Within three decades of the town’s pioneer John Beal arriving by canoe, Bracebridge had grown to become an economic centre despite the number of marginal farms in its surrounding townships. In 1890 the building of another vast leather tannery and the creation of a major park within the town exemplified the town’s twin pillars of economic development and vital cultural life. Both reinforced the robust sense townsfolk had of Bracebridge as a go-ahead community.
The possibilities continued to dazzle. By the 1890s James Boyer was secretary and a director of the Bracebridge & Trading Lake Railway Company, which aimed to build a railroad from Bracebridge east to Baysville and Lake of Bays, and west to Beaumaris and Lake Muskoka. Railways, including the transcontinental that passed through Muskoka, had become an exciting physical link with the wider world.
Canada counted for the biggest expanse of British red on the world map, and thanks to common political institutions and language, shared laws and legal principles, and even derivative English judicial offices such as the justice of the peace, Canada’s “British subjects” experienced what historian Carl Berger called “a sense of Empire.” Despite this conscious connection to grandeur on a global scale, the country as a whole consisted of fewer than five million people sprinkled over a seemingly endless territory. Ontario styled itself Canada’s “Empire Province,” and, at the start of the 1890s, boasted a population of 2,100,000. The population of Muskoka, which in 1891 was 15,666 and rose some 5,000 more by the turn of the century, was still a far cry from the millions of people promoters like Thomas McMurray had boasted would by now be prospering on their free-grant farms.
Despite this fact, life in Bracebridge, reflected week by week on the rival pages of the Grit Gazette and the Tory Herald, unfolded within a confident sense people had of being part of something larger than themselves. News and advertisements from the United States, reports of global developments, and accounts of national political events, all meshed seamlessly with local births and deaths, weddings and hockey matches, updates on crop prices, and advertisements seeking able-bodied harvesters to go west by train and bring Prairie wheat in from the field.
Queen Victoria, who had ascended the throne in 1837, the same year David Thompson first mapped Muskoka, was well into the longest reign of any British monarch, having herself become as much an institution as the Crown itself. Bracebridge had its Victoria Hotel, Victoria Street, and like most every municipality in Ontario, its Queen Street. In 1897 the agricultural society’s show grounds were renamed “Jubilee Park” to commemorate Victoria’s diamond jubilee.
The long political reign of the Liberal-Conservative Party in Canada under its wise and wily leader Sir John A. Macdonald, who helped form the country in 1867 with the creation of a new federal constitution, and then oversee its development with bold new national policies and the addition of Prince Edward Island, Manitoba, and British Columbia as provinces, was spluttering to its end. After Sir John A.’s death in 1891, which shocked the country not because he was an old man but because it seemed a Canadian institution had vanished, a succession of Tory prime ministers — John Abbott, John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell, and Charles Tupper — held office before the Liberal leader, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, was elected in 1896. Laurier’s leadership in re-fashioning the Liberal Party of Canada and forming a “cabinet of all the talents” by bringing to Ottawa such illustrious provincial leaders as Ontario’s Premier Oliver Mowat began an historic shift in the country’s political alignments. All these events were fully reported in the local newspapers and discussed avidly in Bracebridge, a highly political town.
The 1890s stood as a high water mark for the British Empire. By the turn of the new century, Queen Victoria would be gone, another human institution vanished. Britain’s seemingly invincible military was bogged down in a war in South Africa that would extract a high price, as a relatively small number of resolute fighters in a faraway land stalled the world’s greatest military power in its tracks. Young Bracebridge men were transported to fight and die in South Africa because Canada was an integral part of the British Empire. For London this war was important, and in Muskoka emotions ran high in support of the blood-letting. Market Street in central Bracebridge would be renamed “Kimberley” Avenue after the South African city, and a triangle of land in the centre of town was designated “Memorial Park” for the sons of Muskoka settlers who died while killing Dutch settlers on their farmlands half a world away. The British proved as adept in drawing from their colonies healthy young men to die in their wars as they had been in dispatching to the colonies their troublesome dandies, convicted felons, and orphaned children — a two-way flow of traffic orchestrated by the benignly misnamed “Mother Country.”
Despite the carnage of the Boer War, the last decade of the 1800s would be popularly dubbed “The Gay Nineties,” capturing the open gaiety in society exuded by those able to enjoy life’s pleasures. Beneath the surface glitter of the Victorian era at its zenith loomed rawer reality.
With the arrival of another economic downturn as the final decade of the century began, doubts about the country’s viability resurfaced. In Toronto, Goldwyn Smith, journalist and renowned professor of economics, elevated such misgivings to hard-ribbed analysis in his book Canada and the Canadian Question, in which he marshalled economic, geographic, and political reasons for folding Canada’s brief experiment with nationhood into union with the United States.
In its celebration of life, the revels of the “Gay Nineties” offered a popular way to defy and transcend these social, economic, political, and military strains. Celebration was in the atmosphere of Bracebridge. Embattled individuals, who struggled in their circumstances and from time to time found themselves before Magistrate James Boyer, were otherwise at the band concerts, in the parades, and on the sports fields. Individuals experiencing rougher social conditions and the raw edges of life might not themselves have chosen the moniker “Gay Nineties” for their times, but then people in a position to name eras are seldom the threadbare folk living on hard energy at society’s margins.
In the predictable boom-bust cycle of a capitalist economy, the decade advanced from economic depression into a recovery. With general prosperity returning, many Muskokans did have a good time. Bracebridge newspapers ran accounts of local sporting matches, outdoor church services, visiting circuses, fabulous touring bands, fall fairs, community picnics, theatrical performances, and festive excursions across the lakes by boat, down the roads by buggy, and along the tracks by train.
In the struggle to overcome all of these ups and downs, Muskoka’s incomparable character emerged. From the opening of the settlement the district was a place of natural beauty, physical hardship, dashed hopes, sudden profits, irreconcilable conflicts, and new starts. The diverse peoples flocking from distant places to claim land were, year by year, increasingly re-formed by the land’s claim on them. It made them democrats and stoics.
Families had become homesteaders in a localized Ontario economy of mixed farming and wage labour in forestry, mills, tanneries, and manufacturing workplaces, integrated with facilities for transportation, accommodation, and services for vacationers. They dwelt on their rural acreages or in Muskoka’s main towns of Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, and Huntsville; the larger villages of Bala, MacTier, Port Carling, Rosseau, Baysville, Dorset, and Port Sydney; or the smaller settlements such as Walker’s Point, Windermere, Milford Bay, Utterson, Dwight, Falkenburg. These people lived amid rugged conditions and scenic splendour in the Canadian Shield’s northern hinterland but still close to the southern cities, witnessing changes for which they were both designer and creator, and of which they were sometimes beneficiary and other times victim. They were interacting alike with well-to-do folk trekking into the district for vacations, and edgy neighbours who were scrounging year-round just to get by.
Out of the rawness of this cauldron emerged a distinctive new variety of people,