Toronto

is a youthful city by European standards but the wilderness on which it stands was populated by hunters well over 10,000 years ago. At this time the area was in the grip of an ice age and when this finished leaving a huge lake, ancestors of the Iroquois settled along the shore. By the time the Europeans were lured there by the fur trade in the seventeenth century, Huron, Seneca and Mississauga peoples used the area for hunting and fishing. The French fur trader Etienne Brûlé attempted to make allies of the Huron as protection from rival tribes but by the time the French established their trading post, most of the Huron had died from European diseases.