Canadian Transport Sourcebook

Chapter VII

THE LAST YEARS

1. Retrospect

The gradual changes which occurred in the Island business have necessarily been touched upon in turn. It would have been impossible to deal intelligently with the early and middle periods without looking forward, at times, to the later years. Two of the most obvious causes of the differences between the business of the 1860's and early 1870's and that of its last thirty years were the losses following the "break" of 1873, and the death of the founder in 1884.

There was however a far deeper cause than these—the depletion of the forest. If there had been no "1873," and if the whole of the founder's estate had remained in it, the business must still have changed greatly. It had been based upon the seemingly unlimited virgin forest of great trees, and must inevitably have shrunk with the shrinkage of the forest, regardless of any other cause.

Blacksmith, Boiler and Machine Shops; Office

"The Big House," 1895

And there is this, also. Timber-making was the first form of forest exploitation, but, while the Island arm was still doing a big business in timber, the second form—sawing had already begun. The old timber names which survive, in the Ottawa Valley for instance, are now lumber names. Their cutting in the bush is still carried on somewhat as it was in the timber days, but the bush product is logs for the sawmills on the Ottawa, not timber for Quebec. With the filling up of the country and the consequent activity in the building trades, more and more of the trees—especially pine—were sawn into lumber, joists and flooring, instead of being hewn into timber. Demand from the United States accentuated this tendency.

Why, then, did the Island firm not change over from hewn timber to sawn lumber? It was certainly not because the partners did not see what was happening. The basic reason was perhaps in the Island itself, where the business was rooted. The Island was an ideal rafting station, but impossible as a site for a big sawmill. Choice trees, cut into valuable timber, could pay for freighting by vessels to the Island; when rafted, they were floated on easily to Quebec. Logs for a sawmill could not pay for such handling—they must float direct to the mill. Again, there was riot room enough on the Island for piling lumber in any great quantity—above all there was no possibility whatever of shipping lumber out by rail.

Two other points: first, wood for shipbuilding was being replaced by steel, which meant that the end of the Island's shipyard was in sight; second, water carriage had to meet the ever-increasing competition of the railways.

Indeed the change of the form of the firm from a partnership to a limited liability company, in 1886, was an expression of a general trend. The "one man" undertaking—for that is what the Island business was had had its day.

So much for the causes of change. What were the actual conditions, in the last twenty-five years of activity at Garden Island? Timber-making, for so long a large part of the business, had ceased. It is true that to the end a little pine was bought for floating oak in the rafts, and that it was sold at Quebec, but this was purely incidental to the rafting, it was not a "line of business" in itself.

Forwarding timber for other owners had become the firm's main occupation; there was only one competing firm in these years, and for the last ten or twelve of them, none at all. On the Lakes, steamers and tow-barges had taken the place of schooners; on the river, the rafting continued very much as it had always been done. As long as there was enough timber moving to Quebec to keep the Island organization busy, all was well—apparently. In the 1890's, the firm at times had more timber to forward than its own vessels could handle, and others had to be chartered to help to bring it to Garden Island. There were some busy seasons of rafting, even as late as 1906. In that year eighteen rafts, containing almost a hundred drams, were sent down to Quebec. With two cargoes which were sent through and unloaded there, the total delivery of timber by the Island firm to Quebec consignees was a, little over 1,800,000 cubic feet.

This busy season, however, like one or two others in these last years of rafting, does not show that there was any real revival, but rather that the end was near. First, these eighteen rafts were the only ones which went to Quebec. Again, the widespread sources of this timber of 1906 show that there had been a struggle even to find it. A mixed lot of some 200,000 cubic feet had come into Toronto by rail—gleanings from the wood-lots of "old" Ontario. The oak, some 600,000 cubic feet, had come to Toledo, Ohio, from points on the Ohio River and from Kentucky¹; most of the elm still came from Wisconsin and farther west, and had been loaded by the Island vessels at Green Bay. Part of the waney pine was delivered by the Algoma Central Railway to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and loaded there; another part came by rail into Duluth, Minnesota—this lot may have come from as far west as the Rocky Mountain slopes in the State of Idaho. A. third, part of the pine came to Kingston by rail from Northern Ontario; on it the arm earned only the river freight, whereas, twenty years earlier, timber from that district would have come to some point on Georgian Bay, and would have made work for the Island vessels as well as for rafting down the river.

This loss of work to them was not the only difficulty with the railways. For instance, down in Kentucky or West Virginia the oak-maker might turn over his timber to a railway, to be delivered at Quebec at a through rate per hundredweight—but it was often understood between shipper and railway that the Island firm was to take over the timber at Toledo. Bargaining with the American railway for a division of the through rate was not easy; the arm had to choose, at times, between losing the freighting from Toledo to Quebec or taking it at less than its regular rate. Moreover, the arm often had to pay the railway freight (to Toledo) before loading the timber into its vessels, and then wait for reimbursement by the owners, perhaps until the timber reached Quebec. And there was the question of damage. Timber might, and did, fall from badly loaded flat-cars had the damage complained of in the timber-coves at Quebec been done while the timber was in the railway's charge, or not? It was very difficult to be positive, and railway claims-agents are "hard traders."

In lake freighting, new problems grew out of the lessening amount of timber to be carried. In the earlier years the schooners had carried timber all through the season—a shorter season than in the 1900's, for the schooners were laid up for the winter more or less at the same time as the last raft left for Quebec. But in 1906, for example, about eighty per cent. of the rafting had been done by the middle of August, and the lake vessels had delivered the remaining twenty per cent. of the timber at Garden Island by the first of September. The rafting expenses could be cut off when that work was over, but the lake vessels could not lie idle for two to three months. Other work must be found for them, and none of it was so profitable as timber carrying. The Island vessels, of heavy and costly wooden construction needed for their special work, were at a disadvantage in competition with the usual bulk-carriers. In other words, these Island vessels were special craft, not typical lake vessels; they could earn a good living at their own work, but only an indifferent one in general lake freighting.

Towing on the St. Lawrence, too, which was for so long an important part of the Island business, had almost ceased in the 1900's. After the Government Tug Line was cut o8, in 1874, towing still went on, for there were still plenty of river-barges to be towed chiefly grain-laden downstream and "light" upstream. There was enough of this work to cause the firm to launch from the Island shipyard, in 1894, a fine screw tug, the Reginald, designed for 9′ draft. Soon after this the whole scene was changed by the deepening of river and canals, from Kingston to Montreal, to 14′. After this work was completed, in 1905, steamers which could come through the then Welland Canal could go on down to Montreal, and trans-shipment of grain into river-barges at Kingston soon came to an end.

For the raft towing, and for wrecking jobs, the firm, of course, had to maintain two or three side-wheel river steamers, down to the end.

In the last fifteen years it became increasingly difficult to find men who knew the timber-carrying trade on lake and river. It was perfectly natural that this should be true; with the decline of the trade the sons of the "oldtimers" had gone into other callings. Or, if they had become lake sailors, they preferred the easier life on a bulk-freighter to the hard work of the timber-carrier. There was a similar trend in the life of the great river its men were being drawn off into other occupations. Many of the Caughnawaga Indians, for example, became structural steel erectors.

The Indians bring us back to the rafting, which, as has been said more than once, was the mainstay of the Garden Island business throughout its life. Perhaps "the Governor" unconsciously foresaw the end of it when on a September evening of the early 1880's he suddenly turned to his son, "the Boss, " and said, "Hiram, we' ve no raft on the river tonight." It probably could not have been said, between mid-April and early November, in the preceding quarter-century.

2.Postscript

Did the timber trade help or hinder the early development of eastern Canada?

Generally, the answer must be that it was a very great help. It provided employment for the penniless immigrant, enabling him to establish himself more quickly than he could have done by his own unaided effort. The established settler, too, and his sons, found winter employment in the woods. The timber-men were the nearest buyers for the settler's produce. Indeed the timber-men's demand outran the local supply—quantities of pork and other foodstuffs had to be imported from the United States. Taking a wider view, the trade provided purchasing power for the country at large.

Again, the trade in timber—as has been pointed out already—was a great stimulus to wooden shipbuilding along the lower Lakes. The same thing was true of the actual export from Quebec; the trade brought down both the materials for shipbuilding and the cargoes for the finished ships.

There is also the relation of the timber ships to immigration. Timber is a very bulky commodity; far more space was needed for it, eastbound, than could be filled with imports, westbound, to Quebec. (This has continued to be a shipping problem on the St. Lawrence route, for our later staple, wheat, is also bulky.) Moreover, timber was a rough cargo which did not attract high-grade shipping; it did not need to be protected, like perishable and more valuable cargo. The westbound timber fleet, then, lacking cargoes, could provide cheap passage for emigrants to Canada from the British Isles—conditions on board the ships were often appalling, but the settlers did arrive, in spite of them.

On the other hand it has been argued that the timber trade, as a whole, was detrimental to the progress of the country. It was pointed out that the timber-man cut only the best trees, that is to say the trade cleared no land for settlement. Another argument was that the settler was always close to the forest and so was tempted to try to be a timber-man as well as a farmer, which too often meant that neither occupation was efficiently followed. Some critics held that the timber trade attracted undesirable men—men who were always on the move and would never be permanent settlers.

These arguments can hardly be said to weigh very heavily against the positive benefits which accrued to the country, in the early years, from the export timber trade.

Today, however—even granting that in the early years the trade was a help to the country—today it can be seen only too plainly what a mad waste of capital resources the timber trade was. (The rape of the forest was accelerated by the change from timber to sawn lumber, and still more by the development of the pulp and paper industry.)

Neither government nor settler nor timber-maker considered what kind of land was being exposed by cutting the forest trees, though it was known that the hardwoods grew on deep land, enriched by the leaf-mould of ages, and that pine was found on light soils unsuitable for agriculture. There are hundreds of square miles of indifferent land on the Laurentian Shield and its margins which ought not to have been cleared of their forest cover.

How simple forest conservation could have been, a hundred years ago, if only men had not believed that the trees were literally inexhaustible. Suppose that the forest had been left to renew itself over a few wide areas—the headwaters of the Grand River, for instance, or the Muskoka Lakes region. Had this been done, the forest wealth of many parts of eastern Canada would today be almost fabulous, and would yield high annual dividends to the State or to private owners. Fire and disease have destroyed much of the forest, perhaps as much as the timber-maker, but that is beside the mark. The timber-maker did not fell a tree to save it from fire—rather he left "slash" in the forest which greatly increased the risk of fire.

There is another side to all this. Those who regret the loss of the forest (whether cut and burned by the settler, or made into timber for export) are prone to give to the trees of a century ago the value which they would have if they were standing today. The fact is rather that they had no great value, a century ago. They were a formidable barrier between man and the soil by which he has lived since he ceased to be a mere wanderer and hunter.

In any case the great trees have vanished. You may drive a car over all the highways of Ontario, even in the north, without seeing a tree which would make a stick of timber. For the timberman's tree had its deep (or widespread) root system, then a tall clear trunk completely free of branches—all its branches and leaves were high in the air .It was the survivor in its own local struggle; it had reached out around its base for moisture, and upwards for sunlight, leaving its competitors dead or stunted, but annually sowing seed for their successors and its own. The giants are no more—their scrubby degenerate "second growth" descendants of today's countryside seem hardly to be of the same race.

The young Scottish diarist MacGregor, already quoted,² has left his impressions of the forest along the Napanee River in 1833. "The trees," he says, grow "to a great height without any branches." He speaks of the forest's "solemn gloom ... nothing to disturb the silence ... save the shrill notes of the jay, ... the rustling of the winds heard at intervals far above among the branches." Some of Bartlett's drawings confirm the diarist's word-picture, they show clearly the dignity of the original forest trees.

It is sad that the trees have gone, yet the story of square timber is an important and interesting part of the history of the early days of eastern Canada. It is the completeness of the "cut" which is to be regretted, not the vigour and resource with which the trade was carried on by so many timber-makers of whom the Garden Island arm was certainly not the least.