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A reprint of the historic original from 1879. Maps by John Rogers. Sketches by S. Penson.
Muskoka. Now a magnet for nature tourists and wealthy cottagers, the region underwent a profound transition at the turn of the twentieth century. Making Muskoka traces the evolution of the region from 1870 to 1920. Over this period, settler colonialism upended Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee communities, but the land was unsuited to farming, and within the first generation of resettlement, tourism became an integral feature of life. Andrew Watson considers issues such as rural identity, tensions between large- and household-scale logging operations, and the dramatic effects of consumer culture and the global shift toward fossil fuels on settlers’ ability to control the tourism economy after 1900. Making Muskoka uncovers the lived experience of rural communities shaped by tourism at a time when sustainable opportunities for a sedentary life were few on the Canadian Shield, and reveals the consequences for those living there year-round.
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Recreation and Sport are an integral part of Canadian culture. This is nowhere more evident than in the Muskoka District of Ontario. Beginning in the 1860s, people from more populated areas of Southern Ontario and the North Eastern United States flocked to Muskoka to enjoy nature's bounty. They came to fish, hunt, canoe, sail, swim, hike and explore. Many vacationed at one of the ever expanding selection of Muskoka resorts. Others built their own recreational retreats or cottages. Also beginning in the 1860s, Free Land Grant recipients ventured to the area to take land and attempt to farm it. They became the permanent population base and set about developing their own recreations and sporting organizations. This book surveys the attempts of all of Muskoka's residents and visitors to enjoy the recreational opportunities the region provided. The main focus of this local history is on how people in the past used recreation and sport to enhance their lives. In other words, what they did for exercise and fun.
How emigrants were lured to Ontario’s Muskoka in the 1870s in a vain attempt to farm the Canadian Shield. When the Free Grants and Homestead Act was first introduced in 1868, fierce debates erupted in Ontario’s Legislature over whether land in the Muskoka region should be opened to settlement or reserved for the Aboriginal population. From the beginning, many people vented serious doubts about the free grant scheme, citing the district’s poor agricultural prospects. In the end, such caution was ignored by overeager boosters. The story in Hardscrabble also takes readers to Britain, where emigration philanthropists urged their government to send the country’s poor to Canada, then follows these emigrants as they left the familiar behind to make a new life in the Canadian wilderness. The initial romance of living off the land was soon dispelled as these hapless souls faced clearing the land, building shelters, and sowing crops in desolate, remote locations. Donna Williams’s extensive research leads her to conclude that Muskoka’s experience epitomizes the wrongheadedness of placing already poor people on remote land unsuited for farming.
A young law clerk from England falls in love in 19th-century New York and reinvents himself in Canada. Quiet Isaac Jelfs led many lives: a scapegoated law clerk in England; a soldier in the mad Crimean War; a lawyer on swirling Broadway Avenue in New York. His escape from each was wrapped in deep secrecy. He eventually reached Canada, in 1869, with a new wife and a changed name. In his new home — the remote wilderness of Muskoka — he crafted yet another persona for himself. In Another Country, Another Life, his great-grandson traces that long-hidden journey, exposing Isaac Jelfs’ covered tracks and the reasons for his double life.