Max framing the north arm of Diamond Lake from the previous night’s tent spot
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The portage from Bob Lake to Diamond Lake done, we had originally planned to paddle up the north arm of the Lake that same afternoon to check out the pictographs. Having done a less-than-satisfactory job of documenting the rock painting site on our last visit in 2009, this time we planned on doing better! However, the wind and the waves had their own agenda, so we ended up camping on a small island at the south end of the arm. We hoped that by the next morning there would be less wind and no rain.
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Morning came and the weather for the next three hours would be the best of the entire five days of our early October trip. We paddled the 2.6 kilometers to the pictograph site on the west side of the arm on completely calm water. In my thoughts was the withering conclusion about the meaning of the Diamond Lake pictographs delivered by Canada’s then pre-eminent archaeologist David Boyle over a hundred years ago.
The Annual Archaeological Report for 1906 (Being Part of Appendix to the Report of the Minister of Education Ontario) included an article titled “Rock Paintings At Temagami District”. Near the end of the article attributed to W. Philips but with Boyle as the editor, he writes this -
overview of Diamond Lake Pictograph Site
This article (published in 1907) represents the first scholarly record of the Diamond Lake pictographs. Doing the recording was a W. Phillips, a “temporary Assistant” in the Archaeology Department at the Ontario Provincial Museum. As the Museum’s Superintendent, Boyle had sent Phillips up to Temagami to check reports of rock paintings. Here is Phillips’ own account of his visit -
The Diamond Lake Pictograph Site – view from the north
As Phillips noted in his report, the ochre markings are spread out over a ten-meter length of the white quartzite surface. Overhead ledges protect the painted markings from the worst of the run-off water. They face east/southeast and are thus spared the worst of the winds from the NW. The above photo shows the site from the north end with the dot in the circle as the last of the pictographs.
the northernmost Diamond Lake pictographs – sketch from Dewdney’s book
It would be fifty-three years before the next visitor from the museum (now named The Royal Ontario Museum) would arrive. It was Selwyn Dewdney, then at the start of his decade-long quest to document the pictograph sites of the Canadian Shield. The Diamond Lake Site would be #40 of the 166 he would eventually visit. In the 1962 first edition of the book Indian Rock Paintings of The Great Lakes he writes the following -
Diamond Lake/Lady Evelyn South Arm – clink on the image to enlarge
Some time before Dewdney visited the site (in 1942 to be exact), a local lumber company had built a dam just north of the pictograph site at the point where Diamond Lake flows into the south arm of Lady Evelyn Lake. This point – once known as Lady Evelyn Falls but thanks to massive flooding it is now just the Lady Evelyn Lift-Over – is the subject of an Ottertooth article. It has this to say -
This would explain why parts of the Diamond Lake pictograph site were under water when Dewdney visited in 1959.
Since Dewdney, with a few exceptions, there has been very little discussion and research of the Diamond Lake pictographs – or of the pictographs of the Temagami area in general. One exception is Thor Conway, who as a young archaeologist visited the Diamond Lake site with Dewdney in the mid-1970’s and who continues to publish material on pictograph sites all across the Canadian Shield area. His book on the Agawa Rock pictograph site, for example, stands as the definitive study of that Ojibwe rock painting location.
Conway first visited the Diamond Lake site in 1974. As luck would have it, the previous year the dam had been destroyed by a work crew from the Ministry of Natural Resources and the water had come down to its natural level. Two years later he was there again with a CBC film crew. Also along for the visit were Dewdney and Gilles Tache, a Quebec archaeologist also focussed on the pictograph quest. During their visit they were able to determine that water levels were lower by about 4.5 feet (1.37 meters) from where they had been on Dewdney’s 1959 visit. The dynamiting of the dam in 1973 made that much of a difference.
Conway’s book Discovering Rock Art In Ontario’s Provincial Parks (2009) has a chapter on the Diamond Lake pictographs. Even though the book is impossible to find, the one chapter that Conway provides as a sample of the book’s contents is the one on Diamond Lake! Click here to read at least some of that chapter.
We approached the pictograph from the south.The following sequence of images follow the ten meters of rock face from south to north. In doing so we followed the order in which Phillips presents his drawings of the various pictographs. The site begins with some indecipherable ochre marks and ends with the most well-known of the Diamond Lake rock paintings. Conway has counted 77 individual ochre marks or paintings; we were not as successful!
ochre on rock at Diamond Lake
Artery Lake Central
The pictographs begin with a few barely discernible ochre marks at the south end of the site. They were “painted” with a mixture of ground hematite and fish oil and then applied to the rock surface, not with a brush, but by finger. The figures are usually no more an inch (2.5 cm) wide and up to five or six inches long. As I mentioned in another pictograph-related post, people are sometimes disappointed when they see them. In the grand scheme of things, these are admittedly very simple physical expressions of the values and beliefs of a paleolithic culture. However, they speak to anyone who has experienced the rugged beauty of the Canadian Shield.
The photo above is of the first of them, three ochre marks of which what may be a star pattern or a figure with outstretched arms is the most visible. It brought to mind a pictograph we had seen on the Bloodvein River system’s Artery Lake at the other end of the Anishinaabe world.
T mark and other ochre marks at Diamond Lake
The next evidence of ochre comes just a meter further north. Still visible is what looks like a T. It is with this pictograph that Phillips began his drawings of the Diamond Lake pictographs; it is #1 in his inventory. There is an ochre smudge above and to the right of the T but it is badly eroded.
Phillips – Plate IV top
Diamond Lake – ochre slash
We have now moved up about four meters of the site. So far these is very little to make sense of. We were now looking at what seems to correspond to pictographs #2 and #4 on the top of Phillips’ Plate IV above. The ochre marks in between may be #3. It is impossible to say from the image below. Are we are looking at crane footprints being used as a clan emblem or are we are looking at rudimentary Thunderbird images?
Diamond Lake – Thunderbird pictographs or Crane footprints?
And then we come to the core of the site – the stretch beginning on the right side of the deep cut into the rock face. The first pictograph we see is of the moose. It is #6 on Phillips Plat IV (see below). Underneath the moose body is evidence of an impact – from a bullet or a hammer-head perhaps. It seems unlikely that the painter would have placed the moose there if there was not more rock face in front of him and underneath. So where did the rock go? Conway states this in his book -
My assumption is that he is locating the missing pictograph here, in the empty space next to the moose painting. Given how certain he is of a missing painting, he must have seen a Dewdney sketch of the panel which included it. It is also possible that the slab of rock just broke off from the rock face and fell into the water below.
Diamond Lake Pictograph Site – The Core
To the right (i.e. north) of the moose painting are three other clearly visible pictographs. On the Phillips Plate they are numbered #7 (the six vertical lines, often referred to as tally marks but – who can say for sure?), #9 (a puzzling construction we called “the half banana”), and #10 (usually interpreted as a canoe with 6 paddlers, and interpreted as a sign of strength and power or of a hunting party). Looking more closely at the panel, other faint and lines can be seen, with the highest one looking like Phillips #8 with the five fading vertical lines. All that is missing these days is the moss! Click on the image below to enlarge it and see for yourself.
Phillips Plate IV bottom
Diamond Lake – overview of the next three pictograph panels
Diamond Lake – moose and vertical lines paintings
canoe pictograph – Diamond Lake
Then we arrive at the last three panels of the site as pictured in the shot below. Plate V (see below) of the Phillips drawings contains all of them. (If Plate VI, which I included here, also records further Diamond Lake pictographs, then we did not see them. More likely it is the record of the Lady Evelyn South Arm pictograph site. See the end of this post for an explanation of what has happened to the Lady Evelyn site since Phillips and Ryder visited in 1906.)
the Diamond Lake Site – the Three Northernmost panels
Dewdney devotes very little space to the Diamond Lake pictographs in his book. The one quote above, along with the sketch of the core of the site, and the quote which follows is pretty much all he had to say.
Looking at Phillips’ Plate V, #14 would represent the “clumsy heron”, #11 the maymaygwayshi, and #19 the circle with the center. Perhaps included in his catch-all phrase “stick figures” is #16. It is surprising that he did not identify it as the horned snake of Anishinaabe myth. #17, looking very much like a square root symbol, is another stick figure. Not mentioned by Dewdney are the three dots, what looks like a canoe with two paddlers, more crane or heron footprints, and other impossible-to-say-what marks.
Diamond Lake pictographs – crane and bird tracks
horned snake pictograph at Diamond Lake
Diamond Lake – the last two panels
the northernmost grouping of Diamond Lake pictographs
Diamond Lake Pictographs – northernmost grouping
As if to point out the problem of saying exactly what it means, he concludes his comments on the site by noting this about the circle with the dot -
He ends the statement with an exclamation point.
one last look at the Diamond Lake Pictograph site
Already noted was David Boyle’s statement near the end of the 1907 article “Rock Paintings At Temagami District”. He wrote: “It would be utterly vain to look for any interpretation.” In spite of that, he could not resist offering an interpretation and ends up proving his very point!
Rather than see the site as it is – associated in Anishinaabe tradition as the home of the maymaygwayshi and other powerful medicine spirits to which a number of shamans came over an extended period of time – he sees it as a tablet on which one person has written a “sentence” or two using the pictographs as script.
This one person, he writes, has written a “story”. Boyle is able to state quite categorically that the first sentence ends near the top of Plat VI! Oddly enough, the article ends with that assertion. I flipped the page, expecting to see a continuation somewhere but that is it – a peculiar way to end the article. To conclude, Boyle seems to be victim of the notion that the pictograph site represents an application of a coherent Anishinaabe writing system. It is almost as if he sees the cliff face as another birchbark scroll.
There is no Rosetta Stone – in spite of the mid-1850’s inventories of symbols and their meanings left by Schoolcraft and Copway – to help us unravel the meaning of the Diamond Lake pictographs. However, those who have visited have given us more insight into the nature of pictographs and their significance. Boyle’s “utterly vain” can be amended to “much is still puzzling”. Thanks to more recent visitors we can now better see elements of the Anishinaabe world view in the ochre, from possible references to the their clan (doodem) system and their religious beliefs.
As we paddle past the dramatic quartzite rock face, the least we can do is stop and appreciate the fact that maybe two or three hundred years ago Anishinaabe shamans stopped at this same spot. As a part of a vision quest, perhaps, or as a visit to the home of the maymaygwayshi for powerful medicines, the rock paintings were part of the ritual. From their birch bark canoes they reached out to the rock and created enduring marks with their specially prepared mixture of finely ground hematite and fish oil. While we will never completely understand the significance of all the ochre paintings, we still stop and for a brief while enter into another world.
Useful Links:
Just click on the blue text to access material.
You can access the pdf file of W. Phillips’ “Rock Paintings At Temagami District” from my Dropbox folder. If you want to see where it came from, look here – The Annual Archaeological Report for 1906 (Being Part of Appendix to the Report of the Minister of Education Ontario) published in 1907.
the 1962 first edition of Selwyn Dewdney’s Indian Rock Paintings of the Great Lakes is available for online reading or download. A second edition of the book came out in 1967 with documentation on an additional 60 sites.
Thor Conway’s Discovering Rock Art In Ontario’s Provincial Park can be purchased directly from the author. Five pages of the Diamond Lake chapter are available as a sample.
The Thor and Julie Conway article on the Lake Obabika pictographs – “An Ethno-Archaeological Study of Algonkian Rock Art in Northeastern Ontario, Canada” – provide excellent background to the Diamond Lake pictographs, which are briefly mentioned in the article published in issue #49 of Ontario Archaeology in the mid-1980’s.
Brian Back’s Ottertooth article “The Lady Evelyn Lift-Over” provides excellent historical summary of the impact of dams on water levels on Diamond Lake and Lady Evelyn Lake.
Dewdney mentions Cuttle lake in his discussion of the Diamond Lake pictos. Grace Rajnovitch’s article “Paired Morphs At Cuttle Lake” is in the Jan/Feb1980 issue of Arch Notes, the newsletter of the Ontario Archaeological Society. It includes drawings from one of the panels and provides a point of comparison.
Goerge Copway’s The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibway Nation can be read online or downloaded in various file formats. Pages 132-134 provide examples of pictographic symbols. Copway writes – “An Indian well versed in these can send a communication to another Indian, and by them make himself as well understood as a pale face can by letter.”
Another collection of Diamond Lake pictograph photos can be seen at the temagami.nativeweb.org site. The pix show some of the pictos from a better angle than our shots do. Go here – Ancient Pictographs at Diamond lake in Temagami How ancient they are is an open question. My guess would be no more than four hundred years.
Finally, I wonder whatever happened to the film footage shot by that CBC crew in 1976.