Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer
book published in the north country. The start of a competitor newspaper in Bracebridge, the Free Grant Gazette, and McMurray’s overextension of his financial resources in building offices for the town’s main street at the time of the mid-1870s recession, led to the demise of the Northern Advocate. With its closure, James Boyer returned to his position as Macaulay Township clerk.
Whatever their impact on individual fortunes, the recurring boom and bust cycles of capitalist economies eventually created an economic upswing that pulled Bracebridge into recovery. By the end of the 1870s, William Hamilton was able to report: “There was as a general thing much of bustle and life in the village, owing to the lumber traffic and the large number of immigrants on their way to locate on free grants or to purchase farms.”
The bleak irony in this good news was that many newcomers had learned of these opportunities through the promotional book The Free Grant Lands of Canada and the widely circulated Northern Advocate, but by incurring the financial outlay of building stores and offices in anticipation of the prosperity the settlers would bring to town, the visionary entrepreneur Thomas McMurray had been unable to hold on long enough to take advantage of the newcomers’ arrival and the return of good times.
By the end of the 1870s, Bracebridge’s population had climbed to a thousand inhabitants, and the village hummed with its many small factories, most financed by the Bracebridge bank owned locally by Alfred Hunt. The town’s citizens were kept up to date and politically aroused by two rival local newspapers, the Liberal Gazette and the new Muskoka Herald, which upheld Conservative interests.
Bracebridge continued to benefit from the fact that it was a natural home for mills of all types, which were operated by the waterpower of the falls, and for factories that were dependent upon large supplies of freshly running water. The town’s early industry — the flour mill, lumber mills, and shingle factory, later joined by the woollen mill and leather tanneries — was now augmented by a match factory, a furniture factory, brickworks, a cheese factory, a buggy shop, blacksmith shops, and livery stables.
The initial Beardmore tannery, reorganized as the Muskoka Leather Company, was now flanked along the riverbank below Bracebridge Bay by the sprawling Anglo-Canadian Leather Company’s tanning facilities. Local tanning would continue to expand until the companies combined production made Bracebridge part of the largest leather-producing operation in the British Empire, using hides imported from as far away as Argentina. All that was required for this pre-eminence in the leather economy, apart from hard work by tannery labourers and continuous harvesting of tanning bark by local farmers, was acceptance by all concerned that the Muskoka River downstream from the facilities would be outrageously polluted, filled with dead fish and the bodies of shoreline creatures that had perished — all killed by the stinking vats of fouled tannic acid emptied into the river’s waters.
Despite “Manitoba Fever” and the exodus of a number of farming homesteaders, the district continued to receive new arrivals. Employers were attracting tradesmen for jobs in mills and manufactories. As the population grew, Muskoka began to acquire more in the way of enriching cultural and social institutions.
Amongst the latter were the many local chapters of loyalist societies and fraternal lodges, bodies set up to reinforce the adherence of their members to familiar causes in this unfamiliar setting, and to provide mutual support for one another in difficult times. These various societies and orders, lodges and associations, were not service clubs of the kind that carry out helpful community-building projects; their focus was looking to the well-being and support of their own members.
It was that attribute, in an era without government welfare or social assistance programs, that helps account for the presence of so large a number of these entities in places like Bracebridge, and why most enjoyed large memberships, quite apart from the grand causes they ostensibly stood for. Such rudimentary “welfare” as was available in Muskoka was mostly provided through local chapters of these non-governmental organizations, and by local congregations of churches, which likewise looked to the well-being of their own adherents, thanks to the unspoken pioneers’ pact of mutual self-help.
James Boyer became secretary of the Sons of England Lancaster Lodge, secretary of the Loyal Orange Lodge, and secretary of the Loyal True Blue Association. Besides carrying his note-taking supplies to these meetings, he seemed to bring positive energy, too. Accounts of his involvement with the Orangemen, whom he joined through Bracebridge Lodge No. 218 in 1876, refer to his “enthusiasm.”
The existence in this small town of so many loyalist societies, as well as the several parallel ones for women, in many of which Hannah participated, gave testimony to just how British-minded the Bracebridge community was. Increasingly embodying its identity as a dynamic frontier town on the rugged Canadian Shield, the town was still an inseparable piece of Canada, which, in turn, was an integral part of the British Empire. In the cities, towns, and villages across Canada, just as across the Empire’s numerous British countries and territorial possessions, the red-white-and-blue Union Jack waved from a thousand flagpoles. Pupils in small and scattered schoolhouses gazed in respectful awe at the red-coloured areas on the wall map that identified so much of the world as the British Empire “on which the sun never set.”
Bracebridge’s loyalist societies esteemed visible patriotism. James never wore a flower, except a rose in his lapel on St. George’s Day to honour the patron saint of England. Intermittently, as municipal clerk he included on Bracebridge council’s agenda the purchase of a flag for the use of the town. And while he knowledgeably addressed loyalist clubs on the Battle of Waterloo and generally displayed a scholar’s interest in British affairs, James also took his family to “the Glorious Twelfth” celebrations of the Orange Lodge where, after the parades, more palpable displays occurred as sun-leathered men circled drums in a field, beating them with such intense rhythmic frenzy the corners of their Protestant mouths foamed. That raw intensity, too, was part of the “patriotic” reality. When elections rolled around, the Orange Lodge could be sure to deliver voters, who invariably cast their ballots in support of the Conservative candidate.
Over the years James not only rose to senior ranks in all these societies, but also participated actively in other fraternal associations, like the Independent Order of Odd Fellows and the Independent Order of Foresters, as secretary and in other top offices. All these entities served to knit together the social fabric of Muskokans. They also served to create a bellicose culture that would militantly commemorate the Protestant victory at the Battle of the Boyne every July 12, embrace without hesitation the armed suppression of the Riel Rebellion, enthusiastically send young Muskoka settlers to their deaths in Britain’s war against Dutch settlers in distant South Africa, and raise an entire battalion, the 122nd, with district-wide support, for the four-year massacre in Europe that would come in 1914 with The Great War.
The culture and economy of Muskoka that had taken shape was not a stagnating one, however. The Boyers and the other early homesteaders and tradespeople who first settled the region were joined by visitors. Ontario government’s homesteading project, which simply aimed to open up Muskoka for farming, began to take an unusual turn. The arrival of adventuresome folk who made their way up the colonization road and around the lakes by small boats in the 1860s helped to transform the culture of the region and add an unanticipated aspect to the local economy.
Permanent settlers were joined by people who came to Muskoka not to start a new life but to refresh the one they already had. They did not want to clear the land and farm it but to hunt its woods for game and gaze upon its scenic splendour. They sought not to use the lakes and rivers to transport logs but to fish and boat for pleasure. The magic in it was that they came, not to try to make money, but to spend it.
Because Muskoka offered people the experience of being in a natural northern setting — one conveniently close to the cities of the south — the district found itself welcoming people who wanted “a Muskoka vacation.” Without the interaction of summer visitors and permanent residents, this new way of life could not have emerged, but the commingling of the two types of people added a dynamic new element to the character of Muskokans above and beyond the mixture formed from the interaction of lumbering, farming, and manufacturing activities. Henceforth, the term Muskokans necessarily embraced seasonal vacationers and permanent residents, because you could not have one without the