First published in 1878, this is an account of the experiences of a widow and her grown-up children who emigrated to Muskoka, Ontario in Canada.

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Muskoka. Now a magnet for nature tourists and wealthy cottagers, the region underwent a profound transition at the turn of the twentieth century. Making Muskoka traces the evolution of the region from 1870 to 1920. Over this period, settler colonialism upended Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee communities, but the land was unsuited to farming, and within the first generation of resettlement, tourism became an integral feature of life. Andrew Watson considers issues such as rural identity, tensions between large- and household-scale logging operations, and the dramatic effects of consumer culture and the global shift toward fossil fuels on settlers’ ability to control the tourism economy after 1900. Making Muskoka uncovers the lived experience of rural communities shaped by tourism at a time when sustainable opportunities for a sedentary life were few on the Canadian Shield, and reveals the consequences for those living there year-round.

A tale of deception and adversity, Hardscrabble tells how unscrupulous politicians, emigration agents, and philanthropists lured impoverished emigrants to farm the Muskoka backwoods in the 1870s. What these new settlers weren't told was that their land was situated on the rocky Canadian Shield.