Raw Life. J. Patrick Boyer

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      Finding six men to pose for a photo in the mid-1880s was as easy as setting up the camera outside Bracebridge’s busy Crown Lands office, hub of real estate transactions and property registrations, where James Boyer conducted his active land conveyancing practice.

      newspaper in the northern districts. He wanted James to edit the publication. James accepted McMurray’s offer, and from 1871 to 1873 the Northern Advocate became James’s main focus. His job as editor was one that he was ideally suited to, because a primary mission of the weekly was to promote settlement under the free-grant lands system. He’d learned of the program in New York, was now benefiting from it, and was keen to promote it to others. He gathered reports from successful Muskoka farmers and published, at McMurray’s behest, a great deal of “practical information” to help new homesteaders. The Northern Advocate was sold in Muskoka, but also distributed widely in parts of the United States and Britain. The same information was also published in book form, The Free Grant Lands of Canada, giving McMurray another “first”: the first 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 СКАЧАТЬ