First Nations

The first humans began appearing in what is now Eastern Ontario as the glaciers receded, about 10,000-12,000 years ago. When French explorers arrived in the 1500s, Algonquin tribes claimed northern parts of Hastings County and Mississauga Indians lived in the south. Indians of the Iroquois Confederacy, including the Mohawks, lived south of Lake Ontario but used some lands north of the lake and the St. Lawrence River as their summer hunting grounds. While the French who governed Quebec formed alliances with native groups for their own purposes, they signed very few treaties. After the fall of Quebec in 1759, the British imposed a new system of negotiating surrender of native lands before colonization or settlement could begin.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 reserved lands for aboriginal people and ordered people who had settled on those lands to leave. Future negotiations with aboriginals were to be done in public only between representatives of Britain and native leaders, with the outcome of negotiations to be recorded in written treaties. Under this proclamation, most of the interior of the continent was declared "Indian lands" and off-limits to settlement.

This policy was soon severely tested.

Treaties with the Natives

Loyalist refugees moving northward after the American Revolutionary War objected to settling under the seigneurial system of Quebec, preferring instead to found new homes under the British law to which they were accustomed. They were also eyeing new lands along the St. Lawrence River Valley and the north shore of Lake Ontario, which were officially Indian lands.

Governor Frederick Haldimand was forced to make concessions. The British government began negotiating treaties with the Indians to acquire land for European settlement in what would soon become Upper Canada, under a distinctly British colonial government.

TREATIES

On October 9, 1783, Captain William Crawford negotiated with several Mississauga chiefs, in exchange for guns, gunpowder, 12 laced hats and red cloth, the sale of land from "Toniato or Onagara River (on the St. Lawrence River ) to a river ( Trent ) in the Bay of Quinte within eight leagues of the bottom of the Bay including all the islands, extending back from the lake so far as a man can travel in a day".

1783, 1784, 1787. The Gunshot Treaty negotiated by Captain Crawford over a number of years gave the British land rights stretching along Lake Ontario from just west of present-day Toronto east to the Trent River at the Bay of Quinte. Aboriginals gave up their land rights extending north of the lake within the sound of a gunshot - 12 miles or 20 kilometres - in exchange for annual gifts. Uncertainties in this treaty were not clarified until the Williams Treaties were signed in 1923.

April 1, 1793. Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe granted Tyendinaga Township to the Mohawks for their exclusive use forever. This was in recognition for the Mohawks losing their traditional homeland in the new United States, and for siding with the British in the Revolutionary War. Over the years the native territory was reduced from 92,700 acres to 17,604.

August 5, 1816. A tract of 428 acres at the mouth of the Moira River in Thurlow Township was purchased from the Mississauga Indians. This property now constitutes the downtown core of Belleville.

May 31, 1819. A provisional surrender by Mississauga Indians gave up claims to land in the townships of Marmora, Madoc, Elzevir, Grimsthorpe, Tudor, Lake, Wollaston, Limerick and Cashel. This surrender also included most of Renfrew, Carleton, Lanark, Frontenac and Addington counties. Confirmation came three years later.

June 19, 1856. Mississauga Indians surrendered claims on Grape Island and other islands in the Bay of Quinte after they moved to a reserve in Alnwick Township, Northumberland County.

November 5, 1818. Herschel, Faraday, Wollaston and Lake townships were surrendered by the Chippewa and Ojibwa Indians.

October/November 1923. The Williams Treaties covered a huge tract of land in central Ontario, from the Quebec border along the Ottawa River to the Lake Ontario shoreline. The land included the northernmost townships of Hastings County : McClure, Wicklow, Bangor, Monteagle, Dungannon, Carlow and Mayo.