Toronto is founded Toronto (York) didn't amount to much until Jarvis arrived on the scene in 1807 to civilize it. In 1670 the name Toronto made its first appearance in history in the form 'lac de Taranteau' on a map of southern Ontario drawn by the French priest Father Rene de Brenhant de Galinee. On the 1670 map the name referred to Lake Simcoe, not the area known as Toronto today. As maps were copied and passed from hand to hand in the following years, the name was miscopied and, by the 1720s, it was accepted as referring to a trading post on Lake Ontario at the mouth of the Humber River, where present-day Toronto is located.
The meaning of the word has been a subject to much discussion. The most popular interpretation originated with the nineteenth-century historian Henry Scadding, who claimed that it derived from a Huron word meaning 'to be plenty,' so that Toronto means 'plenty of people' or, as Scadding put it, 'meeting place.
This interpretation is not accepted by many historians today, who are better versed in native languages. Current interpretations suggest the origin of the word Toronto in a Mohawk term for fish trap or weir, which were a noticeable feature of life around Lake Simcoe
Toronto was known to native peoples for centuries before the Europeans arrived as the southernmost end of a well traveled portage between Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay. Many temporary encampments were made in the area, but there appear to have been no permanent settlements until about the time of the arrival of the first Europeans.
During the period 1600-1650, the Huron people lived in the Lake Simcoe area, and probably south to Toronto, but they were driven out in turn, and by 1666 members of the Iroquois Confederacy had moved into southern Ontario. Senecas were living in a village named Teiaiagon in the area in the late autumn of 1678, according to the report of a Franciscan named Father Hennepin, best known in history as the first European to see Niagara Falls. Father Hennepin stayed with the Seneca for three weeks in their longhouses on the Humber River, probably about where Baby Point is located today. (Seneca were one of the Six Nations which joined to form the Iroquois Confederacy--Seneca, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga) In August of 1680 Teiaiagon was visited by the French explorer, Sieur de la Salle, who was on his way with a group of shipbuilders to build a vessel to sail down the Mississippi.
By the 1690s, the Iroquois were driven out of southern Ontario by the Mississaugas, a branch of the Ahnishnabe (Mississauga, Objibway, Odawa, Chippewa). Unlike the Senecas, who practised agriculture and lived in settled communities, the Mississaugas were hunters and fishermen and moved with the season from camp to camp. In 1615 the first European reached Toronto. The young Étienne Brulé was serving as interpreter for the French explorer Samuel de Champlain. As Champlain traveled past Laker Couchiching, he sent Brulé and a party of Hurons to explore the Toronto portage.
In the summer of 1750 the first Europeans settled in the area of Toronto. Fort Rouillé was built by the French on what are now the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition, next to Lake Ontario. It was small and lasted only ten years. In fact, it was more of a fortified trading post than a military fort. Although officially it was named Fort Rouillé, after the French colonial minister, in the area it was known as Fort Toronto.
No more than a satellite of the important French forts, Forts Frontenac and Niagara, it never held more than a handful of soldiers-- in 1754 only seven and, in 1757, only fiftenn, even in the middle of the Seven Years War. The final struggle between France and Britain for supremacy in North America, known as the Seven Years War, spelled the end of Fort Rouillé. In 1759 the French lost the Battle of the Plains of Abraham and, with it, Quebec. Then in June a British naval force laid siege to Fort Niagara. Realising that they were too small to resist a British attack, the fifteen troops at Fort Rouillé burned the fort and retreated to Montreal.
The British were not interested in the Toronto area at first. Even though the French had abandoned the area, the British were content to run their fur trade from their new post at Fort Niagara, Toronto being regarded as too remote. The burnt ruins of Fort Rouillé were left as a memento for nearly a century of early Toronto history, until 1878, when they were cleared to make way for the grounds of the Toronto Exhibition. Archaelogical digs on the fort began in the 1980s.
The Toronto Purchase The Mississaugas were the main occupiers of the north shore of Lake Ontario in 1763, when Britain defeated France in the Seven Years War, gaining control of France's North American possessions. The British were concerned to acquire lands by treaty, since many of the native peoples had been their allies in the war. Accordingly, the British Governor-in-Chief at Quebec, Lord Dorchester, sent a ship, the Seneca, to Toronto Bay in August of 1788. It was met and guided into the harbour by the resident fur trader, St Jean Rousseau, who had a house on the Humber River.
The price of Toronto was 149 barrels of goods and a small amount of cash, the total value being 1,700 pounds. The goods included 2,000 gun flints, 24 brass kettles, 10 dozen mirrors, 2 dozen laced hats, a bale of flowered flannel, and 96 gallons of rum. The Seneca also carried surveyors, who drew up plans for a possible town site and sounded the bay to prepare the way for future shipping, but after Dorchester's men left, Toronto saw very few European visitors for several years. Events began to move more quickly only after Governor Simcoe selected Toronto in 1793 as the "temporary" (Simcoe vainly hoped to make a permanent capital in the area of London) location for the capital of the new province of Upper Canada.
