A second Sulpician effort was the expedition of Fathers Dollier de Casson and Brehant de Galinée in 1669. The two, accompanied by a young La Salle, were to open a mission among the Shawnee in the as yet unexplored Ohio country. Initially they were guided to the Seneca villages on the Genesee River but could proceed no further because the Seneca were at war with the Shawnee. Having been told of an alternate route, the expedition now proceeded to the west end of Lake Ontario. In the Seneca village of Tinaouataoua on the portage between Burlington Bay and the Grand River, they met Adrien Jolliet, older brother of the more famous Louis Jolliet, who was on his way to Montreal from Sault Ste. Marie with Ojibwa guides. He and Jean Peré had been ordered by Talon to search for copper deposits in the Superior area. West of Long Point they had cached their canoe and walked overland to where Dollier and Galinée met them. Jolliet described the route to the Sulpicians and gave them a map. It is likely that Adrien Jolliet was the first European to have seen Lake Erie. Feigning ill health, La Salle now deserted the Sulpicians and returned to Montreal. The expedition pressed on and, in spite of losing their guides, Dollier and Galinée decided to continue to Lake Erie. By now it was late in the fall and the party had to winter. The site chosen was on Black Creek near the modern Nanticoke, called by Galinée “an earthly Paradise... there is assuredly no more beautiful region in all Canada.” The next spring, when they continued their voyage, the expedition lost their supplies in a storm and, still without guides, decided to terminate their journey by seeking refuge with the Jesuits at Sault Ste. Marie. From there Dollier and Galinée eventually got back to Montreal via the Ottawa River, the first group of Europeans to have paddled around southern Ontario.

In 1670 Talon ordered that all exploring expeditions keep diaries and stake formal claims of possession in newly discovered lands. The thrust of exploration changed, however, as Talon, under orders from the King of France, began to send expeditions west toward the Mississippi to discover routes to the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico, and north to James Bay to divert the furs that were beginning to move to the newly founded Hudson’s Bay Company. The actors in these dramas — Marquette, Louis Jolliet, La Salle, Tonti, Albanel and others — made no significant discoveries in Ontario. Their discoveries lay elsewhere. Although La Salle’s activities on Lakes Ontario and Erie in the 1670s led to a greater understanding of these lakes, they were already by then essentially known. His activities did, however, have an added effect. The fur trade in which he became active was illegal because his licence was mainly for bison skins, not beaver. Illegal trading had been a fact ever since Radisson and Groseilliers had shown the way but not as open and on as grand a scale as that of La Salle and his patron, Governor Frontenac. In order to compete in the Upper Great Lakes the Montreal traders sponsored increasing numbers of illegal traders called coureurs de bois. They joined the natives as chief suppliers of beaver to the Montreal market. Prominent among then was Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, who traded along the shores of Lake Superior and into the headwaters of the Mississippi. Unable to cope with the illegal fur trade, the Crown decided in 1681 to pardon the coureurs de bois and legalize the interior trade through a permit system. This decision coincided with renewed Iroquois hostilities in the Lower Great Lakes. Together, these two actions produced a flood of traders seeking native fur suppliers in the Upper Great Lakes, a proven source area for beaver away from the frontier of conflict.

In 1685 the English from Albany, New York, used the Iroquois conflict to send their first expedition into what is now Ontario. Led by Johannes Roseboom and guided by a French deserter, Marion La Fontaine, the Dutch-English traders reached Mackinac, in eleven canoes, via Lakes Erie and Huron. In 1686 they again reached Mackinac, this time by the Toronto portage. Emboldened by their successes, two expeditions were launched in 1687, one led by Roseboom, the other by Major Patrick McGregory. Both were intercepted by French-native troops, arrested and deported. This ended any further English forays into southern Ontario until 1758, during the Seven Years War.

To the north, to which French attention was increasingly shifting, the English had gradually become acquainted with the treacherous coast first explored by Foxe and James. Posts had been established at the mouths of the Nelson, Albany, Moose and Rupert rivers. Although these river systems were known from native accounts, none but the Rupert had been explored by Europeans. In 1684 Dulhut sent Jean Peré and two colleagues led by native guides from the east shore of Lake Nipigon down the Kenogami and Albany rivers to James Bay. The party was supposed to proceed to the mouth of the Nelson River to persuade some renegade Frenchmen to switch sides. Upon reaching Fort Albany they were arrested as “spies” and incarcerated on Charlton Island. Peré was deported to England, but his companions, La Croix and Des Moulins, escaped to the mainland where they found friendly natives who guided them to Michilimackinac. The result of all this was the exploration of the Albany River system and, after the escape from Charlton Island, the Moose-Missinaibi-Michipicoten route.

In 1686, alarmed by increasing English competition on territory claimed by France, Governor Denonville launched a military expedition of 100 men, led by Pierre de Troyes, on the Hudson’s Bay Company posts. The expedition went north on the well-known Ottawa River route to Lake Abitibi. Here they built a base and, on June 7, left the lake for the unexplored Abitibi River. On June 20 they were within sight of Moose Factory, which surrendered, as did Albany and Rupert, totally unprepared for an overland attack.

The only major part of Ontario that had not yet been explored was the lands and rivers to the northwest of Lake Superior. To the French this was a dangerous area because the major water routes leading west, about which they knew a little from native accounts, lay in the war zone between the Dakota Sioux in the headwaters of the Mississippi and their ancient enemies, the Cree and Assiniboine, to the north and west. In 1688, probably under orders of Dulhut, Jacques de Noyon was guided via the Kaministiquia River route to Rainy Lake. Here he wintered and met some Assiniboine who told him of a vast western sea and stories about people that led de Noyon to believe that the Spaniards were not far away. These were not the first of such stories, but they added to the lore that La Vérendrye was to follow fifty years later.

With the elimination of English competition from the Bay, furs flooded into Montreal. By 1696 a glut of beaver had developed on the Paris market prompting the King to ban the trade in beaver, close the major trading posts and order the traders to return to the St. Lawrence. Although not all Frenchmen complied, exploration was effectively curtailed.

Between 1702 and 1713 France and England were at war. At the peace settlement, formalized by the Treaty of Utrecht, France was forced to recognize English claims to the shore of Hudson and James Bays. Claims to the interior, about which no one knew very much, least of all the English, were to be settled by a joint commission.The commission could come to no agreement and in the end nothing was settled until North America became British in 1763. What the wranglings of the commission did demonstrate, at least to the French, was that any country that could stake claims to the northwestern interior by actually going there would have a better claim in any future negotiations. With this in mind, as well as a renewal of the beaver trade in 1714 caused by the destruction of the huge surplus through vermin in the Paris warehouses, French attention shifted again to Lake Superior. Gradually posts were rebuilt and native contacts renewed.

In 1728 Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye became commandant of the Lake Superior posts and, with the strong support of Governor Beauharnois, began making plans to search for the Western Sea (mer de l’Ouest) and to claim the interior for France. Like all his predecessors, La Vérendrye began by questioning Native informants about the west. These drew maps for him and, in 1731, when his son Jean-Baptiste and a nephew Dufrost La Jemerais began their push with native guides to Rainy Lake, the French had a good perspective on the geography of the interior from Lake Superior to the northern end of Lake Winnipeg. In 1732 La Vérendrye’s men reached Lake of the Woods and, in 1734, Lake Winnipeg. It had taken 123 years for Europeans to cross and explore what is now Ontario!

By the end of the French régime all of Ontario except the extreme northwestern part, north of the Albany-English River system, was well-known to the French. In 1767-68 and again in 1769-70 William Tomison explored the Severn River for the Hudson’s Bay Company, mainly because the “Pedlars” from Montreal were siphoning furs out of the area. In the years following his journeys, penetration of northern Ontario by Montreal-based traders became commonplace. Eventually the Hudson’s Bay Company followed and built posts in 1777 on the Missinaibi (Wapiscogamy House) and upper Albany rivers (Gloucester House). With this two-pronged attack on Ontario’s northland, the last frontier was explored and began appearing on maps.

Exploration is, of course, many-sided and goes on continuously as new generations search with different objectives for new meanings in their surroundings. Following the traders came surveyors, lumbermen, prospectors, geologists and settlers. Surveyors such as Samuel Holland, David Thompson and Henry Bayfield laid out the broad limits of the province. These were succeeded by the land surveyors who structured our landscape into counties, townships and farm lots. Each explored by providing the detail that was not known before. Those who sought lumber and minerals were also explorers because they searched purposefully for elements of nature that were not yet known. These were all 19th century endeavours, especially the search for minerals that was not put on any systematic basis until the founding of the Geological Survey of Canada under Sir William Logan in 1842.

Nothing stays static. Ontario is changing: emerging from the older landscapes are newer ones embedded in them. People who travel in the province will forever be exploring, as did its first inhabitants 11,000 years ago, as did Champlain and as do all of us who follow them. Ex-ploring Ontario is not something that occurred only in the past; it occurs every time any of us seek areas we have not seen before where we can make discoveries that are meaningful to our intellect and senses.