The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
S >>
Stephen Leacock >> The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
This etext was produced by Gardner Buchanan
CHRONICLES OF CANADA
Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton
In thirty-two volumes
Part I
The First European Visitors
THE DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY
A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
By STEPHEN LEACOCK
TORONTO, 1915
CHAPTER I
BEFORE THE DAWN
We always speak of Canada as a new country. In one sense,
of course, this is true. The settlement of Europeans on
Canadian soil dates back only three hundred years.
Civilization in Canada is but a thing of yesterday, and
its written history, when placed beside the long millenniums
of the recorded annals of European and Eastern peoples,
seems but a little span.
But there is another sense in which the Dominion of
Canada, or at least part of it, is perhaps the oldest
country in the world. According to the Nebular Theory
the whole of our planet was once a fiery molten mass
gradually cooling and hardening itself into the globe we
know. On its surface moved and swayed a liquid sea glowing
with such a terrific heat that we can form no real idea
of its intensity. As the mass cooled, vast layers of
vapour, great beds of cloud, miles and miles in thickness,
were formed and hung over the face of the globe, obscuring
from its darkened surface the piercing beams of the sun.
Slowly the earth cooled, until great masses of solid
matter, rock as we call it, still penetrated with intense
heat, rose to the surface of the boiling sea. Forces of
inconceivable magnitude moved through the mass. The outer
surface of the globe as it cooled ripped and shrivelled
like a withering orange. Great ridges, the mountain
chains of to-day, were furrowed on its skin. Here in the
darkness of the prehistoric night there arose as the
oldest part of the surface of the earth the great rock
bed that lies in a huge crescent round the shores of
Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the unknown wilderness of
the barren lands of the Coppermine basin touching the
Arctic sea. The wanderer who stands to-day in the desolate
country of James Bay or Ungava is among the oldest
monuments of the world. The rugged rock which here and
there breaks through the thin soil of the infertile north
has lain on the spot from the very dawn of time. Millions
of years have probably elapsed since the cooling of the
outer crust of the globe produced the solid basis of our
continents.
The ancient formation which thus marks the beginnings of
the solid surface of the globe is commonly called by
geologists the Archaean rock, and the myriads of uncounted
years during which it slowly took shape are called the
Archaean age. But the word 'Archaean' itself tells us
nothing, being merely a Greek term meaning 'very old.'
This Archaean or original rock must necessarily have
extended all over the surface of our sphere as it cooled
from its molten form and contracted into the earth on
which we live. But in most places this rock lies deep
under the waters of the oceans, or buried below the heaped
up strata of the formations which the hand of time piled
thickly upon it. Only here and there can it still be seen
as surface rock or as rock that lies but a little distance
below the soil. In Canada, more than anywhere else in
the world, is this Archaean formation seen. On a geological
map it is marked as extending all round the basin of
Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the shores of the Arctic.
It covers the whole of the country which we call New
Ontario, and also the upper part of the province of
Quebec. Outside of this territory there was at the dawn
of time no other 'land' where North America now is, except
a long island of rock that marks the backbone of what
are now the Selkirk Mountains and a long ridge that is
now the mountain chain of the Alleghanies beside the
Atlantic slope.
Books on geology trace out for us the long successive
periods during which the earth's surface was formed. Even
in the Archaean age something in the form of life may
have appeared. Perhaps vast masses of dank seaweed
germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming
oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and
breaking at its rock formation and distributing it in
new strata, each buried beneath the next and holding fast
within it the fossilized remains that form the record of
its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds
in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in
vast beds of decaying vegetation that form the coal-fields
of to-day.
Animal life began first, like the plants, in the bosom
of the ocean. From the slimy depths of the water life
crawled hideous to the land. Great reptiles dragged their
sluggish length through the tangled vegetation of the
jungle of giant ferns.
Through countless thousands of years, perhaps, this
gradual process went on. Nature, shifting its huge scenery,
depressed the ocean beds and piled up the dry land of
the continents. In place of the vast 'Continental Sea,'
which once filled the interior of North America, there
arose the great plateau or elevated plain that now runs
from the Mackenzie basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead
of the rushing waters of the inland sea, these waters
have narrowed into great rivers--the Mackenzie, the
Saskatchewan, the Mississippi--that swept the face of
the plateau and wore down the surface of the rock and
mountain slopes to spread their powdered fragments on
the broad level soil of the prairies of the west. With
each stage in the evolution of the land the forms of life
appear to have reached a higher development. In place of
the seaweed and the giant ferns of the dawn of time there
arose the maples, the beeches, and other waving trees
that we now see in the Canadian woods. The huge reptiles
in the jungle of the Carboniferous era passed out of
existence. In place of them came the birds, the
mammals,--the varied types of animal life which we now
know. Last in the scale of time and highest in point of
evolution, there appeared man.
We must not speak of the continents as having been made
once and for all in their present form. No doubt in the
countless centuries of geological evolution various parts
of the earth were alternately raised and depressed. Great
forests grew, and by some convulsion were buried beneath
the ocean, covered deep as they lay there with a sediment
of earth and rock, and at length raised again as the
waters retreated. The coal-beds of Cape Breton are the
remains of a forest buried beneath the sea. Below the
soil of Alberta is a vast jungle of vegetation, a dense
mass of giant fern trees. The Great Lakes were once part
of a much vaster body of water, far greater in extent
than they now are. The ancient shore-line of Lake Superior
may be traced five hundred feet above its present level.
In that early period the continents and islands which we
now see wholly separated were joined together at various
points. The British islands formed a connected part of
Europe. The Thames and the Rhine were one and the same
river, flowing towards the Arctic ocean over a plain that
is now the shallow sunken bed of the North Sea. It is
probable that during the last great age, the Quaternary,
as geologists call it, the upheaval of what is now the
region of Siberia and Alaska, made a continuous chain of
land from Asia to America. As the land was depressed
again it left behind it the islands in the Bering Sea,
like stepping-stones from shore to shore. In the same
way, there was perhaps a solid causeway of land from
Canada to Europe reaching out across the Northern Atlantic.
Baffin Island and other islands of the Canadian North
Sea, the great sub-continent of Greenland, Iceland, the
Faroe Islands, and the British Isles, all formed part of
this continuous chain.
As the last of the great changes, there came the Ice Age,
which profoundly affected the climate and soil of Canada,
and, when the ice retreated, left its surface much as we
see it now. During this period the whole of Canada from
the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains lay buried under a
vast sheet of ice. Heaped up in immense masses over the
frozen surface of the Hudson Bay country, the ice, from
its own dead weight, slid sidewise to the south. As it
went it ground down the surface of the land into deep
furrows and channels; it cut into the solid rock like a
moving plough, and carried with it enormous masses of
loose stone and boulders which it threw broadcast over
the face of the country. These stones and boulders were
thus carried forty and fifty, and in some cases many
hundred miles before they were finally loosed and dropped
from the sheet of moving ice. In Ontario and Quebec and
New England great stones of the glacial drift are found
which weigh from one thousand to seven thousand tons.
They are deposited in some cases on what is now the summit
of hills and mountains, showing how deep the sheet of
ice must have been that could thus cover the entire
surface of the country, burying alike the valleys and
the hills. The mass of ice that moved slowly, century by
century, across the face of Southern Canada to New England
is estimated to have been in places a mile thick. The
limit to which it was carried went far south of the
boundaries of Canada. The path of the glacial drift is
traced by geologists as far down the Atlantic coast as
the present site of New York, and in the central plain
of the continent it extended to what is now the state of
Missouri.
Facts seem to support the theory that before the Great
Ice Age the climate of the northern part of Canada was
very different from what it is now. It is very probable
that a warm if not a torrid climate extended for hundreds
of miles northward of the now habitable limits of the
Dominion. The frozen islands of the Arctic seas were once
the seat of luxurious vegetation and teemed with life.
On Bathurst Island, which lies in the latitude of 76
degrees, and is thus six hundred miles north of the Arctic
Circle, there have been found the bones of huge lizards
that could only have lived in the jungles of an almost
tropical climate.
We cannot tell with any certainty just how and why these
great changes came about. But geologists have connected
them with the alternating rise and fall of the surface
of the northern continent and its altitude at various
times above the level of the sea. Thus it seems probable
that the glacial period with the ice sheet of which we
have spoken was brought about by a great elevation of
the land, accompanied by a change to intense cold. This
led to the formation of enormous masses of ice heaped up
so high that they presently collapsed and moved of their
own weight from the elevated land of the north where they
had been formed. Later on, the northern continent subsided
again and the ice sheet disappeared, but left behind it
an entirely different level and a different climate from
those of the earlier ages. The evidence of the later
movements of the land surface, and its rise and fall
after the close of the glacial epoch, may still easily
be traced. At a certain time after the Ice Age, the
surface sank so low that land which has since been lifted
up again to a considerable height was once the beach of
the ancient ocean. These beaches are readily distinguished
by the great quantities of sea shells that lie about,
often far distant from the present sea. Thus at Nachvak
in Labrador there is a beach fifteen hundred feet above
the ocean. Probably in this period after the Ice Age the
shores of Eastern Canada had sunk so low that the St
Lawrence was not a river at all, but a great gulf or arm
of the sea. The ancient shore can still be traced beside
the mountain at Montreal and on the hillsides round Lake
Ontario. Later on again the land rose, the ocean retreated,
and the rushing waters from the shrunken lakes made their
own path to the sea. In their foaming course to the lower
level they tore out the great gorge of Niagara, and tossed
and buffeted themselves over the unyielding ledges of
Lachine.
Mighty forces such as these made and fashioned the
continent on which we live.
CHAPTER II
MAN IN AMERICA
It was necessary to form some idea, if only in outline,
of the magnitude and extent of the great geological
changes of which we have just spoken, in order to judge
properly the question of the antiquity and origin of man
in America.
When the Europeans came to this continent at the end of
the fifteenth century they found it already inhabited by
races of men very different from themselves. These people,
whom they took to calling 'Indians,' were spread out,
though very thinly, from one end of the continent to the
other. Who were these nations, and how was their presence
to be accounted for?
To the first discoverers of America, or rather to the
discoverers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
(Columbus and his successors), the origin of the Indians
presented no difficulty. To them America was supposed to
be simply an outlying part of Eastern Asia, which had
been known by repute and by tradition for centuries past.
Finding, therefore, the tropical islands of the Caribbean
sea with a climate and plants and animals such as they
imagined those of Asia and the Indian ocean to be, and
inhabited by men of dusky colour and strange speech, they
naturally thought the place to be part of Asia, or the
Indies. The name 'Indians,' given to the aborigines of
North America, records for us this historical
misunderstanding.
But a new view became necessary after Balboa had crossed
the isthmus of Panama and looked out upon the endless
waters of the Pacific, and after Magellan and his Spanish
comrades had sailed round the foot of the continent, and
then pressed on across the Pacific to the real Indies.
It was now clear that America was a different region from
Asia. Even then the old error died hard. Long after the
Europeans realized that, at the south, America and Asia
were separated by a great sea, they imagined that these
continents were joined together at the north. The European
ideas of distance and of the form of the globe were still
confused and inexact. A party of early explorers in
Virginia carried a letter of introduction with them from
the King of England to the Khan of Tartary: they expected
to find him at the head waters of the Chickahominy.
Jacques Cartier, nearly half a century after Columbus,
was expecting that the Gulf of St Lawrence would open
out into a passage leading to China. But after the
discovery of the North Pacific ocean and Bering Strait
the idea that America was part of Asia, that the natives
were 'Indians' in the old sense, was seen to be absurd.
It was clear that America was, in a large sense, an
island, an island cut off from every other continent. It
then became necessary to find some explanation for the
seemingly isolated position of a portion of mankind
separated from their fellows by boundless oceans.
The earlier theories were certainly naive enough. Since
no known human agency could have transported the Indians
across the Atlantic or the Pacific, their presence in
America was accounted for by certain of the old writers
as a particular work of the devil. Thus Cotton Mather,
the famous Puritan clergyman of early New England,
maintained in all seriousness that the devil had inveigled
the Indians to America to get them 'beyond the tinkle of
the gospel bells.' Others thought that they were a
washed-up remnant of the great flood. Roger Williams,
the founder of Rhode Island, wrote: 'From Adam and Noah
that they spring, it is granted on all hands.' Even more
fantastic views were advanced. As late as in 1828 a London
clergyman wrote a book which he called 'A View of the
American Indians,' which was intended to 'show them to
be the descendants of the ten tribes of Israel.'
Even when such ideas as these were set aside, historians
endeavoured to find evidence, or at least probability,
of a migration of the Indians from the known continents
across one or the other of the oceans. It must be admitted
that, even if we supposed the form and extent of the
continents to have been always the same as they are now,
such a migration would have been entirely possible. It
is quite likely that under the influence of exceptional
weather--winds blowing week after week from the same
point of the compass--even a primitive craft of prehistoric
times might have been driven across the Atlantic or the
Pacific, and might have landed its occupants still alive
and well on the shores of America. To prove this we need
only remember that history records many such voyages. It
has often happened that Japanese junks have been blown
clear across the Pacific. In 1833 a ship of this sort
was driven in a great storm from Japan to the shores of
the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British
Columbia. In the same way a fishing smack from Formosa,
which lies off the east coast of China, was once carried
in safety across the ocean to the Sandwich Islands.
Similar long voyages have been made by the natives of
the South Seas against their will, under the influence
of strong and continuous winds, and in craft no better
than their open canoes. Captain Beechey of the Royal Navy
relates that in one of his voyages in the Pacific he
picked up a canoe filled with natives from Tahiti who
had been driven by a gale of westerly wind six hundred
miles from their own island. It has happened, too, from
time to time, since the discovery of America, that ships
have been forcibly carried all the way across the Atlantic.
A glance at the map of the world shows us that the eastern
coast of Brazil juts out into the South Atlantic so far
that it is only fifteen hundred miles distant from the
similar projection of Africa towards the west. The
direction of the trade winds in the South Atlantic is
such that it has often been the practice of sailing
vessels bound from England to South Africa to run clear
across the ocean on a long stretch till within sight of
the coast of Brazil before turning towards the Cape of
Good Hope. All, however, that we can deduce from accidental
voyages, like that of the Spaniard, Alvarez de Cabral,
across the ocean is that even if there had been no other
way for mankind to reach America they could have landed
there by ship from the Old World. In such a case, of
course, the coming of man to the American continent would
have been an extremely recent event in the long history
of the world. It could not have occurred until mankind
had progressed far enough to make vessels, or at least
boats of a simple kind.
But there is evidence that man had appeared on the earth
long before the shaping of the continents had taken place.
Both in Europe and America the buried traces of primitive
man are vast in antiquity, and carry us much further back
in time than the final changes of earth and ocean which
made the continents as they are; and, when we remember
this, it is easy to see how mankind could have passed
from Asia or Europe to America. The connection of the
land surface of the globe was different in early times
from what it is to-day. Even still, Siberia and Alaska
are separated only by the narrow Bering Strait. From the
shore of Asia the continent of North America is plainly
visible; the islands which lie in and below the strait
still look like stepping-stones from continent to continent.
And, apart from this, it may well have been that farther
south, where now is the Pacific ocean, there was formerly
direct land connection between Southern Asia and South
America. The continuous chain of islands that runs from
the New Hebrides across the South Pacific to within two
thousand four hundred miles of the coast of Chile is
perhaps the remains of a sunken continent. In the most
easterly of these, Easter Island, have been found ruined
temples and remains of great earthworks on a scale so
vast that to believe them the work of a small community
of islanders is difficult. The fact that they bear some
resemblance to the buildings and works of the ancient
inhabitants of Chile and Peru has suggested that perhaps
South America was once merely a part of a great Pacific
continent. Or again, turning to the other side of the
continent, it may be argued with some show of evidence
that America and Africa were once connected by land, and
that a sunken continent is to be traced between Brazil
and the Guinea coast.
Nevertheless, it appears to be impossible to say whether
or not an early branch of the human race ever 'migrated'
to America. Conceivably the race may have originated
there. Some authorities suppose that the evolution of
mankind occurred at the same time and in the same fashion
in two or more distinct quarters of the globe. Others
again think that mankind evolved and spread over the
surface of the world just as did the various kinds of
plants and animals. Of course, the higher endowment of
men enabled them to move with greater ease from place to
place than could beings of lesser faculties. Most writers
of to-day, however, consider this unlikely, and think it
more probable that man originated first in some one
region, and spread from it throughout the earth. But
where this region was, they cannot tell. We always think
of the races of Europe as having come westward from some
original home in Asia. This is, of course, perfectly
true, since nearly all the peoples of Europe can be traced
by descent from the original stock of the Aryan family,
which certainly made such a migration. But we know also
that races of men were dwelling in Europe ages before
the Aryan migration. What particular part of the globe
was the first home of mankind is a question on which we
can only speculate.
Of one thing we may be certain. If there was a migration,
there must have been long ages of separation between
mankind in America and mankind in the Old World; otherwise
we should still find some trace of kinship in language
which would join the natives of America to the great
racial families of Europe, Asia, and Africa. But not the
slightest vestige of such kinship has yet been found.
Everybody knows in a general way how the prehistoric
relationships among the peoples of Europe and Asia are
still to be seen in the languages of to-day. The French
and Italian languages are so alike that, if we did not
know it already, we could easily guess for them a common
origin. We speak of these languages, along with others,
as Romance languages, to show that they are derived from
Latin, in contrast with the closely related tongues of
the English, Dutch, and German peoples, which came from
another common stock, the Teutonic. But even the Teutonic
and the Romance languages are not entirely different.
The similarity in both groups of old root words, like
the numbers from one to ten, point again to a common
origin still more remote. In this way we may trace a
whole family of languages, and with it a kinship of
descent, from Hindustan to Ireland. Similarly, another
great group of tongues--Arabic, Hebrew, etc.--shows a
branch of the human family spread out from Palestine and
Egypt to Morocco.
Now when we come to inquire into the languages of the
American Indians for evidence of their relationship to
other peoples we are struck with this fact: we cannot
connect the languages of America with those of any other
part of the world. This is a very notable circumstance.
The languages of Europe and Asia are, as it were, dovetailed
together, and run far and wide into Africa. From Asia
eastward, through the Malay tongues, a connection may be
traced even with the speech of the Maori of New Zealand,
and with that of the remotest islanders of the Pacific.
But similar attempts to connect American languages with
the outside world break down. There are found in North
America, from the Arctic to Mexico, some fifty-five groups
of languages still existing or recently extinct. Throughout
these we may trace the same affinities and relationships
that run through the languages of Europe and Asia. We
can also easily connect the speech of the natives of
North America with that of natives of Central and of
South America. Even if we had not the similarities of
physical appearance, of tribal customs, and of general
manners to argue from, we should be able to say with
certainty that the various families of American Indians
all belonged to one race. The Eskimos of Northern Canada
are not Indians, and are perhaps an exception; it is
possible that a connection may be traced between them
and the prehistoric cave-men of Northern Europe. But the
Indians belong to one great race, and show no connection
in language or customs with the outside world. They belong
to the American continent, it has been said, as strictly
as its opossums and its armadillos, its maize and its
golden rod, or any other of its aboriginal animals and
plants.
But, here again, we must not conclude too much from the
fact that the languages of America have no relation to
those of Europe and Asia. This does not show that men
originated separately on this continent. For even in
Europe and Asia, where no one supposes that different
races sprung from wholly separate beginnings, we find
languages isolated in the same way. The speech of the
Basques in the Pyrenees has nothing in common with the
European families of languages.