The system of navigable water ways from Duluth and Port Arthur on Lake Superior to the Strait of Belle Isle is twenty-two hundred miles long. At Lake Ontario the head of the St. Lawrence River is two hundred and thirty-one feet above the sea level, and its current descends that distance to tidewater chiefly by going down successive rapids. There are ship canals around these rapids and around Niagara Falls, and also connecting various lakes above. The Sault Sainte Marie locks and canals, at the outlet of Lake Superior, have already been described. The admirable systems conducting navigation around the rapids in the river below Lake Ontario also carry a large tonnage. Between Ogdensburg and Montreal, a distance of about one hundred and twenty miles, the navigation of forty-three miles is through six canals of various lengths around the rapids, each having elaborate locks. The Gulf of St. Lawrence is also constructed upon an enormous scale, covering eighty thousand square miles, and with the lower river having a tidal ebb and flow of eighteen to twenty-four feet. The mouth of the river and head of the Gulf are usually located at Cape Chatte, far below the Saguenay, and from the Cape almost up to Quebec the river is ten to thirty miles wide. In front of Quebec it narrows to less than a mile, while above, the width is from one to two and a half miles to Montreal, expanding to ten miles at Lake St. Peter, where the tidal influence ceases. Above Montreal the river occasionally expands into lakes, but is generally a broad and strongly flowing stream with frequent rapids. The largest ocean vessels freely ascend to Montreal, at the head of ship navigation, Lachine rapids being just above the city. For several months in winter, however, ice prevents.
THE CITY OF TORONTO.
Lake Ontario, out of which the river St. Lawrence flows, is nearly two hundred miles long, and in some places seventy miles wide. It has generally low shores and but few islands, and the name given it by Champlain was Lake St. Louis, after the King of France. The original Indian name, however, has since been retained, Ontario meaning "how beautiful is the rock standing in the water." Three well-known Canadian cities are upon its shores—Hamilton at the western end, Toronto on the northern coast, and Kingston near the eastern end. Hamilton is a busy, industrial and commercial city of fifty thousand people, having a good harbor. The great port, however, is Toronto, with over two hundred thousand inhabitants, the capital of the Province of Ontario, and the headquarters of the Scottish and Irish Protestants, who settled and rule Upper Canada, the richest and most populous province of the Dominion. Toronto means "the place of meeting," and the word was first heard in the seventeenth century as applied to the country of the Hurons, between Lakes Huron and Simcoe, the name being afterwards given to the Indian portage route, starting from Lake Ontario, in the present city limits, over to that country. Here, in 1749, the French established a small trading-post, Fort Rouille, but there was no settlement to speak of for a century or more. The United Empire Loyalists, under General Simcoe, founded the present city in 1793 under the name of York, and it was made the capital of Upper Canada, of which Simcoe was Governor. The location was an admirable one. The portage led up a romantic little stream, now called Humber River, while out in front was an excellent harbor, protected by a long, low, forest-clad island, making a perfect land-locked basin, sheltered from the storms of the lake. The nucleus of a town was thus started on a tract of marshy land, adjoining the Humber, familiarly known for nearly a half century as "Muddy Little York," which characteristic a part of the city still retains, as the pedestrian in falling weather can testify. Yet the site is a pleasing one—two little rivers, the Humber and the Don, flowing down to the lake through deep and picturesque ravines, having the city between and along them, while there is a gradual slope upward to an elevation of two hundred feet and over at some distance inland, an ancient terrace, which was the bank of the lake.
The town did not grow much at first, and during the War of 1812 it was twice captured by the Americans, but they could not hold it long. As the back country was settled and lake navigation afterwards developed, however, the harbor became of importance and the city grew, being finally incorporated as Toronto. Then it got a great impetus and became known as the "Queen City," its geographical advantages as a centre of railway as well as water routes attracting a large immigration, so that it has grown to be the second city in Canada, and its people hope it may outstrip Montreal and become the first. It has achieved a high rank commercially, and in religion and education, so that there are substantial grounds for the claim, often made, that it is the "Boston of Canada." It contains a church for about every thousand inhabitants, Sunday is observed with great strictness, and it has in the University of Toronto the chief educational foundation in the Dominion, and in the Toronto Globe the leading organ of Canadian Liberalism. The city spreads for eight miles along the lake shore; the streets are laid out at right angles, and there are many fine buildings. Yonge Street, dividing the city, stretches northward from the harbor forty miles inland to the shore of Lake Simcoe. There are attractive residential streets, with many ornate dwellings in tasteful gardens. St. James' Cathedral, near Yonge Street, is a fine Early English structure, with a noble clock and a grand spire rising three hundred and sixteen feet. There is a new City Hall, an enormous Romanesque building with an impressive tower, and Osgoode Hall, the seat of the Ontario Superior Courts, in Italian Renaissance, its name being given from the first Chief Justice of Upper Canada. In Queen's Park are the massive Grecian buildings of the Provincial Parliament, finished in 1892 at a cost of $1,500,000. This Park contains a bronze statue of George Brown, long a leading Canadian statesman, and a monument erected in memory of the men who fell in repelling the Fenian invasion of 1866.
The buildings of the University of Toronto, to the westward of the Queen's Park, are extensive and form a magnificent architectural group. The main building is Norman, with a massive central tower, rebuilt in 1890, after having been burnt. There are fifteen hundred students, and the University offers complete courses in the arts and sciences, law and medicine. To the northward is McMaster Hall, a Baptist theological college, tastefully constructed and liberally endowed. From the top of the tall University tower there is an admirable view over the city and far across the lake. The town spreads broadly out on either hand, running down to the harbor, beyond which is the narrow streak made by the low-lying island enclosing it. Far to the southward stretch the sparkling waters of Ontario, reaching to the horizon, while in the distance can be seen a faint little silver cloud of spray rising from Niagara. In the northern background villas dot the green and wooded hillsides, showing how the city spreads, while in every direction the incomplete buildings and the gentle distant noises of the builder's hammer and trowel testify to its robust growth. Many steamers move about the harbor, and among them are the ferry-boats carrying crowds over to the low-lying island, with its many amusement places, the city's great recreation ground. At Hanlon's Point, its western end, was long the home of Hanlon, the "champion sculler of the world," one of Toronto's celebrities.
THE LAKE OF THE THOUSAND ISLANDS.
Out of Ontario the great river St. Lawrence flows one hundred and seventy-two miles down to Montreal, being for much of the distance the boundary between the United States and Canada. Kingston, with twenty-five thousand people, guarded by picturesque graystone batteries and martello towers—the "Limestone City"—stands at the head of the river where it issues from the lake. To the westward is the entrance of the spacious Bay of Quinté, and on the eastern side the terminus of the Rideau Canal, leading northeastward to the Rideau River and Ottawa, the Canadian capital. This was originally the French Fort Cataraqui, established at the mouth of Cataraqui River in 1672, the name being subsequently changed by Count Frontenac to Frontenac. The Indian word Cataraqui means "Clay bank rising from the water," and after the fort was built the meaning changed to "fort rising from the water." Here the Sieur de La Salle, in 1678, built the first vessel navigating the lake. The British captured the fort in 1762, naming it Kingston, after the American Revolution, and by fortifying the promontories commanding the harbor, made it the strongest military post in Canada after Quebec and Halifax, the chief work being Fort Henry. Its garrisons have been long withdrawn, however, and now the old-time forts are useful chiefly as additions to the attractive scenery of its harbor and approaches. At the outlet of Ontario the course of the St. Lawrence begins with the noted archipelago known as the "Lake of the Thousand Islands," there being actually about seventeen hundred of them. This is a remarkable formation, composed largely of fragments of the range of Laurentian mountains, here coming southward out of Canada to the river, producing an extraordinary region. This Laurentian formation the geologists describe as the oldest land in the world—"the first rough sketch and axis of America." During countless ages this range has been worn down by the effect of rain, frost, snow and rivers, and scratched and broken by rough, resistless glaciers, and we are told that, compared with these fragmentary "Thousand Islands" and the almost worn-out mountains of the lower St. Lawrence basin, the Alps and the Andes are but creations of yesterday.
Wolfe Island broadly obstructs the Ontario outlet between Kingston and Cape Vincent on the New York shore, and from them, with an island-filled channel, in some places twelve miles broad, the swift river current threads the archipelago by pleasant and tortuous passages nearly to Ogdensburg, forty miles below. These islands are of all sizes, shapes and appearance, varying from small low rocks and gaunt crags to gorgeous foliage-covered gardens. On account of their large numbers, the early French explorers named them "Les Milles Isles," and in the ancient chronicles they are described as "obstructing navigation and mystifying the most experienced Iroquois pilots." Fenimore Cooper located some of the most interesting incidents of his Pathfinder in "that labyrinth of land and water, the Thousand Isles." The larger islands in spring and summer are generally covered with luxuriant vegetation, and the river shores are a delicious landscape of low but bold bluffs and fruitful fields spreading down to the water, with distant forests bounding the horizon. The atmosphere is usually dry, light and mellow, and the Indians, who admired this attractive region, appropriately called it Manatoana, or the "Garden of the Great Spirit." Howe Island adjoins Wolfe Island, and below is the long Grindstone Island. Here on the New York shore is the village of Clayton, where the New York Central Railroad comes up from Utica and Rome, the leading route to this region. Below is the almost circular Round Island with its large hotel, and everywhere are charming little islets, while ahead, down the St. Lawrence, are myriads more islands, apparently massed together in a maze of dark green distant foliage, the enchanted isles of a fascinating summer sea:
"The Thousand Isles, the Thousand Isles,
Dimpled, the wave around them smiles,