There was a time when the land now occupied by Elora and Fergus was a battleground.
It wasn’t during the Fenian troubles, or during the Mackenzie Rebellion, or in the War of 1812. The violence and bloodshed took place generations earlier in a conflict that history calls the Iroquois Wars, the French and Indian Wars, or simply the Beaver Wars. It was a dark period that saw the Indigenous people who lived in this part of what is now Ontario swept into a war of near-annihilation.
This was the country of the Attawandaron Nation, known to Europeans as the Neutral Confederacy. They were an Iroquoian-speaking people who did not belong to the powerful Five Nations Iroquois Confederacy (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca) who occupied what is now upstate New York. To the north and east of the Attawandaron were the Huron-Wendat, long-time rivals of the Iroquois Confederacy.
Because the Attawandaron were not allied with either the Huron-Wendat or the Iroquois Confederacy, French explorers and missionaries who arrived early in the 17th century called them Neutrals, a name still used by historians today.
The Attawandaron lived by farming, hunting and fishing. Approximately 4,000 people lived in villages along the Grand River, and numerous artifacts such as arrowheads and stone tools have been found in the Elora Gorge.
Their land was a source of flint, which was useful for making cutting tools and starting fires and therefore was a valuable commodity. While the Huron-Wendat and the Iroquois Confederacy engaged in sporadic raiding against each other to carry off captives and plunder, the Attawandaron prospered through trade. Unfortunately, another commodity would prove to be their undoing.
That commodity was beaver pelts. With the coming of Europeans – principally the British, the French and the Dutch – to North America, furs took on a whole new value for Indigenous peoples as trade items, but beaver was the most valuable of them all. Thanks to a fashion trend in London, Paris, Amsterdam and the other capitals of Europe, beaver pelts were practically worth their weight in gold to white traders. Everyone who was anyone in European society had to have a beaver hat. In fact, to really be fashionable, you needed several of them, because there were different beaver hats for men and women for every occasion, from a morning stroll down the avenue in the affluent part of town, to a night at the opera.
Of course, the white traders didn’t pay Indigenous hunters in gold for their beaver pelts. They paid for them with steel knives and other tools: wool blankets, copper cooking pots, cheap trinkets like mirrors and coloured beads, alcohol, and – most desirable of all to warriors and hunters – guns and ammunition. These things were all of great value to Indigenous traders, but of minimal cost for the Europeans. Each side actually believed they were getting the better part of the deal.
The Iroquois Confederacy traded with the Dutch and the English, while the Huron-Wendat and their Algonquin neighbours and allies did business with the French. This drew the Indigenous nations and the colonial European powers into each others’ conflicts. In their hunt for ever more beaver pelts, the Indigenous nations began to encroach on each others’ territories. Samuel de Champlain earned the undying enmity of the Iroquois Confederacy for his colony in Quebec when he joined the Hurons in battles against them between 1609 and 1615.
The future location of Elora and Fergus was a long way from Quebec and from the Iroquois lands on the other side of Lake Ontario. However, strategically it lay between the belligerent factions. The land of the Attawandaron was about to become a dark and bloody ground.
The Attawandaron had never been as warlike as the Huron-Wendat or the Iroquois Confederacy. Moreover, their population had been decimated by epidemics of smallpox and other diseases brought to the Americas by Europeans.
The French had been reluctant to trade firearms to their Indigenous allies, but the Dutch and English had no qualms about it. The Iroquois were therefore almost unstoppable when the Beaver Wars began in 1628.
The Iroquois attacked their nearest neighbours, the Mohicans and the Wenro, taking over their hunting grounds and forcing survivors to seek protection in the lands of the Attawandaron and the Huron-Wendat. Within a few years the beaver in the conquered territory was trapped out, so the Iroquois warriors, encouraged by the Dutch, once again expanded their territory through warfare. This continued after the Dutch lost their New Amsterdam colony to the English, who re-named it New York.
Sporadic warfare continued for the next few decades, sometimes interrupted by short-lived truce agreements. The Iroquois invaded the land of the Attawandaron in 1650. The attacks were ferocious and thousands were killed. Many were taken captive to be assimilated into Iroquois communities, because the Iroquois had also lost large numbers of people to disease.
Within two years, the Attawandaron were completely driven from their traditional territory. Those who fled to the safety of Huronia had only a temporary reprieve. Soon the Huron-Wendat themselves were all but annihilated in Iroquois attacks that saw the destruction of the French Jesuit mission of Ste. Marie at present-day Midland and threatened the French settlements along the St. Lawrence River.
The French and the Iroquois Confederacy finally made a peace settlement in 1667. By that time the Beaver Wars had caused a massive shift of populations and other conflicts throughout the Great Lakes region as people fleeing the violence moved into other Indigenous nations’ territories. The fur trade would be a contributing cause of subsequent wars, including the American Revolution. The indiscriminate slaughter of the beaver, whose dams and ponds were such an integral part of the woodland topography, caused ecological end environmental damage that lasted for generations.
The beaver, one of the most iconic symbols of Canada, was through no fault of its own the cause of much strife and bloodshed, and the ultimate demise of the original inhabitants of the land now occupied by Elora and Fergus.
