I am at the nozzle of the mighty grain funnel down which Canada’s wheat crop is pouring into the boats of Lake Superior. The prairie provinces of the Dominion produce in one year almost a half billion bushels of wheat, and after the harvest a steady stream of golden grain rolls into the huge elevators of Port Arthur and Fort William, its sister city, three miles away.
These cities are on the north shore of Lake Superior, two or three hundred miles from Duluth, and within four hundred miles of Winnipeg. Port Arthur is situated on Thunder Bay, opposite the rocky promontory of Thunder Cape, and Fort William is a short distance farther inland at the mouth of the Kaministiquia River. Both towns have harbours deep enough for the largest lake steamers, and during eight months of the year a great caravan of boats is moving back and forth between here and the East. By the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian National railways, Port Arthur and Fort William have connection with every part of the wheat belt, and almost the entire amount of wheat exported, or about seventy per cent. of the total production, is brought here for storage and transportation.
The two cities are so full of the spirit of the breezy West that one feels it in the air. The region is in step with twentieth-century progress. The people look at the future through the right end of the telescope, and most of them have microscopes in front of the lenses. Everyone is building air castles—not in Spain, but upon Lake Superior—and although he acknowledges that he has not yet got far beyond the foundations, he can in his mind’s eye see cities far surpassing those of the present.
Speaking of the enthusiasm of the Port Arthurites—the night I arrived I walked up the street and entered a stationery store. While making a purchase I happened to remark that the town was beautifully located.
“It is,” said the clerk, “and if you will come with me I will show you one of the finest views in the world just behind this store.”
Supposing it to be a walk of a minute or so, I consented. The clerk grabbed his hat and out we went. He tramped me two miles up the hills back of Port Arthur, leading me on and on through one district after another, until I wondered whether I was in the hands of a gold brick agent or some other confidence man. At last, when we were out among the real estate signs, he struck an attitude and exclaimed:
“Behold Port Arthur.”
It was moonlight and I could see the ghost-like buildings scattered over the hills, while down on the shore of the lake was the skyline of the business section with the mighty elevators on the edge of the water beyond. It was a fine moonlight view of Thunder Bay, but being tired out after my trip from the “Soo,” I was not enthusiastic.
Fort William and Port Arthur are rivals. Port Arthur was built first. Formerly the site of an Indian village, it was founded by the Canadian Pacific Railway. Shortly after its birth the baby town decided to tax that great corporation. This made the railway people angry, and it is said that the then president of the line decided to discipline the infant by moving his lake terminus to Fort William, which was then a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. He thereupon shifted the railway shops to Fort William, saying that he would yet see the grass grow in the streets of Port Arthur. For a time the grass did grow, but later the Canadian Northern road, now a part of the Canadian National, was built through, and Port Arthur now has traffic from both roads. Most of the business of the Canadian Pacific is still done at Fort William.
Fort William and Port Arthur are connected by a street-car line and the land between them has been so divided into town lots that they may some day unite the two cities. Both places believe in municipal ownership, and each manages its own electric lights, telephones, and waterworks. Fort William is the larger, Port Arthur having four or five thousand less people.
During my stay here I have gone through some of the wheat elevators. Fort William has twenty-two and Port Arthur ten, with a total storage capacity between them of fifty-six million bushels. Plans are under way to make this enormous capacity even greater. The terminal elevator of the Canadian National Railways, built on the very edge of Lake Superior, is the largest in the world. It consists of two huge barn-like divisions between which are more than one hundred and fifty herculean grain tanks. These are mighty cylinders of tiles bound together with steel, each of which is twenty-one feet in diameter and will hold twenty-three thousand bushels of wheat. This great tank forest covers several acres, and rises to the height of an eight-story apartment house.
The storage capacity of the elevator is eight million bushels of wheat, which is more than enough to supply a city the size of Detroit with flour the year round. The elevator can unload six hundred cars of wheat, or about six hundred thousand bushels, in a single day, including the weighing and binning. It has scales that weigh forty-three tons at a time.
The wheat comes to the elevator in cars, each of which holds a thousand or fifteen hundred bushels. By a car-dumping machine the grain is unloaded into the basement of the huge buildings at the sides of the tanks. From there it is raised to the top of the elevator in bushel buckets on endless chains at the rate of six hundred and fifty bushels a minute, or more than ten every second. It is next weighed, and then carried on wide belt conveyors into the storage towers. The machinery is so arranged that by pressing a button or moving a lever a stream of wheat will flow to any part of the great granary. The grain runs just like water, save that the belts conduct it uphill or down.
When ready to be transferred to a steamer, the wheat is drawn from the bottom of a bin, again elevated to the top of the building, weighed, and then poured into the vessel through spouts. It is not touched by hand from the time it leaves the car until it is taken from the hold of the ship, and the work is done so cheaply that it costs only a fraction of a cent to transfer a bushel of wheat from the car to the boats. For ten or eleven cents a bushel it can be carried a thousand miles or more down the lakes and put into the hold of an ocean steamer that takes it to Europe.
In one of the elevators of the Canadian Pacific Railway at Fort William a train of wheat is handled every twenty minutes during the season. I timed the workers as they unloaded one car. It contained sixteen hundred bushels of wheat, or enough, at twenty-five bushels an acre, to equal the crop of a sixty-four acre farm. Nevertheless, it was elevated, weighed, and put in the tanks within less than eight minutes.
The open navigation season on the Great Lakes lasts from May to December, and during this time as much as five million bushels of wheat a day have been put on freight boats at Fort William or Port Arthur for trans-shipment to the East. Some of the freighters unload their cargoes at Georgian Bay ports, on the east side of Lake Huron, from where the wheat goes by rail to Montreal. Other ships discharge at Port Colborne, Ontario, from where the grain is carried on barges through the Welland Canal and thence down the St. Lawrence and its canals to Montreal. Still other shipments go through United States ports. A few small steamers take their cargoes all the way by water from the head of the Lakes to Montreal; the grain carried in this way is only between two and three per cent. of the total.
The all-water route and the combined rail-and-water route from the head of the Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard are much cheaper than the all-rail route, due to high railway freight rates in eastern Canada. A bushel of wheat can be sent over the thirteen hundred miles between Calgary and Fort William for about fifteen cents, while the overland freight rate from Fort William to Quebec or Montreal, a distance of only a thousand miles, is twenty-one cents. The rate on the all-water route from Fort William to Montreal is ten cents cheaper, or eleven cents. From Fort William to New York via Buffalo it is fourteen cents, but vessels sailing from New York offer lower ocean rates and can get cheaper marine insurance, so that more than half of Canada’s export wheat is shipped abroad via the United States.
Whenever we have put a high tariff on Canadian wheat, the amount exported to our country declines. We now admit Canadian wheat free of duty on condition that none shall be consumed in the United States. This does not mean that it may not be manufactured. At present fifty per cent. of all that is imported is made into flour, and then reëxported.
Some of the lake freighters in the Port Arthur and Fort William harbours are like no other craft I have seen. They have an elevated forecastle at the bow for the crew, with the engines and officers’ quarters in the stern. In rough weather one can pass from bow to stern only by means of a life rope, and orders and reports are given by telephone. In the stretch of deck between is a series of hatches, sometimes thirty or more, through which the cargoes are loaded or discharged. A single vessel will often carry three hundred thousand bushels of wheat, or the equivalent of six or seven trainloads of forty cars each. Among the boats in the lake grain trade this season were a number of small ocean-going freighters from Norway, attracted here by the cargoes available at profitable rates.
Besides the great fleet of grain-carrying ships, passenger steamers run from Port Arthur and Fort William to Georgian Bay, touching at all the important ports on the route. I steamed for eighteen hours through Lake Superior coming here on one of the boats from the “Soo.” That lake is so large that at times we lost sight of land and it seemed as though we were in mid-ocean. At other times we could see the irregular coastline, which is rock-bound and picturesque. The water of Lake Superior is as clear as crystal; it is icy cold the year round.