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It is common practice to define our world by observation of that which surrounds us. We experience our modern society by simply living in it, and perceive hints of our more recent past through the older homes of the area, in the rural area of much of the city, and in celebrations of our pioneer heritage. It is, however, a mistake to bind our perspective merely by the changes brought about since our first settlers made their way to the area now known as the City of Pickering.
Our cultural landscape has witnessed several distinct changes since the retreat of the glaciers some 11 000 years ago when this land became suitable for human habitation. It was the people we regard as Paleo-Indians, whose ancestors had entered this continent from Asia, who first populated the highlands of the city's north. We know them by their tools, weapons and the campsites that they contributed to the archaeological record as they went about their seasonal rounds.
Over the centuries changes in tool making and an apparent growth in population signaled a new cultural group known as Archaic peoples. They, too, were nomads but inhabited a significantly more temperate world as the climate warmed and the boreal forests gave way to the mixed woods that we recognize today. These people were likely the precursors of the Algonquian-speaking tribes that we know now, such as the Ojibway and Mississauga First Nations.
About a thousand years ago, a new people migrated into the area of the Great Lakes. They hunted the game of the vast forests and ate of the plants and seeds that were provided by the bountiful environment, but they also brought the concept of agriculture with them. They supplemented their diets by growing what they referred to as the 'Three Sisters'—corn, beans and squash. This new cultural group is known as the Lake Ontario Iroquois, and eventually coalesced into tribes such as the Huron, the Six Nations, and others who share the Iroquoian language group. The Miller Site, a village excavated in the late 1950s, was home to these people c1125.
Those who shared the land were not without inter-tribal tensions, especially once the European newcomers began to engage in trade for the rich fur resources of the New World. Conflict arose between those Iroquois on the north shore of Lake Ontario and their cousins to the south eventually resulting in the dispersal of the Huron and other northern tribal units.
Our cultural landscape, then, witnessed new changes as both the Iroquois Confederacy of the south claimed rich northern trapping lands and the French assumed colonial rights in the name of their king. The two cultures met at Gandatsetiagon, a late seventeenth century Seneca village on the Rouge River, with the visit of Father Francois Fenelon in 1669, but parted ways with the punitive expedition of the Marquis de Denonville in 1687. By 1700, an alliance of Algonkian peoples had driven the Iroquois back to what is now New York State. The French, who did less to settle Pickering than to exploit its resources, came as missionaries, traders and soldiers. Of their century and a half of tenure few physical remnants survive. Their legacy is most evident upon the map, leaving behind such place names as the Rouge River, Petticoat (petit cote) Creek, and, perhaps, Frenchman's Bay. Shortly after the fall of Quebec, New France became, instead, a part of the British Empire.
It was the British who ultimately prepared the land for settlement by signing treaties with the Mississauga First Nations and surveying their new dominion. The ensuing pioneer era is the cultural sequence that we most readily recognize as our city's recent heritage. It is the way of the settler that we may see skillfully interpreted at the Pickering Museum Village; the settlers' shadows are still evident about the landscape. But they were certainly not the first to walk the forest trails of Pickering.
'Modern' Pickering began as Edinburgh Township in the District of Nassau, but under the administration of Lieut-Gov John Graves Simcoe, Edinburgh Township was changed to Pickering Township and The District of Nassau to the Home District. The name Pickering was probably derived from the town of that name in Simcoe's homeland of Yorkshire, England, as were Scarborough and Whitby, Pickering's neighbours in both the old and the New World.
In 1791, Deputy Provincial Land Surveyor, Augustus Jones, surveyed the lakefront from Murray Township to York. He ran a 'base line' far enough inland from the lake to miss bays such as Frenchman's Bay and on the line he laid out the townships. The township concessions were run parallel to the base line 1 1/4 miles apart. The land
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