to fight and die in South Africa because Canada was an integral part of the British Empire. For London this war was important, and in Muskoka emotions ran high in support of the blood-letting. Market Street in central Bracebridge would be renamed “Kimberley” Avenue after the South African city, and a triangle of land in the centre of town was designated “Memorial Park” for the sons of Muskoka settlers who died while killing Dutch settlers on their farmlands half a world away. The British proved as adept in drawing from their colonies healthy young men to die in their wars as they had been in dispatching to the colonies their troublesome dandies, convicted felons, and orphaned children — a two-way flow of traffic orchestrated by the benignly misnamed “Mother Country.”
Despite the carnage of the Boer War, the last decade of the 1800s would be popularly dubbed “The Gay Nineties,” capturing the open gaiety in society exuded by those able to enjoy life’s pleasures. Beneath the surface glitter of the Victorian era at its zenith loomed rawer reality.
With the arrival of another economic downturn as the final decade of the century began, doubts about the country’s viability resurfaced. In Toronto, Goldwyn Smith, journalist and renowned professor of economics, elevated such misgivings to hard-ribbed analysis in his book Canada and the Canadian Question, in which he marshalled economic, geographic, and political reasons for folding Canada’s brief experiment with nationhood into union with the United States.
In its celebration of life, the revels of the “Gay Nineties” offered a popular way to defy and transcend these social, economic, political, and military strains. Celebration was in the atmosphere of Bracebridge. Embattled individuals, who struggled in their circumstances and from time to time found themselves before Magistrate James Boyer, were otherwise at the band concerts, in the parades, and on the sports fields. Individuals experiencing rougher social conditions and the raw edges of life might not themselves have chosen the moniker “Gay Nineties” for their times, but then people in a position to name eras are seldom the threadbare folk living on hard energy at society’s margins.
In the predictable boom-bust cycle of a capitalist economy, the decade advanced from economic depression into a recovery. With general prosperity returning, many Muskokans did have a good time. Bracebridge newspapers ran accounts of local sporting matches, outdoor church services, visiting circuses, fabulous touring bands, fall fairs, community picnics, theatrical performances, and festive excursions across the lakes by boat, down the roads by buggy, and along the tracks by train.
In the struggle to overcome all of these ups and downs, Muskoka’s incomparable character emerged. From the opening of the settlement the district was a place of natural beauty, physical hardship, dashed hopes, sudden profits, irreconcilable conflicts, and new starts. The diverse peoples flocking from distant places to claim land were, year by year, increasingly re-formed by the land’s claim on them. It made them democrats and stoics.
Families had become homesteaders in a localized Ontario economy of mixed farming and wage labour in forestry, mills, tanneries, and manufacturing workplaces, integrated with facilities for transportation, accommodation, and services for vacationers. They dwelt on their rural acreages or in Muskoka’s main towns of Gravenhurst, Bracebridge, and Huntsville; the larger villages of Bala, MacTier, Port Carling, Rosseau, Baysville, Dorset, and Port Sydney; or the smaller settlements such as Walker’s Point, Windermere, Milford Bay, Utterson, Dwight, Falkenburg. These people lived amid rugged conditions and scenic splendour in the Canadian Shield’s northern hinterland but still close to the southern cities, witnessing changes for which they were both designer and creator, and of which they were sometimes beneficiary and other times victim. They were interacting alike with well-to-do folk trekking into the district for vacations, and edgy neighbours who were scrounging year-round just to get by.
Out of the rawness of this cauldron emerged a distinctive new variety of people, the “Muskokans.”
Chapter Two
The Court: Canadian JPs by the Late Nineteenth Century
Bracebridge was a political hotbed. Dominion and provincial elections were frequent, council elections rolled around every New Year’s Day, and townsfolk voted on contentious plebiscite questions frequently: all helped stoke the fires of political intensity. Rare was the Muskokan who hesitated to state his opinions on anything, from the fence-sitting leaders of the country to the location of his neighbour’s line fence. Nobody could escape taking sides, in this era before the secret ballot, when each man’s vote was openly cast amidst spirited townsfolk thronging at public polling stations, where the voter’s spoken declaration was, in fact, usually a proud or defiant shout, naming his chosen candidate. Everybody knew where a fellow stood, and whom he supported.
Fitting in so as not to stand out, James Boyer identified himself as “an Independent Liberal” shortly after arriving in the district. He was not an active partisan. His position as town clerk restrained him from being outspoken, and conducting municipal elections and plebiscites required him to be neutral. He used this as a shield, content to be a quiet Liberal bystander to controversy. James still feared that partisan animosity could trigger closer scrutiny by adversaries and betray his identity. As a participant-observer (someone directly engaged in the affairs of his community through a variety of roles, who simultaneously had to stand apart from them as recording secretary, municipal clerk, or newspaperman, etc.), he exuded a balanced quality; he was a calmly reticent man whose nature suggested to others he could keep confidences. Many consulted James for his informed view on things, and he steadily rose in local stature because he was not seen as a threat to anyone.
Someone who frequently sought him out was Alexander Cockburn, the first Muskokan James encountered — the two had shared the same rough coach ride into the district in September 1869. The influential steamboat owner and timber entrepreneur had run in federal and provincial elections, was a catalyst in district politics, and by 1878 was the Liberal MP representing Muskoka. Cockburn kept interested in Boyer’s career, partly for sentiment as the man who “introduced” him to Muskoka when they crossed the Severn River together, but also out of shrewdness because his rising political career required good relations with someone who, at turns a newspaper editor, school teacher, municipal clerk, and officer of more than a half-dozen church, fraternal, loyalist, and agricultural societies, could influence so many others. The two men enjoyed booting about information and ideas, since both shared a wily outlook about the workings of government and politics. Although both were Liberals, each was also his own man. James voted for Conservative candidates if he agreed with their stands more, while Alexander voted with the Conservatives in Parliament or the legislature if it helped install locks on the Indian River for his steamboats, get Crown timber concessions to log Muskoka’s forests, or win government grants for his pioneering steamboat program.
Cockburn would be of great help to James in his bid to become a justice of the peace. Boyer was unable to practise law because becoming a member of The Law Society of Upper Canada would mean establishing his professional qualifications, which in turn meant reference to New York, where he was known by a different name, was an American citizen, and had left a wife and daughter behind. But he was still in love with the law. Boyer’s lack of standing as a lawyer, however, was the very qualification needed to make him a candidate for justice of the peace in Muskoka. The rules, Cockburn noted to him, stipulated that a JP could not be a lawyer. All the same, the provincial government liked to appoint a person of standing in the community, and James, after a decade in Muskoka, clearly had achieved that. If the prospective nominee was steeped in the law, but not active in its practise, even better. If a Liberal, even an “Independent” one, better still.
Cockburn could recommend, but the decision would be made by Oliver Mowat, provincial Liberal leader and head of Ontario’s government as premier and attorney general. This wily, mutton-chopped premier with poor eyesight and thick glasses would remain in office a record number of years until 1896, only departing Queen’s Park in order to become Canada’s minister of justice in the new Laurier government in Ottawa.
