LOST VILLAGE OF HOCHELAGA
His theory: Cartier landed at an inlet at the end of Hervieux St. in Laval’s St-François district, and then walked along a moraine — a natural ridge still used by farmers to reach fields. Cartier arrived at Hochelaga near where Montée St-François meets Rang St-Elzéar, Wiedman says. There’s no mountain in Laval, you say? Wiedman dug up an 1872 map that shows an elevation existed where a quarry now sits on Rang St-Elzéar. The height was not indicated.
Wiedman suggests Cartier came down the St. Lawrence and turned onto the Mille-Îles just before he reached Montreal, avoiding rapids on the Rivière-des-Prairies by laying anchor on the calmer waters of the Mille-Îles.
Once on land, “Cartier described the path he took as ‘well-trodden,’ ” Wiedman said, adding the Indigenous Peoples “wouldn’t have built a path with a bulldozer. It would have had to have been a natural path and the moraine fits that description. During the ice age, ice pushed up the Earth and left a natural elevated pathway — a natural portage that runs along the spine of Laval.” That path would have taken him to Hochelaga, near a mountain.
“Mount Royal in Montreal is not the Mount Royal that Cartier described — Mount Royal was right here in Laval,” Wiedman said, pointing beyond the chain-link fence that surrounds the deep, vast Carrière TNT.
When you’re looking for a village lost for centuries, you have to consider all the possibilities.
Gates St-Pierre’s search for Hochelaga started this summer in Outremont Park, across the street from the distinctive pitched-roof house Beaugrand-Champagne designed for himself. Searchers did not find any Indigenous items.
The hunt will continue in 2018. The next phase, part of a threeyear, $80,000 project funded by Montreal and Quebec, will involve digging on McGill’s front lawn, or perhaps in Westmount Summit Park or in a wooded area near the HEC Montréal business school in Côte-des-Neiges.
Gates St-Pierre is skeptical of the Rivière-des-Prairies theory.
“Jacques Cartier, being an expert navigator, probably wouldn’t have taken the wrong river when he arrived at the eastern end of Montreal,” he said. “He would have wanted to stay on the bigger river, he would have guessed that navigating on a larger river would allow him to go a longer distance, as he was looking for a passage to the west.”
Also, in his description, Cartier says he can see his boats from the top of Mount Royal. “If they were on the north side (at Beaugrand-Champagne’s spot on the Rivièredes-Prairies), it would be almost impossible to see his boats because the distance is twice if not three times longer,” Gates St-Pierre said.
As for the Laval/Mille-Îles River theory, “I’m not saying that it’s completely ridiculous as a hypothesis but his arguments are not convincing,” Gates St-Pierre said of Wiedman.
“Again it suggests that Jacques Cartier would have taken the wrong way and would not have taken the more obvious route on the St. Lawrence,” he added, noting he has never heard the Laval hypothesis raised by historians, archeologists or anthropologists.
And “based on old maps, including the one (Wiedman) provides from 1872, there’s indeed a small hill, a geological formation (in Laval),” Gates St-Pierre said. “But it seems rather small compared to (the) Mount Royal (described by Cartier), which was probably twice as big and as high.”
Wiedman’s conversions of French leagues to kilometres are incorrect, he added. Wiedman, for his part, stands by his calculations, suggesting he has “yet to find any historians or archeologists who truly tried as hard as I did to apply the distances quoted in Cartier’s journal to an actual map and the historical landscape of Montreal.”
Though some contend Cartier sailed as far as the Lachine Rapids, Gates St-Pierre said the most likely scenario has Cartier stopping near Old Montreal, at St. Mary’s Current between Montreal and Île Ste-Hélène.
Cartier could have bypassed that strong current but might have opted to stop because of a crowd waiting for him on shore, Gates St-Pierre said. This stopping point would better fit distances mentioned by Cartier.
Most experts don’t think the 1860 discovery near McGill was Hochelaga, he added, noting it could have been another Iroquoian village since communities picked up and moved every 20 years or so.
“Most archeologists believe a location south or just southeast of the mountain would be the most probable location,” he said, noting such a locale would have provided protection from north winds in winter.
The Hochelaga mystery has been known to fuel English-French flare-ups.
The friction started almost 100 years ago, when the northern route (the Rivière-des-Prairies) found favour predominantly among francophones, while anglophones largely backed the southern itinerary (the St. Lawrence), University of Guelph historian Alan Gordon has noted.
The northern route was backed by the likes of Catholic cleric and nationalist historian Lionel Groulx, while the southern one had support of people like scholar William Lighthall, mayor of Westmount from 1900 to 1903.
Even today, experts who stray across their side of the linguistic divide are sometimes labelled traitors. For some, the McGill plaque rankles. A nationalist newsletter recently used Duff ’s opinion piece about competing Hochelaga monuments to denounce the McGill monument as an “abusive misappropriation of history.”
It began in 1922 when the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada was contemplating installing the Hochelaga plaque at McGill. Word came that Beaugrand-Champagne had proof Cartier had taken the Rivière-des-Prairies, with Hochelaga located in Outremont, close to the Université de Montréal.
“Jacques Cartier and the narrative of French discovery reinforced francophone claims to historic occupation of the northeastern flank of Mount Royal” — Outremont, according to Gordon’s book, Making Public Pasts, published in 2001.
The McGill plaque eventually went ahead, with the location of Hochelaga left fuzzy. Erected in May 1925, it reads, in English and French: “Near here was the site of the fortified town of Hochelaga visited by Jacques Cartier, in 1535, abandoned before 1600. It contained 50 large houses, each lodging several families who subsisted by cultivation and fishing.”
The Sault-au-Récollet arm of the nationalist Société St-JeanBaptiste was having none of it.
In July 1926, it installed a marble plaque to the right of the front door of Église de la Visitation. It reads, in French: “Here at the foot of the last rapids of the Rivière-des-Prairies on Oct. 2, 1535, Jacques Cartier landed en route for Hochelaga.”
Both plaques are still in place, resolute in their claims.
Unless Gates St-Pierre has some luck over the next two years, they’ll probably remain where they are for future historians, amateur and professional, to contemplate.
Mount Royal in Montreal is not the Mount Royal that Cartier described — Mount Royal was right here in Laval.