Madeleine McDowell waves her walking cane in the air as a few stragglers wander up the hill away from a Humber River tributary in Toronto's west end.
"If I were a shepherd, I'd use my crook," she calls out.
Nobody is intimidated. Slight in stature, Ms. McDowell's bookish demeanour is accented by the Toronto Public Library bag slung over her shoulder. One might suspect that the woman who got the Humber named a Canadian Heritage River knows how to wield influence – not just her cane.
Besides, it's a common cause that has brought these 90 people to Black Creek in Smythe Park on a sunny Saturday in July for this Heritage Toronto walk.
Ian Smith folds the handle of his walking cane flat to make a stool. Wearing the popular uniform of a wide-brimmed hat and fanny pack, he says, "Learning about your city's heritage gives you a richer sense of where you live."
If that's the case, the Humber River should offer a steady stream of riches.
Ms. McDowell has herded the group toward a park trail.
The trail is called Toronto Carrying Place, a portage and canoe route that followed the Humber River from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe and the upper Great Lakes.
Ms. McDowell reads from fur trader Alexander Henry's diary from 1765 as he crossed the height of land to enter the Humber watershed.
"At [Lake Simcoe's] farther end we came to the carrying-place of Toronto. … The woods and marshes abounded with mosquitoes. … The whole country was a thick forest, through which our only road was a foot-path."
Ms. McDowell explains the footpath would have been well worn even then.
The Huron and Petun First Nations established fishing camps in the young Humber Valley as the ancient Lake Iroquois receded 12,000 years ago. Archaeologists have unearthed 4,000-year-old spear tips just a kilometre away at James Gardens, where Black Creek meets the Humber.
Corn has been grown here for 1,600 years, according to archaeologist Ronald Williamson, author of Toronto: a Short Illustrated History of its First 12,000 Years. By the beginning of the 13th century, the migrant camps along the Humber had become small permanent settlements. By the early 16th century, they were home to 2,000 people.
Enter the Europeans. Étienne Brulé, Samuel de Champlain's sometimes loyal right-hand man, was the first explorer to see Lake Ontario. He travelled south down the Humber (then called the Toronto River) in 1615, a few years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
In the face of European diseases and shifting alliances, the Huron moved north, but Seneca Iroquois filled in from the south and chose a large promontory looking over the Humber, between present-day Bloor and Dundas streets, to build the village of Teiaiagon. Ornamental combs sculpted from moose antlers found in graves dating to the mid-17th century suggest life here was not just about subsistence.
It was from Teiaiagon, says Ms. McDowell, that one of the three greatest expeditions in North American history embarked. In 1680, René-Robert Cavelier, better remembered as Sieur de La Salle, set out up the Humber on a journey that would see him become the first European to travel the length of the Mississippi, claiming it for France.
"They know about La Salle in Chicago," says Ms. McDowell. "Just not here. It makes the hair on my neck stand up to know that he walked just steps from my house."
That makes Ms. McDowell one of the modern inhabitants of Teiaiagon, now known as Baby Point.
Ms. McDowell remembers walking along the Humber as a child in the 1940s. A young naturalist even then, she had to be restrained by her parents when she wanted to climb up the sandy banks to visit swallow nests.
At that time the many mills that had once industrialized the river had crumbled (with many of the buildings being re-assembled upstream at Black Creek Pioneer Village). With a watershed larger than that of the Don and Rouge rivers combined, the Humber usually had enough flow to dilute its urban and septic effluent. It seemed a welcoming environment and people continued to build houses and businesses on its floodplains.
Then, in October of 1954, the history of Toronto's rivers took a turn when Hurricane Hazel dropped 28 centimetres of rain over two days on the Humber.
With 81 people dead, Eglinton Flats inundated, 20 bridges destroyed and entire streets washed away, politicians charged the region's conservation authorities with ensuring floods would never again be so destructive.
To clear the valleys, the body that would soon become the Toronto Region Conservation Authority (TRCA) expropriated 500 homes and acquired 9,000 hectares of property.
When TRCA barred development in the valleys, it laid the groundwork for a new era in the life of Toronto's rivers. Half of all parkland in Toronto is owned by the TRCA, and slowly the expropriated areas have become lands of leisure. Smythe Park itself was once a gravel pit used by its owner (first name Conn) to build Maple Leaf Gardens for his very successful hockey team. Since 1956 it has been home to one of Toronto's most popular swimming pools and it now features a series of re-naturalized spring-water ponds with resident beavers.
The heritage horde walks east along a Black Creek that is here confined to a concrete channel. Ms. McDowell explains that neighbouring Lambton Golf and Country Club has paid for a study on removing the concrete channel and re-naturalizing Black Creek from the Humber junction upstream to Alliance Avenue.
That would be an improvement, according to Amelia Wellman, 20, and Billy Seguire, 23. They are sitting on the grass with shoeless feet dangling over the top of the angled concrete slab. They say they live nearby and come to the creek about once a week. Mr. Seguire says the river draws him in out of the city landscape.
"Oh look, trees, and water," he says with an ironic tone. "I gravitate here. I like seeing the water flow by."
To give others a head-start in appreciating – or at least recognizing – the rivers that have shaped this city and now offer its main recreational opportunities, city council in 2009 erected 64 signs highlighting river crossings around the city. Whether other efforts will further re-introduce Torontonians to their rivers remains to be seen. Mayor Rob Ford, then a city councillor who had recently left the TRCA board, registered his opinion of the signs at the time.
"You'd have to be retarded if you can't see frickin' water in front of you," said Mr. Ford.
"I think everyone knows where the Don River is and the Humber River is. It's only been there for over a hundred years."
In fact, as the heritage walkers now appreciate, it's been around much longer.
Special to the Globe and Mail