Basic Geography of Ontario

The most prominent important feature of Ontario is arguably the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes are more like freshwater inland seas than lakes found in other parts of the world. They provide an superb means of travel and trade, and the rich agricultural potential of the region is beyond calculation. When you consider the countless smaller lakes and rivers north of the Great Lakes, the region is well-suited for the development of trading and farming societies, though the winters are harsh. Southern Ontario was the centre of a rich Native cultural zone.

Because of the lake system, Southern Ontario is separated by water from the United States, so it is seen as a peninsula, surrounded by water on all sides (except the north). The border separating the U.S. from Canada reinforces this geographical feeling.

The Great Lakes basin drains into the Atlantic Ocean via the mighty St. Lawrence River, once called "Canada's Highway".

The Canadian Shield occupies most of Northern Ontario (and a big chunk of Canada). The shield is a massive, very stable plate set in the middle of the country. Its precambrian rock is the oldest existing geographical feature in the world. Over time, the hard rock of the shield has been eroded and scraped clean by glaciers, lakes, seas, rainfall and wind. It's pock-marked with thousands of lakes and rivers. The ancient rock is rich in minerals and the land is filled with bountiful primary resources, though the climate is vicious and the environment often hostile to human habitation. It takes a resourceful culture to survive there. Much of it is still totally inaccessible to the modern world.

Glaciers have shaped almost all Canadian geography. The advancing and retreating sheets of ice, kilometres thick, relentlessly gored their way over Canada and the northern U.S.A., and left scars, debris piles and remains everywhere they went. The ice sheets were so heavy that the land is still suffering from isostatic rebound, still upheaving since the weight of the glaciers was last removed about 10,000 years ago.

The Far North is sub-arctic. This is the area above the treeline. Polar Bear Provincial Park is found in this zone, on the shores of James Bay. James Bay empties into huge Hudson Bay, which is connected to the Arctic Ocean. Very few people lived in this area, of course, because of the harsh climate. It takes a very special set of cultural skills to survive in the sub-arctic and arctic regions, but Canada's small population of northern peoples have been thriving for thousands of years. Even the icy, cold and desolate island archipelagoes in these waters have traditionally supported arctic hunters. The Inuit and northern Cree live in this area, as well as on the opposite shore of James and Hudson Bay, in the modern province of Quebec.

The Boreal Forest makes up almost all of Ontario. It's a vast area. The trackless forest is thick, pockmarked by thousands of lakes, and the soil is poor. It has rocky shorelines, endless rivers, lakes and swamps, and an incredible abundance and variety of wildlife. The native peoples of this area traditionally survived by living in small, mobile villages and communities, a free life hunting game and trading with their southern neighbours for goods they couldn't produce themselves, such as corn and other agricultural products.

The modern Algonquian-speaking native nations (Cree, Ojibway, Chippewa) are descendants of these peoples. They became the cornerstone of the early Canadian fur trade. When the European greed for beaver and other furs grew, these resourceful and skilled hunting nations intermingled and spread all over Ontario, Manitoba and Western Canada.

Southern Ontario is a rich, temperate area. It's where most people in Ontario live today, and it was where most people lived before Europeans arrived. The Great Lakes and the rivers around them make the area perfect for transportation. Agrilculturally, the land is insanely rich. The sandy soils in South-Western Ontario were (and are) perfect for growing tobacco and other crops. The climate is temperate and because of the lakes it's locally varied, providing lots of microclimates useful for specialized purposes. It was perfect for an agricultural civilization, if you could tolerate the brutal winters.