The site of the original French stockade, established here in the middle of the last century, was nearly at the middle point between the landing-place of the United States force in 1813, and the existing Fort. West of the white cut-stone Barracks, several earthworks and grass-grown excavations still mark the spot. These ruins, which we often visited when they were much more extensive and conspicuous than they are now, were popularly designated "The Old French Fort."
It is interesting to observe the probable process by which the appellation "Toronto" came to be attached to the Trading-post here. Its real name, as imposed by the French authorities, was Fort Rouillé, from a French colonial minister of that name, in 1749-54. This we learn from a despatch of M. de Longeuil, Governor-in-Chief of Canada in 1752. And "Toronto," at that period, according to contemporaneous maps, denoted Lake Simcoe and the surrounding region. Thus in Carver's Travels through North America in 1766-8, in p. 172, we read, "On the north-west part of this lake [Ontario], and to the south of Lake Huron, is a tribe of Indians called the Mississagués, whose town is denominated Toronto, from the lake [i. e. Lake Simcoe] on which it lies, but they are not very numerous." This agrees with Lahontan's statements and map, in 1687.
What Carver says of the fewness of the native inhabitants is applicable only to the state of things in his day. The fatal irruption of the Iroquois from the south had then taken place, and the whole of the Lake Simcoe or Toronto region had been made a desert. Before that irruption, the peninsula included between Notawasaga Bay, Matchedash, or Sturgeon Bay, the River Severn, Lake Couchichin and Lake Simcoe was a locality largely frequented by native tribes. It was especially the head-quarters of the Wyandots or Hurons. Villages, burial-grounds, and cultivated lands abounded in it. Unusual numbers of the red men were congregated there.
It was in short the place of meeting, the place of concourse, the populous region, indicated by the Huron term Toronto.
In the form Toronton, the word Toronto is given by Gabriel Sagard in his "Dictionnaire de la Langue Huronne," published at Paris in 1636.
With Sagard it is a kind of exclamation, signifying "Il y en a beaucoup," and it is used in relation to men. He cites as an example—"He has killed a number of S. (the initial of some hostile tribe)." "Toronton S. ahouyo."
In the Vocabulary of Huron words at the end of Lahontan's second volume, the term likewise appears, but with a prefix,—A-toronton,—and is translated "Beaucoup." Sagard gives it with the prefix O, in the phrase "O-toronton dacheniquoy," "J'en mange beaucoup."
We are not indeed to suppose that the Hurons employed the term Toronto as a proper name. We know that the aborigines used for the most part no proper names of places, in our sense of the word, their local appellations being simply brief descriptions or allusion to incidents. But we are to suppose that the early white men took notice of the vocable Toronto, frequently and emphatically uttered by their red companions, when pointing towards the Lake Simcoe region, or when pressing on in canoe or on foot, to reach it.
Accordingly, at length, the vocable Toronto is caught up by the white voyageurs, and adopted as a local proper name in the European sense: just as had been the case already with the word Canada. ("Kanata" was a word continually heard on the lips of the red men in the Lower St. Lawrence, as they pointed to the shore; they simply meant to indicate—"Yonder are our wigwams;" but the French mariners and others took the expression to be a geographical name for the new region which they were penetrating. And such it has become.)
We can now also see how it came to pass that the term Toronto was attached to a particular spot on the shore of Lake Ontario. The mouth of the Humber, or rather a point on the eastern side of the indentation known as Humber Bay, was the landing place of hunting parties, trading parties, war-parties, on their way to the populous region in the vicinity of Lake Simcoe. Here they disembarked for the tramp to Toronto. This was a Toronto landing-place for wayfarers bound to the district in the interior where there were crowds. And gradually the starting-place took the name of the goal. The style and title of the terminus ad quem were usurped by the terminus à quo.