Preface and Acknowledgments

Abstract

During the 1850s, Great Lakes aboriginal families began the dif‹cult transition to reservation life within a region dominated by non-Indian newcomers. The natives’ ability to move back and forth between the old ways and the newfangled ones brought by whites was a good omen and impressed fortyfour-year-old British travel writer William H. G. Kingston. He visited an aboriginal village while his steamer was anchored off Christian and Beausoleil islands in Georgian Bay and marveled at the “living Red Indians” and their wigwams. “But a change has come over them,” he noted. “Even now they are no longer the same people they once were; for . . . the good-natured, easy-going, laughing, idle, brown fellow of the present day contrasts greatly with the ‹erce Red warrior of a century ago.” Kingston observed that most of the men did not wear “ill-made blanket coats”; indeed, “some even had on shooting-jackets and caps, and others black coats and trousers, and black round hats.” But that evening, while back on his boat, the past paid a visit.