“One instinctively treats Paul Vasseur with respect”
- Ontario Métis Facts
- Jul 23
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 20
The Toronto Star’s 1921 article, Strange Old Legends Surround Penetang, shares colourful stories about several of Pinery Point’s “virile and thrilling” Métis residents. One of those Métis residents is Paul Vasseur.
Paul Vasseur was born in the 1830s to Marguerite (nee Longlade) and Charles Vasseur, whose young Métis family had relocated to Penetanguishene from Drummond Island in 1828, alongside much of their Métis community, to take up a land grant “across the bay” from the small British naval outpost in Penetanguishene harbour in an area that would later become known as Pinery Point.
Like many of his fellow Métis community members, Vasseur “spent his whole life along the shores of the bay, guiding, trapping, fishing, lumbering and fighting.”
It was through his prowess in the latter that a Paul Vasseur once garnered the reputation as the “terror of Penetanguishene”, of which at the time of the article’s 1921 writing, “people in Penetang still remember some of his battles”, some of which left the indomitable “Paul bloody and horrible bruised but still on his feet above the vanquished visitor”.
By 1921, however, owing to his hard-fighting life, the now-elderly Paul Vasseur was “a broken old man of 92, deaf and blind [with] battle-scarred cheek bones, massive shoulders and huge wrists [that] make him terrible even in his senility.”
Even then—despite his advanced age and deteriorating physical presence—the Toronto Star couldn’t help but ultimately conclude that, “One instinctively treats Paul Vasseur with respect.”
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