Shows that the most effective agent of change in the first century of Ontario's development was not the locomotive but settlers' attempts to change the forest into agricultural land. This work traces the threads that went into creating a successful farming colony while documenting the sacrifice of the forest ecosystem to the demands of progress.

"The strength of the book is its capacity to draw together the considerable body of diverse scholarly writing that has been produced over the past two decades and to set his into a framework that permits the reader to see Ontario's first generation ... of settlement for what it was." Peter Ennals, VP Academic and Research, Mount Allison University. "[Making Ontario] is a highly interesting synthesis of Ontario's colonization and of the implementation of the constituent elements that would lead to the province's socioeconomics ... [Wood's] significant synthesis, and approach of historical geography is a valued spatial contextualisation, illustrating the subtleties involved in Ontario's development during the first half of the 19th century." [translation] Jean-Claude Robert, Department of History, Universite du Quebec a Montreal.