The Lake Erie Shore. Ron Brown
to the north, where more unconverted Natives lay, La Salle took ill and returned to Montreal. This left Dollier and Galinée to become the first to explore and record the shores of Lake Erie. Galinée, it turned out, was a colourful and observant note-taker and his forty-eight-page manuscript has left the earliest account of pre-contact Lake Erie.5
On October 4 the little company parted ways, and the priests, with the remaining expedition, made their way west to the Grand River. They found the river very difficult to navigate: “It is marvellous how much difficulty we had in descending the river for we had to be in the water all the time dragging the canoe which was unable to pass through for lack of water.”
Ten days later they arrived at the mouth of the river and recorded the first written account of the lake. “At last we arrived on the shore of the lake which appeared to us at first like a great sea because there was a great south wind blowing at the time. There is perhaps no lake in the whole country in which the waves rise so high because of its great depth and great extent.” (It is in fact due to the lake’s shallowness, not its “great depth” that its waves rise so quickly and steeply.)
During their earlier conversations with Jolliet, the latter had advised them of a canoe he had left along the shore. To secure the canoe for their journey, the priests sent their Dutch interpreter ahead overland to locate it. Setting out into the lake, the expedition struggled for three days with the stormy waters before finally spotting a sheltered landing spot. “We found a spot which appeared to us so beautiful with such abundance of game that we thought we could not find a better place in which to pass our winter.” Here they encountered a variety and quantity of game enough to last them the long, cold winter, as well as an ample supply of walnuts, chestnuts, and cranberries. And to their surprise and delight they discovered an abundance of wild grapes. “I will tell you by the way that the vine grows here only in sand on the banks of the lakes and rivers but although it has no cultivation it does not fail to produce grapes in great quantities as large and as sweet as any in France.” And they put them to good use. “We even made wine of them with which M Dollier said holy mass all winter.”
Galinee wrote glowingly, calling the area “this earthly paradise of Canada.” He says: “I call it so because there is assuredly no more beautiful region in all of Canada.” The woods were open and the rivers full of fish and game. The “bears [were] fatter and of better flavour than the most savoury pigs of France. In short, we may say that we passed the winter more comfortably than we should have done in Montreal.” Despite all the comfort they enjoyed that winter, it would soon change into a series of hardships and discomforts, and, ultimately, failure:
We could not pass the winter on the lake shore because of the high winds by which we should have been buffeted. For this reason we chose a beautiful spot on the bank of a rivulet about a quarter of a league in the woods.… At the end of three months our men discovered a number of Iroquois coming to this place to hunt beaver. They used to visit us and found us in a very good cabin whose construction they admired and afterwards they brought every Indian who passed that way to see it … for that reason we had built it in such a fashion that we could have defended ourselves for a long time against these barbarians if the desire had entered their minds to come to insult us.
The location of this “paradise” was the Lynn River at the site of today’s Port Dover, and their winter camp was located on a small stream that flows into it, named Patterson Creek. The earthworks from their winter cabins are visible to this day, fenced and marked with a commemorative cairn.
A cross marks the spot where missionaries Dollier and Galinée celebrated their stay at Port Dover’s “earthly paradise.”
Finally, after five months and eleven days, on March 29, 1670, they set off again, but not before erecting a cross on a high hill overlooking the lake. But they may have left too soon. After making only six or seven leagues, a strong wind forced them to halt, and they lost a canoe in the process. This forced several of them to walk along the shore to reach where they thought the spare canoe lay waiting. Here they discovered that the shoreline to be frustrating tangle of gullies and underbrush. “We reckoned only two days walking to reach it … the land route was very bad because of four rivers that had to be crossed and a number of great gulches that the water from the snows and rains had scooped out. We decided it was necessary in order to cross the rivers to go a good distance into the woods because the farther the rivers run into the woods the narrower they are and indeed one usually finds trees which having fallen in every direction to form bridges over which one passes.” This worked well until they reached the mouth of Big Creek, which empties into Long Point Bay, (which they termed “Little Lake Erie”). Here, they were forced to fashion a raft, which they guided through the marshy neck of Long Point to the open waters of the lake where “contrary to all expectations found it still quite filled with floating ice.”
Eventually they located the canoe and replenished their larder, finding their way to the east side of Point Pelee. Here, they beached their canoes and fell into an exhausted sleep when, during the night, they were suddenly awakened by a terrifying sound. “Astonished to hear the lake roaring so furiously [Dollier] went to the beach to see if the baggage was safe, and seeing that the water already came as far as the packs that were placed the highest point cried out that all was lost.”
At this they decided to abandon their mission and return to Montreal. But rather than retracing their exhausting route through Lakes Erie and Ontario, they opted for the by then more familiar route by way of Lake Huron and the French River.
Although they were not likely the first Europeans to see Lake Erie, they have left behind the first written account, a detailed and grim description of that untouched “paradise.”
During the French occupation of Canada, little was happening west of Montreal. This was a time when the government of New France was trying to solidify its trading relationships with the northern tribes such as the Ottawa and the Ojibwa and the southern tribes such as the aggressive Iroquois. Their only built presence in southwestern Ontario were Fort Frontenac at Kingston, Fort Niagara on the south shore of Lake Ontario with its opposite number, Fort Rouille on the site of today’s Toronto, while Fort Detroit guarded the entrance to the Detroit River. It was only in this latter location that the government granted lands to French settlers. Their long-lot pattern of farms and their place names survive to this day both within Windsor and throughout the surrounding rural areas of Essex County.
Following the Treaty of Paris, which in 1763 ended of the Seven Years’ War (or the French and Indian War, as it was known in North America) between England and France, Britain assumed control over what is today Ontario. During the postwar period the shores of Lake Erie remained quiet. But the American Revolution was soon flaring, and those who had remained loyal to Britain were forced to flee their American homes. As compensation, Britain granted land in New Brunswick and Ontario to those refugees known as United Empire Loyalists. While the first refugees took up their land grants in eastern Ontario in the 1780s, farm lots were being surveyed along the shores of Lake Erie as early as the 1790s. In 1784, Tyendaga chief Joseph Brant was granted all the land along the banks of the Grand River, ten kilometres back, from its mouth at Port Maitland to its source near present-day Dundalk.
But the military presence was never far away. Fort Malden was built between 1796 and 1799 (and known at first as Fort Amherstburg) at the western end of the lake to guard the entrance to the Detroit River, and in 1764, the first Fort Erie had been built to guard the Niagara River on the east. In between, naval reserves were laid out at Port Maitland, Point Pelee, and Turkey Point, where a fort known as Fort Norfolk was started, but hostilities ended before it was completed. But, even as a handful of squatters began to move into such accessible lands as those on Long Point and Point Pelee, the lakeshore’s first legitimate settlement scheme was about to unfold.