The Township of Scarboro 17961896 Author:David Boyle General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1896 Original Publisher: Printed for the Executive Committee by W. Briggs Subjects: Scarboro (Ont.) Scarborough (Ont.) Scarborough (Toronto, Ont.) History / Canada / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there ... more »may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. BEFORE THE WHITE MAN. " Tribe was giving place to tribe, language to language ; for the Indian, hopelessly unchanging in respect to individual and social development, was, as regards tribal relations and local haunts, unstable as the wind." -- Parkman. WHEN Canada was taken possession of by the French near the middle of the sixteenth century, it is probable that nearly all the peninsula formed by the great lakes, and a wide strip extending easterly along the shores of Lake Ontario and the River St. Lawrence, were occupied by members of the powerful Huron-Iroquois Indians; the rest of the territory (forming Upper Canada at a more recent date) having been in the hands of the Algonkins, who were less disposed to occupy fixed places of abode, for it is well known that the former people settled themselves in what by courtesy we call villages, consisting of rudely constructed houses built, or put together with poles and sheets of bark in a sufficiently permanent manner to last for a few years. Many of these dwellings, being intended to accommodate several families, were, according to our ideas, of disproportionate length when compared with their breadth, measuring from fifty to three hundred feet in one direction, and not more than fifteen or twenty in the other. All now remaining to indicate the sites of these "long houses" are rows of ashes mingled with charcoal and fragments of bone, shell and coarse pottery. When th...« less