From Nicoll's to Jeff's Corner is ten long and weary miles, five or six of which are through the forest. Jeff's is not a tavern, so that you must go to bait the horses to Des Hommes, about two miles further, where there is no inducement to stay, it being kept by an old French Canadian, who has a large family of half-breeds. Therefore, on to the village of Penetanguishene, which is twenty miles from Bruce's, or some say twenty-four. We started from Bruce's at half-past three in the morning, and reached "The Village," as it is always called, at half-past twelve, on the 30th of June, and the rain still continuing ever since we left Toronto. Thus, with great expedition, it took the best portion of three days for a transit of only 108 miles. This has been done in twenty-four hours by another route, as I shall explain on my return.
Penetanguishene is a small village, which has not progressed in the same ratio as the military road to it has done. It is peopled by French Canadians, Indians, and half-breeds, and is very prettily situated at the bottom of the harbour. Lieutenant-Colonel Phillpotts, of the Royal Engineers, selected this site after the peace of 1815, when Drummond's Island on Lake Huron was resigned to the Americans, for an asylum for such of the Canadian French settled there as would not transfer their allegiance. They migrated in a body.
This is the nearest point of Western Canada at which the traveller from Europe can observe the unmixed Indian, the real wild man of the woods, with medals hanging in his ears, as large as the bottom of a silver saucepan, rings in his nose, the single tuft of hair on the scalp, eagle's plumes, a row of human scalps about his neck, and the other amiable etceteras of a painted and greased sauvage.
Here also you first see the half-breed, the offspring of the white and red, who has all the bad qualities of both with very few of the good of either, except in rare instances.
CHAPTER IV.
The French Canadian.
At Penetanguishene you see the original pioneer of the West, that unmistakeable French Canadian, a good-natured, indolent man, who is never active but in his canoe singing, or à la chasse, a true voyageur, of which type of human society the marks are wearing out fast, and the imprint will ere long be illegible. It makes me serious, indeed, to contemplate the Canadian of the old dominant race, and I shall enter a little into his history.
Res ardua vetustis novitatem dare; and never could an author impose upon himself a greater task than that of endeavouring succinctly to trace such a history, in this age of railroads and steam-vessels, or to bring before the mind's eye events which have long slumbered in oblivion, but which it behoves thinking minds not to lose sight of.
Man is now a locomotive animal, both as regards the faculties of mind and of motion; unless in the schools, in the cabinet, or in amusing fictions founded on fact, he rarely finds leisure to think about a forgotten people.