Thunder Bay is Canada's historic transhipment point between East and West. The inland terminus of the St. Lawrence navigation system and port of entry to the northwestern interior of North America, it is also the West's major outlet to the Great Lakes and thence to the markets of the world. This has been Thunder Bay's role since European trader-explorers first penetrated the West some three hundred years ago. Even after construction of the railway assisted-the populating of the prairies and made possible the wheat boom, Thunder Bay continued to provide the link between East and West. Although the city of Winnipeg also calls itself "The Gateway to the West," by virtue of both history and geography the distinction of being the gateway to as well as from the West properly belongs to the city of Thunder Bay and the communities of Fort William and Port Arthur which preceded it.
Transhipment is necessary whenever topography or economics dictate that goods cannot be transported all the way to their destination in the same carrier. The transfer of cargoes from one conveyance to another for forwarding to other centres takes place at transhipment points. These centres are selected for their physical and strategic advantages and for ease of communication with markets and suppliers alike. In the early history of Canadian transportation, most transhipment took place between two kinds of water carriers. During the early nineteenth century, for example, furs collected at the North West Company's inland posts came to Fort William by twenty-four-foot birchbark canoes (canots du Nord), the craft most suited for navigating and portaging along the vast network of interlocking waterways spread across the northern half of the continent. But at Fort William, the furs had to be transferred to larger thirty-six-foot canoes (canots du maötre), more suited to the treacherous waters of Lake Superior and the lakes, rapids, and portages of the Ottawa River route to Lachine. At Lachine rapids necessitated transhipment and the cargo had to be transferred to wagons in order to reach Montreal. From there it went by bateau (a flat-bottomed boat) or ship to Quebec where it was loaded on ocean-going vessels bound for England.
With today's diverse means of air, land and water transportation, transhipment no longer necessarily involves water carriers. Indeed, it is now possible to move such products as grain all the way by land from the prairies to national markets or coastal ports. But because of the relative cheapness of water transportation, much of the western crop still comes by rail only as far as the head of the Great Lakes navigation system at Thunder Bay where it is transhipped to lake freighters or ocean-going ships. As the third largest port in Canada in terms of tonnage shipped, Thunder Bay is continuing today the transhipment function of the area that was begun in the fur trade period.
Unlike settlements based on the availability of natural resources and arable land, transhipment centres like Thunder Bay depend on advantages offered by their location. The city takes its name from the bay at the mouth of the Kaministikwia River on the western shores of Lake Superior, midway between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Shielded from the turbulence of the world's largest body of fresh water by a great rocky promontory known as the Sleeping Giant, Thunder Bay forms a great natural harbour from which the Kaministikwia River leads to the height of land between the Atlantic and Hudson Bay watersheds and thence to the waters leading to the prairies. For perhaps two thousand years before Europeans reached Lake Superior, North American natives used the Kaministikwia as a trade route to the West. Then came the French in their search for furs and the North West Passage to the western sea; explorer-traders like Daniel Greysolon Dulhut, Jacques de Noyon, and the La VÄrendryes built bases at the river's mouth from which to penetrate the interior. Following the British Conquest of New France there came the North West Company in 1801, to be followed by the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821. Thus, the point at which the Kaministikwia River entered Thunder Bay became the logical site for the emergence of a major transhipment centre on Canada's east-west transportation network.
History as well as geography, however, dictated the final selection of Thunder Bay as Canada's gateway to the West. Besides the Kaministikwia, two other river systems lead from the western shores of Lake Superior towards the Rainy Lake-Lake of the Woods-Winnipeg River waterway to the West: the Pigeon River thirty miles south of Thunder Bay at the present Canada-United States border and the St. Louis River flowing into the western tip of the lake at Duluth, Minnesota. Because of the greater distances of the St. Louis system, the real choice lay between the Kaministikwia and Pigeon Rivers; in the 1730s the French abandoned the former in favour of the latter which, despite the arduous nine-mile Grand Portage from Lake Superior to the Pigeon's navigable waters, was still quicker and easier than the steep portages of the Kaministikwia. The Anglo-American "pedlars" who assumed control of the Montreal-based fur trade in the 1760s also used the Pigeon River route. They continued to do so for almost twenty years after the 1783 peace treaty ending the American War of Independence gave Grand Portage to the United States. It was not until the turn of the century, however, that the stationing of a United States custom official at the Grand Portage finally forced the fur-traders to retreat to British territory and the old route up the Kaministikwia to the West.
With the absorption of its last Montreal based rival in 1804, control of the fur trade flowng through the St. Lawrence passed into the hands of the North West Company. From Fort William, its inland headquarters and emporium, the Company held sway over a vast domain stretching to the Arctic and, eventually, the Pacific Oceans. Fort William was located at the Kaministikwia River's junction with Lake Superior and was so named in 1807 in honour of the Company's chief director, William McGillivray. For a brief span of twenty years, some two thousand Nor'Westers from East and West converged on Fort William each summer. There the wintering partners and Montreal agents divided profits and debated company strategy. The clerks sorted the bales of furs and packs of trade goods, while voyageurs and natives joined in the hectic activities and boisterous celebrations of the rendezvous. With the Company's absorption into the Hudson's Say Company in 1821, however, Hudson Bay became the fur trade's principal entry into the interior. As the East-West transportation system linking Montreal and Fort William with the Athabasca and Columbia Districts declined, so did Fort William itself, just as its French predecessor had when Grand Portage supplanted it almost a century earlier.
Since Thunder Bay's early recorded history, then, the destiny of establishments at the mouth of the Kaministikwia has depended on the fate or the policies of commercial powers based in metropolitan centres such as Montreal or London. When its geographical location no longer served the economic or political interests of fur trade monopolies, Thunder Bay lost its position as linchpin for a commercial communications network. it relied instead on the exploitation of the area's natural resources for survival. When Grand Portage became the French entrepot for the exchange of merchandise and pelts, Fort Kaministiquia continued to exist as an ordinary post. When the short Hudson Bay route triumphed over the lengthy St. Lawrence system after the amalgamation of 1821, Fort William survived as a Hudson's Bay Company post based on the local fur trade and commercial fishing, its links to the Canadas all but severed. As the fur trade declined during the nineteenth century, Fort William too declined, its decaying buildings magnifying in retrospect the now legendary grandeur of its North West Company epoch. Well before the Hudson's Bay Company closed the Fort William post in 1881, however, events of national import were unfolding which would place Thunder Bay once more on the crossroads of a revived transcontinental transportation network. One outcome of these developments would be the emergence on its shores of not one, but two, distinct and rival communities.
The history of Canadian expansion westward and that of Thunder Bay during the latter hart of the last century are inextricably linked. Even before Confederation, Canada's dream of wresting Rupert's Land from the domination of the Hudson's Bay Company came closer to reality with the opening of the Sault Ste. Marie canal in 1857. The admittance of steamships for the first time to Lake Superior made it seem feasible for the West to be brought into Canada's orbit. With steamships came surveyors and settlers, the former to plot the course of a water and land route to the Red River on behalf of the Province of Canada, and the latter to exploit the region's forest and mineral wealth as well as its transportation potential. Although the Red River Road remained little more than a survey for over ten years, new kinds of economic activity unassociated with the fur trade fostered the creation of new settlements at Thunder Bay distinct from the Hudson's Bay post at Fort William.
As a direct consequence of the opening of Lake Superior to steam navigation, the first of these communities developed on the shores of Thunder Bay since the sandbar across the Kaministikwia's mouth made the river inaccessible to deep water shipping. Known as the Station or The Landing, the new harbour had also been selected as the start for the forty-five-mile long road at the Lake Superior end of the land and water route to the Red River, surveyed in 1857 by Simon J. Dawson. Thanks to the region's mining boom of the 1860s, The Station's port facilities were already being expanded at the time of Confederation when the new Dominion Government's request that Dawson start construction on the road stimulated further activity at the waterfront. But the event which most firmly established The Landing as a permanent settlement was the "Riel Rebellion" of 1870. Colonel Garnet Wolseley, commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, selected it as the base from which his troops moved west to suppress Riel's provisional government. Although most of Wolseley's men followed the old fur trade route from Lake Superior up the Kaministikwia River, part of his force used an alternate way, building the Dawson Road through bush and marsh as they proceeded. The future of the newly named Prince Arthur's Landing as the link between the Great Lakes and the newly opened prairies seemed assured.
In the meantime, another new community had been forming on the banks of the Kaministikwia, two miles upstream from the Hudson's Bay post at Fort William. It was also seven miles from The Landing, a considerable distance in the period of slow transportation by water and wagon. Located on a surveyed townsite called the Town Plot, it also came to be known as Westfort to distinguish it from the original Fort to the east. At the same time, the "River" and eventually "Fort William" became terms applying to the entire stretch of river bank from Lake Superior to the Plot. While merchants like the Marks brothers had been in on Prince Arthur's Landing's emergence as the Great Lakes port of entry to the West, families like the McKellars and the Vickers settled along the river in the vicinity of the Town Plot in order to promote mining, lumbering and real estate. Along with Hudson's Bay Company factor, John McIntyre, they envisioned grand commercial possibilities for the Kaministikwia whose potential as a great harbour they maintained was superior to that of Prince Arthur's Landing. The fact that part of the Wolseley Expedition had used the old Kaministikwia fur trade route rather than haul their boats up the unfinished Dawson Road reinforced the settlers' faith in the River that was fast becoming a busy artery for local traffic.
The Landing, however, had forged ahead of the River, thanks to the shipping business generated by the mining boom at Silver Islet. Yet The Landing's potential for growth had been limited by the short life of the Dawson Road as an avenue for colonization. Immigrants found it easier to travel by rail and steamboat through the United States from Duluth to the Red River rather than endure Dawson's rugged wagon and water route with its many portages and stopovers. By the time the Canadian Government was ready to start construction on an all-Canadian railway to the West and thereby ensure its dominion from sea to sea, two separate communities had become established at Thunder Bay. Organized around separate commercial interest goups, The Landing and the River now vied to become the starting point of the Pacific Railway's western section from Lake Superior to Winnipeg.
The sod turning ceremony for the start of the Pacific Railway which took place at the Town Plot on June 1, 1875 intensified the smouldering rivalry between The Landing and the Plot over the location of terminal transportation facilities. Miffed at being by-passed as Canada's transhipment point despite their established harbour - and at the letting of railway contracts to residents of the River - The Landing's citizens organized the Prince Arthur's Landing and Kaministiquia Railway for the purpose of carrying freight and passengers from its docks to the railway terminal at the Plot. The government's refusal to allow the tracks to be linked with the Canadian Pacific's only confirmed the suspicion of a cabal between the government and The Landing's rivals. The distrust was reinforced by the beginning of dredging to allow larger ships to navigate the river. In 1881, however, the newly incorporated Canadian Pacific Railway demonstrated that it viewed Thunder Bay as one unified harbour by making The Landing the port of call for its steamers, by locating most of its works there, and by absorbing The Landing's railway into its system. And at the C.P.R.'s behest, The Landing became Port Arthur in order to befit its prestigious new role.
On completion of the C.P.R.'s line from Lake Superior to Winnipeg in 1882, the harbour of Thunder Bay assumed anew its strategic importance as the key transfer point in an East-West transportation system controlled from Montreal. Whereas in the fur trade past, the exchange had been between the small canot du Nord and the larger freight canoe (canot du maötre), schooner or bateau, it now involved train and steamship. Even after the railway became truly transcontinental in 1885, Thunder Bay's transhipment facilities remained the most significant feature of Canada's transportation network. As Canadian economist W.A. Mackintosh wrote in 1923:
That portion of the railway which links Winnipeg with Lake Superior was and is the most essential part of Canada's transportation system. Other parts of the railway were significant and essential, but none has had the significance of that section which overcomes the Laurentian barrier between the Great Lakes and the prairies.
What made this section of the railway doubly significant was the West's new staple product, wheat. While the railway soon fulfilled its mission by peopling the West with homesteaders, no one foresaw that their harvest would produce the period of economic expansion known as the "Wheat Boom". With the first trains from the West came grain, first a trickle, then surging into a flood, which only let up with World War I. For thirty years, the unsurpassed annual yields of the prairie farmlands reached a limitless international market, all funnelled through Fort William and Port Arthur. As its boosters were wont to proclaim, Thunder Bay had become the granary of the world.
During the 1880s, Fort William and Port Arthur shared, albeit somewhat fractiously, in the bounties of the wheat boom which the railway dispensed. While the Kaministikwia was considered ideal for the C.P.R.'s grain elevators, coal docks and bulk freight operation, Port Arthur was used more for passenger ships and higher class package freight. Despite the C.P.R.'s view of Thunder Bay as one harbour, the two towns continued to clamour for government contracts to improve their respective waterfront facilities at the expense of the other. Fort William, however, knew best how to court the mighty railway, and thereby won the battle for her favours. Situated between east and west Fort William, McKellar Ward offered a bonus of $120,000 in 1889 to ensure that the C.P.R. locate its principal works within the town's limits; Port Arthur's town council, on the other hand, that year seized a locomotive to realize the railway's arrears in taxes. Whether in response to these actions, or to a prior decision to move to its newly acquired Hudson's Bay Company properties along the Kaministikwia, the Canadian Pacific Railway transferred its terminal operations to East Fort William. The C.P.R.'s move, however, left Port Arthur as a mere port of call and railway stop. Her fate seemingly doomed by the country's most powerful corporation, Port Arthur paid for her rashness in an economic slump, while Fort William reached new heights of prosperity by capturing the entire grain trade in the first extravagant years of the wheat boom.
But the unsurpassed economic expansion based on railways and wheat allowed for more than one transhipment point on Lake Superior. The Canadian Northern Railway entered the business of shipping grain from western Canada in 1902 with Port Arthur as its Great Lakes terminus. Stimulated by the construction of grain elevators, coal docks, wharves, warehouses and rail facilities, Port Arthur's economy experienced a resurgence in commercial activity and population growth, placing it on a more or less equal level with Fort William. At any rate, the popular term encompassing both communities was now the "Twin Cities". By 1905, the ever-increasing flow of grain and freight prompted the start of a third transcontinental railway, the Grand Trunk Pacific whose Lake Superior terminals were located in Fort William, south of the Kaministikwia River. As the prairies yielded more and more millions of bushels of grain annually, and as the stream of West-bound settlers and workers swelled proportionately, Thunder Bay's statistics in elevator, freight shed, and coal dock capacity, as well as in shipping tonnages and numbers of vessels entering her harbours, spiraled ever upwards.
Keeping apace with these figures were those relating to population growth, starts in domestic construction, and location of new industries. By 1910, Fort William boasted some 25,000 residents as compared to 4,000 a decade before, while for Port Arthur the population had risen to 15,000 from 2,500. As each municipality sought to outdo the other in attracting new industries through favourable bonuses or tax incentives, it looked as though the Canadian head of the lakes might indeed become the "Chicago of the North", the perennial goal of the local business community. Perhaps because Winnipeg shared with Fort William and Port Arthur many of the functions Chicago had in the United States, this never quite happened. Nevertheless, as Sir Wilfrid Laurier proclaimed in 1910, the Twin Cities had become "the gate of the trade of the West."
Indulging in an excess of self-congratulation, the cities' promotional literature reflected their mood of expansionism. Entitled Port Arthur-The Gibralter to the West, one pamphlet advertised its subject thus:
No city possesses to a greater extent a wealth of natural advantages exceeding those possessed by Port Arthur - The Doorway to Great Britain's Granary - The Gateway of Commerce to the Great Prairies of the North West and the mining and timber land of British Columbia, such as Chicago holds to the fortunes of the Great Western States.
Other brochures proclaimed Port Arthur to be "The Geneva of Canada" or "The Nerve Centre of the West". While most publicity material advertised only one city or the other, some acknowledged the existence of both cities. Fort William and Port Arthur, Lake Superior: Canada's Great Inland Port, for example, used such slogans as "Two cities within the limit of one Great National Harbor - The Ocean Port for half a Continent - Where Rail Meets Water and Great Vessels Assemble."
But what was the nature of the communities that had grown up around this "Great National Harbor"? The fact that two rival municipalities continued to exist side by side despite their common economy based on wheat and railways was the characteristic which first struck prominent visitors of the early 1900s. Proclaiming his dislike for the expression "the Twin Cities", Sir Wilfrid Laurier urged the formation of "one great city covering the western shore of Lake Superior, one alone in interests and purpose." Yet despite the logic of amalgamation, the cities remained divided, each with its own business centre, its own civic life and social structure. Their antagonisms were rooted in historic tradition and perpetuated by the domination of each city by different railway corporations. As Rudyard Kipling could not help but observe during his travels through Canada in 1907, "They hate each other with the pure, poisonous, passionate hatred which makes towns grow."
This unfriendly rivalry notwithstanding, the two towns were amazingly alike. The absentee ownership of major industries - the railway companies and the grain elevators and most of the secondary ones as well made for economic dependence and social decapitation. Another shared characteristic, and one which became more and more noticeable after the turn of the century, was the influx of European immigrants who amounted to about one-third of the total population by 1910. With the rest of the population divided about equally between Canadian and British-born, the early English-Canadian homogeneity had been replaced by ethnic diversity.
The place of origin of Thunder Bay's inhabitants coincided more or less with their place on the social scale, the middle class being mostly Canadian, the tradesmen and skilled workers British, and the unskilled manual labourers European. Made up of merchants and ship-owners, railroad and timber contractors, mining promotors and professional men, the middle class dominated the political life of the two communities through control of the municipal administrations, the daily newspapers and the local associations of the old-line parties. Despite its "client-patron" relationship with big government and giant corporations, local business sought a measure of independence through the enticement of other industries to the area, such as the Ogilvie Flour Mills, the Copp Stove Company, the Canada Car and Foundry, the Atikokan Blast Furnaces and Port Arthur Shipbuilding Company.
The municipal ownership of public utilities was another means by which the middle class, as represented in the Boards of Trade, sought an advantageous position for itself and the municipalities. In the movement for public ownership of utilities which swept North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, populist business groups joined together against private corporations in the interests of cheap rates, good service, fair labour conditions, and democratic control of franchises. Aided by the anti-monopoly sentiment of the general population, Port Arthur and Fort William became pioneers in the municipal ownership of such utilities as the electric street railway, hydro and telephone.
Aligned with the middle class on this issue were the skilled workers in the various railway and construction trades. Organized into unions, these groups had become a recognized force in the life of the communities early in the century through successful strikes against outside corporations and participation in such public issues as municipal ownership. Several Canadian-born "aristocrats of labour" in the railway brotherhoods enjoyed immense prestige ink civic affairs. This influence culminated in the election to the mayoralty of Fort William in 1909 and 1910 of L.L. Peltier, general chairman of the Order of Railway Conductors for the entire C.P.R. system. More class conscious than their Canadian counterparts were British-born trade unionists like Harry Bryan and Frederick Urry who not only organized the trades but also the unskilled in construction and on the docks. Such men also acted as the conscience of society through participation in labour and radical politics or the social gospel movement.
The non-English speaking group of recent immigrants made up the third division in society. Considered as the "aristocracy of the foreign-born" were the Finns who settled in large numbers at Port Arthur and throughout the surrounding area. Although their physical characteristics, their literacy and their Protestantism made them more acceptable as future citizens than immigrants from Mediterranean and Slavic cultures, the favour with which many viewed the socialist analysis of the class struggle acted as a deterrent to their easy assimilation. While what has been called their "associative spirit" also found an outlet in the Lutheran Church, their tradition of radical unionism and politics was felt in the local labour movement at least until the 1950s. With the inflow of immigrants after both world wars came the ideological disputes of Finland, the bitterness of which has only recently subsided. Through its continuous renewal by newcomers, however, the Finnish-Canadian community still lends a special cast to the commercial and cultural life of Thunder Bay, in particular that part formerly known as Port Arthur.
At the lowest level of society were all the other immigrants who had come to Thunder Bay to engage in the heavy manual labour associated with docks, railways and construction. Like the Finns, the other Europeans also kept their sense of ethnic identity alive, the various nationalities responding to their new living and working environment in ways peculiar to the historic and cultural traditions of their homeland. By 1910, the two cities consisted of numerous pockets or sub-communities of different cultures from the Austro Hungarian and Russian Empires and the Mediterranean. Each group had an internal dynamic of its own. A striking feature of Greek and Italian life, for example, was strong familial and communal loyalty centred around churches and other Old World institutions. Such traditions, combining with that of self-reliance in matters of communal justice and defence, helped unite them in battle against strike-breaking during various confrontations between dock workers and police before World War I. While such clashes heightened the anti-foreign bias of most English-speaking Canadians, they also drew attention to the immigrants' working conditions of low wages and long hours at seasonal employment, and to their crowded living quarters in districts lacking sanitation and drainage services.
With the growth of a large working-class population of diverse national origins during the wheat boom's golden years of rapid industrialization, society became fragmented along class as well as ethnic lines. The 1913 strike by the street railwaymen's union featured many traumas including a riot by immigrant strike sympathizers, the shooting of an Italian onlooker by police, the manning of the street cars by armed guards, and the call by labour leaders for a general sympathy strike. All of these events created a long-lasting bitterness within the two cities. While Iabour riots of a violent nature generally ceased with World War I, severe industrial conflicts continued to plague labour relations at Thunder Bay. World War I brought a further increase in social tension through strikes by grain handlers, the guarding of the elevators by the 96th Lake Superior Regiment, and the classification of many foreign-born residents as enemy aliens. With the growth of the pulp and paper industry after the war, labour strife became more prevalent in the woods than on the waterfront. The high ethnic composition of the bush workers and their radical leadership further perpetuated the polarization of society.
Polarization along class and ethnic lines, however, represented only part of Thunder Bay's endemic factionalism. Unlike Northern Ontario one-industry towns based on the extraction of forest or mineral resources, Thunder Bay's transhipping function entailed a multi-faceted economy. The result was a complex social structure of many sub-groupings, sometimes paralleling, sometimes overlapping one another. Such divisions could be seen in the middle class among the old pre-railway families, wealthy entrepreneurs and small businessmen, and in the working class along ethnic and ideological lines. Compounding such cleavages were the historic existence of two rival municipalities and what A.W. Rasporich has called a "bewildering variety of political factions" representing the Liberal, Conservative, social democratic, and Marxist traditions in Canada. While the expansion of the district's lumbering operations and location of paper mills at Thunder Bay after World War I created an alternate economic base, an additional layer of relationships was imposed on the existing social fabric. Yet it is these very changing and conflicting relationships which give the community its robust and unpredictable political life, coloured by sporadic outbursts against "outside forces" located "down east" in Toronto or Ottawa.
As the western terminus of Great Lakes shipping, Thunder Bay's Lakehead Harbour describes itself as "Canada's Mid-Continental Seaport". Competition from the Pacific Coast and Hudson Bay notwithstanding, her terminal elevators silhouetting the skyline still provide the major outlet for western grain. Other port facilities handle iron ore, newsprint, pulpwood, coal and petroleum products as well as general freight. As a result of the St. Lawrence Seaway, Thunder Bay remains one of the busiest ports in Canada servicing Great Lakes and deep sea freighters alike.
Despite Thunder Bay's position in the country's national and international East-West communications network, however, the city has yet to overcome its psychological isolation from the rest of Canada. As Gateway between East and West, she is part of neither and often feels alienated from both. In addition to isolation and factionalism, Thunder Bay faces many other challenges, including those of industrial and urban growth. Despite amalgamation and its increasingly rich array of cultural and recreational activities, the new city is still struggling to create a common identity of its own. Whether the identity will be discovered in local traditions and strengths or through a denial of the past and the fostering of antagonisms within and without depends on many unknown factors. Among them whether the citizens can embrace the mission of the city of the future as defined by Lewis Mumford - to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world.
