Paudash Lake
Paudash Lake is a lake in south central Ontario southwest of Bancroft along Highway 28. The lake is located just north of Silent Lake Provincial Park in Haliburton County, south of the panhandle of Algonquin Provincial Park. The nearest communities to Paudash Lake are the village of Cardiff, close to the lake's Inlet Bay, and the hamlet of Paudash to the northeast of Lower Paudash Lake. Actually two lakes, 'Paudash' and 'Lower Paudash', the lakes are located on the Crowe River, near its head waters, which flows into the Trent River at Crowe Bay north of Campbellford.
Geography and geology
Paudash Lake has several different sections within it; Lower Paudash Lake to the east, North Bay to the north, Joe Bay to the southwest and Inlet Bay to the northeast. The lake has a surface area of and a maximum depth of. Fish species include largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, walleye, lake trout, perch, pumpkinseed, northern cisco, white sucker, and small bait fish of various types.The area contains over 10,000 lakes which were formed by glaciers some 11,000 years ago during the end of the last ice age. In the heart of the Ontario lake country are the two areas known as "Muskoka" and "Haliburton". To many people in Ontario, the area is part of what is known as cottage country, in reference to the some 250,000 summer cottages on the lakes of southern Ontario.
North Bay has massive pink granite, partially tree-covered cliffs, rising hundreds of feet out of the lake along the shoreline. Except in the bare-rock areas, most of the lake's shore is lined with trees and heavy foliage.
Paudash Lake is located within the Canadian Shield. During the last Ice age, glaciers scraped away a deep layer of rock, through to metamorphosed sedimentary deposits and the original Precambrian bedrock. As a result, the soil atop the Canadian Shield is typically thin, less than a deep in many cases. In addition, there is a great deal of exposed bedrock, such as the beautiful cliffs on Paudash Lake. All of the lakes in the Shield were carved out or sculpted by glaciers, and usually have the characteristically rocky shorelines, although many depressions contain deep glacial deposits in addition to water. In the case of Paudash Lake, the local bedrock is metamorphosed sedimentary rock, including limestone, which helps to neutralize acid rain.
Water and climate conditions
The water of Paudash Lake is clear and typically reaches within six feet of the surface in the summer. The lake is fed by numerous small streams forming the headwaters of the Crowe River, including that from four small lakes including Silent Lake, Deer Lake, Anderson Lake, and Centre Lake. Based on this inflow, and the outflow to the Crowe River, the provincial government estimates that the water of the lake is replaced every three years. The lake is normally totally frozen over from mid-December to the third week in April, when the ice usually breaks up.History
Paudash Lake was named after Chief George Paudash, a Crane-doodem member of the Chippewa Indians of the Hiawatha Reserve of Rice Lake. The immediate area was first settled by pioneer families in the early 1870s. One of the original families, the McGillivray's, are still part of the Paudash Lake community. In 1875, Malcolm McGillivray Sr. took a land grant of at Concession V111, a point of land jutting into Paudash Lake, and later built the first bridge over the narrows between the upper and lower lakes. While the first summer cottage was built on Big Island by the Johnson family in North Bay in the early 1920s, there was very little development on the lake, and indeed in Haliburton as a whole, until the late 1930s, when the two great access highways from the south were constructed. Highway 28 in the east, and Highway 35 in the west, with Highway 118 later connecting the two. The War then delayed development on the lakes, and finally in the late 1940s, development got under way.From the 1880s to the 1940s there were commercial resorts in Muskoka and Haliburton that were accessible by railroad and boat, with local transport over dirt roads by horse and buggy and later, cars and buses. The uncoordinated and ill-advised attempts by the government to develop Muskoka and Haliburton between 1850 and World War II for other purposes were a failure, however, due to the area's general unsuitability for agriculture and industry.
Major cottage development on Paudash Lake got underway in the 1950s and continued through the 1960s. Today, the lake is largely 'developed' with 640 properties, and virtually all new construction involves the removal of 50- or 60-year-old cottages and their replacement by modern cottages, usually designed by architects. Fifteen percent of the land on the lake is unoccupied, permanent 'Crown land', as well as one large island.
Ojibwas on Paudash
On November 5, 1818, the six Chiefs of the Chippewa Nation of southern and central Ontario, including Chief Paudash, sold and conveyed to the Crown what is today all of southern Muskoka and southern Haliburton, for the "consideration of the yearly sum of Seven Hundred and Forty Pounds Province Currency in goods at the Montreal price". Chief Paudash's "mark" on the Treaty was, in accordance with the custom of signing as a representative of the Crane-doodem, a tiny stick drawing of a Crane. The use of the Crane-doodem agrees with accounts that say the Chief who made the mark, probably George Paudash father of Mosang, and grandfather of Robert, was the last hereditary grand chief of the Missassaugas. The grand chief was derived from the chief of the dominant doodem. This is coincidentally interesting also because the crane image dominates the Petroglyphs at Stoney Lake in Petroglyph Provincial Park. It MIGHT suggest that the crane is a recent addition graphically laying claim to the site by the Ojibwa.Despite the fact that Paudash Lake is named after an Indian Chief, there is universal agreement among anthropologists and archeologists that the Ojibwa tribe of Ontario never established regular settlements in most of Haliburton. This was not simply due to the Indians' nomadic habits, but also due to the extremely long and harsh winters and the lack of major rivers bisecting the area for transportation. Another significant influence was that the lakes in Haliburton were not a major food source. But this is actually irrelevant because it is common knowledge among Ojibwa themselves and among scholars of other aboriginal hunter-fisher-gatherer peoples, that they did not establish permanent settlements because they had to move from one site of hunting-fishing-gathering to another and stayed only as long as needed. But this has nothing to do with naming. As with the Eels Lake and Jacks Lake south of Paudash, it was the practice of early settlers - when the Indian presence still had strength - to name lakes after the apparent dominant Indian clan or extended family patriarch or chief. Jack's Lake was named after Jack Cow and Eels Lake after Eel Cow. It follows that settlers experienced the visits now and then of the Paudash family at Paudash Lake and that was how the name was established.
As Haliburton did, and still does, contain a tremendous amount of game, the Ojibwa tribe did use the area as a summer hunting ground at least at the time of early settlers. At the time of the early settlers in the 1870s and 1880s, there were still small Indian hunting parties passing through the Paudash Lake area during the summer. While they had no permanent camp on the lake, the hunting parties would occasionally spend the night on Wolf Point on Joe Bay or at the north end of Silent Lake. Certainly Paudash Lake did have an earlier name in the Anishinaabe language spoken by the Ojibwa, as did all major Haliburton lakes. However, very few other major Haliburton lakes have retained Anishinaabe associated names, the most notable being Kashagawigamog. But settlers did have a tendency of naming lakes after the clan chief who appeared to identify with a lake, as described above, and for that reason the use of the Paudash name could suggest that the Paudash clan frequented that lake and considered it their hunting-fishing territory in the same way Jack's Lake and Eel's Lake were named after two brothers - Jack and Eel, and that settler history shows Jack fiercely claiming his territory. In early settler times, names of lakes were not given by governments but by settlers according to what family or chief/patriarch of clan seemed to claim it their territory. Aboriginal boat using hunter gatherer tribes were organized in this way - and it is a natural pattern because it can be found throughout the northern wilderness among boat-using peoples - they defined their hunting territories according to water basins, and if it was a river, then the extended families or clans claimed tributaries and lakes of that river system. There could be some 5-6 clans on branches of that river system. wandering from campsite to campsite in a territory determined by this activity, dependent on where their canoes could go. But these clans might be small - maybe a dozen or so people - and natural human social needs brought clans together usually annually in a common place. For river oriented clans, that common place would be at the bottom of that river system. Paudash Lake, like Eels and Jacks, not to mention Stoney and others, are all on waterways flowing to Rice Lake; thus Rice Lake became the congregating site and governments saw it, and most early original reserves were defined at these congregating sites and then the clans were encouraged to remain and farm and not travel to their traditional hunting territory. Paudash Lake, thus, is a Rice lake Ojibwa lake, and that is why its name is Paudash - the same as that of a dominant Rice Lake family in Ojibwa history.
By the time the Pilgrim Fathers landed in the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock in 1620, French Canadians had already explored Muskoka and Haliburton and had established relations with the Indians on Georgian Bay of the Great Lake Huron, even further west of Muskoka. Indeed, before England took over New France, French were dealing with the Ojibwa. But the matter of the Rice Lake and in general Mississauga Ojibwa is complicated because the Mohawks invaded southern Ontario in the mid-1600s and pushed the original Huron settlements, and any Algonquian friends north up the Trent Severn valley. There is a question of whether the Mississaugas originated on the north shore of Lake Huron, or whether they were originally the Ojibwa of the major north lake Ontario rivers who were driven out in the mid-1600s along with their friends the Hurons, and returned in the late 1600s to reclaim their original territories from the Mohawk nations who had settled there. This is the relevance of the French information, but its relationship to Paudash Lake is quite indirect and this entire paragraph is going somewhat off the subject of Paudash Lake.