A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE TOBEATIC
By Andy Smith

In the late 1930s, Chief Sanctuary Warden, Chester Gray of Kemptville, Yarmouth Co., led Burton Spiller, a writer for the American magazine Field & Stream, on a 10-day fishing trip into the newly created Tobeatic Game Sanctuary. In his account of the trip, Spiller described portaging his canoe in the area of Siskech Lake:

“I was struggling along … when I suddenly heard a great organ playing. The sound came from somewhere before me and I went on eagerly, for organ music has a strange power to stir my soul. Presently I found myself in a great cathedral. Towering hemlock trunks rose all around me, stretching upward of fifty—sixty—seventy feet to where the lofty and interwoven branches barred the sunlight. Among these branches the winds stirred, and the effect was one of celestial music. Soft, resonant, deep, it sang of a time when God walked in the cool of the forest. Then as the wind played upon muted pipes, the chorus rose, full, swelling, triumphant, a mighty diapason of sound that held me breathless.” [Burton L. Spiller, Fishin’ Around, New York: Winchester Press, 1974, p53.]

What Spiller described was a remnant of what the Mi’kmaq called “Tupsie’katik,” or “place of the alder,” known today as “the Tobeatic.” The Tobeatic, struggling to reclaim its wilderness grandeur after two centuries of human exploitation, is a 1400 sq. km (540 sq. mile) wilderness and semi-wilderness area in the interior of southwestern Nova Scotia.

First Nations peoples traveled the ancient Tobeatic for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, seasonally crossing the province on a network of rivers, portages and overland trails connecting the Annapolis Basin and Atlantic coast. The canoe was best suited for the task, and although no longer made of birch bark, the canoe still remains the best method of transportation on the Tobeatic’s network of small rivers.

Beginning with the French settlement of Annapolis Royal in the early 17th century, the Tobeatic has slowly been transformed. The sustainable needs of the Mi’kmaq and early Acadian communities gave way to the increased pressures of early English settlement. By the early 19th century the forests were being commercially harvested for shipment overseas and, as communities grew, demands grew. At the same time large areas of the Tobeatic’s Great Barrens in Digby and Yarmouth counties were being regularly burned for blueberry production and browse for large mammals, further depleting an already nutrient-poor soil.

The Tobeatic’s wildlife also faced increasing pressures. Moose and caribou were hunted for food in the lumber camps, and later by American and British sportsmen, or “sports.” By 1905 the caribou was extinct in southwestern Nova Scotia, and, despite being protected since 1937, the mainland moose is now on the endangered species list and at risk of extirpation.

In 1927, the year following the establishment of the provincial Department of Lands and Forests, the 360 sq. km (140 sq. mile) Tobeatic Game Sanctuary was established, the first provincial game reserve. Although too late for the caribou, it was the first area set aside for wildlife protection and conservation in the province. Now known as the Tobeatic Wildlife Management Area, its boundary and purpose remain unchanged.

However, surrounding the then new Tobeatic Game Sanctuary was an area four times its size which remained unprotected, but was still sufficiently wild and remote that it could be saved from further human pressures. It was in this surrounding area where extensive forest harvesting and commercial guiding for hunters and fishermen pushed deeper and deeper into the relatively unspoiled Tobeatic. However, except for logging camps, most access was still either by foot, ox team or canoe.

Public concern for preserving more of Nova Scotia’s natural environment again surfaced in 1967 when a third of these lands surrounding the Tobeatic Game Sanctuary were placed under protection by Parks Canada as Kejimkujik National Park, which promoted traditional access by canoe and eliminated all hunting and trapping. Although there was a proposal in the early 1970s to build roads and turn the remaining Tobeatic lands into a more developed “resource management area,” no action was ever taken, and the Tobeatic’s interior remained intact.

By the 1990s provincial and federal initiatives again shifted the management vision towards further protection. In 1997 the Shelburne River, which flows through the Tobeatic, was designated a Canadian Heritage River, and in 1998 most of the remaining lands surrounding the Tobeatic Wildlife Management Area (the old Sanctuary) became part of the new Tobeatic Wilderness Area.

A management plan, still under discussion for the new Tobeatic Wilderness Area, has brought the Tobeatic to the attention of a new generation, and raised the age old conflict between protection and exploitation. And herein lies the current debate.

Human activity has again placed the Tobeatic at risk. In the last decade of the 20th century, the all-terrain vehicle (ATV), with its devastating environmental impacts, has increasingly replaced the canoe as a method of accessing the new Tobeatic Wilderness Area. In addition, a number of leases for hunting and fishing camps are now within the boundaries of the wilderness area. Once given generously to guides and local sportsmen to encourage commercial outfitting, these camps are now encouraging unsustainable use. Along with hunting and trapping (which may be allowed in some form under the new wilderness area legislation), ATV use and leases appear to be in conflict with the primary purposes of the Tobeatic Wilderness Area, namely, to “maintain and restore … natural processes and biodiversity [and] protect … natural landscapes and ecosystems.” Although protection is now the primary management direction, the survival of “Tupsie’katik” for future generations is still, after nearly 80 years, far from assured.

Spiller was overly optimistic in the 1930s when he prophesied that the Tobeatic will be “a sanctuary that will be unchanged a hundred years hence.” It will more likely take hundreds of years before we again hear celestial music in God’s great hemlock cathedrals or find Him paddling Tobeatic rivers.