The swashbuckling voyageurs or coureurs des bois were a tough bunch. These entrepreneurial adventurers lived a life that would be similar to an endless canoe trip without the benefit of modern materials. The voyageurs were something like UPS, delivering goods far and wide. Due to a top-hat fashion craze in Europe, beaver pelts were worth a lot of money (the beaver pelts were used to make the felt top-hats.) Canada (then New France) was rich with beavers. Repeated glaciation had scrubbed the land bare and the watersheds are still sorting themselves out. Canada is criss-crossed with rivers and lakes - ideal habitat for beavers. These remote beaverlands would be all but inaccessible but for a prehsitoric invention: the canoe.
A canoe is a truly remarkable thing. Small and lightweight. You can fill it with hundreds of pounds of stuff, float it in a few inches of water and push it anywhere you want to go with a flat stick. When you run out of water, you can pick it up and carry it until you find some more water. Just the thing for traveling around in the wilds of Canada.
The Saint Lawrence river was the connection between the Old World and the interior of Canada. It was only barely navigable to sailing ships. The Saint Lawrence has been dammed and has many locks today, but during the fur trade it was quite a horrible place to sail a ship. Strong currents and rocky hazards were common. But, somehow ships were able to travel up the Saint Lawrence to Lake Ontario. They could go no further, since the only way to get into the other great lakes involved a trip up Niagara Falls. Luckily there was a natural harbour protected by a spit of land near the Humber river so that the ships that came up the Saint Lawrence could anchor and unload trade goods and load pelts bound for Europe. Today we call this spit of land the Toronto Island, because it was cut off from land by the Eastern Gap.
OK, the natives had a way to get from Lake Ontario to Georgian Bay. There was an established canoe route that connected Georgian Bay with Lake Ontario. From Georgian Bay, the route follows the present day Trent Severn Waterway to Lake Simcoe. The Humber river was a larger river in the past, and it was possible travel along it as far as King City. But between King City and Lake Simcoe there is a good distance, and a hilly obstacle called the Oak Ridges Morraine. No matter. The natives simply picked up their canoes and carried them 10 km or so over the Morraine. Today we call this a "portage" from the French word "carry". The trail connecting the Humber and the Holland has been lost to time.
Map showing Carrying-Place Trail. Humber River in green, Holland River in blue and massive portage between the two.
In 1615 Étienne Brûlé travelled this route with native people.
Anyone who has been on a canoe trip knows that portages are some of the most strenuous things a human can do. Pick up a canoe, balance it on your shoulders and climb through the forest. Make several trips to carry all your stuff. With lightweight modern materials it is painful and grueling. And a long portage by today's standards is half a kilometer - even this is too much for a lot of people. There is a 10 Km portage in the middle of the route. This is a good hike.
At some point there was a discussion about the route between natives and Europeans. The natives tried to explain that there was a long portage on the route, and this got translated to French, then to English and came out as "carrying place" (not bad!) When they tried to describe how to find the route at the south end of Lake Simcoe they told the Europeans to look for where the willow trees hung out over the water. In that dialect there is a handy way to say where the willow trees lean out over the water: toron-ten. Somehow the description of the route and the ultimate destination became intertwined.
In 1688 the French built a fort near the Old Mill across the river from a native settlement called Teieiagon. In 1750 the French built Fort Toronto near the mouth of the Humber river on the Eastern bank. That same year they built Fort Rouillé on the exhibition grounds. The French were hoping to control the profitable fur trade by developing the location where the voyageurs and larger ships met. There is a plaque near the spot where Fort Rouillé stood. The plaque is South of the bandshell, East of the windmill.
So, Toronto as we know it formed around Toronto Harbour and the Humber river. Roncesvalles is between the two and likely had a good deal of European activity in the 1600s and native habitation long before that. Indian Road, just West of Roncesvalles, was actually an ancient trail.
The Carrying-Place Trail was in active use in 1793 when John Graves Simcoe decided that there should be a straight road connecting Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe. And voila: Yonge Street was born.
