quarried flint to make arrowheads, spear points, knives, and tomahawks.
While nearly all evidence of the Neutrals has long been eradicated, buried, or ploughed under, a remarkable remnant known as the Southwold Earthworks, located in Elgin County, has survived. Surrounded by farm fields and forested ravines, the earthworks, a national historic site since 1923, was occupied around AD 1500, and consisted of a double palisade, four to five metres in height with gaps to allow the passage of a stream. Explorations by famed archaeologist Wilfred Jury3 in the 1940s also unearthed evidence of a succession of villages near Clear Creek. Still earlier, a Chatham amateur archaeologist named Edmund Jones had found the remains of a Neutral village in what is today Rondeau Provincial Park.
Attiwandaronks typically used the longhouse for their dwellings.
While the grisly fate of the Jesuits who were tortured and killed in 1649 still resonated in France and Quebec, the religious fervour to convert the “heathen savages” continued unabated. Next up were a pair of Sulpician priests, one René de Bréhant de Galinée and François Dollier de Casson. Anxious to convert those tribes living west of the Great Lakes, who had yet to encounter their first missionary, the two were in fact part of an exploratory expedition headed by a young Jesuit dropout, René-Robert, Cavalier de La Salle.
Despite farming by the settlers, the Attirondawonk Earthworks have survived and display the trenches used in their palisaded village.
Having read the much sought-after Jesuit Relations in France, La Salle hungered for adventure in the new world. During a chance meeting with two Iroquois, La Salle was told of a river that led south of Lake Erie to a faraway salt sea. Imagining that this might at last be the fabled passage to China, La Salle raised enough money to put together an expedition to discover this new route. Governor Daniel de Remy de Courcelle of New France agreed, but only on the condition that he agree to add the two missionaries to his force.
On July 6, 1669, the group set out. Seven canoes, each containing three men and their supplies and equipment, and two Iroquois guides, along with a Dutch settler who was fluent in Iroquois, made their way west along Lake Ontario to an Iroquois village at the end of the lake. Here they met by chance an earlier explorer, Adrien Jolliet.4 Fresh from Lake Superior, where he was seeking a copper mine, Jolliet told the astonished travellers of a new route to the upper lakes, one that led not through the traditional French River route, but that took him through Lake Erie and Lake Huron.
At this news, the expedition was fated to dissipate. While the two priests decided to follow Jolliet’s new route to the north, where more unconverted Natives lay, La Salle took ill and returned to Montreal. This left Dollier and Galinée to become the first to explore and record the shores of Lake Erie. Galinée, it turned out, was a colourful and observant note-taker and his forty-eight-page manuscript has left the earliest account of pre-contact Lake Erie.5
On October 4 the little company parted ways, and the priests, with the remaining expedition, made their way west to the Grand River. They found the river very difficult to navigate: “It is marvellous how much difficulty we had in descending the river for we had to be in the water all the time dragging the canoe which was unable to pass through for lack of water.”
Ten days later they arrived at the mouth of the river and recorded the first written account of the lake. “At last we arrived on the shore of the lake which appeared to us at first like a great sea because there was a great south wind blowing at the time. There is perhaps no lake in the whole country in which the waves rise so high because of its great depth and great extent.” (It is in fact due to the lake’s shallowness, not its “great depth” that its waves rise so quickly and steeply.)
During their earlier conversations with Jolliet, the latter had advised them of a canoe he had left along the shore. To secure the canoe for their journey, the priests sent their Dutch interpreter ahead overland to locate it. Setting out into the lake, the expedition struggled for three days with the stormy waters before finally spotting a sheltered landing spot. “We found a spot which appeared to us so beautiful with such abundance of game that we thought we could not find a better place in which to pass our winter.” Here they encountered a variety and quantity of game enough to last them the long, cold winter, as well as an ample supply of walnuts, chestnuts, and cranberries. And to their surprise and delight they discovered an abundance of wild grapes. “I will tell you by the way that the vine grows here only in sand on the banks of the lakes and rivers but although it has no cultivation it does not fail to produce grapes in great quantities as large and as sweet as any in France.” And they put them to good use. “We even made wine of them with which M Dollier said holy mass all winter.”
Galinee wrote glowingly, calling the area “this earthly paradise of Canada.” He says: “I call it so because there is assuredly no more beautiful region in all of Canada.” The woods were open and the rivers full of fish and game. The “bears [were] fatter and of better flavour than the most savoury pigs of France. In short, we may say that we passed the winter more comfortably than we should have done in Montreal.” Despite all the comfort they enjoyed that winter, it would soon change into a series of hardships and discomforts, and, ultimately, failure:
We could not pass the winter on the lake shore because of the high winds by which we should have been buffeted. For this reason we chose a beautiful spot on the bank of a rivulet about a quarter of a league in the woods.… At the end of three months our men discovered a number of Iroquois coming to this place to hunt beaver. They used to visit us and found us in a very good cabin whose construction they admired and afterwards they brought every Indian who passed that way to see it … for that reason we had built it in such a fashion that we could have defended ourselves for a long time against these barbarians if the desire had entered their minds to come to insult us.
The location of this “paradise” was the Lynn River at the site of today’s Port Dover, and their winter camp was located on a small stream that flows into it, named Patterson Creek. The earthworks from their winter cabins are visible to this day, fenced and marked with a commemorative cairn.
A cross marks the spot where missionaries Dollier and Galinée celebrated their stay at Port Dover’s “earthly paradise.”
Finally, after five months and eleven days, on March 29, 1670, they set off again, but not before erecting a cross on a high hill overlooking the lake. But they may have left too soon. After making only six or seven leagues, a strong wind forced them to halt, and they lost a canoe in the process. This forced several of them to walk along the shore to reach where they thought the spare canoe lay waiting. Here they discovered that the shoreline to be frustrating tangle of gullies and underbrush. “We reckoned only two days walking to reach it … the land route was very bad because of four rivers that had to be crossed and a number of great gulches that the water from the snows and rains had scooped out. We decided it was necessary in order to cross the rivers to go a good distance into the woods because the farther the rivers run into the woods the narrower they are and indeed one usually finds trees which having fallen in every direction to form bridges over which one passes.” This worked well until they reached the mouth of Big Creek, which empties into Long Point Bay, (which they termed “Little Lake Erie”). Here, they were forced to fashion a raft, which they guided through the marshy neck of Long Point to the open waters of the lake where “contrary to all expectations found it still quite filled with floating ice.”
Eventually they located the canoe and replenished
