Lakehead University - Yearbook (Thunder Bay, Ontario Canada)

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THE NOR ' WESTER THE KAMINISTIQUIA ROUTE — Continued fall of New France, began to meet with success in the late 1760 ' s. The traders or ' pedlars ' , as they were called, pushed west by way of Grand Portage; some of these men eventually formed the nucleus of The North West Company. Only one trader, Thomas Currie, went to Kaministiquia, in 1767, to re-establish commerce in that area; but in subsequent years he followed the Grand Port- age Route, and the Kaministiquia Route was completely forgotten. In the following years an increasingly successful trade was carried on by the English and Scottish traders of The North West Company. They developed a long chain of forts from Grand Portage deep into the western regions of Canada, practically unchallenged by the interests of the Thirteen Colonies to the south. The American War of Independence and the Treaty of Versailles, 1783, however, changed the picture somewhat with the definition of the Cana- dian-American boundary along Pigeon River. The North West Company found that some of its most important posts, including Grand Portage, were in American territory. As a result, Edward Umfreville was despatched in 1784 to find a new all-British route through Lake Nipigon and connecting lakes and rivers to Lake Winnipeg. Umfreville was successful in his ven- ture, but the route proved too difficult and was never used. During the in- tervening years The North West Company continued to use its posts in the United States, but was finally forced to relinquish them under the terms of Jay ' s Treaty of 1794. It is interesting to note that the Kaministiquia Route, along with the Grand Portage Route, was marked on Peter Pond ' s map of 1789. Pond, an itinerant trader throughout the west, was from time to time connected with The North West Company; apparently the information that he possessed was never divulged. It was not, therefore, until 1798 that the only practical all-British route was re-discovered. Roderick Mackenzie, on a trip from Grand Portage to Rainy Lake, met a family of Indians at the height of land, and learned from them of a route from Lake Superior to Rainy Lake navigable for large canoes, and entire- ly in British territory. Mackenzie followed the ioute to Lake Superior, and thus re-opened the waterway discovered by Jacqes de Noyon, a hundred and ten years earlier. The North West Company transferred its post from Grand Portage to Kaministi- quia in 1802-03, and the fur trade was continued by the Canadian route. In 1807, Kaministiquia was re-named Fort William after William McGillivray, the Company ' s agent. Unt il the decline of the fur trade, and the advent of modern methods of transportation, Fort William and the Kaministiquia Route remained in continuous use in the vast fur empire of the north west. MR. JOHN STEVENSON — 17

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THE NOR ' WESTER W$t Eamtmsittcjma Houte EDITOR ' S NOTE: Mr. John Stevenson is at present teaching at the Fort William Collegiate Institute and spending his spare time working on his thesis for his master ' s degree, which will deal with the history of Fort William. The following essay has been assembled from information he has accumulated prior to commencing his thesis. One of the earliest established trading routes from Lake Superior to the in- terior of the North American continent was the Kaministiquia Route. It was discovered, in 1688, by Jacques de Noyon, a French trader from Three Rivers, Quebec, who travelled up the Kaministiquia River, portaged through to Dog Lake and the Seine River, and eventually reached Rainy Lake. De Noyon spent the winter at Rainy Lake, and built a post at its western outlet for the Government of New France. The Thunder Bay area had been visited twice before de Noyon ' s explorations. Radisson and Groseilliers apparently skirted the north shore of Lake Superior, in 1662, on their famous venture into the north west. In 1678, Daniel Grey- soion, Sieur du Lhut, and La Tourette established the first French fort, Kaministiquia, on the present site of Fort William. This fort, however, was not maintained during subsequent years, and was finally abandoned. In 1717, with a view to the discovery of the western sea, the Kaministiquia post was re-built by Zacharie Robutal de La Noue under the direction of the Governor, M. de Vaudreuil, and the Intendant, M. Begon of New France. The King of France gave his blessing to the scheme along with an annotation that costs be kept to a minimum. In 1727, Pierre de Varennes, Sieur de La Verendrye, was appointed to the Postes du Nord , which included Kami- nistiquia. In the years following his appointment, La Verendrye used the Kaministiquia Route numerous times in his unsuccessful search for the west- ern sea. French efforts to extend the fur trade and to press to the western sea were continued by subsequent commanders after the death of La Verendrye in 1749; preference, however, was eventually given to a shorter route from Superior west — that developed from Grand Portage along the present Inter- national boundary to Rainy Lake. When the Seven Years ' War broke out in 1756, French officers and men were recalled to Montreal and Quebec to help defend the eastern section of New France against the British. By the end of the war, and with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the posts of the north west were all but abandoned by the French. English efforts to reconstitute the trade from Montreal to the interior, after the 16 —

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THE NOR ' WESTER JOURNEY TO RUTUF It was the morning of May 18, 1996, when I had finally finished construction of my saucer shaped intercelestial space missile. Having reached the age of thirty, two days previously, and having celebrated my birthday at a surprise party which my friends had thrown for me on the night of May 16, I was in very good spirits. My elation increased when I proudly inspected my fioraluminum missile fitted with six motors powered by solar and electro- atomic energy. For security reasons I cannot reveal the dimensions, weight, power, or color of my missile. Alter completing preparations for my departure from Earth, I secretly shot off into space from a spot in the most isolated region of desolate and barren Labrador at twenty-one minutes after two o ' clock in the afternoon of May 18, 1996. Again, for security reasons, I have to withhold certain information, including the exact take-off place and the speed with which I left the earth ' s atmosphere. It all seemed like a dream. But I was jolted back to reality with a shock when my missile broke through the light barrier. My gyro-gravitational cockpit allowed me to maintain my balance when my missile accelerated beyond the speed of light. It felt as though eons of time had passed. Actually I had been travelling just seventy-four hours, twenty-six minutes, and four and three-fifth seconds when my missile left our universe and entered another one known only to myself. Its name is Rutuf. I had made the journey very quickly because I had taken a short cut through the fourth dimension. I set my automatic radar-operated controls to land at my destination, the planet Hewhassay. I arrived without mishap and climbed down from my missile. I met a citizen who could converse with me, because the people of Hewhassay spoke a kind of Pidgin-English. The friendly Hewhassayan ' s name was Otis K. Zmpclbtx (pronounced Qsnrvpdk). He told me that all the people of Hewhassay had ignored my arrival there. He told me that the law of the planet forced the populace to ignore unusual things in the sky, especially flying saucers. He quoted the law which stated: Strange, uncommon, or unusual objects (particularly those which are saucer shaped) seen in the sky are to be ignored. They do not (under any circum- stances) exist. The said objects are merely optical illusions, hallucinations, or the results of mass hypnosis. The citizens of Hewhassay resembled the people of America except for their scrawny bodies, the result of doing no physical work. Push-button controlled robots and electronic brains relieved the people from burdensome physical and mental effort. Because their eyes were badly weakened from cinema- scopic five dimensional colored television, 98.6 per cent of the population wore thick spectacles resembling binoculars. Senator Shady Burns, dictator of the democratic Hewhassayan government, Otis told me, enforces laws which restrict, restrain, control, confine, and pro- hibit certain thoughts, opinions, and beliefs of the citizens. Senator Burns enforces these laws to preserve the glorious freedom and liberty which we Hewhassayans enjoy. Senator Burns also had a crusher machine which resembled the meat grinder used by American housewives, except that it was twelve and one-quarter times larger, and its jaws were kept churning by 18 —