By Gregory Clark, August 4, 1923.
Hundreds of Abandoned Homesteads Throughout the Lakes Region of the Great Summer Resort Bear Witness to a Past of Hardship and Despair.
To the world Muskoka means gaiety, ease and joy.
It is a bit of the earth, it seems, set aside at the creation for the delights of summer.
But in back of those bright shores that are studded with hotels and cottages are evidences of an epic struggle in former days.
Muskoka and winter, Muskoka and grim hardship, Muskoka and dark despair seem absurd contradictions in terms.
But back over those splendid hills of light green and dark green, on little side roads where lovers stroll, throughout that beautiful region now largely given over to the summer resort, you will come across hundreds of ruined and abandoned homesteads, the mute records of at least one defeat Ontario dealt her pioneers.
The lake region of Muskoka is peculiar in this respect, there is no average farmstead. As you motor through the district you pass some small areas that appear to be excellent farm lands. But when you leave the highways and the neighborhood of the larger towns you strike the great contrast. For miles you will traverse hills and dales of wilderness, with infrequent clearings where a pitiful, tumbledown little shanty, new or old, scrabbles a meagre existence from a small patch of ground. Then you will emerge all of a sudden on a wide and beautiful clearing of hundreds of acres, and in its midst a modern red brick house, large barns and out-buildings, in perfect repair, every evidence of being a very successful farm.
There is no average. Either they are very well fixed or very poor.
And to add a sinister touch to the poor ones, the wilds are filled with hundreds of these ruined and abandoned homesteads, most of them the log houses and rough barns of the pioneer, the picturesque, hand-made homesteads of the builders of the province.
The reason is simple enough. That part of Muskoka consists largely of sand and rocks. It is fine soil for pines and hollyhocks, but poor for potatoes and other fruitful crops. Scattered all over the district are deposits of better soil, valleys where great forests have stood for ages, flats where swamps have been easily or naturally drained away.
When the pioneers came thrusting into Muskoka from the south they knew not which was good soil and which was stones. The forest hid that vital fact. The shrewdest were rewarded with a hundred or two hundred acres of loam over and in the sand. The less shrewd came wearily into some gorgeous valley filled with the sunset which Muskoka alone can devise and proudly and gladly they made a camp and, unladed their ox-cars and cried to the dark hills:
“Home!”
And when with gigantic toil which this older part of the province has forgotten, even when it looks at its endless fields, the forest was torn down and laid in piles and burned, these less shrewd pioneers found under the strong and sturdy forest only hummocks of sand and countless boulders, and here and there outcroppings of the fundamental rock which lies shallow under the whole of that northern country.
If you look at some of these abandoned homesteads with a recreative eye, you will be able to reconstruct the whole tragedy. For the clearings about the log shanties are not regular and ordered, spreading out squarely, but are in patches, a couple of acres cleared here, and over a ridge in a neighboring gulley, a couple of acres more, and so on, as the pioneer, finding rocks and sand in this dark valley where he so gladly cried “Home!” searched each autumn, with fire and axe, for that stretch of hidden earth which would be black and smooth and soft to the plow.
You don’t have to travel far in from your cottage or hotel to find one of these tragedies clearly written in logs and boulders and brushy meadows already falling victim to the enfolding forest. Fate has played a pretty trick with Muskoka. For fifty years it was the scene of a thousand failures made more bitter by the few successes. To-day, it is a nation’s playground, full of ease and music and brightness. Its million dollar breezes dimpling lakes and driving light sails and cooling ten thousand screened verandahs, have touched far different scenes.
The opening up of the west and its prairies and the arrival of the summer resort saved Muskoka from being a tragedy for those who had pioneered into it. Hundreds who had struggled faithfully to find the black acres under the forest gave up and went to the west, from which, twenty-five to forty years ago, fabulous reports were coming into the east. Far away were boundless acres of black soil covered not with forests, but with grass. To select your homestead you had not to cruise a wilderness and trust to luck for what the clearing would show, but merely walk over your hundred and sixty acres and feel it with your feet. No clearing but to drive the plow through the sod and burn a little swale of willows.
And by the hundred from Muskoka, as from all other parts of the province where disappointment had sought out the pioneer, they packed up and set forth for the west.
Those who remained, either from doubt or from poverty, were persuaded to remain by the arrival of the summer resorters. The exploitation of Muskoka as a summer resort is thirty years old, and yet it has only begun.
When the first cottagers came they brought relief to the poorest settlers. Garden crops could be sold at the best of prices. Milk, butter and meat were in demand. The labor of the man was needed for clearing, building and well-digging about the summer cottages.
Other settlers took in a few summer boarders and so were put on the first step towards the summer hotel. The majority and many of the best of the Muskoka hotels are run by the descendants of pioneers. From keeping a few visitors in the homestead to the erection of a small hotel and from the small hotel to the modern Muskoka hotel were logical steps.
There are golf links in Muskoka on pastures that were regarded as hopeless by the pioneer who cleared them. There are farms in Muskoka found to be more profitable as pleasure grounds for two months of the year than as farms for twelve months.
One old lady in her eighties told me the story of her pioneering in Muskoka. She came as a girl of eighteen by ox-cart into the country now the heart of the gayest resorts. A party of fifteen entered the district. They cleared their acres and found sand and stones. But they added to their income by cutting lumber for the markets at Bracebridge and Gravenhurst. Winter was desperately hard. They were cooped up for five months, while wolves possessed the forests.
They lived poorly and lonely, and the men went off in the winter to the lumber camps and in the summer added small patches to their clearings and tended sparse crops of hay and wheat and a limited garden.
When the west boomed her brothers and brothers-in-law and other men of the community promptly abandoned their clearings and went west. Everyone of them proved successful farmers in the west, died, well off, and deeded over their little Muskoka clearings to their sister, who owns hundreds of acres of bush and scrub.
Yet she still dwells in a small and poor farmhouse amid about forty acres of cultivated soil, growing corn and vegetables for the summer resorts, and pasturing a herd of cows for milk for the same market. She is poor, but quite happy. Her grandchildren own and operate several tourist hotels throughout the lakes.
Not far out of Bracebridge I talked to a settler in his seventies. His two chums, after five years pioneering beside him in Muskoka, gave up and went to the legendary west. They sold him their clearings for three hundred dollars each, no cash down, to be paid in instalments as the remaining man found convenient,
Both the wayfarers settled out of Winnipeg and became very wealthy wheat farmers and cattle-raisers. Both are dead now. But for many years the two of them made trips every other year to Muskoka for fishing and hunting. They came and stayed with their old chum who stuck to Muskoka. In this way, be paid off the three hundred dollars each for the clearings, the westerners paying part cash for their accommodation and part the old debt until it was wiped out.
You would think they would have given him the clearings. That they would have persuaded him to give up his miserable stone acres and come out west with them.
“This is good land,” said the old man to me, “I have been very happy on it. I have more fun than those chums of mine. They died before me. They had to come back here for their fun. Ther coaxed me to come out west, but they knew I wouldn’t budge-“
Those two well-off westerners wouldn’t have insulted their chum by offering him their abandoned land for nothing.
“Still you have had to struggle hard for what you’ve got here?” I asked, waving at the little unpainted home, the rock bound pasture, the undefeated forest all about the clearing.
“No harder than anybody else. I had a strong time. My sons are doing well, some in the towns, some at the resorts.
“Nobody can dig a well like me. I have doctors and lawyers and millionaires coming to me for advice and help all the time. They would be no good without me. There was a bank president just drove up here to this clearing an hour ago to get me to tell him where to build his new boat house. Big blue car. I am going with him to-morrow to show him where-“
So it wasn’t a tragedy altogether. They had a strong time. The desolate homesteads you will find everywhere in the lake region of Muskoka were the original settlings of men who went west or moved out to the lake shores to meet the cottagers and the tourists.
Still, for all the joy and the fame and gaiety that have made Muskoka a beautiful, byword there has been a grim contrast of bitter struggle and disillusionment which somehow hallows the district and justifies the compensation of these days of dancing and idling and making merry.
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