The Land Between: Northwestern Ontario Resource Development, 1880 to the 1990s

John Van West is a policy analyst with the Ontario Native Affairs
Secretariat.

This book is a detailed study of resource development in northwestern
Ontario, an area the authors refer to as “the land between” Sault
Ste. Marie and the Manitoba border.

It was fur, minerals, timber, and fish that first encouraged
Euro-Canadian settlement in the region. The rural and urban landscape
that emerged was characterized by transient logging and mining camps,
resource-dependent communities (including agricultural communities),
railway towns, and two large settlements—Sault Ste. Marie and Thunder
Bay. In most cases, these settlements and the resource industries that
sustained them were controlled by American entrepreneurial interests.

Although the first inhabitants of “the land between” were Native
and Euro-Canadian, the authors offer only limited discussion of Native
people and the impact of resource-development activities on their
communities. Their analysis of the various resource sectors is also
uneven. The commercial fisheries receive far less coverage than, for
example, mining and forest industries, an imbalance that is due in part
to the limitations in the historical record.

Supported by numerous maps, detailed endnotes, and an extensive
bibliography, this groundbreaking study will appeal to historians,
geographers, land-use planners, and anthropologists.