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Historian Gregory Klages is in the process of publishing the diaries of Mark Robinson, who spent three decades as a Park Ranger (and served twice as Acting Park Superintendent) in Ontario’s Algonquin Park. Klages recently met with NiCHE Book Review Co-Editor Peter Stevens to discuss the project. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Peter Stevens: Who was Mark Robinson and why might he be of interest to historians, and to environmental historians in particular?
Gregory Klages: Robinson was an Algonquin Park Ranger. He started working there December 1907, and he retired in 1936. He maintained a daily diary through that entire time. His diaries record all the social, technological, and environmental changes he saw, and they offer us a really unusual, continuous, in-depth insight into life in the park in the early 20th century.
In addition, Robinson was a writer for publications like Saturday Night magazine and the Barrie Examiner, and he often spoke to field naturalist clubs, sharing his knowledge of animals, of nature, of environmental change in Algonquin Park.
He also was acquainted with a wide range of public figures from his day, including cabinet ministers and premiers; prominent environmentalists such as Jack Miner, Ernest Thompson Seton, and Archie Belaney (a.k.a. Grey Owl); and painters like Tom Thomson and A.Y. Jackson.
PS: What was Algonquin Park like at the time Robinson began working there?
GK: The park was created in 1893 as Algonquin National Park, largely in response to the lumbering industry. There were concerns that as foresters harvested old growth trees, they were trampling young trees and despoiling waterways as they shipped logs downstream.
When Robinson arrived in the park, places like Canoe Lake, which many people today see as a sort of unspoiled wilderness, had hundreds of miles of railway siding beside it. It was a booming village with sawmills and a population of about 500 people. As a Park Ranger, Robinson was responsible for helping the lumbering operations, but also for monitoring tourism, which was growing in importance, culling wolves, and harvesting pelts from beavers and other animals as a source of revenue for the provincial government.
PS: Robinson’s diaries reveal some interesting changes in how Canadians think about nature.
GK: Today, a lot of people think of the park as this great undisturbed wilderness, but when you read Robinson’s diaries, you realize that it is anything but that. Much of that park has been forested at some point or another. There was a significant network of cottage leases. There were communities and farms in the park.
Also, for almost 100 years, it was provincial policy to harvest wolves, to kill them off as a pest. And of course, we think of that today as a nonsensical or strange policy. Up until 1920, rangers would be paid to harvest beaver pelts and to harvest live beavers and ship them to furriers and to zoos. So there’s a lot of things in Robinson’s diaries that we might be surprised by today.
PS: It’s interesting because when you read the diaries, on the one hand, you’ve got one man’s personal reflections on his lived, daily experience in the bush. He’s talking about the weather. He’s talking about plants and animals that he’s encountered, he’s talking about hunting and fishing, and cutting wood for fuel. But on the other hand, the whole reason he is there is because he is a representative of the state who has been charged with enforcing certain official policies.
GK: He definitely had this idea that he was a representative of authority within the park. But that went beyond his official government role. When a train came into the park, for instance, he had to see who got off. He had to check and see, were they carrying weapons? Were they carrying alcohol, which wasn’t allowed in the park at the time? He writes in his diaries about scolding men for swearing, or bathing nude in the lakes, or playing billiards at the local hotel on a Sunday. So he was not only a representative of the state. He also saw himself as a representative of Christian morality.
Algonquin Provincial Park Archives & Collections, 1976.43.9, Mary Colson Clare. Used with permission.
PS: How did someone who spent most of his time in the bush end up meeting so many significant figures in Canadian history?
GK: Joe Lake, Robinson’s beat in Algonquin Park, was probably the most prominent entry point for trains coming into the park from the south. So anybody coming in there was probably going to run into Mark Robinson. And so people like Ernest Thompson Seton would come there. Lady Eaton would come there. Jack Miner spoke there. When people like Tom Thomson and A.Y. Jackson wanted to come into the park, they got off at his station.
But sometimes it was pure luck. The accounts of Robinson’s encounter with Grey Owl vary. But it seems that Archie Belaney was trying to run across the park, probably with a gun, and he wasn’t supposed to have that. And so the Park Superintendent got wind of him doing that, and told the rangers to go out and find this guy who’s trying to cut across the park with an illegal weapon. And so Robinson had to bring Grey Owl into his hut.
He sat at this interesting intersection of time and place.
PS: You’ve published two volumes of the diaries so far, with a third and final volume still to come. Does Robinson’s perspective change at all over the course of the diaries?
GK: Definitely. By the 1930s—a period that will be covered in the third volume—Robinson is in his sixties. The idea of being out there, portaging and heaving that canoe around and doing all that kind of hard work, it’s maybe getting a little more difficult for him. So he’s essentially set aside as an office guy, watching the phone, taking messages. But because he is at headquarters so much, we get a quite different set of insights than in the first two volumes, because now he is describing more of the decision-making processes, the concerns of that hierarchy within the park.
He also describes fundamental changes like the building of a highway through the park in the 1930s, military interest in the park, and the introduction of airplanes as a new means to spot forest fires. Also, I think, there was kind of a changing morality. Prohibition was gone. The standards were shifting around issues like swearing or playing pool on Sundays. His world was changing, and Robinson wasn’t always happy with that evolution.
Algonquin Provincial Park Archives & Collections, 1976.1.52, Rose Thomas & Jack Wilkinson Collection. Donated by Ottelyn Addison. Used with permission.
PS: How did Robinson and his diaries first come to your attention?
GK: Back in 2006, I was working on a project called Death On A Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy for the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History project. Robinson was the Park Ranger for the lake in which Thomson went missing, and his diaries are one of the best primary sources we have, because every day he was writing details down: here’s where we went to search for Thomson, here’s the condition of Thomson’s remains, and so on.
When I went to the Trent University Archives to see the diaries, I discovered that there was something like three or four boxes of material. They were just such a fascinating little museum in and of themselves. At that point I thought, somewhere in the future, once I have finished up my work on Thomson, I want to go back to these Robinson diaries and just understand them more fully. And the more immersed I got in them, the more excited and interested I became.
PS: In making Robinson’s diaries more widely available, who is your expected audience?
GK: There’s a couple groups of readers that I think that will find these books particularly enjoyable, and they’re really quite different. The first audience I had in mind was people who really love the park and want to read about it in such a way that they can kind of immerse themselves in it. In some regards, the diaries read like a work of fiction. There’s a narrative, this change over time. Players come into the story and leave the story. I love the idea of somebody sticking these Algonquin Diaries in their backpack and sitting at a fire somewhere in Algonquin Park or on a rainy day in a tent and being able to go, “Mark Robinson was on this lake 100 years ago today. He was going right past where I am right now.” To me that was just such a cool idea.
I think the books also will appeal to those who are interested in the history of the park, as historians, as environmentalists. Robinson records things like ice-out dates, migration patterns, weather patterns, technological change in the park, weeks-long dog sled trips across the park, the relationship between the lumber industry and park authorities. How did these things actually work, 100, 120 years ago? Also, why did they prohibit alcohol in the park, even before the province adopted prohibition? I hope all of those things are appealing to social historians, to environmental historians, and even to public policy historians. So I believe there is a multitude of readers who will be interested in the books.
Shadowy Lakes & Dreaming Woods: Mark Robinson, Algonquin Park Ranger, 1908-1917, and Bush Friends All Around: Mark Robinson, Algonquin Park Ranger, 1917-1924 were published in 2024 by Dinerva Publishing, and are available from Indigo Books and the Friends of Algonquin Park Bookstore. Volume 3 of the Algonquin Diaries will appear in the spring of 2026.
Follow @rgrmarkrobinson.bsky.social to receive regular excerpts from Mark Robinson’s diaries.
Feature image: Log jam during J.R. Booth Company log drive down the Amable du Fond River at Kiosk [n.d.]. Algonquin Provincial Park Archives & Collections, 1972.3.94, Rose Thomas & Jack Wilkinson Collection. Used with permission.
Gregory Klages
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