Algonquin Revisited: Biography to Hagiography to Label

Abstract

The more we know of its peculiar history, more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems.... It is not pristine sanctuary.... Instead, it is product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by stuff of which it is made (Cronon 69). (1) Indeed, as refuge from our increasingly strident, urban way of life, Algonquin's 7,725 square km of forests, lakes, and rivers have assumed an almost incalculable importance as living with vanishing past. How many city children have, or will, come to Algonquin and hear for first and only time in their lives mournful howl of wolf? How many will see first hand--in Algonquin and nowhere else--a facsimilie [sic] of wilderness that once covered all of Ontario? (Algonquin Park Official Website) Which description best suits Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park: living link or reasonable facsimile of wilderness? Both fit. The site may embody what Patricia Jasen observes as the history of real people, real power, and real money, but those facts lie hidden below official rhetoric (28). Occupying space marked by Latitude 45' 10 to 46' 00, Longitude 77' 30 to 79' 10, Park also hovers overhead in Ontario like some cultural dirigible. Imagery now forms nexus between Park and public. Examining how that site came to be subsumed within images that follow allows us to follow process detaching Park from materiality. Trees, rocks, and water inflate into imagery, itself shaped by imaginative and commercial agendas. Everything that was once solid melts into air. Moving from actual parkland to Figure 1--in Central Canada an icon of Canadian nationalism--to Figure 2--originating in one of Canada's leading contemporary commercial enterprises, Roots Clothing--involves us in both biography and hagiography. Among competing providers of outdoor/recreational/casual garb and gear, Roots through its label conveys very specific image of a country as rugged and unspoiled as it is fragile and beautiful, vast expanses of green wilderness intersected by pure and sparkling water systems (Pevere 63-64; see also Raffan 131; Johnston 128). The question I address here is just how topography morphed into imagery, and specifically into this particular imagery? Others have traced outlines of forces--social, commercial, political, and cultural--whose pressures effected this transformation. (2) My survey is detailed narrative of this process as it unfolds. Yet this process, however symbolic, nonetheless functions within historical framework. Dates can be assigned, names named. Even when none of facts here are new, their realignment within new narrative casts new light upon their interrelationship. Glimpsing that interrelationship is my purpose here. I The complexities involved in generating public policy insinuate rather than thrust Park into Euro-Canadian history and consciousness of Southern Ontario, A good place to begin is 1850, when most of agricultural land of Southern Ontario had come under ownership and eventual cultivation. By 1855, Opeongo settlement road extended as far as Bark Lake, edge of what is now Park's eastern limit (Wadland 1998, 3). A colonization company had settled Kaszubian Poles further east of there in 1859, in district south of Eganville (Welcome to Wilno). The Ottawa Valley was ceasing to be lumbering preserve; logging and settlement frontiers began to intersect. Only time impeded similar abutment happening west of there, in an area called at times Madawaska Highlands, or Muskoka Region. Uneasiness over this oncoming collision converted lumber industry into first of Algonquin Park's progenitors. A forest industry historian parallels Big Timber's forays into hinterlands of Quebec and Northern Ontario with remapping that marked imperial scramble for Africa. …