During the last ice age, 15,000 years ago, Asia and North America were connected near the Bering Sea by a 1,000 mile wide grassy plain. Primitive hunters followed herds of large game animals across the land bridge to spread over North America during the next ten centuries. These people were named 'Clovis Point People' by archeologists because their distinctive stone tools were first found in Clovis, New Mexico.
Descendants of the Clovis People moved south and east of the Bering Strait eventually reaching the Grand River and Lake Erie. Archeologists gave the name 'Mound Builders' to the earliest inhabitants of this part of the North American continent. Many remains of Pre-historic native settlements were found in the Grand River valley, including nine sites in the Rockwood area. The Mound Builders were extinct by the time the first European explorers reached the Grand valley in the 1600's, and in their place were the Eastern Woodlands tribes, known as the Iroquoian-speaking people.
From the Grand River, eastward across the Niagara River, Southern Ontario was home to the Iroquoian people of the Neutral Nation, or Attiwandaron ('people who speak a slightly different language'). The Neutrals were an agricultural people, growing corn, beans, squash and tobacco, and supplementing their diet with wild game and fish. Their palisaded riverside villages were moved as the soil became exhausted. The term Neutral was used by French explorers because of the peoples refusal to become involved in warfare between the Huron Nation to the north and the Iroquois Nation to the east. The Hurons and Iroquois visited and traded with the Neutrals, and at times would wage war in Neutral territory if they were not accompanied by members of the Neutral tribe. The term Neutral should not imply a pacifist people, for the Neutrals were themselves fiercely at war with the Assistaronon (Fire Nation) people of Michigan and Ohio.
In 1650, several disputes with the Senecas of the Iroquois Nation resulted in the Neutrals being embroiled in a war on two fronts. In the summer of 1651, a large scale attack by the Senecas drove the Neutrals from the Grand River valley. For the next hundred years the valley remained unpopulated, used only by occasional hunting parties of Iroquois. Later, the land came into the possession of the Mississaugas, who named the river the O-es-shin-ne-gun-ing, ('the one that washes the timber down and carries away the grass and the weeds').
During these troubled times, the Grand River valley was visited sporadically by parties of French explorers, missionaries and fur traders. De Galinée, a geographer priest, mapped the area in 1669 to 1670, and gave the name of La Rapide to the Grand River.
Jacques-Nicholas Bellin (1703-1772) was the first cartographer to use the name 'Grand River' He referred to the river as 'R. d'Urse ou la Grand Rivière' on a famous map of the Great Lakes published in 1744.
After the defeat of the French by the British forces in 1760, the country became known as Upper Canada and La Rapide was renamed the Ouse, after an English river. In the spring of 1775, open rebellion of the American colonists forced more changes in the Grand River valley.
British Loyalists were driven from their lands in the new republic and resettled along the east end of Lake Erie and the lower Grand River valley. Among the loyalists fleeing to British protection were descendants of six thousand German refugees, who had earlier been allowed to make their New World home on lands owned by the Six Nations.
During the revolution, the Six Nations People from the Finger Lakes area of New York State fought on the side of the British under the command of Chief Joseph Brant. They were left homeless after the defeat and Joseph Brant appealed successfully to the British Crown for a new home for his people.
Land in the Grand River valley was chosen and purchased from the Mississaugas in 1784. The land grant encompassed six miles each side of the river, from source to mouth. The total extent of the river was unknown at that time, and government surveys placed the grant's northern boundary near Fergus, with a total area of 674,910 acres. Brant chose a site for his new Mohawk village at the side of the Grand River in the place known as Brant's Ford (Brantford).
In the 1790's, an established means for colonizing the interior of Upper Canada was through the granting of large tracts of land, whose owners then sold lots or parcels to prospective settlers and developers. Joseph Brant negotiated this right for himself and the Six Nations. Six major blocks of land were sold in 1978, and these tracts later became the sites of the major cities and prime agricultural land of the Grand River watershed.
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