The history of Ontario's premier cottage destination, Muskoka, was not commonplace or uneventful. Beginning in the 1860's, emigrants from the British Isles and Europe were lured to this desolate region with the promise of free land grants for farming. What they found were mature forests, swamp, and never ending rock. Their heroic attempts to make a living farming on the Precambrian Shield did not come without considerable discomfort. Pioneer Muskoka documents the struggles faced by these early homesteaders and their response to hardship, isolation, disease and poverty. This is the tale of a community banding together to overcome fear with courage and determination. Readers will be astounded by the lengths these settlers went in their quest to make a home for themselves and future generations in Muskoka. The eventual shift from farming to more profitable industries such as lumber and tourism brought a shift in attitude towards this now highly sought after locale. The first families, through their enormous efforts, were able to create this positive and enduring change.

Thomas Osborne delivers a gripping account of 1870s Ontario pioneer life. The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale. For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic." Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.

Recreation and Sport are an integral part of Canadian culture. This is nowhere more evident than in the Muskoka District of Ontario. Beginning in the 1860s, people from more populated areas of Southern Ontario and the North Eastern United States flocked to Muskoka to enjoy nature's bounty. They came to fish, hunt, canoe, sail, swim, hike and explore. Many vacationed at one of the ever expanding selection of Muskoka resorts. Others built their own recreational retreats or cottages. Also beginning in the 1860s, Free Land Grant recipients ventured to the area to take land and attempt to farm it. They became the permanent population base and set about developing their own recreations and sporting organizations. This book surveys the attempts of all of Muskoka's residents and visitors to enjoy the recreational opportunities the region provided. The main focus of this local history is on how people in the past used recreation and sport to enhance their lives. In other words, what they did for exercise and fun.

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.

Ghost Towns of Muskoka explores the tragic history of a collection of communities from across Muskoka whose stars have long since faded. Today, these ghost towns are merely a shadow – or spectre – of what they once were. Some have disappeared entirely, having been swallowed by regenerating forests, while others have been reduced to foundations, forlorn buildings, and silent ruins. A few support a handful of inhabitants, but even these towns are wrapped in a ghostly shroud. But this book isnt only about communities that have died. Rather it is about communities that lived, vibrantly at that, if only for a brief time. Its about the people whose dreams for a better life these villages represented; the people who lived, loved, laboured, and ultimately died in these small wilderness settlements. And its about an era in history, those early heady days of Muskoka settlement when the forests were flooded with loggers and land-hungry settlers.

This book presents individuals who have made an important contribution to tourism. Most are entrepreneurs in the classic sense, but others are individuals who have had unintentional subsequent effects on tourism through their actions. The book is arranged in four parts: (i) giants of hospitality (chapters 1-5); (ii) giants of travel (chapters 6-10); (iii) giants of activities (chapters 11-14); and (iv) giants of development (chapters 15-19).

In this lavishly illustrated new book, the author of Early Life in Upper Canada and other famous histories of pioneer days, relates the story of the Canadian farm and farmer from the primitive to the machine age. Farm life and farm processes are pictured in fascinating detail, and Mr. Guillet quotes generously from books, newspapers, letters and hitherto unpublished archives material, using the words of those who actually witnessed the life of other days–the pioneers themselves, or the more observant of the numerous travellers who visited Canada during the period. The 450 illustrations contained in the two volumes of this work include many never before reproduced. A detailed list of contents and a full index enable the reader to find readily any topic of pioneer life to which he wishes to refer.

In publishing the human stories behind the late-19th-century cases of Magistrate James Boyer in Bracebridge, Ontario, and Muskoka, his great-grandson J. Patrick Boyer shows that Canadian society hasn't changed much whether the focus is on early road rage, the plight of abused women, environmental contamination, or punitive treatment of the poor.

James Boyer's impressive life story - editor of the first newspaper in Ontario's northern districts, homesteading farmer, schoolteacher, town clerk of Bracebridge for decades, Methodist choir director, Muskoka district magistrate from 1878 to 1900 - is well documented in books and newspaper features. Behind his noteworthy Canadian life, however, lurked the haunting shadow of another. Isaac Jelfs, a young English clerk, became scapegoat for a Stratford law office scandal. In Birmingham the desperate Jelfs married, believing the older woman was pregnant by him. Unemployed, he tried to start over as a soldier with the Dragoon Guards in the Crimean War. As a deserter who escaped that mad slaughter to New York, he joined a major Broadway Avenue firm, fell in love with another woman, and fled to Canada with her and their love child to begin yet another new life, this time as Muskoka pioneer "James Boyer."

A feud that began in the Muskoka's backwoods comes to a dramatic climax with precedent-setting events in the House of Commons at Ottawa after a partisan Tory returning officer uses a technicality to make no return of the Liberal candidate as the district's elected MP in the 1872 general election.