The Castle of White Otter Lake

Years ago, our friend Pete “The Sweet” told me about a strange and impressive log cabin built on a remote lake in northern Ontario. The broad strokes of the story are that in the early 1900’s a man named Jimmy McOuat decided to build himself a towering structure (all by himself) in the backwoods of the north. His life was filled with mystery and tragedy and those tales and the cabin itself, known as the Castle of White Otter Lake, live on today. I was fortunate enough to make the trip in the summer of 2020 and visit the castle myself. In doing some research for that trip I came across a 1980’s documentary on the cabin. It was produced, directed, shot and edited by Peter G. Elliott. Here’s a snippet of Peter talking about making the film “I shot this film on a $12,000 budget using my 16mm Bolex camera, an Ontario Arts Council grant and an editing room at The National Film Board. The film was shown on CBC's Canadian Reflections and on Global Television and various broadcasters in the British isles during the 1980's.”

I’ve watched it a handful of times over the years, in doing research for my trip, for this song, and just for enjoyment. When the band decided to release this song as one of the singles for “Easy Does It”, Jared suggested reaching out to Peter to see if he’d allow us to use his documentary footage to put together our own video. I’ll be honest, I was never really expecting a reply, but Peter got back to me and after chatting and hearing the song he graciously agreed to let us use his footage for our video. I recommend giving his documentary a watch (it’s even narrated by Gordon Pinsent!), you’ll find a link to it in the description under the video on YouTube.