Today in History for Oct. 7:
In 1663, Jean Baptiste Le Gardeur de Repentigny was chosen as the first mayor of Quebec.
In 1737, iron was first smelted in Canada, at St-Maurice, Que.
In 1758, the first meeting of the Nova Scotia legislature was held.
In 1763, Cape Breton was annexed to Nova Scotia.
In 1763, a Royal proclamation sought to deal with the problem of aboriginal unrest in the west. The western boundary of Quebec was set at a line running northwest from the point where the 45th parallel crossed the St. Lawrence River to Lake Nipissing. The Appalachian watershed became the western boundary of the Atlantic colonies, blocking British settlement of the Indian lands of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. Labrador, Anticosti Island and the Magdalen Islands were given to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia annexed all the area the French had known as Acadia.
In 1777, an American revolutionary force under George Washington was routed at Chadds Ford, Pa. by the 1st American Regiment. The regiment later became known as the Queen's York Rangers -- one of Canada's oldest military units. It was organized before the American Revolution by Robert Rogers but was later moved to Toronto by John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. The Rangers also served in the Northwest Rebellion, the Boer War and the First and Second World Wars.
In 1786, Louis-Joseph Papineau, leader of the 1837 rebellion in Lower Canada, was born.
In 1804, the government schooner "Speedy" and all of its passengers were lost in a storm on Lake Ontario. Among the dead was Robert Gray, Upper Canada's solicitor general.
In 1825, the great Miramichi fire killed nearly 200 people and destroyed more than 15,000 square kilometres. It laid waste to Newcastle and Douglastown and most of the other settlements in the region, now part of New Brunswick.
In 1849, author Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore at age 40.
In 1913, oil was discovered at Okotoks, Alta., 45 kilometres from Calgary.
In 1913, Henry Ford launched a new production process in Detroit called the assembly line, which revolutionized car production.
In 1916, in the most lopsided victory in U.S. college football history, Georgia Tech defeated Cumberland College 222-0 in Atlanta.
In 1919, the Joan of Arc Institute was founded in Ottawa to offer extensive social services to the community.
In 1923, artist and sculptor Jean-Paul Riopelle was born in Montreal. Riopelle, who became one of Canada's best-known artists of the 20th century, died on March 12, 2002.
In 1931, Desmond Tutu was born. The Anglican church leader in South Africa won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting apartheid.
In 1949, the Republic of East Germany was formed.
In 1950, the United Nations General Assembly gave moral approval to the occupation of all Korea by UN troops.
In 1959, the Soviet Union's "Luna 3" took the first photos of the dark side of the Moon.
In 1963, FLQ members Gabriel Hudon and Raymond Villeneuve were sentenced to 12 years each in prison for terrorist activities.
In 1966, 19 teenagers and their bus driver were killed when a Toronto-bound freight train ripped through a chartered bus at a level crossing near Dorion, Que.
In 1969, a state of emergency was declared when Montreal police and firefighters staged a 16-hour wild-cat strike, resulting in two deaths, violence and looting.
In 1980, West German car dealer Jaromir Wagner became the first man to cross the Atlantic on the wing of an airplane. Wagner stopped four times during his trip from Glessen, West Germany, to Goose Bay, Labrador.
In 1981, Egypt's parliament named vice president Hosni Mubarak, to succeed Anwar Sadat as president. Sadat had been assassinated the previous day.
In 1985, the Italian cruise ship "Achille Lauro" was hijacked by Palestinian gunmen. (The hijackers, who killed an elderly Jewish American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, surrendered two days after taking over the ship.)
In 1990, Canadian CF-18 fighter jets began arriving at camp "Canada Dry" in Qatar. The jets were sent to join a multinational force amassed in the Persian Gulf to blockade Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait.
In 1997, Frank McKenna announced his resignation as premier of New Brunswick.
In 1997, an arbitrator ruled the RCMP must pay Brian Mulroney more than $2 million to cover his legal expenses plus interest in the Airbus affair.
In 1998, Matthew Shepard, a gay college student at the University of Wyoming, was beaten, robbed and left tied to a wooden fencepost outside of Laramie; he died five days later. (Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney are serving life sentences for Shepard's murder.)
In 1999, Adrienne Clarkson was installed as the 26th Governor General of Canada amid great pageantry, becoming the first member of a visible minority to hold the post. She served an extended term which ended on Sept. 27, 2005. Over those six years she travelled to more than 300 communities across Canada.
In 2000, a Slovenian ski instructor became the first person to ski non-stop down Mount Everest. It took 38-year-old Davo Karnicar five hours to travel the 3,500 metres from the summit of the world's tallest mountain to a base camp.
In 2001, the United States began bombing Afghanistan in response to the previous month's terror attacks in New York and Washington.
In 2003, California voters decided to terminate governor Gray Davis in the recall election -- and replace him with movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger was by far the best known and best funded of the more than 130 candidates in the recall vote.
In 2003, Izzy Asper, founder and chairman of the CanWest Global media empire and a well-known philanthropist, died at age 71.
Also in 2003, an Ontario court reinstated the ban on possessing small amounts of marijuana. Possession laws had become virtually unenforceable after a lower court ruling earlier in the year.
In 2004, Bombardier Aerospace cut about 2,000 jobs -- 1,440 in the Montreal area and 540 in Belfast, Northern Ireland -- because of slowing demand for its Canadair Regional Jets.
In 2005, Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency that he heads won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons by using diplomacy to resolve standoffs.
In 2006, trooper Mark Andrew Wilson was killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan, becoming the 40th Canadian soldier to die in the conflict.
In 2008, the U.S. Federal Reserve announced it would purchase the $1.6 trillion commercial paper market in the hopes of relieving the credit squeeze.
In 2009, three scientists, Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their studies of the structure and function of ribosomes, which are crucial to life.
In 2010, Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Spanish-speaking world, won the Nobel Prize in literature.
In 2011, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Tawakkul Karman, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Leymah Gbowee, three champions of women's rights in Africa and the Middle East.
In 2012, Venezuela's National Electoral Council announced that President Hugo Chavez had won re-election for the third time. (Chavez died in March 2013 at age 58 after at two-year battle with cancer.)
In 2016, Jean-Francois Lisee was elected leader of the sovereigntist Parti Quebecois.
In 2016, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end Latin America's longest-running armed conflict.
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(The Canadian Press)
The Canadian Press
