Bowmanville. William Humber

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      A Deed of Conveyance

      “I believe Indians fear loss of meaning—that is, memory—beyond all other losses, because without it one can love nothing. After all love proceeds from memory, and survival depends absolutely upon memory.”

      – William Least-Heat Moon, Prairyerth

      Change is never some anonymous, inevitable force acting like a law of nature. It is at least partially, and often largely, the result of human actions and choice. Such was the fate of the original native inhabitants.

      There appear to have been few natives in the area at any time. Residence may have been limited to the summer when creeks flowing into Lake Ontario were stocked with fish.¹ That use corresponds to the recreation of later Bowmanville citizens for whom fishing in the Bowmanville Creek below the Vanstone Mill is perhaps their strongest authentic connection with the surrounding environment.

      According to archaeological evidence native contact with the area dates to the European time of 1000 BC, often referred to as the Woodland Period. From perhaps 700 BC to 1000 AD the Point Peninsula Culture covered this area and much of Eastern Ontario. Ontario Iroquois then dominated much of southern Ontario from 1000 AD to the coming of European contact. Their lifestyle was characterized by a corn economy supplemented by fishing and hunting. By 1400 the combination of beans and squash with corn diminished their reliance on hunting.

      Contact between Europeans and natives began in Ontario in the 17th century, but such encounters would have been casual and rare in the area of Bowmanville in this period. Still, arrowheads and pottery fragments occasionally rise up from the earth to remind present day residents of a native presence. In her remarks on returning to Bowmanville for centennial celebrations in 1958, Minnie Jennings recalled an old Indian burial ground at the site of the Medland home on Liberty Street. She also told stories that had been the material of her own youth about a native battleground on the Vanstone’s Hill, with a tribe on the hill attacking a tribe as it came down what would become the Kingston Road. “My brother and I found several Indian arrow heads as we played in Mr. Horsey’s Grove or gathered beech nuts under the trees,” she said.²

      These events, however, occurred before formal white settlement and in fact disease and war had practically ended the Iroquois presence by 1650. There would be about one hundred years of virtual non-population marking the boundary between one residency and the next in this area. Formal native contact in the area around Bowmanville with Europeans and American ex-patriates began in the late 18th century, and the earliest reports of contact generally suggest an amicable if uneasy co-habitation.

      James Fairbairn says that scattered bands of Rice Lake natives hunted along the creeks “. . . but never interfered with the white people appearing quite harmless and kindly disposed.”³ John Coleman on the other hand shows his sympathies early in his little history of Bowmanville, referring to “. . . the rude, savage Indian, who looked with jealous eyes upon the encroachment of the whites.”⁴ He proceeds to build a case for the original white settlers’ bravery against enormous odds noting, “The Indians were very troublesome, and caused considerable anxiety, being armed and equipped, and very different from the remnants of the broken tribes occasionally seen at the present time.”⁵ To support his case, however, he lamely describes one instance in which the home of one of the three original settling families, the Trulls, was invaded by a native woman and her four children. Only Mrs. Trull and her children were home and the native woman asked for some flour which was denied. She proceeded to search the house and distribute the flour in equal portions to the white family and hers.⁶ It may have been a type of communalism unacceptable to the new inhabitants but it also suggests a necessary justice in a time of want.

      Most accounts of native-white contact in the 19th century focus on a dispirited even tragic remnant of a people and treat them as objects of bizarre humour and racial contempt. One such account from The Observer in 1878 described a lacrosse game at the Drill Shed on present day Carlisle Avenue in which, “An Indian, Johnnie Cornstalk, with his squaw came to the game drunk and when heckled he threw a brick that cracked the skull of his spouse. She was attended by Dr. McLaughlin and was taken home to the wigwam where she is recovering.”⁷

      Nevertheless the British tried to acknowledge the basic native ownership of these lands even though such European concepts were of limited or nonexistent import among aboriginals in North America for whom land was a sacred trust not a commodity to be bought and sold. Occupancy was not a factor of market forces but usually resulted from superior military resolve.

      In 1775, following the acquisition of France’s lands in the New World, but also cognizant of future problems with the thirteen colonies in America and the need to retain native alliances, the British superiors of Governor Carleton instructed that:

      “No purchase of Lands belonging to the Indians, whether in the Name and for the use of the Crown, or in the Name and for the Use of proprietaries of Colonies be made but at some general Meeting, at which the principal chiefs of each tribe, claiming a property in such Lands, are present; and all Tracts, so purchased, shall be regularly surveyed by a Sworn Surveyor in the presence and with the Assistance of a person deputed by the Indians to attend such Survey; and the said Surveyor shall make an accurate Map of such Tract, describing the Limits, which Map shall be entered upon Record, with the Deed of Conveyance from the Indians.”⁸

      Vanstone’s Pond, Bowmanville, Ontario.

      These explicit directions were ignored almost immediately in a large territory which included the present site of Bowmanville. In 1783, following the victory by American insurgents and the British need to relocate thousands of Loyalists on the very native land which they hoped to acquire, Sir John Johnson was appointed to oversee Indian affairs.

      On October 9 of that year, following a meeting of several Mississauga leaders and British military administrators on Carleton Island at the east end of Lake Ontario, Captain Crawford reported to Johnson that, “He had purchased from the Mississaugas all the land from Toniato or Onagara to the River in the Bay of Quinte within eight leagues of the bottom of the said Bay, including all of the islands, extending from the lake back as far as a man can travel in a day.”⁹

      But there remained something untoward about the negotiations. Even as details faded it was clear that despite Carleton’s instructions, Crawford had used questionable means to convince the natives to sign what was effectively a blank deed for the area from the Etobicoke Creek west of Toronto to the Trent River, to a depth of ten to twelve miles from Lake Ontario. Popularly dubbed the “Gun Shot Treaty” it had no follow-up survey or legal description. Sir John Johnson hushed up the indiscretion by forbidding any staff associated with the Indian Department to benefit from the transaction.

      Though lands in the Toronto area between the Don and Etobicoke Creek were part of the Toronto Purchase Treaty in 1787 and later confirmed in 1805, the majority of Gun Shot Treaty lands including those on which Bowmanville sits, remained part of the controversial earlier deal.

      An 1847 map of Indian surrendered land reaffirmed the native position that they had never signed away the area, but the government was faced with significant white settlement in the area which made retrenchment unlikely. They maintained that the natives had effectively acquiesced to the state of affairs. The issue might have forever remained in legal ambiguity but for embarrassing questions arising out of native land claims in British Columbia in the 1920s. Land issues were reopened in other parts of the country including those associated with the Gun Shot Treaty’s invalidity, “a fact” historian Leo Johnson says, “of which even the Mississaugas were not aware.”¹⁰

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