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T

he Laurentians are situated in the Grenville geological province, a slowly moving land mass that collided with the Canadian Shield a billion years ago. It is precambrian. That means that is it was formed before there were any signs of animal life. The cambrian period began with the first signs of animal life only 650,000,000 years ago.

About half way through its history, our whole area was at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea and at different times, the most recent being only fourteen thousand years ago, it was scraped and gouged by glaciers. The path of this most recent glacier, the Laurentide sheet, can be seen vividly from the air. The lakes Cornu, Manitou and des Sables all sit in two roughly parallel long valleys that run from the northwest to the southeast.

Despite its age, it is hard to find old fossils, since our area was scraped clean and presumably the millions of years of accumulated soils and detritus were pushed off to the southeast. If you find an outcropping of the underlying metamorphic rock, though, you may find evidence of fossils hardened into the stone. Large parts of the Grenville province may have been covered by igneous rock that spilled over its surface from volcanoes, and this rock will have no fossils.

As the ice receded, large and rocky mounds and exposed rock were left to bear witness to the tremendous forces that had been at work. Our forests slowly replaced the receding ice sheet and a lot of our recent history can be read right off the hills, especially in the fall when the leaves change. The soil on our forest floor contains the seeds of many kinds of trees, each waiting patiently for its signal to germinate. The relatively undisturbed forests that the fur traders found consisted of large straight white pines. These trees are 'tolerant', ones that can grow well in the shade. They can begin their lives in a shady birch forest but will grow eventually to rob the birches of their sunlight. The maple is another tolerant tree, and together these giants dominated the forests. The intolerant species must wait for some kind of disaster to clear the ground. Then they spring to life and grow quickly. One variety, the jackpine, must wait in the ground for its seed to be cracked open by fire. Only then can it begin to grow. Over the thousands of years since the ice left, there must have been fires and storms that devastated the forests and left the jackpines, birches, spruce and fir the task of repairing the damage. A hundred years after a disaster, the pines would be slowly dominating the canopy again. We can still see the occasional pine standing above the forest on the top of a hill. These trees can grow way beyond the size of most of the trees we have become used to. Under this canopy, eventually the ceiling of the forest could become very high, and the spaces between the trees, very large. What an inviting forest it must have been for the first humans. There must have been a sense of order and wellbeing that we can only speculate about. Despite the high ceiling of the forest and the tall trees, the waterfront would have been walled off by cedars or other water-loving species, and their branches, exposed to the sun, would have grown from stump to crown. Possibly the bottom branches would have been eaten or broken by the deer or moose that grazed there in winter. This would have allowed light to penetrate the forest all along the water's edge. This effect is visible around Lac Tremblant where the deer have left a well trimmed line of branches that are just out of their reach, and it forms the illusion of a second shoreline, just above the waterline and parallel to it.

The lakes themselves, teeming with fish in the clear water, must have been the most beautiful scene of all.

The first humans, the Algonquin or Anisinapek entered this territory more than a thousand years before Europeans first arrived. Probably they shared it at different times with other people such as the Montagnais and Nippising. Their legends and myths have left their mark on our area in many ways. The name Manitou meant 'mysterious being', or 'mystery' and they believed that the Manitou lived on Mont Tremblant and would shake the mountain in anger if humans disrupted the natural order. They used birch bark canoes to travel over the lakes and lived in the area mostly as nomads, ranging from the Ottawa river valley. They, too, seemed to have used the Laurentians for recreational purposes. With the arrival of the first Europeans, the Algonquin used our area principally to satisfy the large European demand for furs.

It is hard to find any area that still reflects the majesty of those early Laurentian forests and lakes, and as we shall see, the arrival of the Europeans wrought many other changes.

Joseph Graham has written a book that features a select number of stories of Laurentian places and how they got their names. To learn more, click here.

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This material may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the author. © Joseph Graham