Basic Info
Jobs and Brownfields
To those of us born and raised in this type of society, the ongoing sprawl and urbanization of Guelph can seem normal, and inevitable. “People gotta live somewhere,” the explanation goes. But when we consider all that has been destroyed and remains threatened in this process, as well as the motivating factors of wealth and power, greed, control, and so on, it can allow us to place today’s justifications for ‘development’ in a more accurate historical context, and see this development as less natural, less inevitable, and less legitimate.
An Abbreviated History of Guelph and the Surrounding Area
Archaeologists working on the HCBP development found evidence that the Hanlon Creek area was used by Indigenous people as far back as 11,000 years ago (more on the archaeological assessment later). Uncovered were things like spear tips, arrowheads, and other stone tools for preparing animal hides and cutting animal bones. Things made from wood, sinew, and hide, have long since decayed. This land was prime hunting and gathering grounds, as it was home to a fish-bearing creek, large forests, rolling hills, and a wetland.
This is a photo of a spear tip or arrowhead that was found on the site.
In the centuries prior to European colonization of Southern Ontario, this land was inhabited by the Neutral nation. They had between 12,000 and 40,000 people, and lived around the western shores of Lake Ontario, the northern shores of Lake Erie, the headwaters of the Niagara river, and also around the Fergus, Elora, and Guelph area. To the north were the Huron nation, who numbered an estimated 25,000 and lived mostly around the southern shores of Georgian bay and the headwaters of the Grand river.
This is a map showing a rough approximation of territory home to different nations. It is not extremely accurate but serves the purpose of showing some of the traditional territory of Indigenous people.
Early European settlers described this land as having been heavily forested, with “wild fruit trees of vast variety,” including wild cherry, grapes, black currants, red currants, several kinds of gooseberries, raspberries, black raspberries, cranberries, wild plums, strawberries, blackberries, hazel nuts, chestnuts, hickory, and many other kinds of fruit and nuts. The rivers were full of sturgeon, trout, whitefish, herring, pike, pickerel, bass catfish, perch, eel, trout, salmon. “Elk, caribou, and black bear; deer, wolves, foxes, martens and wild cats filled the woods.”
Some of the first Europeans to walk this land were French Jesuit missionaries, who began attempts at colonization and religious conversion in earnest in the 1600s. The most well known, Jean de Brebeuf (who has a Catholic youth camp named after him near Rockwood), worked with other aspects of French colonization to destabilize peaceful relations between neighbouring nations, in order to control the fur trade.
Jean de Brebeuf
Charles Johnston, in The Valley of the Six Nations, quotes Brebeuf as saying, “I shall be here so many years, during which I shall cause many to die, and then I shall go elsewhere and do the same, until I have ruined the whole land.” Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) warriors eventually killed Brebeuf in 1649, but his entry into the Grand River watershed led the way for future generations of immigrants to keep his legacy alive.
On October 7, 1763, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued by King George III, after Great Britain beat the French in the ‘French and Indian War.’ The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was intended to organize Britain’s new colonies and stabilize relationships with the Indigenous people, and is frequently used as a legal precedent in land-use conflicts between the Canadian government and Indigenous people. In it’s very first paragraph, it lays out the priorities of Britain (and later Canadian) use of this land:
A scanned version of the Royal Proclamation of 1763
“Whereas We have taken into Our Royal Consideration the extensive and valuable Acquisitions in America, secured to our Crown by the late Definitive Treaty of Peace, concluded at Paris the 10th Day of February last; and being desirous that all Our loving Subjects, as well of our Kingdom as of our Colonies in America, may avail themselves with all convenient Speed, of the great Benefits and Advantages which must accrue therefrom to their Commerce, Manufactures, and Navigation....”
With regards to colonial settlement of this land, it is impossible to find a clearer statement of how the primary founding motivation has been to exploit the land in order to make money and gain power.
After their victory in the French and Indian War, Britain claimed ownership and control of all the territory on Turtle Island the French were using. The problem was that the French never claimed ownership over the land, but rather regarded themselves as guests in the Indigenous people’s territory, to whom they gratefully paid rent. Britain defended their illegitimate claim with a strategy of violence, deceit, false promises, divide-and-conquer, germ warfare, fraudulent land deals, and eventually various social control mechanisms like the reservation system, the creation of the Northwest Mounted Police and later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a forced transition to agriculture, the Indian Act, residential schools, and so on. Because these policies succeeded in killing off and controlling the Indigenous people enough to open the land to settlers, Guelph, along with nearly all other Canadian municipalities, owes its creation just as much to these policies as to men like John Galt.
On December 7, 1792, the British government signed a treaty with a handful of male chiefs from the Mississauga nation. For 1180 pounds, Britain secured paper title to the lands that include Guelph.
On April 23, 1827, Guelph was founded by John Galt, a Scottish novelist and head of the Canada Company, one of many ‘colonization companies,’ as they were called at the time. In Galt’s words, him, Charles Prior, the superintendent of the Canada Company, William Dunlop, another official of the Company, and some hired hands,
“Walked to the brow of a rising ground, and a large maple tree was chosen; on which, taking an axe from one of the woodmen, I struck the first stroke. To me at least the moment was impressive – and the silence of the woods, that echoed to the sound, was as the sigh of the solemn genius of the wilderness departing for ever.
Dunlop followed me, then, if I recollect correctly, Mr. Prior, and the woodmen finished the work. The tree fell with a crash of accumulating thunder, as if ancient Nature were alarmed at the entrance of social man into her innocent solitudes with his sorrows, his follies, and his crimes.
I do not suppose that the sublimity of the occasion was unfelt by the others, for I noticed that after the tree fell, there was a funereal pause, as when the coffin is lowered into the grave; it was, however, of short duration, for the doctor pulled a flask of whisky from his bosom, and we drank prosperity to the City of Guelph.”
This is a picture of what looks to be a black walnut. Trees around here were once regularly this size.
By the early 1840s, barely 13 years after the founding of Guelph, people were already writing about how, “the living, breathing denizens of the forest are various; but their numbers are fast diminishing before the destructive progress of civilization.”
This is a chestnut tree. Chestnuts are estimated to have once comprised 1 in every 4 trees in the forest, being an enormously important food staple for many people and other species. It has suffered greatly due to an imported chestnut blight.
As a transition from history to the present, the words of Frieda Knoblach, from The Culture of Wilderness, fit well:
“The story of a wild nature, discovered, domesticated, and transformed into something (or someone) ‘productive’ and ‘improved,’ is told again and again by many people…. Because this story is understood as inevitable, indeed natural, and domestication and ‘improvement’ are understood as salutary goals, the violence of such social and environmental transformations – as well as the possibility that they are unwanted, unnecessary, or at least susceptible to critique – is erased.”
A drawing depicting the transformation of the forested landscape to an agricultural landscape in support of European settlers