Depicting Canada’s Children

Shaping Modern Boyhood: Indian Lore, Child Psychology, and the Cultural Landscape of Camp Ahmek

Lift we our hearts to the home of our dream, Where beauty of Nature and sky’s glory gleam. Deep in the wildwood set like a gem Hail to old Ahmek, the maker of men. —“Spirit of Ahmek” (lyrics by Dr. Eustace Haydon) T he first canadian-owned private summer camp in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, Camp Ahmek stands on the shores of Canoe Lake, some three hundred kilometres from Toronto.When it opened in 1921, its built environment was rudimentary indeed. The initial brochure mentioned sleeping tents, a“wellappointed ” kitchen, and a “spacious dining hall”—although early photographs reveal this last as a large tent. As with the first generation of North American summer camps established for middle-class boys in the 1890s, the most important components of the camp environment were natural: “a sandy bay,… [proximity to] fifteen hundred lakes and rivers,… forests teeming with wildlife,… [and] lake breezes … impregnated with health-giving fragrance filtered through thousands of acres of pine and balsam.”1 Within a decade, however, the cultural landscape of Camp Ahmek had been transformed by the construction of an astonishing variety of permanent structures, all recorded on Harold V. Shaw’s map of about 1928 (fig. 2.1). Accommodating camper activities were a dining hall cum recreation lodge, a council ring (with nearby totem pole), a cabin built by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, a massive log theatre, an Indian village, horse stables, and rings for both riding and boxing. Supporting the camp’s administrative functions were an administration building, an infirmary, a medical cabin, a doctor’s cottage, and cabins making up the “rest camp.” Purely utilitarian structures included a kitchen and its stores, an ice house, a pump house, a water tower, SHAPING MODERN BOYHOOD Indian Lore, Child Psychology, and the Cultural Landscape of Camp Ahmek ABIGAIL A. VAN SLYCK 27 28 abigail a. van slyck shaping modern boyhood 29 FIGURE 2.1 Map of Camps Ahmek and Wapomeo, Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, c. 1928. Drawn by Harold V. Shaw, this map graced the cover of Ahmek brochures in the 1930s. (Courtesy of Taylor Statten Camps) a root cellar, and an electrical plant. Sleeping tents and cabins for campers, visitors, and the cooking staff were also numerous. The camp landscape extended into Canoe Lake as well, with swimming and boating docks (accommodating, among other craft, a pirate ship and a war canoe), life guard towers, and, on a small island, an open-air chapel. (On two larger islands, the closest of which was a kilometre away, stood Ahmek’s sister camp. Founded in 1924, Camp Wapomeo was less fully equipped than Ahmek, but nonetheless boasted a dining room, a recreation cabin, an infirmary, permanent sleeping cabins , and swimming and boating docks on each island.) At one level, this rapid development is a testament to the ambitions of Ahmek’s founder, Taylor Statten, who had first become involved in camping in 1905, when he ran Camp Couchiching for the Central ymca of Toronto.2 Thanks in large part to his efforts at Ahmek, Statten became a leader in North American camping circles, serving in 1939 as the founding president of the Canadian Camping Association and in 1941 as the first Canadian elected president of the American Camping Association.3 Like many of his fellow“boys’ work professionals”(to use the parlance of the time), Statten embraced camping as an ideal way to pursue the spiritual goals at the heart of the ymca enterprise. Yet he also became increasingly disenchanted with the ymca’s emphasis on religious conversion, as well as with what he came to characterize as the unscientific way camp leaders sought to achieve their aims. Thus, in the 1910s, he helped establish the Tuxis and Trail Ranger programs, using Indian lore and woodcraft (the term used to describe skills required to live in the woods) to enliven the Canadian Standard Efficiency Tests (cset), a system of points, certificates, and badges awarded to boys who met “objective standards” of development along intellectual, physical, devotional, and social lines. So involved did Statten become with the programs that in 1920 and 1921, he hosted ten-day leader training camps for men involved in the movement; the site for Camp Tuxis was on the shores of Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, near Little Wapomeo, the island on which Statten and his wife, Ethel, had built a summer cabin in 1916.4 When he established Camp...