Story of the Footprints
Put together by the What Was My Backyard? artistic team
With text adapted from newspaper articles, blogs and other sources (see below)
Note: As part of my placement, I will be working to adapt this content into a document for participating students to engage with ahead of the residency, and will be contributing to accompanying introductory lesson plans for teachers.
During the last ice age, a really big glacier covered pretty much all of Canada, including the Toronto area. When the ice age ended, about 12,500 years ago, the ice sheet gradually melted.
In what we now call Toronto, the water that melted off the glacier formed a giant lake. It filled the basin where Lake Ontario is now all the way up to Davenport Road.
When the ice dam blocking the St. Lawrence finally broke, much of the water in the big lake rushed out, and what was left was a lake that was way smaller than Lake Ontario of today. There was five kilometers more shoreline than there is now.
That meant that about 11,000 years ago the entire Toronto area was a vast plain of tundra and spruce forest. With the glacier gone, animals moved in. There were mammoths and mastodons, ancient caribou, musk ox and bison, bears and wolves – and humans. They were nomadic hunters with stoned-tipped spears and small settlements throughout the region.
At one point, it seems a family of them walked north up from that smaller lake toward what’s now downtown Toronto. They were wearing moccasins, and for at least a few steps, they walked through blue clay, leaving their footprints behind.
Over the next few thousand years, the lake gradually grew, until it became the Lake Ontario we know today. And those 100 footprints, captured in that clay, were hidden from view. That is, until 1908 when workers installing an water pipe, 70 ft underwater just east of Hanlan’s Point discovered them.
“It looked like a trail,” a city inspector told the newspaper. “You could follow one person the whole way. Some footprints were on top of the others. There were footprints of all sizes, and a single print of a child’s foot, about 3 inches long.”
But the city was in a rush. They wanted to build a tunnel and they didn’t want to slow down. So they just poured concrete over the prints and kept going.
"If they were found to be authentic, it would have been the only discovery of footprints of the first people of Ontario," says archaeologist Ron Williamson. "It would have been amazing."
But somebody told the newspaper, the newspaper wrote about it. More than 100 years later, somebody read that old newspaper and wrote more about it, somebody else read that, put it in a presentation and told a group of artists about it, and so now we’re telling it to you. Bringing those footprints into to this room, and into our performance.
A Few Other Sources:
University of Toronto (via First Story Toronto)