There’s a small city up the St. Maurice River on the north shore between Montreal and Quebec City named La Toque (The Toque) so perhaps that is pretty definitive.
Well I’ll be darned, I looked it up in the MacMillan World Atlas before I posted, and I just looked again at the map’s very fine print with my 52-year-old eyes, and La Tuque it is. The website says “Le nom de ce hameau qui était un ancien poste de traite de la Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson provient probablement de la «traduction d’un toponyme amérindien qui désignait la rivière aux rats comme un habitat de rats musqués.»” which I think translates to “the name of this hamlet which was an ancient trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company probably comes from an amerindian name which designates the river of rats as a muskrat habitat”.
[ul][li]** toque**[/li][li]** toque**[/li][li]** toque**[/li][li]** toque**[/li]
I have just written the word four more times than it has ever been used in Mississippi. :p[/ul]
Muskrat fur hats are an old Canadian tradition from the days when the fur trade was the main economic engine. Old paintings of early Canadians show a lot of unelaborate, practical, fur winter hats. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police still officially wear muskrat hats as part of their winter uniform, so… an old fur trading post that’s been named “La Tuque” since the earliest days of European settlement, associated with muskrat fur trading, which would generate winter hats, it ain’t Phd thesis material but I think we’re about as close as we can get. I’d use tuque over toque from now on.
On a sidenote, the word “toque” was used on some sort of scrabble championship I watched today.