Murray Leatherdale

Nipissing from Brule to Booth Murray Leatherdale

Nipissing from Brule to Booth focuses early Canadian history onto an area that stretches from the confluence of the Mattawa and Ottawa Rivers, up the Mattawa River to Trout Lake, over the La Vase portages (the height of land), across Lake Nipissing and down the French River to its mouth at Georgian Bay. Considered by many as one of the finest recreation areas in Ontario, North Bay straddles the height of land between Lake Nipissing, drained by the French River as it cuts its way through the Precambrian Shield, and Trout Lake, drained by the Mattawa River, which cuts through the Shield in the opposite direction. This route played an important role in the discovery of Canada, a transportation artery for its riches. It was used continuously during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by explorers, fur traders, missionaries and lumbermen. It considers this historically significant conduit from its geological origins through an examination of the social and cultural behaviour of its indigenous peoples, the Nipissings, to the early European explorers and finally, with the early Lumberman; a survey of the early years in the Nipissing area, in the years before the white settlement began in earnest. The research for this book was done almost entirely from the original source materials in The Jesuit Relations and the personal diaries of various explorers. The Jesuit Relations is a collection of letters and reports sent home to the Father Provincial in France by the Jesuit Missionaries in New France spanning the period from 1605 to 1795.