Hamilton Spectator columnist Jeff Mahoney, on Cootes Paradise, the setting for my novel, The Fishers of Paradise.

MAHONEY: Requiem for Cootes Paradise ‘canal rats’
By  Jeff Mahoney
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There’s nothing left of the once famous/infamous Hamilton boathouse colony at Cootes Paradise, which flourished between 1920 and 1940.
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It’s the kind of community you’d expect to find tucked into the curl of a shoreline on the Louisiana bayou.

Boathouses on stilts. Squatters, pothunters, rogues and rounders. Poor folk, struggling families, many subsisting on fish and game gleaned from the unique and plentiful wetland environment that they’ve claimed as their home.

But it’s not Cajun; it’s Canadjun. More specifically, it’s Cootes Paradise, Hamilton’s own.

Read the rest here:

 

http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/866287–mahoney-requiem-for-cootes-paradise-canal-rats