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.
*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