

TORONTO: AN HISTOEICAL SKETCH 



vance of the English, he writes to the minister de 

 Seignelay : " M. de la Durantaye is collecting people 

 to entrench himself at Michilimaquina and to occupy 

 the other pass which the English may take by Toronto, 

 the other entrance to Lake Huron. In this way our 

 Englishmen will have somebody to speak to. All 

 this cannot be accomplished without considerable 

 expense, but still we must maintain our honour and 

 our prosperity." By the middle of the next century 

 (A.D. 1749) a stockade was erected and a trading 

 post established at Toronto. This measure was in- 

 tended to cut off the Indian trade from the English 

 post which had been established at Oswego, or Choue- 

 guen, as it was then called. The new French fort 

 was named Fort Rouille, after the Colonial minister, 

 and was visited soon after its foundation by the 

 famous " apostle of the Iroquois," the Abbe Picquet. 

 He found the bread and wine good, an opinion which 

 subsequent French visitors have not always shared, 

 but doubted the wisdom of establishing a rival to the 

 trading posts at Forts Frontenac and Niagara. The 1756 

 destruction of Oswego at the beginning of the 

 Seven Years' War seems to have led to the abandon- 

 ing of the new trading post, although the name con- 

 tinues to appear occasionally in dispatches. " The 

 Journals of Major Robert Rogers," which were pub- 

 lished in London, A.D. 1765, give an account of the 

 visit he paid to Toronto in September, 1760, in the 

 course of an expedition to take possession of Detroit. 

 After describing the joyful reception and the impor- 

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