Then there is its human history — fugitive slaves escaping their humiliating servitude, heroines rescuing the crew of a sinking ship, a “witch” doctor, an imperious “emperor” after whom many a place has been named, nefarious rum-runners, and the mysterious, little-known pre-historic inhabitants.
Yet for those who know Erie’s shores, and love them, they are anything but forgotten. But for those who live in Ontario’s sprawling metropoli, or are more used to the traditional cottage country, Erie’s shores are little known. For most of Ontario, Lake Erie is indeed Ontario’s forgotten south coast.
1 THE MAKING OF A LAKE Tidal Waves, Monsters, and Dead Zones
Compared to the millions of millennia that water has existed on Earth, Lake Erie is but a mere newcomer. Its current form is less than 4,000 years old. Nor will it remain thus for much longer.
Lake Erie is a product of the last ice age. For thousands of years, massive glaciers covered most of eastern Canada, and parts of the northeastern United States, an ice sheet that some scientists estimate may have been more than three kilometres thick in some places. What the land looked like before this big freeze is anybody’s guess. What is known is that the basins occupied by today’s Great Lakes likely existed in some form, and were deepened by the enormous scouring of the advancing ice sheets.
But some 20,000 years ago, when the earth began to warm again, and the ice began to melt, the glaciers did not recede in a uniform way. Rather, the mass broke into irregular lobes, one forming to the east of today’s lake, another to the north. As the ice melted, a lake formed, which scientists have named Lake Maumee.1 While its elevation varied during the melt, its waters flowed westward through today’s Michigan, and then down the Mississippi.
But the great glaciers weren’t done yet. A cold snap enlarged them once more, creating yet a different lake, one which was named Lake Whittlesey, but whose waters again flowed west through Michigan. Then the glaciers retreated once more and exposed a startlingly different outlet for the lake waters, through an earlier version of today’s Niagara Gorge. Then, when the ice sheets advanced yet again, and filled the gorge with glacial debris, that outlet became blocked and the waters were forced eastward through today’s Mohawk Valley in New York State.
Finally, the ice began to recede for good. As it did, the Niagara Gorge again became Lake Erie’s outlet. Because the original gorge was now filled with debris, the waters carved out a new channel. That channel is marked by today’s Niagara Gorge, where it begins its sharp bend at the famous whirlpool. The old gorge, now buried, lies between the whirlpool and the community of St. David’s.
But because the enormous weight of the ice continued to depress the land, that outlet was about fifty metres lower than it is today, and so too were the waters of Lake Erie. That lower elevation meant that much of the lake’s western section stood high and dry, an area that today lies west of Long Point. The islands of the western lake, Pelee Island, Middle Island, and the American islands formed a land bridge, allowing the passage of animals and some of the earliest human inhabitants.
Finally, about 4,000 years ago, with the ice far to the north, its weight gone, the land around the Niagara Gorge began to rise, allowing the lake to fill to almost its present levels.
But how much longer will it survive as a lake? As the great falls of the Niagara River continue to erode their way upstream, they will eventually reach Lake Erie itself, where as they erode farther into the lake bed, will lower the lake and turn it into a massive river.
The Shape of the Lake
Despite being one the smallest of the “Great” Lakes, Erie, at nearly 26,000 square kilometres, remains the tenth largest in the world. Among the Great Lakes, however, only Ontario is smaller by volume. Nearly 390 kilometres long, the lake at its widest is ninety-two kilometres. It is however, the shallowest of the lakes with an average depth of only nineteen metres. While its deepest points, east of Long Point, plunge to sixty-four metres, its western waters go down a mere thirteen metres. Still, it remains the only one of the lakes whose lowest point is actually above sea level.
With only a handful of rivers flowing into it, Erie’s waters are provided mainly by the Detroit River. The Niagara River remains its sole outlet. Because of its shallowness, the waters of the lake renew themselves completely once every two-and-a-half years.2
Rock Point Provincial Park offers fossil displays in its shoreline bedrock.
Of its total shoreline length of nearly 1,400 kilometres, slightly less than half lies in Ontario, the remainder laps the shores of the American states of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. Those states contain no fewer than three counties which bear the name “Erie,” while none of the six counties or regions on the Ontario side carry the name of the lake on which they lie.
Unlike the rocky Ontario northlands, Lake Erie’s physical shoreline characteristics have resulted directly from the forces of the last ice age, although moderated somewhat by wind and water. The eastern section of the shore is a level and poorly drained clay plain with few shoreline features. Beaches and sand dunes alternate with flat, rocky headlands, the latter often exhibiting spectacular fossil displays (Rock Point Provincial Park is one of the best sites from which to observe them). A flat, limestone shoreline surrounds the elusive Point Abino lighthouse. Inland lie extensive areas of peat bogs.
Port Colborne marks the entrance to the busy and historic Welland Canal, completed in 1927. Immediately to the west of the harbour looms a soaring dune locally named the Sugarloaf, a feature which still serves as a navigation aid for vessels plying the lake.
The only significant break in the shoreline comes at Port Maitland where the wide, sluggish waters of the Grand River seep into the lake. A heritage waterway, the Grand begins its run in a wide swamp north of Dundalk in a wide swamp known as the Osprey Wetlands. As it winds its way southward through cattle country it gradually picks up tributaries until, at Grand Valley, it begins to resemble a river. At Fergus it begins to tumble through the fairyland rockscapes of the Elora Gorge, where hole-in-wall and dry waterfalls rock formations have created an almost otherworldly waterscape. Beyond the gorge, it has carved out a wide, meandering valley where the water power gave rise to a string of mill towns with names like Conestoga, Galt, Glen Morris, Paris, Brantford, Caledonia, and Dunnville, which is situated at the mouth of the river. The river is wide, its banks marshy and home to a variety of wildlife species.
West of the Grand, the shoreline continues to be low and occasionally rocky, interrupted only by a few small creeks, such as Stoney Creek, which provided mill sites for the community of Selkirk, and Nanticoke Creek, which performed
