The wagon bounces over yet another rock before coming to a sudden, jarring halt. Cursing, the settler inspects the wagon for damage. Mile after mile of ruts, mud-holes, and rocks have taken its toll on the wagon, and if it has broken down, he and his young family will be forced to carry all their worldly possessions to their land grant.

Good news. The wagon is fine, but thoroughly stuck. The settler swats at the mosquitoes gorging on his neck while surveying the situation. He looks around, seeing nothing but endless trees. With darkness approaching, he suddenly feels very small, and very alone.

Scenes such as this played out numerous times along the Nipissing Road in the 19^th century. Far from being a road upon which dreams were built, as it was labeled by Government officials, the Nipissing Road was more likely to lead to hardship and heartache than prosperity.

It began with good intentions and great ambition. In 1864 the Government of Canada elected to open up the vast, untracked interior of Parry Sound District to settlement by created a colonization highway that would cut through the heart of this wilderness frontier. Surveys were completed in 1865 and construction on the road began in earnest the following spring.

There were several reasons behind the scheme. Land-hungry immigrants from the Old World were desperately clamoring for farms to call their own, but with all the land in southern Ontario already spoken for, this wild and untamed region represented the next available option. Even more importantly, the lumber companies needed settlement to make their efforts at exploiting the rich forests feasible. Without locally grown grain to feed draft-horses, villages to supply a modicum of the trappings of civilization to workers, and the ready supply of cheap labor that farmers represented in their winter off-season, it would have been difficult for lumber interests to profit from the untapped forests.

The Nipissing Road commenced at the north end of Lake Rosseau, and ran 67 miles northward, through inhospitable forest and swamp, over rivers and rocky highlands, before terminating at Lake Nipissing.

For much of its length the road was little more than a rough trail. And yet it was busy, very busy. Contemporary accounts record as many as 30 to 40 wagons laden with immigrant families and their belongings passing through on a single day.

To serve these travellers, taverns and inns, often little more than log shanties but occasionally quite refined, sprung up along the Nipissing Road. There were dozens of them, so many in fact that at one point an only slightly exaggerating newspaper correspondent noted that there was a ‘watering hole’ located every three miles. If the comforts of civilization were hard to find out here in the wilderness, than at least a shot of whiskey to chase off ones fears at failing in this harsh land wasn’t.

Also developing along the Nipissing Road were tiny hamlets, each one located about 10 to 12 miles – or an average day’s journey – apart. Like the taverns, these communities existed almost solely to cater to road-weary travellers. Here, settlers could find stores to purchase goods, a blacksmith to shoe a horse or repair a wagon, a post office to mail off a letter to concerned relatives, or a church in which to pray that the decision to uproot one’s family and settle them in this frontier wasn’t a terrible mistake.

These hamlets numbered about a dozen all told. A few, like Magnetewan, Commanda and Nipissing still exist as small villages to this day, their prosperity assured by strategic locations and patches of relatively fertile soil. These are the lucky exceptions.

Most of Nipissing Road’s pioneer villages are now lost forever to the mists of time and encroaching forest. They included among their number Seguin Falls, Dufferin Bridge, North Seguin, Rye, and Spence (the former Spence Hotel survives today, restored as if new, at Muskoka Heritage Place in Huntsville).

These villages were tiny pockets of civilization. Between them was nothing but dark, oppressive forest and countless predators, animal and human alike. There are numerous harrowing tales of settlers being stalked by packs of bold wolves, and of bears preying upon precious milking cows. Rarer, but still frequent enough to be a menace, were highwaymen who robbed and even murdered unwary travellers. None were as colourful or notorious as the outlaws of the American West, but it’s safe to assume that those being held-up at gunpoint made no distinction between the two types.

Though Nipissing Road remained primitive and occasionally dangerous, it continued in steady use for two decades, and as long as did the communities strung out along its length thrived. But the arrival of the railway in Callander in 1886 diminished the road’s importance. It was now far faster, to say nothing of being more comfortable, to travel by train than in a bone-rattling wagon for days on end. Predictably, use of the Nipissing Road began to dwindle, and as it did the taverns and villages along its length withered away like fruit on a winter’s vine.

Most of the settlers, discouraged by the barren soil and harsh climate, wearied by years of fruitless toil and an overwhelming sense of isolation, fled to the newly opened Prairie Provinces. Their homes were not sold; they were simply abandoned. Many certainly felt they had been abandoned by a callous government in an inhospitable wilderness.

As decades passed, the forest began encroaching upon the once vibrant road, overwhelming vast stretches. With a few exceptions, the road is today accessible only by off-road vehicles. Its length is littered with abandoned cemeteries, overgrown farms, and all-too many broken dreams.