The New Dominion Monthly was a Montreal-based popular general-interest magazine published from 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation, into the 1870s. The magazine carried features on Canadian history, geography, and curiosities of public interest for a national Canadian readership. The July 1870 issue includes a feature on Oak Island.
The 1870 date places this article in the period after the early-and-mid-nineteenth-century treasure-hunting companies had concluded their major work on Oak Island and before the 1893 Oak Island Treasure Company prospectus consolidated the standard narrative. It is one of the earliest popular-magazine treatments of the Oak Island story to appear in print, joining a small body of early treatments that includes the Liverpool Transcript newspaper articles of the early 1860s and Judge DesBrisay's 1870 history of Lunenburg County.
The article is hosted within Early Canadiana Online as part of its pre-twentieth-century Canadian periodicals collection. Researcher Richard Joltes has examined this and similar early popular treatments as part of his document-by-document analysis of how the Oak Island legend evolved across nineteenth-century printed sources.
What this source documents
Early popular-magazine treatment of the Oak Island story prepared for a Canadian general-interest readership in 1870; an account of the search history as understood and reported in mid-nineteenth-century Canadian magazine journalism, predating the consolidation of the standard narrative in the 1893 prospectus.
Why it matters
The July 1870 New Dominion Monthly article is one of the small body of pre-1893 popular-press treatments of Oak Island. For research questions involving how the standard Oak Island narrative took shape across nineteenth-century printed sources, this article is part of the foundational documentary record. The article is among the sources examined in Richard Joltes's document-by-document analysis of the legend's evolution and is referenced in subsequent skeptical and academic treatments of the Oak Island story.