“We fathers and our fathers saw, before the white man came,
Yon mighty giant heave in sleep and breathe the sulphurous flame;
Have seen him, roused in anger, lash these sea.' in furious wrath,
And all the torrents of his ire in lightning pouring forth; . . .

But never saw through lifted clouds his rugged sides before
The white man came to drive away those lurid clouds of yore.”

H. R. A. Pocock.

THE very name of Thunder Bay appeals to the imagination, and, even when travelling along the rugged coast of Lake Superior in the id'e ease and the accompanying noise and crowding of a modern railway train, one understands a little how Indian legends of grim gods and sleeping giants—with the powers of tempest and death in their keeping—should have arisen here. The shifting mists, the dark waters, the towering crags of "Kitchigama”—the Ojibways Big Sea Water - even now force one to think of the sternest side of nature, and of the mysteries of pain and storm. Here and there along the margin of the lake man has made good his foothold, and, though in one sense his achievements of engineering skill and mechanical ingenuity are dwarfed by the grand scale of nature’s workings, this, from another point of view, but adds to his triumph. The forbidding rocks and long, long stretches of lonely wilderness hint at the magnitude of the powers against which the explorer, the trader, the maker of railways has pitted himself, sometimes to meet crushing disaster, often to come off conqueror.

At all times men have been few in the Thunder Bay District, but these few have been, for the most part, men of energy, who have dared largely, though not rarely, for ends that seem small enough, and so the story, as it is to be pieced out from the records kept under difficulties by explorers and traders, has fascinations which here can scarcely be hinted at. First it is Frenchmen who enchain our interest. The valiant pair, Radisson and Des Groseilliers, whose love of country suffered eclipse, perhaps, through their love of adventure, may have been the first of white men to reach the Karninistiquia (where the city of Fort William now stands), after which, turning northwards, they passed through the Lake Nipigon region. Some sixteen years later, in 1673, Greysolon Dulhut, “one of the most daring spirits in the service of France in Canada,” is supposed to have erected a trading-post at the mouth of the Kaministiquia. Afterwards he built a fort in the heart of the wilderness at Lake Nipigon, which vast sheet of water is now the centre of one of the largest of Ontario’s forest reserves. Here he probably stayed for several years, and no doubt succeeded in diverting some of the Indian trade from the English posts on Hudson Bay; but when the French finally resigned their claims to that region they only became the more eager in prosecuting the trade in the districts north and west of Lake Superior.

In 1728 La Verendrye was in charge at Lake Nipigon, and whilst there heard from the Indians marvellous tales of the farther west, which impelled him to devote the remainder of his life to the hard task of the explorer. But such undertakings were costly, and to enable him to finance the work he obtained from the French Government a monopoly of the fur trade in the far west, as men then knew or imagined it. In 1731 he wintered where Fort William now is, before starting on his search for the western sea, but in the following summer this noble and courageous explorer, who was actuated not by love of gain, but by a passion for discovery, passed to a stage beyond the boundaries of Thunder Bay.

Some seventy years later, when the United States Government imposed a duty of from twenty to twenty-five per cent, on all goods carried over the “Grand Portage” in Minnesota, which was the route used by the North-West Company, that great trading association removed its headquarters from the Portage to the mouth of the Kaministiquia, having previously sent out men to search for a new water route (entirely within British boundaries) from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg. A way had thus been discovered from Lake Nipigon to Portage de L’Isle, on the Winnipeg River, but it was not a convenient route. Then, in 1798, the old French route from the Kaministiquia, by Dog Lake. Dog River, Rainy Lake, and the Lake of the Woods, was rediscovered by Roderick Mackenzie, a cousin of the more famous Sir Alexander Mackenzie.

The buildings at the mouth of the Kaministiquia were begun about 1801, but the removal was not completed till 1804, and the new fort did not receive its present name till 1807, when it was- named Fort William, in honour of William McGillivray, one of the partners of the North-West Company. From this time Fort William was the point from which the Montreal voyogeurs or mangeurs de lard, turned back towards the east, and the trappers and hunters again set forth towards the regions of the setting sun. Alternately it was the scene of wild feasts and revels, of the strenuous labours of loading and unloading the trading canoes, and of fierce contentions amongst their rival crews. The fort was imposing in appearance, consisting of a large number of houses, stores, workshops, and other buildings, surrounded by a palisade fifteen feet in height. After 1813 its great banqueting-hall was adorned by a map completed in that year by David Thompson, whose later explorations were accomplished in the service of the North-West Company.

In 1816 Simon Fraser, who nine years earlier had made “the descent of the fearful canon” down which the river bearing his name plunges towards the Pacific, was in charge at Fort William. It was the eventful year when Lord Selkirk, hearing on his way to the Red River of the murder of Governor Semple, turned aside to Fort William to demand of the North-West Company’s partners there an account of their treatment of his unhappy colonists. He was armed with the authority of a Magistrate of Upper Canada and the Indian Territories, and backed by a force of 250 men, of whom many were experienced soldiers. On August 12th he encamped his following on the south side of the Karninistiquia, in full view of Fort William; then he proceeded to arrest Fraser and other partners, ultimately sending them to York for trial, while he wintered at Fort William, and then went on to the Red River. The Nor’-Westers had powerful friends in the east, however, and soon the tables were turned. The Earl had to answer in the courts, and was fined two thousand pounds for having imprisoned the traders at Fort William. Selkirk did not long survive his harassing experiences in Canada, and in 1820, the year of his death, the rival trading companies united under the time-honoured name of the Hudson Bay Company.

Fifty years later, on a bright May morning in 1870, Colonel Wolseley, on his way to chastise Riel, passed "the clean, white buildings” of Fort William, and landed a little to the north, naming the spot Prince Arthur’s Landing (afterwards changed to Port Arthur) in honour of Queen Victoria’s third son (now our Governor-General). There the troops were disembarked, and as an old Indian stood watching the landing of a company of sappers and gunners he exclaimed: “What a lot of white people there mast be in the world! ” But the problems connected with the taking of all these men and the necessary stores through the wilderness to the Red River seemed at times to defy solution. Immediately after Confederation the cutting of what was called the Dawson Road had been begun, but as yet it extended only forty-four miles, and had been recently damaged by forest fires. Renewed fires, tempests, floods, plagues of flies, the inexperience of boatmen—all threatened the success of the expedition, but patience and cheerfulness won the day and accomplished the task.

But it is not to soldiers alone that the untracked wilderness turns a forbidding face. The surveyors of our first transcontinental railway—the C.P.R.—had no less hardships to endure, no fewer difficulties to surmount. In 1872 a surveyors’ party of seven, owing to a little carelessness in leaving alight the fire at which they had cooked breakfast, all lost their lives in a forest fire. Another party, exploring for the Nipigon and Port Arthur branch in the winter of 1879-80, were frozen in on a sudden drop of the temperature, whilst trying “to navigate Black Bay in the venerable tug Neff." The tunnelling of the huge crags and the construction of the road-bed along the north shores of Lake Superior were scarcely less difficult than the crossing of the western mountains, but in both instances man’s ingenuity triumphed over nature’s “thus far and no further!”

The Canadian Pacific Railway gave a great impulse to the growth of Port Arthur, which by 1887 had a population of 4500. Then a serious difference of opinion between the authorities of the town and the railway was followed by the removal of the divisional headquarters of the latter to Fort William, which, of course, caused that old fur-traders’ station to develop rapidly. Meanwhile,' Port Arthur languished, till, in 1902, it became the lake port of the Canadian Northern Railway, and now “the twin cities,” with their immense docks and elevators, flourish side by side.

But they do not live wholly by the activities of the transportation business. The stern county behind them is rich in mineral wealth. Ages ago some ancient people mined for copper on Isle Royale, just beyond the international boundary line, and the spot where Port Arthur stands was called by the Indians “Shuniah” or "Silver,” a name justified by some finds of the precious metal during the construction of the streets. The red men feared to awaken the wrath of “the Sleeping Giant” by pointing out his treasures, but the clue to the discovery of the Rabbit Mountain silver mine was given by an Indian. This is only one of many rich mines in the district, whilst the Atikukan Iron Company has a huge smelting plant at Port Arthur.