railway, knew all train schedules down to the minute and the contents of every rail car. One night, one of the Tremblay boys, who had married into the LaFrance family, led a party to the tracks with a brace and bit and several buckets. It was a bitter night with the white of one’s breath barely visible in the fog of blowing snow. One of the boxcars contained a shipment of fine Scotch whiskey that was headed west. They drilled through the boxcar’s wooden floor and into an oak keg and caught the whisky in pails as it drained through the hole.
Isidore had started work at the Chapleau rail yards in 1899 at age fifteen. He quickly worked his way into a locomotive cab as a fireman and in 1902 advanced to locomotive engineer. At nineteen years old, he was in command of a roaring locomotive beast thirty metres long and weighing close to three hundred tons. Being a locomotive engineer had its benefits: good pay, status, and the joys of exercising command and control in an important job. But it also brought sacrifice. There were long stretches away from home and family.
Railroading was dangerous work. Construction accidents were common, as were collisions resulting from inaccurate timing and crashes set up by Mother Nature. The LaFrances were not immune to the tragic consequences of railway life. In 1906, Lambert received word that his brother Napoleon had been hurt while working on a construction train carrying gravel west of Chapleau. The train pulled in to Chapleau with Napoleon, his leg severed when he had slipped between two cars. Lambert held him in his arms as the train travelled to Biscotasing where medical help was available. When the train reached Biscotasing, Napoleon was dead, having bled to death in his brother’s arms. His name is engraved on a workers’ memorial plaque near the Chapleau station.
Five years later, Isidore braked a locomotive as it rolled into Chapleau station when a small engine wheel broke off. The engine stayed on the tracks and no one was hurt. CPR bosses tried to blame the incident on Isidore, so he told them to shove the job and applied to the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR), which was rapidly expanding out West. He and Louise found themselves far from the warmth of family life in Chapleau. They were stationed in Port Arthur, the main eastern terminus for the new railway, and Isidore began running the big engines in every division between Hornepayne on the east and Edmonton on the west.
The LaFrance-Aquin-Burns family circle mourned the move of the eldest LaFrance son and the eldest Aquin daughter. Louise and Isidore were key family players — sociable, friendly, and just nice people to have around. Free rail passes were plentiful in the family, however, and there was enough back and forth between Chapleau and Port Arthur to hold family ties intact. Then, in early 1918, the Chapleau families learned that Isidore and Louise had left Port Arthur. Inexplicably they moved west and were living in the unheard-of village of Hanna, somewhere out on the plains of east-central Alberta.
Then came news from the West of the arrival of a long sought after baby. Isidore and Louise, who’d been having trouble conceiving and were now into their thirties, finally had a child. Father Gasçon, who had a habit of appearing at important times in people’s lives, carried details of this miraculous child back to Chapleau. It had seemed somewhat odd, but this impoverished and busy priest had travelled west just to visit Isidore and Louise and reported them well settled into family life with their new daughter, Veronica Cecile LaFrance.
As quickly as they had disappeared out West, the LaFrances reappeared in Ontario, at Port Arthur. That, too, seemed odd. A year out West, then back to Ontario. But it was no secret that Isidore loved Port Arthur and people just assumed the LaFrances had not taken to the Prairies.
Port Arthur felt more like home to the LaFrances. Isidore relished running his locomotives along the Lake Superior shoreline. He was fascinated with the spectacular views. The Great Inland Sea dominated all views to the east for at least 180 points on the compass. From almost any hill along the waterfront, the horizon was filled with water. Water moving relentlessly eastward on an incredible journey to the Atlantic Ocean. Only a few island dots, and of course massive Nanabijou, interrupted an otherwise unbroken view of water that stretched from the Port Arthur waterfront to Sault Ste. Marie, 450 kilometres east.
Nanabijou is the Sibley Peninsula, a rocky spine roughly thirty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide that juts into Lake Superior from the north to form the vastness of Thunder Bay. Seen from the cities of Port Arthur and Fort William, amalgamated as Thunder Bay in 1970, it does indeed look like an Indian giant wearing full headdress, sleeping on his back with his arms folded across his chest. It is an amazing piece of nature that Canadians, in a 2007 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation(CBC) poll, voted one of the seven wonders of Canada.
The legend of the Sleeping Giant is myth, but the silver treasure is real. There have been attempts to mine it, the most successful in the 1870s and 1880s. Miners extracted tons of silver and Silver Islet became known as the world’s richest silver deposit, but Nanabijou constantly fought back, raking Lake Superior with vicious storms that made mining operations miserable. In 1884, a shipment of coal needed to fuel the pumps that kept water out of the mine did not arrive on time. The pumps fell silent, the mine flooded, operations ceased, and the mining families moved away. Nanabijou had succeeded in protecting at least some of his treasure.
Long before the silver seekers came, the mainland shore opposite the rocky peninsula was Native territory. The Ojibwe Natives lived along the shoreline where the Kaministiqua River joins Lake Superior, or the Big Lake, in what used to be Fort William. The North West Company built a fur trading fort there just after the turn of the 1800s, and it became a major rendezvous point for fur traders heading west or returning to Montreal. In 1868, Simon Dawson began building a road from the Lakehead waterfront to the Red River colonies out West. It ran straight up the hill from the lake, later becoming the forked road where Everest Funeral Home and St. Andrew’s Church faced each other.
Nanabijou, the Sleeping Giant, as seen from Hillcrest Park overlooking the part of Thunder Bay known as Port Arthur until the early 1970s.
Until the railway came, the road leading away from the water was the path used by settlers, surveyors, traders, and soldiers sent to put down the western Métis rebellion. Many a traveller leaving the waterfront from the Port Arthur side must have stopped along the road where it tops the hills to look back and absorb the spectacular views of the lake, the islands, and Nanabijou.
Isidore rented a house up that hill when he returned from the West with Louise and their new baby. It was near Hillcrest Park, a flat spot from which you could drink in the entire panorama of the Thunder Bay region. You could stand on the rock wall and look down at the brick-chimneyed rooftops of the houses that spill into downtown. These were the homes of the working class, the immigrants who melted into a Lakehead society that seemed less hyphenated than other parts of Canada. They were mainly Finns, Swedes, and Italians and the rooftops of their edifices poked up from below the hilltop — St. Anthony’s Catholic Church and the Scandinavian Boarding House. Everything looked so much smaller from up there. There was a sense of being airborne. The rectangles and squares of the commercial buildings of downtown were tiny. Even the gargantuan concrete tubes of the grain elevators that blocked access to the water’s edge appeared less significant. Only the Giant itself, despite being twenty-five kilometres straight out from the park, gave any sense of bigness.
The LaFrances’ house was a two-storey wooden place at 385 Cornwall Avenue on the hillside overlooking the lake. It was anchored to the rocks just below where High Street ran past Hillcrest Park, and if you craned your neck from an upstairs window, you could view the lake. It was a short walk over the brow of the hill to Hillcrest Park, with its flower gardens and a long rock wall with imbedded cannons pointed out over the harbour. On cool, spring days, kids climbed onto the cannons to feel the warmth that the black iron had absorbed from the sun. Opposite the park are some of the city’s finest old homes, built there long ago for the splendid view.
Hillcrest Park was a popular place to stroll. It was almost like a park in the LaFrances’ backyard where
