Toronto needs a museum, claims columnist

Mea culpa. Two decades ago, when I wrote a Fodor's travel guide to Toronto, I tried to pump up the prose by telling the story of the first white man in the area. Coureur de bois Étienne Brûlé, scout for Samuel de Champlain, lived among the Huron (so my text assured readers) until, in 1633, his drinking and womanizing so offended them that they killed and ate him. Sex, death and cannibalism - I hoped all this would lure people into reading about Toronto.

This is why we need a Toronto museum. Historians now say the Brûlé story is wrong, wrong, wrong. The Frenchman was tortured to death by his allies for suspected treachery, not ribaldry, and he was probably killed near Lake Erie, not the mouth of the Humber River. The west-end Toronto streets and schools named after him should find a new myth.