Top Centre: On the golf links, Little Metis Beach, QC, 1915. Wm. Notman & Son. McCord Museum.

Top Right: Metis Beach from Boule Rock, QC, about 1914. Wm. Notman & Son. McCord Museum.

Middle Left: Metis Lighthouse Under Construction, 1908. Unknown Photographer. Canada Science and Technology Museum.

Middle Centre: Bathers and bathing houses, Seaside Hotel, about 1910. Unknown photographer. McCord Museum.

Bottom Left: Tennis courts, Cascade Golf and Tennis Club, Metis Beach, QC, about 1914. Wm. Notman & Son. McCord Museum.

Bottom Right: Falls and trout pool, Metis Beach, QC, about 1900. Wm. Notman & Son. McCord Museum.

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…I grew up in Les Boules, Monsieur Bouchard. And I came back…I see charming homes and grounds maintained with pride by shoreline dwellers who live through each autumn with the fear of a giant tide that might flood their basement, eat at their land and might force them to leave. This great river is beautiful and romantic from the point of view of a tourist. How crazy are these residents who have their windows facing south only, forgetting this grandiose panorama to instead use the sun’s rays to warm their homes during the long winter months?  

In my village, I can see great efforts deployed to create a new dynamism and revitalize the citizens and the municipality. Following exchanges between the two schools and the opening of a new bilingual library, we are working to build bridges between the anglophone and francophone communities. And with the adoption of an architectural plan our municipality is investing time and effort to harmonize new buildings with the built heritage…Here there are many of us, each in our own way, seeking to add a bit of vitality and dynamism to this little village that we love to encourage families to move here.

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To outsiders, resistance seemed futile, even racist. In Métis Beach, novelist Claudine Bourbonnais has her fictional character Romain Carrier describe the reaction to the extinction of the village’s name: 

The shock was too great to the system…Oh, there were of course a few protests from Metis Beach, a few base comments, some of the old hatreds unburied. There was a crisis when one of them, Harry Fluke at their head, who refused, in vain when the firetruck they had paid for from their own pockets was to be used for the entire community. “’You should have heard what they said about the Francophones,” John said. You would think it was fifty years ago! 

The 2002 amalgamation created a single town where there were two and brought the communities together for the first time since the early days of the Metis seigneury.  

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When she broke into the Metis home of Mrs. Thomas Molson in October, 1918, Eugénie Côté had already been convicted for a theft from a Mont-Joli widow. From the Molson residence she stole 25 silver forks, 22 silver spoons, a bone-handled butter knife, a pair of opera glasses and case, playing cards, a box containing a pair of scissors and toothbrush, two balls, two linen tablecloths and 50 pieces of lingerie with the monogram “J.T. Molson”. The total value of the stolen items was $50.  

The theft was barely newsworthy. How then did Côté’s story end up on the editorial pages of the Toronto Globe? She was arrested at a Gaspe lumber mill for pretending to be a man; wearing men’s clothing was an offence. But in wartime Canada, when the arrest of a woman doing her patriotic duty made the news, many rose to her defence. Her plight was raised by irate MPs in the House of Commons and the editorial page of the Globe.   

It was only when she was booked into the Rimouski prison that the truth came to light. Côté was a master shape-shifter. She was not doing war work but trying to escape the law. She had taken on a new identity, changed gender and donned men’s apparel to avoid imprisonment.  

Eugénie Côté was again convicted. But this time she was sent to a prison from which she could not escape – the Kingston Penitentiary. There she was forced to don women’s clothes and taught to sew. 

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 The cold waters of the St. Lawrence are unforgiving. Many drowned; most succumbed to hypothermia. When the body of one of the victims washed up in Metis, local school children quickly mobilized. Their story gave rise to a heart-wrenching article “Children of Little Metis Lay Flowers in Victim’s Coffin” that appeared in the Montreal Herald:  

A little girl found at Little Metis was brought to the morgue last night – a ruddy faced beautiful child of five or six years of age. Packed in a box of ice the young victim arrived here. In the box lay a pathetic little wreath of wood flowers and mosses made by the little children of Little Metis who found the little castaway. The wreath broke everybody’s heart here, with all this death there are no calloused hearts in Quebec. On a card with the flowers child hands had written “As a token of respect for those who found her,” and in her dead hands they had placed another bouquet of wood flowers. An envelope attached said, “Put on by Eileen Tuggy, Little Metis, Quebec,” while on the back of the envelope was written, “if identified I would like to know.

The young girl was later identified as Edith Hart, a four-year old travelling with her parents and infant brother to meet her grandparents in Scotland. The entire family perished. Hers was the only body found.  

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The cairn in the graveyard at the Leggatt’s Point Cemetery commemorates the greatest maritime disaster to touch Metis – the sinking of the Amanda in October, 1841. Bound for Quebec City from Limerick, the ship took 41 down with it, mostly Irish immigrants from Limerick, Clare, Cork, Galway and Dingle – passengers seeking a new life in British North America. Only the captain, two seamen, two apprentices and ten passengers survived. The cairn was erected decades later, a sign of the community’s wish to mark this singular event.  

 The Amanda was not Metis’s only maritime disaster. Several decades earlier, the Montmorenci had gone to the bottom. Then there were the disasters that did not happen, like the Allan Line’s SS Polynesian that was heading towards Mount Misery in a thick fog in May, 1876 with 1,200 passengers on board when one of the passengers raised the alarm just in time for the vessel to reverse its course.

The graveyard of stranded and sunken vessels was one of the reasons why local leaders and ship owners pressured the government of Canada to erect a lighthouse. The first lighthouse was completed in 1874. It led to a reduction in shipping accidents. But close calls continued and remain a reality to the present day.  

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Wilfred Bovey was the first writer in Canada to show an interest in French-Canadian culture. Although a lawyer and not an academic, he was associated with McGill for most of his career, first as administrative aide-de-camp to McGill president, Sir Arthur Currie, and then as director of Extramural Relations and Extension. He summered in Metis his entire life and developed a special appreciation for the French-Canadians he met here.  

From the ivory tower of McGill, Bovey penned Canadien in 1932 and The French Canadian Today in 1938, two seminal works in the study of French-Canadian culture. They are among the first academic studies in a field that would become known as Canadian Studies. Bovey’s studies examined French Canada’s culture on its own merits. Shedding the anti-Catholic bias common in English Canada at the time, Bovey examined the long history of French presence on Canadian soil and the evolution of its social and political culture.  

Bovey wrote an extended article on the Gaspe region that appeared in the National Geographic magazine in 1935, the first to portray the region for a popular American audience. In his National Geographic article, Bovey concealed his knowledge of the region from his readers, choosing a dispassionate presentation as if he were discovering the Gaspe for the first time, not letting on that he had grown up on its shores and knew its paths and people as well as anyone.

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Metis was a bastion of patriotic sentiment. By August 1940, many Metisians had enrolled in the army, air force or navy and were in training and readying for combat. The Montreal Gazette reported an occasion where English children, vacationing Canadians and visitors from the United States banded together in a spontaneous outpouring of shared patriotism in one of the Metis hotels: 

…After dinner the English mother sat before the piano and began to play “There’ll Always be an England”. Before she had played the chorus, all the guests had taken up the refrain. Three encores were played before the crowd would let her stop. Then the wife of the presbyterian minister took her place and began to play the American counterpart of “There’all Always be an England”, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America”. Canadians, English and Americans joined in the chorus of the American song which has somewhat the same swing as the English tune. When it was over, the American lady inquired where she could purchase a copy of “There’all Always be an England”. The English woman immediately made her a present of the copy which she had and the American in turn promised to send her a copy of “God Bless America”. Then the American woman’s husband remarked drily. “God will bless America as long as there’s an England.

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 The first church in Metis was built in the 1840s. But the community had difficulty mustering the funds requires to pay the living of the minister, which meant wages and a place to live. From 1863, Metis enjoyed the services of Presbyterian missionary Thomas Fenwick, who was appointed soon after his graduation from Knox College in Toronto. He became a local leader and the voice of Metis, his letters on a wide range of subjects appearing in newspapers in Rimouski, Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto. Reverend Fenwick also oversaw the construction of a new church at Leggatt’s Point but left soon afterwards. A Presbyterian church was completed in Little Metis the same year to serve the summer community, the majority of whom were Presbyterians.  

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Even though Metis was shut in for much of the winter, the community still thrived. Church services were held in local churches and community members assembled regularly for meetings and special events.  

Winter sports meant hockey. Community members pooled their resources to create a rink and lay the ice for games. A team was assembled to compete with clubs from nearby communities. The language of play was English, as were the cheers, setting them apart from all of the region’s other teams. 

The Little Metis Hockey Club competed in the region’s hockey league in the 1920s through the 1940s. The team travelled by sleigh to Price for games and by train for matches in Rimouski and Matane. The club was twice local champions, besting their competitors to win the cup for the Lower St. Lawrence region, a hotly contested crown where the sport of hockey was king.  

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