Nipissing: Historic Waterway, Wilderness Playground

By Françoise Noël

2016 Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Award — Shortlisted
2015 Speaker's Book Award — Shortlisted

Explore the history of tourism in the Nipissing Passageway, from Mattawa to Georgian Bay, beginning with Champlain’s voyage in 1615.

In the nineteenth century, while the hope of building a Georgian Bay Ship Canal remained elusive, promotional efforts were made by the railways to market the area as a “sportsman’s paradise.” In the early twentieth century, Ontario began to build roads to lure American motorists to the area. In Nipissing, Françoise Noël demonstrates how these efforts led to the early appearance of cottagers in the French River area and the rise of local outfitters. Places of interest include Quintland, named for the famed Dionne Quintuplets, which was seen as a “pilgrimage” site and saw resort expansion through to the post-war recovery.

A look at the Nipissing area today reveals that, for many, it remains a wilderness playground.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Jan 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781459724419

Françoise Noël

Françoise Noël is a professor of history at Nipissing University. Through her photography and by visiting local scenic spots she has become intimately familiar with the Nipissing area. Françoise is the author of Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario. She lives in North Bay, Ontario.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1 A Historic Waterway

Chapter 2 Railways and Sportsmen

Chapter 3 Campfire Stories and the Experience of Place

Chapter 4 From Tent Life to Resorts

Chapter 5 Ontario’s Lakeland Playground

Chapter 6 Pilgrimage to Quintland

Chapter 7 Making Room for Women and Children

Chapter 8 Reading the Landscape

Appendix I List of Places to Stay in the Nipissing Area in 1947

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

The research and writing of this book was made possible by a sabbatical leave from my regular teaching duties at Nipissing University and I gratefully acknowledge the support of Nipissing University for this project.

I owe a special debt to Odwa Atari, whose workshop for faculty on the use of mapping software provided me with a sufficient start to be able to develop my own maps for this project. Both he and Chin in the geomatics lab were always willing to help when I ran into trouble. Unless otherwise noted, the maps in this book are based on the CanVec digital topographical dataset provided by the Government of Canada, Department of Natural Resources Canada — a much-appreciated service.

Research has changed dramatically in the last decade. This project required few trips to the archives and many of the people who made it possible are unknown to me: they are the staff of various libraries and archives who have made resources available online at internet.org, the David Rumsey Map Collection, Library and Archives Canada, the Toronto Public Library, the National Gallery of Canada, and others. I am particularly grateful to those who answered my emails and met my various requests for images in a friendly and timely manner. While much of the visual material included in this study is in the public domain, some is provided with the permission of the copyright holder. I am grateful to all those who have provided me with permission to use their material. I am particularly happy to be able to include the watercolour art of Hope Rathnam, whose family has been visiting the French River for six generations.

I would like to acknowledge the efforts of my editor, Jennifer McKnight, copyeditor, Britanie Wilson, the design staff, and others at Dundurn who have worked hard to make this project a success. I am especially grateful to Barry Penhale and Jane Gibson at Natural Heritage Books who believed in this book from its inception, and for their support and encouragement throughout the process.

Finally, I would like to thank the many colleagues, friends, community members, and family members who have supported me in various ways. In particular, I am greatly saddened that my friend and colleague, Anne Clendinning, who was always so encouraging of my writing, is not here to see the final product. A special thank-you goes to Martha Gould and to my sister Denise Touchette.

Introduction

Lake Nipissing, with its miles of beautiful sandy beaches and its many bays, has often been described as a beautiful sheet of water. The seventh largest lake in Ontario after the Great Lakes,[1] it lies at the centre of an area that is both scenic and historic (Map 1). It drains through the French River into Georgian Bay, although once, before the last ice age, it flowed to the east. North Bay, a city of 54,000, lies nestled along the shore of Lake Nipissing, reaching the escarpment to the north and the shores of Trout Lake. Short portages link Trout Lake to Turtle Lake, Pine Lake, Lake Talon, and finally, the Mattawa River, which flows into the Ottawa River at Mattawa — the meeting of the waters. The entire waterway between Mattawa and Georgian Bay is known as the Nipissing Passageway and, with its many waterfalls, is one of the most scenic sections of the historic fur trade route from Lachine, near Montreal, to the Great Lakes and beyond. The founder of New France, Samuel de Champlain, explored this route in 1615. Missionaries, fur traders, explorers, and voyageurs alike have travelled it as well. It is, therefore, familiar to anyone who has ever taught a Canadian history survey course, including this author. The Nipissing area disappears from most Canadian history textbooks after 1825, when the Montreal fur trade gave way to trade out of Hudson Bay. The area itself as a destination, or as a place of importance in its own right, seldom, if ever, reappears.

Since moving to North Bay to teach history at Nipissing University twenty-six years ago, I have had the opportunity to experience this area on a more personal level. With its rocky shorelines, towering white pines, and mixed hardwood forests, the natural environment of this area has much to offer nature lovers and outdoor enthusiasts. Like many others, I have my favourite spots that I return to over and over again. On the Amable du Fond River, a tributary of the Mattawa, an extreme narrowing of its rocky banks at Eau Claire Gorge constricts the water into a turbulent bubbling mass of white water, best viewed from the cliffs above. Just west of North Bay, Duchesnay Creek cascades over a series of rapid drops over large boulders at Duchesnay Falls; both change with the seasons and the level of the water, and yet are always fascinating, the sound of the rushing water hypnotic. Red trilliums and other spring flowers are abundant along the trails leading from the Falls. The hiking routes at Samuel de Champlain Park are a great place to enjoy views of countless native flowers, the pine forest above, and the Mattawa River far below. A paddle across Pimisi Bay rewards you with a view of the historic Talon Chutes, where the drop from the tall cliffs to the bay into the water below is thirty metres; unlike the more adventuresome, I have never had the urge to jump into the water below.[2] The French River, with its maze of islands, provides endless scenic views. A hike to Récollets Falls, now reachable from Highway 69, provides just a small taste of what spending time on the rocky shores of the French might be like. In winter, after a snowfall, or when the ice freezes on the trees, a breathtaking wonderland emerges.

Map 1. This relief map of the Nipissing Passageway study area shows the gradual decline in elevation from Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay. The irregular pattern of the drainage system, which runs along fault lines, can also be seen. To the east of Lake Nipissing, the Mattawa River, surrounded by high hills, flows along a major fault line into the Ottawa River at Mattawa. This geography was a major factor in the history of the area.

As a historian, however, it is not just the scenic landscape that has captured my attention, but also the remnants of a former time that linger — in buildings, cemeteries, sometimes just as a plaque. While conducting oral histories for a research project on family and community history in the area extending from Mattawa to North Bay, I had the occasion to travel through some of the smaller rural communities, places like Grand Desert, which are now hardly more than a name on a map. Several rural churches in this area have closed, but remain standing. A few, seemingly in the middle of a field, are still in service. Old schools are sometimes abandoned, sometimes converted for other uses. Travels into the country to enjoy the fall colours in the Nipissing and Restoule area south of Lake Nipissing resulted in similar discoveries. The old general store at Commanda, now a museum, still stands as a testament to a past era that is all but forgotten. At French River, a private home retains a sign from its days as a CPR station. For years there was one little white clapboard cabin in between the larger houses along Memorial Drive in North Bay. Now it is gone. There are two small log cabins with large chimneys, dwarfed by the highrise condominium complexes that surround them on Lakeshore Drive. At the corner of Banner Avenue, a crude totem pole once stood beside a souvenir shop, along with another at Jessup Creek, across the street from the modernized Sunset Inn, near a sign that marks the entrance to what might have been a campground. Around Sunset Point along Lakeshore Drive (what used to be Callander Road) there are still numerous cabins, most of them part of motel complexes. A better understanding of the history of the area has allowed me to make sense of these built landscapes.

I first heard about the Dionne quintuplets as a child. When I started teaching at Nipissing University, I made a point of showing my Canadian social history class Pierre Berton’s film on the Dionnes because it was a national story that had occurred locally. Early on, I drove from Callander to Corbeil to see what remained of Quintland, where the Dionne quintuplets were displayed to the public; other than Nipissing Manor, which I recognized as the Big House (built to house the Dionne quintuplets and their family when they were reunited), it didn’t seem that much else remained. It was not until it was pointed out to me much later that I made out the former Dionne nursery, a former souvenir shop, and part of the fence that kept visitors out between viewings. When I started interviewing locals who remembered the 1930s, I heard over and over again how the Dionne quintuplets and the tourists they generated had transformed the area during the Great Depression. One person I talked to, however, indicated that tourism had been an important part of the Nipissing area well before the quintuplets’ arrival, and thought it was a shame that most people seemed to think that the boom in visitors only started with them. Her grandfather had started taking visitors out on Lake Nipissing to go fishing at the end of the nineteenth century.

These conversations and my experience of the Nipissing area led me to undertake this project. I wanted to better understand how the quintuplets had impacted the area, but more importantly, to know what had come before. How important was tourism before the 1930s, and why did most locals so closely associate it with the quintuplets? What first brought visitors to this area, and what did they do when they got here? My original plan was to look at the entire four hundred years since Champlain passed through the area in 1615, but in the end, that proved too ambitious. Only a brief outline of the period before 1870 follows (Chapter 1); the focus of this study is on the period from the 1870s to the early 1950s. Despite the significance of the Quintland years in the history of visitors to the Nipissing area, the famous quintuplets are not the whole story.

From the 1870s to the 1920s, long-distance travel was almost exclusively by rail. Chapter 2 outlines the railway companies present in the area and examines the way in which the railways, to promote traffic, constructed the area as a wilderness, marketed as a sportsman’s paradise. Chapter 3 examines accounts, mostly published, of fishing for giant muskies on the French River, moose hunting in the Mattawa area, deer hunting in the Loring area, and of canoeing the Mattawa and French Rivers. The Nipissing area had become a destination, or rather a set of destinations in close proximity to one another, each with its own appeal. These sportsmen found themselves, not in pristine wilderness, as the guidebooks implied, but on the lumbering frontier where they made their way with the help of aboriginal guides. Chapter 4 examines the rudimentary infrastructure that arose around the sportsmen. Outfitters soon emerged to facilitate their stay and to provide them with the guides, boats, and supplies they needed. When the CPR opened its own resort in the area, the French River benefitted from its extensive national and international publicity campaigns. The Nipissing area, especially the French River, was discovered by many American sportsmen who came both as members of hunting or fishing clubs and as cottagers.

By the 1930s, sportsmen increasingly arrived by automobile rather than rail, and they brought their families with them. Chapter 5 looks at the way in which the province of Ontario orchestrated its own advertising campaign to publicize the advantages of its Lakeland Playground as a vacation destination in the 1920s — a publicity campaign aimed primarily at an American audience. Road maps and lure books were not enough, however. Good roads were crucial to attracting the American motorist, and road construction into the north supported the province’s plans. At the onset of the Great Depression, the number of American visitors to Ontario dropped dramatically and the future of the tourism industry looked bleak. The situation changed almost overnight when quintuplets were born to a farm family in Corbeil, in the heart of the Nipissing area. Born on May 28, 1934, the Dionne quintuplets — the first set of quintuplets to survive more than a few days — began, almost from birth, to draw people to the area. Between 1935 and 1943, the pilgrimage to visit the Dionne quintuplets was the most prestigious motor tour one could take. During this time, over three million visitors made their way to Quintland; Chapter 6 explores this phenomenon. Exploring the challenge of making room for this sudden explosion of visitors to the area through to the late 1940s, Chapter 7 provides a close analysis of the accommodation available in 1947 — that, and captures the expansion related to Quintland.

The extent to which this recent history of the Nipissing area can still be read in the current landscape is examined in Chapter 8. Very little effort has been made to preserve the early tourism landscape, or even that of Quintland, but signs of it remain nonetheless.

Just as they did in the era of canoe travel, many travellers still pass through the Nipissing area on their way elsewhere. For more than a century now, however, Nipissing has also been a destination, at first only during the summer, then year round. People have come to this somewhat neglected area of northern Ontario located between the very popular Algonquin Park and the Temagami* Forest Reserve, to be in contact with nature, to fish, to hunt, and to relax. Some families have been returning to the French River area for six generations. It has always been their special place. For many, the fact that it was not as popular as other similar destinations was part of the attraction. Today, Samuel de Champlain Park on the Mattawa River is particularly popular,[3] but all of the smaller lakes and rivers that abound in the area draw their share of visitors. Both the Mattawa and the French River are now designated as Heritage Rivers and Waterway Parks have been established along much of their shoreline. The historic nature of the Nipissing Passageway and its association to Samuel de Champlain appeals to many, as it offers them a way to connect with Canada’s distant past. What is perhaps less appreciated, is that these visitors are themselves part of the equally fascinating more recent history of the area, as is demonstrated in the pages to follow.

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*Originally spelled Timagami, but later changed to the current spelling. For the sake of consistency, the current spelling is retained throughout this book, though the older usage may appear in some quotations.

Chapter 1

A Historic Waterway

It was not scenery, however pleasant, that first drew visitors of European origin to the Nipissing area. Like the aboriginals who had used the Nipissing Passageway for thousands of years to travel by canoe from the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, the first Europeans to travel through were on their way elsewhere. Etienne Brulé would be the first, but Samuel de Champlain, who made his voyage in 1615, was the first to leave a written record of his trip. With the eyes of a colonizer, Champlain saw only a barren land: This whole region is even more unprepossessing than the former; he wrote, for I did not see in the whole length of it ten acres of arable land, but only rocks and a country somewhat hilly.[1] For the next two centuries, missionaries, fur traders, and explorers alike continued to travel this route, many of them leaving a written record of their travels. The illiterate French Canadian voyageurs that paddled their canoes left behind an oral tradition that was often recorded by their bourgeois masters, as well as a legacy by way of the colourful names of portages found along their route. Some names refer to the physical characteristics of the portage: Les Epingles, La Dalle, and the Grande and Petite Faucille; others refer to incidents in the travels of the voyageurs themselves. One story goes that when a party of voyageurs lost one of their canoes they had to send two of their party back to get another; when they returned they found their companions still camped in the same spot, not yet having carried their loads across the portage. This portage is known as Portage des Paresseux, or Lazy Portage, to this day.[2]

The first visual record of the Nipissing Passageway sketched on the spot was by John Elliott Woolford, a talented artist who accompanied Lord Dalhousie on his journey through the area in 1821. The newly appointed governor general of the Canadas wanted to see for himself the territory over which he ruled. Woolford made sketches whenever they stopped, often at Lord Dalhousie’s specific request. Later, Woolford and Charles Ramus Forrest, also associated with Lord Dalhousie, used these sketches to create finished watercolour images. As a military and topographical artist, Woolford was interested in showing how things were done, particularly at the portages. Occasionally, however, he simply captured the picturesque nature of the landscape.[3]

The fur traders abandoned this route in favour of Hudson Bay after 1825. Lumbermen and surveyors were the next to take an interest in the area. As early as 1837, the possibility of linking the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes by canalizing the Nipissing Passageway route was raised, but before this or any other form of exploitation could take place, scientific knowledge of the territory was sought. In 1845, William Logan of the Geological Survey of Canada spent seven miserable weeks (it rained almost every day) in the field surveying the upper Ottawa River to the head of Lake Temiscamang and the Mattawa River from the Ottawa River to Lake Nipissing. His detailed description of the river included the measured height of each of the falls and an estimate of the total rise to Lake Nipissing. The old canoe route on the Mattawa, Logan noted, was a river that ran between Lake Talon and Turtle Lake (Lower Trout Lake), whereas the new canoe route passed through Pine Lake and its two portages.[4] As late as the early twentieth century, Logan’s maps were still recommended as the best available for someone undertaking a canoe trip in the area without a guide.

This image of the La Dalle portage on the French River demonstrates how the canoes were towed from the shore with a line. It clearly shows the river flowing through a fault line with sharp cliffs on one side and slightly less so on the other. This watercolour by John Elliott Woolford was prepared based on sketches he made while making the journey through the Nipissing Passageway with Lord Dalhousie in 1821.

Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, TPL 902-1-5.

Unlike many of the other watercolours produced from this trip, Woolford’s image of the source of the Mattawa River has a picturesque quality to it and in this image, the landscape is empty, much like those of the landscape artists of the early twentieth century. The Mattawa was often referred to as the Petite Rivière, or Little River, to distinguish it from the Ottawa, which was the Grande Rivière.

Courtesy of the Toronto Public Library, TPL 902-1-6.

The beauty of the landscape near Mattawa, where tall hills rise up over the wooded shoreline of the Ottawa and the Mattawa Rivers, has been recorded in countless travel accounts. Here, John Elliott Woolford captures the beauty of the river at sunset, with the hillsides muted, almost like clouds, and a small island in the foreground.

John Elliott Woolford, Petite Riviere Joins Ottawa near Lake Nippissing, 1821. Watercolour over graphite on wove paper, mounted on cardboard, 14.3x 23.7cm. Purchased 1979 with the assistance of a grant from the Government of Canada under the terms of the