A
‘rather melancholy’ encounter
Raucous
laughter and the smell of vomit permeated the village as the men, women and
children got drunk on French brandy. Two women were knifed in a drunken brawl.
The
year was 1676.
The
Seneca village of Teiaiagon — meaning “It
crosses the stream” — sat atop a high plateau bordered on its north, south
and west sides by the meandering Humber River.
Now,
it’s the site of the stately mansions and swimming pools of the exclusive Baby
Point neighbourhood, the Bloor and Jane Sts. area.
Then,
it was where six French traders-the first group of White visitors to present day
Toronto — gave the Indians their first taste of alcohol.
“All
the inhabitants were dead drunk for three days,” chronicled an unknown writer
of the time, possibly a missionary travelling with the traders. ‘The old men,
the women and the children got drunk; after which the six traders engaged In the
debauchery … running about naked with a keg of brandy under the arm.” And so
began the relationship between natives and whites here.
“A
rather melancholy beginning for Toronto the Good,” wrote the late Canadian
historian Percy Robinson in his 1933 work, “Toronto during The French
Regime.”
French
explorer. Etienne Brflé
had travelled down the Humber River 61 years before the encounter, becoming the
first white man to glimpse lake Ontario. Although the Seneca village appeared on
a 1763 map drawn by the young adventurer Louis Jolliet, Robinson describes the
brandy incident as “the first definitely recorded visit of white men to the
site of the present city.”
Teiaiagon
was built 50 years after Brule’s visit, 2.5 kilometres north of the lake.
Probably the most important of all the villages on the site of Toronto before
the arrival of Europeans - and one of the most well-researched — the village
of 50 longhouses, home to 4,000 or 5,000 people, was built on an easily
defensible plateau surrounded by a wooden palisade and fields of corn, bean and
squash.
The
Seneca, along with the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida and Cayuga comprised the Five
Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Although
the Iroquois originally lived in what is now upstate New York, they pushed
north, extending their villages into southern Ontario.
The
Iroquois regularly moved village sites -to allow the land to rejuvenate and to
search out richer hunting sounds. But Teiaiagon was unusual in that it was to be
a permanent site. It was a virtual paradise-and a strategic location to take
advantage of trade with other First Nations and later, Europeans. In the fur
‘trade and war for North America, the Iroquois allied with the British.
In
their push to secure lands north of their territory for new beaver resources in
the 1640s, the Iroquois destroyed virtually every village in Southern Ontario
belonging to their mortal enemies, the Huron, who were allied with the French.
Just
as the Iroquois wanted more hunting territory, the French and their Indian
allies wanted control of the land around Lake Ontario. Eleven years after
French traders got the people of Teiaiagon drunk, a fleet of hundreds of small
boats brought French and Indian enemies up the Humber River to the village.
Teiaiagon was destroyed on orders from the French governor— but no one knows
if the Seneca were massacred or if they burned their village and escaped into
the woods.
After
1687, Teiaiagon disappeared and the area was taken over by Mississauga Indians.
The French built a fort there in 1750,renaming the site Baby Point.
Later,
Toronto’s first mills, powered by the fast flowing Humber, were built in the
area. Settlers moved into farm the land, and slowly, urbanization took over.