IN PRAISE OF PRIMARY SOURCE MATERIAL

This week I’ve continued to thoroughly enjoy writing Chapter 5. Partly because it’s another chapter full of big developments for both Muskoka and the Muskoka Colonization Road, but mostly because I have plenty of primary source material.

Primary source material includes all kinds of eye-witness accounts, recorded in diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspaper reports, letters. It is to a non-fiction book what compost is to a garden. You can produce good stuff without it, but with it your results are stronger and more colourful.

In this chapter I’m writing about a major upgrade to the first 19 kilometres of the Muskoka Road. This topic could be kind of technical and boring – we’re talking about gravelling and planking here – except that I have the 1870 engineering specs that the government sent out and the engineering drawing hand-done by the supervising engineer. The specs include details like this for the gravelled part of the road:

• “If broken stone is used it will be so broken that the largest will pass through a ring of 2 1/2 inches [6 cm] in diameter.” I love this! So that must mean that the supervising engineer – the wonderfully named  Thomas Nepean Molesworth – carried such a ring with him?

And for the planked portion of the road:

• “Pine or hemlock planks 8 feet by 3 inches [2.4m X 7.6cm] resting on wood supports 12 inches [30cm] wide by 1 foot [30cm] thick, fastened thereto with five foot [1.5m] cut spikes driven diagonally at each end of a plank.”

Sounds like a pretty sturdy road, right? Not really. Because we have the letters written by Harriet Barbara King, a self-described “emigrant lady” who took a stagecoach up that same stretch of road the summer following its re-engineering. Here is what she had to say:

“Oh! The horrors of that journey! The road was most dreadful – our first acquaintance with ‘corduroy’ roads… Your brother with his arm round me the whole way (I clinging to the collar of his coat), could hardly keep me steady as we bumped over every obstacle. In the worst places I was glad to shut my eyes that I might not see the danger.”

The Muskoka Colonization Road was a bone-jarring, dangerous, painful route into the district for almost 80 years. I can tell you that, or I can show you that, through eye-witness accounts from primary source material. The humus for my story!