BEFORE THE CANADIAN PACIFIC  RAILWAY  ̶  AND NOW

   During the summer months we had three mails a month, delivered by the Sarnia boat and we wrote our reply to our mail ready for the next trip ten days hense. In winter we had one mail a month delivered by dog team from Port Arthur. The trip down to Red Rock (Nipigon) usually took the Courier two days during the short days of winter and heavy going. When he arrived late in the evening he would sleep at the Post and we had the whole night before us to answer our letters. But if he came during the afternoon he turned back at once and our incoming mail had to remain unanswered for a month.

   In all that hundreds of miles of lake coast from Sault Ste Marie to Port Arthur there was not a single doctor or clergeman of any denomination. Apart from a severe cold we had no sickness, the worst we had to contend with was cuts and occasionally gunshot wounds. Such cases we attended to and relieved with what backwoods skill we possessed, and yet we lived, were contented and took things as they existed.

   Man can accustom himself to any place and any condition of surroundings especially an Anglo Saxon or French Canadian. I give the palm to those two after having had almost all nationalities under me at one time or another.

   I lived on the north shore of Lake Superior and at inland posts from 1876 till 1881, and what I have committed to paper is as things existed during that period.

   In the autumn of eighty the awakening began, parties of surveyors were landed at several points along the coast locating the line of our pride of Canada in railroad construction, The Canadian Pacific Railway.

   As these parties came out from the interior with the reports of their winter’s work, I left that part of the country to assume charge of an eastern district in the Province of Quebec, and never had occasion or opportunity to revisit that part of Canada till this present Summer of 1909  ̶  an absence of twenty-eight years.

   What facilities of travel I enjoyed and what transformation of scenes I beheld I set forth under the heading  ̶  “OF NOW”

(Continued in Part 3, Conclusion)