In 1900 the Liberal government of Ontario undertook a major initiative to resolve the problem. In keeping with Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s optimistic prediction that the 20th century would belong to Canada (and that obviously meant Ontario), it commissioned a grand survey to inventory the natural resources of the region north of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The reports of the ten survey parties collectively painted a picture of potential wealth beyond the wildest imagination, wealth in timber reserves, in mineral deposits and, most important in the age of the agrarian myth, in the agricultural lands stretching across the North from the Quebec border to Thunder Bay.

To access the Great Clay Belt to the northwest of Lake Temiskaming clearly required a railway. In 1901 the Ross administration dispatched a survey party to locate possible routes for the road from North Bay to New Liskeard but then could find no private company willing to take on the project. With an election in the offing and promises to keep, the decision was made to build the line under government supervision. At North Bay on May 10, 1902, the Minister of Public Works, the Honourable Frank Latchford, turned the first sod for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, although serious construction did not really start until a year later.

Very much like the CPR which preceded it and in marked contrast to its contemporary, the ACR, the T&NO proved to be much more than a mere colonization road. By January 1905, when phase one of construction was completed on schedule to Mile 114, New Liskeard, its raison d’etre had altered dramatically. Responsible for the change was the discovery of silver in the vicinity of Mile 103 just to the south of Haileybury.

That the region possessed valuable mineral resources had been suspected for some time. In the late 1890s, former Sudbury mayor, Daniel O’Connor, who later gave his name, reversed, to one of the first tourist establishments on Lake Temagami, the Ronnoco Hotel, had identified possible nickel and iron deposits in the area. Silver, however, was something else again. Often credited with making that first discovery was yet another blacksmith throwing a hammer at a fox. In fact, the claim bearing Fred LaRose’s name was the second to be filed, the first being registered to J.H. McKinley and Ernest Darragh, railroad tie suppliers to the T&NO.

News of the silver strike only slowly leaked to the outside world, but as men such as Tom Hebert, William Trethewey and Alex Longwell staked claim after claim during the winter of 1903-1904, the trickle of prospectors to what Provincial Geologist W.G. Miller formally designated Cobalt became a flood. A jumble of buildings haphazardly thrown up around the mines without the benefit of a single urban planning principle, the town had character. Well-blessed with the ubiquitous “blind pig,” the officially “dry” Cobalt was remarkably law-abiding, even before the creation of the Ontario Provincial Police in 1909 to keep the peace there. Still, it was not the sort of place where the better class of people chose to live. That was to the advantage of its more staid neighbour to the north, Haileybury, incorporated as a town in 1904 and soon to sport its famous “Millionaire’s Row”, the residences of silver kings along Lake Temiskaming.

Setting Cobalt apart from a mine site like Sudbury was the fact that, at least during the early years of its existence, it was the proverbial “poor man’s camp.” In several documented instances, men were literally able to wrest great wealth from open cuts on the surface of their claims with nothing more than a pick and shovel. In 1907, as a consequence, nearly thirty mines operated in the district and another several hundred existed on paper.

Even in Cobalt, however, the “poor man’s camp” phase was short-lived, and few of the original prospectors ended up with the fabulous riches that came from their mines. Instead, when the surface ore was gone, they sold out to men with the investment capital needed to sink shafts, purchase equipment and hire work forces. The appearance of individuals like the Timmins brothers from Mattawa, Eugene Meyer of New York and M.J. O’Brien of Ottawa changed the dynamics of the mining industry, a change reflected in the formation of the Cobalt Mine Managers’ Association in 1907. Intended to counter the threat of unionization by mineworkers, the Association contributed to a bitter strike that poisoned employer-employee relations for years to come, a not uncommon situation in northern Ontario’s history.

Predictably, the silver strike touched off a wildfire of exploration as prospectors fanned north and westward from the Tri-Towns by every available means of transportation. In 1907 a “New Cobalt” was thought to have been found at Elk Lake and Gowganda. Two years later the rush to the area ended almost as abruptly as it had begun, a victim of suddenly disappearing silver veins and the lure of gold in the Porcupine district farther north.

The activity in the Porcupine was not the first sign of gold fever to hit the North—the future Kerr-Addison mine at Larder Lake was located there in 1908, for example—but it was certainly the most frantic. The “Big Three” gold mines, the Dome, the Hollinger and the McIntyre, were discovered within a matter of a few months in 1909. As eventually happened at Cobalt, in each case the original stakeholder benefitted relatively little from his claim. Dome, discovered by Harry Preston working for Chicago businessman W.S. Edwards, quickly found its way into the hands of a group of INCO-associated investors headed by Ambrose Monell. Benny Hollinger did reasonably well, selling his share of the Hollinger to the Timmins brothers of Cobalt fame for a reported $300,000, but Sandy McIntyre received a paltry $15,000 from two New York investors for his claim.

Originally the gold rush brought to life several small settlements around Porcupine Lake such as South Porcupine, Golden City and Pottsville. To a considerable extent they resembled Cobalt in appearance, having that same careless ad hoc air about them. The day of reckoning in each of their early existences was July 11, 1911, when a brush fire swept through the area. Only Golden City (later known as Porcupine) was saved and at least seventy people perished. Within weeks, out of the ashes emerged phoenix-like a new community incorporated one year later as the town of Timmins.

East of Timmins, on the other side of the T&NO tracks, another (albeit somewhat less frenzied) gold rush was also occurring. Numerous claims had been staked by a wave of prospectors that invaded the Kirkland Lake district from the Swastika area in 1906-1907, but most had been abandoned because of their lack of promise. Unlike at Porcupine where veins of gold jutted from the surface, the ore at Kirkland Lake was buried below ground and not easily detectable. There, for success, knowledge of geology was necessary in conjunction with the usual dose of good luck.

Harry Oakes had both. A flamboyant American from Maine, in the 1890s he had been bitten by the gold bug and had embarked on an odyssey that took him from the Klondike to Alaska, Australia, California and Colorado, picking up the requisite wisdom along the way before arriving in New Ontario in the summer of 1911. Showing remarkable patience, Oakes assembled a number of claims around Kirkland Lake that became, in 1914, the famous Lake Shore mine. Simultaneously, Bill Wright and Ed Hargreaves staked their property as well. Kirkland Lake’s future was to be golden indeed.

Although neither Timmins nor Kirkland Lake was directly served by the T&NO main line (in both cases branch lines were very quickly built to them), the railroad played a critical role in their development, more than justifying the decision made in 1904 to extend the line northward as rapidly as possible. By the end of 1906 the line was in full operation to Englehart, 25 miles north of New Liskeard. It reached Monteith early in 1908 and Cochrane, in the heart of the Great Clay Belt, by the summer of 1909.

As an agricultural colonization road, the T&NO was immensely successful. Together with the provincial government, the railway launched an advertising blitz, promising settlers agrarian possibilities that unfortunately proved to be far beyond the region’s capabilities. In the first 30 years of the 20th century the Cochrane district was the fastest growing in New Ontario, its population doubling between 1911 and 1921, and again in the next decade. In the next 30 years, in contrast, many people left the area and agricultural production declined by nearly a half.

The T&NO also yielded tremendous benefits for tourism, particularly in the vicinity of beautiful Lake Temagami. During the 1890s, poetic glimpses of the recreational offerings of Temagami had been given in the writings of men such as Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott who canoed its waterways. Early in the new century the splendid isolation of the area attracted youth camp advocates such as the American enthusiast A.S. Gregg Clarke, who founded Camp Keewaydin in 1901, and A.L.Cochrane of Upper Canada College who established Camp Temagami two years later. Railway access opened the district to the general public as well, justifying the construction in 1905-1906 of the Ronnoco Hotel at Temagami, the Temagami Inn on Temagami Island and the Lady Evelyn Hotel on the north arm of the lake.

The forest sector was also promoted by the T&NO. By the time of construction, the square-timber trade that had been the mainstay of the industry during the latter part of the 19th century had run its course in New Ontario, but the market for sawn lumber still flourished, as reflected in communities such as Latchford and Elk Lake. Just beginning its exponential rise was pulp and paper in towns such as Iroquois Falls serviced by a branch of the railway in 1913. To preserve the region’s massive timber stands for future, managed use, the government of Ontario created the Temagami Forest Reserve in 1901.

In the opposite corner of New Ontario, yet another railway system, the Canadian Northern, the brainchild of William Mackenzie and Donald Mann, accessed vast natural resources in northwestern Ontario. Starting in the late 1890s, the two men cobbled together a transcontinental railway that, while duplicating its CPR predecessor in places, also opened large sections of northern Ontario. Moving east from Winnipeg, the CN worked its way south of the Lake of the Woods through Minnesota to the towns of Rainy River and Fort Frances, incorporated in 1904 and 1903 respectively. Both acted as centres for the burgeoning lumbering, pulp and paper and tourist industries in their locales. Much to the chagrin of Fort William, the railway chose Port Arthur as its Lakehead terminus, although the setback was not such as to delay the incorporation of both in 1907 as cities, the first in New Ontario.

From Nipigon Bay on Lake Superior, the Canadian Northern followed a more northerly arc than the CPR, cutting just to the east of Lake Nipigon before heading east. Along its length appeared the usual number of precisely spaced new railway towns such as Beardmore and Hornepayne, although the emergence of major urban centres such as Geraldton did not occur for several decades. Extremely important was the decision to make Capreol, just outside Sudbury, the terminus at which the line split in two, one branch going to Ottawa, the other to Toronto. This measurably strengthened the Nickel Capital’s claim to urban pre-eminence in northeastern Ontario, particularly in view of the fact that in 1908 the CPR’s Sudbury-Toronto line also became operational.

Rounding out New Ontario’s rail configuration was the completion in 1915 of the National Transcontinental, built by the government of Canada as part of the expanding Grand Trunk system. For political

reasons quite unconnected with Ontario, it traced the most northerly route through territory completely untapped by the other railways until it intersected with the T&NO at Cochrane. Community development along its northwest section would largely await the post-New Ontario era, when Red Lake, a gold-mining camp, and Sioux Lookout, a centre of lumbering and pulp and paper, began to flourish. The National Transcontinental was more immediately successful in developing the Great Clay Belt area, where Hearst, Kapuskasing and Smooth Rock Falls, all owed to it their existences as agricultural and pulp and paper towns.

By 1915 both the railway revolution and the New Ontario era were drawing to a close. Thereafter, other than the T&NO, which, under the impetus of political imperatives, advanced from Cochrane to Moosonee on James Bay in 1932, railroad consolidation and not expansion was the order of the day. Consolidation was the watchword elsewhere as well. With surprisingly few exceptions, Elliot Lake being the most notable, the communities that today give identity to the North were then in place, products in one way or another of the lines of steel. Demographic and economic growth continued, of course, but more unevenly and largely within the parameters laid out by the railways.

The New Ontario era was an exciting, expansionist one, full of heady days and colourful people. In contrast, its more prosaic successor, Northern Ontario, has had a considerably more difficult time of it, characterized by as much bust as boom. But that is another story.