The Dawn of Canadian History | Page 4

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CHRONICLES OF CANADA Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H.

Langton In thirty-two volumes

Part I The First European Visitors
THE DAWN OF CANADIAN HISTORY A Chronicle of Aboriginal
Canada
By STEPHEN LEACOCK TORONTO, 1915

CHAPTER I
BEFORE THE DAWN
We always speak of Canada as a new country. In one sense, of course,
this is true. The settlement of Europeans on Canadian soil dates back
only three hundred years. Civilization in Canada is but a thing of
yesterday, and its written history, when placed beside the long
millenniums of the recorded annals of European and Eastern peoples,
seems but a little span.
But there is another sense in which the Dominion of Canada, or at least
part of it, is perhaps the oldest country in the world. According to the
Nebular Theory the whole of our planet was once a fiery molten mass
gradually cooling and hardening itself into the globe we know. On its
surface moved and swayed a liquid sea glowing with such a terrific
heat that we can form no real idea of its intensity. As the mass cooled,
vast layers of vapour, great beds of cloud, miles and miles in thickness,
were formed and hung over the face of the globe, obscuring from its
darkened surface the piercing beams of the sun. Slowly the earth cooled,
until great masses of solid matter, rock as we call it, still penetrated
with intense heat, rose to the surface of the boiling sea. Forces of
inconceivable magnitude moved through the mass. The outer surface of
the globe as it cooled ripped and shrivelled like a withering orange.
Great ridges, the mountain chains of to-day, were furrowed on its skin.
Here in the darkness of the prehistoric night there arose as the oldest
part of the surface of the earth the great rock bed that lies in a huge

crescent round the shores of Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the
unknown wilderness of the barren lands of the Coppermine basin
touching the Arctic sea. The wanderer who stands to-day in the
desolate country of James Bay or Ungava is among the oldest
monuments of the world. The rugged rock which here and there breaks
through the thin soil of the infertile north has lain on the spot from the
very dawn of time. Millions of years have probably elapsed since the
cooling of the outer crust of the globe produced the solid basis of our
continents.
The ancient formation which thus marks the beginnings of the solid
surface of the globe is commonly called by geologists the Archaean
rock, and the myriads of uncounted years during which it slowly took
shape are called the Archaean age. But the word 'Archaean' itself tells
us nothing, being merely a Greek term meaning 'very old.' This
Archaean or original rock must necessarily have extended all over the
surface of our sphere as it cooled from its molten form and contracted
into the earth on which we live. But in most places this rock lies deep
under the waters of the oceans, or buried below the heaped up strata of
the formations which the hand of time piled thickly upon it. Only here
and there can it still be seen as surface rock or as rock that lies but a
little distance below the soil. In Canada, more than anywhere else in the
world, is this Archaean formation seen. On a geological map it is
marked as extending all round the basin of Hudson Bay, from Labrador
to the shores of the Arctic. It covers the whole of the country which we
call New Ontario, and also the upper part of the province of Quebec.
Outside of this territory there was at the dawn of time no other 'land'
where North America now is, except a long island of rock that marks
the backbone of what are now the Selkirk Mountains and a long ridge
that is now the mountain chain of the Alleghanies beside the Atlantic
slope.
Books on geology trace out for us the long successive periods during
which the earth's surface was formed. Even in the Archaean age
something in the form of life may have appeared. Perhaps vast masses
of dank seaweed germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming
oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and breaking at its

rock formation and distributing it in new strata, each buried beneath the
next and holding fast within it the fossilized remains that form the
record of its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds in the
dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in vast beds of decaying
vegetation that form the coal-fields of to-day.