This paper explores the unacknowledged imaginative work involved in the making of the Greater Golden Horseshoe, Canada’s foremost metropolitan region of expansion and condensation. It takes note of the fact that Larry Bourne and Jim Simmons’ 2003 identification of Canada as “an overwhelmingly urban [and metropolitan] nation” (25) coincided with a growing recognition of a new kind of ruralized conurbia taking shape in Ontario. For over a generation people had addressed the network of urban, urbanizing, rural and natural reserve landscapes in the Hamilton-Toronto-Quebec City region as a spatial entity. When Herbert H. Rogge coined the term “Golden Horseshoe” in 1954, the name began to metaphorically circumscribe the region’s most common cartographical representation even as it inscribed the land with a dual faith in future urban fortunes and anti-urban, wilderness bliss. With the renaming of the region and the implementation of a systematic growth plan in 2004 as well as the renouncement of the conservationist growth plan in 2024 came a new era of incorporating one of Ontario’s most important poetic voices—Emily Pauline Johnson—into ruralizing trajectories of (sub)urbanization. The paper therefore discusses two books of poetry by the Anglo-Haudenosaunee public performer Emily Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (1861–1913), a celebrated citizen of Brantford, the western door to the Greater Golden Horseshoe, as incentives to consider the rooted cosmopolitanism and the cultural nationalism at play in the design of conurbations and their literary champions. Methodologically grounded in the ‘old’ school of hermeneutics and newer approaches to scripting, the paper invites a conversation between research on rurbanization and scholarship on literary placemaking.