The Toronto Carrying Place: Rediscovering Toronto's Most Ancient Trail

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The cemetery is right at the intersection of Baseline and Greenbank. It’s an enormous site, sprawling over sixty acres of suburban Ottawa; a vast green space in the middle of the residential west end. As you go in from Baseline Road, the land rises suddenly in a wooded ridge. The trees on the slope and crest of the ridge are largely the pines after which Pinecrest Cemetery and Crematorium is named.

Only because of the ridge are the trees still here at all. Three corners of the intersection are dense with townhouses, apartment buildings, and a strip mall. The cemetery corner is much greener, but even here most of the trees have understandably given way to well-tended grass.

The only big stand of trees left is on the ridge. It is difficult to dig graves on a steep slope, and the cemetery planners sensibly decided long ago to leave the hillside in its original state. Like some living fossil the hillside wood has remained, essentially untouched, since long before there were settlers here.

At the foot of the ridge, not far from the cars on Baseline, a path leads into the wood. If you follow it, you enter at once into a different world, the sound of the traffic and the light of the twenty-first century slightly filtered through a hundred trees. The leaves crunch under your feet. Ahead of you in the gloom you can just about pick out the trail as it leads up through the wood to the top of the ridge. There is enough room for one person on the path single file — Indian file, as we used to say when I was young.

It all feels so right. This is what the Native trails must have looked like, sounded like, smelt like, 400 years ago. This is straight out of The Last of the Mohicans.

Unfortunately it all comes to an abrupt halt when you emerge at the top seconds later, and find yourself in a modern, nicely groomed hilltop cemetery.

A plaque near the end of the path informs you that you have just walked part of a Native trail that led from the Ottawa River above the Deschênes Rapids to the Rideau River below the Black Creek Rapids. This portage would originally have been ten kilometres long, and would have taken about a day to travel. Now you can walk all twenty metres that are left of it in thirty seconds.

The Pinecrest Cemetery entrance to the tiny surviving stretch of Ottawa’s Black Rapids portage. Used by the Algonquin First Nation until well into the 1800s, this trail led from the Ottawa River to the Rideau River and allowed travellers arriving from the Northwest to get to Lake Ontario via the Rideau and a series of shorter portages. The famous Rideau Canal was completed by Colonel By in 1832 to replicate this route, much as Yonge Street was built by Lieutenant Governor Simcoe to reproduce the Toronto Carrying Place.

Ontario was once criss-crossed with these kinds of paths. While rivers have been the best highways in Canada for almost all of our history, there are some places you just can’t paddle a canoe. Sometimes you need to portage from one river to another. Sometimes you need to go someplace where there aren’t navigable steams. So you follow a trail.

This book is about one of the most important of the Native trails in Ontario — the Toronto Carrying Place, which stretched from the Holland River near Lake Simcoe to what is now Toronto. In its time, the Carrying Place was a well-known and well-used shortcut from Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence valley to the upper Great Lakes and the Northwest. Over countless years, the trail saw traders and warriors, First Nations and Europeans alike, hauling their cargoes through the woods.

But that was long ago. It has been four hundred years since the Carrying Place first entered recorded history, and over two hundred since it disappeared from the record. I am eager to go have a look, but after so long what could possibly be left? We are talking, remember, of a forest trail, a footpath worn into the ground, not some massive pyramid or even a paved road. As I write this, months before I head out into the field, it is not at all obvious to me that there will be anything left to see. Still I want to look.

This book is an attempt to rediscover the Toronto Carrying Place — to retrace its route and its influence on our times, and to find whatever evidence may be left of it today. It is quite literally a trip into the past.

Also my past, as it turns out, but I will try not to be maudlin. My best friend and I both lived in the valley of the Humber, close to the Carrying Place, and spent much of the 1970s roaming up and down the river in our parents’ smoke-filled cars. Bob really should be writing this book, but since he’s not here anymore, I’ll have to do it.

C.W. Jefferys drew this well-known map of the Toronto Carrying Place for Percy Robinson’s 1933 book about Toronto’s early history. The map has been copied, scanned, enhanced, engraved, reprinted, and plagiarized umpteen times since then. Along the route of the trail alone the map appears in four different places, and at least three books published within the last five years have used it. Modern scholarship has suggested changes to some details (like the locations of First Nations villages, for instance), but the map is still considered to be largely accurate, a tribute to Robinson’s research and Jefferys’s draughtmanship.

The Toronto Carrying Place 1615–1793 by C.W. Jefferys from Toronto during the French Régime: 1615–1793, by Percy J. Robinson, second edition © University of Toronto Press, 1965. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

My plan is quite simple. I will walk the length of the Carrying Place, from its foot near the mouth of the Humber River, to its head on the Holland River. I will keep as close to the original course of the portage as I can, and I will note what I see. In the past, travellers usually made the forty-five-kilometre (28-mile) trip in under two days on foot, but I will take three. Not to put too fine a point on it, no one is going to mistake me for a travel-hardened coureur des bois. Three days will suit me just fine.

Three days on the trail, three days in the footsteps of the Wendat, the Anishinabe, the Haudenosaunee, the voyageurs …

I can hardly wait.

A Note on First Nations Names

Everyone knows by now that many of the names we usually ascribe to First Nations are either misunderstandings, or words in other languages, or insults, or all of the above. In this book, I have tried to use the name preferred today by the First Nation to which it refers. Unfortunately, First Nations authorities do not always agree on the preferred name, let alone the spelling of that name. I have tried to be consistent in using the following terms:

I have kept the useful linguistic terms Iroquoian and Algonkian to refer to groups of languages, and I use the term Ojibwe to refer to the language spoken by the Anishinabe.

I am aware of the concerns about misappropriation of Native culture by non-Natives such as myself. I have tried to be as respectful and astute as I can be, but inevitably, as an outsider, I will have gotten many things wrong. There is also the very real risk of misrepresentation, as I blunder into the territory of expert archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists. I look forward to being corrected in the new books, websites, and exhibitions that I hope will continue to document and celebrate Southern Ontario’s First Nation heritage.

And Two Final Notes on Time

Distance and family commitments made it impossible for me to find three consecutive days for this trip. The walk was actually done in three stages over the course of three years. The timing was the same in each year — mid-August — and the circumstances were remarkably similar. However, this book is written as if the three days in question were consecutive, which was not the case.

In the years that it took to write this book, many things along the route of the trail have changed. In some cases, if I became aware of what was happening and felt that it was significant to my theme, I have acknowledged the change. In other cases, I have not. Everything changes — it’s the nature of life.

Chapter One

Anyone who says he likes to portage is a liar.

— John Parker, Outdoor Educator

Making Trail

For my first two years of teaching, I risked sudden death and broke several municipal bylaws every single morning in my rush to get to the closest transit station. My reckless dash took me across four lanes of rush-hour traffic, a patch of National Capital Commission grass, and two lanes of busy parkway before ending in illegal entry to the bus platform.

There was a safer, officially sanctioned route, involving traffic lights and bridges, which took three times as long to travel. I never used it. Like dozens of other morning commuters, I took the shortest, fastest, most direct route, which did not vary from day to day.

In my very first week crossing the NCC land (in which were the remnants of a settler’s apple orchard), I noticed that collectively my comrades and I were wearing down a path — a thin dirt track that was the most practical way from A to B. From then on, it was a point of honour to always use the path, to participate in this little bit of nation building. We kept it going through the fall and winter, pressing down the leaves and the snow, and of course, the more we used the trail, the deeper and more useful it became. I began to mention the path to friends as a metaphor for karma, like some canyon of habits and tendencies that is harder to escape with each journey through it. I liked it.

Trails are a mammal thing. Caribou tend to follow the same routes, not just in their annual migrations north and south, but even in their daily foraging, where they will typically stay on tracks laid down by past caribou. Snowshoe hares create a network of runways throughout their territory. According to Environment Canada, major runways follow the same routes in summer and winter, and the snowshoe hares keep the trails well-maintained, quickly clipping off stems and leaves which begin to block the runways; they may need these routes to escape predators.[1] Wow, highway maintenance…. Even the squirrels in my backyard bound along well-established paths (invisible to human eyes except after a snowfall) linking nest-trees and good hunting grounds. The squirrels consistently choose the shortest, the most efficient, the safest route.

Squirrel trail after a snowfall. Like all mammals, squirrels have a no-nonsense approach to getting from point A to point B. If they can do it in a straight line — great. We would do exactly the same. Perhaps, as relatively large animals, we are always looking for ways to move efficiently and save energy. One of the things that gets in the way of our empathy for other species, like insects, spiders, fish, or birds, is that they don’t travel in a way that we understand. They have their own reasons for moving in the erratic way they do, but it seems alien to us. We have warmer feelings for animals that make trails and stick to them.

And so us.

Our various species of hominid ancestors doubtless made trails as they visited rivers and waterholes day after day, or skirted the Bad Places where the lions lurked. But, of course, there is nothing left of the paths of the earliest humans, beyond the occasional fossilized footprint. As seasonal hunting camps evolved into more permanent settlements, footpaths would naturally have led to the nearest sources of food, to neighbouring hamlets and to places of spiritual importance. Satellite images of landscapes in northeastern Syria show fascinating networks of trails that radiate out from communities into the surrounding fields and link ancient settlements. The trackways, known as hollow ways because of the way they have been worn into the earth, date from the Early Bronze Age (2600 BCE–2000 BCE).[2] These same sorts of patterns probably recurred everywhere that communities settled down. With the growth of towns and then cities in Asia and the Middle East, many of these trails were formalized and paved, to become urban streets or rural roads.

The earliest European trails that we know of date from the Neolithic Age (5500 BCE–2500 BCE). Nearly 1,300 kilometres (800 miles) of ancient ridge routes have been identified in England alone. Typically, these footpaths keep to the high ground and run for enormous distances, though they may not necessarily have always been used for long journeys. England’s ridge routes have been in continual use since the old days and, amazingly, some are still there. You can still walk the Icknield Way through East Anglia, as did Neolithic drovers, Bronze Age warriors, Celtic merchants, Roman soldiers, and mediaeval farmers.

Low roads have also been found in river valleys, and, most impressive of all from an archaeologist’s viewpoint, we can still see timber roads that were created through wetlands.[3] The Sweet Track, an elevated causeway through a peat marsh in Somerset, has been dated to the winter or spring of 3807 or 3806 BCE. (Apart from anything else, you have to marvel at that kind of scientific precision.) This makes the Sweet Track the oldest-known made road in Europe.[4] Ancient boardwalks made of tree trunks have also been found in other European wetlands. Interestingly, this same type of road was re-invented by European settlers in North America almost 6,000 years later as the infamous corduroy road, the bane of horses’ legs and wagons’ axles.

In the Americas too, paths, trails, and ceremonial ways have existed for thousands of years. Famously, the Incas of Peru had a system of paved roads to keep information flowing throughout their empire. The mound-building Adena and Hopewell cultures of the Ohio Valley seem to have built sacred paths between some of their centres, probably for reasons of religion rather than transportation.[5] The villages of the Wendat near Georgian Bay were joined by a 425-kilometre (200-mile) system of narrow paths running through the forest.[6] The Wendat also built timber causeways in Holland Marsh (like Europe’s Neolithic cultures). But while trails were not uncommon in North America, they were never the preferred means of transportation.

Portages

In Europe, prehistoric paths crisscrossed landscapes that had already been cleared for centuries. Not so in Canada, where dense forests, rocky barrens, and vast plains meant that trails on land were absolutely a last resort, to be blazed only when streams were impassable or too distant.

In fact, for most of Canadian history, the only practical way to get around the country has been by boat. Only the laying down of railway tracks made travel on land as fast as on water, and it was not until the 1940s that highways became real alternatives to rivers or canals. In Canada, water has almost always been the best way to go.

But rivers have rapids and falls, and sometimes flow in inconvenient directions. To keep moving in a canoe, or to shorten a trip by hours or days, sometimes you just have to haul the boat and its cargo out of the water, and carry the damn thing — a portage, which is, quite literally, a carrying.

The Conesus Lake trail in the Onondowahgah homeland clearly shows how trail routes are dictated by geography and economy of effort. This old First Nations path ran along the top of a natural ridge of slate that was literally the only practical way through the valley of the lake. According to the photographer’s notes, The lake banks are too precipitous for roadways or even paths in the vicinity and a large detour would be necessary to reach the opposite bank but for this natural salient which shows no artificial grading or structure. This photograph was taken in 1918, just before the trail was destroyed by deforestation.

Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, NAA INV 9380500 OPPS NEG 947 A.

The word portage used in this sense is not old as words go. According to the Grand Robert de la langue française, it was first used in print in 1694 by a French official in Canada named P. Villeneuve who complained about les portages dans l’eau jusqu’à la ceinture.[7] The word’s first appearance in English was in a 1698 translation of Father Hennepin’s travelogue (specifically the bit where he has to get around Niagara Falls), but it does not seem to have been used as a verb (as in to portage around that God-awful waterfall) until as late as 1864.[8] While it has strictly Canadian roots, the word has travelled well. These days one can find references to portages in Africa or Asia, and I just reread the passage in Lord of the Rings where Aragorn finds a portage-way around the rapids of Sarn Gebir on the great river Anduin. From Canada to Middle Earth — not bad, really …

Portages can be as short as a few dozen metres or as long as — well, as long as the Toronto Carrying Place, which, at around forty-five kilometres (28 miles), must rank as one of the longest in North America. It’s so long that you have to wonder about the common sense of such a long shortcut. Carrying a canoe on your head for forty-five klicks doesn’t sound like such a good idea to me.

This is why we portage. The Chaudière Falls (between the cities of Ottawa and Gatineau) are just one of many obstacles on the centuries-old canoe route along the Ottawa River. This site is known as asticou (kettle) to the Anishinabe nation in whose territory it lies, and it is a sacred spot, though it has been exploited for hydroelectric power for over a hundred years and is now largely hidden from sight. Elder William Commanda of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg worked for many years to have the Falls and the surrounding area returned to the care of First Nations. His death in 2011 and the growing pressure to develop this entire area leave Elder Commanda’s Asinabka project in jeopardy.

In fact, there are reports that canoes were simply abandoned at the beginning of this portage and either left for the next group passing through (something like the communal bicycles strewn throughout modern cities) or hidden. Once they arrived at the other end of the portage, if there were no abandoned canoes available, the travellers would simply make new canoes.

This seems such a waste of a valuable possession, and such a waste of time and labour, that I had difficulty believing it. But my teaching colleague, outdoorsman John Parker, who has made a portage or two himself, has no trouble with it at all. It would be madness to carry a canoe for forty-five kilometres. Easier to make a new one.

And just as fast, perhaps. Fur trader Alexander Henry was with a party of sixteen Anishinabe warriors (not voluntarily, but that’s another story) at the foot of the Toronto Carrying Place on June 19, 1764. They had just arrived from Michilimackinac (near Sault Ste. Marie), and were en route to Niagara. Having left their canoes on the Holland River at the head of the portage, they simply made new canoes for everyone at the other end. Henry says that it took them just two days:

Next morning, at ten o’clock, we reached the shore of Lake Ontario. Here we were employed two days in making canoes, out of the bark of the elm-tree, in which we were to transport ourselves to Niagara. For this purpose, the Indians first cut down a tree; then stripped off the bark, in one entire sheet, of about eighteen feet in length, the incision being