"The Land is Beautiful, but Also Savage, Wild, and Far From the Comforts of Hearth and Home"

The story of human history in Algonquin continues from where we left off here:

http://americanvoyages.blogspot.com/2012/08/i-never-imagined-i-would-see-land-like.html

The Algonkin continued to visit their sacred summer home every year as a slow trickle of French settlers and the births of the first true French-Canadians started visibly changing the St. Lawrence and lower Ottawa valleys.  By and large, the voyageurs bypassed Algonquin to head out to the boreal forests north of the Great Plains or south into the Mississippi-Missouri watershed.  We do not know why this is the case, but the good relations between the Algonkin and the French probably had a lot to do with it.  While arrangements could be, and often were, made with the various other Algonquian peoples such as the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Nipissings to hunt and trap in their lands, voyageur activity in the upper Ottawa watershed largely took place along the northern tributaries in the part of the Laurentian mountains that rose across the river in Quebec.  Perhaps Brule and Champlain made it clear that Algonquin was to remain inviolate.  We may never know, but we do know it remained a place unto itself even after the native peoples of Canada and the French-Canadians took on a new existence under British rule in 1763.

Settlement in Ontario by new colonists from the British Isles took place at a very slow pace, only really getting underway once the United States won its independence from Britain.  Americans who did not desire independence found themselves increasingly unpopular.  In some cases, hostility against them was taken to the point where even if they did acknowledge the emergence of the new sovereign entity they lived in, their homes and land were burned to a crisp and their lives threatened with violence if not outright death.  While some of these people, now called loyalists, were still passionate enough about a connection to Britain that they could only live under the rule of Westminster, many more simply found that the conditions for them had become intolerable.

Public Domain, a statue commemorating the arrival of loyalists into Ontario in front of McMaster university in Hamilton, Ontario.  Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UnitedEmpireLoyalistsHamilton.JPG

They found themselves exiled, many settling in Nova Scotia, many making their way into southern and eastern Ontario.  The birth of modern American-Canadian relations was rocky, to say the least.  Had they continued to exist in such a chilly state, Ontario might have looked quite different today.  Why on earth, after all, would an agrarian colonial transplanted society ever even try to head north into rocky, cold lands that were the domain of the savages, French-Canadians, and the rough and tumble men of the Hudson's Bay Company?  Southern and eastern Ontario at least resembled something of what had been left behind, and with a bit of landscaping, could even appear to be a true little piece of England across the waves.  

Well, the first English-speaking Ontarians were compelled to move north yet again by the Americans, but this time out of economic opportunities.  Canada had already found an economic bastion in the timber industry, helping Britain and her allies achieve naval victory over Napoleon's forces by providing an incredible source of lumber for the allied shipyards.  One tree, more than any other perhaps in the history of the world, became an object of desire, the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).

100+ foot pines on the shore of Lake Travers, from a September 2011 trip by Bob and Diana McElroy.

The picture above can be misleading, as the White Pines sticking out above the canopy seem larger than they are due to the surrounding forest recovering from a violent wind event in 1999, but the visual impact is representative of how these trees appeared throughout their range before they were decimated by logging in the 19th century.  White Pines, many over 150 feet tall and some over 200 feet high absolutely dominated forests stretching from Iowa to Nova Scotia and south along the Appalachians into northern Georgia.  They seemed to be countless, and the large amount of harvest worthy timber from a single giant tree made the trees seem inexhaustible.  The American economy, however, has a way of turning plentiful natural resources into barren landscapes.

The need of the growing United States for lumber was the reason for both the near demise of the wilderness of Algonquin and its salvation.  The land that had survived as a majestic testament to the awe-inspiring power of nature had survived thousands of years of human activity that kept away from it out of awe, respect, and even distaste had finally met its match in the power of the saw.  Come by tomorrow to see this story continue to unfold.