Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Today Curé Antoine Labelle is mostly known as the man who led the opening up of the Laurentians for settlement, but his vision and impact went far beyond that. The settlement of the Abitibi-Témiscamingue region happened in large part due to that impetus, and if you look at a map of where Canadian francophones live today you can see how francophone populations were implanted well into Ontario along a northern axis in the Kapuskasing-Hearst-Timmins region, and also along a more southerly one in the Sudbury/Nipissing area.
It does seem like the effort eventually petered out at Sudbury and Hearst going west.
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It's unpleasantly cold in winter and hard to farm much beyond Hearst and Sudbury in Ontario, so I could see settlement petering out for those reasons.
I've done the drive from Hearst to Thunder Bay. There's not too many places in this country that are as remote as that drive is, especially the strip from Hearst to Longlac.