Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
Standing 13 feet tall in his bronze incarnation in Couchiching Beach Park, French seaman, soldier and visionary Samuel de Champlain played a monumental role in the early exploration of the New World four centuries ago.
Sadly, two of the most significant historical sites in the Orillia area that Champlain observed in 1615 and described in rich detail in his lengthy journals are invisible to modern eyes, one hidden underwater, the other obscured by woods.
Since setting out June 11 as part of Quebec City’s 400th-anniversary celebrations, nine people are retracing Champlain’s astounding 1,500- kilometre journey up the Ottawa River and down the French River to Georgian Bay—the legendary freshwater sea—then south through the 30,000 Islands to the Midland area.
Today, on the last stop of their 10- day tour, the group Following Champlain’s Footsteps will visit Midland and Orillia.
In the Midland area, where French
Recollet missionaries performed the first
Catholic mass on Aug. 12, 1615, they will tour the Wye Marsh Wildlife Centre, historic Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons, and the Martyrs’ Shrine.
The Sainte-Marie mission was not established until 1639, five years after Champlain’s death.
Cahiague, the woodland site near Warminster believed to be the largest native village in the Huron nation, boasting 200 longhouses at the time of Champlain’s arrival, is not on the itinerary.
Nor is there any mention in the Footsteps itinerary of the native fish weirs, the national historic site at the Atherley Narrows where the Hurons were netting fish as Champlain assembled a war party to attack the Iroquois in September 1615.
Instead, the modern-day adventurers will have dinner at the Ossawippi Dining Cars Restaurant on the Orillia waterfront, then see the Champlain Monument before heading to Carriage Ridge Resort at Horseshoe Valley for the night.
Advertisement
Sponsored by tourism and heritage ministries, the 10- day Footsteps route is as much about tourism as history, so much of the emphasis is on promoting local attractions, such as whitewater rafting on the Ottawa River, sea kayaking on Georgian Bay or cave touring in Collingwood.
Nonetheless, the omission of two key sites in Champlain’s journey through Huronia is suggestive of a failure to fully recognize a significant segment in the broad sweep of Canadian history.
The magnificent Champlain Monument, erected with great fanfare in 1925 in Couchiching Beach Park, showed great civic spirit and a brilliant, artistic celebration of our colourful past. Though seen as somewhat patriarchal today, the monument does dare to place history on a pedestal.
To this point, the same energy and imagination have not been applied to draw the fish weirs at The Narrows and the Huron village of Cahiague into full public view to capture the collective imagination.
“Nobody can get anything done,” complained Don Ross, who remembers first discussing an interpretive centre at The Narrows in 1995, when he was chair of Orillia’s Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee.
Carbon dating of stakes removed from the weirs indicate the site was used by First Nations people for 4,500 years, predating the pyramids of Egypt.
In the third volume of his journals, Champlain watched Hurons fishing in The Narrows on Sept. 1, 1615, and described the activity.
The party set out from Cahiague, he writes, and arrived at “the shore of a small lake (Couchiching) distant from the said village three leagues (12.6 kilometres), where they make great catches of fish which they preserve for the winter. There is another lake immediately adjoining (Simcoe), which is 26 leagues in circumference, draining into the small one by a strait, where the great catch of fish takes place by means of a number of weirs which almost close the strait, leaving only small openings where they set their nets and in which the fish are caught.”
Champlain does not offer any further details of the angling operation, his thoughts being focused that day on gathering a war party to travel south of Lake Ontario to launch the ill-fated attack on the main Iroquois stronghold near modern-day Syracuse, N. Y.
After being struck twice by arrows and wounded in the leg, Champlain and his soundly defeated contingent of natives and French mercenaries retreated to Huronia to recover.
On the return trip, his injured leg causing him excruciating pain, the relentless observer took time to describe a deer hunt that mirrored exactly the simple technology used so effectively at The Narrows.
In the middle of the woods, the Hurons spent 10 days constructing two fences in a V-shape out of “great wooden stakes eight or nine feet in height, joined close together, and the length of each side was nearly 1,500 paces. At the extremity of this triangle there is a little enclosure, getting narrower the farther it goes, and partly covered with branches, with only one opening five feet wide, about the width of an average gate, by which the deer were to enter.”
The natives would rise at 5:30 in the morning and, by banging sticks together, drive deer through the woods toward the death trap.
In 38 days, from Oct. 28 to Dec. 1, 1615, the Huron caught and killed 120 deer in the enclosure of stakes, feasting on the meat, keeping the fat to use like butter and the skins for clothing, Champlain reports.
Champlain thought of the spacious land of the Hurons as a great island surrounded by lakes and rivers. His journals describe a fairly settled population, growing the Three Sisters—corn, squash and beans—and gathering a variety of fruits and berries and hunting abundant wild game.
“All these regions abound in animals of the chase, such as stags, caribou, moose, does, buffaloes, bears, wolves, beavers, foxes, weasels, marten and several other species,” he writes.
Champlain travelled through the area for a number of reasons, the foremost being the search for a navigable route to China.
“Everybody was looking for a way to Cathay,” said Jamie Hunter, curator of the Huronia Museum in Midland.
Attempts to find a northwest passage had failed, said Hunter.
“Frobisher had tried and hit a pile of ice. The East India Company sent Henry Hudson and he banged around up north and didn’t find anything.”
Champlain, who had heard about the great freshwater sea, pushed west in the company of his allies and trading partners, the Hurons.
Attacking the Iroquois, the longtime enemy of the Hurons, was part of cementing his relationship with that First Nation, said Hunter, noting there were 12,000 to 14,000 Hurons living in 18 villages. “Champlain visited 14 of them.”
His journals give a vivid portrait of native life, and many of his maps were the first attempts to chart the twisting tangle of rivers, the curving bodies of lakes and the vast land masses they drained and encompassed.
Not nearly enough has been done in Simcoe County to catalogue and preserve native sites, said Hunter.
“We really need a comprehensive inventory of archeological resources, especially with development pressure increasing.”
The fish weirs are the longest-standing man-made structure in Ontario, said Hunter.
“There are still 80,000 posts in the soil underwater.”
Creating some sort of interpretive centre at the site, possibly in time for 2015, the true 400th anniversary of Champlain’s journey through this area, would be marvellous, said Hunter.
(C) The Orillia Packet & Times