EDITOR:
In the 'Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island", published in 1880, on page 136, lot 65, on 80 acres of waterfront land owned by Malcolm McKinnon there's a black rectangle labeled in capital letters: 'OLD FRENCH FORT'. Why is a war criminal's name associated with this fort? Specifically, the Amherst slur inclines towards obscenity and is hurtful. The fort's name must have been changed after 1880, hence after confederation.
In the Atlas' 29,000-word historical sketch there isn't anything about Indigenous peoples. Here's a sampling: "...a deep interest has always attached to the conquest of the wilderness by civilization, to the foundation of new nations... and to the first critical years of their development. ...ere yet the hunter's antlered victim ceases to quiver beneath his fatal shot, ere yet the echoes of the woodman's axe die away..., ere yet the foeman's blood is wiped from the warrior's steel."
I asked Keptin John Joe Sark about what happened when British forces came to P.E.I in 1758? John Joe told me that Cornwallis had issued the orders and P.E.I was "just like Vietnam." Then John Joe said, "They tried to starve us. They shot all the big game."
In 11 words, I understood how the extermination of the P.E.I. Atlantic walrus (sea cow) and P.E.I. caribou had occurred; and then in 1880, in the west, John A. Macdonald, the railroad - the road of steel, the buffalo slaughtered and starvation once again.
Tony Lloyd,
Mount Stewart
