History of Toronto and County of York, Ontario, Vol 1

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CHAPTER I. PRE-HISTORIC CANADA.

THE history of Canada is the history of three races,—the Indian, the Frenchman, and the English-speaking immigrant from the British isles or the neighbouring Republic.

The Indian tribes had roamed over the unbroken forest that is now the Dominion of Canada, through ages that we can only approximately estimate by the guesses of experts in our pre-historic annals. Like the other inferior races of man, they have no annals, no record of their own past; but the record of race, stamped on skin and skeleton, would seem to indicate an Asiatic origin. In the part of North America south of what is now New York State, the present race of Indians appear to have superseded a far more civilized race, the builders of fortified towns and permanent temples, who were well acquainted with the use of metals. But when, in the sixteenth century of Christian civilization, French and English maritime enterprise, born of the new birth of classical literature, discovered or re-discovered this country, the Indian race in Canada had not advanced beyond the civili zation of the Stone Age. They were in some respects behind, they were in no respect in advance of, the human wild beast who was the contemporary of the mammoth and the cave-bear. Their spears and arrows were pointed with carefully-chipped flint, their knives were of clam-shells ; of the use of

metal they knew nothing; their dress was that of the earlier savages described in the legends of Hebrew and other primitive races, paint and the skins of wild beasts. They had no domesticated animals except a breed of dogs useless for the chase, which they kept for the purpose of religious sacrifice and of food. They had lived for unknown centuries with no home but the forest, which they shared with the wolf, the bear, and the lynx. In architecture they were inferior to the brute instinct which had shaped the lake cities of the beaver, the cave-shaped nests of the mole, the wax hexagon of the bee.

The Indians of Canada represent its pre-historic age. It is impossible to estimate the date of their sparse and nomadic occupation of a country that, now civilized into farms, towns, and cities, supports an increasing population which to their feeble and shifting number is as a thousand to one. No doubt these inferior races fulfilled a useful purpose. They were of some service to the first white immigrants into Canada. They guided Champlain up the tortuous courses of the Ottawa ; their conversion from Fetichism to Roman Catholicism elicited the noblest missionary effort which the Christian Church has seen since its first century of miracles and martyr doms. But they surpassed all other savage races known to history in cruelty, treachery, and revenge; and whenever, after a fashion, they have become civilized, they seem to have lost many of the virtues of savage life. It may be doubted whether the heroism of the French Jesuits does not count among the wasted efforts of man's noblest powers. The Christian ized Indian is no permanent or prosperous element in the population of this country; his civilization is second-hand; disease and vice decimate his ranks ; alcoholism fastens its fangs into his strength. An intelligent officer of the Hudson's Bay Company, employed at the Pacific Railway station of Mattawa, in 1882, not long since expressed the opinion that the Indian tribes in the northern part of Canada will most likely be extinct before the end of another hundred years. ..