SAULT STE. MARIE AND THE CLAY BELT
I am at the “Soo,” where Lake Superior, the world’s largest body of
fresh water, has been harnessed and is being made to work with a force
of sixty thousand horses all pulling at once. The St. Mary’s River,
through which Lake Superior empties into Lake Huron, has a fall of
about twenty-two feet in one mile, and power plants have been installed
which are generating electricity for industries on both the American
and Canadian sides of the river.
A large number of the industrial plants here belong to Americans. The
main buildings of these works look like mediæval castles rather than
modern factories. They are equal in beauty to any of the ruins of the
Rhine or the Danube. Indeed, they remind me of the mighty forts of
Delhi, the capital of India. They are made of a rich red and white
sandstone, with crenellated walls, and, notwithstanding their beauty,
are said to have been built at a remarkably low cost. The blocks of
sandstone were taken out of the canal dug for the power plant.
[Illustration: The “Soo” Canal not only has the heaviest freight
traffic of any artificial waterway in the world, but is also on the
route of the passenger steamers that carry thousands of tourists
through the Great Lakes.]
[Illustration: The longest bascule bridge in the world is operated by
the Canadian Pacific Railway at Sault Ste. Marie. Each section is 169
feet long, and is raised by electric power to permit vessels to pass
through the canal.]
[Illustration: The moose in the thick forests of Canada feed off the
trees and smaller shrubs. The moose have such short necks and long
front legs that they cannot browse on grass without getting down on
their knees.]
[Illustration: Ontario has so many lakes that canoes can be paddled for
hundreds of miles with practically no portages. Since the days of the
French explorers, these lakes have formed part of the water route from
the East to Hudson Bay.]
It is interesting to go through these factories and see the work of
Lake Superior in harness. In the pulp mills, where more than a hundred
huge truck loads of news-print are turned out every day, I saw the logs
ground to dust, mixed with water, and made into miles of paper to feed
printing presses. The output is so great that every three months
enough paper is made to cover a sidewalk reaching all the way round the
world.
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.
The Clay Belt is just north of the height of land of the North American
continent, which divides the rivers flowing north from those that flow
south. The streams on the southern side of the ridge flow into the
Great Lakes, and some even to the Gulf of Mexico. On the north slope
they flow into Hudson Bay, or by the Mackenzie and other rivers into
the Arctic Ocean. The Clay Belt has seven good-sized rivers and is well
watered throughout.
[Illustration: If there is a moose within sound of the hunter’s
birch-bark horn, he will think it one of his brethren calling and be so
foolish as to come near and be shot. These animals are still plentiful
in Canadian forests.]
[Illustration: The trout-filled streams of interior Ontario and Quebec
are a Mecca for the fishermen of both the United States and Canada. In
the tributaries of the St. Lawrence the fresh-water salmon also provide
good sport.]
In midsummer the Clay Belt is as hot as southern Canada or the northern
part of the United States. As a matter of fact, Cochrane, its chief
town, is fifty miles south of the latitude of Winnipeg. Everything
grows faster than in the States, for owing to the high latitude the
summer days are fifteen or sixteen hours long, the sun rising a
little after three and setting between eight and nine. The clay loam
is particularly fitted for growing wheat, and certain districts have
yielded forty bushels an acre. Oats, barley, and hardy vegetables
are raised successfully. The country looks prosperous, and there are
well-filled barns and fine herds of livestock as evidences of its
productivity.
When the first settlements were made, Northern Ontario had no railroads
to market its produce. Four thousand miles of track have since been
built, including two lines now a part of the Canadian National. One of
these goes through the very centre of the Clay Belt and has settlements
all along it. At almost every river crossing is a lumber mill, for
Northern Ontario’s vast forest stretches and the water-power in its
streams have made it an important producer of lumber and wood pulp. The
trees of the Clay Belt are mostly of a small growth, therefore chiefly
valuable for pulp and easier to handle in clearing the land.
Ontario has set aside thirteen million acres of forest reserves, nine
tenths of which is in the northern part of the province. The Nipigon
and Timagami reserves are each larger than Rhode Island and provide
camping grounds unequalled in the Dominion. Lake Timagami is dotted
with hundreds of islands and is a favourite haunt of canoeists. Farther
west, near the Manitoba boundary, the beautiful Lake of the Woods is
another famous camping and hunting district.
Immense herds of caribou roam through Northern Ontario. They are to
be seen in droves of hundreds and sometimes of thousands. They have
cut their trails across the country, and a hunter to whom I have been
talking tells me that from his camp at night he can often hear the
rushing noise they make as they move through the woods.
In the forests farther south moose are found in great numbers. These
animals are browsers rather than grass eaters, their necks being
so short that they have to get down on their knees when they eat
grass. Deer and smaller animals also abound, wild ducks and geese are
plentiful, and the streams are filled with fish. Indeed, it is little
wonder that each year sees thousands of campers making their way to
this “sportsman’s paradise.”