Kapuskasing An Historical Sketch

Author : Watson Kirkconnell
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331748533
Total Pages : 26 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (485 download)

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Download or read book Kapuskasing an Historical Sketch written by Watson Kirkconnell and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-19 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Kapuskasing an Historical Sketch: No; 38, January, 1921 Two decades ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century, even Canadians knew the vast hinterland to the north of Old Ontario and Quebec only as a limitless and unprofitable wildness. From Manitoba east to Labrador, stretching two thousand miles in length and various hundreds in width, stood the battered granite foundations of the oldest mountain range in the world, hills already incomprehensibly ancient when the Rockies, Alps and Himalayas were first upheaved in Tertiary times, yet still formidable enough to act as a great natural barrier. Four hundred miles north of the C. P. R. the Hudson's Bay Company factors were still bartering with Crees and Ojibways on the shores of a great inland sea. What lay between was held to be a primeval chaos of barren rock, a veritable abomination of desolation. In 1902 the Ontario Government began to build the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, an exploration road striking almost due north into the hills above North Bay. In 1903 the railway-builders uncovered silver deposits at Cobalt, now perhaps the richest silver-mining centre in the world, and the Canadian people awoke suddenly to the potentialities of this despised wilderness. A small but rich area of farm land was next found in the Lake Temiskaming basin further north, and under a liberal colonization policy agricultural development almost kept pace with mining operations. North of Lake Temiskaming, the railroad slashed its way into the hills once more, drawn on by the discovery of immense gold deposits near Swastika and Porcupine. Meanwhile the Laurier government had begun in 1905 to build the National Transcontinental from Moncton to Prince Rupert. This new road crossed Ontario far to the north of any previous settlement, and disclosed for the first time, north of the rocky height of land, an immense tract of millions of acres of arable land, known thereafter as the Great Clay Belt. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.