Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 673
All this is just right and in keeping with the surroundings. It was nature that suggested the gigantic idea. Outside, beyond the capes of Thunder Bay, stretches the great reach of Lake Superior. The bay itself would shelter a whole navy, and its towering rocky islands and shores make a navy look small and insignificant. In and through the town the sweeping circles and the branching mouths of the Kaministiquia River are quite properly all drawn on the same big scale. Behind the city mountains rise, quite close by, single and in chains, not like other mountains, soft and sloping, but torn and scarped and scarred, with upheaved layers of separate rocks that bear witness to millions of years of evolution. Geologists say that this is the oldest part of the world. I believe it. The Creator was trying out his hand: not in the dainty touches of finished art but in the broad, bold strokes of primitive design.
As with the town so with its commerce. For Fort William no gewgaws of retail trade in parcels and packets, no luxuries in little boxes. It deals in great raw primitive stuff, and it handles it not with hands but with cranes. High stacks of pulp wood rise as little mountains and keep sinking down as the pulp sticks go into the roaring mill, splash and tumble in foam, agonise in sulphur fumes, depart this life as living wood to come spinning out from great rollers, quiet and still, in their death shroud, as miles and miles of paper. Two hours sees it all through its death and resurrection. Wrapped in great bales too big to lift, machinery piles it up in cars, and rolls it into the Great Lakes steamers and away it goes down the lakes. Newsboys presently will be shouting over it in the great American cities. But in the beginning was Fort William.
With the paper goes iron and other ores; everything seems to go far away and to come from far away, — Ship-loads of sulphur from Yucatan for the death agony of the spruce sticks, — ship-loads of binder twine that was sisal in Honduras and will be turned into social credit in Alberta. But towering over it all, and dwarfing even the gigantic primitive industries are the grain elevators and the grain boats: the wheat that never ends, pounded and poured, spread out and sucked up, moving in a roar of machinery and a cloud of dust, — still and inert in the ship’s silent hold, and thus all the way from the prairies to Liverpool. The elevators of the twin cities have a capacity of 92,000,000 bushels of wheat. But the figures don’t matter. Make them as big as you like and they’d seem too small.
Yet for anybody who likes figures, prefers figures and can’t get along without them, here are a few Fort William-Port Arthur statistics to write down. But don’t try to remember them. In five years they’ll all be out of date. The two cities have 30 grain elevators. They hold 92,000,000 bushels of grain. The combined city area has 340 miles of railway track in sidings. It has 22 miles of dock frontage. It can, and has, sorted out and unloaded 2,748 cars of grain in one day. It can roll out 865 tons of paper a day. It has behind it the water power of the Nipigon and the Kaministiquia. It has developed already over 100,000 hydro-electric horsepower, a statement which is more or less meaningless to untrained people like myself, but which gets a certain meaning by comparison. It is using already about as much hydro-electric horse power as the whole of Nova Scotia, or as Alberta and Saskatchewan put together. It sells it for 1 cent for a Kilowatt hour and lights its houses so cheaply and so brightly that you can play poker all night for the bare cost of the whiskey.
The scale of the emptiness and the openness of Fort William makes New York and London seem crowded, breathless anthills, — no place for men. I’d like to live there. I’d like to go to Fort William young and live there fifty years till it had five hundred thousand inhabitants, and get old and half childish and prattle away about what it was like when it only had fifty thousand.
The reporter who received my “interview” seems indeed to have been pleased with it, for he added to it a very handsome tribute to my personal appearance. “Professor Leacock,” he said, “looks like anything rather than a professor.” This was high praise and he followed it with a flattering description of my physical appearance. Alas! I was soon to realize how greatly the strain and fatigue of public lecturing was to wear me down, as I could see by comparing the Fort William report with those that succeeded it. The young man at Fort William wrote: “Stephen Leacock is a stockily-built man with a shock of iron-grey hair, a boisterous manner, an infectious laugh, and eyes that seem to be always smiling.” Two weeks later, at Saskatoon, the paper said, “Dr. Leacock is a grave-looking man with a scholarly stoop, whose worn face lights up occasionally with a smile.” More recently at Vancouver a reporter wrote:
“The little man, who is under-sized and practically bald, sank wearily into a chair, apologizing for his fatigue with a wan ghost of a smile.” By the time I reached Victoria, the newspaper said,— “The poor little rat was found sitting in his golf bag, over the top of which his face peeped out with anxious solicitude. He appeared deeply dejected, asked for a glass of buttermilk and inquired the name of the town he was in.”
I think I have got the last quotation right: if not word for word, that is the gist of it.
I addressed the assembled Canadian Clubs of Fort William and Port Arthur on the subject of our happy relations with the United States and what a pity it is that such happy relations couldn’t be copied by the European nations. As a matter of fact there is no better instance of this than the existence of Fort William itself and its peculiar situation on the continent. It is what would be called in Europe the strategic centre of Canada. Whoever holds Fort William cuts Canada in two. Luckily for us we don’t have to think in such terms. We talk of our cities in America as chief wheat centres, or principle hog centres or as first and second egg-eating centres but never as strategic centres. I hope we never do.
I had had occasion to realize this peculiar feature of the situation of the city during the only other previous visit I had paid to the town. It was in 1916. I had come there on behalf of the King of the Belgians being on an extended tour to give humorous lectures and send the money to the Belgian refugees gathered in the French city of Nantes. I went a long way. In fact the King of the Belgians had very generously said that he didn’t care how far I went as long as I paid my own expenses. It was my first attempt to give humorous lectures. Till then I had only lectured on heavy political subjects. But this tour was intended to be a source of fun. I remember that my first lecture, at St. John, New Brunswick, was spoiled because the chairman announced it as “international law” and the audience believed him.
But I remember that in Fort William in 1916 the Mayor of the town, the late Sam Young, talked to me of how easily the Germans could have seized Fort William and cut Canada in two on August 4, 1914. It was even easier then than now. There were no aeroplanes and no bombs to reckon with. North of Fort William was practically nothing. A surprise party, prepared in advance could have landed from the other side of the Lakes, blown up culverts and bridges, put all the civil population, then only 30,000, on a couple of trains and sent them west, held the town and invited German reservists to make their way there. I forget who won out, Mr. Young or the Germans. But it was a close thing between them.
The plan, if successful, would have blocked up all the Canadian grain, — there was no Panama, no Hudson Bay to take it, — and would have made all overseas contingents impossible till the town was retaken. This would have been a difficult thing to do, where nature had fortified it, east and west, with hundreds of miles of rock, muskeg and sunken gorges. So difficult indeed is the Lake Superior shore that there is one place where the railway had to be built in a three mile curve to get half a mile ahead.
At the time when Mr. Young explained the campaign to me the opportunity had long gone by. He was able therefore, without loss of patriotism, to throw himself with great vigour into the combat on both sides. Indeed it took him two years and cost him millions and millions to lick himself. Thus do generous minds often find a kind of pleasure in putting themselves in the other fellow’s place and fighting on his side. Thus have I once had, thirty years ago, the privilege of listening to the famous Dr. Jameson explaining how the Boers could have licked the English by disregarding Ladysmith and Mafeking and making a rush for the sea. Thank Heaven the Germans never thought of these smart things till after they’d been licked. But the Fort William idea is at least curious, — and carries us back to the everlasting fact that any ‘strategic’ stuff as between the United States and Canada would mean destruction. Our only form of defense against one another is to have absolutely none at all. As to the Germans I don’t think they are ever likely to start anything worse in Fort William than, “German Choral Society”, — no, they couldn’t.
And Fort William need only be interested in the ‘strategy’ of its economic development. The grain trade and the Ocean Water Way, which is inevitably coming and coming soon, will turn it into a metropolis. Add to this the Eldorado of Gold in the district above it, — in what was once Canada’s fatal wilderness and is now Canada’s greatest hope! It is amazing what we have in Canada, the vast extent, the magnificence of the opportunity: — if only we don’t tear it apart into nine pieces, one for each province to chew in its own corner of the den.
So I turn to speak of Fort William and the Waterway, and the great voyage from the sea.
CHAPTER TWO
FORT WILLIAM AND THE WATERWAY
THE DANGEROUS VOYAGE of Fort William — Its Contrasts of Sun and Storm — Of Dream and Danger — The Great Waterways Project — Bound to Come — Cheaper than Paying Relief.
By giving lectures in Fort William and elsewhere in 1916, I was able to send quite a sum of money to help maintain the Belgian refugees quartered in the French city of Nantes. The mayor of the town wrote me a letter of thanks. I don’t know where he got his geographical information from. No doubt he was as vague in his ideas on geography as all Frenchmen are: their own country is so marvellous that they never bother with others. No doubt also the mayor used an atlas of the days of Louis XIV. He wrote, “We observe with admiration that you have penetrated even into the ‘Country of the Savages’ and have made the dangerous voyage to Fort William.”
I often repeated the phrase as a joke but the more you think of it the more it seems justified. It was, and it is dangerous, — dangerous in the old days, and dangerous, for those who go down to the sea in ships, even today. The first white people who ever came to the mouth of the Kaministiquia took months, even years to get there, months of dangerous travel by river and portage and pathway, often wintering as they went, with danger on either hand; danger from man or from nature. Many who went there, as the Irish would say, never got there.
The French in New France had from the first heard from the Indians of the great waters to the west, and that further on beyond was a great northern salt sea. Many had tried to reach it. Champlain, in search of it, got part of the way up the Ottawa.
Certain voyageurs, — nameless and without record, — went into the wilderness and returned with great loads of furs. Many never came back. All the country now called Ontario was overrun, in the seventeenth century, with bands of conquering Iroquois, killing and burning any fugitives that could be found.
Through this country at this time, — the year was 1658, went the great explorer Radisson as fierce as any Indian, and braver. With him was his brother-in-law, Groseillers, twenty-nine Frenchmen and some Indians. Their idea was to make the “dangerous voyage of Fort William.” They left Montreal in June of 1658. They went up the Ottawa, and by Lake Nipissing, the French River, into and around Lake Huron. On Manitoulin Island they fought a war-party of Iroquois, and carried away eight of them, of whom three were dead. They ate the dead ones and burned the others over a slow fire. That sounds pretty dangerous travelling, for somebody.
Objection was taken to this statement, when first I made it, on the ground that it implies that the Indians were cannibals. So they were, to a great extent, especially the Indians of Central Canada, our own crowd. The Senecas took the lead. They and the Ottawas and the Pottawottamies, were especially keen on eating the hearts of their enemies as a way of acquiring courage.
One is reminded of Mark Twain’s grotesque fancy called Cannibalism in the Cars, in which a group of travelling congressmen, snowbound and starving, fall to eating one another after proper legislative voting as between majority and minority. “The next morning,” says the narrator, “we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast, one of the finest men I ever sat down to.” A Seneca Indian would have read that passage with matter-of-fact approval. The Senecas lived round where now are Buffalo and Rochester. Their name is the same as Genesee and Genosha. A great many hotels, restaurants and even lunch-wagons are named after them. It seems quite right.
Whether Radisson joined in the feast indicated above, is left ambiguous in the original text of his journal. He may have. He was a terrific character, lived with the Indians as an Indian and joined in their torture of their enemies. There is a fine account of him, from material out of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s archives, in Douglas Mackay’s new and fascinating book, The Honorable Company.
Radisson’s party wintered on Green Bay (off Lake Michigan) and there the Crees told them the way to take to reach the great salt sea of the north. They went through the Sault into Lake Superior. From Chemaugemon Bay they explored a lot of the water shed between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. They wintered on Lake Superior. Next Summer they started for home, fighting the Iroquois as they went (on one occasion five hundred at a time), and reached Montreal in August of 1660. The journey had taken two years and two months. Their lives were at no time worth two weeks purchase. No insurance company would have touched them.
Yet they helped to make the history of the world. Radisson had learned of the ‘great salt sea’, the Hudson Bay, — of the fur territory all around it, and how to reach it from Lake Superior. He may still have thought, as Champlain certainly did, that this great salt sea led round the corner to ‘Cathay’. He ought not to have thought this, because by this time English exploring ships, looking for the north west passage had practically circumnavigated the Bay. But he certainly had an idea of the great wealth offered in furs. He resented the attempt of the French Governor of Canada to make him pledge half his furs in advance. So when he went he went without official leave, passed from Lake Superior through the fur country and reached the Bay. Quarreling again with the Governor, Radisson turned to England. King Charles and his marvellous cousin Prince Rupert, — the patron saint of our North West, — itself once Rupertsland, — knew a good thing when they saw it. The result was the Hudson’s Bay Company, the British occupation of the North West, and my lecture tour. All this resulted from Radisson’s first achievement of the dangerous voyage of Fort William!
After him come others, priests and explorers, scattered through the remaining century of the French Regime in Canada; Father Menard, who never came back, though his breviary and cassock were found years later; Father Allouez: and Marquette and Joliet and Hennepin. But French discovery drifted chiefly over the divide towards the Mississippi. The names of these explorers stand in their hall of fame, written up side by side as the names of the streets of Minneapolis with the red and green lights of the over crowded traffic to remind them of the result of their labours. But one, the famous Duluth, belongs also and very much to Fort William. He set up his chief post on the Kaministiquia, exactly at the site of the town. Then he traded as far as the Lake of the Woods and Lake Nipigon.
But as long as the English held the Bay and the French the St. Lawrence, neither one nor the other could make use of the natural and proper route to the fur country. When the cession of Canada gave the English both the Bay and the Lakes the “dangerous voyage of Fort William” came into its own. The new Northwest Company, organized from Montreal tapped the Hudson Bay territory from the basis of the lakes. Every Canadian read of the grand old days of the company, its fleet of canoes coming and going and its wintering partners. The farewell dinners, Scottish model, at Beaver Hall, took the place of the masses held on the French model at St. Anne’s by the departing coureurs des bois. The members of both nations, on such a dangerous journey, prepared themselves to die, but each in their own way.
The two fur companies joined. The steamboat came, replacing the canoe for the lake journey. Then the railway took over the first part of it, and the ‘voyage’ was from Collingwood to Fort William. Thus went Lord Wolesley with steamers and a flock of boats, built in Collingwood, to suppress the Red River rising, that vanished at his approach. Young Prince Arthur of Connaught who was in the expedition has left his name in Port Arthur.
After that, the route was and remained by rail and steamer to Fort William with half a dozen Ontario points of departure, Owen Sound leading. Beyond Fort William the route after 1870 was a mixture of canoe and portage and steamer, as it was when the young Reverend Mr. Grant, later Principal Grant, passed through in 1872, from Prince Arthur’s Landing to Fort Garry, on a voyage of discovery, under Mr. Sandford Fleming, to find the best way through the Rocky Mountains. Later the route was by rail to the Red River and down the river by steamer, till the completion of the C.P.R. hooked it all up from Fort William to the Pacific.
At first sight all the ‘danger’ seems out of it. But that is only on first sight. The water journey from Montreal to Fort William, — soon to turn into the great waterway from the sea to the West, — is among the most strange and romantic voyages in the world. At one end, at one time of the year, it looks like the voyage of a dream: at the other, in the closing of the season, it looks like a grim tragedy of men against the sea.
In the Soulanges Canal, as the motor cars pass along the straight highway that borders it, is a great lake freighter moving up stream. From the motor car that overtakes and passes it, it seems motionless, — a little ruffle of foam at the bow and a little churning of the water about the propeller at the stern: no sound: no one in sight; the ship of a dream. A sailor of the deep sea would scoff at the sight of it, the long whale-back body, battened down and flat, the high superstructure in front with a single funnel far astern.
