Wolseley’s point of view, the odyssey was a success. Dawson had ordered one hundred and fifty boats specially built for the expedition on the Isle of Orleans and shipped to Sarnia, from where a crew of eight hundred skilled voyageurs brought them to Lake Superior and thence over the portages the soldiers had prepared (the same technique and some of the same voyageurs were later used to navigate the cataracts of the Nile during the attempt to rescue Gordon in 1884-85). But in the process Wolseley’s troops destroyed as much of the road as they built and held up construction for the three months it took to move the sixteen hundred men through the wilderness. By the time the last soldier had moved on, the road was in such a state that it was useless.
Eventually, however, it was completed. Tugs and steamboats were placed on a dozen lakes. Dams were built on the Maligne River to raise the water levels around the falls and rapids as much as a dozen feet. Tents, houses and shanties were erected for the convenience of passengers. And two great locks, eight hundred and two hundred feet high, were planned at Fort Frances so that steamboats might eventually circumvent the rapids of the Rainy River. Between 1872 and 1873, a thousand settlers paid their ten dollars to use the Dawson Route between the lakehead and Winnipeg.
It was a formidable route. A tug or steamboat was required on every lake and a different team of horses, together with harnesses and wagons, at each of the ten portages. Throughout its brief existence, there was never a time when some section of the Dawson road was not in need of repair. Indeed, the route was scarcely open when the completion of a railway from Duluth to Moorhead on the Red River, in the spring of 1873, made it obsolete. Travellers could now take the lake boat to Duluth, proceed by rail to the river and there pickup a steamboat to Winnipeg. This, too, was a rough trip. As one traveller recalled, “half the time we didn’t know whether we were on the rails or on the ties”; but it was nothing compared to the Dawson Route in 1874.
In that season the government determined to contract out the freight and passenger service to a private company. The contractors agreed to move passengers from the lakehead to Winnipeg in ten or twelve days and freight in fifteen or twenty. But because they were subsidized by the government to carry passengers at low fares, it was in their interests to carry as few as possible and put most of the $75,000 subsidy in their pockets.
The story is told of one luckless settler arriving in a pitiable state of exhaustion and dilapidation at the office of Donald A. Smith, M.P. , in Winnipeg, and proclaiming: “Well, look at me, ain’t I a healthy sight? I’ve come by the Government water route from Thunder Bay and it’s taken me twenty-five days to do it. During that time I’ve been half starved on victuals I wouldn’t give a swampy Indian. The water used to pour into my bunk of nights, and the boat was so leaky that every bit of baggage I’ve got is water-logged and ruined. But that ain’t all. I’ve broke my arm and sprained my ankle helping to carry half a dozen trunks over a dozen portages, and when I refused to take a paddle in one of the boats, an Ottawa Irishman told me to go to h—1 and said that if I gave him any more of my d—d chat he’d let me get off and walk to Winnipeg.”
In June and July of 1874, the pioneer newspaper of Manitoba, the Nor’wester , began to carry the immigrants’ complaints. They considered the station-master at Fifteen Mile shanty “a brute,” and the men at the Height of Land “mean and surly.” At Baril Lake, the baggage was flung helter-skelter into the hold of a barge where it rested in eight inches of water. On one passage across Rainy Lake where, true to nomenclature, a cloudburst descended, male passengers compassionately took the tarpaulin off a woodpile and placed it over the heads of the women and children.
Eventually, however, it was completed. Tugs and steamboats were placed on a dozen lakes. Dams were built on the Maligne River to raise the water levels around the falls and rapids as much as a dozen feet. Tents, houses and shanties were erected for the convenience of passengers. And two great locks, eight hundred and two hundred feet high, were planned at Fort Frances so that steamboats might eventually circumvent the rapids of the Rainy River. Between 1872 and 1873, a thousand settlers paid their ten dollars to use the Dawson Route between the lakehead and Winnipeg.
It was a formidable route. A tug or steamboat was required on every lake and a different team of horses, together with harnesses and wagons, at each of the ten portages. Throughout its brief existence, there was never a time when some section of the Dawson road was not in need of repair. Indeed, the route was scarcely open when the completion of a railway from Duluth to Moorhead on the Red River, in the spring of 1873, made it obsolete. Travellers could now take the lake boat to Duluth, proceed by rail to the river and there pickup a steamboat to Winnipeg. This, too, was a rough trip. As one traveller recalled, “half the time we didn’t know whether we were on the rails or on the ties”; but it was nothing compared to the Dawson Route in 1874.
In that season the government determined to contract out the freight and passenger service to a private company. The contractors agreed to move passengers from the lakehead to Winnipeg in ten or twelve days and freight in fifteen or twenty. But because they were subsidized by the government to carry passengers at low fares, it was in their interests to carry as few as possible and put most of the $75,000 subsidy in their pockets.
The story is told of one luckless settler arriving in a pitiable state of exhaustion and dilapidation at the office of Donald A. Smith, M.P. , in Winnipeg, and proclaiming: “Well, look at me, ain’t I a healthy sight? I’ve come by the Government water route from Thunder Bay and it’s taken me twenty-five days to do it. During that time I’ve been half starved on victuals I wouldn’t give a swampy Indian. The water used to pour into my bunk of nights, and the boat was so leaky that every bit of baggage I’ve got is water-logged and ruined. But that ain’t all. I’ve broke my arm and sprained my ankle helping to carry half a dozen trunks over a dozen portages, and when I refused to take a paddle in one of the boats, an Ottawa Irishman told me to go to h—1 and said that if I gave him any more of my d—d chat he’d let me get off and walk to Winnipeg.”
In June and July of 1874, the pioneer newspaper of Manitoba, the Nor’wester , began to carry the immigrants’ complaints. They considered the station-master at Fifteen Mile shanty “a brute,” and the men at the Height of Land “mean and surly.” At Baril Lake, the baggage was flung helter-skelter into the hold of a barge where it rested in eight inches of water. On one passage across Rainy Lake where, true to nomenclature, a cloudburst descended, male passengers compassionately took the tarpaulin off a woodpile and placed it over the heads of the women and children.
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