NINE

The Voices of the Pioneers

BY THIS TIME, THE BOY, aided by the special ties he developed in delivering poached fish, had rebuilt his relations with his newspaper customers. To provide prompt service, he now read the Toronto Daily Star after rather than before beginning his delivery rounds. And on collection nights, always inquisitive, he would ask the old-timers, the children of the pioneers, why their families had come to Muskoka in the first place and what they remembered of the Indians. The old people, naturally hospitable and somewhat lonely, loved to talk about the old days, and began to invite him in for hot chocolate and cookies.

“Lad, our parents wuz lied to.”

They then regaled him with stories of hope, disappointment, and endurance. Canadian government agents in the old country in the latter half of the nineteenth century had, in fact, misled the first settlers, inducing them to come to Muskoka by offering them two-hundred acres of land free of charge and claiming that the land was excellent for farming. All the prospective landowners had to do was to remain on the land they picked out for five years and fulfill a certain number of conditions, and it would be theirs.

A flood of enthusiastic people took up the offer. They left their homes in England, Scotland, and Ireland to brave the violent waters of the North Atlantic, to journey up the St. Lawrence River to Montreal, passing the villages and towns settled by French colonists as long ago as the early seventeenth century. Then they travelled by train through towns and cities such as Cornwall, Kingston, Belleville, and Whitby, populated in more recent times by immigrants from the United States and Britain, to Toronto, then a city of sixty thousand. There they purchased guns, axes, clothing, cooking utensils, and other items judged necessary to prepare them for life in the backwoods of the province. It was then onwards north by rail to the end of the line at the town of Barrie at the southern tip of Lake Simcoe, where they embarked on a steamboat to travel to the head of the adjoining Lake Couchiching.

Up to this point, the emigrants had passed through long-settled lands and encouragingly prosperous farms and villages. The old-timers said their parents fully expected that after a few difficult years of clearing land in Ontario’s frontier country, they would soon be planting crops in deep, lush soil and joining the ranks of Canada’s comfortable farming class. But they were to be disappointed.

On disembarking, the hopeful pioneers found themselves standing in dense bush and being attacked by clouds of pitiless mosquitoes and blackflies. Roads as they had known them in the old country did not exist. To reach their destination, they first had to pass through an immense cedar, alder, spruce, and hemlock swamp, over a so-called Corduroy road of logs laid at right angles to the direction of the trail over the mud. Then they had to navigate the grandly named Muskoka Colonization Road – actually a rough stump-studded track that threaded its way through the white pine, beech, oak, and birch wilderness uplands and over ridges and alongside beaver meadows to the bottom end of Lake Muskoka. Until a railroad and a functional highway were pushed through, the early settlers had the choice of walking or of riding in bone-jarring ox carts and stage coaches that often became mired in the mud.

In short order, the pioneers discovered that the agents in the old country had neglected to mention that the soil in most places was limited to a thin covering of leaf mould on top of glaciated pre-Cambrian granite. Nor had they referred to the heavy snowfalls and the bitter cold of endless winters, a growing season so short the leaves began to change colour in late August, or to the primitive accommodations of rough, dirt-floored shanties, the monotonous diet of sowbelly pork and molasses, the backbreaking labour required to clear land, and the crushing isolation and absence of stores, schools, churches, and doctors. No one warned them that women with peaches-and-cream complexions acquired in the moist, mild climate of Britain would be turned in short order into gaunt, worn-out, hollow-eyed drudges, their lifespans shortened by frequent pregnancies and constant child rearing as well as endless labour in fields, stables, and homes. They were not told that those lucky enough to find patches of arable land among the lichen-covered boulders and bedrock to cultivate crops would more often than not have to carry their wheat on their backs in heavy sacks over rough trails to be ground at a distant mill – and have to bring the flour home the same way.

They even failed to tell them that there were Indians in the district at the time, let alone that these native people might think they owned the land they had occupied for so long.

The old folk would smile as they complained, because they were justifiably proud of what their fathers and mothers had accomplished despite their hardships. Their parents, they pointed out, had followed in the tradition of the earliest pioneers in pushing back the frontier and creating a modern, prosperous Canada. Just a few years after the arrival of the first settlers, enterprising businessmen started a steamboat service on the Muskoka Lakes, facilitating the movement of freight, merchandise, and people. A dam, public docks, and locks were built at the site of the rapids on the Indian River around which the future village of Port Carling would grow. Logging companies moved in, hiring local men and boys to harvest the giant white pines that dominated the landscape, thereby injecting cash into the local economy. Husbands and sons drowned working on the lakes, or were killed in lumber-camp accidents, but their families just carried on. Middle-class Canadians from the big cities in the south streamed into the area on fishing and hunting trips, eventually purchasing land and constructing cottages. Wealthy Americans from Pittsburgh then adopted Muskoka, building palatial summer homes on the islands.

As a result, the first settlers, who were leading subsistence lives with no markets for the products of their bush farms, for the first time found people anxious to buy their fresh milk, butter, eggs, poultry, lamb, pork, and beef. Soon the more enterprising among them were opening small hotels. A number of these places grew in a generation to become huge, luxurious establishments for the well off. Before the end of the century, tradesmen had started building canoes and rowboats to sell to the summer residents.

And by the start of the Great War, a couple of inventive villagers formed the Disappearing Propeller Boat Company. Known affectionately as Dippies, the boats were actually heavy skiffs or rowboats with retractable propellers and shafts powered by lightweight gas-powered engines. In short order, since people liked the idea of protecting their propellers in shallow water, the company was the biggest motorboat company in Canada. Within a decade it folded, but the old-timers never forgot their moment of motorboat glory.

Then in the early 1930s, disaster struck the village. The boy did not need the old-timers to tell him the story, for his mother, then a girl of seven living with her parents in their one-room shack at the Indian Camp, had been a witness to the traumatic developments. She told her son that fire after fire had mysteriously broken out in those years, systematically torching the main buildings of the business section. She remembered waking one December night in 1930 to the frantic pealing of the church bells in the Presbyterian church, calling on every able-bodied villager to form a bucket brigade to fight the fire that would destroy the main boatworks of the community.

Then, the next fall, she heard the bells again, and as her father rushed to join the volunteer firefighters, she stood with her mother on the shore of the Indian Camp and watched flames and explosions light the night sky. Hanna’s General Store, then a large wooden building filled with lumber, cases of canned goods, boxes of soap, drums of gasoline, tins of paint, and all manner of flammable materials in its basement storeroom, burned to the ground, and the fire spread from building to building until the entire business section with the exception of one hotel, the Port Carling House, was a smouldering heap of ashes. But the people just rolled up their sleeves and started again, this time erecting fine brick fire-resistant buildings and endowing the village with a business section vastly superior to those of surrounding communities of similar size.

The old-timers were proud of the pluck and accomplishments of their fellow villagers.

“You ain’t gonna find a more up-to-date and purdy village of its size in all the Dominion. We got street lights, town water, our own telegraph office, a party-line telephone exchange, our own school, a nice natural ice-hockey rink complete with a change room heated by a box stove, a community centre dedicated to our war heroes, a library, and in the summers a restaurant and the Straw Hat Little Theatre, with big-shot actors all the way up from the big city. And now there’s even talk about putt’n in sewers! And to think a hundred years ago this place was just bush!

“Today, Port Carling is the village in the district with the greatest community spirit by far. The Legion and the Lions Club are going strong, and there’s never any shortage of volunteer firefighters. Even the Orange Lodge has lotsa members here, even though it’s fadin’ fast elsewhere in the Dominion. And that’s a great shame because there was a time not so long ago in this here province of ours when every village, town, and city had its own Orange Lodge and Orange Hall. Anyone who was anyone – whether reeve of this village, mayor of Toronto, or even prime minister of the whole country – were members of the Lodge. It used to be the real centre of community life in this here village. At one time, even the English Church held its services in its hall. It still has high ideals despite what some people say about it. Thank gawd, the people of Port Carling have remained true and faithful.”

The boy knew something about the Orange Lodge. At the urging of his best friend who came from a strong Orange Lodge family, he had attended a meeting of village youngsters, who were being recruited to join the youth movement of the organization. On that particular evening, no one talked about high ideals. Instead, the youth leader had quickly reviewed the history of the organization, dating back to the defeat of Catholic James ii by Protestant King William iii at the Battle of the Boyne River in Ireland on July 12, 1690. The boy then had to sit through an uncomfortable evening as the leader and other speakers ranted on about the perfidy of Papists, the venality of priests and nuns, and the inferiority of French Canadians. Having himself been at the receiving end of bigotry, the boy could hardly wait to get away. And when he got home, he had to endure a tongue-lashing from his father, who was strongly opposed to the Orange Lodge and all that it stood for.

The boy was puzzled at the hatred he encountered that night, a sentiment he assumed was shared by his elderly customers, for there were no Catholics and no French Canadians in the village. There was one small community up the lakes where most of the people were English-speaking, French-Canadian Catholics, but they enjoyed excellent personal relations with everyone in the village, including the Orangemen. He assumed the old-timers would not take kindly to discussing the matter with him and said nothing. They had been raised in an era in the province when anti-Catholicism and prejudice against French Canadians were part of the popular culture. As a generation, they seemed to be set in their opinions and determined not to let their personal friendships affect their deeply held beliefs.

He reckoned, however, that he would be on safer ground in probing the old-timers about the native roots of the village and the aboriginal people who had spent their summers, year after year, for most of the past century down at the Indian Camp. Indians, in contrast to Catholics and French Canadians, had never been the object of long-term systematic vilification by the leading fraternal organization of the village. Yet in response to his questioning about the Indians who lived in Obajewanung, the old-timers were not particularly forthcoming. Yes, there had been a community of Indians at the site of the future Port Carling when their pioneer parents had arrived. Yes, the Indians had been hospitable when the first settlers had arrived uninvited and unannounced, and had provided them with food and seed corn and any help they could from their limited means. Yes, the Indians had been ordered to leave to make way for their parents. Yes, there were still a few Indian log cabins around when they were growing up. Yes, in fact, their families had appropriated some of the cabins for their own use. Yes, there were a few Indian burial grounds here and there, the locations of which had long been forgotten.

When the boy asked them if what their parents had done was fair, they admitted that the Indians undoubtedly had been treated badly. But, they added, the white people who built Port Carling were as deeply attached to their twentieth-century community as the Indians had been to their village when the settlers arrived. Their parents had made something out of Port Carling. If the place had been left to the Indians, they said, it would have been just another backward reserve. As far as they were concerned, the fact that Port Carling had once been Obajewanung was a mere historical curiosity and a closed chapter.

The old-timers were more comfortable talking about the Indians who came from the distant reserve of the boy’s mother. They admitted that the settlers thought they were rid of Indians when the people of Obajewanung were expelled. They were surprised, therefore, when other Chippewas from farther south quietly appeared in the summers to erect their wigwams and tents around the locks and dam, telling them their ancestors had fished and hunted for hundreds of years in the area. These natives were soon joined by Protestant Mohawks from Oka, Quebec, who had moved to Muskoka after losing out in a land dispute with the Catholic church in the late nineteenth century. Initially, the natives spent their summers fishing and trapping, but they soon found a ready market for their handicraft among summer residents and day trippers from the steamboats. But the white villagers of the time did not like it.

“Our parents didn’t want a bunch of squatters on prime land at the height of the tourist season.”

The government, nevertheless, established a small reserve for them on several acres of land on the shore opposite the locks – and the Indian Camp was born. The old-timers confessed that relations between the two peoples had never been easy. To their knowledge, villagers and natives had never intermarried – the language and cultural gap between the two peoples was just too great. Besides, they said, there had been too many wild parties down at the Indian Camp for the liking of the villagers.

Aware of the boy’s ties to the native world, they also tried to find nice things to say about the people in the Indian Camp and its inhabitants.

“The Indian Camp was a favourite with tourists who had never seen Indians before. It drew them to Port Carling. There even used to be wresl’n matches down there on Sundays. Some of them Mohawks were professionals and put on good shows. Everyone from the village and lots of tourists would go. There was one old fellow who was more than a hundred when he died. Was supposed to have met the old Queen herself…was a member of the Salvation Army, a great Christian, and leader of his people…was always down at the Indian Camp…always liked jawing with him.”

One old couple, whose son had been killed in the war, remembered the contribution of the Indians in the wars.

“In 1914 and again in 1939, a lot of the guys down at the Indian Camp signed up. They made sacrifices just like our sons and were treated badly afterwards.”

And, to the boy’s delight, they told him they had known and liked his Indian grandfather.

“He was a hard worker. Got along with everyone and pitched in and helped us fight the fires of the thirties. Even entered a burning building and carried out a badly burned young lady from the big city who was spending the summer in the village. It was not his fault that she was so far gone she died.”

 

But like old people everywhere, talking and joking about the good times of their youth was what they really wanted to do.

“Our parents had it tough, but people pulled together in those days. Everyone got together for bees to raise barns and houses. They got all the food they could eat and pailfuls of whisky to drink. No one asked for money. The men used to form teams and see which one could get the most done. And after the bee, they’d celebrate and fight all night.”

“In the old days, we used to hold big sports competitions on Victoria Day and invite everyone around the lakes to come and try to beat us. There’d be rac’n, wresl’n, and jump’n. Trying to catch a greased pig was always great fun. In the winters, there’d be hockey, and the guys from Port Carling would win the fights if not the games.”

“A rich man in my day was someone who could afford a two-hole outhouse rather than a simple one-holer!”

“You’d think the kids of today invented Hallowe’en. Why, when I was a boy, we’d wait until someone was comfortably sitting on the seat in the old outhouse before tipping it over. Once, after dark, we moved an outhouse a few feet down the path, just far enough to leave the honey pit unprotected, and then we hid nearby to wait for the fun to start. Sure enough, someone came out to use the facilities, didn’t notice we had moved it, and just as he reached for the door, fell into the hole. He warn’t hurt, but you should have heard the shout’n, holler’n, and laff’n. My gawd, now that was what we called hav’n a good time in Port Carling in the old days!”

“We even put a wagon full of hay on the school roof. And those guys who think they’re so good at nett’n fish! Why, in my day, we used dynamite!”

“When I was a young man in the 1890s, there warn’t no rules against drink’n and there was a bar in that old hotel down at the locks. Whisky was a dollar a gallon. The drink of real men was whisky and ale, half and half. As for the fight’n, it was Ulstermen against French Canadians every parade day on the Glorious Twelfth of July, the anniversary of the victory of Good King Billy in the Battle of the Boyne. It was Ulstermen against Ulstermen every weekend, and Ulstermen and French Canadians against Englishmen every night.”

Their eyes misted over at the thought of the old days before the villagers went soft, built three churches, banned alcohol sales, and started catering to an upscale tourist crowd.