History of Ontario

The History of Ontario covers the period from the arrival of Paleo-Indians thousands of years ago to the present day. The lands that make up present-day Ontario, the most populous province of Canada as of the early 21st century, have been inhabited for millennia by groups of Aboriginal people, with French and British exploration and colonization commencing in the 17th century. Before the arrival of Europeans, the region was inhabited both by Algonquian (Ojibwa, Cree and Algonquin) and Iroquoian (Iroquois, Petun and Huron) tribes.

A French explorer Étienne Brûlé explored part of the area in 1610–12. The English explorer Henry Hudson sailed into Hudson Bay in 1611 and claimed the area for England, but Samuel de Champlain reached Lake Huron in 1615 and French missionaries began to establish posts along the Great Lakes, forging alliances in particular with the Huron people. Permanent French settlement was hampered by their hostilities with the Iroquois five leagues (based in New York State), who were allied with the British. By the early 1650s, using both British and Dutch arms, they had succeeded in pushing other related Iroquoian speaking peoples, the Petun and Neutral Nation out of or to the fringes of territorial southern Ontario.

The British established trading posts on Hudson Bay in the late 17th century and began a struggle for domination of Ontario. The 1763 Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War by awarding nearly all of France's North American possessions (New France) to Britain.

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