The Bloody Beaver Wars & Toronto in the 1600s

1687. A year of war and famine on the shores of Lake Ontario. That summer, on a night in early July, an army camped near the mouth of the Rouge River, at the very eastern edge of what's now the city of Toronto. A few thousand men — professional soldiers from France, militia from Québec and their First Nations allies — feasted on venison before bed. They were tired, finally heading home at the end of a bloody campaign against the Seneca.

Their war was driven by a fashion trend. Far on the other side of the Atlantic, in the cobblestone capitals of Europe, hats made of beaver felt were all the rage. The demand had already driven European beavers to the brink of extinction. Now, the furriers turned to the Americas to feed their ravenous sartorial appetite. The competition over the slaughter of the large, aquatic rodents plunged the Great Lakes into more than a century of bloodshed and violence. By the end of the 1600s, a series of conflicts had been raging for decades on end. Thousands of warriors fought bloody battles over control of the fur trade. They called them the Beaver Wars.

This was long before the city of Toronto was founded, long before the British conquered Québec, all the way back in the days when the French still claimed the Great Lakes for themselves. As far as they were concerned, this was New France. But barely any Europeans had ever set foot on this land: only a few early explorers, fur traders and missionaries. Where skyscrapers and condo towers now reach into the clouds, there was an ancient forest of towering oak and pine, home to moose, wolves and bears. But there were plenty of people here, too — just not French ones: the First Nations and their ancestors had been living here for thousands and thousands of years.

Beaver felt hats, 1776-1825

In the late 1600s, the Seneca had two bustling villages within the borders of today's Toronto, with dozens of longhouses surrounded by vast fields of golden maize. In the west, Teiaiagon watched over the Humber River at the spot where Baby Point is now (just a bit north of Bloor Street and Old Mill Station). In the east, Ganatsekwyagon had a commanding view over the Rouge.

They were both very important places. The Humber and the Rouge were at the southern end of a vital fur trade route: the Toronto Carrying Place trail, which gave our city its name. The rivers stretched north from Lake Ontario toward Lake Simcoe. From there, fur traders could reach the Upper Great Lakes, where the beaver population was still doing relatively well. Now that the Seneca controlled the Toronto Carrying Place, they could ship beaver pelts south into the American colonies and sell them to their British allies.

That pissed the French right off. They wanted those beaver pelts flowing east down the Ottawa River instead, toward their own relatively new towns of Montreal and Québec. By then, they had already spent decades fighting over the fur trade. They were on one side of the Beaver Wars, generally allied with the Wendat (the Europeans called them the Huron) and a variety of Algonquin-speaking nations, like the Odawa. On the other, the British supported the Haudenosaunee (who they called the Iroquois): a confederacy of five nations, including the Seneca.

And things were only getting worse for the French. By 1687, they still had only a few thousand settlers living in all of New France, most of them centered around Québec and Montreal. They had tried to expand their control west into the Great Lakes, establishing a trading post — Fort Frontenac — where Kingston is today. But their efforts ended in humiliating failure. They'd been forced to make peace with the Haudenosaunee and their British allies.

They were beginning to worry that they were going to lose the Beaver Wars entirely — and all of New France with them. They were scared the Haudenosaunee might overrun their settlements in Québec, and that their own First Nations allies would soon abandon them to trade with their enemies instead. 

Thousands of kilometers away, in his new royal palace of Versailles, King Louis XIV — the famous Sun King, who reigned over France longer than any monarch has ever reigned over a major European nation — decided it was time for a change. The Governor of New France was fired. In his place, a new Governor was sent across the Atlantic to run things.

His remarkably long name was Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville. He was a career solider: a respected officer from an old, rich family with deep ties to the throne. Upon his arrival in Canada, he would wage even more bloody war.

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Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville

The new Governor's first move was to ignore the peace treaty. Denonville sent a hundred men north to Hudson's Bay to launch a surprise attack against British trading posts there. It was a rout. The French seized three posts run by the Hudson's Bay Company. Now, they controlled the northern trade.

Next, Denonville turned to treachery. In the summer of 1687, he proposed a peace council: a great feast with the leaders of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Fifty chiefs came to Fort Frontenac that June to meet under a flag of truce. But it was a French trap. When the chiefs and their families arrived, Denonville's men captured them all, taking about 200 prisoners. Some were tied to posts, bound so tight they couldn't move; some were tortured. Many would be shipped across the Atlantic in chains to serve King Louis as galley slaves.

And Denonville still wasn't done. He'd brought an army with him to Fort Frontenac: 3,000 men, including professional French soldiers, militiamen from Québec, a few coureur de bois, and hundreds of First Nations allies. He led them across Lake Ontario, a sprawling fleet of hundreds of canoes and bateaux sailing toward the southern shore, where New York State is today: the heartland of the Seneca.

The Governor's plan was simple: an invasion to capture and kill as many people as he could. His ultimate goal was laid out clearly in letters sent back and forth across the Atlantic between Denonville, his boss at Versailles, and King Louis himself.

They wanted, they said, "the Establishment of the Religion, of Commerce and the King's Power over all North America." They wanted New France to stretch all the way from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi. To do it, they said, they would have to destroy the Haudenosaunee. If they failed, they feared the ruin of New France.

Denonville's boss — a government minister at Versailles — laid out the plan: "all their plantations of Indian corn will be destroyed, their villages burnt, their women, children and old men captured and their warriors driven into the woods where they will be pursued and annihilated by other Indians who will have served under us during this war."

"[His Majesty]," the minister wrote in a letter to Denonville, "expects to learn at the close of this year, the entire destruction of the greatest part of the Savages."

The army landed near where Rochester is today, at Irondequoit Bay. Then, they headed south toward Ganondagan, the biggest of the Seneca villages. Three columns of French soldiers marched through the forest with their First Nations allies. They carried swords and torches and arquebuses — an early forerunner of the musket.

Ganondagan State Historic Site today

But Denonville would have trouble finding anyone to capture or to kill. There was only a single battle fought during the entire campaign. One afternoon, as the French army was approaching Ganondagan through a narrow pass, hundreds of Seneca warriors opened fire on them from behind. There were dozens of casualties on both sides, but the attack failed. Outnumbered, the Seneca warriors retreated.

After that, they disappeared. Denonville didn't see another enemy warrior during the rest of the campaign. And every time his army arrived at a Seneca village, they found it already abandoned.

So the Governor adjusted his plan. If he couldn't kill the Seneca with swords and guns, he would starve them to death instead.

"I deemed it our best policy," he explained to Versailles, "to employ ourselves laying waste the Indian corn which was in vast abundance in the fields, rather than follow a flying enemy..."

For the next ten days, the French army was hard at work burning fields of maize. Kilometer after kilometer went up in smoke. Vast stores were destroyed, too; everything that had been saved for the winter. According to the Governor's own estimates, his men burned 1.2 million bushels of maize. Plus, they burned beans and other vegetables. A "vast quantity" of pigs was killed, too. Entire villages were burned to the ground.

With winter coming in just a few short months, Denonville's scorched earth campaign was enough to cause a famine. It wasn't just Seneca warriors who would die thanks to the French: Denonville's war was a war against civilians. Against the entire Seneca people.

"We have, assuredly," the Governor boasted, "humbled the Senecas to a considerable degree, and seriously lowered their pride and raised the courage of their Indian enemies." 

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Longhouse village

By the end of those ten days, Denonville's army was tired. It had been weeks since they left Montreal, making the long and dangerous journey up the rapids and waterfalls of the St. Lawrence River toward Lake Ontario. They'd marched through the woods for days on end, weighed down by their supplies, plagued by mosquitoes. Now, they were getting sick too. "It is full 30 years that I have had the honour to serve," the Governor wrote to Versailles, "but I assure you, my lord, that I have seen nothing that comes near this in labour and fatigue."
 
Meanwhile, some of his First Nations allies were already leaving. There were tensions. Denonville had been badmouthing them in his reports for their "barbarities" and "cruelties" (without even the slightest hint of irony). Some of them were from Haudenosaunee nations themselves — having allied with the French after converting to Christianity — and many seemed to have reservations about the scorched earth campaign. When Denonville asked them to burn the Seneca maize, they'd simply refused.

The Governor decided it was finally time to head home.

He took the long way around. First, the army stopped at Niagara. There, they built a new French fort on the spot where Niagara-on-the-Lake is today. Fort Denonville would give the French and their First Nations allies a base of operations to launch future attacks against the Seneca.

Then, they followed the shoreline as it wrapped all the way around the lake — passing future sites of cities like St. Catharines, Hamilton and Oakville — which brought them, eventually, to the place where Toronto now stands. 

It's hard to tell from Denonville's reports exactly where they stopped each night. But most historians seem to think the army spent two nights within the borders of today's Toronto: the first near the mouth of the Humber River; the second near the mouth of the Rouge.

In his dispatches, the Governor doesn't mention anything about the inhabitants of Teiaiagon or Ganatsekwyagon, the Seneca villages on those rivers. Some historians have suggested that Denonville's army must have destroyed them, too. But it's also entirely possible that the Seneca had voluntarily abandoned them years earlier. Communities usually moved to a new location every 10 to 15 years or so.

Pretty much all the information we have comes from the entry Denonville made in his diary that day — the day we think he woke up at the Humber and travelled to the Rouge. It's not much, but it's one of the very earliest written accounts of the place where Toronto now stands:

The mouth of the Rouge River today

"The storm of wind and rain, prevented us from leaving in the morning but at noon, the weather clearing up, we advanced 7 or 8 leagues and encamped at a place to which I had sent forward our Christian Indians from below. We found them with two hundred deer they had killed, a good share of which they gave to our army, that thus profited by this fortunate chase."

The next morning, the army continued east toward Montreal.

Denonville's campaign had succeeded in bringing death to the shores of Lake Ontario, but his greater goals would fail. The Seneca suffered terribly that winter, but the nation was far from destroyed. And the Haudenosaunee would fight back. The Five Nations of the Confederacy launched their own campaigns deep into the heart of New France. They raided French settlements and destroyed farms. Two years after Denonville's army slept on the banks of the Rouge, Mohawk warriors would travel all the way to the island of Montreal and attack the French settlers at Lachine, burning the town to the ground.

That same year, Denonville was replaced as Governor and returned home to France. He got a new job at Versailles: tutor to the king's kids.

Back in Canada, the wars raged on for another decade. But some leaders on both sides were working toward peace. By the end of the 1600s, the French had tracked down all of the surviving chiefs forced into slavery by Denonville's treachery. Thirteen of them were still alive. They were finally allowed to return home. Meanwhile, the Haudenosaunee were starting to worry about the growing power of their British allies. In 1701, a huge peace council was held at Montreal, with long negotiations leading to a treaty between New France and forty of the First Nations, including the Haudenosaunee. The Great Peace of Montreal became one of the defining moments in Canadian history.

As for Toronto, in the decades that followed the Great Peace, the French established their own trading posts at the southern end of the Carrying Place trail. Fort Douville was built near Teiaiagon. Fort Toronto was at the mouth of the Humber. Fort Rouillé stood on the Exhibition Grounds. By then, their allies, the Mississauga, had moved south into the area; they had villages at Ganatsekwyagon and near Teiaiagon, too.

But the days of peace wouldn't last: there would be even bigger wars in the 1700s. The British eventually invaded New France, winning the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and conquering all of French Canada. The last of the French forts at Toronto — Fort Rouillé — was burned as their troops retreated.

Then it was the American Revolution. The British were overthrown in the United States and those who were still loyal to the Crown were driven from their homes. A flood of Loyalist refugees fled north. Many of them ended up on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, where the British created a new province for them. They called it Upper Canada.

The new province would need a new capital. It would be built on a sheltered harbour between the Humber and the Rouge: at the end of the ancient fur trade route where the First Nations and their ancestors had been living — and hunting beavers — for thousands upon thousands of years. A place they called Toronto.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

You can read the documents sent between Denonville, his boss and the King as part of the Documentary History of New York State, which you'll find on Google Docs here.

You can read Denonville's biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography here and his Wikipedia page here. The page for the Beaver Wars is here, Ganondagan is here, the Great Peace of Montreal is here, Teiaiagon is here, Ganatsekwyagon is here, Fort Rouillé is here and some of the other French forts here. 

David Wencer writes about Teiaiagon for Torontoist here and the Canadian Encyclopedia has more about it here. The Kingston Whig-Standard has more about Denonville's treacherous "peace council" here. And the Counterweights blog shares a history of Toronto before the modern city was founded here. 

The image of the beaver hats comes via Wikipedia, the painting on Denonville comes via the Répertoire du patrimoine culturel de Québec, Ganondagan State Historic Site comes via FingerLakes.com, the longhouse village comes via the Canadian Encyclopedia, and I took the photo of the Rouge River myself.

This post is related to dream 40 The Beaver Wars Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, 1687

How Napoleon Bonaparte Is Indirectly Responsible For One Of The Best Walking Trails In Toronto

The Mast Trail, Rouge Park

Freaking Napoleon. Nobody could beat him. Ever since the beginning of the French Revolution, France had been fighting wars with pretty much every single other big country in Europe. And while Robespierre and his gang of paranoid mass murderers were busy guillotining everybody in Paris, Napoleon was leading the French army to one victory after another. Before long, he had taken over the country, crowned himself Emperor, and built a network of conquests and alliances that stretched from one end of Europe to the other. The only country left to fight was England. So an invasion of England was next on Napoleon's list.

There was just one big, floating, wooden problem: the Royal Navy. The British fleet had ruled the waves for the last 100 years. And they could beat Napoleon. People still talk about how badly Lord Nelson's fleet pwned the French at the Battle of Trafalgar. It left Napoleon's navy in tatters.

But the Emperor did have another way of screwing with the Royal Navy: he could take away their wood.

People in England had been chopping down their forests since the Stone Age. They barely had any left. And it took thousands of oak trees just to build one ship. The masts were especially hard to find — they had to come from big, strong, old-growth pines. The British were having to ship them in from the far north-east corner of the continent, from the towering forests on the shores of the Baltic Sea.

The same Baltic shores that Napoleon now controlled.

In fact, Napoleon now controlled just about all of the shores in Europe — which meant he could seriously mess with the British economy. He declared an embargo. No one was allowed to trade with England. Not France, not Napoleon's allies, not the nations he had conquered, not even neutral countries. If he found anyone trading with the British, he would arrest the Britons and burn all the goods. He even threatened to invade Russia if they didn't agree. And just like that, Napoleon had robbed the Royal Navy of their Baltic masts.

The Mast Trail, Rouge Park

That's where Toronto comes in. While all of this was happening in the early 1800s, our city was still a brand new little frontier town. It was surrounded by ancient forests that had been growing here for thousands of years. They'd occasionally been cut down too — the First Nations cleared land for villages and corn fields — but they'd never suffered anything like the permanent, wholesale deforestation English forests had. There were still woods all over eastern Canada. And they were full of masts.

Napoleon could keep the Baltics from trading with England, but his navy couldn't keep England from shipping wood across the ocean from Canada. All over the Canadian colonies, lumberjacks started cutting down trees. Timber exports went up by something like 1000% in just three years. Tens of thousands of masts headed across the Atlantic.

Some of them came from the forests of Toronto. The woods of the Rouge Valley — now the verrry eastern edge of Scarborough — were very tall and very old. They were home to wolves and bears and cougars and elk, wild beasts roaming beneath enormous white pines — the perfect tree for making masts. Some of them rose twelve storeys above the forest floor.

By then, the mouth of the Rouge River had already seen plenty of history. The very first people to walk along the valley's forest trails had been prehistoric nomadic hunters. They arrived thousands and thousands of years ago, leaving behind traces of their campsites and the rock they chipped into tools. More recently, it had been the First Nations. By the middle of the 1600s, the Seneca had built a village — Ganatsekwyagon — on a high hill overlooking the valley. It was a hub for the fur trade. Famous French explorers Jolliet and Marquette stopped by on their way deeper into the continent. Coureurs de bois came to trade, or to travel up the Rouge in canoes toward Lake Simcoe. One missionary spent a famously harsh winter there, starving and desperate, living off squirrels and chipmunks and eating moss off the base of the trees. Even the Governor of New France once paid a visit to Ganatsekwyagon during his war with the Seneca. His allies, the Mississauga, took it over.

Now, the Rouge Valley was part of the British Empire. And with the Empire at war with Napoleon, it was ax-wielding lumberjacks making trails through those woods. The great old pines came crashing to the ground, were floated down the Rouge to Lake Ontario and then shipped out the St. Lawrence to make the long journey across the Atlantic. They rose again as masts from the decks of British ships fighting the French half a world away.

The mouth of the Rouge River

Napoleon never was able to invade England. Eventually, his embargo broke down. The Russians finally got sick of it and started trading with the British again. Napoleon responded by invading Russia — which was a terrible idea. His army was devastated by the Tsar's scorched earth campaign and the bitter cold of the Russian winter. It was a turning point. Within a couple of years, his empire had crumbled. He was defeated and then exiled... and then escaped, raised another army, and was defeated and then exiled again. This time for good.

But even with Napoleon gone and the embargo lifted, the British still wanted Canadian lumber. The trees kept coming down and the exports kept going up. They doubled and doubled and then doubled again. Soon forestry had taken over from the fur trade as the engine of the Canadian economy. Today, it's still one of our biggest industries.

There are no more lumberjacks in the Rouge Valley, though. The forests growing there today are protected — Rouge Park is slated to become a national park. There are still enormous white pines towering above the forest floor. Some of them have been growing there since those Napoleonic days — the trees that were, at the time, too small for masts. The old logging trail is still there too. It's called the Mast Trail now. Twenty-first century Torontonians and tourists can walk in the same place those lumberjacks did 200 years ago. And where missionaries and explorers, coureurs de bois and First Nations, prehistoric hunters and wild beasts were walking long before that.

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P.S. — Those pine trees weren't just used to build ships in England. Before the Napoleonic Wars were over, we'd be building our own warships over here.

That's because Napoleon wasn't the only one with an embargo: the British had one against him too. This meant that neutral countries like the United States were caught in the middle — they were at risk of having their goods seized no matter which side they traded with. Even worse: the English were using the embargo as an excuse to board American ships and arrest any man who was British — or sort of British, or maybe kind of seemed like he might be British and couldn't prove he wasn't — so they could force him to join the Royal Navy and fight the French. Impressment, they called it. And it pissed the Americans off. It was one of the main reasons they declared war in 1812. While the British were still fighting Napoleon in Europe, the Americans invaded Canada.

Suddenly, the Great Lakes were a battlefield too. Control of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario became vitally important — it meant that you could supply your troops on the ground, support them in battle, and move them around. And so, a naval arms race broke out, with both sides rushing to build the biggest and most powerful fleet they could. Canadian lumber was now being used to build warships in Canada.

Toronto played an important role. The main reason the Americans invaded and occupied our city in 1813 was because we were building one of the biggest ships on the Great Lakes — the HMS Isaac Brock — which would have shifted the balance of power in our favour. The Americans were hoping to seize it, but we burned it first. They retaliated by burning down our parliament and other public buildings. A few months later, one of the war's most pivotal naval battles happened just outside our harbour.

But I'll save those stories for a future post.

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P.P.S. — Another kind of interesting note: Lord Nelson. He died fighting Napoleon's fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar, and became a national hero in England. They named the public square in the heart of London "Trafalgar Square" and built a giant column to honour Nelson's memory. It's one of the most iconic landmarks in Britain. But he was also a hero over here. Defeating Napoleon's navy meant the trade route between Canada and England stayed open. People in Montreal were so happy about that they built their own column to honour Nelson in their own public square more than 30 years BEFORE the Londoners built theirs. It's still there in Old Montreal at the top of Place Jacques-Cartier.

Nelson had also played an important earlier role when it came to those Baltic masts. Long before Napoleon's embargo, some of the other most powerful countries in Europe wanted to keep England from being able to trade with the Baltics. So they shut down the narrow channel between Sweden and Denmark — the only way into the Baltic Sea. Nelson was the hero of that episode too. He led the British fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen. When his commander gave him permission to retreat, Nelson famously lifted his telescope to his blind eye so that he couldn't see the signal. He kept fighting and won. It meant that the British got to keep trading with the Baltics right up until Napoleon's embargo.

Oh and Nelson was famous for other stuff too: for having lost an arm in addition to that eye, and for openly living in a sinful threesome with the young Lady Emma Hamilton and her elderly husband William. 

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You can learn more about the Mast Trail here and in a PDF here. The Toronto Star has more about the plans to turn Rouge Park into a national park here. There's a whole report on the state of the Rouge watershed, with lots of heritage info, in a PDF here. And there's another one with some info about Rouge Valley heritage and wildlife here. You can learn more about Napoleon's embargo here and here. Or the entire Napoleonic Wars here. The Canadian Encyclopedia has some more information about the Canadian timber trade here. And the federal government has a military heritage website with more information about it here. Meanwhile, Wikipedia's got you covered here if you want to learn about the British timber trade instead. If you'd like to know more about warships on the Great Lakes, head on over here. And Wikipedia also has a little page about the Naval Shipyard, just west of the foot of Bay Street, where the HMS Isaac Brock was being built. You can check that out here.

Oh and photos by me.

An Army Gathers On Yonge Street

This isn't Yonge Street. It's Quebec. Louis-Joseph Papineau speaks to L'Assemblée des six-comtés, 1837

This is the fourth in a series of posts about William Lyon Mackenzie and the birth of Canadian democracy. Part one here and part two here and part three here.

1837. Crazy huge giantassedly important year in the history of Canada. Just massive. And it had been a long time coming. In the few decades since our city had been founded, Toronto and the rest of Upper Canada had been ruled by a series of dictatorial Lieutenant Governors and a few families of rich, conservative, mostly incompetent, frequently corrupt government officials: the Family Compact. They were appointed by the British to run the colony without much say from ordinary Canadians, and even when the conservatives in England lost power to the liberal Whigs, things didn't really change. Canadians who wanted real democracy, with power over our own affairs, were getting really flipping frustrated. And in 1837, those frustrations boiled over.

The momentum built all year long. The whole continent was in the grips of a depression. Crops were failing.  People were even angrier than usual. And William Lyon Mackenzie, who had completely given up on negotiating with our British overlords, did everything he could to fan the flames. He wasn't exactly subtle about it. "Canadians," he wrote, "Do you love freedom? ... Do you hate oppression? ... Then buckle on your armour, and put down the villains who oppress and enslave your country... Up then brave Canadians. Ready your rifles and make short work of it."

Hundreds of protesters showed up at Mackenzie's rallies. When they were attacked by supporters of the Family Compact, they armed themselves. Farmers polished up old muskets. Blacksmiths forged new pikes. They held military drills. Before long, Mackenzie had declared independence from Britain and drafted a new constitution. He'd done everything short of firing the first shots.

And that's about the time when the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Bond Head, decided to send away all of his troops. Every single last soldier marched out of Upper Canada. He'd left Toronto without any organized defenses at all.

You see, we weren't the only ones fighting over Canadian democracy. In Lower Canada — Quebec — very very very very very similar things had been happening. They had their own version of the Family Compact: the Château Clique. They had own version of the Reformers: les Patriotes. And they had their own fiery leaders: dudes like Louis-Joseph Papineau and Wolfred Nelson. That spring, the Whig government in England had rejected every single last one of their demands. People were pissed. Francophones and anglophones. Reform rallies in Lower Canada got bigger. And angrier. British products were boycotted. There was talk of revolution. That summer, the government banned all public meetings. That fall, les Patriotes responded with the biggest rally they had ever held. (That's what's going on in the painting I posted above.) Six thousand people were there as Nelson roared, "The time has come to melt our spoons into bullets!" Within weeks, Papineau and Nelson were leading a makeshift army of volunteers through rural Quebec, poised to strike at the British-backed government in Montreal.

The Governor General in charge of Lower Canada freaked the fuck out. He just up and quit. So in the face of revolution everything was left to John Colborne — the very same guy who had been fired as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada for being too conservative and then was accidentally replaced with the also-super-conservative Bond Head. He asked Bond Head for help. And Bond Head responded by sending him all the troops he had.

Now, nobody seems be entirely sure why he did it. Bond Head claimed (especially after the fact) that he wanted to trick Mackenzie into attacking. Then they could arrest him and hang him and have done with it. But most people seem to think that he was just a complete idiot. Even with reports of rebel activity pouring in, he simply didn't believe that enough people were pissed enough to support Mackenzie's revolution. He didn't make any plans for Mackenzie's arrest. Or for the defense of the city. He did spend lots of time ignoring the people who were worried. There was a whole crapload of weaponry stored at old old old City Hall (at King and Jarvis, where St. Lawrence Hall is now). And Bond Head didn't have anyone guarding it. If it fell into rebel hands, the government would be screwed.

With the Lieutenant Governor being useless, all rational thinking was left to Colonel James FitzGibbon. He was a hero from the the War of 1812 — the guy Laura Secord ran to warn when the Americans were going to attack — and had actually saved Mackenzie's life once from an angry mob of Family Compact folk. He was convinced Mackenzie's threats were real and he started making preparations behind Bond Head's back. He ran training drills with a bunch of militia volunteers. He wrote up a list of every loyal Tory he could think of and went from door to door warning them all to keep their guns loaded and ready. He worked out a warning system: at the first sign of an attack, they'd ring the bells of St. James Cathedral and Upper Canada College. And he assigned a group of his men to protect City Hall every night.

James FitzGibbon

Maybe most importantly, when Bond Head's Executive Council held a meeting to discuss (and dismiss) the possibility of an attack, FitzGibbon burst into the room with more troubling updates from north of the city: of rebels staging military drills and of blacksmiths working day and night to forge enough weapons for an army. (The scene is hilariously described in an old book about the rebellion, especially amusing if you imagine that they're speaking with the silly voices from the historical episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia: "'You do not mean to say,' queried Judge Jones, turning towards him with a scarcely repressed sneer in his voice and tone, 'that these people are going to rebel?' 'Most distinctly I do,' responded Colonel Fitz Gibbon; upon which the Judge turned towards the Lieutenant-Governor, and in a contemptuous tone exclaimed, 'Pugh, pugh!') Despite the fact that most of Toronto's leaders thought FitzGibbon was batshit insane, by the end of the meeting he'd finally convinced Bond Head to take at least a little bit of action. Dispatches were sent to some of the other towns in Upper Canada asking for volunteers.

It was a good idea. Les Patriotes had won their first battle against Colborne's troops and Mackenzie was rushing to follow in their footsteps. He told his rebels to meet at John Montgomery's tavern, on Yonge Street just north of Eglinton, which was still a few kilometers north of the city in those days. That weekend, they began to arrive. There were hundreds of them. Farmers and blacksmiths and clerks and craftsmen. Mackenzie had even chosen a commander for his army: Anthony Von Egmond, a Dutchman who had fought both for and against Napoleon during the wars in Europe. He was supposed to arrive on Thursday. December 7, 1837. That was going to be the day of the Canadian Revolution. They would march down Yonge Street, head over to City Hall, seize the weapons, capture Bond Head and declare a new Canadian republic.

Well. That was the plan anyway. But the plan would go to shit long before Thursday.


Continue reading with Part Five, Revolution! ish!, here.

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You can read Mackeznie's "Rebellion Proclamation" here. You can read other stuff about the road to rebellion here. And here. Learn more about FitzGibbon here. And read a book that gives a detailed description of the rebellion, including a first-hand account and the scene when FitzGibbon burst into the Executive Council meeting here.

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837