TORONTO: AN HISTORICAL 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 eut 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 Rouillé, after the Colonial minister, 
and was visited soon after its foundation by the 
famous “ apostle of the Iroquois,” the Abbé 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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