The book before me is “Echo Maker: Craig Macdonald and the Lives that Produced One of Canada’s Most Significant Historical Maps.”

There is nothing inaccurate in the title, but it does little justice up front to the cultural importance of Macdonald; neither does it signal the significance of his work in recasting and giving life to the early history of Ontario and Canada as a whole.

As he puts it, native elders like Peter Albany helped him to “record a priceless, undocumented Indigenous heritage of more than 1,200 portages, 75 snowshoe trails, and more than 600 Indigenous names for various geographical features and their meanings and associated stories.”

Macdonald inherited from Peter Albany a firm desire to preserve this kind of oral information, which was once so crucial in the lives of the early people of Temagami. Hence, their shared aspiration to preserve this fragile record.

I am amazed that Craig Macdonald’s name had not registered with me during my six years on the board of the Canadian Canoe Museum. Even in my many conversations with James Raffan, I recall no reference to him. But then, in 2025, when I attended a special CCM session in which Raffan introduced Macdonald in person and helped to tell the story of the making of Craig’s extraordinary and intricate map of the Temagami region, I became aware of his great importance as a researcher and a cultural visionary. All this is dramatized and described in Raffan’s book, “Echo Maker.” It is a must read for those interested in the land we live on and its little-understood, pre-settlement history.

The story begins at Kirk Wipper’s Camp Kandalore in the 1940s, when Kirk hired a former camper and promising counsellor to look into and map more venturesome canoe routes for the camp in both summer and winter. That young man was Craig Macdonald. He came from a Toronto family of engineers that included a great-uncle named Sir Sandford Fleming. He had an independent........

© Peterborough Examiner