Toronto of Old Part 6

She sketched from nature with great elegance, and designed cleverly. The seven or eight ill.u.s.trations which appear in the American edition of the "Characteristics," dated at Toronto, are etched by herself, and bear her autograph, "Anna." The same is to be observed of the ill.u.s.trations in the English edition of her "Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies;" and in her larger volumes on various Art-subjects. She had super-eminently beautiful hands, which she always scrupulously guarded from contract with the outer air.

Mrs. Jameson was a connoisseur in "hands," as we gather from her Commonplace Book, just mentioned. She there says: "There are hands of various character; the hand to catch, and the hand to hold; the hand to clasp, and the hand to grasp; the hand that has worked, or could work, and the hand that has never done anything but hold itself out to be kissed, like that of Joanna of Arragon, in Raphael's picture." Her own appeared to belong to the last-named cla.s.s.

Though the merest trifles, we may record here one or two further personal recollections of Mrs. Jameson; of her appreciation, for example, of a very obvious quotation from Horace, to be appended to a little sketch of her own, representing a child asleep, but in danger from a serpent near; and of her glad acceptance of an out-of-the-way sc.r.a.p from the "Vanity of Arts and Sciences" of Cornelius Agrippa, which proved the antiquity of _charivaries_. "Do you not know that the intervention of a lady's hand is requisite to the finish of a young man's education?" was a suggestive question drawn forth by some youthful maladroitness. Another characteristic dictum, "Society is one vast masquerade of manners," is remembered, as having been probably at the time a new idea to ourselves in particular. The irrational conventionalities of society she persistently sought to counteract, by her words on suitable occasions, and by her example, especially in point of dress, which did not conform to the customs in vogue.

Among the local characters relished by Mrs. Jameson in Canada was Mr.

Justice Hagerman, who added some of the bluntness of Samuel Johnson to the physique of Charles James Fox. She set a high value on his talents, although we have heard her, at once playfully and graphically, speak of him as "that great mastiff, Hagerman." From Mrs. Jameson we learned that "Gaytay" was a sufficient approximation in English to the p.r.o.nunciation of "Goethe." She had been intimately acquainted with the poet at Weimar.

In the Kensington Museum there is a bust, exceedingly fine, of Mrs.

Jameson, by the celebrated sculptor Gibson, executed by him, as the inscription speaks, "in her honour." The head and countenance are of course somewhat idealized; but the likeness is well retained. In the small Boston edition of the "Legends of the Madonna" there is an interesting portrait of Mrs. Jameson, giving her appearance when far advanced in years.

Westward from the house and grounds whose a.s.sociations have detained us so long, the s.p.a.ce that was known as the Government Common is now traversed from south to north by two streets. Their names possess some interest, the first of them being that of the Duke of Portland, Viceroy of Ireland, Colonial Secretary, and three times Prime Minister in the reign of George the Third; the other that of Earl Bathurst, Secretary for the Colonies in George the Fourth's time.

Eastward of Bathurst Street, in the direction of the military burying-ground, there was long marked out by a furrow in the sward the ground-plan of a church. In 1830, the military chaplain, Mr. Hudson, addressed to the commander of the forces a complaint "of the very great inconvenience to which the troops are exposed in having to march so far to the place of worship, particularly when the weather and roads are so unfavourable during a greater part of the year in this country, the distance from the Barracks to the Church being two miles:" adding, "In June last, the roads were in such a state as to prevent the Troops from attending Church for four successive Sundays." He then suggested "the propriety of erecting a chapel on the Government reserve for the accommodation of the Troops." The Horse Guards refused to undertake the erection of a chapel here, but made a donation of one thousand pounds towards the re-edification of St. James' Church, "on condition that accommodation should be permanently provided for His Majesty's Troops."

The outline in the turf was a relic of Mr. Hudson's suggestion.

The line that defined the limit of the Government Common to the north and east, (and west, of course, likewise), prior to its division into building lots, was a portion of the circ.u.mference of a great circle, "of a radius of a 1,000 yards, more or less," whose centre was the Fort. On the old plans of York, acres of this great circle are traced, with two interior concentric arcs, of radii respectively of eight and five hundred yards.

We now soon arrive at the ravine of the "Garrison Creek." In the rivulet below, for some distance up the valley, before the clearing away of the woods, salmon used to be taken at certain seasons of the year. Crossing the stream, and ascending to the arched gateway of the fort, (we are speaking of it as it used to be), we pa.s.s between the strong iron-studded portals, which are thrown back: we pa.s.s a sentry just within the gate, and the guard-house on the left. At present we do not tarry within the enclosure of the Fort. We simply glance at the loopholed block-house on the one side, and the quarters of the men, the officers, and the commandant on the other; and we hurry across the gravelled area, recalling rapidly a series of spirit-stirring ordinal numbers--40th, 41st, 68th, 79th, 42nd, 15th, 32nd, 1st--each suggestive of a gallant a.s.semblage at some time here; of a vigorous, finely disciplined, ready-aye-ready group, that, like the successive generations on the stage of human life, came and went just once, as it were--as the years rolled on, and the eye saw them again no more.

We pa.s.s on through the western gate to the large open green s.p.a.ce which lies on the farther side. This is the Garrison Reserve. It bears the same relation to the modern Toronto and the ancient York as the Plains of Abraham do to Quebec. It was here that the struggle took place, in the olden time, that led to the capture of the town. In both cases the leader of the aggressive expedition "fell victorious." But the a.n.a.logy holds no further; as, in the case of the inferior conquest, the successful power did not retain permanent possession.

The Wolfe's Cove--the landing-place of the invader--on the occasion referred to, was just within the curve of the Humber Bay, far to the west, where Queen Street now skirts the beach for a short distance and then emerges on it. The intention had been to land more to the eastward, but the vessels containing the hostile force were driven westward by the winds.

The debarkation was opposed by a handful of Indians, under Major Givins.

The Glengary Fencibles had been despatched to aid in this service, but, attempting to approach the spot by a back road, they lost their way. A tradition exists that the name of the Grenadier's Pond, a lagoon a little to the west, one of the ancient outlets of the waters of the Humber, is connected with the disastrous bewilderment of a party of the regular troops at this critical period. It is at the same time a.s.serted that the name "Grenadier's Pond" was familiar previously. At length companies of the Eighth Regiment, of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, and of Incorporated Militia, made their appearance on the ground, and disputed the progress inland of the enemy. After suffering severely, they retired towards the Fort. This was the existing Fort. The result is now matter of history, and need not be detailed. As portions of the cliff have fallen away from time to time along the sh.o.r.e here, numerous skeletons have been exposed to view, relics of friend and foe slain on the adjacent common, where, also, military ornaments and fragments of fire-arms, used frequently to be dug up. Some of the bones referred to, however, may have been remains of early French and Indian traders.

The _Loyalist_ newspaper of May 9, 1829, published at York, speaks of the re-interment on that day of the remains of an officer killed at the battle of York. The article runs as follows:--"The late Capt.

McNeil.--It will be recollected by many of the inhabitants of York that this officer fell while gallantly fighting at the head of his Company of Grenadiers of the 8th Regiment, in defence of the place, on the morning of the 27th of April, 1813. His remains which so eminently deserved rites of honourable sepulture, were from unavoidable circ.u.mstances consigned to earth by the hands of the enemy whom he was opposing, near the spot where he fell, without any of those marks of distinction which are paid to departed valour.

"The waters of the Lake," the _Loyalist_ then proceeds to say, "having lately made great inroads upon the bank, and the grave being in danger of being washed away, it may be satisfactory to his friends to learn, that on these circ.u.mstances being made known to Major Winniett, commanding the 68th Regiment at this Post, he promptly authorized the necessary measures to be taken for removing the remains of Capt. McNeil, and placing them in the Garrison Burial Ground, which was done this day.

A firing-party and the band attended on the occasion, and the remains were followed to the place of interment by the officers of the Garrison, and a procession of the inhabitants of the town and vicinity."

The site of the original French stockade, established here in the middle of the last century, was nearly at the middle point between the landing-place of the United States force in 1813, and the existing Fort.

West of the white cut-stone Barracks, several earthworks and gra.s.s-grown excavations still mark the spot. These ruins, which we often visited when they were much more extensive and conspicuous than they are now, were popularly designated "The Old French Fort."

It is interesting to observe the probable process by which the appellation "Toronto" came to be attached to the Trading-post here. Its real name, as imposed by the French authorities, was Fort Rouille, from a French colonial minister of that name, in 1749-54. This we learn from a despatch of M. de Longeuil, Governor-in-Chief of Canada in 1752. And "Toronto," at that period, according to contemporaneous maps, denoted Lake Simcoe and the surrounding region. Thus in Carver's Travels through North America in 1766-8, in p. 172, we read, "On the north-west part of this lake [Ontario], and to the south of Lake Huron, is a tribe of Indians called the Mississagues, whose town is denominated Toronto, from the lake [_i. e._ Lake Simcoe] on which it lies, but they are not very numerous." This agrees with Lahontan's statements and map, in 1687.

What Carver says of the fewness of the native inhabitants is applicable only to the state of things in his day. The fatal irruption of the Iroquois from the south had then taken place, and the whole of the Lake Simcoe or Toronto region had been made a desert. Before that irruption, the peninsula included between Notawasaga Bay, Matchedash, or Sturgeon Bay, the River Severn, Lake Couchichin and Lake Simcoe was a locality largely frequented by native tribes. It was especially the head-quarters of the Wyandots or Hurons. Villages, burial-grounds, and cultivated lands abounded in it. Unusual numbers of the red men were congregated there.

It was in short the place of meeting, the place of concourse, the populous region, indicated by the Huron term Toronto.

In the form Toronton, the word Toronto is given by Gabriel Sagard in his "Dictionnaire de la Langue Huronne," published at Paris in 1636.

With Sagard it is a kind of exclamation, signifying "Il y en a beaucoup," and it is used in relation to men. He cites as an example--"He has killed a number of S. (the initial of some hostile tribe)." "Toronton S. ahouyo."

In the Vocabulary of Huron words at the end of Lahontan's second volume, the term likewise appears, but with a prefix,--A-toronton,--and is translated "Beaucoup." Sagard gives it with the prefix O, in the phrase "O-toronton dacheniquoy," "J'en mange beaucoup."

We are not indeed to suppose that the Hurons employed the term Toronto as a proper name. We know that the aborigines used for the most part no proper names of places, in our sense of the word, their local appellations being simply brief descriptions or allusion to incidents.

But we are to suppose that the early white men took notice of the vocable Toronto, frequently and emphatically uttered by their red companions, when pointing towards the Lake Simcoe region, or when pressing on in canoe or on foot, to reach it.

Accordingly, at length, the vocable Toronto is caught up by the white voyageurs, and adopted as a local proper name in the European sense: just as had been the case already with the word Canada. ("Kanata" was a word continually heard on the lips of the red men in the Lower St.

Lawrence, as they pointed to the sh.o.r.e; they simply meant to indicate--"Yonder are our wigwams;" but the French mariners and others took the expression to be a geographical name for the new region which they were penetrating. And such it has become.)

We can now also see how it came to pa.s.s that the term Toronto was attached to a particular spot on the sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario. The mouth of the Humber, or rather a point on the eastern side of the indentation known as Humber Bay, was the landing place of hunting parties, trading parties, war-parties, on their way to the populous region in the vicinity of Lake Simcoe. Here they disembarked for the tramp to Toronto.

This was a Toronto landing-place for wayfarers bound to the district in the interior where there were crowds. And gradually the starting-place took the name of the goal. The style and t.i.tle of the terminus _ad quem_ were usurped by the terminus _a quo_.

Thus likewise it happened that the stockaded trading-post established near the landing on the indentation of Humber Bay came to be popularly known as Fort Toronto, although its actual, official name was Fort Rouille.

In regard to the signification which by some writers has been a.s.signed to the word Toronto, of "trees rising out of the water"--we think the interpretation has arisen from a misunderstanding of language used by Indian canoe-men.

Indian canoe-men in coasting along the sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario from the east or west, would, we may conceive, naturally point to "the trees rising out of the water," the pines and black poplars looming up from the Toronto island or peninsula, as a familiar land-mark by which they knew the spot where they were to disembark for the "populous region to the north." The white men mixing together in their heads the description of the landmark and the district where, as they were, emphatically told, there were crowds, made out of the expressions "trees rising out of the water," and "Toronto," convertible terms, which they were not.

As to the idea to which Capt. Bonnycastle gave currency, by recording it in one of his books on Canada, that Toronto, or Tarento, was possibly the name of an Italian engineer concerned in the construction of the fort,--it is sufficient to reply that we know what the official name of the Fort was: it was Fort Rouille. Sorel, and Chambly, and it may be, other places in Canada, derived their names from officers in the French service. But nothing to be found in the early annals of the country gives any countenance to Capt. Bonnycastle's derivation. It was probably a mere after-dinner conversational conjecture, and it ought never to have been gravely propounded.

We meet with Toronto under several different forms, in the French and English doc.u.ments; but the variety has evidently arisen from the attempts of men of different degrees of literary capacity and qualification, to represent, each as he best could, a native vocable which had not been long reduced to writing. The same variety, and from the same cause, occurs in a mult.i.tude of other aboriginal terms.

The person who first chanced to write down Toronto as Tarento was probably influenced by some previous mental familiarity with the name of an old Italian town; just as he who first startled Europeans by the announcement that one of the Iroquois nations was composed of Senecas, was doubtless helped to the familiar-looking term which he adopted, by a thought of the Roman stoic. (Pownall says Seneca is properly Sen-aga, "the farther people," that is in relation to the New England Indians; while Mohawk is Mo-aga, "the hither people." Neither of the terms was the name borne by the tribe. According to the French rendering, the Mo-agas were Agnies; the Sen-agas Tsonnontouans.)

The chivalrous and daring La Salle must have rested for a moment at the Toronto Landing. In his second expedition to the West, in 1680, he made his way from Fort Frontenac to Michilimackinac by the portage from the mouth of what is now the Humber to Lake Huron, accompanied by a party of twenty-four men.

In the preceding year he had penetrated to the Mississippi by the Lake Erie route. But then also some of his company unexpectedly found themselves in close proximity to Toronto. The Franciscan Friar, Hennepin, sent forward by La Salle from Fort Frontenac with seventeen men, was compelled by stress of weather, while coasting along the north side of Lake Ontario, to take shelter in the Humber river. It was then the 26th of Nov. (1678); and here he was delayed until the 5th of December. Hennepin speaks of the place of his detention as Taiaiagon: a word erroneously taken to be a local proper name. It means as we are a.s.sured by one formerly familiar with the native Indians, simply a Portage or Landing-place. So that there were numerous Taiaiagons. One is noted in particular, situated, the _Gazetteer_ of 1799 says, "half way between York and the head of the Bay of Quinte:" probably where Port Hope now stands. It is marked in the old French maps in that position.

(On one of them a track is drawn from it to "Lac Taronthe;" that is to the chain of Lakes leading north-westerly to Lake Toronto, _i. e._ Lake Simcoe.) The Taiaiagon of Hennepin is stated by him to be "at the farther end of Lake Ontario," and "about seventy leagues from Fort Frontenac:" too far, of course. Again: the distance from Taiaiagon to the mouth of the Niagara river, is made by him to be fifteen or sixteen leagues; also too far, if Toronto is the site of his Taiaiagon.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

IV.

FROM THE GARRISON BACK TO THE PLACE OF BEGINNING.

We now enter again the modern Fort; pa.s.sing back through the western gate. On our right we have the site of the magazine which so fatally exploded in 1813; we learn from Gen. Sheaffe's despatch to Sir George Prevost, that it was "in the western battery."

In close proximity to the magazine was the Government House of the day, an extensive rambling cl.u.s.ter of one-storey buildings; all "riddled" or shattered to pieces by the concussion, when the explosion took place.

The ruin that thus befel the Governor's residence led, on the restoration of peace, to the purchase of Chief Justice Elmsley's house on King street, and its conversion into "Government House."

From the main battery, which (including a small semi-circular bastion for the venerable flag-staff of the Fort) extends along the brow of the palisaded bank, south of the parade, the royal salutes, resounding down and across the lake, used to be fired on the arrival and departure of the Lieutenant-Governor, and at the opening and closing of the Legislature.

From the south-eastern bastion, overlooking the ravine below, a twelve-pounder was discharged every day at noon. "The twelve-o'clock gun," when discontinued, was long missed with regret.

At the time of the invasion of Canada in 1812, the garrison of York was manned by the 3rd regiment of York militia. We have before us a relic of the period, in the form of the contemporary regimental order-book of the Fort. An entry of the 29th of July, 1812, showing the approach of serious work, has an especial local interest. "In consequence of an order from Major-General Brock, commanding the forces, for a detachment of volunteers, under the command of Major Allan, to hold themselves in readiness to proceed in batteaux from the Head of the Lake to-morrow at 2 o'clock, the following officers, non-commissioned officers and privates will hold themselves in readiness to proceed at 2 o'clock, for the purpose of being fitted with caps, blankets and haversacks, as well as to draw provisions. On their arrival at the Head of the Lake, regimental coats and canteens will be ready to be issued to them." The names are then given. "Capt. Heward, Lieut. Richardson, Lieut. Jarvis, Lieut. Robinson. Sergeants Knott, Humberstone, Bond, Bridgeford."

In view of the test to which the citizen-soldiers were about to be subjected, the General, like a good officer, sought by judicious praise, to inspire them with self-confidence. "Major-General Brock," the order-book proceeds, "has desired me (Captain Stephen Heward) to acquaint the detachment under my command, of his high approbation of their orderly conduct and good discipline while under arms: that their exercise and marching far exceeded any that he had seen in the Province.

And in particular he directed me to acquaint the officers how much he is pleased with their appearance in uniform and their perfect knowledge of their duty."