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

A Brief History of the Pigeons of Toronto

Davenport & Caledonia

Pigeons have been living with people for literally as long as anyone can remember. They were one of the first animals we ever domesticated — sometime back in the days of prehistory. Pigeons are already there in some of the oldest records we have: Egyptian hieroglypics, Mesopotamian tablets from 5000 years ago, the epic of Gilgamesh... Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan used them to send messages during battle. The Ancient Greeks used them to announce the results of the first Olympic Games. The Greeks and the Romans and the Phoenicians all used them as a symbol of the goddess of love. White doves, which are really just white pigeons, are still a symbol of peace today.

The  birds were selectively bred over thousands of years into a kaleidoscope of colours and characteristics. But they're all descended from wild Rock Doves. The species has been around for about 20 million years — so, like, a third of the way back to the dinosaurs (when we were still living in trees). They evolved in Asia before spreading to Europe and Africa and they're still around today. They all look pretty much like your standard template pigeon: blue-gray with black stripes on their wings and iridescent purple-green necks. They live on sea cliffs and on mountainsides, and thanks to their super-powers they can almost always find their way back home. Scientists think pigeons might be able to sense the magnetic field of the Earth. And they're crazy-smart, too: you can train them to recognize the letters of the alphabet and their own reflection in a mirror. One scientist taught them to tell the difference between a Monet and a Picasso. They're smart enough to use landmarks to find their way home.

That homing instinct is what made pigeons such an awesome species to domesticate: if you want to send a message, you can just take a pigeon to the place you want to send the message from and then let the bird fly home with it. They can cover thousands of kilometers. They're fast, too: they can get up to almost 100 km/h over short distances. That's faster than a cheetah.

Some of those domestic pigeons never did fly home, though. Instead, they went feral. In the Old World, they've been doing it since the days of antiquity. In towns and in villages and in cities, they found tall buildings and temples and cathedrals that were a lot like the sea cliffs and mountainsides they were originally evolved for. They also found a ton of food. Pigeons can eat all sorts of crap. And unlike most birds (or mammals for that matter), both pigeon moms and pigeon dads can turn that food into a kind of regurgitated milk for their baby squabs. They grow up quick and they multiply fast. They can start pumping out babies when they're just six months old and can do it over and over and over again. When conditions are right: six times a year.

They also, more adorably, mate for life.

It was the French who first brought them to the New World. In 1606, a ship docked in Nova Scotia at the colony of Port-Royal, which had just been founded by Samuel de Champlain. On board were the very first Rock Doves ever to be shipped across the Atlantic. Champlain figured the birds would bring a touch of European civilization to New France — and make good meat pies. When he founded Québec City a couple of years later, a pigeon-loft was part of the original settlement. As Europeans spread out across the continent, domestic pigeons — and their feral descendents — went with them.

But they weren't alone. North America already had lots of pigeons before the Europeans arrived. There were Passenger Pigeons by the billions.

When Samuel de Champlain first arrived, they were everywhere. In his diary, he describes them as "infinite". At their peak, there were flocks of millions of them flying all over the eastern half of the continent, including what we now call southern Ontario. Their nesting grounds covered vast stretches of forest. A single tree could hold a hundred nests; branches buckled and cracked under the weight while droppings covered the ground like snow. In the spring and in the fall, they would migrate in HUGE numbers. One naturalist near Niagara-on-the-Lake watched a flock head south into the United States for fourteen straight hours. They formed a column a kilometer and a half wide and five hundred kilometers long. And that was nothing. Sometimes, they could blot out the sun for days.

Passenger Pigeon, 1835 (via TPL)

Passenger Pigeons were bigger than their Rock Dove cousins, with longer necks and longer tails. People called them "graceful" and "dashing". Their colour was little a bit like a Mourning Dove's or a Robin's: brownish-blue-gray on top with a pinkish-red breast. "When they flew to the east of you so that the sun shone on them there was a perfect riot of colour as they passed," the Owen Sound Daily Sun Times wrote, "the sheen of their plumage in the evening sun was such that no words could be found to describe nor a painter to paint it. The flash of brilliant colour and the wonderful whirr of their wings in flight as they passed within a few yards can never be forgotten."

My favourite description of the birds comes from Chief Simon Pokagon of the Potawatomi. He wrote this in a newspaper called The Chautauquan in 1895:

"[I]f the Great Spirit in His wisdom could have created a more elegant bird in plumage, form, and movement, He never did... I have stood for hours admiring the movements of these birds. I have seen them fly in unbroken lines from the horizon, one line succeeding another from morning until night, moving their unbroken columns like an army of trained soldiers pushing to the front.. At other times I have seen them move in one unbroken column for hours across the sky, like some great river, ever varying in hue; and as the mighty stream, sweeping on at sixty miles an hour, reached some deep valley, it would pour its living mass headlong down hundreds of feet, sounding as though a whirlwind was abroad in the land. I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America and regarded the descending torrents in wonder and astonishment, yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven."

He called them "the most beautiful flowers of the animal creation of North America."

In Toronto, the birds most famously congregated on the banks of Mimico Creek in Etobicoke. They would rest there before making the flight south across the lake. In fact, that's how Mimico got its name: it's derived from the Mississauga word omiimiikaa, which means "abundant with wild pigeons."

It wasn't just Mimico, though. The birds were all over town. In 1793, Elizabeth Simcoe (wife of John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant Governor who founded our city that same year) described flocks of Passenger Pigeons so thick you could tie a bullet to a string and knock them down with it. There are stories of enormous flocks flying up the Don Valley every spring, or soaring over the Islands, or spending the night in the Beaches. In Don Mills, people remembered a flock that once took an entire morning to fly by. In Cabbagetown, they remembered one that took days. Children were paid to shoot at them, to scare them away from farmers' fields. In Mimico, they said you could kill a dozen birds with a single shot.

When a flock passed through Toronto in the 1830s, hunters went on a killing spree. "For three or four days the town resounded with one continued roll of firing," a writer later remembered, "as if a skirmish were going on in the streets." At first, the authorities tried to control the slaughter, but soon they gave up: "a sporting jubilee was proclaimed to all and sundry."

A Grand Pigeon Shooting Match, 1833

The area around Sherbourne and Bloor became known as the Pigeon Green, where hunters would wait for the birds to descend into the valley — bringing them within easy firing range. In our city's early days, Passenger Pigeons were a staple of the Torontonian diet. They were fried, roasted, stewed and turned into soups and pies.

The hunting of Passenger Pigeons became a major industry. The flocks had always been harvested by the First Nations, but now the slaughter was waged on a massive scale. At some sites in the United States, tens of thousands of birds were killed every day for months on end: shot, trapped in giant nets, poisoned with whisky, trees set on fire to drive newborn squabs out of their nests. Entire railway cars were packed full of them and shipped away to be sold as meat and mattress stuffing. You could buy them all over the place, including the St. Lawrence Market.

The hunts took a staggering toll. And so did the logging industry, which grew by leaps and bounds in the 1800s, destroying the ancient forests where the pigeons lived. All over eastern North America, the birds were being wiped out at a breathtaking pace. In just a few short decades, they went from being probably the most populous bird on Earth to the brink of extinction. Some estimates claim there were 250,000 birds dying every day.

Many people refused to believe what was happening. As the number of Passenger Pigeons plunged, concerns about over-hunting were dismissed by critics as "groundless", "absurd", and "without foundation." Even some people who did admit the population was crashing refused to believe humans were responsible. They came up with alternative theories: some said the birds had all drowned in the ocean or in Lake Michigan; some said they'd flown away to Australia, or died in a forest fire, or froze to death at the North Pole.

By the end of the 1800s, the birds had almost completely disappeared from the wild. The Toronto Gun Club had to start shipping them in from Buffalo for their annual hunt. By the time the Ontario government finally got around to protecting them in 1897, there were barely any Passenger Pigeons left to protect.

The last two to be killed in Toronto were caught in the fall of 1890. Ten years later, someone said they saw five of them fly over the Island. That was the very last time a Passenger Pigeon was ever seen in Toronto. In 1914, the last member of the species — a 25 year-old named Martha — toppled off her perch at the Cincinnati Zoological Garden. Passenger Pigeons were officially extinct.

By then, Rock Doves had taken over our city.

In the early 1900s, domesticated pigeons were still being used in pretty much the same ways they'd always been used. Every year at the Ex, pigeon owners raced thousands of birds. At the Royal Winter Fair, they awarded prizes to the best-bred — they still do. Some were used as game for hunting. Others were used to fight the World Wars: the Canadian Army enlisted pigeons to deliver messages just like the Ancient Romans did thousands of years ago. It was a pigeon called Beach Comber who brought back the first word of the disastrous landing at Dieppe. They gave the bird a medal for it.

The feral descendents of those domestic pigeons took to the skyscrapers and bridges of Toronto just like they'd done in cities all over the world. You can see them flying above our muddy downtown streets in archival photographs from more than a century ago. Most of them are many generations removed from their captive ancestors; they've reverted back to the blue-gray colouring of wild Rock Doves. But some are still white or pink or brown or speckled or spotted, the genetic heritage of their domestic great-grandparents.

Still, not all of Toronto's wild pigeons are Rock Doves from the Old World. There's one native species that still calls our city home — the closest living relatives of the Passengers Pigeons. They used to be called Turtle Doves, or Rain Doves, or Carolina Pigeons. Today, we call them Mourning Doves because their gentle hoots sound like someone crying.

They were here, too, when the first Europeans arrived, but in much smaller numbers than Passenger Pigeons. Instead of the dense woods where their extinct cousins lived, they preferred open spaces. As the forests of the Passengers Pigeons disappeared and were replaced by farmer's fields, Mourning Doves prospered. Today, there are something like 400 million of them; they live all over the southern half of the continent. In Ontario, they've been protected for more than fifty years, but the federal government recently announced they're considering an end to that ban. Soon, it seems, there may be an open season on Mourning Doves. But Ontario won't be alone. More than a hundred years after Passenger Pigeons were hunted in the skies above Toronto, their closest cousins are still the most hunted migratory game bird in North America.

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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

The Royal Ontario Museum has an extensive collection of Passenger Pigeons, including one on display. The Art Gallery of Ontario has a great painting called "The Passenger Pigeon Hunt" by Antoine-Sébastien Plamondon, also on display.

Here's the full text of what Elizabeth Simcoe had to say about Passenger Pigeons in her diary on November 1, 1793:

"The flights of Wild Pidgeons in the Spring & Autumn is a surprising sight. They fly against the wind & so low that at Niagara the Men threw sticks at them from the Fort & killed numbers, the air is sometimes darkened by them. I think those we have met with here [at York/Toronto] have been particularly good. Sometimes they fix a bullet to a string tied to a Pole & knock them down. Coll. Butler was observing that they build where there are plenty of Acorns but do not feed within 20 miles of the place, reserving that stock of Provisions till the young ones can leave their Nests & then scratch the Acorns up for them."

Here's an account of seeing some Passenger Pigeons in the Don Valley by John Toivnson, as read to the Brodie Club of Toronto:

"My first close-up view of the wild pigeon occurred in 1864, when I was eight years of age. At that time we lived on Winchester Street, near the Necropolis, and my father, who was an amateur taxidermist and interested in all forms of bird life, made frequent trips up the Don valley. On Sunday morning, early in April, in the year above mentioned, I accompanied him in his usual stroll up the river. When we had proceeded a short distance north of the Winchester St. bridge, a flock of wild pigeons (probably two hundred or more) were seen flying up the valley. Opposite Castle Frank at the spot where the west end of the Bloor St. viaduct now is, the flock turned to the left and settled down among the trees. We climbed up the hillside, which was much more densely wooded then than it is at the present time, and as we neared the crest of the hill we could hear the noise of the birds fluttering about and calling, which, as I recollect it, was louder and more shrill than the notes of the mourning dove; anyway they were making considerable noise."

And another account by Toivnson, from 1876:

"I saw a greater number of wild pigeons in one vast flock than I ever expected to see. One morning about the middle of April in that particular year (1876) I happened to be on Toronto Island near the Eastern Channel, when I noticed what I supposed to be an immense black cloud over the lake to the southeast moving towards Scarboro Heights, but as there was a moderate north wind blowing I could not figure out how the cloud was moving against the wind. However, I did not have long to wait, as the moving mass changed its course and swung to the westward, and in a few minutes the northern edge of the flock was directly overhead and I found myself gazing at an in- numerable flock of wild pigeons. The birds were flying at a height, as near as 1 could judge, of probably 500 feet, but as the visibility was good there was no doubt about what they were, as their long tails were clearly discernible. I took out my watch and that flock kept passing over my head for fourteen minutes. I think if my father had been there (reluctant as he was to use the word millions) he would have broken his rule that time. I could plainly hear the rushing sound made by the wings until the birds passed out of sight."

There's an entire book about Passenger Pigeons in Ontario online here. The Toronto and Region Conservation Authority has  brief mention of them in a PDF here. There's a bit about Samuel de Champlain and pigeons here. Messenger pigeons were used in Halifax the surrounding islands as described here. There's lots of info about the history of pigeons here. And even more here. And here.

The City of Toronto talks a bit about our pigeons — and whether they're a problem — here. The CBC talks about pigeons in the War here. There's a photo of Canadian soliders releasing a pigeon during the First World War here. And a Canadian carrying carrier pigeons during the Second World War here. The Canadian Pigeon Racing Union has some info on homing pigeons here. Guelph's The Peak talks about Passenger Pigeons here. The Canadian Encyclopedia does the same here. Wikipedia has a bit about Passenger Pigeons in the history of Mimico here.

Torontoist has a video of a pigeon taking the subway here. YouTube has a documentary about how smart pigeons are here. And there's a song about Martha, the last of the Passenger Pigeons here.

The Giant Prehistoric Beavers of the Don Valley Brick Works

Hooooooo boy. Meet the giant beaver. It’s one of the largest rodents to have ever walked the earth: as much as seven feet long and more than 200 pounds. So, like, the size of a black bear. Its teeth were six inches long, but scientists aren’t sure if they were used to chop down trees like beavers do today; giant beavers probably ate aquatic plants, and there’s no evidence they built giant dams either. Their tails were probably quite different from their modern cousins, too: longer and thinner. And they had shaggier hair.

They also used to live in Toronto — about 130,000 years before our modern city was founded.

The first scientist to discover them here was Toronto’s most famous and celebrated geologist: Arthur Philemon Coleman. In the late 1800s, he became the first geologist to realize the importance of the big cliff on the northern end of the Don Valley Brick Works. At the bottom of the cliff was a bedrock of slate from about 450 million years ago — littered with fossils from the days when this part of the world was a tropical sea filled with trilobites. But what really makes the cliff special is what Coleman found above that slate: a remarkably complete geological record of the last 135,000 years.

Layer by layer, the exposed earth shows the last two Ice Ages coming and going, leaving rocks and dirt and boulders behind as enormous glaciers covered this land in ice and then melted away as the climate changed again. It’s the only place in this part of the world where you can see all of that history laid out in front of you. And in between those two Ice Age layers, there are a bunch of other layers: from a time when the planet was warmer. One of them, near the bottom, is a layer of sand and clay from about 130,000 years ago. That’s where A.P. Coleman found the giant tooth of a giant beaver.

Back in our giant beaver days, Toronto was actually a couple of degrees warmer than it is now. Instead of Lake Ontario, there was an even bigger and deeper lake here; they call it Lake Coleman in honour of the moustachioed geologist. Everything that now sits in downtown T.O. was very much underwater back then. The sands and clays at the foot of the cliff in the Brick Works — which is all the way north of Bloor — would have been in the shallow waters near shore, at the mouth of the prehistoric ancestor to the Don River.

A.P. Coleman

Coleman and his team were able to piece together a whole scene thanks to the other fossils they found along with the beaver tooth. The area where the river met the lake was a marshy wetland back then, surrounded by woods and grasslands. Prehistoric stag-moose, bigger even than moose are today, with huge sets of antlers, roamed through a wilderness that would have seemed both familiar and strange to us. There were plenty of trees and other plants that still grow in Toronto today: oaks and pines and maples, willows, cedars and elms. But there were also some species that you can only find further to the south these days — in the United States, where it’s warmer — as well as a few that are long-extinct. There were giant prehistoric bears here, too. Massive, ancient bison. Woodchucks and white-tailed deer. On occasion, a thunderstorm sparked a fire, flames tearing through forests and fields, enormous panicked beasts rushing for the safety of the water.

Scientists figure that giant beavers didn’t spend much of their time on land; even less, it seems, than beavers do today. They stuck to the swamp at the mouth of the river, swimming through the marsh, feeding on the aquatic reeds and long grasses that lined the shore. (And if they did behave like their modern relatives, maybe they were even cutting down trees and building beaver lodges big enough to house a family of rodents the size of a bear.) They’d been living like this, in the wetlands of North America, for two million years. And they had more than another hundred thousand years left to go.

But not in Toronto. As the next Ice Age began, Toronto got colder, eventually getting buried beneath a layer of ice two kilometers thick. The giant beavers would have been forced far to the south. And as the Ice Age ended, around 10,000 B.C. or so, the last members of the species died out. The giant beaver was extinct.

By then, a new species was living in North America: human beings. Back in the days when giant beavers had been swimming around the Don Valley, humans were still a young species, having only recently evolved on the savannas of Africa. But by the time the giant beavers went extinct, indigenous peoples had established cultures and communities all over the Americas — soon to become civilizations. The First Nations and their ancestors have been living in Toronto for thousands and thousands of years. But it was only a few hundred years ago that the first Europeans showed up. And when they did, many of them came looking for the smaller, modern relatives of those prehistoric beavers — so they could turn these new beavers into hats.

Finally, just a little more than 200 years ago, the British founded a new capital on this spot. To build it, they needed bricks. To make bricks, they needed clay. And one of the best sources for clay was discovered in the very same place where that prehistoric river once met that prehistoric lake. The Don Valley Brick Works was born, turning clay into red and yellow bricks of such a high quality that they won gold medals at the Chicago World’s Fair. A lot of Toronto’s old buildings are made of Brick Works bricks. Much of our city was quite literally built from the mud of the swamp where giant beavers once roamed.

Today, the Brick Works is no longer an industrial wasteland. Instead, we’ve tried to return it to its roots: a mixture of wetlands, forests and fields. Native species of plants and animals have been reintroduced and allowed to thrive — some of them are the very same species that would have been here in the days of the giant beaver. In fact, if you get lucky, you might even spot one of the newest residents: a modern, normal-sized beaver, swimming around the wetland where 130,000 years ago its giant beaver cousins did the very same thing.

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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

This post was edited from its original version to be more awesome.

Image: Castoroides in New Jersey by Charles R. Knight, 1904 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The ROM has a giant beaver, along with other prehistoric beasts who would have lived in these parts on display, which is raaaaather cool. And a few indigenous nations, like the Mi'kmaq and the Cree, have myths about giant beavers.

You can read more about the north cliff of the Brick Works here, at the oh-my-god-so-good Lost Rivers site.

There's a neat photo of the cliff from it's industrial days here and the wasteland that was the quarry here. 

Oh and Torontoist is currently running a series on our city back in its prehistoric days. They've started with a couple of posts about super-super-super old stuff. You can find them all here.

Here, also, since I made this list and didn't use it but don't want to delete it, a few of the plants A.P. Coleman and his team discovered evidence of from that period 130,000 years ago: sugar maples, ash, cedar, hickory, willows, elm, locust trees, oaks, white pine, sycamore, sedges, which are like rushes, mare's tail, algae, mosses.

And then there's this video about giant beavers from a Discovery Channel series called "Prehistoric New York":

Toronto's First Cat

Toronto when it was just a few days old

The cat arrived on a July morning in 1793. Toronto was just a few days old. It had only been a week and a half since one hundred British soldiers sailed into our harbour and came ashore at the mouth of a creek they would call the Garrison. That's the spot where they pitched their tents and started taking axes to trees. Enormous old oaks and pines crashed to earth as the men began to clear away the ancient forest that had been growing here since prehistoric times. In its place they would build Fort York – and a few kilometers to the east, the first few blocks of a new town. This was going to be the new capital of the new province of Upper Canada, away from the border and easily defensible – ready for the inevitable war with the Americans.

It was in the early morning of their eleventh day clearing trees that a great big British ship sailed into the harbour. This was the HMS Mississauga. On board was the man who had sent them here: John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of the new province. He had sailed overnight from Niagara-on-the-Lake (the temporary capital) to oversee the construction of what he hoped would some day become a thriving metropolis, a testament to the glory of the British Empire. And he brought his family with him.

The next evening, he and his wife Elizabeth found a spot across the creek from the fort to pitch their own tent. It was an elaborate canvas house with two rooms, doors, wallpaper, windows and floors – even a stove to keep it warm. This was the very same tent that had once been used by one of the most super-important and famous European explorers ever. Captain James Cook had lived in it on his travels around the Pacific Ocean, right up until he "discovered" Hawaii, tried to take the indigenous king hostage, and was killed.

Now, in the forest of Toronto, the tent was home to the ruler of Upper Canada, his wife, and three of their children. They'd left the older ones behind in England, but brought their toddlers – Sophia and Francis – with them. Their youngest daughter, Katherine, was a brand new baby girl: she'd been born just a few months earlier in that very same tent.

She wasn't the only new addition to the family, either. At Niagara-on-the-Lake the Simcoes had gotten three pets: two dogs (who I'll talk about in another post) and a cat. And since they'd all come along for the trip to Toronto, (assuming none of the soldiers brought a cat along with him) this cat was the very first house cat to ever set paw on this land. Elizabeth Simcoe wrote a paragraph about him in her diary, just a few weeks after they arrived:

"I brought a favourite white Cat with grey spots with me from Niagara. He is a native of Kingston. His sense & attachment are such that those who believe in transmigration would think his soul once animated a reasoning being. He was undaunted on board the Ship, sits composedly as Centinel at my door amid the beat of Drums & the crash of falling Trees & visits the Tents with as little fear as a dog would do."

Toronto's first cat was a badass.

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That painting was done by Elizabeth Simcoe herself about ten days after they arrived. It's looking west from what's now the Port Lands. You can see the tiny little white specks of the first huts at Fort York and the tall masts of the ships that brought the Simcoes and the others here. 

Katherine, sadly, didn't live a very long life. The baby got sick in the spring and died. She was one of the first people buried in a cemetery that's still there, kind of, preserved as park called Victoria Square just southeast of King and Bathurst. You can read more about her and the other people buried there here.

You can read more about the canvas house from the Captain Cook Society here. 

As for wild cats, the internet is being weirdly unhelpful on this, but I suspect there would have been some prowling those woods in the days before our city was founded: bobcats and lynx and maybe even mountain lions.

Interestingly, the canvas house wasn't only the connection between James Cook and our Lieutenant Governor. Cook had served under Simcoe's dad on a ship called the Pembroke, which is how he learned how to be a great big important ship captain guy.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

Mabel The Swimming Wonder Monkey, or The Great Dead Monkey Project

DEC VAX 11/780

Okay, so, this story seems to vary wildly from one source to the other, so I have no idea how much is true and how much is urban legend. But there's no way in hell I'm passing up the opportunity to write a post about The Great Dead Monkey Project, so here goes:

They say Mabel was a monkey, maybe a chimpanzee, trained by scientists at the University of Toronto in the late '70s. They called her Mabel The Swimming Wonder Monkey  because they'd taught her how to swim underwater; she could breathe with a kind of scuba system. The researchers would pump in various gasses to determine the kind of effects they had on her body. 

The whole system was controlled by an early computer—the DEC VAX-11/780. It was a brand new, state of the art machine which took up most of a room, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and came with up to 2 MB of memory. But the one the researchers at U of T were using had developed some kind of problem, so one day, while Mabel was in the pool, a technician came in to fix it. And while he was working on it, he accidentally screwed with part of the system regulating Mabel's air. The Swimming Wonder Monkey drowned.

Her death, according to a dictionary of computer geek slang, is how they got the term "scratch monkey"—an extra drive used to back-up data while troubleshooting. Apparently it's a common expression for safety-conscious computer folk: "Always mount a scratch monkey". If they'd done that at U of T, their monkey wouldn't have died.

There's another version of the story out there as well. It comes from someone who claims to have interviewed the woman who programmed the computer. According to her, the experiment had nothing to do with swimming underwater, but involved five monkeys who were hooked up to the computer so that it could read their brain waves. When the DEC VAX-11/780 was being worked on, it supposedly accidentally sent out electrical signals, directly into the monkeys' brains. It killed three and stunned the other two. The experiment became known as The Great Dead Monkey Project.

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I was tipped off to this one by a couple of friends who run the Once Again, to Zelda blog and are editors with me over at the Little Red Umbrella and who were trying to figure out why an ad for a "Toronto Bucket List" with a photo of a chimpanzee in a wetsuit kept showing up in the sidebar of their Facebook feeds. Which is still confusing. You can read the online dictionary's version of the story here, and The Great Dead Monkey Project version here. Also, coincidentally, there's a monkey gargoyle at U of T, on one of the doorways to University College, which you can see a photo of here.

Donkey Baseball

Donkey baseball

Okay, so I haven't actually been able to find much information about this, but according to what I've pieced together from the internet and my dad's memory, it was an American promoter who first came up with the idea of donkey baseball. He figured people would be willing to pay to see baseball played on donkeyback—which of course they were. The  regular old non-donkey-riding pitcher would throw to the batter, who, once he'd gotten a hit, would clamber up onto his steed and do his best to coax it around the bases. Meanwhile, fielders would try to goad their own donkeys into going after the ball.

The promoter and his team toured around  North America challenging local baseball squads to mount up. It became quite the fad; people started organizing their own games, there was even a movie made about it. And when they came through T.O., they'd head  down to a diamond in New Toronto—by the lakeshore in Etobicoke—right across from the Goodyear plant where my grandfather worked. He and the rest of the company's softball team would cross the street, pair up with a donkey and play a few frustrating innings.

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You can read more about one old game of donkey baseball in this Sports Illustrated article. And apparently people still play the game from time to today. There's YouTube video of it here and here, which really seems a lot less fun when you think of it from the donkey's perspective. There are also those who also play donkey basketball. It has its own Wikipedia page and denunciations from PETA and everything.

A Few Animal-Friendly Paragraphs From When Toronto Was For Kids

Pape Avenue in 1922

A friend of mine recently gave me a pretty amazing book. It was written in the 1960s by  a guy named Robert Thomas Allen. Apparently he was a "humourist"; mostly he comes across as a curmudgeonly old man pissed off that the Toronto he knew growing up in the '20s has given way to the modern age. Grumble grumble back in my day grumble grumble.

But the 120 pages are chock full of intimate details of what life was like, christ, nearly a hundred years ago now. One of my favourite bits is when he talks about all the animals that used to be wandering around:

"One thing wrong with these times of increasing populations and expanding cities is that people only know people. Nobody knows animals any more, the way they did when there were delivery horses and flocks of sparrows on city streets; chickens, geese, and an occasional cow in suburban backyard; and every boy longed to own a guinea pig, rabbit, white rat, ferret, or flock of pigeons, which we found a lot more interesting than human beings...

"There was also a black bear chained over in Phippin's Lumber Yard on Pape Avenue, where you could stand for hours amid the scent of pine shavings, looking at the strange, foreign, snuffing, beady-eyed creature as it sat with its legs spread, front paws dangling, patches of its bare belly as black as shoe leather. It was practically like taking a trip to the Yukon. There was a CNR conductor on Browning Avenue with a racoon, and a kid on Arundel Avenue with a crow, and a woman on Bowden with a parrot that she used to put out on her porch about the time we went to school. We'd keep ourselves late standing there calling without the slightest effect, "Polly want a cracker? Polly want a cracker?"

"We knew all the horses that appeared on the street pulling bakers' and butchers' wagons... There was a horse that used to graze in a field at the top of Broadview Avenue... Now and then a delivery horse took the bit in his mouth and you'd hear the cry go up, "A runaway! Here comes a runaway!" and there'd be the electrifying sight of a horse coming up the front lawns over petunias and wire fences with a bread wagon careening behind it. I used to read in the Boys' Own Annual how to stop a runaway horse by trotting along beside it with my Boy Scout hat on, grabbing one shaft in my left hand and the dangling reigns in my right, gradually bringing the horse to a gentle stop, then turning to the father of my girl, saluting smartly, and saying, "Is this your bread wagon, sir?" But what I used to do when a runaway horse came up the street was to find myself on the veranda, without remembering how I got there, thinking what an impossible life a hero led.

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He goes on to talk about all the animal stories he used to love reading, some by Toronto writers like Charles G.D. Roberts and Ernest Thompson Seton, who I recently wrote about in my post "Two Awesome Moustaches vs. The President of the United States", here.

As far as I can tell, When Toronto Was For Kids is out of print, but you can find a copy at the Toronto Reference Library. You just can't take it out. Info here. Oh and I'm pretty sure he grew in the '20s, because he keeps talking about people who've recently returned from the First World War, but he never actually gives any dates.

Toronto's Oldest Tree

The oldest tree in Toronto (and a tiny person on a roof)

When John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant-Governor who founded Toronto, first sailed into our bay in 1793, what he found, of course, was an untamed wilderness. An ancient forest covered almost all of the area, right up to the shore of the lake in places, with enormous oaks and pines towering hundreds of feet into the air, lush canopies of maple and ash, streams and brooks and rivers filled with salmon and trout, plus deer and bears, wolves and foxes, bald eagles and flocks of passenger pigeons so thick that they blocked out the sun.

Simcoe picked out a spot on the shore for Fort York, laid out ten blocks of a new town, and ordered his men to begin the arduous task of clearing the trees and building a city in their place. The clear-cutting would continue decade after decade as vast stretches of open land were carved out of the wilderness. (The scale of it was enough to shock some people even in those days—nearly 150 years before the birth of environmentalism. After her arrival in Toronto in 1836, the outdoorsy wife of the Attorney-General complained, "A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.") But that, of course, was just the beginning. Despite our "city within a park" slogan, Toronto's total canopy coverage today sits at just 17%. That, depressingly, is about the same as Los Angeles'—less than half of the 40% boasted by other unlikely American cities like Washington, Atlanta and Houston.

Still, amazingly, a few of those same ancient trees that stood in the lush forest of Simcoe's day have survived more than 200 years of Toronto. The oldest of them all is a giant Bur Oak. It stands in the backyard of a house in the Annex, more than 35 meters high with a trunk almost 6 meters around. It's somewhere between 350-400 years old, which means it had already been there for 150 years when Simcoe first arrived, and must have started growing right around the same time that Étienne Brûlé is said to have become the very first European to visit these parts alllllll the way back in 1615.

And that, my friends, is nothing. The oldest tree in Ontario—a White Cedar on the Niagara Escarpment—germinated in 688 AD. That makes it 1322 years old—only about 50 years younger than Islam.

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Back in November, the Toronto Star published a profile of that Bur Oak, which I borrowed the photo from and you can read here. And back in 1923, they published an article by Ernest Hemingway, worrying about the effect car exhaust was having on Toronto's oaks in general. It's over here. Long before that, Simcoe's wife Elizabeth painted watercolours of the ancient forest, some of which you can find here and here and here. And, in a happy coincidence, NOW published an article about Toronto's trees today, including the city's current efforts to get the canopy coverage up to 30-40% by planting more than 100,000 trees a year. It's here.

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

There Are Some Crazyass Fish Living In Our Lake

Lake Sturgeon

This is a lake sturgeon. Sturgeon have apparently been around for about 100 million years, swimming the lakes of North America while there were still dinosaurs walking around on the land. They can live to be more than 100 years old. Some even make it past 150. And they're huge; Wikipedia says they can grow to be more than nine feet long.

So, to recap: there are ancient fish living in our lake that are bigger than you and may have been alive since before the American Civil War.

There used to be tons of them in the Great Lakes, but (surprise!) once the Europeans showed up, overfishing and habitat destruction killed most of them. Now they're protected as a species of "Special Concern" (the same as polar bears) and you can't fish them anymore. (Unless, of course, those same Europeans massacred your ancestors and forcibly occupied all of their land, in which case letting you fish what you want is literally the least we can do.)

Lake sturgeon spend most of their time in the depths, feeding along the bottom, but sometimes they're seen in the shallows, especially during breeding season. And that means next time I'm down by the lake, I'm not going anywhere near the water.

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BEARS!!!

 Black bears, painted by James Audobon

Last week, in an incredible children's book about the history of Toronto called The Toronto Story (which I'll now be stealing all sorts of great stuff from), I found a brief mention of the fact that Bay Street was originally known as Bear Street... because of all the bears. A quick Googling confirms that, yup, the area around Bear Street was home to more than one bear sighting in the city's earliest days, around the turn of the 19th century.

The street was apparently given the name after a bear was startled out of the woods that used to stand at Queen and Bay, where City Hall is now. It took off toward the lake (which was much closer in those days; it came all the way up to Front Street) and was chased right down Bay/Bear/whatever people called it before they called it Bear Street.

It wasn't the only bear-related incident in those early days when the new town was being carved out of the vast forests which had stood on the northern shore of Lake Ontario for thousands of years.  A little bit west of Bay Street, a bear found its way into a horse pasture. The two badass horses inside, Bonaparte and Jefferson, killed it with their bare hooves. And in 1809, a bear turned up on George Street, just a few block east. A Lieut. Fawcett split its head open with a sword.

Googling around about the history of bears in Toronto will also lead you to some other interesting info. Like that in 2006 a polar bear at the zoo was bitten by a mosquito and died of West Nile. Or that an obviously disturbed man brought a rifle to the Riverdale Zoo in 1965 and shot and killed a grizzly. Or that it was a Torontonian-turned-Winnipeger, Harry Colebourne, who bought an orphaned bear club, named her Winnie and donated her to the London Zoo during WWI, where she would inspire A.A. Milne to write Winnie-The-Pooh.

Mostly, though, those Google searches just lead you to a lot of websites about hairy, gay men.