The village stood high above the winding river, perched atop a ridge with a commanding view of the valley below. Dozens of longhouses shone in the September sun, kept safe behind a wooden palisade of tall logs. Great fields of maize stretched off into the distance and along the river’s edge, while hunters stalked deer in the forests beyond. This was the village of Teiaiagon, home to hundreds of Seneca people.
The Seneca were one of the five nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (who Europeans called the Iroquois). They had long been living on the southern side of Lake Ontario, but in recent years, as the Wendat were driven north, the Haudenosaunee had spread their reach across the lake. By the 1670s, it was the Seneca who called the forests of Toronto home.
They built at least two villages in the place where the modern city now stands. Ganatsekwyagon was in the east, near the mouth of the Rouge River. Teiaiagon was in the west, near the mouth of a river they called Niwa’ah Onega’gaih’ih — little thundering waters. Today, it’s known as the Humber River. Each of the villages watched over a branch of one of the most important trade routes in the Great Lakes: the Toronto Carrying Place. From Teiaiagon, the portage trail followed the path of the Humber up toward Lake Simcoe. It had been used by countless generations of First Nations travellers as a shortcut between the lower Great Lakes and the upper Great Lakes.
Now, the French wanted to use it, too.
On that September day in 1681, a small flotilla of canoes appeared on the river. They paddled up from Lake Ontario, thirty men in birchbark boats filled to the brim with supplies. They were French: an expedition led by the notorious explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. They were among the first European visitors to the village, at the beginning of a dangerous voyage through the heart of a continent they barely knew, to places no European eyes had ever seen before. Many of them would never make it home. But by the end of their voyage, they’d have claimed half of North America in the name of France. Soon, Frenchmen like them wouldn’t just be passing through the place where Toronto now stands. They’d be living there: building forts, trading furs, laying the very earliest European foundations for the city to come.
But it all started with the first few visitors, many of whom were brought to the Toronto Carrying Place by a trio of ill-fated French relationships: one disturbing marriage, one scandalous separation, one doomed engagement.
It took weeks for the news to travel from Paris all the way across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence River to the tiny settlement of Quebec. And when he first heard it, Samuel de Champlain refused to believe it. It was too terrible to be true. And yet it was: the king of France had been brutally murdered, stabbed to death by an assassin when his carriage got stuck in a traffic jam. And with King Henry IV dead, the entire future of Canada suddenly hung in the balance.
It was 1610. Nearly a century had passed since Jacques Cartier became the first French explorer to sail up the St. Lawrence, claiming the Indigenous lands he saw there for France. But it was only in recent years that the French presence in North America had really solidified. That was largely thanks to King Henry, whose support for the colony was so vital he’s been called “The Creator of New France.” It was largely thanks to Henry’s backing that Samuel de Champlain was able to explore farther into the interior of the continent, expand the fur trade, and found a new town: Quebec City was just two years old when the assassin’s knife found its mark.
With King Henry’s death, New France was in real danger. The dead king’s son was too young to shoulder the responsibilities of the Crown, so it was Henry’s widow who took over. Marie de’ Medici was from one of the most powerful families in Europe, and with her attention focused on France, she didn’t care much about Canada. Support for the nascent colony of New France was crumbling quickly. One of Champlain’s patrons had already been fired; his own salary was under threat. The explorer had little choice but to rush back home across the ocean. Said to have hit a sleeping whale with his ship along the way, he arrived in Paris seven weeks later determined to save his colony. Champlain spent that winter scheming and schmoozing, painstakingly rebuilding the support he would need to keep New France going.
A key part his plan: a wedding. The explorer was going to get married.
It was a deeply disturbing match. Champlain needed to cement an alliance with an old friend: an influential member of the French court who could provide a generous dowry if Champlain married his daughter. Neither of the men seemed to care that Hélène Boullé was only twelve years old and very much opposed to the idea of marrying the forty-three-year-old explorer. Even by the standards of the time, she was clearly too young for married life. Champlain agreed they wouldn’t consummate the marriage right away; they’d wait at least two years for that, when Hélène was fourteen and he was forty-five. But he wasn’t about to let an unsettling age difference or the feelings of his preteen bride stand in the way of his dreams for his Canadian colony.
The wedding went ahead, held at a church just across the street from the Louvre. And with the marriage, Champlain got the dowry he was seeking. With his alliances locked down and his lobbying done, Champlain sailed back to New France before the winter was over. He returned to Quebec with a more secure sense of Canada’s future, confident enough to push the French presence even deeper into the continent.
Before he left for France, Champlain had sent one of his men to take part in something of a cultural exchange. He’d brought a Wendat emissary with him on his trip to Paris (Savignon was shocked by the brutality of the city and warned others to stay away), while a young Frenchman named Étienne Brûlé was sent to live among the Wendats. The teenage explorer was enjoying his time with them, already beginning to adapt to their way of life; he would eventually marry a Wendat woman as well as a woman in France. And with the colony’s financial future now looking more promising thanks to his horrifying wedding, Champlain asked Brûlé to extend his stay and to explore even more of the continent.
That’s how Brûlé ended up writing his name into the history books of Toronto. In 1615, he became the first European to set eyes on Lake Ontario. And while the details of his travels are a bit hazy, most historians have assumed the Wendats took him down the Toronto Carrying Place trail, making him the very first non-Indigenous person ever to set foot on the land where Toronto now stands.
He would eventually be followed by millions more. But that was all in the distant future. The French weren’t even regular visitors to the area in the early 1600s. It would take a few more decades for that, and a new governor looking to escape a scandalous marriage.
Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac et de Palluau was twenty-eight years old when he fell in love with his neighbour in Paris. Anne de La Grange-Trianon was sixteen and, as one historian put it, “witty, cultured and endowed with an iron determination” as well as “the imperious beauty of a goddess.” The palace of Versailles still owns a painting of her, in which she’s quite literally portrayed as the goddess Minerva, resplendent in her steel armour, with a shield and a bow at her side.
In some ways, Frontenac was a catch, too. While we don’t know what he looked like, the young soldier was the godson of the former king, well-connected at the royal court, and said to be quite a charming fellow.
Anne’s father, however, didn’t want him anywhere near his daughter. He worried that Frontenac was only after one thing: money. La Grange was going to have plenty of it. She stood to inherit an absolute fortune — enough to bail out her new beau, who’d already managed to burn through his own inheritance thanks to a notoriously lavish lifestyle.
Anne’s father was so dead set against the match that he sent her away to a convent, trying to keep the young lovers apart. But it was too late. Frontenac and La Grange had already eloped, secretly getting married just weeks before. He was so enraged by the betrayal that he disowned his daughter, vowing to remarry and have more children just so she would never inherit his fortune. And that’s exactly what he did.
Frontenac and La Grange were effectively cut out of the will, but that didn’t stop them from living as if they were entitled to all the riches of an aristocratic French lineage. They lived in a posh house in Paris and spent a fortune on all the trappings of court life. Within the first twenty years of their marriage, they managed to rack up hundreds of thousands of livres in debts (millions of dollars in today’s money). The Frontenacs might have lived like rich aristocrats, but they were desperately broke. And it wasn’t long before their marriage began to fall apart.
La Grange was a woman of adventure. She had no interest in playing the role of a traditional wife. Within a few years, she’d left her husband, getting caught up in the intrigues of a civil war by joining the entourage of a princess who opposed the king. When their side was defeated, they were banished to a gloomy castle as punishment.
Alone in their crumbling chateau, the princess and the women of her entourage all shared a bed at night. La Grange developed a particular fondness for a certain Madame d’Outrelaise, who seems to have won her heart. Anne was horrified when Frontenac paid her a visit. “Rather than looking after her husband,” the princess remembered, “she ran and hid, crying and uttering laments because her husband had said he wanted to stay with her that night.” La Grange was so distraught, the princess called for a priest to perform an exorcism.
As mortifying as that experience must have been for Frontenac, his romantic troubles were only just beginning. Spurned by La Grange, he fell deeply in love with another woman. But she eventually left him to become the mistress of the king — a situation that left Frontenac in a deeply awkward position.
With his marriage in ruins and his finances in crisis, he desperately needed a fresh start. When the position of governor of New France suddenly opened up, it must have seemed like a miracle. If he got the job, his debts would be deferred. Frontenac lobbied hard, pulling every string he could, even getting La Grange to help. And it worked. He set sail for Canada in 1672, leaving all his troubles behind — including his wife.
Since the days of Champlain and Brûlé, only a few French explorers, missionaries, and fur traders had ventured along the Toronto Carrying Place. The king had little interest in the region; he wanted the new governor to concentrate on reinforcing their existing settlements. But Frontenac had different ideas.
Upon arriving in Quebec, he turned his attention west, toward Lake Ontario and the Toronto Carrying Place. He wanted to secure the trade coming down the portage route for the French, rather than allowing it to continue south toward the English colonies of America. So, he decided to build a fur-trading post on Lake Ontario where it emptied into the St. Lawrence: the place we now call the Thousand Islands.
Thanks to his days at the French court, the governor knew just how powerful spectacle could be. And he pulled out all the stops to convince the Haudenosaunee to allow him to build his fort. He arrived with a fleet of 120 canoes paddled in perfect formation, drums rolling, bands playing, banners flapping in the breeze. He was surrounded by a military honour guard, his Wendat and Anishinaabe allies, and four hundred French soldiers wearing the bright blue uniforms of musketeers. Fort Frontenac was built in record time — less than a week — and would soon attract a small number of settlers who cultivated the surrounding land. For the first time in history, there was a European settlement on the shores of Lake Ontario.
Suddenly, the Toronto Carrying Place was much easier to reach. Great warships built at Fort Frontenac could now sail the lake, while canoes could make the trip to Teiaiagon in a matter of days. French explorers, missionaries, and fur traders became more regular visitors to the place where the city of Toronto would eventually be built.
And that was just the beginning. Frontenac had come to Canada mostly as a way to escape his wife and his debts, but he would prove to be one of the most ambitious governors in the history of New France. He imagined a colony that would stretch all the way across the continent. Great expanses of Indigenous land would be claimed in the name of the French Empire.
But to make his dream a reality, he would need to send an explorer on a mission up the Toronto Carrying Place into the unmapped heart of North America. It was an absurdly dangerous voyage that would take years to complete.
Thankfully, he knew just the man to do it.
René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle wasn’t an easy man to like. He was gruff, temperamental, impatient, paranoid, and focused obsessively on his goal; he was an explorer willing to risk not only his own life but the lives of his men in order to push on just a little further. Some of his followers worried he was mad. They mutinied against him more than once: abandoning him in the dead of winter, burning down his forts, trying to kill him outright.
But La Salle and Frontenac hit it off. They shared the same dream: a vast New France stretching across North America. And La Salle had the experience to make it real. Born to a rich family in France, he’d been raised on tales of the Jesuit missionaries and their adventures. He and his men had been exploring the Great Lakes for years, paying occasional visits to Teiaiagon. La Salle had learned a lot from First Nations tutors and guides: how to speak their languages, track animals, make fires, and slather himself with grease to protect against mosquitos. He’d abandoned his sword for a hatchet and his boots for moccasins. And he was no stranger to the Toronto Carrying Place; he’d travelled the length of the portage route during some of his expeditions.
Together, Frontenac and La Salle spent long nights crafting a plan, while all the way on the other side of the ocean, La Grange was hard at work on their behalf. She acted as her husband’s ambassador at the court of Versailles, helping to get him the support he needed to back La Salle’s adventures. It turned out that Frontenac and La Grange did make good partners — as long as they were a few thousand kilometres apart.
The plan was ambitious. La Salle would attempt his most daring voyage yet: travel up the Toronto Carrying Place, across the upper Great Lakes, and then south to the mouth of the Mississippi River, claiming an enormous chunk of the continent for France in the process. It promised to be a wildly expensive undertaking. Even Frontenac and La Grange couldn’t give La Salle all the necessary support. If he was going to pull it off, he would need even more help.
Luckily, Frontenac wasn’t the only person with a soft spot for the infamous explorer.
Madeleine de Roybon d’Allonne was born in France to a noble family and, just like La Salle, had left it all behind for the promise of Canada. It’s thought she probably crossed the ocean looking for a husband. The rugged outposts of New France were full of men, but there was a desperate lack of women for them to marry. Some have even suggested that d’Allonne may have been one of the famous Filles du Roi (“king’s daughters”). With so few women in his Canadian colonies, King Louis XIV had paid hundreds of women — many of them poor orphans who had little choice in the matter — to sail across the ocean and become wives for his lonely colonists. They would have children, build families, and strengthen New France.
D’Allonne was one of the few who didn’t find a husband in the small but growing eastern settlements like Quebec City and Montreal. Instead, she kept heading west, all the way up the St. Lawrence to Fort Frontenac. La Salle had been put in charge of the new fort and he gave her a strip of land where she built a small farm and even ran her own fur-trading post.
It’s not clear when the two adventurers began their romance. But it’s easy to imagine how they could fall in love: La Salle, the confident explorer, and d’Allonne, the courageous fur trader. Both were from prosperous French families; both were in their midthirties. Soon, they were engaged to be married.
But the wedding would have to wait. It didn’t take long for rumours of their love affair to reach Paris. One of the men funding La Salle’s explorations wrote him a worried letter, concerned he might have become distracted by d’Allonne’s charms. He needn’t have worried. La Salle would never put his fiancée ahead of his adventures. Annoyed, the explorer wrote back, explaining that there was no way he was going to get married before he conquered the Mississippi. He was insulted the man had even asked.
In fact, his new sweetheart had joined the ranks of his investors. D’Allonne agreed to contribute more than two thousand livres to the funding of her fiancé’s historic voyage (tens of thousands of dollars in today’s money).
And so, as the summer of 1681 came to a close, it was with her help that La Salle and his men were able to load their canoes full of supplies and set off down the lake toward Teiaiagon. She may very well have been there to see them off, saying goodbye to the man she’d promised to marry as he paddled away into the distance. She wouldn’t see him again for two years.
At Teiaiagon, La Salle enlisted the aid of the Seneca. They would help his expedition make the punishing journey up the Toronto Carrying Place portage. Each of these canoes was twenty feet long and filled with more than a thousand pounds of supplies. It took fifteen days to haul them up the trail, following the twists and turns of the Humber before finally reaching Lake Simcoe, almost one hundred gruelling kilometres away.
It would be many more months before La Salle finally reached his destination, using the help of First Nations guides to reach his goal: the mouth of the Mississippi. He claimed the land around it for France and named it after his king: Louisiana.
The dream La Salle and Frontenac had shared during those long nights of planning had finally come true. As far as the French were concerned, New France now stretched all the way from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi. And with the Toronto Carrying Place now more important to them than ever, the scene was set for the first French forts to be built in the place where the biggest city in Canada would one day stand.
La Salle never did marry Madeleine de Roybon d’Allonne. She spent two years waiting for him, but when he finally returned from his mission the wedding was called off. La Salle had achieved the goal that had been driving him for years, and yet he still didn’t feel satisfied. Instead of settling down at Fort Frontenac with his fiancée, he would leave her there as he set off on one last adventure.
According to some sources, La Salle was accused of seduction over the affair. There were people who believed he had tricked d’Allonne into falling in love with him by promising marriage before callously abandoning her when the time came. It was a serious legal charge, but she would defend him to her dying day, dismissing the accusations as untrue.
La Salle did leave her with one final parting gift. He drew up the paperwork to officially confirm her ownership of her land at Fort Frontenac. It made her the first European woman to own land in what’s now Ontario. And while she stayed home to farm it and run her fur-trading post, the man she’d once promised to marry sailed off to France to secure funding for yet another expedition. They would never see each other again.
On this last adventure, La Salle’s luck would finally run out. He was trying to build a permanent settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi. But sick of being mistreated, his men rose up in mutiny once again. They shot him with a musket, stripped his corpse naked, and left it in the woods to be eaten by wolves. What was left of his settlement was eventually overrun by First Nations warriors; most of the settlers were killed, the rest were taken prisoner.
D’Allonne would meet a similar fate. By the time La Salle set off on his final expedition, Frontenac had been replaced. The new governor was much less interested in exploring the Great Lakes than in waging war against the First Nations who called them home. Just a few months after La Salle’s death, the new governor of New France launched a scorched earth campaign against the Seneca: burning villages and crops, killing all those he could find. Baron Lahontan was one of the soldiers under his command.
In retaliation, Fort Frontenac was overrun by the Haudenosaunee. D’Allonne’s farm and trading post were destroyed. She was taken prisoner. She’d spend years in captivity before she was finally released to spend her final years in Montreal, trying to convince colonial officials to give her back her old land. By the time they did, she was too old to travel. She died in 1714, a single woman to the end of her days.
By then, a landmark peace treaty had been signed between France and dozens of First Nations: the Great Peace of Montreal. And with quiet returning to the Great Lakes — at least for a while — the French looked west once again. Nearly half a century after La Salle first set foot at the mouth of the Humber, a new trading post was built there. And it was given a familiar name.
The Haudenosaunee word Tkaronto is thought to have originally referred to the fishing weirs of Lake Simcoe: it means “the place where trees stand in the water.” Since Lake Simcoe was at the top of the great portage route along the Humber, the French called the whole trail the Toronto Carrying Place. Eventually, the name was used for the area at the southern end, too.
So, that’s where the French got the name for their new fort, a name that would eventually be passed down to a city of millions. Today, it serves as a linguistic echo of the days when Seneca villages kept watch over its rivers and when ill-fated romances brought French explorers sailing through its waters.
They called it Fort Toronto.