Beaver River

The Beaver River is a slow flowing, meandering river with a wide floodplain. Located in Durham Region, Ontario, the river has its headwaters in the Oak Ridges Moraines, and flows north into Lake Simcoe. The Beaver River Wetland Complex is a 2300-hectare area of the Beaver River floodplain, stretching from Uxbridge to Cannington, that has been designated an Area of Natural and Scientific Interest and a provincially significant wetland. Five hundred hectares of this wetland complex is managed as a Conservation area by the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority. The Trans-Canada Trail follows the course of the Beaver River, providing pedestrian and cyclist access to the wetland. This section of the trail is paved with gravel and is built on top of the abandoned Toronto and Nipissing Railway line.

The floodplains of the Beaver River support a variety of wetlands, including open river aquatic communities, shallow marshes, and thicket and treed swamps. Open water habitats occur along the river’s edge, and support submerged and floating vegetative communities, including species such as coontails, pondweed, waterlilies, bull-head lily, and butterwort. Moving inland, open water gives way to shallow marshes dominated by cattails and large sedges, including bladder sedge, silvery sedge, porcupine sedge, beaked sedge, and blister sedge.

Dense speckled alder and slender willow thicket swamps form an intermediary zone between marshlands and forested swamps. Forested swamp ecosystems, located in upper areas of the floodplain, are composed of water-loving tree species such as paper birch, black ash, balsam poplar, trembling aspen, tamarack, and white cedar, and support an understory of shrubs such as meadowsweets and red osier dogwood. Common herbaceous plants that grow in these swamps include virgin’s bower, white turtlehead, sensitive fern, jewelweed, Joe-pye weed, and horsetails.

Prior to the 15^th century, the Beaver River watershed was part of the homeland of the Huron-Wendat (also spelled Huronne in French, and Wyandot or Wyandotte) Nation. There are two documented Wendat villages located north of the Beaver River Wetland Complex, which demonstrate their historical skill in agriculture, and also include burial sites. Additionally, the Beaver River Wetlands are located at the western end of an Indigenous overland portage route that early colonists called the Wick Portage. This 6.4 km footpath connects the eastern Nonquon river, close to the point where it meets Lake Scugog, to the Beaver River near modern day Sunderland, and is a continuation of the Scugog carrying place, which connected Lake Ontario to Lake Scugog. Using the Scugog and Wick portage roots, one can travel from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe, and then north to Lake Huron via the Severn River. These pathways were important travel and trade routes, evidenced by long-standing trading posts that were located on modern day Washburn Island on Lake Scugog, and at the mouth of the Nonquon River.

During the course of the Beaver Wars in the 17th Century, the Huron-Wendat left what became the Durham region and moved northwest of Lake Simcoe, and eastward to Wendake region, to live in other areas of their homelands with Algonquian and French allies. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy and their allies settled in former Huron villages in the area, until they concluded the Great Peace of Montréal in 1701 along with all the other nations, which ended the Beaver Wars. After which, they returned south of Lake Ontario, as well as their communities along the Saint Lawrence, and West of the Niagara River. During the early 1700s, the ancestors of the people who became the Missisaugas of Scugog Island First Nations, a branch of the Ojibwa Nation, moved to the Scugog Island area from their ancestral homelands near the northern shores of Lake Huron.

Following the American War of Independence/Revolutionary Way, the Durham area began to experience heavy European settlement pressure, as loyalists fled to southern Ontario. To accommodate loyalist refugees, the Mississauga chiefs and British crown representatives signed a treaty in 1787, which was called the Gunshot Treaty, whereby the Mississauga agreed to share with settlers a stretch of land between the Bay of Quinte and the Etobicoke Creek. However, the treaty was hastily put concluded and implementation was full of misunderstandings, which were negotiated for the next 135 years. These negotiations culminated in the Williams Treaties of 1923. The Williams Treaties were signed between the crown and seven Anishinaabe nations and resulted in the exchange of 20,000 km² of land to the Crown in exchange for a one-time monetary payment. Both treaties were understood by Anishinaabe peoples to guarantee the right to hunt and fish and continue living in their homelands, although this has been disputed in court. The Williams Treaties were finally implemented in court and upheld in 2018.

By the 1830s, European settlers developed several agricultural communities, including Sunderland, Blackwater, and Cannington, on the Beaver River floodplains due to the rich soils that are present. During this time, they built sawmills, wool mills, and grist mills on the Beaver River in these towns. A railway line running from Coboconk to Toronto, called the Toronto-Nipissing Rail line, was constructed in 1871. The rail was used to transport lumber from northern Ontario to Toronto, and grain from the Durham region to eastern communities, and serviced the towns of Blackwater, Sunderland and Cannington. This line was cased in the 1980s and was afterwards removed and converted to the modern-day Beaver River section of the Trans-Canada trail.

Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority: Beaver River - Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority (lsrca.on.ca)

Missisaugas of Scugog First Nation, Origin and History: https://www.scugogfirstnation.com/Public/Origin-and-History