Before recorded history, the French River was a trade route for aboriginal inhabitants of this vast landscape. Trading furs, tobacco, flints, dried fish, copper and other essentials of a pre-modern people, they left few traces of their occupancy on the landscape – perhaps a good message for modern day Canadians. With the arrival of Europeans, the beginnings of a modern Canada began. In the photograph above this text, you can see those beginnings.

A man leans against a log cabin. Ulysse Carrière is the Lodge at Pine Cove’s maintenance head and well into his second decade with the lodge. Ulysse is a direct descendant of the first Français Canadiens who arrived in Quebec, during the 1600s. Voyageurs, coureur de bois, Jesuit and Recollet priests, who together with First Nations peoples, began the modern exploration, mapping, ethnographical study, trading of furs, lumbering and agriculture, that was the slow, difficult and often brutal process, that created modern Canada.

The log cabin, against which Ulysse leans, built in 1935 by Gene Rioux, was the first cabin built at Pine Cove. The log cabin represents the first home of many settlers to Canada, from the 1600s to the 1900s. This log cabin is called Bob’s. Bob was a legendary fishing guide on the French for forty years and a First Nation Cherokee. A little bit out of his nation’s traditional territory of the now Southern United States, didn’t bother Bob, he loved the French River for its fishing and clean air. The cabin, was Bob’s home for six months of the year. Today, the cabin is one of Ulysse’s maintenance buildings. Neat and tidy it houses many of the tools that help keep Lodge at Pine Cove, in such great shape. Bob would have approved.