The name of Toronto has a history distinct from that of the city itself. Originally, the term " Tkaronto " referred to a channel of water between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching on maps as early as [1] but in time the name passed southward, and was eventually applied to a new fort at the mouth of the Humber River. Fort Toronto was the first European settlement in the area, and lent its name to what became the city of Toronto. John Graves Simcoe identified the area as a strategic location to base a new capital for Upper Canada , believing Newark to be susceptible to American invasion.
A garrison was established at Garrison Creek , on the western entrance to the docks of Toronto Harbour , in ; this later became Fort York. This narrows was called tkaronto by the Mohawk , meaning "where there are trees standing in the water," [2] and was recorded as early as by Samuel de Champlain.
Prior to the Iroquois inhabitation of the Toronto region, the Wyandot Huron people inhabited the region, later moving north to the area around Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. The word toronto , meaning 'plenty', appeared in a French lexicon of the Wyandot language in By , Passage de Taronto referred to a canoe route tracking what is now the Humber River.
He opposed the renaming scheme, stating: [10]. It is to be lamented that the Indian names, so grand and sonorous, should ever have been changed for others. Newark, Kingston, York are poor substitutes for the original names of the respective places Niagara, Cataraqui, Toronto.
The name has also sometimes been identified with Tarantou , [5] [11] a village marked on a map of New France by Nicolas Sanson. However, the location on this map is east of Lake Nipissing and northwest of Montreal in what is now Quebec. The use of the name Tkaronto had reemerged as an alternate name for the city in The reemergence was attributed to an "Indigenous awakening", that aimed to honour the city's Indigenous history and to decolonize the city's name.
