Accidental Pioneer

How I Survived Five Years in the Canadian Bush

Author: Thomas Osborne

The view young Thomas Osborne and his even younger brother first had of Muskoka was at night, alone, trudging unmarked primitive roads to find their father who, in the early 1870s, had decided to go ahead of them and make a new start for his beleaguered family by getting some free land in the bush east of Huntsville. The miracle is that Thomas Osborne lived to tell the tale.

For the next three years, he endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes, boats, falling trees, and near escapes from wolves, bears, and battles with local toughs and a mysterious neighbouring settler from Poland. Yet it was, at the same time, a glorious adventure for a teenager who thrilled to the pristine beauty of nature, became enormously strong, mastered the art of a barter economy, and learned to prevail in a society where law enforcement was not yet established.

After five years, Thomas quit Muskoka, “never to return.” But before he was killed by an automobile in San Diego, California, in 1938, he penned a graphic memoir of his time in the primitive conditions and how he survived Muskoka in the early 1870s. As Roy MacGregor, author of A Life in the Bush, writes in his forward to Accidental Pioneer, “Thomas Osborne’s book is real move-over-Susanna-Moodie stuff,” an undiscovered Canadian classic.