Queens County's Indian Gardens and its treasure

"The Indians were numerous there at the time. The prisoners were tortured in a most cruel manner.”

In the late 1920s the Mersey Paper Company became more than a dream. The logical choice to develop power for the plant was the Mersey River. Not only did the construction of No. 1 power dam at Lake Rossignol create power for the new mill, but as the rising water created a massive reservoir, bits of Mi’kmaq pottery, clam shells and other artifacts were dredged up from the soil and could be seen in the roots of falling trees.

At first, this created little attention and was not thought to be unusual. The area had long been known as the Indian Gardens. This was the place where groups of Mi’kmaq came each year to cultivate small plots of land.

As the waters behind the dam grew, bits and pieces of the ancient culture continued to be unearthed. This was from an area stretching one-half mile; an area too large for simple gardens; but an area large enough to be the camp for hundreds of Mi’kmaq.

This observation tweaked the curiosity of three Liverpool men, Thomas H. Raddall, Brenton Smith and Austin Parker. In the months that followed, the three men, as did others, spent a great deal of time searching the Rossignol Lake shoreline for bits and pieces of early Mi’kmaq artifacts. They found many pieces of pottery, shells and crude tools.

About the same time, they would also visit Port Joli and Port L'Hebert sites to explore mounds, which they knew to be in those areas. It appears it was customary for the Mi’kmaq to leave their winter inland camps each spring and make their way to the coast for hunting and fishing in summer.

Parker, Raddall and Smith determined that the Mi’kmaq pitched their wigwams on exactly the same locations year after year. That was verified by the circular mounds of bones, shells and pottery that were discovered there.

Many of the bits of pottery they found matched in design and decoration the pieces they had found in the Indian Gardens! Apparently then, they made the same journey, from the Indian Gardens to their summer camps, year after year.

As a winter camp, the Indian Gardens area was ideal as it could easily support a large encampment. From here, the Mi’kmaq had easy access to the abundance of wild game in the nearby Dun Raven Bog to the southwest. Firewood was most important, and since the Mi’kmaq of that time had no tools suitable for cutting firewood, they were forced to rely on blowdowns. The miles and miles of lake shore allowed them to use canoes to transport the large amount of wood necessary to sustain their settlement.

An important question remained. Why had such a large and prosperous band been virtually forgotten both in Mi’kmaq law and in the written records of the early white settlers?

As early as 1798, an expedition led by Privateer Captain Joseph Barss of Liverpool had reported no trace of Mi’kmaq in the area.

Three years later a government surveyor, Titus Smith journeyed out to survey and explore land along the South Shore, 20 miles back from the sea. His report mentions only that he was told of an ancient wooden cross in a pile of stones in the Indian Gardens. Whether the cross was put there by French explorers or missionaries, no one, including Smith could determine.

The first clue to the disappearance of the Mi’kmaq came to author Thomas H. Raddall in an interview he conducted with Seward (Sew) Coombs, a noted Milton, Queens County woodsman, hunter and trapper.

As a young man in his twenties, Coombs worked as a logger just west of the Indian Gardens. One day, as he walked through a stand of pines, he noted that one tree in particular showed a shiny area on its bark, a sure sign of an old injury. More through curiosity than any other motive, he cut a notch in the scarred section and discovered an ancient wedged shaped Mi’kmaq tool lodged deep in the tree trunk. When telling his tale to Raddall, Coombs remembered the approximate diametre of the pine and the number of inches he had cut into the trunk.

With this information Raddall sought the help of noted forester, Ralph Johnson. Together they checked the average growth rings for pine and calculated the age of Coomb's pine tree. They came up with a mean date of 1750.

Now it could be determined with some accuracy that the Mi’kmaq had been in the Indian Gardens until the mid-1700s. Yet, Captain Barss and surveyor Titus Smith had reported no sign of them 40 years later!

In Thomas Raddall's searching mind there was an explanation, although it came from a seemingly unrelated incident in the early history of Nova Scotia.

In 1746, only three years before the founding of Halifax by the British, a French fleet under the command of the Duke d'Anville sailed for America. d'Anville's force was to rendezvous in Halifax or Chebucto as it was then known, with French troops from Quebec and the West Indies to lodge an attack on the British in Boston.

Although the largest expedition of its kind ever to leave France, the d'Anville fleet was ill-fated from the start. The French vessels were lashed by Atlantic storms, sickness typhus and scurvy, which spread quickly among the officers and crew and only the remnants of the original expeditionary force ever reached the shelter of Chebucto.

They arrived in port in September and many of the French who survived the voyage perished while in Chebucto. In all about 1,100 died. Many were thrown into the harbour and died along the shoreline.

There were reports in early Halifax chronicles that at least two and perhaps three of the French vessels were considered unseaworthy and were burned and sunk in the harbour.

Reports in Haliburton's history of Nova Scotia indicated clearly that bands of Mi’kmaq, probably preparing to return to their winter camps, came across the bodies of the French and took the clothes from the corpses’ clothing, which still carried the typhus-infesting lice.

The results are obvious, although they are undocumented. The infected Mi’kmaq returned to their camps in the Indian Gardens for the winter months. There, they huddled together in fear of an unknown and devastating disease, and hundreds perished. It is estimated that as many as one-third of the Mi’kmaq population in Nova Scotia at the time disappeared. That more did not die is truly remarkable, in fact a miracle.

Those who survived apparently left the Indian Gardens never to return to the place where so many had died.