12 The Illumination of Joseph Keeler, Esq. 



cornered Baie de Coins) was on the Carrying Place at Presqu* 

 Isle. There, too, were the remains of the old Iroquois camping 

 ground and their burial ground at Bald Bluff across the Bay. 

 From there the Sulpitian missionaries had pushed westward to 

 the Seneca village up the shore to Tenagou, now his home 

 Toronto, and north by the Trent, Rice Lake and the Otonabee, 

 to the hunting grounds of the now vanished Hurons, about 

 Matchedash Bay. To the Carrying Place, too, came La Salle 

 on his first memorable journey, seeking an outlet westward 

 to the ocean, and there strangely, too, selected the course, via 

 Lake Erie, instead of the short northerly route, certainly known 

 to his Indians, in his trip to Michilimakinac, fearing, we may 

 suppose, the Jesuits might oppose him along the customary 

 route. There he camped at Kente, the old Indian village and 

 mission, and lent lustre to its traditions by his temporary pres- 

 ence in it. Around the Bay, the Carrying Place, the sand 

 beaches and the rice marshes, there gradually gathered a halo 

 from which the dim past grew clearer, and when, at the end of 

 the PresquTsle chronicles, Mr. Keeler read of how settlements 

 west of the Carrying Place grew and demanded an easy water- 

 way eastward; of how a survey was made in 1794 for a canal 

 through Murray township; of how it was stated that from that 

 time onward every member of Parliament for the Newcastle 

 District had been elected on the promise of getting the canal 

 built, and when finally he read that it was a Keeler, indeed his 

 father's cousin, the Hon. Joseph Keeler, the bearer of the first 

 family name, that of the captain, the first immigrant and settler 

 at the Bay, and now his own name, the whole present seemed 

 to have disappeared into that glamoured time, and he seemed 

 to be living over again the lives of all those actors in that old 

 drama of the Carrying Place. It presented the painted redman, 

 once on the warpath now a kindly neighbor, half assistant, 

 half dependant of the early settlers; then the patient mothers 

 awaiting the return of their heroic husbands now away down 

 the Great Bay for flour for their hungry children; again the 

 growing of these lusty settlements with their alarms, activities 

 and struggles; pictured the war of defence, and later of organised 

 government; and last the coming of the immigrants into the 

 back settlements, the increasing vessels and traffic on the lakes, 



