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Cooking Through Crisis: What Early Settlers Can Teach Us.
A lot of fictional stories nowadays show a rough future for humanity in the form of some kind of post-apocalypse. Whether it is a zombie outbreak, a strange virus, or a nuclear war, one of the biggest challenges for survival is finding food. Oddly enough, the early settlers of Simcoe County from the 19th century may have had better survival skills than a lot of us today. So, here are some food-related skills that the settlers would have had that would help in post-apocalyptic Simcoe County.
1: Fishing, Tracking, and Hunting
Activities that are now recreational pastime for many outdoorsy Ontarians were a necessity for many in settler times. Settlers and Indigenous peoples alike could fish throughout the year, either through the ice or from the edge of the water. Many settlers also learned how to track, and could follow footprints of many animals. Hunting was often done with traps or ranged weapons, depending on the size of the animal.
2. Cooking
Nowadays, we have things like fancy stoves and microwaves for cooking, and matches and lighters for starting fires. Settlers, however, didn’t have such convenient luxuries. They would use tools like a flint and steel to light fires, or gunpowder on rare occasions. Modern appliances would be nothing more than heavy pieces of metal and plastic in post-apocalyptic Simcoe County, and lighters and matches may not be able to be found. Flint and Steel might be the best option then.
For cooking, settlers would usually use things like pots, pans, and kettles. These may be able to be found after the apocalypse, but meat on a stick over a fire could also work in pinch.
3. Preserving Food
Now, food will spoil quickly if it’s left out, especially in Simcoe County’s humid summers. So, cooking and preserving this food for long periods was very important for the settlers. Things like fridges and freezers today are all well and good, but they will be useless in the apocalypse. Settlers were able to tackle this problem by salting and smoking their meat, and then storing it in salt-filled barrels. This would help keep things preserved and edible for months.
4. Foraging
If an apocalypse were to happen, foraging for food would be important for any would-be survivor. Grocery stores would probably be raided early for supplies, so other sources would have to be found. For early settlers, foraging for things like berries, nuts, and wild fruits would and could be done, although it may not work all year around.
5. Drinkable Water
We saved the more important for last. Water is the most important thing to find in a post-apocalyptic Simcoe County. Town water systems would no longer work, so other sources would have to be found. Luckily, Simcoe County is covered in a ton of lakes, rivers, ponds, and creeks, so there are lots to choose from, you just have to find them. One way is to follow wild animals, as they can lead you straight to a water source. Catching rainwater in barrels and other containers could also work, something that the settlers sometimes did. During the winter months, snow could also be melted to drink, although this might take awhile. Settlers often dug wells near their homes, which is something they became pretty skilled at as time went on, something you could also try if the apocalypse were to happen.
That Simcoe Serpent
There exist many stories which speak of monsters that prowl the lakes which bespeckle Canada’s maps. Among some of the most well-known are those of the Ogopogo, a Serpent said to inhabit the Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, and the Manipogo of lake Manitoba.
The creature which is said to prowl the waters of Lake Simcoe and Lake Kuchiching has been called by many names including Igopogo, The Simcoe Serpent and, more recently, Kempenfelt Kelly.
Stories of a creature in Lake Simcoe were first told long before Europeans set foot in Canada. The First Nations people who lived in this area known as the Wendat or Huron (by French settlers) told stories of a giant, long-necked serpent which would rise to the surface of the lake on moonlit nights.
The first sighting by Europeans occurred in 1823, when the Soules brothers described an encounter with a creature that swam very quickly. According to them, it left “a deep wide trail in the mud.” The Soules brothers went on to report a second sighting of the beast at which time they claim to have seen “huge fin-like appendages.”
58 years after the Soules brothers made their first report, the Barrie Northern Advance ran one of the strangest stories of the so-called “sea serpent”. Here is a firsthand account by Mr. Cavana and his companion of what happened.
Mr. Allan G. Cavana was a Dominion Land Surveyor and on July 28th, 1881, he and his partner were examining the marshes which join Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching. The story began when Mr. Cavana heard a puffing sound. He initially believed it was the sound of a mill while his companion believed the sound must have been coming from a nearby train. They would soon realize they were both mistaken. According to them, a head “the size of a human’s” rose out of the water on a serpentine body. Evidently the source of the puffing sound, it swam along at 15 miles per hour (24 kilometers per hour) and its head rose about 3 feet out of the water. After a brief pursuit by the two men, it went into deeper water and slowed down. The puffing sound ceased when it stopped moving, and it dove beneath the surface.
From 1881 to 1906 accounts of a monster in the lake appeared sporadically in the papers. Another sighting occurred when a group of boys were fishing on the warf at the end of Mulcaster Street. On May 3rd, 1890, the Barrie Northern Advance ran a piece titled “That Sea Serpent Again Appears” in which a dark shape was reported to have approached the boys in the water. Then, it raised its head out of the water and the boys “dropped their rods and bolted.” The article indicates that the boys stayed at a length from the monster and threw stones at it, however it was unfazed. In this account, they said the creature’s face looked like that of a horse.
Sightings continued well through the end of the 20th century. Some said it had a head like a boxer dog, some said it had horns, one report even said it had wings. A curious similarity between many of the sightings with only a few exceptions is that it is said to be between 18 and 10 feet long, which is unusually small for stories of lake serpents.
The name Kempenfelt Kelly was popularized by local entrepreneur Arch Brown and later used to promote the city’s image by then mayor, Willard Kinzie. Now, Kempenfelt Kelly is the friendly mascot of Kempenfest where you can find her on T-shirts and merchandise.
Whether or not there really are creatures lurking in Lake Simcoe’s murky depths, these stories have served to inspire the imaginations of generations of residents, and the creature will surely continue to be an essential element of local folklore.
Glacier Tracks
Alfred Russell Wallace 1876: “We live in a zoologically impoverished world, from which all the hugest and fiercest, and strangest forms have recently disappeared.”
10,000 years ago the climate on Earth was undergoing rapid changes. It was a time when the last mammoths were disappearing in a sweeping extinction event which affected most of the large mammals around the world.
The titanic Laurentide ice sheet once extended as far south as the state of Ohio. As it began to recede around 20,000 years ago, pioneering animals and plants reclaimed the land in its wake. About 10,000 to 12,000 years ago the global temperature continued to rise and the ice sheet retreated far enough north to reveal the land we now know as Simcoe County.
The modern terrain of our area and the great lakes region in general is the direct result of the movement of large walls of ice called glaciers. These glaciers advanced and retreated in a seesaw of shifting climatic conditions which began 2.6 million years ago. The effect of multiple glacial retreats and advances was to scrape the Earth and press it down. Although the great lakes basin was once a well drained highland, by the end of the last ice age, all the lakes within it had been formed from the melt water of the receding glaciers.
It turns out that discovering what Simcoe County was actually like back then is surprisingly difficult to do. Even though we have found a tusk fragment from either a mammoth or a mastodon in Simcoe County, it is hard to know if either of those animals lived here. The first reason is that Mammoths were large mammals and it is suspected that, just like today’s elephants, they moved around quite a bit during their substantial life spans. For that reason it is quite possible that the tusk’s owner was just passing through Simcoe County on its way to somewhere more comfortable. Another reason why it can be difficult is that as the glaciers moved they often took large amounts of earth with them. Knowing this, it’s quite possible that the tusk was deposited here from another location.
The tusk fragment was discovered in 2008 by a man from Springwater Township. It was later determined that it belonged to either a mastodon or a mammoth. The tusk fragment is currently on display in the Simcoe County Museum.
When the glaciers retreated they made major changes to the world. To gain a sense of how much it changed the way animals lived, we can look at the Taiga. Many people in Canada know the Taiga by its other name, boreal forest. Taiga or boreal forest exists mostly above the 50th parallel and, today, it is the largest unbroken land biome on the planet. However, 10,000 years ago most of the land above the 50th parallel was covered in ice. The taiga forest biome comprises 29% of all forest cover on the planet, but back then it would have been impossible for such expansive forests to grow.
10,000 years is a virtual moment in geological time and yet in that span of time one of the greatest biomes on the planet came into existence where once there was only ice. In fact we are still technically in the ice age and we are merely experiencing a glacial retreat for now. We are due for another cold spell but, fortunately for us, that might not arrive for another 50,000 years.