Last updated: July 6, 2022.

This first post introduces the Temagami region and provides a bit of historical background, mostly focusing on aspects of the story I learned about in researching for this canoe trip.  You can skip history class and get right to the trip maps,  route options, and planning by clicking on the link below –

The Lady Evelyn River From Top To Bottom: Route Options, Maps, Shuttles, Permits, And More

• Table of Contents:

• Temagami – Early 1900s Rail and Road Connections
• Mining, Logging, and Indigenous Land Claims
• Temagami as a Canoe Tripping Destination
• Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Park
• The Lady Evelyn River
• Reid and Grand – Canoeing Ontario’s Rivers
• Hap Wilson – His Essential Tripping Guidebook and The Cabin
• More Historical Context
• F.G. Speck in Temagami – 1913
• Kekek, Wendaban, and Misabi
• Report on The Survey and Exploration of Northern Ontario – 1900
• Lady Evelyn of the Lake- Who Was She?

Temagami & The Lady Evelyn River:

Temagami is the region to the north and west of North Bay in northeastern Ontario. In the Anishinaabe language of the Algonquin and Ojibwe people, whose hunting grounds it had been for some time before the newcomers arrived, the name refers to the region’s largest lake and means “deep waters.”

While there already was a minor Hudson Bay Co. post on Lake Temagami in the 1830s, Temagami’s isolation would definitely end in 1904 when a newly-built rail line, the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway,  reached the top of the NE arm of the lake on its way from North Bay to New Liskeard.

The following year an 18-year-old English adventurer, Archie Belaney, stepped off the train and morphed into a new life as a fur trapper and wilderness guide before gradually becoming Grey Owl, the world-famous Ojibwe environmentalist.

Twenty-five years after the rail line, a rough gravel road from North Bay, officially named the Ferguson Highway,  further connected the region to southern Ontario.

Mining, Logging, and Indigenous Land Claims:

The 1903 discovery of silver in the nearby Cobalt area prompted a massive mining boom. The mines’ need for cheap energy led to the building of hydroelectric stations and a compressed gas plant on the Montreal River below Latchford.  To regulate water flow, a control dam was built at Latchford in 1910 and then in 1925 at Mattawapika Falls, the outlet of the Lady Evelyn River system. The Mattawapika Dam is estimated to have raised water levels by some four to five meters, flooding a vast area from the dam all the way west to Willow Island and Sucker Gut Lakes.

The establishment of the Temagami Forest Reserve in 1901 provided some protection for the old-growth pine, some of which still stand today, especially in the Wakimika-Cheeskon area at the top of Obabika Lake.  However, by the 1920s, loggers arrived on the east side of the Montreal River.

A tug boat moved the log booms down the lake to the dam. After tumbling down the log chute, the logs were floated down to a sawmill by Latchford and eventually loaded on the flatbed cars of a southbound T&NO train.  In 1942 a logging company constructed a dam at Diamond Lake’s outlet into Lady Evelyn Lake to facilitate the movement of their winter harvest of timber. It would stand until the early 1970s when the Ontario MNR removed it. Diamond Lake’s water level apparently fell by four feet!

In the  1950s and ’60s, there was a shift in lumber extraction from river drives to logging roads, which came to the Temagami Forest from all directions!

• The Goulard Road up from the south,
• the Liskeard Road from the north,
• the Red Squirrel Road from the east –

and then things really got heated when plans were announced for a ski hill development on Maple Mountain.

By the 1980s, an alliance of environmentalists and Indigenous nationalists had joined to stop the logging roads, protect the old-growth forests, and have the land claims of the local Ojibwe recognized.  While the plans for a resort at Maple Mountain were scrapped and the Red Squirrel Road blockade was successful, lawyers arguing the land claims issue at both the provincial and federal levels in the 80s and early 90s would see their cases dismissed.

In 2020 there is renewed concern about the logging of the Solace Wildlands on the east side of the Sturgeon River near Florence Lake. The cause of N’Daki Menan, the Temagami Anishinaabe homeland envisioned by Gary Potts and modelled on a map drawn up by G.F. Speck in 1913, remains a dream. The closest chance to a settlement divided the Anishinaabe community, with the broadly inclusive Anishinaabe Council accepting but the status Ojibwe of Bear Island rejecting it.

Counter-claims by nearby Algonquin First Nations that they are the true owners of the land complicate matters even further.  [See here for a map from Bonita Lawrence’s Fractured Homeland which presents the Algonquin claim. It reduces N’Daki Menan to Lake Temagami and land whose rivers flow into Lake Nipissing.]

Meanwhile, the area’s inhabitants struggle with making a living that depends less on resource extraction – i.e. the mining and logging jobs that were the mainstay for so long.

Temagami As a Canoe Tripping Destination:

Having grown up in the Abitibi region 150 kilometers to the northeast of Temagami and having made both that Ontario Northland train ride to Swastika and the road trip up Hwy 11 from Toronto to Noranda many times in the 1960s and early 70s, it took a while for my brother and me to see Temagami as a possible canoe tripping destination.

To us, wild meant downriver to James Bay;  Temagami was the scenic lake country and managed logging area we passed through on our way down Hwy 11 to Toronto!  However, a few Temagami canoe trips over the past decade have opened our eyes to the area’s rugged beauty and almost wilderness.  This September, we headed back for a fifth visit.  Our goal was to paddle the length of the Lady Evelyn River system.

Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Park

Created by Ontario’s provincial government in 1983, Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Park is Algonquin Park’s wilder cousin. If Algonquin is where you introduce someone to canoe tripping and camping, then Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater in Temagami is the next step. It is a bit further from southern Ontario, it is rawer, more rugged, and more scenic, with less signage and fewer paddlers.

Don’t let Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Park’s relative size compared to Algonquin on the map above fool you – it is the centrepiece of a hodgepodge of crown land, fifteen other parks, a dozen wilderness zones, and various other designations of public land. This Ottertooth map (here) shows the actual size of Temagami canoe country –  and it is larger than Algonquin!

The Lady Evelyn River:

If the park is the heart of the Temagami wilderness area, then the Lady Evelyn River is the spine running right through it from west to east.  The River begins on the high plateau between Ishpatina Ridge (Ontario’s highest point) to the SW and Maple Mountain to the NE. Five of the top fifteen highest points in Ontario are within 20 kilometers of the river’s headwaters! (See here for more ON high points info.)  By the time it reaches the Montreal River below the Mattawapika Dam, the Lady Evelyn River drops about 110 meters or so in altitude.

The map below shows the various sections that make up the Lady Evelyn River system:

• The North Branch has its headwaters just south of Beauty Lake.
• The South Branch begins in Apex Lake, one portage from Smoothwater Lake on the Park’s western edge.  A bit further down, Florence, considered one of Temagami’s most beautiful lakes, feeds into this branch as it meanders its way to The Forks where it merges with the North Branch.

From The Forks down to Katherine Lake, there are a dozen sets of rapids.  The time of year will determine how paddlers deal with them – portage, wade & line, or run. Katherine Lake was once also known as Divide Lake – and for good reason.  At the bottom end of the lake, there is a choice to be made:

• The North Channel, with the three sets of waterfalls that make up The Staircase, empties into Sucker Gut Lake to the north.
• The South Channel, a bit longer and with more waterfalls and challenging portages, ends at Willow Island Lake at the bottom of the channel.

Then it is north and east through Obisaga Narrows and across the enlarged expanse of the Lady Evelyn Lake created when the Mattawapika Dam (1925) significantly raised lake water levels. Given the park’s status as a “wilderness” park, Lady Evelyn Lake itself, as well as Willow Island and Sucker Gut Lakes, are not included in Lady Evelyn-Smoothwater Park! The fishing lodges (click on the link to see their locations) and motorized boat traffic put them in different categories – natural environment zone or conservation reserve!

An easy 200-meter portage around Mattawapika Dam brings the paddler to the mouth of the Lady Evelyn River as it merges with the Montreal River, the one that those who accessed the Lady Evelyn from the South Branch paddled up to reach Smoothwater Lake.  From the Lady Evelyn River’s Apex Lake headwaters to the mouth, there is about a 112- meter drop (389m to 277m).

On the east side of the Montreal River is Mowat Landing, one possible endpoint of the trip.

Note: The planning post has all of the above in much more detail. Click here to see.

Temagami’s Lady Evelyn River From Top To Bottom: Route Options, Maps, Shuttles, Permits, And More

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Reid and Grand: Canoeing Ontario’s Rivers. 1986.

Canoeing Ontario’s Rivers has been on my bookshelf for over thirty years and has inspired a few canoe trips. Their LE route begins at Gamble Lake on the North Branch and descends the North Channel to end at Mowat Landing. You’ll find 10 pages of text plus 3 pages of 1:100,000 maps locating points referred to in the chapter – The Lady Evelyn: Another Pretty Face (131-145).

Unfortunately, a hard copy of the book is difficult to find nowadays. The Toronto Public Libary system has one copy– and it is for reference only and cannot be signed out.

 

Luckily, the book is available on the Internet Archive website. A digital copy can be accessed for one hour at a time after a free sign-up. It is easy enough to take screenshots of the single pages and then have a copy of the chapter to read at your leisure.

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Hap Wilson: Temagami Guidebook and The Cabin

Temagami: A Wilderness Paradise

Regarding canoe tripping in Temagami, Hap Wilson’s Temagami: A Wilderness Paradise is the book – the essential source.  It was the first of several guidebooks he has written over the past forty years.  His guidebooks to the Missinaibi, the Rivers of Manitoba, and the Upper Ottawa Valley all sit on my bookshelf and have served me well. Route suggestions, detailed sketches of rapids, and advice on portages and campsites, as well as his version of local history…it is all there and still mostly relevant and useful forty years after the first edition!  The book is an investment that will often repay itself as you inevitably return for more of Temagami after your first visit. It points out things that will save you time, aggravation, or worse!

Temagami was first published in 1979 and has seen several reprints and editions.  The one pictured is the second edition from 2011. [See here for an Amazon.ca copy of the book for $25. You may also find it at your public library. The Toronto Public Library has 8 copies of the 2nd ed. See here for the details.]

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The Cabin: A Search For Personal Sanctuary (2005)

Another Wilson book that is worth checking out is The Cabin: A Search For Personal Sanctuary (2005).  It is really his autobiography. It moves from –

• his childhood obsession with creating an isolated and secret space to which he could retreat from his dysfunctional family
• to his discovery of Temagami and wilderness canoe tripping in the early 1970s,
• to how he came to be the owner of what he has turned into an Eco-Lodge at Cabin Falls on the South Channel of the Lady Evelyn River.

The book needs some detailed maps to illustrate the geography that is at its core.  Given that Wilson is clearly obsessed with maps and does an incredible job creating them,  the book disappoints with its one map. On it, the Temagami area is smaller than the size of a postage stamp with the image of the Queen on it. It has none of the detail that would often help the reader make sense of what is being described and narrated.  You end up having to put down the book and access other maps to get the full picture.

Wilson will also have you wincing at his overuse of Brobdingnagian synonyms and often not-quite-appropriate words when simpler ones would do just fine.  However,  there are more than enough Temagami-related nuggets of information and insight to keep on reading.

A digital version of most of the book is also available on the Google Books site.  The Preamble: Transformation and Chapter One are both available. [See here.]  They are recommended reading before a trip down the Lady Evelyn; both will make you look at things a bit differently than usual.

• The Preamble: Transformation recounts the local version of the Ojibwe Flood Myth with Nanabush (referred to here as Nenebuc) taking on Mishipeshu, the Lynx-like creature of the deep waters and the ensuing flood and recreation of earth. And it all begins on Smoothwater Lake!
• Chapter One is Wilson’s account of his own mythic journey from Smoothwater Lake to Cabin Falls on the South Channel of the Lady Evelyn in the company of a friend or client to whom he is revealing his Paradise at Cabin Falls.

A Youtube contributor – Wild Canoes – posted a 14-minute documentary in 2019 titled  “Wild Temagami.”

Directed, produced and filmed by Michael Oliphant and Hailey Sonntag,  the film includes background on the fight to preserve the Temagami wilderness. The landscape in and around Cabin Falls on the Lady Evelyn River provides eye-catching visuals. Hap Wilson and his wife Andrea do (most of?) the narration. The film serves as an excellent promotion for their eco-lodge, which is the only private property in all of Lady Evelyn Park! One thing missing is an acknowledgement that the land they gush about used to be the traditional hunting grounds of various Anishinaabe families.

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More Historical Context:  

Speck’s 1913 Hunting Grounds Map:

The lakes and rivers of the Canadian Shield country we are drawn to were already the home and native land of the Anishinaabe-speaking people (Algonquin, Ojibwe, Cree) before the Europeans arrived.  Concerning Temagami, in 1900 there was a small Ojibwe community on Bear Island.  See the map below for its location.

In an 1899 report published by the Geological Survey of Canada, Alfred Barlow commented on the sizes of the indigenous communities on Lake Temiscamingue, Lake Nipissing, and Lake Temagami. He noted that the Temagami band population was the only one to have decreased – from 93 in 1887 to 75 in 1897-  and observed that “no tract of land has yet been allotted to the Temagamingue band.” (source: p.33) In 1913 G.F. Speck recorded 95 members of the Bear Island band.

It was the transfer of the Hudson Bay Co. to Bear Island from its initial location at the south end of nearby Temagami Island in 1875, which created a new Ojibwe trading post community there. The trading post itself would operate until 1974, when the HBC sold the property to the Zufelt family. Bear Island was also where the cabin of the chief ranger of the Temagami Forest Reserve was located.

With the Canadian Government’s purchase of  Bear Island from the Ontario Government in 1971, it became Bear Island 1 Reserve or what is now called Temagami First Nation. By 1981 TFN had purchased the HBC post from the Zufelts.

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The most graphic and detailed analysis that I found of the Ojibwe presence in the Temagami area was a map drawn up by the American anthropologist F.G. Speck in 1913 during his stay with the Ojibwe families living on Bear Island. He numbered this community at 95 that year.

From his conversations with family heads over a two-week period, Speck concluded that an original group of twelve families had moved into the Temagami area from Lake Huron/Lake Nipissing around the year 1800 in search of new hunting grounds.

The result of Speck’s visit was a brief study for the Canadian Government’s Department of Mines entitled  Family Hunting Territories and Social Life of Various Algonkian Bands of the Ottawa Valley, (Click on the title to access the document.) In it, Speck writes –

The map below of the Temagami area showing the hunting grounds of the dozen or so Ojibwe families who lived there at the time was the result of those meetings with the various family heads.

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Kekek, Wendaban, and Misabi

Speck gives enough detail that had we been doing a Lady Evelyn canoe trip in 1913, we’d have known whose family hunting grounds we were paddling through.  Speck also notes this about entering the hunting grounds belonging to other families.

When it was necessary in travelling to pass through another family territory, permission was generally sought at the owner’s headquarters before passing on, and if by necessity game had been killed to sustain life, the pelts were carried to the owners or delivered to them by some friend. This gave the proprietors the right in the future to do the same in the territory of their trespassers. [Speck, 4]

Not only were Ke’kek and Wendaban of the same Rattlesnake clan, but they were also brothers. Their combined hunting grounds were once the possession of their father Wabigan, who gave Ke’kek the lands encompassed by 27 and 27a and Wendaban 24. From their relative sizes, it may be that Wendaban was the younger son.

Apparently, Wendaban married a Nipissing woman and spent many winters (the hunting time) on Lake Nipissing instead of in the Lady Evelyn Lake area. Wendaban and his wife had no children, and he is said to have died in 1894. Speck did not speak with or record the presence of anyone from hunting ground #24 during his stay.

To the south of  Ke’Kek and Wendaban was the hunting ground of Misabi, still alive and almost 100 years old when Speck was at Bear Island in 1913.  He had come up to Temagami from Georgian Bay – one source says from the Shawanaga area of Georgian Bay – as a young man and, having married one of Ke’kek’s daughters, was given 27a as his hunting ground. That would mean he had arrived around 1840 or so. On a side note, the Nipissing woman mentioned above as Wendaban’s wife is identified by Thor Conway as Misabi’s sister. If so, this might explain why he spent much of his time down on Lake Nipissing.

To think that we are talking about a hunting grounds map drawn up only 110 years ago and reflecting the local realities of the late 1800s.  Given that my father was born in 1914 and my mother in 1922,  and I was born in the Abitibi to the northeast of Temagami in 1951,  this is not exactly ancient history!

Knowing some of the backstories of those Anishinaabeg who lived in Temagami a century or two before us makes the journey on the rivers and lakes they knew that much more meaningful.

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The Ontario Government’s Exploration Survey Report:

In the summer of 1900, an  Ontario Government-sponsored exploration survey party (#3) crisscrossed the Temagami and Matagami regions, paddling up and down rivers in an epic summer of canoeing.  The next year saw the beginning of the construction of a 184-kilometer railroad from North Bay to the top of Lake Temiskaming at New Liskeard. (It was completed in 1904.) The survey would give the government a better idea of the exploitable resources they would find. The survey party’s report covered lumber, mineral, hydroelectric, and farming potential.  Along the way, the survey party also noted features of the waterways they travelled.

Here is what the report said about the crew’s ascent of the Lady Evelyn River from the Lake.

A click on the title will take you to a copy of the report –  Report On The Survey and Exploration of Northern Ontario. Survey Party #3’s report begins on p. 83. It makes for interesting reading: among other things, it sometimes uses the earlier Algonkian language names of lakes and rivers. Lady Evelyn is not one of them!

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Just Who Is the Lady Evelyn The Lake Is Named After?

According to his assistant A.E. Barlow,  the name Lady Evelyn was first applied to the lake by Robert Bell in 1888 when he did survey work in the area for the Geological Survey Department of Canada’s Federal Government. [Bell was responsible for naming over 3000 Canadian geographical features; he is also the one who gave nearby Maple Mountain its name.] 

Only later did someone in the mapping department in Ottawa use the same name for the river coming into the Lake at the bottom of the falls at the outlet of Willow Island Lake. [The falls disappeared in 1925 with the massive flooding caused by the construction of the Mattawapika Dam.]  Before that, the river was known locally as “The Trout Streams,” a translation of the Ojibwa, namegos (trout) + zibbins or sippi (stream or river). See here for a use of Lady Evelyn River in the Ontario Government Northen Ontario Report mentioned above.

Bell’s preference was to make use of local Anishinaabe names. As he had written in an earlier survey report of the Nipigon region in 1870:

Given that Bell seems to have known that the lake had the name Muskananing, he presumably did not find it distinctive enough or had already come across one too many Moose Lake or River.  Instead, he named the lake after the 18-year-old daughter of the current Governor-General in Ottawa.

Note: There is some confusion about which Lady Evelyn had a Temagami lake named after her.  See the following post if you’d like to know more.

Temagami’s Lady Evelyn of the Lake – Who Was She?

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Next Post: The Lady Evelyn River From Top To Bottom: Route Options, Maps, Shuttles, Permits, And More

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For day-by-day maps and route information:

• Day 1 – To The Put-In And Up River To Smoothwater Lake
• Day 2 – From Smoothwater Lake To An “It’ll Do” CS  On Lady Evelyn’s South Branch
• Day 3 – From Our “It’ll Do” Campsite To Florence Lake
• Day 4 – On Florence Lake
• Day 5 – From Florence To Just Below The Forks of the Lady Evelyn
• Day 6 – From Just Below The Forks to Macpherson Lake Island CS
• Day 7 – From Macpherson To The South Channel’s Bridal Veil Falls
• Day 8 – From Bridal Veil Falls To The Bottom of the South Channel
• Day 9 – From The South Channel To The West End of Lady Evelyn Lake
• Days 10 & 11 – From The West End of Lady Evelyn lake to Mowat Landing

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Some Of  Our Other Temagami Trips: 

Since my brother and I grew up in the Abitibi region of northwestern Quebec it took us a long time to realize that there was some great paddling country that did not slope down to James Bay on the Quebec or Ontario side!

It has really just been the last decade that Temagami has become an option for an almost-wilderness canoe trip. The fact that we can put our canoe in the water six hours after leaving Toronto is definitely a factor. Still, the main draw is Temagami itself – rugged and scenic, with layers of history to contemplate and some great campsites to discover.  While we have not returned to Algonquin since the late 1970s, as we get older, Temagami may well become our go-to canoe-tripping slice of the Canadian Shield.

Here are a few trip reports of Temagami visits over the past decade –

Temagami: Paddling From Peak to Peak (Smoothwater Lake to Ishpatina Ridge to Maple Mountain To Temagami Island)

Early Autumn Canoeing In The Heart Of Temagami

 A Return Visit To Temagami’s Diamond Lake Pictograph Site

Paddling To Temagami’s Maple Mountain