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Lake Nipissing, with its miles of beautiful sandy beaches and its many bays, has often been described as a “beautiful sheet of water.” The seventh largest lake in Ontario after the Great Lakes,[1] it lies at the centre of an area that is both scenic and historic (Map 1). It drains through the French River into Georgian Bay, although once, before the last ice age, it flowed to the east. North Bay, a city of 54,000, lies nestled along the shore of Lake Nipissing, reaching the escarpment to the north and the shores of Trout Lake. Short portages link Trout Lake to Turtle Lake, Pine Lake, Lake Talon, and finally, the Mattawa River, which flows into the Ottawa River at Mattawa — “the meeting of the waters.” The entire waterway between Mattawa and Georgian Bay is known as the Nipissing Passageway and, with its many waterfalls, is one of the most scenic sections of the historic fur trade route from Lachine, near Montreal, to the Great Lakes and beyond. The founder of New France, Samuel de Champlain, explored this route in 1615. Missionaries, fur traders, explorers, and voyageurs alike have travelled it as well. It is, therefore, familiar to anyone who has ever taught a Canadian history survey course, including this author. The Nipissing area disappears from most Canadian history textbooks after 1825, when the Montreal fur trade gave way to trade out of Hudson Bay. The area itself as a destination, or as a place of importance in its own right, seldom, if ever, reappears.

Since moving to North Bay to teach history at Nipissing University twenty-six years ago, I have had the opportunity to experience this area on a more personal level. With its rocky shorelines, towering white pines, and mixed hardwood forests, the natural environment of this area has much to offer nature lovers and outdoor enthusiasts. Like many others, I have my favourite spots that I return to over and over again. On the Amable du Fond River, a tributary of the Mattawa, an extreme narrowing of its rocky banks at Eau Claire Gorge constricts the water into a turbulent bubbling mass of white water, best viewed from the cliffs above. Just west of North Bay, Duchesnay Creek cascades over a series of rapid drops over large boulders at Duchesnay Falls; both change with the seasons and the level of the water, and yet are always fascinating, the sound of the rushing water hypnotic. Red trilliums and other spring flowers are abundant along the trails leading from the Falls. The hiking routes at Samuel de Champlain Park are a great place to enjoy views of countless native flowers, the pine forest above, and the Mattawa River far below. A paddle across Pimisi Bay rewards you with a view of the historic Talon Chutes, where the drop from the tall cliffs to the bay into the water below is thirty metres; unlike the more adventuresome, I have never had the urge to jump into the water below.[2] The French River, with its maze of islands, provides endless scenic views. A hike to Récollets Falls, now reachable from Highway 69, provides just a small taste of what spending time on the rocky shores of the French might be like. In winter, after a snowfall, or when the ice freezes on the trees, a breathtaking wonderland emerges.

Map 1. This relief map of the Nipissing Passageway study area shows the gradual decline in elevation from Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay. The irregular pattern of the drainage system, which runs along fault lines, can also be seen. To the east of Lake Nipissing, the Mattawa River, surrounded by high hills, flows along a major fault line into the Ottawa River at Mattawa. This geography was a major factor in the history of the area.

As a historian, however, it is not just the scenic landscape that has captured my attention, but also the remnants of a former time that linger — in buildings, cemeteries, sometimes just as a plaque. While conducting oral histories for a research project on family and community history in the area extending from Mattawa to North Bay, I had the occasion to travel through some of the smaller rural communities, places like Grand Desert, which are now hardly more than a name on a map. Several rural churches in this area have closed, but remain standing. A few, seemingly in the middle of a field, are still in service. Old schools are sometimes abandoned, sometimes converted for other uses. Travels into the country to enjoy the fall colours in the Nipissing and Restoule area south of Lake Nipissing resulted in similar discoveries. The old general store at Commanda, now a museum, still stands as a testament to a past era that is all but forgotten. At French River, a private home retains a sign from its days as a CPR station. For years there was one little white clapboard cabin in between the larger houses along Memorial Drive in North Bay. Now it is gone. There are two small log cabins with large chimneys, dwarfed by the highrise condominium complexes that surround them on Lakeshore Drive. At the corner of Banner Avenue, a crude totem pole once stood beside a souvenir shop, along with another at Jessup Creek, across the street from the modernized Sunset Inn, near a sign that marks the entrance to what might have been a campground. Around Sunset Point along Lakeshore Drive (what used to be Callander Road) there are still numerous cabins, most of them part of motel complexes. A better understanding of the history of the area has allowed me to make sense of these built landscapes.

I first heard about the Dionne quintuplets as a child. When I started teaching at Nipissing University, I made a point of showing my Canadian social history class Pierre Berton’s film on the Dionnes because it was a national story that had occurred locally. Early on, I drove from Callander to Corbeil to see what remained of Quintland, where the Dionne quintuplets were displayed to the public; other than Nipissing Manor, which I recognized as the Big House (built to house the Dionne quintuplets and their family when they were reunited), it didn’t seem that much else remained. It was not until it was pointed out to me much later that I made out the former Dionne nursery, a former souvenir shop, and part of the fence that kept visitors out between viewings. When I started interviewing locals who remembered the 1930s, I heard over and over again how the Dionne quintuplets and the tourists they generated had transformed the area during the Great Depression. One person I talked to, however, indicated that tourism had been an important part of the Nipissing area well before the quintuplets’ arrival, and thought it was a shame that most people seemed to think that the boom in visitors only started with them. Her grandfather had started taking visitors out on Lake Nipissing to go fishing at the end of the nineteenth century.

These conversations and my experience of the Nipissing area led me to undertake this project. I wanted to better understand how the quintuplets had impacted the area, but more importantly, to know what had come before. How important was tourism before the 1930s, and why did most locals so closely associate it with the quintuplets? What first brought visitors to this area, and what did they do when they got here? My original plan was to look at the entire four hundred years since Champlain passed through the area in 1615, but in the end, that proved too ambitious. Only a brief outline of the period before 1870 follows (Chapter 1); the focus of this study is on the period from the 1870s to the early 1950s. Despite the significance of the Quintland years in the history of visitors to the Nipissing area, the famous quintuplets are not the whole story.

From the 1870s to the 1920s, long-distance travel was almost exclusively by rail. Chapter 2 outlines the railway companies present in the area and examines the way in which the railways, to promote traffic, constructed the area as a “wilderness,” marketed as a sportsman’s paradise. Chapter 3 examines accounts, mostly published, of fishing for giant muskies on the French River, moose hunting in the Mattawa area, deer hunting in the Loring area, and of canoeing the Mattawa and French Rivers. The Nipissing area had become a destination, or rather a set of destinations in close proximity to one another, each with its own appeal. These sportsmen found themselves, not in pristine wilderness, as the guidebooks implied, but on the lumbering frontier where they made their way with the help of aboriginal guides. Chapter 4 examines the rudimentary infrastructure that arose around the sportsmen. Outfitters soon emerged to facilitate their stay and to provide them with the guides, boats, and supplies they needed. When the CPR opened its own resort in the area, the French River benefitted from its extensive national and international publicity campaigns. The Nipissing area, especially the French River, was “discovered” by many American sportsmen who came both as members of hunting or fishing clubs and as cottagers.

By the 1930s, sportsmen increasingly arrived by automobile rather than rail, and they brought their families with them. Chapter 5 looks at the way in which the province of Ontario orchestrated its own advertising campaign to publicize the advantages of its “Lakeland Playground” as a vacation destination in the 1920s — a publicity campaign aimed primarily at an American audience. Road maps and lure books were not enough, however. Good roads were crucial to attracting the American motorist, and road construction into the “north” supported the province’s plans. At the onset of the Great Depression, the number of American visitors to Ontario dropped dramatically and the future of the tourism industry looked bleak. The situation changed almost overnight when quintuplets were born to a farm family in Corbeil, in the heart of the Nipissing area. Born on May 28, 1934, the Dionne quintuplets — the first set of quintuplets to survive more than a few days — began, almost from birth, to draw people to the area. Between 1935 and 1943, the “pilgrimage” to visit the Dionne quintuplets was the most prestigious motor tour one could take. During this time, over three million visitors made their way to Quintland; Chapter 6 explores this phenomenon. Exploring the challenge of making room for this sudden explosion of visitors to the area through to the late 1940s, Chapter 7 provides a close analysis of the accommodation available in 1947 — that, and captures the expansion related to Quintland.

The extent to which this recent history of the Nipissing area can still be “read” in the current landscape is examined in Chapter 8. Very little effort has been made to preserve the early tourism landscape, or even that of Quintland, but signs of it remain nonetheless.

Just as they did in the era of canoe travel, many travellers still pass through the Nipissing area on their way elsewhere. For more than a century now, however, Nipissing has also been a destination, at first only during the summer, then year round. People have come to this somewhat neglected area of northern Ontario located between the very popular Algonquin Park and the Temagami* Forest Reserve, to be in contact with nature, to fish, to hunt, and to relax. Some families have been returning to the French River area for six generations. It has always been their special place. For many, the fact that it was not as popular as other similar destinations was part of the attraction. Today, Samuel de Champlain Park on the Mattawa River is particularly popular,[3] but all of the smaller lakes and rivers that abound in the area draw their share of visitors. Both the Mattawa and the French River are now designated as Heritage Rivers and Waterway Parks have been established along much of their shoreline. The historic nature of the Nipissing Passageway and its association to Samuel de Champlain appeals to many, as it offers them a way to connect with Canada’s distant past. What is perhaps less appreciated, is that these visitors are themselves part of the equally fascinating more recent history of the area, as is demonstrated in the pages to follow.

*Originally spelled “Timagami,” but later changed to the current spelling. For the sake of consistency, the current spelling is retained throughout this book, though the older usage may appear in some quotations.