CHAPTER ONE
A Meeting

The story of Orillia begins with the meeting. The meeting of water. The meeting of peoples. The meeting of a grand vision and a horrible reality.
Where deep and wide Lake Simcoe meets shallow and narrow Lake Couchiching, the water rushes north through a reach called The Narrows. About 3300 BCE, people began to build weirs, lines of stakes, to funnel and catch the fish. With food plentiful, The Narrows became a traditional place for gathering, a crossroads where people could rest and share food, shelter, and stories. The Narrows became the meeting place.
At or near The Narrows, two peoples met — the French, represented by Samuel de Champlain, and the Huron. Champlain had already met Huron before, but when he travelled through the lands in 1615 around what is now Orillia, he truly saw the richness of the 30,000-strong Huron nation.
“This country is so fine and fertile that it is a pleasure to travel about in it,” he wrote in his journals. “And this small extent of territory I have observed to be well peopled with a countless number of souls, without reckoning the other districts which I did not visit, which by common report are as thickly settled as those above mentioned, or more so….”
Thirty-five years later, the powerful Huron nation was reduced to 300 people so hungry they dug bodies out of graves to get something to eat. Jesuit priest Paul Ragueneau, who lived with the survivors, wrote: “Mothers fed upon their children; brothers on their brothers; while children recognized no longer, him whom, while he lived, they had called their Father.”
Famine had crept in behind the armies of the Huron’s fierce enemy, the Iroquois. The two great nations had come from the same stock. Centuries earlier, the tribes that eventually made up the Huron had spread north from Iroquois country, south of the Great Lakes, to a territory bordered by present-day Orillia in the east and Georgian Bay in the west. Even before European explorers reached the New World, the Huron and Iroquois had battled. It is unclear why, and historians can see whatever they want in the nature of the conflict. Writing in the late 1800s after the destructive U.S. Civil War, American historian Francis Parkman saw the Iroquois as the “good Indians.” These American-born Indians were democratic, yet nationalistic, just like the victorious Northern states. The Huron were a loose confederation of tribes, much like the South, and obviously weaker for it. During the Cold War in the 1950s, the Huron made a bit of a public relations comeback. The Canadian Huron were the good Indians, according to former Ontario premier and historian E.C. Drury. The Huron were peaceful and democratic, like the West in the 1950s. The Iroquois were totalitarian and war-like, like the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The clash between the Iroquois and the Huron was started, as usual, by the totalitarian tribe trying to overrun the peaceful freedom lovers, said Drury.
Whatever the reasons for the initial rivalry between the Huron and Iroquois, the coming of whites to North America and the growth of the fur trade intensified the conflict. Whichever tribe controlled the fur trade earned the most of the Europeans’ guns and other goods. The Huron occupied a key position: they were at peace and trading with the agricultural tribes of Petuns and Neutrals to the south, and the hunting Algonquin tribes to the north. As middlemen, they controlled the fur trade that moved pelts from Georgian Bay up the French River to Lake Nipissing, then down to the Ottawa River to the St. Lawrence and Quebec. The Huron’s rudimentary tools and belief in a spirit world were enough to convince the French the Natives were inferior savages. But Champlain saw more than savages in the Huron. After all, they were generally peaceful, and organized into clans and villages with clear forms of government. They cleared land and farmed corn, beans, and squash. And they understood commerce. Champlain intended not to destroy or enslave the Huron, but to forge a new nation of French settlers and converted, educated Natives.
Before Champlain fixed that vision on the Huron nation near present-day Orillia, he helped the Huron in a battle against the Iroquois in 1608. He tried to persuade the Huron to let him visit their home territory, but the Huron were reluctant. By 1615, they were not so reluctant. Iroquois raiding parties were making it difficult for the Huron fur traders to reach the French. Huron meeting him at Lachine Rapids that year asked for Champlain’s help against the Iroquois and invited him to visit their villages. Champlain agreed to help, explaining in his journal that he did so:

… both to engage them the more to love us, and also to provide the means of furthering my enterprises and explorations which apparently could only be carried out with their help, and also because this would be to them a kind of pathway and preparation for embracing Christianity. For which reason I resolved to go and examine their territory, and to help them in their wars, in order
to induce them to let me see what they had so often promised me.

That summer, Champlain, two other Frenchmen, and ten Natives in two canoes travelled the French River route to Lake Huron and Matchedash Bay, arriving at Carhagouha, a palisaded town near Nottawasaga Bay in August 1615. For the next three weeks, Champlain travelled from village to village, working his way from Georgian Bay to Lake Simcoe.
Not knowing what to expect, Champlain was pleased with the fertility and size of the Huron nation, which must have further strengthened his vision of a great alliance. The greatest village of all was Cahiague, with 200 large longhouses and 5,000 people protected behind a triple palisade. Champlain arrived at the village, a few miles from present-day Orillia, on August 17. The Huron prepared feasts and dances to celebrate Champlain’s safe arrival and the march against the Iroquois. Champlain stayed in Cahiague until the main body of warriors was assembled, then, on the first day of September, made the short trip to The Narrows between lakes Couchiching and Simcoe.

When the most part of our people were assembled, we set out from the village on the first day of September and passed along the shore of a small lake [Couchiching], distant from the said village three leagues, where they make great catches of fish which they preserve for the winter. There is another lake immediately adjoining [Simcoe], which is 26 leagues in circumference, draining into the small one by a strait, where the great catch of fish takes place by means of a number of weirs which almost close the strait, leaving only small openings where they set their nets in which the fish are caught.

The small army stayed at The Narrows for a few days, waiting for the rest of the Huron. When they had arrived, two canoes with twelve Huron and French interpreter .tienne Br.l. set out to sneak through Iroquois country to reach about 500 allies of the Huron who had promised help. Champlain and the army made their way along the lakes and rivers of the Trent Valley to Lake Ontario. Once they crossed Lake Ontario, they were in Iroquois country, so they hid their canoes on shore and walked through the forest to an Iroquois stronghold near or on Lake Onondaga.
Champlain quickly realized it would be no simple task to overwhelm the Iroquois. Thirty-foot-high palisades enclosed the village. A nearby pond gave the Iroquois fresh water for drinking and to put out any fires. The battle was a disaster for the Huron and the French. Arrows fell down on them like hail. Champlain wrote that the Huron promised to obey him in the battle. But from the start, the Huron’s less organized style of fighting frustrated the French. The Huron and French managed to build a cavalier, a ten- to twelve-foot tower on which the French shooters could stand to fire their guns over the Iroquois palisades. The allies also built a mantelet — a large, movable shelter that could shield a group of warriors from Iroquois arrows as they moved in and laid siege to the fort. But the Huron broke ranks, setting small and useless fires, wrote Champlain. The first attack ended in a stalemate, with several wounded and killed on both sides. Champlain received two arrow wounds, one in the knee and one in the leg, yet tried to convince the Huron to attack again, in an organized fashion. The Huron would agree only to wait a few days for reinforcements. In the skirmishes that followed over the next few days, the Iroquois shouted at the French that they should not interfere in Iroquois and Huron battles — a prophetic warning.
The reinforcements did not arrive, so the Huron and French left. Champlain begged the Huron to take him back to the settlement at Quebec, but the Huron said they could not spare the canoe. Champlain wrote, “I perceived that their plan was to detain me with my comrades in their country, both for their own safety and out of fear of their enemies, and that I might hear what took place in their councils and meetings….” This Champlain did, spending the winter visiting Huron and Algonquin villages, such as Cahiague, cementing the alliance.
That alliance turned out to be deadly to the Huron. Thanks in part to Champlain’s efforts, French Jesuits eventually set up missions throughout Huron country. The Iroquois grew increasingly frustrated at French interference in their affairs, the pressure of white settlement on their territory, and the Huron’s stranglehold of the fur trade. The French feared that a Huron‒Iroquois alliance would free the Huron to send furs to the rival Dutch, so they broke up any moves by the two Native nations to establish a peace treaty between themselves.
Disease gave the Iroquois an advantage over the Huron. Smallpox, brought by the French, raged through Huron country in 1637, killing thousands and reducing the population from 30,000 to about 12,000. Shaken, the Huron gathered north into their strongholds, which stretched from Lake Couchiching to Georgian Bay. The missionary work continued, and fur brigades of canoes laden with pelts still travelled down the Ottawa and up the St. Lawrence Rivers to the French. Iroquois attacks on the brigades intensified in the 1640s. In 1642, the Iroquois slipped into Huron country itself, burning the village of Contarrea, a few miles south-west of Orillia, and killing all the inhabitants. (Cahiague, the capitol village Champlain had visited earlier, was abandoned sometime before 1624, either because nearby resources had been depleted or the two clans that made up the village had gone their separate ways.) Over the next few years, the Iroquois began isolating the Huron by destroying their allies — the Petuns, Neutrals, and Algonquins.
The final destruction of the once-proud Huron nation began July 4, 1648, with an attack on Teanaostaiae, called St. Joseph by the French, a mission town of about 2,000 in what is now Medonte Township. About 700 Huron were killed. The Iroquois slipped back home, apparently satisfied with their success. That fall and winter, hundreds of Iroquois began moving into the forests of eastern Ontario. The French and Huron had no idea their enemy was marching quietly toward them. A thousand warriors suddenly attacked St. Ignace, near present-day Waubaushene, on March 16, 1649, killing most inside. Only three men escaped, fleeing half-naked over snowy fields to nearby villages. Next, the Iroquois took St. Louis, one more village on the road to the main mission village, Ste. Marie. For some reason, the Iroquois fell into a strange panic and left a few days later, torturing prisoners on the way home. The Jesuits had no explanation for the sudden fear among the Iroquois, other than the fact that it was St. Joseph’s Day.