Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

In the saw-mills millions of feet of lumber are being cut into boards for the markets of the United States, and in the veneering works birch logs as big around as a flour barrel are made into sheets, some as thin as your fingernail, and others as thick as the board cover of a family Bible. Here we see that the logs are soaked in boiling water and then pared, just as you would pare an apple, into strips of wood carpeting perhaps a hundred feet long. These strips are used for the backing of mahogany and quartered oak sent here from Grand Rapids and other places where furniture is made. One often thinks he is getting solid mahogany or solid oak, whereas he has only the knottiest of pine or other rough wood on which is placed a strip of birch, with a veneer of mahogany or oak on top. The thick birch strips are used also for chair and opera seats.

Near the saw-mills is the Clergue steel plant, with its smoke stacks standing out against the blue sky like the pipes of a gigantic organ. The works cover acres and turn out thousands of tons of metal products every day. They are supplied by the mountains of iron ore lying on the shores of Lake Superior not far away, with great steel unloaders reaching out above them.

Sault Ste. Marie is one of the oldest settlements in the Dominion of Canada. Here in 1668, Father Marquette established the first Jesuit mission in the New World, and the priests who followed him were the first white men to travel from lower Canada to the head of the Great Lakes, where now stand Port Arthur and Fort William. The town of to-day is a bustling place of almost twenty-five thousand population. It is connected with its American namesake on the opposite bank of the river by a mile-long bridge of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

On both sides of the Saint Mary’s River are the locks of the famous “Soo” Canal, where the Great Lakes freighters and passenger boats are lowered and raised twenty feet between the levels of Lakes Superior and Huron. The first canal was built around the rapids in 1798, to accommodate the canoes of the Indians and fur traders. Along it ran a tow-path for the oxen that later pulled the heavier loads. That canal was destroyed by the United States troops in the War of 1812.

The present canal was opened in 1897, providing a new link in the chain of waterways from the head of the Lakes to the Saint Lawrence. The Canadian lock is nine hundred feet long and when finished was the longest in the world. Since then it has been surpassed by one eleven hundred feet in length on the American side. The United States locks handle about ninety per cent. of the freight traffic, which has so increased in the last twenty years that it has been necessary to add three more locks to the original one on our side of the river. Two of these locks are longer by three hundred feet than the famous Panama locks at Gatun or Pedro Miguel. Each is big enough to accommodate two ships at one time. Nevertheless, during the open season one can often see here a score of steamers, some of them of from twelve to fifteen thousand tons, waiting to go through.

The “Soo” is noted for having the heaviest freight traffic of any artificial waterway in the world. The tonnage passing through it in one year is three times as large as that of the foreign trade shipping of the port of New York, four times as great as the freight passing through the Suez Canal, and five times as great as that of the Panama Canal. For six months of the year an average of more than one steamer goes through every fifteen minutes. The chief freight commodity is ore from the iron mines of Lake Superior, which often comprises seventy per cent. of the total. Coal and wheat are next in importance.

In coming to the “Soo” from Cobalt and Sudbury, I have been travelling through the new Ontario, the “wild northwest” of the Ontario we know on the shores of Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron. The land near those bodies of water is about as thickly settled as Ohio. It has some of the best farms of North America, producing grain, vegetables, and fruits worth millions of dollars a year. At every few miles are modern cities. The whole country is cut up by railways, and one can go by automobile through any part of it. The cities and town hum with factories, and the entire region is one of industry and thrift.

This new Ontario is the frontier of the province. It is the great northland between Georgian Bay and Hudson Bay, extending from Quebec westward through the Rainy River country to Manitoba. This vast region is larger than Texas, four times the size of old Ontario, and much bigger than Great Britain or France. It is divided into eight great districts. The Thunder Bay and Rainy River districts in the west are together as long as from Philadelphia to Boston, and wider than from Washington to New York. The Algoma district, in the southern end of which the “Soo” is located, is almost as wide, extending from Lake Superior to the Albany River, while the Timiskaming district reaches from Cobalt north to James Bay, and borders Quebec on the east.

Until the first decade of the twentieth century this vast territory was looked upon as valuable only for its timber, of which it had nearly two hundred million acres. It was thought to be nothing but rock and swamp, covered with ice the greater part of the year. Its only inhabitants were Indian hunters, Hudson’s Bay Company fur traders, and lumbermen who cut the trees along the streams and floated them down to the Great Lakes. Then a new line of the Canadian Pacific Railway was put through, the great nickel mines were discovered, the silver and gold regions were opened up, and the Dominion and provincial governments began to look upon the land as an available asset.

Exploration parties were sent out by the Ontario government to investigate the region from Quebec to Manitoba. They reported that a wide strip of fertile soil ran through the wilderness about a hundred miles north of the route of the Canadian Pacific Railway. This land is of a different formation from the rest of northern Ontario. It is a clay loam, from which the region gets its name, the Great Clay Belt. This belt is from twenty-five to one hundred miles wide, and it extends westward from the Quebec-Ontario boundary for three hundred miles or more. It is estimated to contain as much land as West Virginia.