Short description:

Making Muskoka traces the first decades of Muskoka?s transformation from Indigenous homeland to a part-time playground for tourists and cottagers and uncovers the consequences for those who lived there year-round.

Long description:

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.

"[Making Muskoka] deserves to find a wide popular audience, not least amongst those who have spent time at a Muskoka cottage."

Table of Contents:

Introduction

1 Rural Identity and Resettlement of the Canadian Shield, 1860?80

2 Indigenous Identity, Settler Colonialism, and Tourism, 1850?1920

3 Rural Identity and Tourism, 1870?1900

4 The Promise of Wood-Resource Harvesting, 1870?1920

5 Fossil Fuels, Consumer Culture, and the Tourism Economy, 1900?20

Conclusion

Appendix; Notes; Bibliography; Index