Thirty years ago North Bay was “Far North” in Ontario. Now the railway builder is reaching out 400 miles still farther north to a “back-door” ocean port and the power engineer is taming mighty torrents in the heart of the wilderness
Two big acts of a drama of winter are drawing to a successful close in the bleak wilderness that stretches north of Cochrane in Northern Ontario, in that No Man’s Land which lies between the Canadian National transcontinental line and James Bay, downthrust spur of Hudson Bay.
They are unrelated scenes in a panorama of development which for years has been changing this once distant North into an annex of the industrial South. But the same man is behind them both. The same dynamic figure is pulling the strings, urging , striving, fighting. He is Harry Falconer McLean, president of the Dominion Construction Company, Ltd., a twentieth-century figure as picturesque as any of the Dominion builders Canada has known.
But first let us get the two acts straight. One is the damming of the east branch of the Moose River at Murray Island, less than fifty miles from Moose Factory, the erection of seventeen concrete piers across the west branch of the same river for a million-dollar steel bridge, so that the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway – Ontario’s publicly owned railroad – may reach Moose Factory and tidewater before fall.