It’s hard to overestimate the importance of waterways throughout history. So many settlements that exist today (and a great many that no longer do) were founded at the mouths of rivers or in sheltered bays along shorelines for a reason. Centuries before trains then cars and eventually planes became the primary mode of transportation for goods or people across vast distances, boats of all sizes and types got the job done.

Nowadays, if we want to travel from Toronto to Little Current, we jump in a car and head north, crossing over to Manitoulin Island from the mainland via the Little Current swing bridge. In the late nineteenth century, that same trip would have been done by horseback -- or possibly by train if we are talking closer to the turn of the twentieth century -- to a port like Tobermory or Hens and Chickens (Collingwood) before catching a steamer to the island. There were a lot of steamers on Georgian Bay back then and photos taken of ports from the period show the nineteen century equivalent of traffic jams as ships jockey for space at piers.

One of the interesting things about Manitoulin Island is the surprisingly lack of major waterways such as rivers and large creeks for such an enormous island. There are so few proportional to the size of the Manitoulin that their lack is mentioned in several reports that were generated in the run up to European settlement in the late 1860s. One that was mentioned in those reports was Blue Jay Creek, which begins as a trickle east of Sandfield before growing into a slow-flowing stream snaking its way southwest through the farm fields of Tekhummah before blossoming into a full-blown creek a few miles before it empties into the east end of Michael's Bay.

Like so many waterways of its era, Blue Jay Creek played an important role in the daily existence of those early settlers. It was used to water cattle and buckets were dipped into it to fill livestock troughs and kitchen water barrels. The thick stands of cedars that crowded its marshy shores from Michael's Bay at least as far north as early settler Andrew Porter’s property in Tekhummah were heavily logged in the mid- to late 1880s. A sawmill that had been established on a neighbouring property in 1880 was used to cut the cedar logs into railway ties before floating them down the creek to Michael's Bay where an estimated that 50,000 to 100,000 were loaded onto lumber hookers in 1886 alone so they could be shipped to markets in the south.

Blue Jay Creek was also a popular fishing destination for locals and visitors alike. Many tales abound of multiple fishing parties making outlandish claims about just how many trout they were able to pull from Blue Jay Creek. One Tekhummah resident, Ben Boyer, claimed to have pulled 800 trout from Blue Jay Creek one day. Maybe, but every time he reported a huge haul, it always seemed to come in response to a record catch reported by someone else and was always much higher, with no independent proof that he'd caught anything at all.

Blue Jay Creek was also brought up in court testimony during the trial of George Amer and his son Laban for the murders of Charles Bryan and his father William. The creek ran through the back of the Amer property and the Bryan's livestock had been caught on more than one occasion drinking from it, causing a whole lot of tension between the warring families. Of course, pretty much everything caused tension between the Bryans and the Amers and the fight over creek access fits comfortably into a very long list of grievances. And yet it does underscore the importance of the creek in the daily lives of those early settlers and how access to it or the lack thereof could make the difference between a comfortable life and one of strife for those early settlers.

Photo of a restored section of Blue Jay Creek snaking through farm fields in southern Manitoulin Island. Courtesy of the Manitoulin Streams Improvement Association.