The dull roar of cannon fire echoed out across the water. It was so loud you could hear it all the way across the lake — on the shores of Humber Bay, where French soldiers listened to the sound with dread. It was clear what it meant: far on the other side of Lake Ontario, the British were attacking Fort Niagara. The French had built a series of forts at the mouth of the Niagara River, beginning with a small trading post erected by La Salle himself. Those forts had stood for the better part of a century, all the way into the middle of the 1700s. But now, the French and the British were at war. The Seven Years’ War has been called the first truly global war, and its reach extended all the way to the very edges of the French Empire, bringing bloodshed to the shores of Lake Ontario as the two superpowers fought for control of North America. For nineteen days, the British besieged Niagara. But that wasn’t the only French fort on the lake. They’d solidified their presence at Toronto, too.
The Carrying Place was a vital thoroughfare in the fur trade — and the fur trade was the economic engine driving New France. Beaver fur hats were all the rage in Europe. The animals’ pelts could be turned into a thin waterproof felt — perfect for a stylish top hat. Tens of thousands of beaver furs could pass through a trading post in a single year. With a post at the mouth of the Humber, the French could meet the First Nations traders as they travelled down from the upper Great Lakes, catching them before they continued south to the British posts in New York State.
The first blockhouse went up in 1720. It was soon followed by a more impressive fort: the one they called Fort Toronto. For the first time, Europeans lived in the place where the city now stands. It was a big success: the trade at Toronto was so profitable that the French built a second fort a few kilometres to the east. Fort Rouillé, which stood at the edge of Humber Bay, was a small collection of buildings kept safe behind a tall fence of sharpened cedar logs, perched atop the small bluff that ran along the lakeshore. At any given time, about a dozen French soldiers called it home.
But as those British cannons rang out across the lake, it was clear the end had come. As the soldiers of Fort Rouillé listened to the battle raging at Niagara, they knew what they had to do. They were under strict orders. They packed up, burned their fort to the ground, and fled forever, retreating back to Quebec.
Fort Rouillé would prove to be the last of the French forts at Toronto. Later that same month, the siege of Quebec City began, ending with the famous Battle of the Plains of Abraham. Within weeks, New France had fallen. It was now the British who would claim dominion over the northern shores of Lake Ontario.
All that was left behind were the scorched remains of Fort Rouillé: a few piles of charred timber, cracked flagstones, and a crumbling brick chimney surrounded by a half-burnt fence. Those ruins would lie there for more than a century — until the 1880s — before they were finally cleared to make way for the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition. Today, an impressive obelisk marks the exact spot where the fort once stood; it was one of the first monuments ever erected in Toronto. Embedded in the ground is a concrete outline of the old fort’s walls. It’s a final reminder of the days when the French Empire reached all the way from the Palace of Versailles to the palatial forests of Toronto.
But those fleeing soldiers wouldn’t be the last French fur traders to set foot on the shores of Humber Bay.
Jean Baptiste Rousseau’s first wedding was held on a Friday in the middle of July 1780. He’d just turned twenty-one when he married Marie Martineau in Old Montreal. But the newlyweds wouldn’t stay in the big city for long. They headed west to start their married life together on the frontier, travelling far up the St. Lawrence to the spot where the great river began. A new settlement called Cataraqui was being laid out around the old Fort Frontenac. One day, it would grow into the city of Kingston.
But the young Rousseau wasn’t interested in a quiet domestic life. He was raised to be an adventurer. The Rousseaus had been one of the very first French families to come to Canada, arriving in the early 1600s among the early settlers of New France. His father had been one of the legendary coureurs de bois — runners of the woods — travelling far into the forests of the interior to trade with the First Nations.
After the colony fell to the British, Jean Bonaventure Rousseau had been awarded the licence to trade at Toronto. He swore allegiance to the British Crown, promised to build peaceful trade relationships with the local First Nations, and headed to Toronto with a canoe full of goods to trade: gunpowder, weapons, ammunition, and alcohol. He built a small house at the mouth of the Humber River, living there for much of the summers, taking over the trade that had once belonged to Fort Rouillé. His young son almost certainly joined him there sometimes, spending formative summers roaming the forests of Lake Ontario and learning the local Indigenous languages. When he grew old enough, he would follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a coureur de bois, taking over the trade at Toronto, and acting as a translator between the British and the First Nations.
As a result, Jean Baptiste Rousseau wasn’t a very attentive husband. During his first few years of marriage, he spent many long months away from home — and away from Marie. It took a toll on their relationship. With Jean away, Marie’s eye began to wander. Within a few years of that joyous wedding day in Old Montreal, she’d fallen in love with another man. The Rousseaus’ marriage came to an end in the summer of 1786.
It was a bit of an unusual breakup. The Rousseaus were Catholic, so they couldn’t get an official divorce. And with few priests and government officials on the frontier, marriages and divorces were frequently little more than a promise between two people anyway. Instead, they came to a written agreement, giving us a brief glimpse into the sad end of their marriage. “I Marie Martineau,” she swore, “having had frequent difficulties with my husband, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, and seeing that we can no longer live together in harmony, have agreed … to mutual and reciprocal separation and to no longer depend upon the other … and in consequence declare him entirely free and independent of me.”
For his part, Rousseau wrote a new will, asking his heir to take care of Marie. “Although I ignore even the existence of my wife … I beg him to do his utmost to lead her back to virtue and to [give her] from my wealth an annual pension income for life as a proof that I forgive her, and … as I on my side, have need of being pardoned for the wrongs I’ve done her.”
One of those wrongs may very well have been his own wandering eye. It wouldn’t be long at all before the fur trader got married for a second time.
* * *
Margaret Clyne was born in the very same year Fort Rouillé was burned to the ground. She was the daughter of a settler family living in New York or Pennsylvania. With the Seven Years’ War drawing to a close, Americans were anxious to push even further west into First Nations lands. Conflict between settlers and Indigenous nations was common. And Margaret’s family was living in the homeland of the Haudenosaunee.
She was just an infant when their home was attacked by First Nations warriors. Her father was killed, beaten to death with the butts of their muskets. Her older brother had his skull crushed against a tree. But baby Margaret was spared. She was found in the arms of her older sister. The two young girls were both taken prisoner. And soon, they would be adopted by one of the most famous leaders of the Kanien’keha:ka (one of the Haudenosaunee nations that Europeans called the Mohawk).
Chief Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea, had fought with the British during the Seven Years’ War and took up arms with them again during the American Revolution. Driven from his homeland at the end of that war, Brant led many of the Haudenosaunee north to settle on the British side of the border — in Canada. Now known as the Six Nations — having added the Tuscarora to their confederacy — the Haudenosaunee were awarded a tract of land around the Grand River. They’re still there to this day. The nearby city of Brantford is named in the chief’s honour.
Margaret Clyne might have been born into a settler family, but she was raised as Kanien’keha:ka. She was in her midtwenties by the time Brant led the Haudenosaunee north to Canada — and she went with him. It was there that she would meet Jean Baptiste Rousseau.
They probably met in Cataraqui, thanks to a mutual connection. Joseph Brant’s sister Molly lived there, too. She had once been married to an important British official: Sir William Johnson. As the superintendent of Indian affairs, he had been responsible for building alliances with the First Nations. And while he was no stranger to violence — he was there during the attack on Fort Niagara, leading hundreds of Haudenosaunee warriors during the siege — he also seems to have recognized the power of romance as a tool of diplomacy.
Romantic relationships played an important role in the fur trade. Many coureurs de bois married Indigenous women, gaining life-saving knowledge and skills from their wives and their wives’ families while also cementing a bond between cultures; they built alliances as well as families. (In the Northwest, some of the descendants of those families would even create their own new nation: the Métis.) Some religious leaders and colonial officials in distant cities like Quebec City and Montreal were deeply worried about the effect Indigenous culture might be having on their fur traders. But many of the men themselves enjoyed the freedoms they found on the frontier. They felt at home in a world where priests were few and far between and where, despite the best efforts of the missionaries, strict Christian morals had yet to take hold.
Sir William Johnson seems to have been one of those men. No one’s entirely sure just how many women Johnson slept with. People liked to say he fathered seven hundred illegitimate children, some with settlers and some with Kanien’keha:ka women. At least two of those love affairs were serious, long-term relationships. The last of these was with Molly Brant, Koñwatsiˀtsiaiéñni. He fell in love with her near the end of the Seven Years’ War, transfixed by her dark eyes and her long braids, amazed by the way she could leap onto the back of a charging horse. The two spent the last twenty years of his life together. They’re thought to have been married in a Kanien’keha:ka ceremony — a union that the Church of England refused to recognize — held inside a longhouse. They had eight children together.
Johnson died just before the American Revolution, but his widow would play an important role in that war. As a Kanien’keha:ka leader and a staunch Loyalist, Molly Brant coordinated Haudenosaunee support for the British, providing weapons, ammunition, and intelligence. When the war ended, she headed north, spending the rest of her days living in Cataraqui — the same tiny town where Jean Baptiste Rousseau found his marriage coming to an end.
The young fur trader seems to have met Margaret Clyne when she came to visit her famous aunt, travelling the entire length of Lake Ontario by herself in a canoe, spending her nights sleeping on the beach during the long journey. Rousseau was an adventurous young man and could court her in her own language. Clyne was an adventurous young woman who wouldn’t expect him to follow the conservative, European way of doing things. It didn’t take long for them to fall in love.
The fur trader’s second wedding day came in 1786. He and Margaret likely got married in a Kanien’keha:ka ceremony before moving into his father’s house at Toronto, living on the east bank of the Humber just a few hundred metres from the mouth of the river. A cherry orchard bloomed behind their home, and the Toronto Carrying Place trail ran right past them as it climbed up a ridge — where Riverside Drive is now — on its long and winding way toward Lake Simcoe. The ruins of Teiaiagon were just a short walk away.
By then, it was the Mississaugas — one of the Anishinaabe nations — who lived in the area around Toronto. In the century since La Salle, the Seneca had been pushed back south across the lake. According to Anishinaabe oral tradition, the Mississaugas began to move south from the lands north of Lake Huron in the late 1600s. A series of battles was fought between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and their own Three Fires Confederacy before a treaty finally brought peace to the warring nations.
By the time the Rousseaus arrived, the Mississaugas could be found throughout much of what is now southern Ontario. They built their own village just across the river from the ruins of Teiaiagon — and may even have used the site of the old Seneca village itself. While their winters would have been spent hunting in the forests to the north, they spent their summers tending to the great fields of maize they grew near the mouth of the Humber.
The Rousseaus must have carried on a thriving trade with the Mississaugas, playing a crucial role in the area. Their little house on the Humber was a crossroad between nations. A French fur trader and his Haudenosaunee wife were living in the land of the Mississaugas, trading under a licence from the British. And when Margaret gave birth to a child in that house, it wasn’t just the first baby of European descent known to have been born at Toronto, it was also both French and British, Indigenous and settler, American and Canadian — a hint of the multicultural city to come.
But that moment was a brief one. Just a few years after Jean Baptiste Rousseau married Margaret Clyne, Toronto was going to change forever.
The British were coming. It began with explorers who passed through on their way deep into the interior of the continent, just like generations of French explorers had done before them. They were eventually followed by surveyors taking careful measurements, drawing up maps, preparing for permanent settlements. It took a few decades after the fall of Quebec, but as the 1700s came to a close, the British Empire was turning its gaze westward, planning to turn the shores of Lake Ontario into a land of cities and farms.
Among the first to arrive was the surveyor Augustus Jones. He, too, was a man of adventure, built for life on the frontier. He spent his summers in canoes and winters on snowshoes. He’d survived multiple cases of malaria and a broken collar bone, cracked when he was thrown off his horse. And he, too, used love to build bonds with the First Nations. Not only could he speak the languages of the Kanien’keha:ka and the Mississaugas, he would marry into both cultures, too: Sarah Tekarihogen (Tekerehogen) was the daughter of a Kanien’keha:ka chief, while Sarah Henry (Tuhbenahneequay) was the daughter of a Mississauga chief. Jones had children with them both, and supported both families at the same time, leading a polygamous lifestyle far from the colonial centres of power half a world away.
But Jones’s arrival also heralded the end of that freedom. As far as the British were concerned, they’d just bought Toronto. After the British conquered New France, King George III issued a decree. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 would prove to be one of the most important documents in Canadian history, reaffirmed in the modern Canadian Constitution. It declared that all the land to the west belonged to the Indigenous people who lived on it — and that only the government was allowed to buy it from them, through international treaties. It established a nation-to-nation relationship between the British Crown and Indigenous peoples.
The Toronto Purchase was the treaty that covered the land on which the modern city stands today. But it was a contentious agreement right from the very beginning. While the signed document was what mattered to the British, for the Mississaugas, the oral promises were much more important. None of them could read the document — it was written in English — but they sent hundreds of people to witness the proceedings. Both sides came away with very different impressions of what had been agreed.
Years later, the British realized that even the written document was worthless. It was just a blank deed that didn’t describe the land in question, and the chiefs’ names had been signed on separate pieces of paper and attached to the treaty after the fact. Even by their own dubious colonial standards, the British clearly had no legal right to the land. They would keep that fact a secret for the next decade, however, before getting the Mississaugas to sign a second treaty. Once again, though, they failed to clearly explain the terms — or that the second agreement covered even more land than the first. It would be 2010 before the dispute was finally settled; the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation were paid $145 million — the 1700s value of the land in modern currency.
But the British didn’t let any of those complications slow them down. Augustus Jones would soon be followed by a wave of settlers intent on turning the shores of Lake Ontario into a bastion of British culture and values. And when they arrived, laws and customs concerning love and marriage would be tightened, reflecting the views that ruled in the capitals of Europe. Common law arrangements and polygamous lifestyles would soon be socially unacceptable.
And so, Jean Baptiste Rousseau’s third wedding day would follow that new wave of settlement. As British laws were introduced to Toronto, the validity of the Rousseaus’ marriage would be thrown into question. They were remarried by an Anglican priest a couple of years after the city was founded, with a Protestant ceremony held at Joseph Brant’s house, complete with all the appropriate paperwork.
And just in case that wasn’t enough, they would be reremarried by that same priest a decade later. Rousseau’s first marriage to Marie Martineau had never officially ended as far as the Church and State were concerned. So, when Martineau passed away in the early 1800s, the fur trader and his second wife held yet another ceremony, just to make absolutely sure they were truly, officially, and legally married.
On a summer night in 1793, a British warship sailed through the darkness toward Toronto. It cut through the black water, heading to a spot just to the east of the Humber, where a big, natural harbour was created by a low sandbar. It was there, just outside the bay, that HMS Mississauga dropped anchor, waiting for morning.
The new British lieutenant-governor and his family were on board. They’d sailed overnight from Niagara, come to build a new capital for their new province. They would need Jean Baptiste Rousseau’s help to do it.
In the days to come, the fur trader would prove to be indispensable, a trusted liaison between the British and the First Nations, respected by all. The lieutenant-governor would eventually request his services as his personal interpreter. And when the fraudulent Toronto Purchase was renegotiated, it was the fur trader who would translate for both sides. The Rousseaus would spend the rest of their lives helping to build the new colony, settling in the nearby town of Ancaster. They would run a general store, a blacksmith shop, an inn, and two mills; Jean would even become a tax collector. The local Anglican church was built on land they donated. In the end, the French fur trader would give his life for the British colony, struck down by a fatal illness while serving in the War of 1812.
But that was all in the future. For now, Rousseau had one simple task. As the July sun rose above Toronto, he headed out to meet the Mississauga. They’d been waiting for him to guide them through the dangerous shoals at the mouth of the bay. There, on the banks of Lake Ontario, they planned to build a muddy little frontier town that would eventually become a towering metropolis of concrete and glass.
The Simcoes had arrived.