The Steamer Algoma Transporting Troops Past Thunder Cape on the Red River Expedition, May, 1870.
The opening of the Sault Ste. Marie locks in 1857 neccessitated a port on Thunder Bay rather than the Kaministikwia whose entrance was too shallow to admit the steamships now sailing Lake Superior. The Landing became the base for a proposed water and land route to the West, as well as a supply depot for the region's nascent mining and lumbering industries. In 1870, the Red River Expedition sent to suppress Louis Riel's provisional government in Manitoba hastened The Landing's development as a port of entry to the West. Transported by steamers like the side-wheeler Algoma the expeditionary force encamped at the renamed Prince Arthur's Landing, and then virtually built much of the land portuion of the route surveyed earlier by Simon Dawson to the Red River.
Thunder Cape is the massive headland at the foot of Sibley Peninsula which marks the entrance to Thunder Bay. This engraving appeared in the Canadian Illustrated News and is the work of Torontonian Willaim Armstrong (1822-1914). A railway engineer who had emigrated from England in 1850, Armstrong produced several sketches of the Red River Expedition for which he was chief engineer.
