, Snider learned of a new roller process which had been used successfully in the mills of middle Europe, and he determined to make a thorough study of it. Through a friend in Toronto, he was able to procure samples of flour milled by this process in Hungary. It was good flour, better than he could mill. Snider foresaw the advantages which would undoubtedly accrue to those who would lead in the transformation of the industry from the antiquated methods of grinding wheat to the gradual reduction system of the new roller process.

Later, when he operated his own mill at St. Jacobs, Snider imported a machine of the new type and set it up in his mill. This was the first apparatus of its kind to be used in America, and Snider’s reputation was established as the leading miller of his generation.

But milling was not the only industry which grew out of the needs of the settlers. The invention of the reaper and the manufacture of various agricultural implements proved a boon of inestimable value to farmers. The people of Fergus claim that Patrick Bell, who came to Upper Canada, in 1833, with Adam Fergusson and James Webster, invented the first reaper to be used extensively in Europe. He brought with him at that time a model of his invention, and he left it in care of the Fergus Public Library, when he returned to Scotland, in 1837. It used to stand on a table in the reading room, but someone with a hardened conscience stole it and never returned it.

The idea of cutting grain by horse power had been tested in England as early as 1799, and several types of reaper had been operated there with indifferent success. During the thirties there were many inventors of reapers in the United States. In 1831, Cyrus Hall McCormick, of Virginia, invented one which caught the popular fancy but when he received his patent, in 1834, forty-six other inventors in his country had already been granted patents for similar machines.

Patrick Bell never patented his invention, but by 1833, his reapers were being manufactured in quantities in England and were in general use not only in the British Isles but on the continent.

Bell was a graduate of St. Andrew’s University. He was employed by Adam Fergusson as tutor to his sons. A likeable fellow, he was, obliging, versatile and willing to do anything from clearing the forest to preaching an occasional sermon in the kirk.

The idea of a reaping machine came to him, he said, in his student days, when his heart ached to see farmers harvesting their grain so laboriously with scythe or sickle in the broiling sun. But he was not a machinist and the manufacture of a reaper seemed hopelessly beyond his feeble powers.

But one day when he was strolling aimlessly about his father’s garden, he noticed a pair of pruning shears which the gardener had left stuck in a hedge. He picked them up and toyed with them for a while, opening and shutting them with his hands. He had it. The motion of an ordinary pair of scissors could be applied to a reaping machine. If shears could be worked by hand to cut twigs, why couldn’t they be operated by machinery to cut grain?

From that time he spent most of his leisure hours applying the scissor action to a series of blades on a cutting bar. When he was satisfied that grain could be cut in this way, he constructed a full-sized reaper in an unused driving shed on his father’s farm. He took his young brother into his confidence and together they consulted with the village blacksmith and bound him to secrecy. The three conspirators worked hard and guarded their secret well. When the reaper was completed, the boys took advantage of their parents’ absence from home to test it in a field of standing grain. It worked! It cut the grain satisfactorily and left it lying behind the cutting board.

Success spurred the boys on to greater achievement. They decided to invent an attachment to the reaper which would bind the grain in bundles, as it fell from the cutting board, then toss the sheaves to one side, so that they could be collected later without stopping the horses. Another series of successful experiments and they had a triple-action machine, which worked well at low speed.

Bell wished to give his invention freely to his fellowmen, without any monetary consideration. But he did not go unrewarded for all that. Two universities conferred upon him honorary degrees in recognition of his great invention, and the Highland Society, of which he was a member, presented him with a thousand pounds in cash.

There is no record, however, that any reaper built on Bell’s model was ever used in Upper Canada. It is said that John Maus, of South Dumfries, was the first man in the province to use a reaper in his grain fields, but he imported the machine from the United States and hauled it home all the way from Port Dover on Lake Erie. To-day agricultural implements are manufactured in immense quantities in the Grand River Valley and shipped to the Atlantic and to the Pacific.

The care of farm animals and the preservation of products of orchard and garden developed other industries. These duties usually fell to the women of the household. They had to churn the butter and make the cheese, soap and apple butter. They did the spinning, the knitting and the weaving of the wool and made the family clothing. Women preserved the food, the dairy products in the spring-house and the meats in the smoke-house. They tanned the hides and made leather and moulded tallow into candles. They were good economists; they wasted nothing. Year after year, the herds increased and the women’s work became drudgery. Then shrewd business men turned this situation to their own pecuniary advantage. The products of the kitchens could be manufactured in factories, in greater quantities, at lower cost, for sale in wider markets. Cider mills, creameries, cheese factories, asheries, potteries, carding mills, knitting factories and soap and glue manufacturing plants were established in every community. Canneries and meat-packing plants followed in due time. Then women were left empty-handed. They could buy their bread from a baker, their milk from a milkman, their meat from a butcher and their clothing from the village store.

Sons and daughters of the farm soon sought employment in the factories. Wages were good and people flocked to the cities. Crossroads became villages and villages expanded into towns. Many of the parents left the farms and took up life with their children in the urban communities. The abandonment of farm life and the crowding of the people into industrial centres is responsible for the most serious problems of modern times, both economic and social.

The situation in Berlin was becoming desperate. Not only were the people of the countryside pouring in to look for work in the factories, but every spring jobs and homes had to be provided for hundreds of industrially-minded German immigrants. And Berlin was built on sandhills. It had no waterpowers, and the Grand River was three miles distant.

John Hoffman, a Pennsylvanian, and a woodworker by trade, was determined not to allow a mere matter of geography to interfere with his material prosperity. He had heard that steam was being used for power in certain industrial plants in Buffalo. Nothing daunted, he journeyed to that city with horses and wagon, bought a steam engine, hauled it over rough, corduroy roads to Berlin and set it up in his factory.

In a short time the industrialists of Berlin were using steam almost exclusively for power. The number and variety of the factories increased steadily. Steam brought to Berlin its first flush of industrial development, and soon the little German town on the sandhills had outstripped all the waterpowered towns within a radius of twenty miles. Even Galt, the Manchester of Canada, found itself suddenly confronted with a formidable rival in the north. Busy Berlin was a town of workers, who manufactured furniture, boots and shoes, liquors, pianos, clocks, soap and glue, and who looked forward to a day of marvellous inventions and of phenomenal industrial activity.

But it looked as though these fond hopes were to be shattered. Steam had not proved an unqualified success in the factories. There was no coal in Ontario. There was coal in Nova Scotia and in Alberta, to be sure, but freight charges made the cost prohibitive. The nearest coal deposits were in Pennsylvania, not too distant, but strikes and labour disputes at the mines often retarded the importation of coal into Canada for weeks at a time. The factories all over the province had to be closed, for they could not operate without coal. Sometimes coal was available, but the industrialists could not afford to pay the inflated prices and the high tariff rates demanded. The result was irregularity of employment, uncontrollable losses affecting both management and employees and general dissatisfaction in labour circles.

Certain leaders of industry in Toronto suggested the possibility of securing current from one of the huge generating plans at Niagara, if it could be obtained at a reasonable price. This proposal seemed remotely feasible, but it never got beyond the stage of mental speculation.

E. W. B. Snider, the St. Jacobs miller, was North Waterloo’s representative in the local House at the time. In his contacts with business men in the capital city, he had encountered their rather nebulous theories about using Niagara Power to operate Toronto’s factories. He considered the idea well, but decided it was a pleasant dream, an illusion, incapable of fulfilment, except, perhaps, in the distant future beyond the bounds of his own lifetime.

In February, 1902, Snider was present at the banquet meeting of the Waterloo Board of Trade. In the course of the evening he made an impromptu address, which had interesting repercussions. He suggested to his convivial audience that Boards of Trade might spend their time more profitably than in eating and drinking. Many vital problems were at that moment confronting the people of Ontario, especially in the industrial field. It was the duty of every member of the Board of Trade to acquaint himself fully with the industrial situation. Each municipality should make a bid for new and diversified industries. It was a poor policy to put all one’s eggs in one basket.

Then he went on to speak of the crying need of cheap sufficient and continuous power for the industrial plants in industrial Ontario. The manufacturers of Toronto were investigating the possibility of operating their factories with Niagara Power. Waterloo Township needed just such power, and a determined effort should be made to secure it as soon as it was available. Would it not be wise to appoint a committee of manufacturers from Berlin, Waterloo, Guelph and Galt to consider the question? The day was coming, he declared, and he believed there were many present who would live to see it, when not only the factories but their streets, their homes and even their barns would be illuminated by power generated at Niagara.

A bland smile made the circuit of the room. Surely E. W. B. was indulging in one of his serious jokes. Niagara Power for the industries of Waterloo County was much too remote a proposition to be worthy of the consideration of practical business men.

A full account of the meeting appeared next day in the press. Daniel B. Detweiler, of Berlin, read it with much interest. He had never heard of Niagara Power as a solution for the industrial crisis in the province, but the idea seized his active mind. When he had studied the question carefully, he was completely convinced that it was practicable and worthy of serious consideration.

Detweiler did not belong to the Berlin Board of Trade but its members were his personal friends, and he did not hesitate to ask permission to address that august body on a subject that was very near to his heart. Permission was given. Detweiler, brimming with enthusiasm, announced that it was his well-considered and firm conviction that Niagara Power for Ontario factories was not a dream of visionaries but a goal capable of attainment. He suggested that a committee be named, comprising representatives from Berlin and other inland towns in the vicinity, to devise ways and means of bringing power from Niagara to the factories of the district.

To his surprise, nothing happened. Only a few were mildly interested. Some were amused. The matter was shelved without discussion, and the Board gave its attention to the consideration of more important business.

“Be your own committee, Dan,” jibed one of the members, as Detweiler was leaving.

A committee of one! The words came to Dan Detweiler as a challenge. He was just the man to undertake a great project single-handed and to carry it through to success. Like E. W. B. Snider, he came of serious-minded, dependable stock. For thirteen years he had been “on the road” for a Berlin button factory, in which he had a financial stake. He knew Ontario well and he had often marvelled at the magnitude of its resources. He was a keen observer, an omnivorous reader and an independent, logical thinker.

He decided to accept the challenge. From that moment he spent all the time and energy he could command thinking and planning for Niagara Power. He waited upon politicians, editors, teachers, hoping to find channels for the dissemination of the idea. He buttonholed men of affairs on the street and dogged their footsteps hoping to be accorded an interview. He had no horse and buggy but he rode a bicycle, or went on foot. He faced discouragement and ridicule, but he never gave up. Like a man obsessed, he thought and planned and talked about nothing but Niagara Power. He had made that the mission of his life.

Detweiler knew little, or nothing, about engineering and he soon realized that he needed expert advice on the subject which had engrossed him. He planned to go to Niagara for an interview with the consulting engineer employed at one of the power-producing plants, but considered in time that it would cost no more to have the engineer come to Berlin to address a public meeting. Detweiler planned every detail of that meeting. On his own responsibility, he sent out urgent invitations to all the manufacturers in the district to be present and he made a special trip to Toronto to interest the industrialists there.

The engineer was able to convince his large audience of power enthusiasts at Berlin that Detweiler’s scheme was practicable. “White coal” could be transmitted by cable from Niagara to any part of Ontario.

Hon. Adam Beck, mayor of London and member of the Provincial Parliament, was present at the meeting. He had come with an open mind, he said, and he was anxious to learn all he could about the subject. He learned so well that in less than a decade the press of the continent had hailed him as champion of the mighty project which was to revolutionize the industry of Ontario.

Adam Beck was himself a manufacturer and the son of a man who had a long experience with mills and foundries and primitive waterpowers. Jacob Beck enjoyed a local reputation as the inventor of a water wheel which he himself said was “of small size and large power.” At that time he lived in Preston in a lovely cottage, which is still standing. It had been his intention to build a waterpower canal from a dam on the Speed to supply power to the mills and factories along the water’s edge, but the people of Preston showed no enthusiasm for his project.

Shaking the dust of Preston from his feet, he moved his family to Wilmot Township, and settled among the Amish people. He built a mill and a foundry, and when a village grew up around his industries, he called the place Baden, in honour of his native German city. His son, Adam, was born in Baden, in 1857. Some day a monument to his memory will stand on the summit of one of the three conical hills which give character and distinction to the birthplace of an eminent man.

The Toronto delegation left the Berlin meeting with the determination to petition the Provincial Government for the right to generate power from Niagara Falls and to transmit it to Toronto, and to any other city that might desire it. The request was promptly refused and the delegation summarily dismissed.

A second meeting, afterwards called the Berlin Convention, was held on February 17, 1903. Of the ninety delegates who attended it some were still smarting under the Government’s high-handed attitude to their proposals. After E. W. B. Snider, Daniel B. Detweiler and Alderman F. S. Spence, of Toronto, had given detailed reports on the waterpowers of Ontario, the Convention had only one mind on the power situation. Pressure must be brought to bear upon the Government to appoint a commission without delay to study Niagara Power in relation to the industries of Ontario. This time the legislators were more amenable to their wishes. The Hydro-Electric Power Commission was appointed forthwith, with Hon. Adam Beck as chairman.

The Commission launched at once an enthusiastic investigation into the waterpowers of the province, including undeveloped as well as developed sites. They made an approximation of the power that would be required for industrial purposes, and they examined the methods that might be employed for the electrical distribution of power from Niagara to the inland towns. They were satisfied that it was a safe and a sound proposition. Electricity could be transmitted by cable to towns and cities within a radius of two hundred miles from the Falls. Moreover, it would entail no great financial expenditure.

The Commission did not work in a corner. Both Mr. and Mrs. John Public followed their deliberations and their findings, as recorded in the press, with much interest. If reports were true, the new power could be used in the kitchen and on the farms, as well as in the factories. Realizing as never before how great an asset the province had in the Niagara River, they determined that it must not be allowed to fall into the hands of some private corporation or unscrupulous promoter. Niagara belonged to the people, and it must be preserved and utilized for the common weal.

A deputation, the largest and the most influential that had ever besieged any Ontario Parliament, demanded that some means be found to provide the people of Ontario with hydro power at cost. Beck’s slogan, “Hydro Power for the People,” was on everybody’s lips, and neither he nor his following would be content with anything short of these demands.

In January, 1910, the Government decided upon a policy of caution in regard to hydro power. It would never do to accede to the wishes of the delegation only to learn, too late, that they must forfeit their seats at the next election. So they devised a rather involved scheme to learn the will of the people. They required all Ontario municipalities that wanted Niagara Power to submit by-laws to the people, authorizing incoming municipal councils to bargain with the Hydro-Electric Power Commission.

In every municipality where the by-law was submitted to the people it carried with an overwhelming majority. The Government accepted this as a mandate from the people, and began at once to construct power plants and to erect huge metal frames along the route of transmission to support the cables.

Berlin was the first municipality in the world to receive power that had been transmitted at a voltage of 110,000 for more than a hundred miles. This honour came to the town partly because of its location in the very heart of the great industrial area of Ontario and partly because Berlin had itself become an industrial centre of some importance, in spite of its geographical handicap. The well-known enterprise and the mechanical skill of the German craftsmen and workers might well have tipped the balance in Berlin’s favour. Besides, the people of Berlin understood the principle of public ownership. For many years the town had owned and operated its lighting system, its power plant and its street railway. And now when hydro power stood waiting on Ontario’s doorstep, Berlin was ready first to open the door and welcome it.

Nor did anyone begrudge the town the privilege and the honour of being host on the occasion of the formal ceremony which marked its inauguration. October 11, 1910, was a gala day in Berlin’s history. No expense was spared to make it a memorable occasion. The streets were gay with flags and bunting. Colourful branches of autumn leaves were criss-crossed with streamers and pendants. Weirdly fantastic figures were displayed in the show windows awaiting the time of their illumination. An enormous arch had been erected across the street in front of the post office to support a huge sign, the words of which, “Power for the people,” were discernible even in daylight. At night, illumined with hundreds of electric bulbs, it would flood the street with a dazzling, white light.

Never had the town entertained on a single day so many illustrious people as were expected on this historic occasion. Premier Whitney would be there, attended by the political, industrial and intellectual brains of the capital city. Hon. Adam Beck and Lady Beck were bringing a host of personal friends from the valley of the Thames. Men of distinction were coming long distances, from the other provinces of the Dominion and from the United States. Special trains would pull into the station from all directions at the appointed time. Thousands of buggies would bring in the ordinary folk who form the bulk of any popular crowd.

When the great day arrived, the rank and file of the workers from the factories of a dozen towns crowded the streets long before the arrival of the special guests. A half holiday had been proclaimed throughout the county, and even the tiniest hamlet sent its quota of spectators. Eight thousand people waited patiently and expectantly.

At the appointed hour, the Berlin band, reputed to be the best in ten counties, marched down the middle of the main street, resplendent in new uniforms. It was on its way to the station to greet the notables with martial music. It returned presently leading a procession of gaily decorated automobiles to the town hall. The people cheered uproariously as the dignitaries passed by.

“Look, that’s him. That’s Adam Beck!” cried a little boy, unable to curb his excitement at sight of his hero.

“What? Him?” replied his companion with a grin. “Huh! He’s only the Premier.”

The great illumination was scheduled to take place in the old skating rink. That was the largest, if not the safest, building in the town. The galleries were reserved for the women, most of whom crowded in early to be sure of a good seat. There was a long, long wait in the semi-darkness of the dingy building. Even the men grew impatient and wondered what was causing the delay.

Suddenly a reverberating burst of applause announced the arrival of the actors in the historic drama. Premier Whitney and Hon. Adam Beck mounted the platform, attended by Mayor Hahn, who was to preside.

Amid deafening cheers, Beck stepped forward to receive an illuminated address expressing universal admiration for the great man, heartfelt congratulations on the accomplishment of the enterprise and thanks for the years of sacrifice and labour it had entailed. It was profusely decorated, with maple leaves in autumn colours and water-colour views of the matchless cataract at Niagara Falls.

In a stirring address the Premier reviewed the history of the movement for Niagara Power. At its conclusion a local girl, chosen to impersonate Ontario, appeared before him bearing a royal purple cushion specially made for the occasion. On it lay a small marble slab, in the centre of which was an electric button. According to a pre-arranged plan, the Premier was to press the button and inaugurate, officially, the wonder-working power.

Premier Whitney stepped toward Miss Ontario, but stopped and turned to Adam Beck. Grasping his hand, he led him to the girl. The crowd was silent, tense. They saw the Premier place Beck’s forefinger on the button and press it with his own.

Suddenly a flood of bright artificial light illumined the darkest corners of the old skating rink, and the rafters resounded with tumultuous cheers. Miss Ontario stood in the foreground holding the cushion. She was radiantly beautiful now, in a blaze of white light, her head adorned like a fairy princess with a crown of twinkling stars. The people stood cheering and waving their hands and their hats. It seemed as though they would never stop. Then the band struck up Die Wacht Am Rhein. The crowd sang the song of their Fatherland, as only Germans can sing it, and the meeting closed with an equally hearty rendition of God Save The King.

Behind the scenes the electricians congratulated themselves. They knew only too well that the hydro service which had been in use in Berlin factories for several weeks prior to its formal inauguration had been exceedingly intermittent and alarmingly undependable. Providentially, it had not failed them at the crucial moment. Two minutes later, a fuse blew at Niagara, the lights went out and the crowd stumbled out of the building in the dark.

The service was restored, however, in time for the banquet in the evening. In the market-house five hundred men sat down to tables artistically decorated with autumn flowers and leaves. The china and the cutlery were the best in town. The food was cooked by Niagara Power and served by professional caterers from Toronto. Never had the market building looked so handsome. Never had any crowd it housed been so hilariously happy.

Suddenly Adam Beck raised his voice above the din and demanded to know where Dan Detweiler was.

Dan was nowhere to be seen, until some one spied him sitting near the door at the end of one of the long tables.

Detweiler was conducted to the head table to sit among the peers. They demanded a speech, and he related very modestly the story of the part he had played in the bringing of Niagara Power to the industries of Ontario. They cheered him to the echo. That was little enough reward for the hours of unremitting energy he had spent willingly and without recompense in a worthy cause.

With the passing of the years, the achievement of hydro power has lost much of its lustre. We live too much in the present, forgetting the past upon which our civilization is built. Certain souvenirs remain, however, to substantiate the story. In the museum of the Waterloo Historical Society, housed in a fire-proof room in the basement of the Kitchener Public Library, may be seen the bicycle which D. B. Detweiler used so effectively under the impulse of his first enthusiasm. The marble square is there, too, still equipped with the electric button which inaugurated hydro power first in Berlin and, later, in Toronto.

D. B. Detweiler was born many years ago in the home of a Mennonite preacher in the pretty village of Roseville, six or seven miles west of Galt. At its main intersection there stands to-day a modest monument erected to the memory of the Committee of One who saw the gleam of hydro power and pursued it. Ontario enjoys to-day the benefits of his magnanimous service.

At a much busier corner on the main street of Kitchener stands a handsome modern building erected by the Public Utilities Commission. On an exterior wall near the entrance door has been placed an inconspicuous bronze tablet bearing a simple inscription:

For all its brevity and simplicity, there is nothing of which the people of Kitchener and the County of Waterloo are so proud as they are of this recognition of three native sons. The first was only one generation removed from Germany; the other two were of Mennonite extraction, with their roots in Middle Europe. It is their answer to the sometimes ill-guarded implication that the “foreigners” of North Waterloo are of inferior stock.

There, in imperishable bronze, is recorded the incontrovertible fact that Waterloo has played the leading rôle in one of the most epochal developments in the history of the province, the utilization of one of the world’s most marvellous natural resources in the service of man. It is also a constant reminder of that great day when the most illustrious men of Ontario—engineers, editors, legislators, journalists, professors, manufacturers and business men—came to honour with their presence the little German town of Berlin, while it was still in its swaddling clothes, and to witness the official inauguration of a new day in the industrial life of the province.

The project, representing an investment of nearly four hundred million dollars, is financed by the Ontario Government. It is a business which the people themselves own and operate, a business securely founded on the rocks of Niagara, a business which will continue indefinitely to pay dividends of incalculable value. It is reasonably certain that an ample supply of power will be available at Niagara for all time and that it can be cheaply generated and distributed. The Commission generates its own power now and is no longer dependent upon the plants at the Falls. Its Queenston-Chippawa Power Plant with its enormous turbines is one of the most spectacular developments of its kind in the world.

The faith of the people of Ontario in hydro power has been fully justified. Within two weeks of the day of its inauguration it was giving a satisfactory twenty-four-hour service in Berlin. The workmen of the seventy-five diversified industries of the town soon became its enthusiastic champions. In a short time “white coal” had supplanted both water power and steam. To-day, the city of Kitchener, with a population of less than forty thousand, stands fifth in point of industrial output among the cities of Ontario. Its motto, Ex Industria Prosperitas, which is carved in stone over the entrance to its handsome, graystone City Hall, is a true indication of the character of its people.

The use of hydro power has given Ontario the unchallenged industrial leadership of the Dominion. Its factories have been stabilized so that they are able to produce superior goods at an assured profit. American industry, too, has established many branches in Ontario because of the ideal power facilities of the province, and in no small measure, hydro power has brought prosperity and financial security.

It has also improved the standards of living. Homes and streets are better lighted. The cooking and preservation of food is facilitated. The use of electrical machinery in the homes of the modern family has made possible the enjoyment of more of the cultural things of life.

To Adam Beck is due a great debt of public gratitude for the consecration of his ability to the service of his fellowmen. This debt was paid in part when King George V knighted him, in 1914, with the hearty and unanimous approval of the people of Ontario. No man was ever more deserving of honour.

Government

During the twenties and the thirties of the past century, the political situation had become intolerable. A virtual oligarchy of leaders of church and state had seized the power and were ruling the land with an iron hand. The common people were held in blind submission. The settler on the back concessions was obliged to pay taxes out of all proportion to his holdings and income, yet he had no voice in the affairs of state.

It was something of an anomaly that Hon. William Dickson, of Galt and Niagara, a member of the inner circle of potentates of the province, should have become a cog in the wheel of circumstances which finally upset the Tory applecart and ushered in responsible government and a new era of prosperity for Upper Canada.

The fateful wheel began to revolve when Dickson went to Scotland, in 1810, as executor for the estate of his cousin, Hon. Robert Hamilton, of Queenston. He took with him Hamilton’s younger children to be educated in the old land, in compliance with the father’s will. From Scotland, Dickson went to Wiltshire, England, to discuss with Hamilton’s widowed sister the question of schools for the children. The lady was living at that time with her daughter, Mrs. Robert Gourlay, on the estate of the Earl of Somerset.

There Dickson met for the first time the daughter’s husband, Robert Gourlay. He recognized him at once as a man of considerable intelligence but, obviously, of precarious financial standing. The man had a stake in Upper Canada, he told Dickson, four hundred acres of land in Oxford County, which he had bought some years before as a bit of a speculation.

Dickson was interested at once and eager to help. With the best of intentions he suggested that Gourlay should go to Upper Canada without delay. The way would surely open for him to become a land agent. He assured him that the time was ripe and that there were marvellous opportunities to make money by speculation in Crown lands. With the backing of their mutual cousins, Thomas Clark and the Hamiltons, Gourlay might be reasonably sure of preferment with Government officials. Gourlay declined the proposal, stating that he was not interested in the accumulation of wealth.

Four years later, Hon. Thomas Clark took his wife on a pleasure trip to Scotland. She was a beautiful Indian woman, a granddaughter of Sir William Johnson, and the Colonel was very proud to introduce her to his relatives. When they went to call on the Gourlays, in Wiltshire, Clark became suddenly violently ill, and the formal call was prolonged of necessity into a lengthy visit.

The two men had an opportunity to become well acquainted. Gourlay soon discovered that Clark’s interests were centred in his financial investments and his social ambitions. He boasted that he had recently received as a free gift, a proprietary claim on a tract of land twelve miles square on the banks of the Grand River, in the backwoods of Upper Canada. He was hoping to sell it to William Dickson at an immense profit. Dickson would, in turn, make a mint of money out of it. Farther north there was a tract half as large which he, Clark, hoped to acquire as reward for military services. That tract was worth its weight in gold. Upper Canada was full of just such marvellous opportunities in real estate. On very small financial investments it was possible to make fabulous sums of unearned money. Now with the four hundred acres which Gourlay owned in Oxford County. . . .

But Robert Gourlay was still uninterested in speculation. His income, he said, was sufficient to meet his humble requirements, and the Old Country was good enough for him.

But the time came, as it usually does, when a little money tucked away for a rainy day would have stood him in good stead. At forty, when the bloom of youth had failed, Gourlay found himself confronted with unexpected reverses. His father lost his money, and with it went the son’s boasted security. Gourlay heroically undertook to pay off his father’s debts, working hard day after day and long into the night. He might have succeeded but for an unfortunate quarrel with his titled landlord, who threw him out of the estate.

Deprived of his living, he had looked immediately for work. When none offered, he sat day after day brooding over his misfortunes. Seated in a comfortable armchair, he solved to his own satisfaction, at least, the problems of the poor. He spent many an hour meditating on the abuses and the limitations which controlled his own life and the lives of his fellowmen. He was by no means a stupid man. He had a good mind, a university education, was logical and far-seeing. But he was eccentric, “dog-goned” eccentric, his neighbours said, and a disagreeable disposition to criticism offset his native ability.

One day he remembered William Dickson’s suggestion that he go to Upper Canada and set himself up as a land agent. And Thomas Clark, when he was leaving after his illness, had offered to help him financially, if he would come and visit him at Clark Hill. Gourlay considered emigration from every standpoint and finally decided to leave his wife temporarily with friends, to fare forth alone on a visit to Dickson and Clark and to investigate for himself the golden opportunities which Upper Canada had to offer.

Gourlay was confident that he was eminently fitted to become a land agent. He knew more than most farmers about soils and scientific agriculture. Because of this knowledge, he had once been commissioned by a government official to make an economic survey of the northern shires of England. What better training could he ask for his new calling? He was inspired by purely altruistic motives. He felt that he had a divine commission to conduct the poor of England to green pastures across the sea and to settle them in comfortable homes beside still waters. This was to be the real mission of his life. Like Moses, he would lead his people to their Promised Land.

Having embarked at Liverpool, he reached Quebec in June, 1817. He spent four days there, and eleven in Montreal, waiting for Thomas Clark, who knew of his coming, to meet him and take him to his home in the Niagara district. When Clark did not come, Gourlay set out on foot for Clark Hill. He encountered many novel experiences in the journey and reached Clark’s home, in mid-July, so ill that he could not even speak. It was September before he was able to discuss with Clark his financial needs, only to learn that the Colonel’s lands were unsaleable at the moment and all his money was temporarily tied up.

Poor Gourlay was left to his own resources. As soon as he had recovered his health, he followed the custom of prospective colonizers and made application for a sizeable block of Crown lands, sufficient to match his superior qualifications. He was granted a paltry hundred acres on easy terms. This he regarded as an overt act of discrimination against him, and in his heart was kindled a deep resentment, which he took no pains to conceal. The day would come, he vowed, when he would hurl that insult into the very teeth of the legislators who had perpetrated it.

While he was a shipboard Gourlay had spent a great deal of time and zeal planning the methods which he hoped to employ in his colonizing scheme. He knew that Upper Canada was a land of marvellous natural resources, as yet latent. It would be his first duty to arouse the people by well-directed advertising to a realization of their priceless heritage. This would be preliminary to the real object of his mission, the bringing of settlers from the Old Land to the end that wealth and prestige might accrue to the Empire.

The first step in these schemes was to draft a circular letter which he sent soon after his arrival in Upper Canada to the various township officials of the province. With this he included a questionnaire under thirty-one headings dealing with the economic and social welfare of the people. The first thirty questions were innocuous enough. The thirty-first was added when Gourlay was smarting under his disappointment. “What in your opinion,” it asked, “retards the improvement of your township in particular and the province in general?” This was intended to strike the initial blow of the warfare he was determined to wage against the Executive Council, who were collectively and individually responsible for the distribution of Crown lands and the general development of the country.

The replies were, in most cases, prompt, candid and detailed, and Gourlay was commended for his interest and enterprise. The township officials found the last question the most thought-provoking. In a variety of phrases they expressed the same idea about it. The Crown lands and the Clergy Reserves were retarding the progress of the country. Some of the secretaries indulged in invidious remarks about individuals who lived in luxury in the Niagara district neglecting such obvious duties as the building of roads through their vast, undeveloped, unassessed properties in the backwoods. Such men, they said, who cared nothing for the poor of the settlements, were a real hindrance to the development of the province. All this was grist for Gourlay’s mill. In 1822, with ill-concealed malice he published, in three volumes, his entire correspondence with the officials, as well as his own observations and findings, which he called A Statistical Record of Upper Canada.

Archdeacon Strachan and his coterie were enraged by Gourlay’s obvious attempt to interfere with their well-established rights. But Gourlay was in no way dismayed. If the Crown lands were an obstruction to progress, as the secretaries had asserted, he would make it his business to poke an inquisitive nose into the machinery of the Crown Lands Department of the Government.

He made some very disturbing discoveries. He learned that great tracts of Crown lands were being distributed from time to time as tokens of friendship, often as bribes, to men of wealth and position, who had absolutely no intention of settling them and who did not so much as pretend to assume the duties and responsibilities of landlord. As for the Clergy Reserves, they had become “a putrid carcass” and a general nuisance. Scattered, as they were, in small parcels throughout the province, they were impoverishing, through their owners’ neglect, the settlers, by whose indefatigable labours the value of the church lands had been doubled and often trebled.

Gourlay placed his guns in position to fire another volley of shot. He was loud in his protestations that these irregularities in the general method of colonization could be remedied, perhaps eradicated, if the owners of the wild lands were assessed and compelled to pay taxes! He deplored the poverty and the discontent he had found in a land supremely blessed with the most bountiful gifts of nature. If the people of Upper Canada would set their house in order, he knew hundreds of British farmers, who could be guaranteed to come out to settle, bringing with them much-needed capital.

There was no denying the charge of the Executive Council that Gourlay was trying to inculcate the germs of sedition. His original correspondence had been calculated to that end. In subsequent open letters to landowners he had dared to say that if the people of Upper Canada were not awake to the mismanagement of the Executive Council, the province would sink inevitably into ruin and decay. To forestall this eventuality, he solicited the signatures of the landowners to a petition which he had drawn up and addressed to the Prince Regent, charging the British Government with neglect of Upper Canada, notably in regard to its failure to compensate the settlers for their losses during the War of 1812, and urging them to remove the evils brought upon the colony by the abuses of the Executive Council.

For this indiscretion Gourlay paid dearly. William Dickson, Thomas Clark and other men of influence, whose luxurious homes had been open to him since his arrival in Upper Canada, cooled toward him perceptibly, because he had published facts and opinions based upon information he had gleaned in the privacy of their family circles. Since Gourlay had proved that he had no regard for confidences, they refused to discuss with him any topic of public importance. His best friends became his bitterest foes.

He made enemies, too, among the men on the streets and the freeholders in the distant settlements by his too-radical ideas and pronouncements, his unrestrained language and his unreasoned threats. These men could not be persuaded that the Lieutenant-Governor should be impeached, as Gourlay had suggested. They refused to believe that the House of Assembly had betrayed the constituencies which had elected its members, or that Dr. Strachan and the Church of England were recreant in their spiritual duties. Gourlay was going too far. It was high time somebody stopped him.

There was general relief when the Government finally stepped in and arrested Gourlay as an alien, charging him with sedition against the Governor and the Legislature of the Province. Strictly speaking, this was not legal, for Gourlay was a British subject and not an alien. William Dickson, Thomas Clark and William Claus gave their solemn witness under oath that Gourlay was a man of desperate fortunes, who was determined to stir up an insurrection.

Gourlay had little to say in self-defence. The court ordered him to leave the province, and when he refused to go, he was left to languish for nearly two years in gaol at Niagara. In his narrow cell he developed a phobia, for martyrdom, said, and probably believed, that he was offering his life as a sacrifice on the altar of public liberty.

He was in a pitiable state of mind and body when the authorities finally succeeded in packing him off to the United States. Across the border, he continued his denunciations of the Government of Upper Canada, under the name of The Banished Briton. Finally he sailed for Liverpool.

Robert Gourlay had performed his mission. Although he had spent only a few years in the province, and most of that time behind prison bars, his name is written indelibly in the history of Upper Canada. He had published the first statistical handbook of the country. If he had been less pugnacious and the Executive Council less arbitrary, a great work might have been produced without strife or bloodshed.

His arduous work bore fruit when he was back in England and his invective was no longer heard. Then the abuses which he had exposed to a more or less apathetic public stood out as stark realities. Forewarned, the people watched the lavish distribution of Crown lands to friends of the Government and noted the shameless illegality which gave as much as fifty thousand acres of land as a gift to one man.

The Clergy Reserves, too, came under discussion. The Presbyterians and the Methodists demanded a share of the revenues from this source on the ground that they, too, were Protestants. But Strachan paid no attention. In 1836 he established many new rectories endowing them with lands, without the knowledge and consent of the Imperial Parliament. This infuriated the Non-Conformists and roused them to concerted action.

At this juncture another political leader came to the fore in the person of William Lyon MacKenzie, a peppery Scot, who had come to Upper Canada in 1820. For many years he had been observing in silence the lamentable condition of public affairs in the province. Especially did he recognize as an iniquitous mistake the policy of land reserves for the Crown and the church. In time it would ruin the country. Through the columns of his newspaper, the Colonial Advocate, he tried to arouse the people to demand a just, economical government, responsible to the people. Most bitterly did he denounce the system which allowed the “Family Compact” to control all the revenues of the province without a mandate from the people.

MacKenzie was more fortunate than Gourlay in that persecution made him a popular hero. When a crowd of hoodlums wrecked his printing press, he received adequate compensation. When he was thrown into prison, the people of Toronto voted him into the mayor’s chair. Again and again he was expelled from a seat in the Assembly and declared incapable of holding office, but he came back each time with an increased majority at the polls. He could afford to laugh at the threats of his enemies for he counted his friends not by hundreds but by thousands.

By 1837, he was persuaded that only by armed resistance could the political evils of the day be overcome, and he began to lay plans for a province-wide rebellion. He divided Upper Canada into districts and arranged a series of meetings in strategic centres. During the summer and autumn of that year fully two hundred meetings were held and MacKenzie was present in person to address most of them.

He came to Galt, in spite of Absalom Shade’s violent opposition to the democratic movement of the day and his personal animosity to its leader. While he was speaking from an open window of a tavern to an audience of several hundred men, there was a sudden commotion in the street. A man with blackened face and fantastic costume mingled in the crowd bearing a hideous effigy of MacKenzie. Then there was an explosion. The effigy was badly scorched, but nobody was hurt. The orator paused a moment, smiled disdainfully and continued his denunciations of the government. Later, a curious farmer pulled from the effigy a pair of good boots, which everyone recognized as the style worn only by Galt’s leading citizen. They were the “brawest” Sabbath shoes he had ever had.

The insurrection broke at Montgomery’s Tavern on Yonge Street, north of Toronto. It was little more than a skirmish. The rebels were soon routed from their defences and put to flight. MacKenzie himself escaped capture. With a four thousand dollar bounty on his head, he roamed for days from one village to another. He travelled at least a hundred and twenty-five miles and was seen and recognized by at least two thousand people, but no one betrayed him. He was able to cross the Niagara River and find refuge in the United States.

Samuel Lount, one of his lieutenants, for whose capture two thousand dollars had been offered, carried the rebellion into the valley of the Grand River. He and a companion named Kennedy had failed to reach the Niagara with their leader. They fled westward then, and for more than thirty hours they hid in a haystack in the village of Mount Pleasant, near Brantford. From there, they reached in safety the Glenmorris home of Samuel Latshaw, a pronounced sympathizer. But a watchful officer of the law made an unexpected and well-timed call on Latshaw, and the fugitives were lucky to escape through the rear door. They scampered off toward Simcoe, realizing only too well that the cards were stacked against them.

Hope revived temporarily when they saw a man and a boy fishing from a rowboat in the Lynn River. As luck would have it, they proved to be French Canadian and quite disinterested in Upper Canadian affairs. Lount bargained with the man to row him across Lake Erie to the Ohio shore.

It was December and bitterly cold. Lake Erie had lashed itself into a fury. For two days and nights the three men and a half-grown boy tossed like floating corks on the windswept waves, pulling frantically on their oars. Not a wink of sleep for anyone. Their clothing was drenched and stiff with ice, and their bodies chilled to the bone. They had nothing to eat but a few chunks of frozen pork. Death stared them in the face. Whether it would come by drowning or by starvation, they were all past caring.

Then, unexpectedly, they saw or thought they saw, the outline of land in the distance. Could it be Ohio, or was it Upper Canada? They pulled toward it with all their might, but a stiff wind caught their feeble craft midships and whirled it about in circles. Stronger and colder blew the gale; fainter and weaker were their human efforts. Soon they lost sight of the land and every hope of seeing it again. Another day without food. Another long, weary night without sleep.

They lost their oars that night, but at daybreak they saw land at close range. The wind had subsided and the little boat seemed to be drifting without effort into the mouth of a river. A farmer stood on the bank watching them with interest, but when they called to him for help, he ran away. He came back later with three other men, and with united effort they pulled the boat ashore and lifted out the three perishing men and the half-grown boy.

“This is Upper Canada,” was the reply. “The Grand River, to be exact. A nice place for smugglers to land.”

Lount and Kennedy looked at each other significantly. But every hope of posing as petty evaders of the customs vanished when a burly policeman popped up, handcuffed all four of them and took them into custody. The farmer who had given the alarm got two thousand dollars for Lount’s arrest, but it cost him the eternal hatred of his neighbours. No one would believe him when he declared that he had mistaken the rebels for smugglers.

Lount and Kennedy were bundled off to Dunnville and from there they were taken to Chippawa. A man from Galt said that he saw Lount there under military escort. He was weak and frightfully emaciated, but the guard compelled him to trudge along as best he could. A crowd of passers-by stood and watched with interest. He was on his way, they presumed, to a lifelong captivity, or perhaps, an inglorious death on the gibbet. The latter supposition was correct, for, on April 12, 1838, Lount was executed, in Toronto, before a large concourse of spectators, including the students of Upper Canada College, who were granted a half holiday to witness the execution.

MacKenzie was a disappointed and a brokenhearted man when he returned to Upper Canada at the close of the conflict. Too late, he realized that the cause of liberty might have been better served without resorting to arms. In 1851, he re-entered the political arena as a representative of the Legislative Assembly for Haldimand County, defeating Hon. George Brown who, later, lived at Bow Park Farm. As long as he was in Parliament he lifted his voice at every opportunity against administrative extravagance, monopoly and privilege in every form. He was always the champion of the poor and the ardent advocate of broader educational facilities for the masses. When he died, in 1861, it was said of him that he had contributed more than any other man to the realization of responsible government for the province.

His grandson, the Right Hon. William Lyon MacKenzie King, Premier of Canada, was born in a low, rambling, frame house near the centre of the town of Berlin. The building has since been demolished to make room for a church. King’s father, John King, was a lawyer and the son of an officer in the Imperial Army; his idolized mother was the youngest daughter of “the indomitable little Rebel.” The two grandfathers clashed on one occasion at the close of the rebellion, when King ordered MacKenzie in the name of the Queen to vacate an old mill in which he and several of his followers had taken refuge.

The people of Kitchener, regardless of political affiliations, are proud to be fellow-citizens of the man who held for so many years, by will of the people of Canada, the Premiership of the Dominion. There are many who remember Billy King in his school days, when he rode about the town on his pony, King Billy. They recall his first election to parliament and they have followed with deep personal interest his political career. On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his leadership of the Liberal Party, his friends in Waterloo Township decided to rehabilitate Woodlands, the boyhood home of the Prime Minister, and to set it aside as a national shrine. The property comprises eleven acres of bush land in the environs of Kitchener.

After the MacKenzie Rebellion the people of Upper Canada settled down to a period of reconstruction. By 1850 there was a splendid increase in the population of the province and a marked improvement in the spirit and enterprise of the people. The government decided that the time had come to rearrange the townships into smaller and more compact areas. Waterloo and Woolwich were to sever their former connection with Wellington County and join Dumfries, Wilmot, and the new Queen’s Bush township of Wellesley to form the county of Waterloo.

It was only natural that the people of Dumfries should take it for granted that Galt, a newly-incorporated town, with a population of over two thousand, the largest in the combined townships, should be the county town. But Waterloo Township advanced the claims of Berlin, the nearest hamlet by comparison with Galt. For geographical reasons, and perhaps for racial considerations, Wilmot, Wellesley, and Woolwich supported this claim. Most of the people of the northern townships were only a few generations removed from Middle Europe.

The fight for the county town was on with a vengeance, and feeling ran high. Public meetings of enormous proportions were convened in both Waterloo and Dumfries with leading men throwing their hats into the ring. Both camps sent deputations to Toronto to give the legislators the local opinion on the subject.

In the end, a compromise was arranged. Dumfries was divided into north and south ridings, approximately equal in area. North Dumfries was added to Waterloo county; and South Dumfries, to Brant. The choice of the county town for Waterloo was left in abeyance for some time, but Berlin was finally chosen, probably because of its central location. In horse and buggy days distance was a matter of great consideration.

Galtonians declared that if Galt were not the county town, it was nevertheless the town of the county. They found solace for their wounded pride in the election of the first warden of the county in the person of Dr. John Scott, a distinguished graduate of Edinburgh University, who “haed the Gaelic.” It was unfortunate that he had taken up residence in Berlin.

In his inaugural address on May 18, 1852, Dr. Scott spoke of the Grand River as “that noble stream,” and he remarked that the central location of the county town would render the transaction of municipal and judicial business cheap and convenient, “as no person can possibly travel over twenty miles to attend courts and councils.” In that same year, the county court house was built and crowned by an imposing cupola. Fifteen years later, Waterloo County built, for its indigent citizens, the first House of Industry and Refuge of the province. The buildings, enlarged and renovated, are still in use.

The year 1867 is a significant one in Canadian history, for it witnessed the first attempt at the Confederation of the British Provinces of North America. Hon. George Brown, the great advocate of the movement, used to say that “on Confederation hangs the future destiny of half a continent,” yet more than one province entered into union with misgivings. To-day Canada stretches from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific and Dominion Day, July 1, the birthday of the nation, has become one of the most popular holidays of modern Canada.

Transportation

“I’ll find a way or make it” was the motto of Hannibal, the brilliant Carthaginian general. With these words on his lips he forded impassable rivers and scaled the lofty Alps. That was in the dim, distant past, yet the spirit of Hannibal is exemplified to-day in the peaceful pursuits of modern civilization as well as on the battlefields of Europe. It is the spirit of the supermen of all time.

The early settlers of Upper Canada were imbued with that same spirit. Such was the urge of the Loyalists when weary, fearful and bedraggled, they sought its inhospitable shores when there was no where else to go. Governor Simcoe was motivated by a similar zeal when he and a party of personal friends broke their way through the tangled forest from Niagara to the Thames. They went, the records say, “in sleighs but mostly on foot.” With like spirit the men of the Canada Company built the Huron Road from Guelph to Goderich over a mass of juniper bushes. Other men of indomitable spirit built a highway from Toronto to Georgian Bay, from Niagara to the Talbot settlement in the west and from Hamilton through mountain rocks to Guelph and on to Fergus.

The Mennonites, too, had the stamina of which pioneering heroes are made. D. W. Smith, the surveyor-general of the province at the turn of the century, relates their experiences in crossing the Niagara, before the days of the first ferry, at Black Rock, north of Buffalo. “Nineteen covered wagons, with families,” he says, “came to settle in the vicinity of Lincoln County. The way they cross the river is remarkable. The body of the wagon is made of close boards; they caulk the seams and by shifting the body off, it transports the wheels and the family to the other side and the vehicle is then put together again.” These crossings were made at Lewiston. Others of their faith came later to Richard Beasley’s tract up the Grand River. They, too, came in oxen-drawn, conestoga wagons with their families and all their earthly possessions. For thirty miles they followed a blazed trail through the ill-famed Beverley Swamp, which lay between the Head of the Lake and their Promised Land.

The conditions under which the European immigrants crossed the Atlantic were atrocious. For weeks they existed in dirty, vermin-infested sailing ships, slept on unupholstered sea chests, cooked their own unappetizing meals and drank the ship’s stale, insipid, contaminated water. If a plague broke out, it only increased the seasickness and the homesickness they already endured.

When they arrived at last in Upper Canada they found that they could look forward to a lifetime spent in isolation. The country was sparsely settled, and the first roads were inexpressibly bad. Some of them were widened and improved later on. The “corduroy” variety, hailed as a great improvement in transportation, was made by placing trunks of trees side by side in horizontal formation to make a solid, but by no means smooth, roadbed.

The corduroy made possible the stage coach. The travellers not infrequently entered the vehicle by way of a window. They were jostled and bumped unmercifully all the way to their destination. It was taken as a matter of course when the passengers were obliged to clamber out of their seats to extricate the vehicle from a mudhole.

Travel by water was not much better. The Indian bark canoe gave place early to the French bateau, especially on the St. Lawrence River, and the bateau, in turn, to the Durham boat, a larger and stronger craft propelled by oars and invented, it is believed, by American traders in the Mohawk Valley. There were many navigable rivers in the interior of the western end of the province, but little use was made of them for purposes of transportation. Not until 1802 was it possible to cross the Niagara at Buffalo by ferry.

The Niagara River was an insurmountable barrier to the development of the province. It was only twenty-odd miles long, but the declivity from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario was three hundred and sixty-five feet. There were many miles of dangerous water including the mighty cataract and the whirlpool rapids below. Only a fool would risk his life in any sort of craft on such a river.

In his Picturesque Canada, George Monro Grant tells the story of a boatman who built a Maid of the Mist, the smallest of tiny steamboats, as a commercial venture. For a small fee, he took passengers to the foot of the Falls and gave them a sensational baptism of spray. But the boat failed to meet expenses and the boatman decided to sell her. He found a purchaser but by the terms of the agreement the owner was required to deliver the boat intact at the mouth of the river. This meant that the Maid of the Mist would have to be piloted through a narrow, rock-bound channel of mad waters six miles long.

The boatman and two friends undertook and accomplished the dangerous feat. The record states that the pilot was a man of extraordinary courage and skill, but he was so badly shaken in mind and body by the ordeal that when he came ashore at the mouth of the river, he seemed fully twenty years older.

The Niagara was a real handicap to the defenders of Upper Canada during the War of 1812. Britain’s war effort would have been strengthened immeasurably, if it had been a normal river. It would then have been possible to send men and munitions to Detroit in the early stages of the conflict by an all-water route, with an enormous saving of time and money. Fort Niagara was in American hands at that time, but it would have been possible for Canadian soldiers to pass that stronghold at night, and there is every probability that they could then have arrived at Detroit in time, and in sufficient numbers, to prevent General Harrison from invading the western part of the province.

But the Niagara was not navigable. General Brock had no recourse but to land his men at the Head of the Lake, to carry his gun and ammunition by foot along an Indian trial, for twenty-two miles, to the Grand River and to follow that stream to Lake Erie in such tubs of boats as the terrified settlers were able to provide. Robert Nichol rigged up a few vessels on Lake Erie and conveyed as many fighters as he could by water to Detroit. The rest of the contemptible army walked!

Still more serious was the fact that the Niagara River was a detriment to the peace-time activities of Upper Canada, especially the development of her foreign trade. The great cargoes of furs and other merchandise from the far west, which came by water to the Niagara, had to be transported by land at the portage and transhipped for Lake Ontario. This meant a considerable loss of time and money.

The trouble was accentuated when at the close of the War of 1812, the Americans built the Erie Canal from Buffalo to Albany and offered easy transportation of Canadian as well as American shipping. Gradually the horse and wagon portage around the Falls was falling into disuse. The Canadians were not slow to see that their trade was being diverted to New York, although the country’s best interests might be served more satisfactorily by the use of their own most excellent waterway, the St. Lawrence River. The time was ripe, it was felt, to abandon the primitive carrying place at the Falls and to construct in its place a canal from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, which should be far enough removed from the international border to be beyond the range of enemy guns, in the event of another war.

The idea recommended itself to the people generally. One suggestion met with universal approval, that the Twelve Mile Creek, which ran through Shipman’s Corners (St. Catharines) should be the route of the proposed canal. The plan was to divert the waters of the Niagara into the canal at the village of Chippawa, a short distance above the Falls.

To William Hamilton Merritt belongs the honour of having organized a company to undertake the work. Operations were begun on the west branch of the creek, at Thorold, and in an incredibly short time two boats entered the canal at Chippawa and floated peacefully down to Port Dalhousie, on Lake Ontario. That was a great day of achievement. The Welland Canal, as it was called, had overcome the disadvantages of the Niagara.

But Merritt was not altogether satisfied. He believed it would be better to take the water from Lake Erie rather than from the Niagara River. Construction was begun forthwith on a Lake Erie entrance to the canal. But the engineers found the work discouragingly difficult because of the loose and drifting nature of the soil at the margin of the lake. It was almost impossible to keep the sand on the shore from filling up and obstructing the bar across the approaches to the in-take.

The difficulty only challenged Merritt to greater endeavour. He was determined to find a solution to the problem. Soon he was casting a covetous eye in the direction of the Grand River, a deep, full-flowing stream, draining twenty-five thousand square miles of land in the interior of Upper Canada. Its mouth was only twenty-two miles from the proposed in-take to the canal, twenty-two miles of low-lying, unproductive, swamp lands, covered with bulrushes, tamarack and wild cranberries. If he could dam the Grand River at Dunnville high enough to divert its waters into his canal by means of a feeder, he would have the gratification of seeing a monumental success rise from the ruins of his apparent defeat.

With characteristic enthusiasm, Merritt promoted his idea wherever he had an opportunity. Especially did he try to mould the opinion of the people who lived in the towns and villages in the valley of the Grand. He told them that the scheme would entail the deepening of the river to the advantage of the whole countryside. Short canals would be built in the southern part of the river, and the residents of the valley as far north as Galt would have a navigable river at their very doors. No longer need the farmers of Dumfries and Waterloo lug their grain and dairy products to Dundas. The Grand River would bear their burdens on its broad back, and they might sit at home in a comfortable chair enjoying their ease and the fruits of their prosperity.

The people throughout the province reacted favourably to the scheme. They saw in this new method of transportation the dawn of a better day for trade and commerce. It was an occasion for jubilation when, in 1831, the British Parliament granted a charter to the organization, which called itself the Grand River Navigation Company. The capital investment was $50,000. Merritt himself and several others took as much as a thousand shares each. Absalom Shade, of Galt, and other men of business acumen up the river bought heavily, believing the company was as financially sound as the proverbial Bank of England.

The Six Nations Indians were numbered among the chief shareholders. Without their knowledge or consent, their trustees had bought, in their name and with money from their treasury, stock to the value of $38,256, more than half the capital investment. The Government had the fore-sight to appoint two men of reputable financial ability to represent the Indians on the Board of Directors. The Indians were highly incensed when the news of this high-handed procedure came to their ears. Alas, they knew only too well how helpless they were to prevent this gross injustice, and as time went by, the volume of their complaints increased in proportion to the diminution of their dividends.

The early spring of 1832 saw the beginning of the improvements to the river, when several short canals were built. Settlements sprang up beside them at Indiana, at York and at Seneca. A plank road, the first of its kind in these parts, was constructed all the way from Hamilton to Port Dover, linking Lake Ontario with Lake Erie. At Caledonia, where the road met the river, a swing bridge of six arches was built with the apparatus for turning at its eastern end to allow for the passage of vessels. This road opened up new land for settlement. Within six years all the land which bordered on it had been sold and at least partially cleared.

The development of the Grand River progressed month by month. The company’s plan was beginning to be apparent. A succession of levels was designed to convert the natural course of the stream into a system of slack-water navigation from two and a half to three feet deep. This was sufficient to allow the passage of boats of light draught as far upstream as the levels could be carried. The engineers were the best that could be employed. They succeeded in raising the levels twenty-five miles up the river to within three miles of Brantford, and there they built three locks of eleven feet each.

So Brantford became the head of the much-discussed Grand River Navigation scheme of the thirties, a fact which contributed immeasurably to the growth and financial prosperity of the village. By means of a cut-off which straightened the course of the river from the village to the slack water three miles south, the millers of Brantford were able to ship their products and to receive their imports at their very doors, eliminating all the inconvenience and expense of hauling.

Absalom Shade was much perturbed, when he learned that Brantford, and not Galt, was to be the head of navigation. So were the farmers and the millers of Dumfries. Shade decided that he would not accept as final the considered judgment of the engineers. If the canal would not come to Galt, Galt would go to the canal. He believed it was possible, at least in the flood season, for a crew of experienced rivermen to steer a number of well-ballasted, flat-bottomed boats downstream to the locks at Brantford. It was worth trying.

Shade and his men built a number of barges, each eighty feet long and sixteen wide, with a capacity of four hundred barrels of flour. Shade’s Arks, the people called them. Half the town was present when the barges were slipped into the river from the end of the bridges and the millers loaded their flour. The adventurous boatmen waved their farewells and the people cheered them to the echo. Those young fellows were risking life and limb to open up new avenues of trade for Galt and Dumfries.

That first dangerous journey to Port Dalhousie was so successful that for three successive years the rivermen of Galt carried the products of Dumfries, flour, wheat, pork and furs, to Lake Erie and the markets of the world. Thanks to Absalom Shade, Galt was reaping the benefits of the Grand River Navigation scheme.

Then one day something happened. Shade’s own barge, loaded to capacity with flour, ran aground on a rock below Glenmorris. There was a violent crash, a creaking of timbers and a good deal of shouting. Shade himself was calm. He ordered the other boatmen to go on their way, while he squared his shoulders to carry barrel after barrel of flour from his Ark to an island in the river. Then he waded to the shore, hurried back to Galt on foot and worked night and day until he had completed a new barge. With consummate skill, he piloted his empty craft down the angry river, picked up his cargo of flour and continued on his way. At Port Robinson, half way through the canal, he overtook and joined the Galt men. This was, as Hon. James Young, of Galt, once said, “the last trip of the only fleet the town of Galt ever possessed.”

The Grand River Navigation scheme was a boon to the people of the valley. The freight service grew by leaps and bounds. In 1840 alone, nearly 500,000 bushels of wheat and millions of feet of lumber were carried down the river to markets which otherwise would have been inaccessible. Industry and trade brought prosperity and contentment.

General satisfaction reached its climax when a passenger service was inaugurated a few years later. Two stern-propelled steamers, the Red Jacket and the Queen, began to ply between Brantford and Buffalo, stopping at the villages along the course of the river to pick up passengers. Their human cargoes were business men, female shoppers, honeymooners and eager, expectant youths from the backwoods of Upper Canada off to the big city on a holiday jaunt. The boats left Brantford at seven in the morning, and at the same hour on the following morning they could see the smoke ascend from the tall chimneys. But the Queen was notoriously top-heavy, and sometimes she ran aground in the shallows. Little wonder, for she drew only three feet of water.

The passenger service increased in popularity every summer. Ten years later as many as a hundred crowded steamers were making the journey with a maximum of comfort, in a minimum of time.

But there came a day when the Grand River Navigation Company, like the Queen, ran aground, and foundered on the shoals of financial insecurity. It was top-heavy with liabilities and it had no depth of assets. Then the town of Brantford, fearful for its trade, was persuaded to raise $200,000 by debentures for a mortgage on the company’s property. Year after year the company defaulted in its obligations and, in 1861, the corporation foreclosed the mortgage and took over the entire stock of the company. When it was put up for sale at auction, a single greenback of the lowest denomination bought all the equipment, and the cut-off was thrown in as a gesture of good will. After that, Brantford could offer no facilities of transportation by water and the canals were used only for water power and for hydraulic purposes.

The Six Nations lost their entire investment, but they continued to hold their worthless papers as souvenirs of the white man’s phenomenal enterprise. To this day the poor, deluded people hope that some time in some court of justice they may recover their losses.

A new riverbed for the Welland Canal was found later in the Ten Mile Creek. It is a ship canal now, and one of the world’s greatest feats of engineering. The Grand River empties into Lake Erie, as Mother Nature intended it should, and the unused feeder is crumbling to ruin in the cranberry marshes along the shores of Lake Erie.

Navigation was superseded by the railway, the marvel of the century. In his report to the Edinburgh Society, Adam Fergusson reported that, in February, 1831, he travelled over the first railway in the world, when he journeyed to Liverpool en route to America. No more than twenty years after that time, the backwoods people of Upper Canada were awake to the superior advantages of travel and transportation by rail and insistent in their demands for railroad service.

The advent of the iron horse was celebrated in much the same way in the principal towns of the province. The turning of the first sod was an occasion long to be remembered. Progressive merchants decorated their store windows in anticipation of a crowd of country people. Long before daybreak there were evidences of excitement and unusual activity in the streets. At the appointed hour thousands of spectators in holiday attire waited for the ceremony to commence. Presently some worthy pioneer approached pushing a wheel-barrow of highly polished wood on which had been placed a pick and shovel. Or perhaps, a silver trowel. He reached the spot where the first rail was to be laid later. There was a deadly silence and a craning of necks when the pioneer removed a square of top soil, placed it in the barrow and wheeled it away. Guns boomed and the people shouted acclaims to their Queen. Speechmaking, feasting and dancing brought the eventful day to a close.

Usually two years passed by before any construction work was begun, and another two years before the first train was scheduled to arrive. That was another occasion that called for a celebration. Invariably the train was long overdue and the people waited more or less impatiently for hours, often in zero weather or in a drizzling rain. Only the most sophisticated stood their ground when at last the locomotive came belching in. Fearful ones ran amuck in the crowd, or climbed trees. Banquets, fireworks and formal balls gave official recognition of the dawn of a new day in transportation and fairer to-morrows in the history of the community.

The first railway to penetrate the valley of the Grand River was the Great Western, which ran from Niagara Falls to Detroit. The Grand Trunk Railway, however, was the pride of Upper Canada. Its builders advertised it as one of the wonders of the world and promised satisfactory service to points as distant as Goderich and Sarnia. It came in the fifties to Brantford, Guelph, Galt and Berlin.

There was no railway service in Nichol township until Adam Brown, of Hamilton, saw an opportunity to enlarge his city’s trade. Guelph, fearing for its own markets, opposed the move, but Brown got his charter and the railroad was completed in 1870.

To commemorate this event, an excursion was arranged from Fergus to Niagara Falls via Hamilton. Warnings for safe conduct were posted. Passengers were forbidden to stand on the platform of the train, to ride on the roof and to board or leave the train while it was in motion. Notwithstanding these precautions, there were several near-accidents, but the excursionists reached Fergus safe, but tired and unspeakably happy, in the wee small hours of the following morning.

As late as 1875, all the locomotives of Upper Canada were fuelled with wood. Great piles of cordage stood in the station yards of the important towns, and gangs of men toured the country periodically for the purpose of cutting four-foot cordwood sticks into blocks that could be stuffed into the mouths of the engines.

The first man to foresee that coal could be used to fuel railway locomotives was James J. Hill, the great American railway magnate. Hill was a Canadian, born in the village of Rockwood, on the Speed River, during the stormy days of the Rebellion and educated at the Rockwood Academy. When his father died, the boy was compelled to leave school at fourteen to earn his living as a clerk in the village store. Later, he went to Wisconsin, interested himself in the problems of transportation, became a builder of railways and took a prominent part in the opening of transatlantic and transpacific trade. In 1915, when the management of the Panama Pacific Exposition invited each state of the Union to name its greatest living citizen, for inclusion in a Hall of Fame, Wisconsin’s unanimous choice was James J. Hill.

Brantford claims the invention of a by-product of the railway, the sleeping coach. It happened when the Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII, was paying an official visit to the British Dominions, in 1860. The Governor of Canada, wishing to reduce to a minimum the ennui which his royal guest would endure on his long journeys in this great land, called for designs for a railway coach, which might be used for travel by night as well as by day.

At that time, no one had ever heard of such a contrivance, but Thomas Burnley, of Brantford, submitted a model and got the contract. A group of expert mechanics built the coach, in Brantford, under Burnley’s supervision. The Prince’s Coat of Arms, exquisitely carved and painted in royal colours, adorned the exterior. The interior furnishings were complete and fastidious to a degree. Inside and out, the car was as perfect as it was original. The Prince was delighted with his unique conveyance. He used it for his trips throughout the province and even into the United States.

Unfortunately, it had not occurred to Burnley that he ought to patent his sleeping coach, and both the name and the profits of his invention went to George Pullman, a shrewder man of the world. As an employee of the Buffalo and Lake Erie Railway, Pullman was accustomed to visit Brantford periodically in the interests of his firm. He happened in one day when the men were at work building the royal car, and when he returned to Buffalo he built his own idea of a sleeping car. His coaches have done much to popularize long distance travel by rail, but the name of Thomas Burnley, the real inventor, is practically unknown.

Bridges, too, will always play a notable part in the history of Upper Canadian transportation. Like couplers which connect coaches to form a train, bridges connect roads and railroads. Without them travel would be limited indeed.

In early days a bridge was often only a tree felled across a river, but for all that it was often more stable than the pretentious structures which were erected later. A bridge was built across the Grand River, in Brantford, in 1812, but it fell in a mass of debris when the first horse and wagon attempted to pass over it. Hundreds more were carried downstream, sooner or later, in a flood of swirling waters.

Modern bridges, whether for pedestrian or vehicular traffic, are built in accordance with the rules of advancing science. They combine beauty and strength. The beautiful bridges at Grand Valley, at Bridgeport, and at Freeport, are notable examples of modern bridge building. The Cockshutt Bridge, below Brantford, is as handsome a structure of its kind as can be found in the entire valley. Originally it was a covered bridge with the roadway on the roof.

Covered bridges are frequently found in Mennonite country. In Pennsylvania, bridges are built with roofs and walls as a protection against inclement weather. Such a bridge stood at Blair, within the memory of the oldest citizens. There was another one of this variety at the village of Conestoga, on the Grand, just above the junction of the two rivers. This one had walls, but no roof. Both of these fell years ago under the pressure of waters in flood.

A third of this type is still standing. It spans the Grand River in the village of West Montrose, in Woolwich Township, midway between Winterbourne and Elmira. Not only is it a well-known landmark, but an excellent example of a covered bridge, for it has both roof and walls. It has a span of two hundred and ninety feet and its width, by inside measurement, is seventeen feet. No one knows exactly when it was built, but local tradition sets the date at 1881, and supports the theory that it was raised into position by ropes and pulleys.

Certain evidences of its antiquity have been preserved to this day. An old-fashioned kerosene lantern hangs from the ceiling and until recently, a verger used to light it at nightfall, in conformity with an old by-law. At either entrance hangs a notice: “Any person who rides or travels over this bridge faster than a walk will be prosecuted.”

In the horse and buggy days, people called it the kissing bridge, perhaps because two small windows provide a minimum of light even in broad daylight. It was a bashful swain who failed to take advantage of the custom and the twilight. Or perhaps it got its name from the fact that its outside walls are elaborately decorated with intertwined hearts and initials, deep-carved and grey with age. Do they still live in West Montrose, those youthful lovers who risked their lives to announce to an unconcerned world their first intimations of the divine passion?

But there has been a revolution in transportation during the past century. Those halcyon, horse and buggy days are gone forever. The bicycle flourished at the turning of the century. To-day, the automobile and the motor truck are the accepted means of transportation. To-morrow, we shall fly perhaps into the stratosphere and encircle the globe. Returning, we shall descend in safety and with assurance to the rooftops of our own houses.

Communication

The first settlers in the interior of Upper Canada endured not only the separation from old friends but isolation from their new neighbours. In sparsely-settled outposts they built up a new Dumfries, an Onondaga of the plains, a Bon Accord far from Aberdeen, a Hamburg where no water was. New homes with the old names, for their hearts and their memories were with their friends in the Old Land.

But for memory, the bond between distant friends would have been soon severed. Few letters were written in those times. Many of the settlers were so engrossed with the business of making a living that letter writing had become a lost art. It was an easy matter to make a pen from a goose quill, and a tolerably good ink could be made from the inner bark of the soft maple. But paper, even thick, unruled foolscap, was scarce, and the nearest store was ten or perhaps twenty miles away.

Besides, having written a letter, the settler was confronted with the problem of its delivery. There were no post offices, and letters were passed from hand to hand and from stage coach to canoe. A few post offices were opened in the towns when the people demanded them, but as late as 1827 there were only about a hundred scattered throughout the province.

In the early days it was the receiver of the letter, and not the sender, who paid for its carriage. The rates were exorbitantly high, so high that letters were not always accepted. Roland Hill, an Englishman, who was in the Postal Service, once saw a girl refuse a letter addressed to her. Presuming that she had no money, Hill offered to pay the postage, but the girl declined. She knew that her brother was well, she said, at least well enough to write a letter, and that was all she needed to know. This incident led to the prepayment of postage on letters and to the invention of the postage stamp. These new postal provisions were not introduced into the Canadas until 1851.

When the Government took over the direction of the postal service, rates were greatly reduced. Soon the patronage doubled, trebled. To-day there is a post office in every hamlet, and mail is delivered speedily by railway, by motor car and by aeroplane, and delivered by carriers at the door of every resident, both rural and urban. Because of their incalculable educational and social value, newspapers are delivered, too, at a financial loss to the country.

These were the white man’s methods of communication. The Indians used their own devices. The drifting smoke of a campfire by day and the light of torches by night conveyed intelligences to those who understood the symbols. Sometimes they sent messages by runners, who relayed belts of wampum. A belt of dark purple beads signified death, or murder, or war. Most famous of all Indian runners was John “Smoke” Johnson, a Tuscarora, who lived to the ripe age of ninety-three. He became so efficient that his people made him a Pine Tree Chief, at the suggestion of the British Parliament.

It was not always necessary to send a runner. If the people up the river knew that a beloved Chief lay at death’s door, “Smoke” would steal down to the river with moccasined feet to announce his death. Into the silent night he would emit a weird, blood-curdling cry and the wail would echo and re-echo down the valley. In this way the passing of the great Thayendanegea was reported. Then all the Indians laid aside their hoes and their bows and arrows to prepare for the mourning. From far and near the braves came to the Mohawk Chapel, wrapped in their funeral strouds. In awed silence, they paid their respects to their leader, and bowed in submission to the dispensations of an all-wise Providence.

The discovery of electricity heralded a remarkable advance in long distance communication. Messages were sent from station to station by means of charged wires. At first a separate wire was used for each letter of the alphabet and for each numerical digit, and messages were sent and received by two separate dials at each station. When the transmitting operator pressed a button on the sending dial, a current of electricity moved a magnetic needle to those same letters on the receiving dial, and the receiving operator at the other station was able to spell out the message. This method of sending intelligences afar was called telegraphy.

The system was improved from time to time. The Morse Code, first used in 1844, used dots and dashes as the means of signalling. Later, these signs were indicated by a magnetic needle. A swing in one direction indicated a dot, one in the opposite direction indicated, a dash. Service was greatly accelerated and to-day telegraphy is indispensable in business and private life.

The science of telephony, or the transmission of sound by electric current, is almost as old. Music and even vocal sounds had been transmitted over wires long before the middle of the century. Many an electrician had spent fruitless hours trying to invent a speaking telephone, for it seemed a logical development of the sound telephone. But years went by and the science of transmitting sound by electricity was put to little or no practical value.

In the end, the speaking telephone was invented not by an electrician but by Alexander Graham Bell, a teacher of deaf mutes, who almost despaired of finding the vital secret because he knew so little about electricity. It came to him as the culmination of a profound study of the science of sound. No one before Bell had ever reproduced speech by electricity, and no one since has ever been able to accomplish it by any other means. It was given to a modest teacher to achieve one of the foremost inventions of all time. He overcame the limitations of time and space and brought the distance near.

Scientists say that speech is a mere motion of air. Instead of the air and ether waves on which the human voice is carried in an ordinary, verbal conversation, Bell substituted electrical waves. A voice spoken into the transmitter of a telephone sets up acoustic waves in the air. The transmitting instrument transforms these into electrical waves of the same shape and form as the acoustic by wire to the receiving station and the receiving instrument re-transforms them into acoustic waves and brings them in intelligible form to the ear of the listener.

During the creative years of his life, Alexander Graham Bell’s home was in the environs of Brantford, not far from the Mohawk Church. More than any other man he has brought distinction to Western Ontario and particularly to the city of Brantford.

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Bell enjoyed a normal childhood in the home of a talented family. His grandfather Bell, who lived under the shadow of the great Scottish castle, enjoyed a considerable reputation as an elocutionist—no mere entertainer, but a man who used his art in the detection and correction of defective utterance. He had two sons, and both became teachers of the elements of good enunciation.

The inventor’s father, Alexander Melville Bell, made a valuable contribution to the study of speech arts when he succeeded in reducing all possible sounds to signs, which could be readily interpreted by any one acquainted with these symbols. From this achievement he went on to the invention of a sort of universal alphabet, which could be used to express the sounds of all languages. He became an authority on speech, and in that capacity he was invited to join the Faculty of the University of London.

In London, his three sons grew up in an atmosphere of scientific experimentation, directed particularly to the study of speech and the organs used in speech production. The boys were encouraged to make models of the vocal organs, the lips, the teeth and the throat, and to relate each to the others. Once in the interests of science they killed a cat, “with the assistance of a medical student and a dose of deadly poison.” But when they saw the poor creature writhing in agony, they buried her in horror, without so much as looking at her voicebox. Instead, they performed the experiment with a lamb’s throat from a butcher’s stall.

They loved their dog, but they wondered why an animal of such superior intelligence could not talk. They manipulated the dog’s throat and by dint of much perseverance on the part of the boys and remarkable canine patience, they produced a sound, which they interpreted as: “How are you, grandma?” On every possible occasion they performed this feat, providing infinite amusement for the family and a small circle of intimate friends.

The three lads belonged to a juvenile club organized for the promotion of fine arts among boys. The Bell attic was the meeting place. As Professor of Anatomy, young Alexander Graham Bell frequently brought small animal skeletons to his dissecting table for his scientific demonstrations. On one occasion he acquired a dead suckling pig, and the fact was so well advertised among the boys that there was a record attendance at the next meeting. All went well until the professor began to dissect the animal. The escape of air from the pig’s gullet sounded for all the world like a protesting grunt. The terrified youngsters tumbled down the stairs and ran for safety, the learned “professor” being well in the van.

As the brothers grew into young manhood, all three showed an alarming tendency to tuberculosis. Within a few years the eldest and the youngest had succumbed to the disease. The parents were distracted. What if they should lose their only remaining son, Alexander Graham? He was in his early twenties, a tall, slight lad with large, dark, intelligent eyes, a pensive countenance and a magnetic personality. Was it possible that they must part with him too?

The doctor advised that only by a complete change of climate could they hope to save their son’s life. The father decided at once to abandon his own career and to take his wife and son to Canada. By a strange coincidence he had no sooner planned to do this than he received an invitation by letter from an old friend, a retired Baptist minister, to come and visit him. He lived, he said, in the pretty village of Paris, on the Grand River.

The Bells went to Paris and the change of air proved so beneficial to the patient that they decided to live permanently in Canada. In 1870, they bought a country estate of thirteen acres on Tutela Heights, just south of Brantford. This was at one time the camping place of the Tutela Indians. There was nothing distinctive about the farm house. It was of the commonest white brick, a storey and a half high. A verandah overhung both the front door and the two flanking French windows, and a narrow gable jutted out overhead to accommodate an exceedingly commonplace window.

But nothing could be more charming than the view from Tutela Heights. Brantford in the distance nestled in a circle of verdant hills like an enchanted city in a fairy wonderland. The smoke from its chimneys drifted hither and yon like the gauze of fairies’ veils caught in a summer breeze. It was a sight to feast one’s eyes upon by day and to dream about by night.

A few rods from the back of the house, the property fell away in a steep cliff, and over its brow could be seen, through the treetops of the hillside, a lovely stretch of the Grand River flowing leisurely southward. Soon its waters would pass the historic Mohawk Church. Then it would skirt the borders of Bow Park Farm and linger in the sparsely settled villages of the lower valley. Sluggishly it would wind its way among ponds of wax-like waterlilies and through marshes of bulrushes and lose itself finally in the limpid waters of Lake Erie.

The descent from Tutela Heights to the river was precipitous enough, but there was ample room among the trees on the summit for a few carefully placed rustic seats. And there young Bell found a place to swing a hammock. He loved the spot from the first, and when the weather was fine he lay long hours basking lazily in the sunshine. From his nook he could see both the distant view and the sparkling river. There was music, too, in the rustling of the leaves. He loved to pretend it was the tom-toms of the Tutela Indians, returning in spirit. The very atmosphere seemed hallowed by the Great All Being, whom all Indians revere.

As often as not, young Bell sat staring into space, quite oblivious to the beauty of his surroundings. Could it be that he was listening to secret revelations of the Great Spirit? Did he see with his inner eye revolving cylinders and dilating membranes? Had he visions of electrical waves fluctuating with the inflections of the human voice? Of his innermost thoughts he said little, but his parents knew that his unusual knowledge of sound and vibrations, supplemented as it had been by access to the results of two generations of study of speech production, gave promise of the fulfilment of the unquenchable ambition which burned in his heart—the determination to transmit speech electrically.

For another year Bell was compelled to fight against the most tenacious of all maladies, but gradually he regained his health and was encouraged to hope for a complete recovery.

During his convalescence he undertook to teach his father’s method of “visible speech” to a class of Mohawk deaf mutes. This brought him in close contact with his Indian neighbours. On one occasion he and his father were invited to Chiefswood, the home of Chief Johnson and his English wife. At the dinner table young Bell was asked to say grace in the deaf and dumb language.

Little Pauline Johnson stood beside her mother’s chair watching intently. It was a long invocation spoken not with his voice, but by gestures of fingers, hands and lips. When he had finished Pauline’s eyes were filled with tears.

She was right. He had repeated the Lord’s Prayer in the wonderful deaf mute language, so simple that even a child could understand.

In April, 1871, the elder Bell was able to secure for his son a post with the Boston Board of Education. His duties included the instruction of a class of deaf mutes in his father’s system of visible speech. So sensational was his success that he was offered a chair in vocal philology in Boston University. He consented to become at the same time a private tutor to a mute boy, named George Sanders. It was arranged that he was to live at the boy’s home, commuting to Boston daily for his lectures at the University.

Bell’s heart was not in the halls of learning. He yearned for a laboratory, and hoped to find in experimentation the realization of his dreams. Soon he obtained permission to fit up the cellar of the Sanders home as a workshop. In a month’s time he had filled it with batteries, coils, cells and tuning forks. He was on the high road to the intensive study of electricity and its adaptation to speech transmission.

His laboratory work became so fascinating that he decided to give up his university work and devote himself to young Sanders. However, he spent most of his time in the cellar and the boy’s father, disappointed in some of Bell’s findings, finally withdrew his patronage and financial support. Then Bell moved his apparatus to Boston and found a companion in Thomas Watson, an expert electrician.

Bell spent the summer of 1874 at Tutela Heights with his parents. In their favourite rendezvous overlooking the river father and son sat by the hour discussing the young man’s problems and ambitions. One day the son uttered a sentence which he himself declared later was his first revelation of the theory of a continuous undulating current, the fundamental principle of telephony. “If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity as the air varies in density during the production of sound,” he said, meditatively, “I could transmit speech by wire.” This was, he often said, his first real conception of the telephone.

Back again in Boston, he and Watson worked night and day experimenting with this new idea. Their equipment was primitive enough. On Bell’s desk was an old cigar box, two hundred feet of ordinary wire and a magnet purloined from a toy fish pond. Watson’s desk in an adjoining room was equipped with a similar set of apparatus.

The two young men were sitting one day at their respective desks when Bell heard a faint, unexpected twang in his instruments. Rushing excitedly to Watson’s desk, he tried to discover what had caused it. There was no illuminating explanation. The sound had not been produced by intention. Disappointed yet strangely encouraged, the young men continued their experiments with diaphragms, using currents of varying strength and circuits in every conceivable way. But the instruments only wheezed and grunted.

Success came at last, on the tenth of March, 1876, when in their little attic workshop, the first word was spoken and understood over the telephone. But Bell knew that he had passed only the first milestone on the road which was to lead to the perfection of his invention.

He went to Tutela Heights that summer with a light heart. In that quiet countryside, free from the restraints of the big city, he would be able to introduce into his experiments the element of distance. He bought quantities of stove-pipe wire and began to tack it up along his neighbours’ fences. Chief Johnson helped him on more than one occasion. He half-believed Bell when he said the time was coming when he would talk over those very wires all the way from Paris to Tutela Heights. But many a farmer smiled knowingly as he tapped his head. Young Bell was surely going daft.

On August 10, 1876, the Bells made an important announcement to their incredulous neighbours. At long last they had been able to transmit speech over the wires which the young man had taken the liberty of tacking up on their fences in their back lanes. From a transmitting station on Tutela Heights the father had recited Shakespeare’s immortal soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” and the son had heard and understood every word of it at a receiving station in Paris, four miles away. This was the first clear, intelligible transmission of speech by wire, although as yet it was only a one-way transmission. On his return to Boston, Bell and Watson continued their experiments until they were able to carry on the first reciprocal conversation over the telephone.

As early as 1875, before ever speech had actually been heard over the wires, Bell had enough confidence in his invention to patent it in the United States. This cost him a hundred thousand dollars, a sum quite beyond the means of his own family and his circle of friends in the vicinity of Brantford. Fortunately, he got financial backing from some of the moneyed fathers of students at the University of Boston. Mr. Sanders came to his assistance, and a certain Mr. Hubbard, whose fifteen-year-old daughter, Mabel, had speech difficulties, which Bell was able to correct, offered him not only money but the weight of his influence.

It was through Mr. Hubbard that Bell was able to show his invention at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, in 1876. But when he brought his apparatus to prepare his display, he found that the booth assigned to him was so poorly situated that there was no possibility of displaying his invention satisfactorily. The judges would have overlooked him entirely, had not Don Pedro, Emperor of Brazil, and chief guest of the Centennial, recognized a familiar face.

“How are you, Mr. Bell?” he exclaimed. “And how are the deaf mutes of Boston?” Don Pedro had not forgotten a conversation he had had with a young Boston professor about the education of the deaf and dumb.

The judges went to the obscure booth and listened to the young man’s explanation of his invention. Bell spoke into the transmitter and the judges took turns at the receiver. Most amazing! They heard him distinctly over five hundred feet of electrified wire.

“It does talk,” said Lord Kelvin, of Glasgow, the world’s greatest electrical scientist of the day. “This is the most remarkable thing I have seen in America.”

Bell received the Exhibition’s highest award, but for all that he found great difficulty when he tried to sell the idea of the telephone to the general public. They thought of it as a scientific toy, a mere plaything of no commercial value. Mr. Hubbard then became its champion, carrying an outfit with him in a suitcase and talking about it on every possible occasion. Still, the telephone was not taken seriously until Bell and Watson demonstrated its possibilities in the business world by carrying on a three-hour conversation between Boston and Cambridge Observatory in the presence of many prejudiced and some openly hostile witnesses.

After that Bell was besieged with requests for lectures and demonstrations. This was good advertising, and the telephone became so popular that within sixteen months there were nearly eight hundred in daily use.

Bell’s patent was not allowed to stand unchallenged. Rival inventors hoped to share in the glory and the profit of the invention. With stocks rising by leaps and bounds on the exchange, Bell had to fight in the courts as many as six hundred lawsuits which had to do in one way or another with his invention. Finally, the Supreme Court of the United States announced its definite decision that Alexander Graham Bell, and he alone, was the inventor of the first real telephone.

In 1882, at thirty-five years of age, Bell surprised the world by retiring from the telephone business. He transferred his enormously valuable stocks to his bride, the former Mabel Hubbard, and took her on a wedding-trip to England. On his return, he devoted himself once more to the teaching of deaf mutes.

Unlike most inventors, Bell lived for forty years to enjoy the honours and the emoluments of his invention. In his prime, he was one of the most picturesque and colourful personalities in the public life of his adopted country. But he was always very humble. “I cannot claim what is known as the modern telephone,” he used to say. “It is the product of many, many minds. All I did was to initiate the movement of the transmission of speech by electricity.”

Other interests engaged Bell’s active mind in his later years. He devoted much of his time to the enterprises of the National Geographic Society and the Smithsonian Institution and to many other worthy scientific organizations. He donated the fifty thousand francs, which the French Academy had bestowed upon him in recognition of his great discovery, to the foundation of a Bureau for the study of problems involved in the education of deaf mutes.

Bell had his own rather unique ideas about social entertainment. He disliked formality, and avoided public ceremonies as he would a pest. But every Wednesday evening, while he lived in Washington, he invited the most outstanding scientists in the nation’s capital to spend a few hours at his home. He took delight in planning an interesting, informal programme, covering in turn every field of research and exploration in which his guests were interested. The men looked forward to these meetings, always entered enthusiastically into the spirit of the occasion and were willing to explain any new developments which they had observed in their own highly specialized fields of science.

One evening, for some unaccountable reason, the conversation began to lag. But Bell upheld his reputation as host by asking suddenly how many of his guests had ever been arrested. The fifteen men in the room were all of the most impeccable social standing, as well as scientific reputation. When eleven of them raised their hands, all constraint faded away and the culprits related story after story of their experience in police court.

Each one of them positively exulted in the enormity of his crime. One was apprehended on a Canadian border as an escaping embezzler. Another was caught red-handed trying to get through a toll gate without paying the fee. A third was handcuffed on a charge of bank robbery. Each story brought forth a round of applause, as confessions were made of the most diabolical misdemeanours. The evening was all too short, the men declared. Never before had they experienced a meeting so utterly unscientific and so absorbingly interesting.

Bell spent the summers of his later years—and half of his winters—in his maritime residence on Cape Breton Island, in Nova Scotia. With him came his wife, his two daughters and their growing families and his own aged parents, who had lived under his roof since 1881. The house stood half way up the wooded mountain-side at Red Point, overlooking the entrancingly beautiful village of Baddeck. It is a magnificent view. White gypsum cliffs overhung with dark green spruces are reflected in the quiet, land-locked Bras d’Or Lakes and look where you will, the slopes are dotted with tiny, picturesque cottages. In the distance, green and brown alternate in vivid patches of meadowland.

All the world goes to Baddeck to see Beinn Bhreagh, Bell’s lovely mountain, to fish in the lakes of the Margaree Valley or to paint the matchless scenery of Beauty’s Isle. Every normal year thousands of tourists pass through the village on their way to the Cabot Trail, which winds its precarious way through Cape Breton’s superb Highlands National Park.

In this bit of New Scotland, where Gaelic is the language of the village streets, the inventor of the telephone chose to spend his years of retirement. But not in idleness. He took up the intensive study of aeronautics and surrounded himself with scientists, young men, for the most part, because he believed in the contagion of youth.

Once more he built a laboratory, which he called his museum, and he experimented with indifferent success on collapsible boats, man-lifting kites and aerial propellers. For the second time in his life, he maltreated a cat, throwing her from a great height so that, in the interests of aviation, he might observe how she would turn before landing on her feet.

Never in those happy Baddeck days did the Bells forget Brantford and Tutela Heights. They often spoke of their life in Paris and Brantford and of their Mohawk friends. They treasured as sacred the memories of the old home on Tutela Heights, the hammock on the edge of the cliff and the Grand River flowing placidly below. These were scenes that they could not hope to see again with human eyes, but they would hang on memory’s wall forever.

It came as something of a surprise to Alexander Graham Bell when, in 1906, he received a cordial invitation to be the guest of the Brantford Board of Trade. There was no declining that opportunity to meet old friends and to revisit the scenes of his young manhood. Certainly he would go.

The people of Brantford took their distinguished guest to their hearts. He was one of them again. The evening banquet given in his honour was a memorable event. His audience taxed the capacity of the hall. He had been looking carefully over the history of the telephone, he said, to discover just what had been achieved in Brantford and what in Boston. He recalled that Sunday afternoon, in 1874, when he lay in his hammock on Tutela Heights, discussing with his father his problems and his ambitions. It was then and there that he stumbled upon the fundamental principle of telephony. “I am prepared to state,” he continued, “that Brantford is right in claiming the invention of the telephone here.”

Facetiously, he reminded some of his audience of the fears they had entertained for his sanity when he began to tack up wires on the fences of the farmers’ lanes. It was over those wires that the first intelligible words were carried. At that time messages could be sent only one way. The first reciprocal conversation over the telephone was made, later, in Boston.

This occasion was all that was needed to inspire the organization and incorporation of the Bell Telephone Memorial Association. It had a dual purpose, to commemorate the invention of the telephone and to perpetuate the name of the inventor. There was an immediate and a generous response when it was proposed to erect a suitable monument in Brantford. An invitation was extended to the most eminent sculptors of Europe and America to submit models of proposed memorials. Nine artists entered the competition. W. S. Allward, of Toronto, was declared the winner, since his model was unquestionably the most generally approved.

Allward’s conception was entirely unique. Using stone as a medium, he has erected a superb piece of statuary. No towering granite shaft topped with a bronze bust of the great inventor. Nothing so commonplace. This monument commemorates an invention rather than the inventor. Its great width signifies time and space. At both the extreme right and the extreme left of the structure stand female figures. One is sending, the other receiving, a message. The central area is an immense, single-piece, bronze casting secured in a granite background. It portrays the recumbent figure of a man attended by four females. One, Inspiration, suggests the message to be sent, the other three, Knowledge, Joy and Sorrow, bear it afar. The inscription reads:

“To commemorate the Invention of the Telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, in Brantford, in 1874.”

This unusual monument is admirably located in a gore formed by three residential streets. It is approached by a series of granite steps and surrounded by a well-landscaped plot known as the Bell Memorial Gardens. The monument and its environment are unparalleled on the continent in point of originality and appropriateness.

Fortunately, the Bell Telephone Memorial Association was able to secure at the same time the Bell homestead on Tutela Heights. It has been placed under the supervision of the Parks Board of the city of Brantford, with a resident caretaker in charge. Throughout the year thousands of tourists come to see the old Bell furniture in the quaint, old parlour of the past century and to examine the exhibits in the museum, which show the chronological development of one of the world’s greatest inventions.

Alexander Graham Bell came again to Brantford to witness the unveiling of the memorial. On that occasion he had the honour of presenting a handsome, silver telephone to His Excellency, the Duke of Devonshire, Governor-General of Canada, who officiated at the ceremony.

That was Bell’s last visit to Brantford. One August day, in 1922, wires around the world flashed the news of the passing of the great inventor. He was at Beinn Bhreagh when the summons came. Loving hands buried his body at sunset on the summit of his mountain. Below were the lovely Bras d’Or Lakes. For sixty seconds during the reading of the funeral service the wires of the continent were silenced in tribute to the man who had enriched the human race by his conquest of time and space.

Three nations claim the inventor and a share in the glory of the invention: Britain, for he was born and reared in the British Isles; the United States, by the right of legal citizenship, his patents and the perfection of his invention, and Canada, the scene of his early inspiration and triumphs and the soil of his last resting-place.

But Alexander Graham Bell belongs to no single country. He is as international and as universal as his marvellous invention. In a very real sense he has become a citizen of the world.

River Control

Despite the rather disparaging remarks of Galinée, of old time, the Grand is a river of some importance. It is approximately a hundred and eighty miles long, the longest and the largest of a dozen sizeable rivers in Southern Ontario. Besides, it is one of the most rapid to be found in the interior. Its tributaries are in themselves rivers of no little consequence, the Irvine, the Speed, and the Nith, and especially the Conestoga, which is famed for the swiftness of its current and the beauty of its borders.

The valley of the Grand River and its subsidiaries lies in the heart of the south-western section of the province. Its area is more than twenty-six hundred square miles and its soil is, on the average, phenomenally fertile. The river-basin is assessed, roughly, at two hundred million dollars. The present population of about three hundred thousand will probably be doubled within a few years, for the development, especially in the urban centres, is very marked. There is room, however, and natural resources, to support millions.

The Grand River has its source in a quarter-million acre, swampy elevation, the northern fringe of which is only about twenty-five miles from Georgian Bay. From this plateau spring many other Ontario rivers, the Nottawasaga, the Beaver and the Mad, which flow into Georgian Bay, the Saugeen, and the Maitland, which run westward into Lake Huron, and the Credit, which empties into Lake Ontario. The Grand alone finds its outlet in Lake Erie, a long, long way from its source.

An enormous bog extends through the adjoining townships of Luther and Melancthon. It is often called the Luther Swamp. These names, so reminiscent of the Protestant Reformation, are said to have been assigned by a Roman Catholic whose ire was aroused when he was surveying the swamp. Luther and Melancthon, he said, were the names of the worst men in history. It was appropriate that they should be given to the worst swamp he had ever seen.

The precise location of the source of the Grand is a matter for disputation, even in the north country. At least three fountain heads are claimed for it in the Dundalk-Corbetton area, and each shifts slightly with the seasons. There are periods when one or another of them ceases temporarily to flow. The old-timer was probably not far from the truth when he volunteered the information: “There is no real source. It just bubbles up where it takes the notion.”

Between Dundalk and Corbetton the waters of these several and indefinable springs converge to form a rivulet, which ripples and prattles on its way like a care-free child, following always the line of least resistance. Presently it finds itself more or less restrained in a riverbed, which may have been created, scientists say, by melting glaciers in some prehistoric era. It dances on its way, with all the abandonment of youth, past isolated farm houses and through pleasing hamlets. Mile by mile, it increases in volume and in momentum. Somewhere along its course it reaches the stature of a river.

The riverbed suddenly narrows in the Fergus-Elora region into a deep, limestone channel. Indignant at these restraints the river lashes itself about, foaming with fury. Then the narrow channel broadens unexpectedly into open, flat country, and the river becomes quiet and tractable. It offers itself in willing service to man, revolving the wheels of industry. Little more than halfway down its course its strength is spent. It becomes unwieldy, corpulent, like an old man in his dotage. And then, full of days, it loses itself in the volume of many waters.

The men who settled in the Luther Swamp arrived too late to secure the most arable land and had to be content with what was left. Inexperienced farmers as they were, for the most part, they found themselves confronted with tasks designed for supermen. The most persistent roots of tamarack and cedar trees had preempted the space which the farmers needed to grow their corn and potatoes. The seeds which they did manage to plant rotted before they had sprouted. The settlers soon realized that what they in their ignorance had bought for farmlands was a veritable bog of such consistency that one had only to jiggle it at any time, anywhere, to experience a mild earthquake.

As a makeshift occupation, the settlers then turned to lumbering. Tamarack and hemlock were saleable and not too difficult to cut. Sawmills were few and utterly inadequate.

In the middle sixties interested onlookers sympathized with these unfortunate people and made representations to the government on their behalf. Soon, hundreds of experienced lumbermen were imported from French Canada to fell the trees and square the timbers. All winter long they cut and sawed pine logs. In the spring they floated them downstream to Galt, and there they were loaded on trains and shipped to builders in Toronto. The waterfall at Elora offered no serious difficulty, for the Frenchmen rode it by chute. Usually the ordeal evoked much merriment, but occasionally a silent wooden horse would throw its obstreperous rider into a watery grave and the laughter subsided for that day.

Thousands of logs were taken out of the swampland every year, not only on the Grand River but on the Irvine and the Conestoga, for these rivers, too, had their headwaters in the Luther Swamp. The deforestation of the land in no way increased the agricultural properties of the soil, but every cord of wood cut aggravated flood conditions in the spring. The surplus waters which used to lie for months in the swamp, because they were retarded by roots, were now free to rush unrestrained down the valley.

Destruction of property was calamitous. Every year the losses through floods ran into thousands of dollars. Fences and trees and outhouses ran races down the river. Bridges were ripped from their moorings. Sometimes a too-venturesome child was caught by the current and hurled into the conglomerate mass of filthy debris on its way to the south.

As soon as the spring floods were over the people bemoaned their losses and enquired petulantly about the cause of the floods. No intelligible explanation offered. As soon as the waters had begun to subside, and the danger was past for another year, the people settled down again to their normal activities and forgot all about the floods.

The people of the swamplands scarcely realized what inconvenience their surplus water was causing the settlers down the river. They were concerned about their own crops. They dug huge trenches and tried to divert the water into the Grand, the Irvine, and the Conestoga. When they failed, they appealed to the government for help. Next spring, surveyors and drainage-engineers, the best the country had, flocked into the swamplands with enormous dredges. They dug deep, unsightly ditches and diverted a great volume of water down the river and its tributaries. But the more they drained away, the more inexhaustible were the floods. After 1890 the situation became increasingly alarming.

It began to be apparent that the floods were doing irreparable damage to the river itself. The spring floods were invariably followed by a season of slack water, or a summer drought, and only in the event of a torrential rain did the river rise again to its normal level.

This deplorable condition was accentuated by a tremendous increase in the industrial and domestic sewerage, which was being dumped into the river from the industrial towns in the valley. These impurities might have been overcome if there had been a normal flow of water during the summer months, for it is a scientific fact that when polluted water is allowed to tumble over rocks in sunshine, wind and rain, it will purify itself. But the river was sluggish and the pollution was retained. At low water it became an “ineffectual, malodorous sewer.”

Soon, fears were entertained for sanitation and the health of the public. Experts gave solemn warning that should the artesian wells in the Grand valley fail at any time in the future, the people would have to depend upon the river and its foul waters for domestic use.

William H. Breithaupt, of Berlin, a civil engineer of considerable reputation, was among the first to realize that a crisis was developing on the Grand River. For years he had been making a thorough study of the problem, having tramped every inch of the course of the river to verify his conclusions. By 1905, he was ready to speak his mind on the subject. He declared that several serious and inexcusable blunders had been perpetuated in the northland. The government had “ignorantly aided and abetted in tagging a noble river with a bad name.” Any reputable Waterloo County farmer could have informed the authorities in Toronto that Providence never intended the Luther Swamp to be partitioned into farms for cultivation. It was a huge bowl of impervious clay, designed as a natural reservoir, to be a perennial and everlasting blessing to the people of the valley. The first mistake was the removal of trees from the swamp; the second was the digging of ditches to drain off the standing water. Inexcusable blunders, both of them, and almost irreparable.

He advocated a policy of a right-about-face. It might still be possible to salvage the reservoir. But immediate steps must be taken to stop the spring floods and to conserve the water in the swamp. There was no honourable alternative, he thought, but to restore the beauty and the utility of the river “for the people who had played so laudable a part in the early development of the province.”

He suggested that huge man-made storage reservoirs should be constructed without delay in the northern reaches of the river. These would serve a dual purpose, the retarding of spring floods and the stimulating of the flow in the summer, when the river was at its ebb. The project would involve the employment of expert engineers and the expenditure of a great deal of money. But cost what it might, it was imperative to restore what had been so ruthlessly and so wantonly destroyed.

Next spring when the floods threatened, and many a subsequent spring, men stood on the street corners of the towns of the valley discussing the Breithaupt proposal. He was right, most of them thought. Reservoirs must be built. But as soon as the waters subsided they transferred their enthusiasm to the more immediate problems which they encountered in the daily round and the common task.

The spring floods of 1912 and 1913 were diabolically uncontrollable. Fergus and Elora were protected by the deep-cut, rocky banks of the river in that vicinity and Waterloo and Berlin were too remote from the river to be in any imminent danger. But Preston and Galt, Paris and Brantford felt the full impact of the swirling waters. Excited citizens threw up improvised levees and hastily constructed barriers of wood and stone, only to see them swept away like cobwebs before a housewife’s broom. The angry waters flooded the main streets with their filth, and seeped into cellars. There was a frightful stench and endless distress. Property was lost and lives were endangered.

At last the municipalities were thoroughly aroused. No sooner had the 1913 flood spent its fury than they besought the government to give them assurances of relief from the recurrence of devastating floods in future years. The government turned the problem over to the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, and laid at its door the responsibility of investigating the situation and presenting its report at the earliest possible date. The people were hopeful remembering the success of this Commission in obtaining hydro power.

The Commission’s engineer was entrusted with the work. After investigation, he reported that in his opinion it would be necessary to construct three large reservoirs on the river south of Elora. The government tabled the report. The people forgot about the river until they saw with horror the rising floods of another springtime. In frenzied haste and at great expense they built levees, which the swollen river snapped like kindling wood and carried off to an unknown destiny, together with an assortment of bridges, driving sheds, cackling chickens and bellowing cattle from up the river.

The year 1929 was memorable because of the crash of the stock market. But the dwellers in the Grand valley will always think of it as the year of the great flood. A hundred thousand dollars went down the river, and the anxiety and suffering occasioned by the disasters were past reckoning. The business areas of Brantford and the low-lying regions of Paris were completely inundated. For several days Galt was a New World Venice, with improvised gondolas engaged in rescuing shrieking women and sobbing children from second-storey windows of beleaguered houses. The most popular men in town were those who possessed a pair of long rubber boots.

The government was confronted with a storm of indignant protest. They had betrayed the people of the valley. Was it to no purpose that Gordon Cockshutt, of Brantford, President of the Grand River Valley Boards of Trade, had repeatedly urged the government to protect them against their annual visitation? Again and again they had demanded control of the flood menace in the spring and the maintenance of an adequate flow of water throughout the summer. But nothing—absolutely nothing—had been done.

So insistent were the demands of the people that the government did not dare to disregard them any longer. The Minister of Mines and Forests, Hon. William Finlayson, was detailed forthwith to study the problem and to make suggestions. Finlayson turned the matter over to Dr. T. H. Hogg, chief hydraulic engineer of the Hydro-Electric Commission, and L. V. Rorke, Surveyor-General of Canada. He charged them jointly to investigate the problem of the control of the Grand River in summer as well as in spring.

He could not have chosen men better qualified to do the work. In February, 1932, they submitted a most comprehensive report, replete with diagrams. They recommended that three storage dams and reservoirs be built in the upper reaches of the Grand River, one at Elora, another at Waldemar, farther north, and the third in the Luther Swamp. If perfect control was desired, it would be necessary to build two additional dams on the Conestoga River. Their plan was to equip the reservoirs to store huge quantities of water when the river was high and to release it gradually during the summer, as it might be needed to regulate the normal flow.

The government was ready now to act. Within a month after the receipt of the report it named William Philip to be chairman of a Grand River Commission, the members of which were to comprise representatives from the municipalities which expressed a willingness to cooperate with the government. These men were expected to become conversant with the situation, so as to be in a position to sell the idea to the people. If the project were to be a success it must have popular support, but no municipality was to be unduly urged to give its sanction without the approval of its citizens.

The charter was granted in 1934, but the work did not begin at once. The people realized that the undertaking was too costly, too stupendous and above all, too experimental to be attempted without extreme caution. They must have time to think. The promoters feared and trembled, for an election was pending. All their work might be undone if there happened to be a change of government. Fortunately, the new premier, Hon. Mitchell Hepburn, and his Minister of Public Works, Hon. Colin Campbell, gave their unqualified approval to the scheme.

Nothing was done, however. In 1936, a summer drought reduced the river to little more than a trickle in some places and dried up the wells in the rural communities. This was all that was needed to convince the government and to remind the people that river control was as essential in the summer as it was in spring. A lot of hard thinking was being done both in parliament and out.

During the next winter a solid mass of ice had piled up two miles above Fergus. Hugh Templin, the local editor, went out camera in hand, to photograph the phenomenon for his paper. Instantly he was struck with the enormous storage capacity of the region. It was much greater, he believed, than the proposed site for the first dam, which was to be constructed at Waldemar. He told the Commission that he had found an ideal site.

Although the spring floods of 1937 were the worst that had ever been experienced in the valley, it was thought unwise to do any more work on the project until Templin’s suggestion had been fully investigated and comparisons made on the sites already under consideration. Then followed a year of experimentation with surveys and diamond drilling. At last Dr. Acres came to the conclusion that the originally-planned, five-dam enterprise could be reduced to a three-dam proposition. Moreover, the erection of two of these, the one in the Luther Swamp and the one at Hollen, on the Conestoga, could be deferred to some future date. The third was an urgent necessity. He suggested that it be built in the locality suggested by Templin, three miles above Fergus, but in much larger proportions than anything previously contemplated. It might cost, he thought, as much as two million dollars. It was cheap at that, for the cost of the erection and maintenance of the three dams would be considerably less than that of the five dams of the original commitment.

In 1938, Parliament notified the Commission that the Federal and Provincial Governments had agreed to share equally in seventy-five per cent. of the cost of the project. If the municipalities interested were willing to be responsible for the remaining twenty-five per cent. of the cost, as apportioned by the Commission, the construction of the big dam at Fergus need not be further delayed. The municipalities consented to this arrangement, with the proviso that eighty-five per cent. of the labour should be distributed among their citizens.

No sooner had the announcement been made of the size and the location of the dam than there were repercussions in the village of Belwood. The dam itself was too remote to cause the people any real concern. But the rumour that it was proposed to back up forty-six thousand acre feet of water in a lake seven miles long and a mile and a half wide caused an uproar of protest. It would ruin their village and destroy their property. Two thousand acres of land in Garafraxa would be under water, at least periodically. Homes and mills would have to be demolished, or moved to higher ground. Through no fault of their own, their village would be destroyed. It would never be the same again.

Exaggerations and groundless surmises added fuel to the general alarm and resentment. There was a blaze of passion when the Commission sent evaluators into the village to expropriate certain properties which were to be wrecked. A few were allowed to move their houses to the top of the hill, and to rebuild them on new foundations. Many contested vehemently the evaluation of their properties. Others shook the village dust from their feet and moved elsewhere. The village library was hoisted to higher ground, but the chopping-mill went upstream to Grand Valley.

More than anything else, the people resented the lake, which the Commission was determined to leave, like an unwanted waif, on their doorstep. It was not a genuine, God-created lake, but a diabolical contraption, brought into being by the big-city engineers and labourers down the river. No honest-to-goodness lake would shrink or expand as this one would, according to reports, by the mere pulling of a lever. There was something eerie about that.

In an effort to appease the people of Belwood, the Commission had painted the future of the village in rosy colours. Along the hundred miles of shore line would rise rows of gay cottages. New people would come to live there, to enjoy the water facilities, to skate, perhaps, in winter. That would mean new interests, new business.

But the villagers had conjured up a different picture. They saw the place overrun with scantily-clothed tourists, ice cream booths, hot-dog stands and slot machines. A dance-floor, too, with a juke-box filling the midnight air with cheap music. The people of Belwood held these things in horror. Development, indeed! It was the cities that would benefit by the new project. Belwood would have to put up with the annoyance, the noise and inconvenience.

The work went on in spite of the imprecations of the village folk. By August, 1939, the Commission was in possession of farm property valued at $300,000. Tenders had been called for, and, engineers connected with construction firms from far and near had come into the locality to test the soil and the rock and to estimate costs.

Dr. H. G. Acres, of Niagara Falls, who had designed the dam, was commissioned to choose the contractor and to be wholly responsible for the erection of the dam. In July, 1939, the first sod was turned. The river was diverted from its course, the riverbed was exposed and sticks of dynamite were planted over a large area to be used for the dislodgement of any unsound rock. A concrete foundation was then laid and presently one end of the superstructure began to rise in the form of a huge, white wall. The work continued so satisfactorily during the summer months that the spring floods of 1940 were retarded appreciably. There was every indication that the dam would be completed, on schedule, on the last day of November, that same year.

Then Dr. Acres ran into serious difficulty. The estimates provided for the rerouting of four miles of rail belonging to the Canadian Pacific Railway along higher ground and also for the replacement of the old railway bridge across the river by a new structure of greater elevation. The Commission discovered that the railway was not paying its way and considered this fact sufficient reason for striking the costly bridge from the estimates.

This led to legal complications. The Canadian Pacific Railway was willing to settle the matter out of court, but the people in the little villages which the railway served pressed for legal action. They protested that the withdrawal of railway facilities would bring them isolation and ruin. The judge sustained the claim and ordered the Commission to build the railway bridge in accordance with the terms of the contract.

The Commission proceeded to carry out the order of the court. But the workmen soon discovered that the rock on which the old bridge had stood was not of the quality required to support a structure such as the plans called for. There was a good deal of hard feeling over the matter, but a general agreement was reached, in September, 1941, when the Commission promised to build the railway over the spillway of the dam itself. Work was then resumed and brought finally to a conclusion. In March, 1942, William Philip, Chairman of the Commission, drove the last spike in time to retard the spring floods, and in August of that same year, Premier Hepburn opened the dam officially in the presence of a great concourse of interested people.

Those who had not seen the dam in the process of construction were amazed at its size and its magnificence. It stretches more than two thousand feet east and west across the valley and rises to a height of seventy-five feet above the riverbed. The spillway is a hundred-and-fifty-foot stretch of massive concrete equipped with four steel gates, each thirty feet square. On each side of the bridge stands a control house, one equipped to operate the gates by electricity, or by a gasoline-driven generator, in case of emergency, the other leading to three control rooms situated in a tunnel under the dam. The bridge overhead is twenty-four feet wide.

In comparison with the great Boulder Dam, of Colorado, and the Roosevelt Dam, in the Salt River in Nevada, the Grand Valley Dam is rather insignificant, but it is eminently important that it is the first structure of its kind to be erected in Canada. It will prove of immense value not only to the people of the valley but to the river itself for it revives the hope that the Grand will be the magnificent river it was in days of long ago.

Certain benefits have accrued to the village of Belwood to compensate it for its losses. It roads and sidewalks have been rebuilt, a new bridge, longer and wider than the old one, was built at no cost to the ratepayers, and a new athletic park has replaced the one which was swallowed up in the waters of the enchanted lake.

No name was given officially to either dam or lake until long after the formal opening. Off the record, the name Shand Dam was used during the construction period, because of its proximity to a school by that name. But since the Shand Family, for whom the school was named, no longer lives in the vicinity nor had anyone by that name ever had any connection with the project, the name lacked significance, when applied to the dam. The Kitchener Board of Trade offered prizes for suitable names for dam and lake, the members of the Commission to be the judges. The names chosen were Grand Valley Dam and Belwood Lake.

The members of the Commission were prodigal of their time whenever the success and the popularity of the project were at stake. This was especially true of the indefatigable Commissioner from Fergus. At great inconvenience to himself, Hugh Templin was always ready to conduct visitors to the dam and to explain in detail the intricacies of the project.

On one occasion he had an audience of women from a distant city. What they lacked in understanding they made up for in appreciation.

Templin beamed his satisfaction. “Would you mind telling me what impressed you most?” he made bold to enquire. “Was it the size of the dam, or perhaps its cost?”

“Neither,” replied the lady. “It’s the way you say: ‘We have changed the course of the river and we are moving that hill a mile to the north. This ground beneath our feet is to be the bed of a lake.’ I always thought that only God talked like that.”

The proposed Luther Dam in the Marsh, at the headlands of the river, will be a much less pretentious structure, costing only about $100,000. A site near Hollen, on the Conestoga, has been surveyed and it is probable that a dam will be built north of Glen Allen within the next two or three years.

The Fruits of Leisure

It has been divinely ordained that by the sweat of his brow shall man eat bread. In pioneer days man bent his back to his burden and gave heed to the materialistic and utilitarian aspects of life. Even in modern times, most men work their way through life under compulsion, mere automatons, cogs in the wheels of the industrial, agricultural and administrative life of the day.

But there comes a respite hour in life when man casts aside the badge of his trade, his overalls, his typewriter, his plough, and gives expression to his true self by doing what he loves to do. It is this margin of leisure that gives zest and beauty to life.

Some are fortunate enough to explore and find new avenues of industry in the wise use of leisure and in the cultivation of hobbies. Judge Helen Kinnear, of Cayuga, pioneered her way into the legal courts of the land. Dr. Abraham Groves, of Fergus, made a life work of his hobby. His book, All in a Day’s Work, is his case-book in pioneer surgery. In that same northern town, Mrs. Clementina Fessenden lived at St. James’ Rectory for five or six years during the seventies. She is described as a “fascinating chatterbox,” yet she gave to her country the inestimable gift of Empire Day and reared a son to be an expert in the field of electrical engineering. For years he was the only member of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario who had any technical knowledge of the transmission of power by electricity.

Fortunate, too, were the women of the Six Nations Indians in the development of their talents in leisure time. Educated in the school of the woods and with no equipment but the fingers of their own hands, they learned how to weave beauty in colour and design into the warp and woof of everyday living. Seeds and porcupine quills adorn their footwear. Do they need dyes, they find the colours of the rainbow in the vegetation of their own countryside. Through generations of practice they have become expert craft workers, doing much with little, and they never waste. The music of their religious festivals is unique. A. T. Cringan, a Toronto musician, fearing lest their oral tribal incantations should be lost, recorded a hundred or more of the most characteristic of the songs for use on a gramophone.

Most of the white pioneers of the province had a background of refinement seldom found in immigrants of the first generation. The Loyalists came to our shores ragged and empty-handed, but they had once lived in comfortable, even luxurious homes and had breathed the atmosphere of privilege and opportunity. Many of them held degrees in law, in medicine and in theology from Harvard and other New England universities. These were the men who had the heart and the moral stamina to prohibit by Act of Parliament, in 1791, the enslavement of negroes. This was the first legislation of its kind in the British Empire, and it was not until 1861, and then only at the conclusion of a bloody civil war, that anti-slavery laws were enacted in the United States.

The settlers from the British Isles and from Middle Europe were by no means the outcasts of the nations. Crushed by religious and economic persecutions, in the homeland, they relinquished home and possessions, clung only to freedom and crossed an ocean to find it. The Scottish immigrants, especially, were people of broad education and refined tastes. Dickson, Galt, Fergusson and Elmslie encouraged only superior men to migrate to Upper Canada, for they knew that only the strong in body and mind and in morals and religion could endure the stress and strain of pioneer life and build a healthy, virile nation.

When these settlers came to Upper Canada they found little time and few facilities for the cultivation of beauty and refinement in their lives. If they would live at all, they must work from dawn till dark clearing the land, erecting buildings, planting, cultivating and harvesting their crops. An occasional barn-raising broke the monotony of their existence, a threshing, perhaps, or a husking bee. But there were no books, no schools and often no stimulating companionships.

Sir John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of the province, craved for his people a more abundant life. He knew that religion and education are the true cornerstones essential to the cultural development of the young colony. With this in mind he planned to build and maintain a grammar, or secondary school for boys in each of the four districts of Upper Canada. These were to be patterned on Eton and Cambridge and, like them, they were to be under the control of the Church of England. In addition to the grammar schools at Cornwall, Kingston, Niagara, and Sandwich, he contemplated a university, at York, for students of pronounced ability in the secondary schools. Unfortunately Simcoe was recalled too soon to see his plans materialize. Fully ten years elapsed before the grammar schools were built and nearly fifty years passed before a university was established.

Nor were there any recognized elementary schools in those days. Parents who wished to have their young children instructed in “the three R’s,” co-operated with other parents of like mind to build and maintain a school-house. The available teachers were usually men who had failed signally in other walks of life. Once a teacher, these ne’er-do-wells were assured of a living, for they boarded around among the homes of their pupils and were able to augment their meagre incomes by revenues from the performance of household tasks and barnyard chores.

These early, unofficial schools were buildings of a few pretentions, usually small, rectangular log cabins. The chinks in the walls were filled with clay and the rafters were depositories for soot and cobwebs. The children sat on backless benches at desks which lined the walls. Ventilation was poor. There were no blackboards, no maps, no illustrative material of any kind. Most of the text books were published in Detroit, or in Buffalo, and too often the sentiments expressed were not intended to inculcate patriotism in the minds of British children.

So fared education in Upper Canada when, on the last day of 1799, John Strachan arrived in Kingston expecting to take over the Presidency of a university. This position, it seems, had been offered to him by Hon. Richard Cartwright and Hon. Robert Hamilton in the name of the Governor, and with his permission. But there was no university in Upper Canada, nor was there any likelihood that there could be one for many a year. Cartwright immediately invited young Strachan to join his household as tutor to his own and the Hamilton boys and Strachan accepted the post. At Kingston he met Rev. John Stuart, one-time rector of Queen Anne’s chapel, at Fort Hunter, who induced him to give up his Presbyterian traditions and become a priest in the Anglican Church.

On the death of Hon. Richard Cartwright, Strachan was appointed to his patron’s seat in both the Legislative and the Executive Council. By this time he had advanced in ecclesiastical circles to be Archdeacon of York and later, Bishop of the Anglican diocese of Toronto. He had already imbibed Governor Simcoe’s idea that all education, and especially all advanced learning, should be under the direction of the Church of England. Through this series of circumstances he found himself in a position to advance his church through the channels of state education. His ideas about higher education were very narrow and very autocratic. Universities were for the classes, and not for the masses, and their function was to train the sons of wealthy parents for the learned professions and to fit them to enter the charmed circle of New World aristocracy.

In 1823, Strachan was appointed Chairman of the first General Board of Education. This made him virtually the Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada. Soon he was off to England to ask the British Parliament to endow a Provincial University with revenues from the Crown lands. He succeeded so well that he was able to bring back a charter secured by patent to “The Corporation of King’s College” and an endorsation of his Crown lands endowment plan. This was all he needed to begin the erection of a state university.

But his plans were violently contested by non-conformists, who realized that Strachan was planning to use public revenues to build King’s College with the intention of making it an Anglican university. This would be tantamount to the establishment of the Church of England as the State Church for Upper Canada. A minority of the people belonged to the Church of England. The majority repudiated the principle of a state church and contended that a publicly endowed university must belong to the people. There must be no compulsion either political or sectarian; no privilege for the rich, no exclusion of the poor.

Excitement over the university question had reached its climax in time to be hurled into the vortex of the Rebellion of 1837-38. Gourlay with his reasoning and MacKenzie with his denunciations uprooted the fallow soil in the educational as well as in the constitutional field, and Strachan’s plans were retarded for the time being.

But Egerton Ryerson was responsible, more than any one else, for sowing the seed of democracy in education. Born in the County of Norfolk, near the mouth of the Grand River, of Loyalist and Anglican stock, he and his four brothers had become itinerant preachers in the Methodist Church, because they believed that the policies and the methods of that Communion were better adapted than those of the church of their fathers to meet the needs of a backwoods country.

Egerton was the cleverest of the Ryerson boys. The fact that the aristocrats held Methodists in derision did not deter him from entering the political arena through the medium of the great Methodist Weekly, the Christian Guardian. His facile pen dripped with burning invective directed at the evils, the inconsistencies and the injustices that were beginning to cast long shadows over Upper Canada.

Meanwhile the Methodists planned to found a denominational college. Ryerson went to England, in 1836, on behalf of his church, and returned with a charter. The college was built at Cobourg and called the Upper Canada Academy. In 1841, it was incorporated as Victoria College, with Egerton Ryerson as its first principal. Soon the Presbyterians, the Baptists and the Roman Catholics had founded denominational colleges.

It was the happiest day of Archdeacon Strachan’s life when the cornerstone of King’s College was laid late in April, 1841. He had been looking forward to that event for forty years. The college opened in June, 1843, with Archdeacon Strachan as president and with an enrolment of twenty-six. The charter, however, had been stripped of its Anglican habiliments so that it was not a model of the universities of England, and the secularization of the Clergy Reserves, in 1854, deprived Strachan of the hope of using revenues from the Crown lands to found a truly Anglican university at some future date. He had founded Trinity College, in 1852, as an Anglican college, but after his death, in 1867, Trinity joined with other denominational colleges to form the University of Toronto.

Egerton Ryerson’s greatest contribution to the province was not the founding of Victoria University but the creation of the present excellent Public School system of Ontario. In 1844, he became Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada, and no man ever worked more ceaselessly or more tirelessly for the public weal. His idea of education was diametrically opposed to that of Strachan. The poorest child in all the land had an inherent right, he contended, to a free and compulsory elementary schooling.

The town of Preston claims that Jacob Klotz was the first trustee in the province to advocate free elementary schools. In 1848, he was able to persuade his fellow-ratepayers to open the local school to all children within the corporation, regardless of whether or not their parents were able to pay for their tuition. Other municipalities followed Preston’s example. Education slowly broadened down for a number of years, but not until 1871 were all elementary schools in the province supported legally by taxes and their facilities made available to all children within the corporation.

Secondary schools remained private schools until recent years. One of the most famous institutions of this type was The Tassie School for boys, at Galt. Its headmaster, Dr. William Tassie, was long an outstanding figure in the educational development of the province. His school ranked with Upper Canada College.

Tassie came to Galt from Hamilton, in 1853, and began his school with a nucleus of less than ten boys. He was principal during twenty-eight years of Galt’s most remarkable expansion and his school became famous for the excellence of his training. Besides the local boys, there sat at his feet sons of the Fathers of Confederation and grandsons of the Family Compact.

Tassie is described as a strict disciplinarian of the two-inch-strap variety and “inaccessible as a mountain peak,” but he won the admiration of his boys through his love of clean sport, especially cricket. His wife, a sister to the second wife of Absalom Shade, was more popular because of her prowess in the culinary art.

Tassie School became the Galt Collegiate Institute, and the Assembly Hall in the handsome graystone building of to-day is called Tassie Hall in honour of the most illustrious of its many principals.

Rockwood Academy was another school of some distinction in the middle of the century. The old building stands to-day at Rockwood, on the Speed, east of Guelph. It was a Quaker institution and William Wetherald, father of Ethelwyn Wetherald, the poetess, was principal for many years.

The names of at least two of the students of this Academy have become household words. Sir Adam Beck, the father of hydro power, was registered there in his teens. So was James J. Hill, who went to the United States when he was still a young man and became chief of the railway kings of the world.

At a central intersection in Kitchener is located St. Jerome’s College, a Roman Catholic Seminary and secondary school for boys. It began very humbly in a small house near the village of St. Agatha, a few miles west of the town of Waterloo. It was founded by the Very Reverend Louis Funcken, in 1864, and two years later it was incorporated by an Act of Parliament under its present name. In time, it was moved to Berlin. One of the city’s few monuments, representing Father Funcken instructing a youth, stands to-day on church property at that same intersection.

The town of Waterloo has the proud distinction of being a university town. Waterloo College, which is affiliated with the University of Western Ontario, at London, is the only school in the valley of the Grand River at which students are prepared for a degree in Arts. It is coeducational and undenominational, although maintained by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada as an outgrowth of its Theological Seminary. Elaborate plans for the development of both college and seminary and for the beautification of the grounds are being entertained for the immediate future.

The literary output of the Grand Valley has been neither stupendous nor scintillating. William Wilfred Campbell and Archibald MacMechan were both born in Berlin in the early sixties, but the lustre pales with the admission that they were still in swaddling clothes when they moved with their parents to other parts. Norman Duncan and Sara Jeanette Duncan were not related to each other, although they had the same surname. Both grew up in Brantford, but the former found the locale for his best work in Labrador, and Miss Duncan, in India. The literary halo of Brantford is clouded by these disturbing facts.

With Pauline Johnson it was otherwise. Whether she travelled east or west, the theme of her poetry was always the same—her own Mohawk people and the injustices they had suffered at the hands of the white men. This was the passion of her life. Little wonder she is the heroine of the youth of modern Canada and her ballads and dramatic verse unchallenged favourites in elocution contests. She died far away from home and her ashes are interred in Stanley Park, Vancouver, but she belongs, and always will belong, to the Grand River and her Mohawk people.

Another name will always be enshrined among his own townspeople. Col. John McCrae, of Guelph, became an immortal figure in Canadian and world literature when he wrote the moving and beautifully simple “In Flanders Fields.” It is, by all odds, the greatest individual poem written by any resident of the valley.

In the field of literary criticism, Dr. O. J. Stevenson, of the Ontario Agricultural College, Guelph, has long been held in high repute, and recently Dr. Carl Klinck, of Waterloo College, has made a valuable contribution in his critical review of the life and works of William Wilfred Campbell.

Edward Johnson, C.B.E., a native of Guelph, reached the dizzy heights of musical fame when, in 1934, he became director of the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York City, a position which he still fills with distinction. He had thrown in his lot with the “Met.” as early as 1922, after he had declined an invitation to become Director in 1914. As a boy, he sang at public performances in Guelph, and studied in Toronto and in Italy. His rich, tenor voice was very popular with Italian audiences, and since his return to America he has sung a greater variety of rôles than any other tenor connected with the Metropolitan. Within recent years he has donated a considerable sum of money to the Guelph Board of Education to be used for musical instruction in the public schools of the city. He still maintains a home in Guelph and spends a considerable portion of his leisure time there. His only child is the wife of Hon. George Drew, present Premier of Ontario.

Augustus Vogt is numbered with his fathers. Fifty years ago he was famous as a choir leader. When only four years old he came with his father, a skilled German organbuilder, to live in Elmira. Very early he showed a talent for music. Once, at a country fair, he whipped a mouth organ from his pocket and amused an audience of sober, Mennonite farmers who had come to view the exhibits. At twelve he was the accomplished organist and choir leader at one of the Lutheran churches of the village.

After a year of intensive study in Germany under eminent musicians, he became organist and choir director of the Jarvis Street Baptist Church. For eighteen years he developed among his choristers the art of singing without accompaniment and was soon recognized as one of the foremost choral directors of the world. His choir became the nucleus of the Mendelssohn Choir, which first made Canada known in the musical world abroad. He himself became Principal of the Toronto Conservatory of Music and, later, Dean of the Faculty of Music, in the University of Toronto.

Offers of lucrative positions in the United States came to him from time to time, but neither these nor the acclaims of appreciative audiences in Europe brought to him such happiness as he experienced in resetting old Canadian folksongs. He was the first native son of Canada to do genuinely constructive work for Canada in the realm of music, broadening and deepening musical culture throughout the Dominion.

In the field of painting, as in music, there are many budding artists, but at least three names must be recorded. All three are, to a greater or less extent, self-trained. Certainly, Homer Watson, of Doon, had no opportunities as a boy to develop the talent that yearned for expression within him. He had to stop school at twelve to help his widowed mother support the family. He worked in the brickyards, in sawmills and in factories. In 1872, he had saved enough money to go to Toronto, with a number of sketches under his arm, to consult with a well-established painter whose work he had seen.

“So you work in the brickyard, young man,” said the artist. “What do you do?”

“For two months in the spring I lay pallets at the pug-mill,” replied Homer. “The rest of the time I do anything I can find. Last winter I cut cordwood.”

At seventeen Homer settled down to serious self-apprenticeship in painting, with occasional jaunts to Toronto and New York to study the paintings which adorned the walls of public buildings. Finally he returned to Doon and began “with faith, ignorance and delight” to paint the old Ferrie Mill in the village. That picture was destined to be hung at the opening of the Canadian Academy under the name of The Pioneer Mill. It was bought by the Marquis of Lorne for Queen Victoria and it hangs to-day among King George’s collection at Windsor Castle. Watson travelled abroad extensively to see the masterpieces of the world. He might have made more money in Europe, but he always returned to Doon to paint the trees of the Grand River Valley. He died, in 1936, in the village of his birth. His studio which stands beside the old mill that made him famous is the possession of his sister, Phoebe.

Carl Ahrens, another woodland painter of Ontario, was ten years younger than Watson, but the two men were friends for many years. Ahrens was born at the little village of Winfield, near Elora, into a family of good blood but of slender means. The wanderlust overcame him when he was a young man. He went west and for three years at Ft. McLeod and at Edmonton he washed dishes, did farm chores and attached himself to an Indian tribe. He began to paint at twenty-four and sold his first picture for nine dollars. F. M. Bellsmith, the artist, encouraged him by engaging him to fill in the foregrounds of some of his pictures with symbols of Indian life. He worked for seven years with Elbert Hubbard at Roycroft Inn. Later, he journeyed through southern California by wagon with wife and family. He settled finally at a home near Galt, which he called Big Trees. Like Watson, he was a painter who had no ambition but to interpret with fidelity the Canadian scene and especially the trees of the Grand River Valley. One of his pictures “Ripe Corn Time” was purchased by the Ontario government to hang in the Parliament Buildings, at Toronto. He will be known as a painter of trees and twilight, for as a painter of shadowy forest interiors he is without a peer. An injury sustained when he was a boy at school followed him through life and curtailed his endeavours, but it failed to dampen his courageous spirit.

Among contemporary artists, Frank Shirley Panabaker, a native of Hespeler, is making a name for himself. In 1930, he was awarded the Dow Prize of the Montreal Art Association for a snow scene on the Grand River. He exhibits widely and he lives with his charming wife and daughter at one of the old Rousseaux Family homes, in Ancaster.

Many residents of the valley have expressed beauty in the erection of their residences. Some of these have historic interest as well. The Elizabethan home of Katherine Langdon Wilks, at Blair, has in addition the charm of interesting and unusual personalities. The estate comprises sixteen hundred acres of fertile uplands and the house is obscured from the river-road by a stand of giant pine trees.

Originally the place was a two-hundred-acre farm settled by a young man named Thompson, who had crossed the ocean in a sailing vessel, the Cruickston Castle. When he had built his humble log cabin he called the place by its present name, Cruickston Park.

In the fifties, William Ashton, a young and adventurous Englishman, bought the property from Thompson and planned to build a rather pretentious stable for pure-bred cattle and a house styled after the manor houses of England. Financial reverses prevented the completion of his plans. Before the roofs were on the buildings the place was on the real estate market. When Matthew Wilks acquired it, in 1858, it was recognized, as it is to-day, as one of the most beautiful estates in Canada. Wilks completed the house, retaining Ashton’s architectural plan but doubling its size. At the same time he bought fourteen hundred acres of neighbouring farm lands and bounded his property with stone fences.

Matthew Wilks had married Eliza Astor Langdon, granddaughter of John Jacob Astor, the renowned fur merchant and the most conspicuous millionaire of his generation. The pair lived for half a century at Cruickston Park raising seven children, one of whom, Matthew, junior, married Sylvia Green, only daughter of the fabulously wealthy Hetty Green.

When Miss Wilks came into possession of the estate she was the only surviving member of the family. Her individuality was evident even in early youth by her absorbing interest in horses. At one time she was regarded as the outstanding horsewoman on the continent, and her sitting room is a museum of cups, medals and ribbons won at exhibitions and on race tracks.

Chicopee, the handsome round-the-year residence of the late Harvey J. Sims, the veteran Kitchener barrister, is several miles further north. Viewed from the flats across the river, it seems to rise like an old country, medieval castle from a bed of eternal rocks. The gardens are superb, but the natural beauty of the deep ravine on the estate is even more entrancing. This is illumined by electric lights gleaming from lampposts that were used in days long gone by for coal oil lamps on the streets of old Berlin. Two others of the same vintage stand at the entrance to Kingsmere, the residence of his lifetime friend, “Billy King.”

Echo Villa, in Brantford, is one of the most historic residences which have survived to the present day. It was the last-century home of Chief Kalkewoguonoby (Sacred Feathers), who preached Joseph Brant’s funeral sermon at the Mohawk Church. He was an Ojibway missionary and a champion of Indian causes. His mother was an Ojibway princess, and his father, the Welshman, Augustus Jones, who became the first Surveyor of Lands in Upper Canada. Chief Kalkewoguonoby’s English name was Peter Jones.

The story is that on one of his many journeys to England in the interests of his people, Peter met a pretty little English girl, Elizabeth Field, who fell so deeply in love with him that she hoped to marry him. But Peter cautioned her to consider well before she should take the step. “Here you see me in full regalia, a chief among men,” he said, “but at home I am just plain Indian.” When he returned to the Grand River he left her in England to make her decision.

Six months later Peter received a letter from Elizabeth asking him to meet her in New York. He went to the big city, married her there and brought her to his home in the woods, near Brantford, and to the companionship of his Indian people.

It happened that Elizabeth had considerable wealth in her own right and with it she cleared the land near Peter’s humble shack and built a palatial, red-brick mansion with a fireplace in every room. The dining room was large enough to accommodate a hundred and sixty at a single sitting. She planted the spacious grounds with trees and flowering shrubs, many of them imported from England. The birds made their nests there and the butterflies and bees flitted from flower to flower. It was an English estate in the midst of the Upper Canadian wilderness.

For many years it was a happy home where parents and five sons were united together in love of God and their fellowmen. Many of the makers of Canadian history visited them there. Governor Sir John Colborne once slept in a room on the ground floor. He opened his window to the perfume of the honeysuckle and the radiance of the morning sunshine. After breakfast he sauntered out to the summerhouse to enjoy a smoke with his genial host.

Peter died in 1856, and Elizabeth did not long outlive him. When the property came into other hands it was materially altered. The rear half of the house including the imposing dining room has been demolished. Of all the trees planted so lovingly by Elizabeth only a straggly lilac bush remains. In place of the servants’ hall stands a modern garage built from its ancient timbers. But the place still has distinction and not a little beauty. Its present owners are determined to retain as much as they can of its original charm and historical significance.

The public parks in the valley of the Grand, like the handsomest of the private residences, border on the river or on one of its tributaries. Occasionally they nestle beside a dam or artificial lake. The largest are usually found in cities and they vary all the way from the natural charm of Dickson’s wooded park, in Galt, and the surroundings of Elora’s tumbling waterfall to the studied artificiality of the formal gardens at the southern entrance to Kitchener. Every village, too, has its recreation grounds, its public square, or triangle, or its flats. There is a favourite swimming hole on the Canagagigue, near Elmira, and a popular picnic ground at Three Bridges, on the Conestoga, near St. Jacobs. Ayr’s beauty spot is a fish pond and an outdoor museum and the dam at New Dundee is known as the Trysting Place.

Through the generosity of Alvin R. Kaufman, of Kitchener, part of his country estate at Lexington, on the Grand, has been set aside and equipped as a public park. In like spirit, Walter Snider, of Conestoga, deeded to the Ontario government, in 1918, that beautiful stand of primeval forest at the confluence of the Conestoga with the Grand, requesting that it be preserved and reforested to all perpetuity, so that future generations of Ontarians might be able to see for themselves how beautiful were the woodland plots of pioneer times.

That forty-five-acre plot of forest growth known for many years as Cressman’s Woods is the most magnificent park in the valley of the Grand. It stands on a back road midway between Kitchener and Blair, and not far from Homer Watson’s studio at Doon. It is a veritable cathedral of trees with botanical names attached, and from a cliff which overlooks the tortuous Grand River may be seen a panoramic view of lovely countryside with the Waterloo Pioneer Tower in the distance.

Years ago, Alvin R. Kaufman, and others, secured this property with no idea of profit, but simply as a public service to posterity. It was long maintained by private subscriptions, but recently it was presented as a free gift to the Kitchener Park Board and renamed the Homer Watson Memorial Park.

About this lovely spot there lingers a legend, an Indian love story of the time when the peaceful Neutral nation inhabited the land but lived in constant dread of the incursions of the ferocious Men of Men. The catastrophe fell upon the Neutrals, and at a very inopportune time. Their hunters had gone to a distant, unknown land in search of game when a messenger brought to the women the terrifying news that the Men of Men were on the warpath and would be upon them within a few days.

The women knew it was their duty to warn a friendly Petun tribe, who lived far to the north on the banks of the stream which was later called the Canagagigue. But there was no one to send—no one but Nashwaaksis, who offered to bear the news, because she loved Oromocto, a Petun warrior, and feared for his safety. Nashwaaksis journeyed for three days in the wilderness before she reached the Petun camp and received the thanks and the gifts of the Petun people. But she cared only for Oromocto’s gift, a pair of moccasins, the token of an approaching marriage. They would pledge their troth as soon as the enemy should be driven from the land.

Eleven days later, Oromocto set out with Nashwaaksis, for the purpose of returning her to her native village. The lovers soon learned that the Iroquois were still prowling about in the woods making the forest hideous with their whoops. They were in constant danger of torture and death.

One evening at twilight they reached a bluff which overlooked a winding river and they decided to spend the night there under the protection of the towering trees of the forest. While the maiden slept, Oromocto kept guard. Suddenly he heard a deep breathing behind him and a victor’s exultant cry. Oromocto was not overcome. He rushed at once to the spot where Nashwaaksis lay sleeping, picked her up and carried her in his arms into denser foliage. Then he turned to meet the foe. Slashing right and left with his tomahawk, he killed seven of the monsters single-handed. Then a wild shriek of despair rent the air and Oromocto, the defender, fell to the ground mortally wounded. Nashwaaksis heard, ran in desperation from her shelter and fell lifeless over her lover’s dead body.

When the Five Nations had returned to their own country the Neutrals sent brave men of their nation to search for Nashwaaksis. They found her lying cold in death over the lifeless body of her Oromocto. When they lifted the bodies of the lovers a spring of water gushed forth, “clear as the character of the beautiful maiden, pure as the love of the twain and cold as the heart of the Iroquois.” They called the spring Oromocto. One drop of water from its crystal fount, the Neutrals said, would restore health and bring happiness in love to future generations of the children of men. Water still gushes from that spring in Waterloo County’s most beautiful park.

The achievements of the past in the realm of architecture and landscaping are but a foretaste of future possibilities in this field, come peace and normal times. With the restoration of the river to its natural volume and charm will come the development of the village of Belwood and the beautification of its artificial lake. The erection of a dam in the Luther Swamp at some subsequent date will provide a locale for a bird sanctuary and a camp for winter sports. The rocks at Fergus and Elora and at the mouth of the Irvine River are capable of the artistry that has been unfolded on the Niagara. The beauty of the village of Conestoga at the confluence of two rivers has been sketched by many artists. So have the other lovely villages of the plain, Bridgeport, Breslau, Freeport, Doon, Blair and Glenmorris. The river from Brantford to Lake Erie is practically unknown to the tourist. Good roads would open its paradisic charms to an incredulous public and bring about at the same time a better understanding between the whites and the Indians, a consummation devoutly to be desired.

Comparatively speaking, we Ontarians have no past, only yesterdays. True, there are chronicles of what the English and the French did to the Indians and to each other three hundred years ago. But our ancestors are all foreigners, immigrants, the earliest of whom arrived less than two centuries ago. They lived narrow, circumscribed lives in isolation, in poverty and in the depths of a wilderness without churches, schools or hospitals. Physical mortality was high, especially for children and young mothers, but the mental vegetation and the moral putrefaction were even more lamentable.

There is to-day no privilege enjoyed by the family of mankind anywhere that is not ours to enjoy. Public health programmes, tuberculosis sanatoria and medical tests have lengthened the expectation of life and a compulsory school law and open university doors have made mental inertia a disgrace. Perversity, and not ignorance, motivates the youthful delinquent of to-day.

These remarkable aspects of modern life and enterprise belong in a peculiar, proprietary way to the people of the valley of the Grand River, which has a leading place in agriculture, phenomenal prowess in industry through the use of hydro power, the marvellous invention of the telephone and priority in river control by mechanical devices.

It is more than extraordinary that these achievements are not attributable to any one of the many races of our people of the Grand valley. Here is evidence that no race has a monopoly on genius and that in every age men and women have been found who use their talents not for their own aggrandizement but for the well-being of their fellowmen. What an array of noble, cosmopolitan souls our short history presents! Dekanawida, the peace lover; Brébeuf, the zealot; John Stuart, the “little gentleman”; Joseph Brant, man of affairs; Benjamin Eby, the Mennonite; John Galt, the colonizer; Adam Beck, the Hydro man; Bell, the inventor; Mrs. Hoodless, the champion of farm women; Ryerson, the educationist, and many others. They were not all of one colour, nor of one race nor of one creed. Gourlay languished in gaol, but clung to his convictions; Mackenzie took the sword in what he believed to be a righteous cause. Strong men were misunderstood, maligned; timid women hesitated on the threshold of public life. But they all heard the whisperings of the Great Spirit: “There is room for your thinkers, your men of vision, your lovers of freedom. Come, and I will make of you a great nation.” From God himself they learned the secrets of the universe and the heart of man. They used the forests, the waterpowers, the air waves and the rich, virgin soil to make life more abundant for men and women and for little children of our day and generation.

One wonders if William L. Stone foresaw the remarkable development of south-western Ontario when he wrote his Life of Joseph Brant about a hundred years ago. In it he remarks casually—

“There is scarcely a finer or more inviting section of country in North America than the Peninsula formed by Lake Ontario on the east, Lake Erie on the south and Lake Huron on the west, through the heart of which flows the Grand River.”

Acres, Dr. H. G., 1st, 2nd
 
Addison, Rev. Robert,
 
Ahrens, Carl,
 
Allward, W. S.,
 
Amish,
 
Anne, Queen of England,
 
Atotarho,
 
Baddeck,
 
Baseline,
 
Beasley, Col. Richard, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Beck, Sir Adam, 1st, 2nd
 
Bell, Alexander Graham,
 
Bell Homestead,
 
Bell Memorial,
 
Bell, Patrick, 1st, 2nd
 
Belwood Village,
 
Belwood Lake,
 
Berlin, see Kitchener.
 
Berlin Convention, 1903,
 
Beverley Swamp,
 
Bindemann, Rev. F. W.,
 
Bon Accord,
 
Boulton, Hon. H. J.,
 
Bow Park Farm,
 
Brant, John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Brant, Joseph, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th
 
Brant, Molly,
 
Brant Monument,
 
Brantford (City), 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th
 
Brébeuf, Jean de,
 
Breithaupt, W. H.,
 
Bricker Family,
 
Bridges,
 
Brock, Sir Isaac, 1st, 2nd
 
Brown, Adam,
 
Brown, Hon. George, 1st, 2nd
 
Brûlé, Etienne, 1st, 2nd
 
Burnley, Thomas,
 
Butler’s Rangers,
 
Caledonia Bridge,
 
Canada Company, 1st, 2nd
 
Canadian Presbyterian Church,
 
Canagagigue River,
 
Canby, Benjamin,
 
Capron, Hiram,
 
Cartwright, Hon. Richard,
 
Catherine II, of Russia,
 
Cayugas,
 
Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876,
 
Champlain, Samuel, 1st, 2nd
 
Champlain Lake,
 
Champlain Road,
 
Chiefswood, 1st, 2nd
 
Cholera, 1st, 2nd
 
Clark, Col. Thomas, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th
 
Claus, Mrs. Daniel, 1st, 2nd
 
Claus, John, 1st, 2nd
 
Claus, Col. William, 1st, 2nd
 
Clephane, George,
 
Clergy Reserves, 1st, 2nd
 
Cockshutt, Gordon,
 
Cockshutt, Ignatius,
 
Colborne, Gov. Sir John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Conestoga River, 1st, 2nd
 
Corduroy roads,
 
Cressman’s Woods see Homer Watson Memorial Park.
 
Crooks, Hon. James,
 
Cruickston Park,
 
Daillon, Joseph de la Roche,
 
Dekanawida,
 
Deserontyou, Capt. John, 1st, 2nd
 
Detweiler, D. B., 1st, 2nd
 
Dickson, Hon. William, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th
 
Docksteder, John,
 
Dollier de Casson, François,
 
Dumfries, 1st, 2nd
 
Dundalk,
 
Dunlop, Dr. William, 1st, 2nd
 
Dunn, J. H.,
 
Dunnville, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Eby, Benjamin, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Ebytown see Kitchener.
 
Echo Villa,
 
Elmslie, George,
 
Elora, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Erb, Abraham,
 
Erb, John, 1st, 2nd
 
Fairchild Family,
 
Farmers’ Institute,
 
Farrell, Col. A. P.,
 
Fergus, (Town),
 
Fergusson, Hon. Adam, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th
 
Ferrie, Hon. Adam,
 
Fessenden, Clementina,
 
Five Nations see Six Nations.
 
Fort Ste. Marie,
 
Fraser, Simon, 1st, 2nd
 
Galinée, René de Bréhaut de,
 
Galt, John, 1st, 2nd
 
Galt (City), 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
German Company,
 
Germans,
 
Gibbon, William,
 
Gifford, Perry,
 
Gilkison, Capt. William,
 
Goldie Family,
 
Gourlay, Robert, 1st, 2nd
 
Governor’s Road, 1st, 2nd
 
Grand River Commission,
 
Grand River Ferry,
 
Grand River Navigation Company,
 
Grand Trunk Railway,
 
Grand Valley Dam,
 
Guelph (City), 1st, 2nd
 
Hagar J. S.,
 
Haldimand, Sir Frederick, 1st, 2nd
 
Halton Block,
 
Hamilton, Hon. Robert, 1st, 2nd
 
Hamilton (City),
 
Hespeler (Town),
 
Hiawatha,
 
Hiawatha’s Belt,
 
Highland Society of Edinburgh, 1st, 2nd
 
Hill, J. J., 1st, 2nd
 
Hoffman, John,
 
Hogg, Dr. T. H.,
 
Homer Watson Memorial Park,
 
Hoodless, Adeline Hunter,
 
Hunter, Fort,
 
Huron Road,
 
Huronia, 1st, 2nd
 
Hydro-Electric Power Commission,
 
Indian Reservation,
 
Iroquois see Six Nations.
 
Irvine River, 1st, 2nd
 
Jarvis, William,
 
Jesuits,
 
Johnson, Edward,
 
Johnson, E. Pauline, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Johnson, Chief G. H. M.,
 
Johnson, Col. Guy, 1st, 2nd
 
Johnson, Sir John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Johnson, Chief John “Smoke”,
 
Johnson, Sir William,
 
Joliet, Louis,
 
Jones, Augustus, 1st, 2nd
 
Jones, Rev. Peter, 1st, 2nd
 
Keith, John, 1st, 2nd
 
King, Rt. Hon. W. L. M.,
 
Kirmes, 1894,
 
Kitchener (City), 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
La Salle, R. C. Sieur de,
 
Le Caron, Father,
 
Livestock,
 
Lount, Samuel,
 
Lumbering,
 
Luther Swamp,
 
Macdonell, Bishop, 1st, 2nd
 
Mackenzie, W. L.,
 
Maid of the Mist,
 
Manitou, 1st, 2nd
 
Matthews, Roswell, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Men of Men see Six Nations.
 
Mennonites, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
 
Merritt, W. H.,
 
Mississauga Purchase,
 
Mississaugas, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Mohawks, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Montreal, 1st, 2nd
 
Moraviantown,
 
Moulton Township,
 
Muirhead Family,
 
Music, 1st, 2nd
 
Naffziger, Christian,
 
Nelles, Rev. Abraham, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Neutral Indians, 1st, 2nd3rd
 
New England Society, 1st, 2nd
 
Niagara River,
 
Nichol, Robert,
 
Nichol Township,
 
Nightingale, Florence,
 
Norfolk Historical Society,
 
Ohsweken,
 
Oneida Township,
 
Onondagas,
 
Ontario Agricultural College, 1st, 2nd
 
Paris (Town),
 
Pilkington, Lieut. Robert,
 
Pioneer Tower,
 
Plank Road,
 
Post Office,
 
Preston (Town), 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
 
Pullman cars,
 
Queen Anne’s Royal Chapel of the Mohawks,
 
Railways,
 
Récollets,
 
Rockwood Academy, 1st, 2nd
 
Rousseaux, J. B.,
 
Russian Mennonites,
 
Ryerson, Egerton,
 
Saengerfest, 1879,
 
St. George (Village), 1st, 2nd
 
St. Jerome’s College,
 
St. Paul’s Church of the Mohawks, 1st, 2nd
 
Salem (Village),
 
Schools, Elementary,
 
Schuyler, Col. Peter, 1st, 2nd
 
Scott, Dr. John, 1st, 2nd
 
Selkirk, Lord,
 
Senecas,
 
Shade, Absalom, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Shade’s Mills see Galt.
 
Shand Dam see Grand Valley Dam.
 
Shantz, Jacob Y.,
 
Sherbrooke Township,
 
Simcoe, Gov. J. G., 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th
 
Simons, Menno,
 
Six Nations, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th
 
Smith, Hon. D. W., 1st, 2nd
 
Smith, Capt. Thomas,
 
Smithurst, Rev. John,
 
Snider, E. W. B., 1st, 2nd
 
Speed River, 1st, 2nd
 
Statistical Record of U.C.,
 
Stedman, Philip,
 
Stoney Creek (Village),
 
Strachan, Bishop John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th
 
Stuart, Rev, John, 1st, 2nd
 
Tassie, Dr. William,
 
Templin, Hugh, 1st, 2nd
 
Thayendanegea see Brant, Joseph
 
Toronto, 1st, 2nd
 
Tuscarora Township,
 
Tuscaroras,
 
Tutela Heights,
 
United Empire Loyalists, 1st, 2nd
 
Universities,
 
Ville Marie see Montreal.
 
Vogt, Augustus,
 
Wallace, J. W.,
 
Wallace, William,
 
War of 1812, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Waterloo College,
 
Waterloo Historical Society, 1st, 2nd, 3rd
 
Waterloo (Town), 1st, 2nd
 
Watson, Homer,
 
Webster, James,
 
Welland Canal,
 
Wellington Square, 1st, 2nd
 
West Montrose Covered Bridge,
 
Wilks Family, Brantford,
 
Wilks, Katherine L.,
 
Wilmot Township,
 
Wingfield, Rowland,
 
Wissler, Sem,
 
Women’s Institute,
 
York see Toronto.
 
Zoellner, Theodore,

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Single index entries have been replaced with a link. Multiple index entries have been designated as reference instances, e.g. 1st, 2nd 3rd, 4th, etc.

ILLUSTRATIONS


1.	People of the Longhouse
2.	The Hiawatha Belt
3.	The Coming of the Palefaces
4.	Fort Ste. Marie
5.	Galinée’s Map
6.	Queen Anne’s Chapel
7.	Johnson Hall
8.	Mohawk Chapel
9.	First Surveys
10.	Brant Memorial, Brantford
11.	People of the Settlements
12.	Pioneers’ Memorial at Doon
13.	The Pergola at Galt
14.	Captain Smith’s House, 1903
15.	The Germans
16.	The Canada Company
17.	Elora Falls in 1899
18.	Mouth of the Grand River
19.	The Ferry
20.	People of Achievement
21.	Kitchener Market
22.	Industry
23.	Flight of the Fugitives
24.	Covered Bridge, West Montrose
25.	The Bell Homestead
26.	Grand Valley Dam
27.	First Schoolhouse in Waterloo—Built 1820

Northern lands

Block 1	to Philip Stedman, 94,305 acres for £8,841.

Block 2	to Richard Beasley, James Wilson and Jean Baptiste Rousseaux, 94,012 acres for £8,887.

Block 3	to William Wallace, 86,078 acres for £16,364.

Block 4	to an unknown purchaser and at an undisclosed price, 28,512 acres.


Southern lands

Block 5	to William Jarvis, 30,800 acres for £5,775.

Block 6	Given originally to John Docksteder, to be sold by him for the benefit of his Indian children to Benjamin Canby for £5,000, 1,900 acres.

	Total 352,707 acres for approximately £50,000.

CONTENTS


Book I

PEOPLE OF THE LONGHOUSE

1.	A League of Indian Nations
2.	The Coming of the Palefaces
3.	The Founder of New France
4.	Around the Peninsula
5.	Good Queen Anne
6.	Lords of the Mohawk Valley
7.	Brant’s Ford
8.	First Surveys
9.	Thayendanegea’s Last Days


Book II

PEOPLE OF THE SETTLEMENTS

1.	Waterloo
2.	Dumfries
3.	Woolwich
4.	The Germans
5.	The Canada Company
6.	Nichol—Robert Nichol, William Gilkison, Adam Fergusson, The Men from Aberdeen, Sem Wissler
7.	South of the Governor’s Road
8.	Six Nations Reservation


Book III

PEOPLE OF ACHIEVEMENT

1.	Agriculture
2.	Industry
3.	Government
4.	Transportation
5.	Communication
6.	River Control
7.	The Fruits of Leisure


	Bibliography

	Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

BOOK I

PEOPLE OF THE LONG HOUSE

Chapter 1

A League of Indian Nations

Chapter 2

The Coming of the Palefaces

Chapter 3

The Founder of New France

Chapter 4

Around the Peninsula

Chapter 5

Good Queen Anne

Chapter 6

Lords of the Mohawk Valley

Chapter 7

Brant’s Ford

Chapter 8

The First Surveys

Chapter 9

Thayendanegea’s Last Days

BOOK II

PEOPLE OF THE SETTLEMENTS

Chapter 1

Waterloo

Chapter 2

Dumfries

Chapter 3

Woolwich

Chapter 4

The Germans

Chapter 5

The Canada Company

Chapter 6

Nichol

Chapter 7

South of the Governor’s Road

Chapter 8

The Six Nations Reservation

BOOK III

PEOPLE OF ACHIEVEMENT

Chapter 1

Agriculture

Chapter 2

Industry

Chapter 3

Government

Chapter 4

Transportation

Chapter 5

Communication

Chapter 6

River Control

Chapter 7

The Fruits of Leisure

INDEX

TRANSCRIBER NOTES