The Manitoulin Island history behind the name Trader’s Pass begins with a phone call. Rob Bell, the developer behind the project, was deep in conversation with his good friend Stephen Davie — one of those long, winding discussions about history and the north that the two men were known for. It was Stephen who mentioned, almost in passing, that fur traders had once paddled right past this shoreline on their way west. That was enough. The name wrote itself.
Stephen Davie was many things — historian, bush pilot, explorer, and the man who found this property, assembled the project, and had the road built into what would become Trader’s Pass. He flew the northern Ontario wilderness the way the voyageurs once crossed it by canoe — with curiosity and without hesitation. His two sons own lots in the subdivision today. Stephen passed away in the summer of 2025, but his fingerprints are on every part of this place, starting with the water at the end of the road that he knew, somehow, was worth finding.
Mnidoo Mnising — Spirit Island
Long before the voyageurs arrived, long before European contact of any kind, this island had a name and a Manitoulin Island history that stretched back thousands of years. Archaeological discoveries at Sheguiandah, on the eastern end of the island, have uncovered evidence of Paleo-Indian and Archaic cultures dating from as far back as 10,000 BC — making this one of the longest continuously significant places in all of North America.
The Anishinaabe peoples — the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi Nations, bound together in the Three Fires Confederacy — knew this island as Mnidoo Mnising. In the Odawa language, the name means the Island of the Great Spirit. The island’s English name, Manitoulin, is itself derived from the Odawa word Manidoowaaling — “cave of the spirit” — named for an underwater cave where a powerful spirit was said to dwell. Even the name we use today is an echo of the Indigenous world that was here first.
For the Anishinaabe, Mnidoo Mnising was far more than a home. It was the fourth of seven stopping places in the Anishinaabe Migration Story — a sacred waypoint in the long journey of an entire people. Great leaders, warriors, and medicine people were buried here. It was a place people travelled to for dreams and visions, a gathering ground where the spiritual and the physical world were understood to be especially close. The island held — and holds — a spiritual significance that visitors still sense today, even without knowing its name.
That presence did not disappear with colonization. Today, approximately 40% of Manitoulin Island’s permanent residents are Indigenous, and the island is home to seven First Nations communities. The Three Fires Confederacy remains an active political and cultural alliance. The Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, established in 1974, continues its work preserving and revitalizing Anishinaabe language, art, and tradition on the island. Mnidoo Mnising is not a place that was — it is a place that is, and will continue to be.
Manitoulin Island History — The Highway of the Fur Trade
Long before Highway 540 wound its way to the western tip of Manitoulin Island, there was another highway — the North Channel. From the early 1600s through the late 1800s, this stretch of water was the main commercial artery connecting Montreal to the fur-rich interior of the continent. It was, as historians have called it, Canada’s first Trans-Canada Highway — and understanding it is essential to understanding Manitoulin Island history.
The route ran from Montreal up the Ottawa River, west along the Mattawa River to Lake Nipissing, down the French River to Georgian Bay, and then west through the North Channel — directly past the shoreline of what is now Trader’s Pass — before continuing up the St. Marys River to Lake Superior and beyond. Every brigade of canoes heading west to the pays d’en haut, and every load of beaver pelts heading east to the markets of Europe, passed through these waters.
The Voyageurs
The men who paddled these canoes were the voyageurs — contracted employees of the great fur trade companies, mostly French Canadian, who were among the most physically remarkable labourers in Canadian history. They paddled enormous freight canoes known as canots du maître — up to 36 feet long and six feet wide, capable of carrying three to four tons of cargo, crewed by eight to ten men. They travelled in brigades of four canoes, paddling fifty strokes per minute to voyageur songs timed to the rhythm of the paddle, stopping only to smoke their pipes at rest points called poses.
These were not leisurely paddles. A brigade leaving Lachine (near Montreal) in May aimed to reach Grand Portage on Lake Superior by early July — a journey that included the full length of the North Channel. Heading home before the rivers froze, they would pass through these waters again in late summer, laden with furs. For nearly two hundred years, from roughly the 1680s until the railway era of the 1870s, this pattern repeated every year like the tides. It is a chapter of Manitoulin Island history that played out on the very water visible from every lot at Trader’s Pass.
They worked for the great trading companies of the era — first the independent coureurs des bois, then the North West Company (founded 1779), and after the merger of 1821, the Hudson’s Bay Company. The HBC maintained trading posts and operations throughout this region well into the late 19th century, with documented posts in the Georgian Bay and northern Manitoulin Island area through the 1880s.
What They Saw From the Water
Here is where Manitoulin Island history and natural history take a fascinating turn — the story of Trader’s Pass intersects with one of the island’s greatest mysteries, the Great Fire.
The mature cedar and white pine you see framing every lot at Trader’s Pass today is second-growth forest. If a voyageur had paddled past this shoreline in the 1650s, he would have seen a very different landscape — or perhaps no forest at all. According to Anishinaabe oral tradition, the island’s original inhabitants burned their settlements as they departed the island around that period, driven out by Iroquois raids during what historians call the Beaver Wars. The island was largely uninhabited for nearly 150 years following those fires.
The forest that grew back in their absence is the forest you see today. What feels like ancient wilderness — the towering pines, the old cedar groves, the dense bush — is in ecological terms a relatively young forest, still in the process of recovering from a history of fire and abandonment that spanned centuries.
There is physical evidence of this still visible in the bush. Old-growth foresters and longtime residents of the island speak of charcoal-studded tree stumps scattered throughout the forest — remnants not of the original trees but of the fires that cleared them. Researchers at Brock University are actively studying the relationship between Indigenous oral history and the scientific and archival record of the island’s fire history, finding that the two accounts are more complementary than contradictory.
The Big Fire of 1865 — and Again in 1889
Manitoulin Island history doesn’t end with the early fires. The island was struck by further catastrophic fires as European settlers arrived. A massive fire in 1865 burned through much of the island so thoroughly that it destroyed all but eighteen of the survey markers that had been placed just the previous year — forcing surveyors to re-map the entire township from scratch in 1866.
Then, around 1889 or 1890, another devastating fire swept the island. A remarkable first-person account written by Dr. Mary Lee Edward, whose family was on the island at the time, describes watching the trees across the lake go up in flames, the family retreating to rowboats on the water as the sky turned yellow with smoke. It was said that 100 years would have to pass before the island would recover its beauty — and that the devastation left charred trunks and brush piles across the landscape for years afterward.
The forest you walk through at Trader’s Pass — the cedar and pine that frame your lake view, the mature trees that give the lots their character and privacy — is the result of more than a century of regrowth since those fires. It is a forest that has earned its beauty the hard way.
Manitoulin Island History — Why the Name Matters
The name Trader’s Pass carries all of this Manitoulin Island history quietly inside it. The voyageurs who paddled past this shoreline were not tourists. They were working men on a commercial highway, transporting the goods and furs that funded the exploration and eventual settlement of a continent. They paddled past a shoreline that had already burned, through a North Channel that was even then one of the most significant waterways in North America.
Today, the same waters carry sailboats and cruisers from across the Great Lakes. The forest that grew up after the fires now shelters some of the finest waterfront lots on the island. And the name Trader’s Pass stands as a reminder — and a tribute to the man who knew the history behind it — that the ground you’re standing on, and the water you’re looking at, has a story worth knowing. For more on what makes this part of the island unique, read our guide to Manitoulin Island real estate.
Own a Piece of That History
Manitoulin Island history runs deep, and Trader’s Pass puts you right at the centre of it. If you’ve been searching for waterfront lots for sale on Manitoulin Island, or dreaming of a waterfront cottage or year-round home on the North Channel, this is where that search ends.
Fifteen home sites on the same water the voyageurs crossed for two centuries. Lots ranging from 1.10 to 3.50 acres with 185 to 360 feet of North Channel frontage, all framed by that remarkable second-growth cedar and pine forest.
Browse our waterfront lots for sale on Manitoulin Island, explore your build options at Trader’s Pass, or contact us to start the conversation.