Full-scale construction of the CPR was delayed a decade by events such as the Pacific Scandal and the fall from power of Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservative administration in 1873. Work on the section of the line between Fort William and Winnipeg, however, began as a Liberal government project in 1875. In 1879 it reached the Lake of the Woods district where, as would repeatedly happen, it bred three closely bunched small communities: Keewatin, Norman and, the largest, Rat Portage. Accessible by water to a wealth of natural resources, they collectively developed as the commercial focus of the district. In the 1880s and 1890s, gold mining experienced boom and bust and the area’s rich forests were opened to lumbermen, especially from the United States. In 1905 the three towns amalgamated to form Kenora.

The segment of the Canadian Pacific from Winnipeg to the Lakehead was completed in 1882. Along the way it opened the Wabigoon area to lumbering and mining development, although only in the 1890s would the agricultural and pulp and paper potential of Dryden be realized. In 1882, also, the first shipment of prairie wheat arrived at Fort William where it was loaded onto the small wooden steamer Erin bound for the east. A year later the first terminal elevator, the King’s, was operational at Port Arthur, and the next spring Fort William followed suit with CPR elevator “A.” Especially after 1887, when a bumper western harvest taxed their collective capacities, the two towns battled tooth and nail for the lucrative grain trade that was to be at the heart of Thunder Bay’s future. Thanks to the population growth attached to this trade, Fort William became an incorporated town in 1892, a status that had been attained by the Port eight years before.

Construction of the eastern section of the CPR from Mattawa to the Lakehead took more than three years, the last spike being driven at Noslo, near Schreiber, on May 16, 1885. All along its length, new communities sprang up overnight at places arbitrarily selected by the company as construction headquarters. Most instant towns with populations of a thousand or more, like Biscotasing, then receded just as quickly to village status or less when the line was completed and the work gangs moved on. For many places along the railway, permanent existence depended upon what role CPR officials assigned to them. Often that role was determined by a simple mathematical calculation. The optimal distance between terminal stations was approximately 130 miles, ’’’travel at that time without refuelling. There were two kinds of terminus. A home terminus, like Chapleau or Schreiber, serving as a storage and maintenance centre, required extensive repair shops and supervisory personnel. An away terminus, such as Cartier and White River, was simply a turnaround station with minimal permanent facilities and staffing.

As a New Ontario development tool, the CPR was most successful at its eastern and western extremities where it cut through uncharted territory. Along its length grew villages and towns primarily involved in resource exploitation such as lumbering and mining. Less successful in this respect was the middle segment running from present-day Marathon to the Lakehead. Because it closely hugged the Lake Superior shoreline, the line opened few new lands and consequently permanent settlements were slower to appear. The real development of the area north of Superior would await another generation and other railways.

For a few communities, circumstances conspired to give the potential for growth to regional dominance. Such was the case with North Bay. Settlement had begun on the south shore of Lake Nipissing in 1865 with the arrival of John Beatty from Mattawa. That Nipissing village would become a local agricultural centre had seemed promising with the completion of a colonization road from Rousseau in 1874. Routing the CPR north of Lake Nipissing dashed any such hopes. Indeed, when the line from Mattawa reached the northeast corner of the lake in the autumn of 1882 an entirely new town was established.

As the story goes, when railway construction supplies ended up at South East Bay on Lake Nipissing they were then redirected to “North Bay.” From the beginning it was very much a CPR village. As would happen in many towns along the entire transcontinental line, Canadian Pacific officials were quick to acquire title to lands in areas expected to become terminal points. In this instance, John Ferguson, nephew of CPR vice-president Duncan McIntyre, purchased 288 acres of land and laid out the original townsite. Initially part of the township of Widdifield organized in 1885, North Bay became an incorporated town on January 1, 1891. Four years later, after a lively competition for the honour with its neighbours Mattawa and Sturgeon Falls, it was designated as the seat of the reorganized judicial district of Nipissing.

Guaranteeing North Bay’s commercial future and confirming its status as a communications centre was the extension from Gravenhurst to Lake Nipissing in 1886 of the Northern Railway, by then a part of the Grand Trunk system. From then on, North Bay was much more than simply a stopover on an east-west railway, albeit a beautifully located one. Rather, it became a pivotal juncture in an increasingly sophisticated transportation system, the “Gateway of the North” through which Empire Ontario (and Empire U.S.A.) intruded into New Ontario.

Just to the west of North Bay, the CPR was also responsible for bringing to life another settlement on Lake Nipissing. Technically the first modern resident of Sturgeon Falls, James Holditch had arrived only in 1878 in fact, large-scale migration came only with the CPR in 1882. A lumbering, farming and, after 1894, a pulp and paper community, Sturgeon Falls was unique in that from the very beginning it attracted both English-Canadian and French-Canadian settlers. The former, families named Richardson, Cockburn, Parker and Stiller, came primarily from southern Ontario (the Muskokas and Simcoe County in particular); the latter, the Jodoins, Michauds, Levesques and Serres, came from the Ottawa Valley. Until about 1900 the majority of residents was English-speaking, but thereafter the balance steadily shifted.

The Canadian Pacific Railway was just as critical in the development of Sudbury, 55 miles to the west of Sturgeon Falls. This city is situated on the southern edge of an elongated soupbowl-shaped configuration ringed by low mountainous terrain now geologically renowned as the Sudbury Basin. Named by CPR Superintendent of Construction, James Worthington, after his wife’s birthplace near London, England, Sudbury also began its existence in 1883 as a railroad divisional site. Two factors ensured that the community did not wither away after the construction crews moved on and its population plummeted from 1,500 to 300 in 1885.

Most important, of course, was the discovery of the copper-nickel deposits in those mountainous outcroppings surrounding the Sudbury Basin. That, too, was a function of the CPR, for it was a railway rock cut a few miles west of the village that yielded the vital samples of ore some time during 1883. Who originally made the discovery is uncertain. There were several legitimate claimants to the honour, including stipendiary magistrate Andrew McNaughton, CP doctor William H. Howey, and company blacksmith Tom Flanagan. Whoever it was, word of a potential copper strike in the area spread quickly, and in February 1884, the first claim was filed by the Murray brothers of Pembroke on the property that five years later would become Murray Mine.

The scramble for claims that occurred in 1884 was fuelled largely by speculation, for none of the prospectors — Frood, Stobie, McConnell, to name only a few — had the massive financial resources necessary to bring a mine into production. In 1885, however, fortuitous circumstances brought to the Sudbury district a man also short on capital but possessed of more than sufficient entrepreneurial bravado to undertake the task. That man was Sam Ritchie.

A businessman from Tallmadge, Ohio, a small town outside Akron, Ritchie in the early 1880s had invested heavily in the Central Ontario Railway and associated iron-mining properties in Hastings County, near Belleville. When the ore finally got to market in 1884, it was found to be metallurgically unworkable, leaving the CPR and Ritchie teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. On one of his frequent visits to the Canadian Pacific head office in Montreal to explore other possibilities for his railway, he happened to notice rock samples sitting on the windowsill of Thomas Tait, secretary to William Van Horne, CPR General Manager, and arranged to have them analyzed. The results of those tests led him to Sudbury in the fall of 1885.

With financial assistance from several Ohio associates, Ritchie purchased the most promising mining sites — Copper Cliff, Creighton, Frood, Stobie, Evans — and transferred them in 1886 to the newly created Canadian Copper Company. Professional evaluation of the properties revealed the presence of even higher percentages for nickel than copper in the ore, and that spelled problems for processing and marketing. None was beyond Ritchie’s inventive capacities and by the early 1890s the CCC was a profitable venture. Although he had a falling out with his Ohio partners in 1891 and was ousted from the CCC, he, more than any other person, was responsible for its initial success. Little wonder that on June 16, 1891, Ritchie was memorialized by an impromptu gathering of citizens as the “Father of Sudbury.”

From 1886 onward, the primarily foreign-controlled nickel-copper industry played an increasingly large role in shaping Sudbury’s fortunes. The American-backed Canadian Copper was the dominant company in the 1890s, although there were several short-lived rivals such as the Vivians of Swansea, Wales, and the CPR-connected Dominion Mineral Company. In 1900 a more serious competitor took the field, the Mond Nickel Company of Great Britain. This move was effectively countered in 1902 by the formation of the International Nickel Company of New Jersey, a combination of Canadian Copper with its refining partner, Orford Copper, and several others. By 1905 INCO had surpassed its major French rival, Le Nickel, and was well on its way to market domination of the world nickel industry.

It must be stressed, however, that although Sudbury was economically bound to the mining industry, it was not at all a typical company-owned town. No mines existed within its boundaries, a factor that has adversely affected its municipal tax base from that day to this. After 1890 the CCC’s headquarters were in Copper Cliff, its chief mine site, just as Mond Nickel would be based first in Victoria Mines and, after 1910, in Coniston. Until World War I most workers lived in villages at mine and smelter sites scattered around the Basin. Sudbury, the CPR entrepôt, served all of these places and therein lay the explanation for its rise to town status in 1893 and its development as the commercial and financial hub of the region.

The second crucial factor in Sudbury’s early history was the decision by the CPR to build a branch line from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie. Operational by 1887, the line transformed the village into a regional distribution centre for the rapidly expanding timber industry along the North Shore of Georgian Bay. During the 1880s and 1890s, lumbermen swarmed up rivers on the North Shore of Georgian Bay such as the Spanish and the Mississagi, breathing life into places like Spragge, Blind River and Thessalon. In addition, of course, this railway also widened Sudbury’s regional hinterland by making it a transshipment point for commerce to and from the newly incorporated town of Sault Ste. Marie and beyond.

The CPR branch line was just as important to Sault Ste. Marie, particularly after the completion of the International Railway Bridge over the St. Marys River in 1889. Linked to the rail connections of its Michigan twin, the Bridge made New Ontario’s Sault a vital point of entry to the flourishing American midwest. Reinforcing its position as a transportation centre was the decision by the Canadian government in 1888 to construct a canal and locks on the Canadian side of the St. Marys River. When opened to navigation in September 1895, the great lock, at 900 feet, was the longest in the world. Within a decade the canal had superseded the American system as the major carrier of goods between the two great lakes.

During the final construction phase of the canal in 1894, there arrived at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a man by the name of Francis Hector Clergue, a Philadelphia visionary cut very much from the same entrepreneurial cloth as Sam Ritchie. (They consequently could barely tolerate each other.) The difference between them was that whereas Ritchie could only dream of doing great things at Sudbury, Clergue was actually able to establish a multi-industrial complex at the Sault, bringing to New Ontario a dimension and level of economic sophistication that it previously lacked.

Firing Clergue’s imagination was the hydro-electrical generating potential of the St. Marys Rapids. In the early 1890s the town itself attempted to develop this potential but went heavily into debt. Employing American capital, Clergue took the partly finished plant off the Sault’s hands, expanded it, and within eight years had developed an integrated industrial empire with several corporate layers. Included under the umbrella of his Consolidated Lake Superior Company and its half-dozen subsidiaries were sawmills, pulp mills, nickel-copper mines (the Elsie and the Gertrude, just to the west of Sudbury), iron mines (the Helen and the Josephine) and, most impressively, an iron and steel plant. By 1902 these various works had swelled the town’s population to over 8,500, making it easily the largest community in New Ontario.

Like other dynamic businessmen of the day, Clergue also developed his own railway network with, of course, the requisite financial assistance of both the federal and provincial governments. The first step came in 1899 with the incorporation of the Algoma Central. The ACR’s original purpose was to link the Sault with the iron mines in the Michipicoten area. Two years later its charter was amended to permit its extension to James Bay, but this extension never materialized. Actual construction of the line covered a period of fifteen years with very little work being done between 1903 and 1910: the northern terminus of Hearst was not reached until 1914.

The ACR was trumpeted as a great agricultural development project, Clergue promising in return for provincial assistance to settle at least 10,000 people along its length. The terrain through which it travelled, however, was not at all conducive to farming; therefore, the promise remained unfulfilled. Besides, by the turn of the century the government of Ontario was looking to quite a different section of the North to serve as the province’s new agrarian frontier.

Clergue had several other pet transportation projects. Difficulties with the CPR in the late 1890s caused him to undertake construction of the Manitoulin and North Shore Railway from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie. Renamed the Algoma Eastern in 1911, it was completed only from Sudbury to Little Current before being taken over by Canadian Pacific. Benefitting most from it, perhaps, was Espanola, a pulp and paper community founded in 1903 by the Spanish River Pulp and Paper Company. Considerably more successful was the steamship division of the ACR, which, in 1900, acquired the first of its Great Lakes vessels and which still exists today.

Francis Clergue proved to be much more adept at creating a diversified industrial complex at Sault Ste. Marie than at operating it profitably. He departed from the scene in 1903 when Consolidated Lake Superior’s financial difficulties threw it into receivership. The impact on the community was devastating. Of the nearly four thousand men left unemployed, several hundred rioted, mostly bushworkers who had arrived in town to find there was no pay.

As has happened quite frequently in 20th century northern Ontario, when private enterprise struggled, government was called upon to intervene. In this instance the provincial authorities poured additional resources into the floundering company and assigned a management team led by C.D.Warren to put it back on its feet. By 1910 the effort was successful to the point where new investors had been found for the restructured Algoma Steel Corporation headed by the redoubtable James Dunn.

The Ross government’s decision to assist Sault Ste. Marie was not terribly surprising given its activities in the Lake Temiskaming region north of North Bay. There, development by the private sector in the late 19th century had lagged badly, although, if just a few far-sighted businessmen had suspected the wealth contained in the region, provincial authorities would surely not have had to take the lead.

One man who believed in Lake Temiskaming’s potential was Charles Cobbald Farr. An immigrant from Suffolk, England, Farr began his lifelong association with the area in 1880 when he became chief agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Temiskaming. In 1885 he purchased thirty acres of land on the northwestern shore of Lake Temiskaming at a site known variously as Humphrey’s Depot, after its squatter owner, and by its Indian name, “Matabanick.” Four years later he left the HBC’s employ to homestead at the Depot, renamed Haileybury after Farr’s English public school. Haileybury was not long without a local rival as, in 1891, the second of the Tri-Towns was established — New Liskeard, located five miles to the north on Wabi Bay.