From the Great Lakes to the wide west : impressions of a tour between Toronto and the Pacific

Front matter

rOTHE

\Vesi

WIDE West o Pi fa

Contents

Chapter Page

I. Owen Sound and its big Chair-making

Factory 7

Chapter I Owen Sound And Its Big Chair- Making Factory

Owen Sound, Ont., May 29th " Westward the Mail and Empire takes its way." This is not exactly what Bishop Berkeley wrote in 1727 in that poem of his, " On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America," but it is near enough. I am going westward, and, as a representative of the Mail and Empire^ I am to record some of my impressions. Repeated injunctions to "Go West, young man," have at length had their effect, and I am going — a living testimony to the effectual force of reiterated counsels. My friends at starting were very kind. They told me what to do. Some of them had been West, and had ridden bucking bronchos. I told them that any advice on 7 this subject would be superfluous, as I did not propose to take exactly that form of exercise. But they persisted in giving it. They also loaded me up with preservatives against all kinds of untoward happenings. That sort of affectionate solicitude always touches me, and I thanked them with tears in my eyes. Then they told me how to write letters to the newspapers while I was away, and at the feet of these Gamaliels I listened humbly. I hope I shall be able to put some of their precepts into practice. But at last the train drew out and bore me from the protection of the Mayor and the Board of Control, so that I felt a sense of orphanhood.

It was a full train of many cars, for an excursion rate of travel prevailed. There is no doubt that the country people come in and buy goods at Toronto stores. Our car looked like the shipping-room of a mercantile establishment at a busy time. Parcels of all sizes filled up every available nook, and bulged out into the aisle. I got a seat at last by the side of a man who had a bad cough. It was a sort of cough that lasted a couple of miles or so at a bout, but it appeared to trouble him less than it did me. Between his lengthened paroxysms he made pleasing observations instead of objurgating his cough. He was 8

A Cheerful Invalid

knowing on the subject of crops, and said the spring ones looked very good. " Look at that ! " he would say, pointing to a glorious field of spring wheat, coming up in regular and abundant luxuriance. Even when he was doubled up and speechless he would point The crops are indeed good. The overflowing promise of Manitoba reaches right down to Ontario. Everywhere things look " kind," despite the weather. It will be a good year. Yet there was a grumbler in the next seat, though he had no cough. This worthy maintained that the fruit was suffering for want of sunshine. The bees and flies had not been able to get their work in on the blossoms of the apple-trees. As a consequence there would be only half the fruit that would otherwise have developed. My coughing friend argued otherwise — in his moments of respite. He seemed disposed to, defend Nature against all comers. When he got out at a wayside station it was with a Parthian observation to the effect that " the fruit would be all right," and as the train passed on through the twilight I saw him leaning against a fence paying for his pertinacity with a cough like a repeating decimal. At Cardwell Junction there was a longish wait for the local train, and a regular parade on the plat- 9 form. It is impossible not to be struck by the healthy and prosperous average of the Ontario people one sees on such occasions — an average of which any democracy might be proud. They are a strong, ruddy, well-fedlooking people. If their faces are not " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," they certainly are not marred by sickness or anxiety. There is much prosperity abroad. It is a good time. The people are doing well. At every station there was a procession of those plethoric parcels homeward. When it became too dark any longer to admire the coloursymphony of fresh green poplars and aspens against dark pines, which was one of the features of the Junction, the other train came up, and we thundered on to Owen Sound " lickety-split."

The recent census reveals the fact that the population of Owen Sound is 9,255. It is a comfortable, well-to-do town, and it already rejoices in granolithic sidewalks on its main street. Its very well-equipped Collegiate Institute occupies a site of unparalleled beauty on the side of a hill, where it is embosomed in trees and verdure, and it seems to have churches enough to hold the entire population. The court-house and gaol have rural and arboreal surroundings of considerable 10

Trees Transmogrified beauty, and its water supply descends from springs on a neighbouring hill by gravitation, which is enough to give adequate fire pressure. The town derives importance not only from its shipping connection with Georgian Bay and the lakes, but from considerable manufactures. There is a chair factory here that is perhaps bigger than anything else of the kind on the continent, where one sees great elm saw-logs brought in dripping wet from the river and converted into chairs before his eyes in a way that is altogether marvellous. Strong men grapple hold of a 15 or 20-foot length of the bole of a tree with the rough, picturesque bark of years on it. In a moment it is on the bed of the sawing machine and falls into slabs. Then it is passed to other saws that further divide it, and to machines that steam, shape and bend it ; to others that bore, turn, smooth and further shape it, until you follow it to the workshops, where men are putting chairs together for dear life, or are staining, varnishing, polishing or packing them. The output is about 2,000 chairs per day, and there appear to be enough finished chairs in the vast warehouses to seat the whole Ontario electorate. I have seen many manufactories in various parts of the world, but I must confess that I do not remember one that seemed packed so full of live energy and all agog. There was something that touched the imagination in the ruthless determination — the irresistible force — with which the dismembered monarch of the forest was turned into chairs. One stood in the shadows of the saw-mill, a place of half-lights and gloom that cloudy afternoon, and looked out through openings on to glancing water, where many logs lay waiting on the lapping waves. Then Titanic men grappled one of them with hooks and chain, and it began slowly to drag in. It seemed like the tragic beginning of a final scene. Perhaps there was a bit of greenest moss on the trunk that gleamed like an emerald in the light that was reflected from the water ; or there might be even the veriest little bud on some fatuous little twig the old tree had put out like a fool in its last days, as if it could not forget that it was once a sapling. Everything about the great roughbarked, massive log breathed of the recent days of the forest, where this tree — three feet in diameter at the base — stood up sturdy and strong, its branching head reaching up towards the sky. A moment, and the steam-devil has got hold of it, and with a scream it loses a slab from its side. This is jerked away, and

The Furniture of Long Ago

again and again it is pressed against the saw, losing piece after piece of its heart, each of which at once begins its lengthened and tortuous journey through the factory, and is further and further dismembered and split up and torn and heated and varnished, till at last the bole of the forest-tree stands in the warehouse in the transmogrified shape of several scores of chairs, like one sees in the furniture departments of the departmental stores.

I remember many years ago visiting a furniture-maker's of the old-fashioned kind, who lived and worked in an old English village in Worcestershire. He made furniture just as his father and grandfather had made it before him, bestowing loving care on each piece, and working as though he thought that, as Longfellow says, "the gods see everywhere." I think it used to take him about a week to make a chair. That was the time his grandfather used to take, and he would have thought it unfilial to exceed him in speed. They did very good work, those men. Even the grandfather's chairs are being used to-day and are thought more of than ever. Of course, wearing out or going to pieces are both out of the question with chairs of that kind. But, then, they cost about ten times what you can get chairs for now ! That is the difference. 13

From the Gfcat Lakes to the "Wide "West

The world to-day demands cheap chairs, and they must have them made in ten minutes. And wonderfully good chairs they are for the money they cost and for the time it takes to produce them. But as I stood watching the wonderful machinery that could disintegrate the bole of an elm tree, and send it helterskeltering through a series of workshops till it emerged — breathless, as it were — in the shape of newly-polished, genteel chairs, ready to go into any of the million houses that are waiting for them, I could not help thinking of the old Worcestershire furniture-maker, who sometimes took orders for a set of dining-room chairs, " to be delivered in two years," or for a mahogany dining-table that was to be " ready in three years, without fail ! " The whole change results from the rise of that great middle class, which is now such an important part of the world, and which, from Britain, from Australia, from New Zealand, from the Cape and elsewhere, calls out to this corner of Canada for chairs to sit upon, that shall be at least genteel, even if they do not last quite so long as those that were made for big houses in the olden time.

Chapter II

FROM OWEN SOUND TO SAULT STE. MARIE

Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., June ist Alexander Henry, that cool and thrifty fur trader, who has left us perhaps the most interesting account of the condition of things in this part of the country in the early days of its settlement, left Montreal in 1760 with four 3 5 -foot canoes and a little band of voyageurs to attend to them, and especially to porter them over the portages — killing work that, by his report. They paddled by lake and river, and ultimately came by way of the Georgian Bay to Sault Ste. Marie. Since that time much has been said and written about our inland seas. Scribblers have scribbled, and stump speakers have exploited their vibrant voices on the theme ; premiers have perorated and poets have sung, but when you sail on them you feel that the half has not been told. It is all true. You feel that even IS

From the Gfcat Lakes to the Wide West

a permanent orchestra of eloquent premiers, with the best stump speaker in the country to beat the big drum, and a poet or two thrown in to do the " frills," couldn't begin to tell all, because it is fresh every day, and Nature in these great spaces of silence and beauty reveals herself to her worshippers as she is, and carries the mind back to a time when those awful things called civilization and progress had not begun to give men swelled heads. I came here from Owen Sound on the Athabasca, one of the three C. P. R. steamships that ply between Owen Sound and Fort William, and drop passengers at this place. These boats appear to the eye that is not nautical so much alike that you can scarcely " tell t'other from which " till you read the name. While there are many people that know these boats by pleasant experience, there are thousands who don't, and for their benefit a word or two about them may be in order. The Athabasca, her twin sister the Alberta, and the Manitoba take it in turns to slip into Owen Sound when the shades of evening are falling, and to lie at the wharf all next day until half-past five o'clock, when the train from Toronto comes ringing in with much noise and fuss and speed, and passengers rush across the wharf to the open gangway, and emit grunts or pious i6

A Dtizzling Start ejaculations of gratitude for that at last they are on board. The boat has been for some time venting its impatience through its fog-horn, but now it thrums with a brutally joyful earnestness till the ropes are cast off, and we are moving away from the wharf with the satisfactory feeling that there is now no stop till we get to the " Soo," as Sault Ste. Marie is abbreviatively called.

On that drizzling, inhospitably cold evening, it was a joy to get into the embrace of the warm steamship. One felt the neighbourhood of the engines to be full of welcome, though by the hundreds and thousands who will take this trip during the coming months, the ship will be valued as the haunt of cool breezes, and on her upper deck they will feel that they can breathe and live once more. But on that evening there was not a soul on the upper deck, and hot July seemed as far away as, Mars or Venus. A few adventurous ones, with their coat collars turned up, paced along the promenade that runs outside the cabins on either side of the lower deck, but these were only the exceptionally strong and healthy, or the exceptionally devout nature-worshippers. But even these warm-blooded and pious ones heard without regret the sound of the dinner bell, and were soon seated with a grateful look 2 17 on their faces at one or other of the multitude of beautifully white tablecloths that cover the tables in the dining saloon. Good white napery is able to cover a multitude of culinary sins, but the C. P. R. provides the luxury, and a faultless cuisine into the bargain. White, indeed, is the prevailing note of the interior. The deft and polite waiters are in the whitest of white jackets. The woodwork walls, perforated with innumerable doors with bright brass handles that open into the state-rooms, are painted white. The elegantly carved rafters that support the roof and form a pleasant vista are white. Everything is spick and span, and the flowers on the tables give a note of colour that is delightful. One-half of the long saloon is dining-room, and the other half — well, just saloon — thickly carpeted with a crimson carpet, into which the foot slips noiselessly, besprinkled with crimson velvet sofas and easy chairs. A piano is there, too, on which some kind amateur is sure to perform, probably pounding out harmonies that are as mechanically regular as the thud of the engine.

When the guests had experimented on the pretty menu card from various points of view, and found it satisfactory, there seemed to grow up a more general sentiment of courage as to the outside, and many promenaded on i8

Beauty on the Lake

the lower deck, while two or three rash ones ventured on the upper.

The green shores were yet in full view, showing rounded masses of tenderest foliage, against the gray, rain-charged sky, or masses of dark pines against which were displayed traceries of emerald verdure. Here and there was a lonely house or a light-station, passing which the fog-horn thrummed. Around us the gulls wheeled in a ghostly silence, or gave a faint, querulous call. We were sailing right into the sunset, and the sunset was a glory of silver grays and lightest blues and greens. Long bands of gray vapour stretched across it. On the water lay an illimitable bank of silvery mist, like a bed of lightest down prepared for the sun. The effect of the brilliant light of departing day on this cloud that had descended on the bosom of the water was indescribably beautiful. When we came up to if the two oil-coated, sou'-westered men on the bridge looked out with as much anxiety as could appear on their calm statuesque faces, on which these solitudes have imprinted something of their everlasting peace. Anon, and again, and again, the fog-horn blew its warning, and, night falling, we descended to our state-rooms.

Comfortable and cosy are these little cabins, 19 as anyone could wish. Their two notes are cleanliness and convenience. What do you want more? There are your two berths — though you are only going to occupy one — your lounge, your washstand, your waterbottle, your bright brass hooks to hang things on, your little window, with its little shutter, lowering which you can look out across the water ; your door that shuts you in and gives you the feeling of a householder at large. As you look around on these comforts, and know that it is but a step to the well-supplied, whitenaperied table outside, you don't mind much how long it is going to take to get to your next stopping place. You are in a very comfortable, floating, electric-lighted hotel. Yes, I forgot the electric light that is made on board, and that you can have in your stateroom in great effulgence by touching that modernity, the latest species of button, so that your page is flooded with radiance as you sit down to read. You open the door, and, hey, presto ! the white cloths have vanished, and there is a comfortable room with any number of tables at which you can write or read or play cards or feel at home at in any way you like. For " the ship is steady in the ocean," as the ballad says, and there is nothing to remind you that you are afloat except the 20

The Wonderful '^Soo'^

thud, thud, thud of the good Clyde-built engines as they whirl the screw in the green water outside.

We all slept like babies, and got to Sault Ste. Marie after lunch on the following day. We had been passing great barges. United States-bound, laden with ore and manufactured lumber, all morning. The reign of fine weather had begun, and the waves were dancing in golden light. The sun was making magical effects among the foliage of the emerald shores. Ozone ? I should think so ! Life in every waft of the breeze ! We came at last in sight of this wonderful " Soo," that is to be the scene, that has been the scene already, of such marvellous business projects. When I was here seven years ago the pulp mills were not begun, though I saw the water let into the Canadian canal, having previously walked through its entire length dry-shod. The great mill now stands, big and castellated, built of the red variegated sandstone of the excavation of that canal. The town that is talking about being a city in the near future has increased marvellously. It seems to be going ahead in a flurry of yellow pine all over the place. There are sidewalks of which Toronto might be proud, and a general air of expectation on every new-comer's face. You hear various languages on the streets. The newspapers are " alive and kicking." There is even a great wooden theatre where an audience of five or six hundred witness innocuous but vivid melodrama with the most unfeigned delight.

Chapter III

SAULT STE. MARIE AND ITS ENTERPRISES

Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., June 4th I WENT down into the comfortable cabin of a trading steamer yesterday, lying off the new steel works that are being built here of solid masonry, in the Roman style of architecture. She is one of six that form the fleet of the Clergue concern, 2,500 tons, a steel boat and well found, built at Newcastle-on- Tyne. She had just come out from England with a cargo of Portland cement, several thousand barrels of which were being unloaded with as much noise and circumstance as if we were at Liverpool or Thames side, instead of amidst these tree-girt shores that come down to the dancing water and where, getting upon an eminence, you can see mile after mile of " second growth " pulp wood and other timber. The skipper had a fine Northumbrian burr to his tongue, and the story 23 of a storm he had weathered, on his last voyage out, was very interesting. Both he and his first engineer knew their Kipling, and testified to the zest with which they had read about Mr. Andrew, the Scotch engineer. It seems, by the way, that there is an odd jealousy of the salt-water sailors on the part of the fresh-water sailors of the lakes — a sort of professional distaste for these sons of Neptune who plough the ocean and then venture to bring their sea-going craft a thousand or two miles inland. The salts get here nevertheless, and there is nothing that makes me feel that the " Soo " trades with the world like going aboard one of these ships and talking with their crew about foreign ports and British seas. Some of these Clergue ships are actually carrying iron ore from Lake Superior down to United States ports. The Portland cement this ship had brought from England is to be used in concrete foundations for the great steel works, the building of which was begun in February and is now far advanced. No fewer than 550 men are at work on the job, and there is a grand and lavish pomp of contractor's machinery and thrumming steam-engines, temporary tramways, and big derricks. Everything is on a large scale : heaps of sandstone for the solid 24

Modem Titans walls — as thick as those of a mediaeval cathedral— hills of sand, scores of waiting carloads of granite to be chewed up into chips by the irresistible grinder to make concrete. I saw the men throwing hefty, irregular lumps of this stone, that had lain asleep in its comfortable stratum for millions of years, into the mouth of the strong-jawed monster, and heard his teeth crunch on it, and pause and crunch again — as a dog crunches a bone — till it came out as little fragments for making concrete that may be depended upon for a thousand years or more. The whole ''outfit," as they call it, is Titanic. Make a railway to that hill where there is granite, and blast your thundering way into it with dynamite ; rend the rocks and load them on to cars. Let your ships bring the unrivalled Portland cement from the south of England. When your laden ships go to Ohio ports let them ballast with sand for the return voyage, and hey ! for the solid concrete, on beds of which we are going to lay these steel-producing monsters for their long travail. The monsters bestrew the side of the track for a mile or more; they are all ready, when the building shall be finished, to be put into their places ; ponderous cogwheels, massive levers, heavy foundation-plates, pipes, cylinders, Bessemer steel 25 furnaces ; they lie around on the grass like big antediluvian fauna on the boulder-strewn waste, where here and there stick up the stumps of trees that are sending out their tender shoots of foliage after their kind.

Here lies the iron where grew the tree, O Sault, what changes thou hast seen !

Canada has reason to be proud of this lusty young town, so vigorous in its new hopeful energy, that stretches itself bravely along by the St. Mary River. Every yard of it is of historical interest, and recalls the days of the first Jesuit missionaries, the suppositions of a new route to China and to countries of gold — realized now, by the way — the days of the early pioneers and fur traders. But now it is to the future that the Ontario " Soo " turns her eyes. There seems every reason to suppose that this place will, in time to come, become a vast centre of wealth-producing industry. To some extent it is that now, but the possibilities of the future look very bright. There was the hectic flush and fever of a " boom " here fourteen years ago, when the sanguine townspeople took great spaces of bush into their municipality and trafficked in this forest real estate as town lots. But even the inflated ideas of that period of epidemic 26

Healthy Activity

as to the amount of room required will be scarcely adequate to what good judges think will be the ultimate needs of the population. What is going on now is healthy growth, conducted with earnest purpose and a calm pulse, and as one climbs the high ground at the north of the town and looks out over the unrivalled prospect of land and water, breathes the clear, exhilarating air, and looks out to where the great Clergue works tower in their solidity and might at the west end, by the side of our wonderful ship canal and those famous foaming rapids that give the place its name, one cannot but feel that here are surroundings that in some respects cannot be equalled in the world. Of course, even now there are incidents which show that the real estate market is lively, but still no signs that are unhealthy. Lots that a couple of years ago could be had for $200 cannot now be bought for $1,000, and people who were bitten by the former boom have found in the conditions of to-day something to alleviate their sores. The business atmosphere is bracing, and the Imperial Bank and the Bank of Commerce have live branches here that are full of bud and fruit, and are attended by wide-awake husbandmen — in fact, to go into either of them is to recall the style of their head offices. You can buy 27 furniture and dry-goods and hardware here as well as anywhere, but there is a sensation everywhere of newness, and of the fact that a very moderate walk will take you right into the midst of foliage and trees and grass. The hotels are full ; everybody has some business that he is pushing ; the people are good-natured, friendly and alive.

THE CLERGUE WORKS.

The industrial enterprises that go under the Clergue cognomen are at the west end of the " Soo," while the best residences are at the east, a reversal of the ordinary locations which this original place has made without a qualm. Much has been told about the big pulp mills and the new steel works, but people must see them before they are quite competent to judge of their vast extent, and of the brain and brawn that have gone to their making. The pulp mill, the sulphite pulp mill, the machine shops, the foundry, the ore-roasting works, the office building, are like castles of solid masonry. The red variegated sandstone that had been excavated from the canals was there, and it was as well to build it up in these solid walls as to cart it away. The buildings look like great forts that might readily be made strong places of defence, and their 28

Pulp-wood Stew

castellated tops would afford abundant opportunities for sharp-shooters. You see the big sulphite mill silhouetted against the sunset by the side of the water, as you look from the veranda of the International hotel, and it looks like some strong fortress on the Rhine. When you enter it you know that there is nothing more massive, more overpoweringly Brobdingnagian, more scientifically economical in the adaptation of means to ends in the whole world. I saw there two great digesters, something like gigantic steel bottles, made of inch-and-a-quarter plates. They were fiftyfour feet high, and their inside diameter was seventeen feet. They weighed 750 tons each, and each of them will hold and stew thirtyfive cords of pulp wood as a charge. Beneath them were great pits into which the hot stewed mass would go with a rush when it was cooked, and where it would have the acid washed out of it. I looked out to where the roasting of nickel ore was to be done, and where the sulphur smoke, instead of being allowed to escape into the air and kill everything around it, will be made into useful sulphurous acid to do the stewing with. I saw great wooden cylinders, 130 feet high, where this gas will be passed through broken limestone and water-jets to cool it, and other- 29 wise prepare it for use. " Use everything, waste nothing," seems to be the motto of this enterprise. Then there were roomy " rifflers " over which the pulp will be passed and further washed, and enormous screens of brass — flat troughs of many square yards' extent — through the fine slits of which it will be sucked. Why, it looked as if half a world's paper material would be prepared here ! The mechanical pulp mill has been in operation for some time, and also the alkali works, and there the same notes of bigness and economy, solidity and adaptation, are visible. There is a foundry that is possibly as big as anything of the kind in Toronto, and a machine shop where there are the finest lathes, shaping machines, planers, and all the usual appurtenances of such an establishment, besides many things that have been invented and made, as occasion required, on the spot. The whole is the product of highly educated brains, officered by the quiet, calm, far-seeing, quick-thinking, Napoleonic man who is at the head of these vast concerns, and his gifted brothers. Not far off is an extensive hotel-like wooden building, where the small army of scientists, engineers, chemists, mathematicians, that Mr. F. H. Clergue has gathered from the world, is boarded in great comfort. Here are Swedes, 30