This post began as an effort to learn more about the railway lines through Portage. A too-short driving vacation to the west (actually, many of them) does not lend itself to exhaustive study of all the subtleties of geography and history as they pertain solely to the local railways. We just wanted to get away from the hospital and relax a bit. So I'm trying to make up for lost time.
Helpfully, there are so many primary, on-line resources and books to consult today, compared to what was available back in the 1990s. Back then one had to find and collect old books - one by one.
My aunt and uncle in Portage were so active in conducting or suggesting interesting excursions for us (including taking the train to Churchill) that we could have been qualified to work as tour guides in Manitoba. They should take full credit for the resulting deep interest I have in this area of the country.
People like maps, but can one present too many of them?
I estimate that there is one map in this post for each 1000 times I have said 'POR-tage' in my life.
So, as we further investigate rail transportation through this wonderful place, perhaps we should first establish whether the functional, descriptive name of Portage la Prairie is apt in the long sweep of history ...
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| from: Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada/Then and Now; Eric W Morse; 1969; University of Toronto Press. |
So, perhaps the Portage la Prairie name is more a function of early French exploration of the area ... rather than being an actual description of the local transportation systems during a significant period of history.
Our 'westbound orientation' ... that is, travelling west by brute petroleum force on the flat asphalted Trans-Canada Highway (or via The Canadian) ... is quite different from the more nuanced and resourceful water routes developed by fur traders and First Nations peoples.
... We were not fueling our paddling and portaging muscles with pemmican ... and trading into the lands draining into 'Hudson's Bay' ... or operating on one of the two subdivisions of the Fort Chipewyan, Grande Portage, Lachine route. Each of these two subs used their own specialized canoe design tailored to the water courses they travelled.
... We vacationers should have been more aware that this 'prairie carrying place' was something which the professionals had learned to avoid!
Eric W Morse has also made some interesting field observations on the probable origin of some portage routes. Briefly, he has noted that moose and caribou tend to follow valleys, on routes with good footing, between bodies of water, and thereby create natural paths between them. Observant explorers in the woods - First Nations people or fur traders - might naturally choose these well-beaten paths when looking for an alternative when their canoes strike dry land. It is a long, insightful passage.... This excellent book is available via archive.org and is well worth reading to understand Canada's earliest transportation systems from someone who had thoroughly researched and travelled them in the modern day.
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| from: Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada/Then and Now; Eric W Morse; 1969; University of Toronto Press. |
Above, from the same book, you can see how big bodies of water were used as travel hubs and distributing points within the water transportation routes. To some extent, they were the highway interchanges of their time. One reasonably expects that travel using heavily-loaded freight canoes was done along the edge of large bodies of water like Lake Superior, etc.
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| from: Manitoba Historical Maps. https://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamaps/albums |
Above, a map by Thomas Jefferys from 1762 documents Fort la Reine and a 'carrying place' where Portage la Prairie is today. At that location, a portage can bridge the gap between the St Charles River (Assiniboine) and Swans Lake (Lake Manitoba).
The original First Nations names would probably have been well-butchered, as English or French explorers heard them, and recorded them with their respective phonetic approximations. And if a name was recorded 'in French', it might later have been anglicized and rewritten in English.
... Our own local 'Cataraqui' - now Kat-er-AWK-way or often just 'Kat' - is nothing like the original French 'sounding out' of the First Nation's name.
... Lake Nipigon, north of Lake Superior on the map above, provides another interesting example.
On this map, you can also see evidence of the prior arrival of explorers from New France and their later social intermingling with First Nations people.
Someone knowledgeable about transportation history once reminded me that some of the old railway routes which were chosen may seem strange today, but that is simply because we are looking at them with a modern highway map in our hands. Similarly, the map above shows the 'original' Canadian transportation system - using bodies of water whenever possible.
Note: The map above was cobbled together from a series of screen prints. If you are interested in old maps and images of western Canada, the website identified above is really worth a visit. For a price, they produce prints of the images shown.
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| from: Historical Atlas of Manitoba; Warkentin & Ruggles; 1970; Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba. |
H.Y. Hind was a professor of chemistry and a geologist. The maps drawn under his expedition's investigation of Rupert's Land in 1858-9 were drawn to a scale of 1 inch to 6 miles - so they were massive in their final forms. One difficulty of preparing maps showing so many detailed features over a country which had not yet been surveyed ... is that those features may be away from their true positions by 10 or more miles. This is an important consideration if one is trying to reach them on foot, by Red River cart, or on horseback.
While astronomical 'fixes' were often made to precisely locate some features, Hind and Dawson (next, below) mapped many features which had not been so precisely located.
In the map above, we see Prairie Portage on the Assiniboine River, and cart trails leading to the Rat River, a tributary of the White Mud River which, in turn, flowed into Lake Manitoba. I've only reproduced a small area of the map published in my book. You can see how the original details are more fine than could be sharply rendered in a modern book printing.
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| from: Historical Atlas of Manitoba; Warkentin & Ruggles; 1970; Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba. |
S.J. Dawson was a civil engineer. Like Hind, he had been sent out by the British and Canadian governments to document the geographic nature of Rupert's Land and assess its suitability for settlement. Dawson and Hind did not agree on how the work should be done and conducted their expeditions separately - according to this book. Hind's map was submitted to the Canadian government and also the British Colonial Office, as well as being prepared so it could be published in book form.
Dawson's map (his expedition was conducted in 1857-8) was submitted to the Canadian government using a scale of 1 inch to 10 miles, covering the territory from Lake Superior to the Saskatchewan River. It was not done as accurately as Hind's and contains some major errors. In particular his representation of hills and mountains in the southern Prairies shows considerable inaccuracies.
Above, we see Prairie Portage, Portage Creek and the White Mud River, as well as Lake Petawe Winipeg (Lake Manitoba).
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| from: Historical Atlas of Manitoba; Warkentin & Ruggles; 1970; Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba. |
Captain John Palliser was a British Army Officer who was assisted by Dr James Hector (geologist) and E Bourgeau (botanist) and he led the British surveys of 1857-1860. The name is familiar to many because 'Palliser's Triangle' (where Canada's own Great Depression 'Dustbowl' occurred) was named after the accurate observations he made about this area's limitations for settlement.
Had decisions been made on the basis of Palliser's group's observations - rather than by a later expedition* which presented glowing accounts of the area's lushness (after an atypical wet period) ... perhaps some errors in settling the area could have been prevented.
* Professor of Botany and Geology John Macoun travelling with Sandford Fleming on five expeditions 1872-1881.
' The Palliser map had a long and useful life. Significant natural features and natural regions were clearly delineated; and the fertile and the arid districts were sharply designated by many short descriptive phrases printed on the face of the map. Such generalizations and interpretations fascinated both cartographers and the general public, and were used on many government and other maps for years. ' Historical Atlas of Manitoba
You know the lay of the land by now, so I won't elaborate on the 'Portage' details, above.
Typical of my aunt and uncle's generous support of our vacations, in 1995, here is Dr Wilf Schellenberg (my uncle) motoring us up the White Mud River from their Lynch's Point camping spot. This was during one of those high-latitude Canadian summer evenings when the sun stays up forever.
I suspect that the banks of the White Mud are more 'tidy' since the development of agriculture, in the area. With the meandering flatland drainage one sees in the Portage area, one would think that the river would naturally be quite marshy at its shores.
At our farthest distance up the river, the width and depth of the watercourse forced us to turn around. At that well-treed location, there were contented cows grazing very close to us in the narrow river - eating any succulent plants which might have grown out of the water.
So the image above (taken before reaching the cows) is an attempt to show you a 'fur trader' view of the White Mud River.
Using a current Google image - looking south from Lake Manitoba to the White Mud River (mouth and boat ramp at the lower right corner) - you can see its meandering course. Our progress upriver was stopped somewhere in those wooded areas on this side of Westbourne.
For historical counter-factual fun, look over towards Portage at the left (to the south-east) and you'll see the Portage to Lake Manitoba 'canal' which forms the Portage la Prairie Diversion. During the spring when high volumes of water come down the Assiniboine River ... and could flood Portage ... the Diversion reroutes the excess water into Lake Manitoba.
... Would hypothetical fur traders have used this modern-day diversion to avoid a portage? Or were there more efficient ways to get to Lake Manitoba than going up the Assiniboine via Portage?
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| from: Practical Hand-book and Guide to Manitoba and the North-West; Alexander Begg; 1877; Belford Bros. archive.org |
Above, we are now entering the period of western settlement and people are starting to use 'brute coal force' to steam their way up the rivers - sometimes to land settlers at particular geographical points where the land is said to be good.
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| from archive.org |
The Canadian Pacific was built through Portage la Prairie in 1880 and it wasn't long before branch lines were built - to profit from the development of farming on the fertile lands found farther away from the main line.
One such project first began as a separate railway with a grand assortment of notable men of importance listed in its prospectus. Later in that year, it was renamed the Portage, Westbourne & North-Western. It became the Manitoba & North Western in 1883. It was finally built under that name in 1884. Like many other small railways across Canada, it went bankrupt. And, just as typically, it was leased by the CPR for 999 years in 1900.
This locally-important railway will be explored more in the next post.
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| from: MacDougall's Illustrated Guide [etc] for Manitoba and the North-West; 1883; WB MacDougall; self-published. archive.org |
... Don't miss out!
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| from: Manitoba Historical Maps. https://www.flickr.com/photos/manitobamaps/albums |
Above, is a postal map of Manitoba from 1884. I think the lines extending from the railways show the distances along the sub-contracted postal delivery routes.
Contrary to the 1881 prospectus of the future Manitoba & North-Western ...
It seems that the 'head of navigation' of the White Mud River ... wait, there's a full sentence ...
'The White Mud River would be crossed at the head of deep water communication with Lakes Manitoba and Winnipegoosis' [sic]
... was not crossed by this railway after all.
The First Nations, fur traders and Métis had quietly gone about their business for a long time.
Settlement and railways, it seems, demanded a lot of prosperity-conjuring, tub-thumping and ballyhoo.