F.V. Williams’s artwork for the cover of Rod and Gun sometimes showed women fishing, but as in the image shown here, the fish were usually small. In this case, the image is static and fails to convey the sense that this woman was actively engaged in catching it.
Used with permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.
This Kodak ad from 1905 takes on hunting terminology but offers an alternative to shooting with a gun: “Hunt with a Kodak.”
Courtesy of the University of Toronto Library. Used with permission of Eastman Kodak Company.
The CPR advertised canoe trips in northern Ontario and Quebec in 1900. In 1907, it advertised summer trips in Eastern Georgian Bay and to the French or Mississauga Rivers as being adventures full of “canoeing, camping, shooting, sailing, motor boating, and all that makes summer outings enjoyable and healthful.” A facing ad announced that it would be opening its “famous new line to the Muskoka Lakes, Georgian Bay and French River,” that season and encouraged readers to inquire about information “for canoe trips, fishing, shooting and summer resort locations.”[14] Canoeists, hunters, and fishermen alike sought to renew themselves through a temporary escape from urban life and civilization, thus making their “anti-modern” holiday a modern phenomenon.[15] As suggested by C.H. Hooper:
It is not the big trips, the wonders of nature, the huge catches, that go to fill the cup of perfect happiness. It is rather the little things, so much more significant, the mere animal pleasures derived from physical exertion amid perfect surroundings, and the resulting satisfaction in having performed daily something difficult, something that required “sand”; the robust health, the tranquil sleep, the vigorous appetite, the nightly renewal of vitality generously expended by day, the gradual readjustment of the system to a natural and rational form of living, until, as Wordsworth puts it, “We recognize a grandeur in the beatings of the heart.” These are the true joys of the open air — these the prompt response of the primitive in us to the call of Mother Nature.[16]
This beautiful scene of the Upper Ottawa River by Frederick A. Verner is considered to be his best painting. It is truly an “imagined geography” in that it was painted in 1882, after he had moved to London, England. Verner had a keen interest in native people, but like many others of his generation, he believed they were destined to disappear. The aboriginal paddlers in this landscape appear in the distance and blend in with their surroundings. They are part of the wildness that drew many to the northland.
Frederick A. Verner, The Upper Ottawa, 1882, oil on canvas, 83.5x 152.3cm. Purchased 1958, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo © National Gallery of Canada.
Concentrated in the large industrial cities of the Northeast and with bulky gear and trophies to transport, sportsmen soon became a target market for the railways. Canadian railway companies, already well-linked to the major eastern cities in the United States, were quick to realize that it was to their advantage to convince sportsmen to travel to Canada rather than to Maine or Michigan. It was not long before they began to advertise with the sportsmen in mind. Northern Ontario at the time was neither a “primeval forest” nor a “wilderness.” It was the home of aboriginals, white settlers, and lumbermen. Forest fires and clear-cutting practices had ravaged the landscape and sawdust from lumber mills threatened the fish habitat on Georgian Bay. Such an industrial landscape would have little appeal. Instead, the railway companies eagerly promoted northern Ontario as a pristine wilderness, a “sportsman’s paradise” with abundant fish and game. They were not alone. The landscape artists of the late nineteenth century, and the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson in the early twentieth century, almost always portrayed an empty landscape, devoid of human activity.[17] As a sportsman’s paradise, it could be enjoyed without the social aspects of the resort hotels, which were then popular:
They are not places to which to go, for display of fine clothes or many changes of raiment, to see dusty crowds hurry past in herds, measuring their pleasures by the mileage over which they rush, but they are places where within convenient and cheap distance of the great highways, exist high altitude and pure air, pretty scenes and mingled land and waterscape; where game laws are respected and fishing carefully preserved, as being the greatest source of attraction to the work-worn city man; where rest from the busy whirl can most surely be obtained; and whether it be under the canvas covering of the camp, or in the comfortable bed of an unpretentious hotel, the laden smell of the sighing pine and soft lappings of the little wave lets on the quiet shores will lull the weary brain to sound and unaccustomed sleep.[18]
Railways and Railway Guides
Before 1900
The first railway to reach the Lake Nipissing area was the CPR (Map 2). It followed the Ottawa River and passed through Mattawa. The new settlement of North Bay emerged where the railway reached Lake Nipissing, and was designated as a divisional point. Its arrival stimulated settlement and the population of the Nipissing area increased, particularly to the south of Lake Nipissing, west of Mattawa, and in the agricultural areas to the west of the lake. In 1894, a colonization branch line of the CPR opened to Temiskaming on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. The second railway to arrive was the Northern Railway of Canada (NRC). Its line to Nipissing Junction, just south of North Bay, was completed in 1886. The Grand Trunk Railway purchased this line in 1888, thereby connecting the CPR’s main line directly to Toronto.
This painting of the Upper Ottawa, like most of the Group of Seven’s images of Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park, portrays a beautiful but empty landscape. There is no evidence of its occupants or their activities.
Frank Carmichael, The Upper Ottawa, near Mattawa, 1924, oil on canvas, 101.5x 123.1cm. Purchased 1936, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo © National Gallery of Canada.
Under the direction of Frederick Cumberland,[19] the NRC emphasized local traffic, much of which was generated by the growing popularity of the Georgian Bay and Muskoka regions as summer resorts for Torontonians. As early as 1874, the Northern began to promote the highlands of Ontario as far north as Lake Nipissing as a sportsman’s paradise. An article in the new American sports magazine, Forest and Stream, noted that this region was unknown in the United States, despite it being “the most accessible, the cheapest, and most prolific in genuine sport, of any we have yet had occasion to visit or refer to.” The lakes and rivers of this area, the article continued:
… abound in three pound brook trout, salmon trout, black bass, and pickerel, [and] some of these localities [are] almost virgin in their primitive wilderness, and yet nearly all [are] accessible by railroad and steamboat, in forty-eight hours from New York, via Toronto and the Northern railroad of Canada. Chief among them are lakes Simcoe, Couchiching, Muskoka, Rosseau, Joseph, Nipissing ... and the Muskoka and Magnetewan rivers.[20]
Alexander Cockburn’s Muskoka and Nipissing Navigation Company operated steamships on the Muskoka Lakes that connected to the Northern’s railway line at Gravenhurst. The furthest point reached by the steamers was Rosseau. The Rosseau–Nipissing Road extended from Rosseau to the south shore of Lake Nipissing. When the Northern issued its first guide to this area in 1875, it listed