Shaped by the West Wind: Nature and History in Georgian Bay

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Nowhere on the Great Lakes is there a shoreline as barren, forbidding,
and dangerous as the northeastern reaches of Georgian Bay and its 30,000
islands. Yet this stretch of low, raspy ridges, wind-blasted vegetation,
treacherous shoals, and wave-scoured islets has achieved iconic status
in the hierarchy of Ontario landscapes. For most of us, images
bequeathed by the Group of Seven and the titles affixed to them sum up
the landscape and its significance: A.Y. Jackson, Terre Sauvage and
Night on Pine Island; Arthur Lismer, A Westerly Gale, Georgian Bay, and
The Guide’s Home. Although Claire Elizabeth Campbell affirms the
importance of their work, she employs the multidisciplinary perspectives
of landscape history to reveal a richer, deeper intellectual
appreciation of the landscape than physical geography alone imparts.

“This book,” she writes, “is the story of the reactions people
have when they encounter an unfamiliar landscape: the plans they concoct
for it, and the changes it forces them to make.” Readers first
experience this austere portion of the Bay through the work of
surveyors, chart-makers and map-makers, whose work both revealed and
brought order out of chaos, rendering the region amenable to government
and administration, economic exploitation and the potential for profit,
recreational pursuits and the prospect of personal renewal. In the five
chapters that follow, the author explains the nature of the assault that
fishers, foresters, and prospectors made on the region’s resources;
how and why storytellers from professional historians to children after
their first canoe trip imagined the experiences of Amerindians and
voyageurs as they did; the culture of wilderness inspired by a striking
marine environment of open water, barrier islands, and sheltered inlets;
the cottage industry for those privileged to own private pieces of the
rock; and provincial parks for those who do not.

This is the work of a trained, sensitive, and penetrating mind, a
scholar who loves both her discipline and region deeply enough to write
for a general as well as an academic readership. To some extent she
succeeds in bridging the gap. Her prose style is clean and lucid. On the
other hand, those who are unacquainted with the theoretical structures
of landscape history will either lose patience or conclude that learning
the game is worth the effort. One wonders how many lovers of Georgian
Bay and its stories will be frogmarched through an introduction that,
though skilfully written, is still that mandatory and measured stomp
through the literature of the discipline. One fervently hopes that
non-academic readers will regard the introduction, the cornucopia of
endnotes, and the superb bibliography as bonuses rather than barriers.