Toronto -- the Bush Forest

I'm taking a course at York University to learn about the historical methods used to learn about history; in this case the history of 19th century Toronto (i.e. the 1800s). The required text for this course is Eric Arthur's "No Mean City" and I'm two chapters into it.

The descriptions of the Toronto shoreline during the 1780s to the turn of the century are really mindboggling. There's an entry by Governor Simcoe's wife describing her first look at the shoreline of Toronto from their boat on Lake Ontario. She describes seeing the dense bush forest, with some hardwood and poplar trees along with some evergreens. She noticed the beaver meadows! I couldn't believe it when I read her description of looking out her window from the summer house they eventually built (called Castle Frank) to see the native's spearing salmon by firelight in the DON RIVER. Freaky.

Anyway, Toronto (or York as it was known at this time) was fairly isolated from other communities (Kingston, Niagara) and one of the notable accomplishments of the then administrator Peter Russell was the contracting with Asa Danforth on a road that would lead was far as the Bay of Quinte. Check out this link for an artist's depiction of "the Danforth Road" as it may have looked during the early part of the 1800s.