Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of OntarioScadding, Henry
History
Toronto of Old: Collections and recollections illustrative of the early settlement and social life of the capital of Ontario
Scadding, Henry
Toronto (Ont.) -- Description and travel; Toronto (Ont.) -- History
As to the idea to which Capt. Bonnycastle gave currency, by recording it
in one of his books on Canada, that Toronto, or Tarento, was possibly
the name of an Italian engineer concerned in the construction of the
fort,--it is sufficient to reply that we know what the official name of
the Fort was: it was Fort Rouillé. Sorel, and Chambly, and it may be,
other places in Canada, derived their names from officers in the French
service. But nothing to be found in the early annals of the country
gives any countenance to Capt. Bonnycastle's derivation. It was probably
a mere after-dinner conversational conjecture, and it ought never to
have been gravely propounded.
We meet with Toronto under several different forms, in the French and
English documents; but the variety has evidently arisen from the
attempts of men of different degrees of literary capacity and
qualification, to represent, each as he best could, a native vocable
which had not been long reduced to writing. The same variety, and from
the same cause, occurs in a multitude of other aboriginal terms.
The person who first chanced to write down Toronto as Tarento was
probably influenced by some previous mental familiarity with the name of
an old Italian town; just as he who first startled Europeans by the
announcement that one of the Iroquois nations was composed of Senecas,
was doubtless helped to the familiar-looking term which he adopted, by a
thought of the Roman stoic. (Pownall says Seneca is properly Sen-aga,
"the farther people," that is in relation to the New England Indians;
while Mohawk is Mo-aga, "the hither people." Neither of the terms was
the name borne by the tribe. According to the French rendering, the
Mo-agas were Agniés; the Sen-agas Tsonnontouans.)
The chivalrous and daring La Salle must have rested for a moment at the
Toronto Landing. In his second expedition to the West, in 1680, he made
his way from Fort Frontenac to Michilimackinac by the portage from the
mouth of what is now the Humber to Lake Huron, accompanied by a party of
twenty-four men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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