The Natural Setting Of Toronto

One of the memories of Toronto that had fashioned an overly-romantic vision of my great Canadian city was that of the physical setting in which she has grown.  Unlike the pancake landscapes of Detroit or Chicago, Toronto was born on some more realistic, diverse ground.  Unlike Manhattan, she has since not paved it over in order to create the illusion of flatness.  In general, Toronto is like the other Great Lakes cities in that she is dominated by her most prominent feature, the water.

Yes, that is open water even in frigid February 2014.  Lake Ontario is the most protected of the Great Lakes, at least from the cold north-western winter winds.  It also gets sloshed around quite a bit by the inflow from the mighty Niagara.  This obviously has a heavy effect on the surrounding climate, both good and ill.

Lake Ontario is the reason why Toronto is here, really.  The city was founded on one of the great portage places between portions of the Great Lakes, specifically Huron and Ontario, a route that had to wait for the dropping of Iroquois hostility to become viable (hence Toronto had never been a French city, even though a fort had been established here in 1750).  Near the lake, the land is level and the shoreline is relatively protected by the offshore islands, making the site attractive to settlement once English Canada became a going concern.  The climate was also a nice, inviting feature.  Further east, the winter gets a bit snowier from lake effect squalls, and the growing season grows just a little bit shorter. 

Toronto, in fact, is noted for being one of the northernmost places in Eastern North America where the eastern deciduous forest (known in Ontario as the Carolinian Forest) exists in the same recognizable form before giving way to the north woods.  As part of this package deal, Toronto gets Atlantic coastal flora, some boreal elements, and even the easternmost extension of the great Prairie Peninsula which is an extension of the central grasslands well into Ontario and even parts of western New York and interior Virginia.  In Toronto, the best place to see surviving grasslands is in High Park, where some oak savanna remnants can be found.

Indeed, in comparison to the mysterious transitional forests and rolling terrain further inland and to the east, the oak openings and level shoreline must have seemed very inviting to settlement.  Early English speaking Canadians were very eager to find land comparable to what they might have had further west along the Lakes or in the Midwest and Ohio Valley, and it helped that Toronto had just this available to them, all at a comfortable (but not ultimately safe) distance from the American border.  That said, again, the place is hardly a level grassland in it's entirety.  Things get very steep, very fast.

Much of Toronto is within a few minute's travel (by any means) of deep ravines and even minor cliffs.  This affords for a very dramatic cityscape, at least as far as eastern urban North America goes.  The other Great Lakes cities, with the exception of Hamilton, really do not offer much in the way of relief, and the end result is that Toronto features some pretty natural park spaces right beside high rise buildings, and not merely because someone thought a park would look nice there.  Back in 1954, in fact, there were actually buildings going up in the ravines.  Then came Hurricane Hazel, the first time in modern history when the Great Lakes got to remind us that they are really little freshwater oceans; the ravines flooded in rages that put an end to both people and urban planning alike.  After the floods had reminded Torontonians just how fragile their up and down rolling city landscape could be, the city started building around, rather than on top of or through, it's topography. 

Most other major cities in eastern North America simply can't say the same.  No defensible ridge of land remains where Detroit was once founded atop the rise where Woodward avenue now runs atop.  Manhattan is relatively flattened in comparison to what it once was and even now is surrounded by.  Our ancestral city of ancient urban concept, London across the sea, has long since fooled people into thinking it was always solid ground devoid of water in all but the Thames.  Boston certainly has done a good job of containing the aquatic geography of its foundations!  Miami looks nothing like the combination of barrier islands, mangrove swamps, and limestone pine ridges that it once was.  Toronto, on the other hand, is a nice lake plain, set of islands, one river valley after another, and even has, well, sea cliffs.  These are better known as the Scarborough Bluffs, one of the coolest and most under-appreciated features of the city.  Sadly, I took no pictures to truly do them justice, but the ones below can decently illustrate how interesting they are. 

So what sort of city has since been built around and on top of these features?  That's in our next post.

Finding the Wendat (Huron) Civilization

Popular imagination tends to portray Native American existence before European contact as a peaceful, primitive situation replete with tepees and elaborate headdresses, but little in the way of any sort of settled, complex civilization.  Popular imagination, of course, is sorely lacking.  Not including the advanced civilization of the Aztecs (who, yes, had a pretty glaring dark side too) and other cultures in central Mexico and further south, there were a great deal of peoples in lands as diverse as the Rio Grande Valley to the Great Lakes area that raised great cities and engaged in extensive agriculture to feed large populations.  The finest remains of such civilizations can be seen in the American southwest, but impressive mounds and fragments of cities can be found in key locations throughout the eastern part of North America, particularly in Illinois, Ohio, and Ontario.  Disease and European involvement in already viscous warfare between various peoples would finish off these great, yes, urban cultures that had already begun to decline due to climactic shifts in rainfall patterns.

While we are fairly certain of conditions that have existed since the 1500s, however, we still know relatively little about what settled life was like for our true first-families, and exciting discoveries keep popping up on a regular basis.  Such is the case of ongoing discoveries made at the "Mantle Site", a Wendat (Huron) where as many as 2,000 people might have lived in a large settlement of permanent structures laid out in a meaningful urban design.  Some news about this can be found here:

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1222889--how-did-huron-wendat-get-cursed-european-axe-a-century-before-european-contact

So who were the Wendat (Hurons) and why is this a big deal?  Well, that funny thing called popular imagination labels them as a weak people who lovingly embraced the French and Christianity when it was offered to them.  As such, they became scattered to the winds by the other nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) attacked them in their weakened state, who had it coming anyway because they sided with the newcomers.  In truth, the Wendat were no weaker than any individual nation of the Haudenosaunee and actually controlled a series of trade routes and contacts because of their strategic position located in the heart of territory that had long been contested by various Algonquin and Haudenosaunee nations.  Settled on the northern shores of Lake Ontario and the eastern and southern shores of Lake Huron (essentially southern Ontario and parts of Michigan), the Wendat saw passage of goods and peoples from the Algonquins, Ojibwa, Potawatamis, Illinois, Ottawas, Chippewas, Senecas, Cayugas, Onandagas, Oneidas, Mohawks, the nations which surrounded them.  Furthermore, as they were such a vital link between so many nations of two major cultural groups, they also had extensive contact with nations further afield such as the Cree, various nations of the Sioux, Shawnees, Delawares, Mahicans, and the various nations who lived further down the Mississippi and Atlantic corridors.  The Wendat were big news, as they were not afraid to facilitate the passage of a lot of economy through their land.

So what else would such a nation do when in such a prestigious and dangerous position of being in contact with so many other nations?  They dug in, made a pretty big city, and instead of fighting everyone else or making peace with them, opened up an exchange of commerce and ideas with them.  The recent find of a Basque axe at the Mantle Site has only furthered proof that the Wendat drew in a lot of distant exchanges of various sorts.  Even before they had seen a Basque or any other European, the Wendat were busy trading some stuff Europeans had traded to nations on the margins of the continent.  Now this might be stretching, but it seems plausible that one of the reasons why the French were so eager to seek out contact, trade, and evangelistic efforts with the Wendat were because other nations, such as the Algonquins, told them that this was a people who were interested in working with others and freely moving around goods both material and intellectual.  While the French found the other Haudenosaunee to be less than friendly towards them, and the Algonquins amicable but also largely ambivalent about helping a people that had set up camp right on their doorstep, they found the Wendat to be very willing to help them trade and explore in a mysterious land of pines, moose, and very cold winters.

In time, this would come to a very beautiful, and very tragic, sharing that would become one of the great marriages of culture that our Canada would be born from.  That, of course, is a passionate story for me to tell you on another day.