What we had seen in the large towns, and in the large gregarious life of cities, we saw "close up" at Nipigon. The varied crowd, Finns, British, Canadian and Indian (one of the Indians, a young dandy, had served with distinction during the war, had married a white Canadian, and was one of the richest men present), danced without social distinctions in that pleasant hall to Finn folk-songs that had never been set down on paper played on an accordion. It was a delightful evening.
For the rest, those with the train fished (or, rather, went through all the ritual with little of the results), walked, bathed in the lake, watched the American "movie" men in their endeavours to convert the British to baseball, or endeavoured, with as little success, to convert the baseball "fans" to cricket. The recreations of Nipigon were not hectic, and we were glad to get on to towns and massed life again.
I confess our view of Nipigon of the hundred houses was not that of the Indian boy who discussed it with us. He told us Nipigon was not the place for him.
"You wait," he said. "Next year I go. Next year I am fifteen. Then I go out into the woods. I go right away. I can't stand this city life."
III
Canada, on Monday, September 8th, demonstrated its amazing faculty for startling contrasts. It lifted the Prince from the primitive to the ultra-modern in a single movement. In the morning he was in the silent forests of Nipigon, a tract so wild that man seemed no nearer than a thousand miles. Three hours later he was moving amid the dense crowds that filled the streets of the latest word in industrial cities.
He stepped straight from Nipigon to the twin cities of Port Arthur and Fort William. These two cities are really one, and together form the great trade pool into which the traffic of the vast grain-bearing West and North-West pours for transport on the Great Lakes.
These two cities sprang from the little human nucleus made up of a Jesuit mission and a Hudson Bay Company depot of the old days. They stand on Thunder Bay, a deep-water sack thrusting out from Lake Superior under the slopes of flat-topped Thunder Cape. The situation is ideal for handling the trade of the great lake highway that swings the traffic through the heart of the Western continent.
Port Arthur and Fort William have seen their chances and made the most of them. They have constructed great wharves along the bay to accommodate a huge traffic. Over the wharves they have built up the greatest grain elevators in the world, not a few of them but a series, until the cities seemed to be inhabited solely by these giants. These elevators and stores collect and distribute the vast streams of grain that pour in from the prairies, at whose door the cities stand, distributing it across the lakes to the cities of America, or along the lakes to the Canadian East and the railways that tranship it to Europe.
On the quays are the towering lattices of patent derricks, forests of them, that handle coal and ore and cargoes of infinite variety. And the [Transcriber's note: word(s) possibly missing from source] derricks and the elevators are the uncannily long and lean lake freighters, ships with a tiny deck superstructure forward of a great rake of hold, and a tiny engine-house astern under the stack. And by these grain boats are the ore tramps and coal boats from Lake Erie, and cargo boats with paper pulp for England made in the big mills that turn the forests about Lake Superior into riches.