CORRESPONDENCE.
THE WATERWAYS AND WATER-POWER OF CANADA.
[To THU EDITOR Or Tai " sorwroam SIR,—There is nothing in the world like the waterways and water-power of Canada. A bare catalogue of its rivers and lakes, rapids and waterfalls, reads like a fairy tale. There is no need to " write them up." Yet perhaps some day a poet may arise to write the " Polyolbion " of the Dominion. But when he comes crowned with maple instead of laurel he must be a Homer rather than a Drayton. Meantime the plain tale of Canada's waterways and water-power set forth below is worth the attention of those who still think with Louis XV. that Canada is nothing but " a few arpents of snow."
The Ottawa, a tributary of the St. Lawrence, is larger than all the rivers of Great Britain, were they running in one bed. The width of the St. Lawrence at its mouth is more than four times that of the British Channel between Dover and Calais, and it takes its rise, says Thoreau, "in a remark- able spring, far up in the woods, called Lake Superior, fifteen hundred miles in circumference it makes such a noise at its tumbling down in one place as is heard all over the world." On one side of you, as you enter it, is the forest- clad shore of Cape Gaspe ; on the other, the bleak desolation of Labrador. You sail under cliffs, naked and awful, that the Indians tell you are haunted by devils and lost spirits; you glide by green stretches dotted with French-Canadian villages, where a great grey church broods over a covey of little red-roofed farms and cottages. You wind in and out among big Atlantic liners, and bark canoes, tall three and four masted sailing ships from Norway, and tiny white-winged yachts. You pass a river that is broken in two near its month
and hangs down like a curtain two hundred and fifty feet high. You steam in the shadow of the purple Laurentians, the oldest mountains in the world, and beneath the high, sparkling ramparts of Quebec. At night a sudden glow through the blackness of the trees marks the landing stage to some townlet; or a great summer hotel, with its windows ablaze, flings splashes of dappled gold from the long terraces on the dark water of the,river. In the early morning you are alongside the quays and grey limestone walls of Montreal, with its miles of docks and huge ocean steamers lying at their moor- ings. Under the great Victoria Bridge, two miles long, and wide enough for a double railway, an electric car track, a car- riageway, and footwalks, till ahead of you gleams a rush of tumbling water, and wrinkled whirlpools, and jagged fangs of rock. Lachine House, for many years the headquarters of the Hudson's Bay Company at the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence, was supposed to be the starting point for China (hence the name), and here assembled the principal traders from Quebec and the Lower Provinces. From this point Sir George Simpson made his annual trip to Norway House, on Lake Winnipeg, there meeting the traders from the whole North-West. He sailed up the Ottawa to its confluence with the Mattawa (meeting of the waters); then up the Mattawa River, with a short portage, into Lake Nipissing ; and then across into Georgian Bay, the northern extremity of Lake Huron; thence under Manitoulin Island to the portage at Sault Ste. Marie ; and thence along the north shore of Lake Superior to Fort William To-day the steamships make light of the rapids; an im- passable obstacle to a canoe is a mere jobble of sea to an experienced pilot in the deck-house of a vessel a couple of hundred feet long, and the main highway follows the St. Lawrence from Lachine to the Thousand Islands. There are about seventeen hundred of them, it is said, but it is hard to believe that any one has ever counted them. Some goddess once emptied a jewel-box full of uncut gems into the St. Lawrence River, just where it leaves Lake Ontario, and, atone afterwards, men set to work to beautify them. They built on them log-houses and chalets, and little, fat. white lighthouses, and laid them out with beds of vivid flowers, while among them the water foams up Lilliputian beaches and sparkles like silver in the sun- light. Then we are at the foot of the great marine stairway. The first ascent, from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie, is a climb of three hundred and twenty-six feet; after that it is a mere trifle of nine feet to Lake Huron, and twenty feet from there to Lake Superior. By the old system of lockage the steps were about fifteen feet in height, but modern engineering makes great hydraulic lifts that raise and lower vessels from forty feet to seventy-five feet. The lakes rise and fall just as a river does. and for the same reason, though the lunar tides are not distinguishable. Given that the evaporation is constant, a heavy rainfall in the spring will swell the volume of water in the tributary streams, and hence in the lake also, a process which lasts sometimes for a number of years, when a reverse action sets in. Other changes, due. to storms and varying barometric pressure, are more violent, but more temporary. The problem of regulating the lake levels, by removing barriers to the outflow, is, however, well within the range of modern engineering skill. From Port Arthur the Red River Expedition under Lord Wolseley followed the course of the Kaministiquia River through Lake Shebandowan to Lac de Afille Lacs, a 1:112.7.e of lakelets and islands where even the Indian guides occasionally hesitated ; thence by a chain of portages, lakes, and rivers to Lake of the Woods; thence down a ladder of rapids to Lake Winnipeg at Fort Alexander. From Lake Winnipeg there are three great exits. By taking the southernmost. a man in a canoe might enter the Red River at its month, paddle up-stream to its headwaters on the borders of North Dakota, cross by a portage of one mile to the head- waters of the Mississippi, and continue down that stream to the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans, which is, geographically, a little south of Cairo. By taking the northernmost, at Norway House, a journey of three hundred and fifty miles through Cross Lake into the Nelson River would bring him into Hudson's Bay at Fort Nelson. The third exit, at the north-west angle of the lake, is called Grand Rapids. From this point the long, sluggish stream of the Saskatchewan, with only one or two small rapids, has been navigated for the
last quarter of a century by flat-bottomed steamers for one thousand miles west as far as Edmonton. Sir George Simpson only went about two hundred and fifty miles, to Cumberland House, where he took canoes, and followed a series of lakes and connecting streams to a point known as Frog Portage, the scene of many a bygone conflict between the officials of the Hudson's Bay Company, the North-West Company, and the X. Y. Company.
At Frog Portage there is a solitary rock, not greater in extent than the floor space of a small room. A keg of gunpowder would blow it to finders, and practically bring the waters of the Churchill River into the Saskatchewan. The numerous waterfalls on the Churchill make it almost impossible to navigate, but by following its course to Ile la Crosse, up a small stream into Buffalo Lake, through La Loche River, to La Loche Lake, a short portage brings you into the Athabasca River at Fort McMurray. From this point a small steamer runs down to the mouth of the river in Lake Athabasca, crossing the west end of the lake to the junction with the Peace River at Fort Chipewyan. The two streams, united, are rechristened the Slave River, and the same steamer follows their course to Fort Smith, three hundred and three miles below Fort McMurray. Here a long fall of water, necessitating a detour of some fifteen miles, forme the last obstacle on the journey through Great Slave Lake into the Mackenzie River, with its nine hundred and twenty- seven miles of unimpeded navigation to the network of channels at Fort McPherson on the Arctic Ocean. Returning to Fort Chipewyan, you may ascend the Peace River to Chutes, where there is a series of short rapids, after which light-draught steamers could run practically to Fort St. John in the Rocky Mountains. Above this point the river is very strong and rapid, till it reaches Hudson's Hope in the heart of the mountains. Down the tributary stream of the Parsnip to Summit Lake, where the Giscumbe Portage (of seven and three-quarter miles) brings you into the Fraser River emptying into the Gulf of Georgia, on the Pacific Ocean, at New West- minster. Another route from Summit Lake, with an easy portage of nine miles between Babine Lake and the Skeena River, reaches the Pacific at Port Essington, and opens up the Omineca Goldfields district, with which it is connected by one hundred and eighty-five miles of pack train. Returning to the Mackenzie River at Fort Simpson, about a hundred and fifty miles from Great Slave Lake, we can ascend the tributary Liard to its junction with the Dease River, then by canoe through Dease Lake, across the height of land (about eight or nine miles) to the Stikeen, thence to Wrangell on the Pacific. From Fort McPherson, at the mouth of the Mackenzie, in the Arctic Ocean, a short trip down the Rat River, across a small portage into the Bell River, leads into the Porcupine, down which stream there is comparatively easy navigation to the Yukon at old Fort Yukon, the most westerly station of the Hudson's Bay Company. When the 141st meridian was finally settled on as the boundary between British and American terri- tory, the Company's agents were crowded reluctantly to a point further east.
A mere catalogue of names of rivers, lakes, and water- ways in Canada would fill a volume, so that it is only possible to skirt the fringe of the subject within the limits of a newspaper article. Take the question of water- power alone. At the Shawinigan Falls there is a cliff some hundred and fifty feet high. Crawling up its steep slope to-day are five gigantic red-brown caterpillars (there will soon be ten), tapering from a diameter of fourteen feet at their mouths to nine feet at the tips of their tails. Each caterpillar represents six thousand horse-power, and when you consider that forty-two thousand horse-power is sufficient to light by electricity a town of three hundred and fifty thousand people, the size of Montreal, you begin to wonder what amount of force is running to waste every minute in a country like this, where waterfalls and rapids are too numerous to be counted. When you bethink yourself further that the time is now coming when this power will be transmissible to indefinite distances, without leakage, the potential wealth of the Dominion becomes incalculable. You can sit in the big dining-room of the St. James Club at Montreal to-night, and the light that sparkles on the silver on the table is generated nine miles away, where the Lachine
Rapids are raging and swirling under a wintry moon. The very sparks that illuminate the room as you utter a word left their birthplace as you framed your lips to speak it. It is hardly a visionary dream that the streets of Teheran should, some day, be lit by power generated in the pine-clad wilder- ness of the St. Maurice River.—I am, Sir, &c., C. H.-W.
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