September 4 - Fort William - Thunder Bay, Ontario

On the recommendation of my brother, who had traveled thru Thunder Bay a couple of weeks back on his way east, we decided to spend the day at Fort William, a reconstructed fur trading post from the early 1800s. Since we slept in until almost nine o'clock and were operating rather slowly even thereafter, we didn't arrive at the fort until 10:30 or so. The trading post really was an entire 19th century trading complex consisting of about 40 buildings enclosed by a 2,400 foot long palisade and another 8 buildings on a farm outside the palisade. In short, it was huge.

Serendipitously, we had arrived on a weekend for which a bunch of re-enactors were staging "The Battle of Fort William". This was a mock battle but some aspects of the situation were modeled on the American vs. British battle for the fur trading post at Sault St. Marie during the War of 1812. In any event, they staged an opening skirmish at 11:30 a.m. in which the British soldiers and voyageurs repelled the Americans, and a 1:30 p.m. final battle that ended with a British defeat.

Both battles were showcases for the tactics of the Napoleonic era, consisting mainly of standing and firing in a line abreast or in a staggered arrangement. Each side had a canon that bellowed out occasionally, completely dwarfing the pops and bangs of the flintlocks and scaring the younger children. I, seemed to be naturally drawn to the bangs, and the bigger the bang the more I wanted to get close and take a picture. It is probably quite fortunate for me that this was mock rather than real combat as such an predilection would be most unwise on an actual battlefield.

In between these bouts of small scale warfare (about 20 men to a side), we toured the buildings of the trading post, chatted with the costumed docents in many of them, and had lunch. We decided to have lunch on site rather than break off or cut short our tour, and selected our meals from the "Authentic Fare" menu in the Cantine building. Monika had a very hearty beef stew with wonderfully thick, flavorful gravy, and I had a bean and pork sausage stew that had some French name. As is our want, we switched dishes in the middle of the meal to see how the other half was faring, so to speak, so I can speak with some authority on both dishes. Monika's beef stew had a lot of large chunks of lean, tender beef with absolutely no gristle, and since she doesn't eat onions I got them all! My stew was thinner and had more vegetables, but the pork sausage pieces gave it a very hearty flavor. Surprisingly, the cook (big French-looking guy with a tattooed arm, no kidding) had spiced my stew to be slightly on the sweet side, which I liked but Monika thought was too sweet. We both liked the fact that the vegetables and white beans were not overcooked but rather on the firm side. We also both liked the large, firm rolls, which were just the thing for mopping up gravy, and a large scone (I think) filled with strawberry jam that we shared for desert. In any case, if you get up this way and visit Fort William, you might want to savor the experience with an dish from the past!

The farm buildings outside the palisade held quite a collection of animals, including sheep, goats, chickens, oxen, cows, and horses. The horses were extremely sturdy looking beasts with thick legs, big hooves and muscles everywhere. They certainly were not Arabians, (Morgans, maybe?), but they had beautiful coats and looked all in proportion to me. The stable boy and girl tried to keep the horses as far as possible from the gunfire, but when they let them back out into the paddock after the battle you could see that the horses were spooked by the way they ran around to work off their nervous energy (yes I'm anthropomorphizing like mad at this point, but that is how it looked to me!).

One of the farm buildings was a dairy with the usual assortment of containers, but also an unusual butter churn. Actually, there were two of these churns, each of which consisted of a barrel that could rotate around a central spindle. As far as we could make out, the spindle was cranked to rotate the barrel that would in turn churn the butter. But the spindles were not directly affixed to the barrel and I couldn't see how it would work as the butter tended to clump up. Unfortunately no docent was present right then, so it remained an unsolved mystery.

The centerpiece of the main square inside the palisade was the Great Hall. As the name suggests, it had a large interior room used for feasts of all the "upper-class" workers during the rendezvous period. The large banquet tables were set at those times with fine linen and dinnerware. The guides and translators could eat in the Great Hall, but were relegated to a table off by themselves in the rear of the main banquet room. The unskilled laborers such as the voyageurs were not allowed in the Great Hall but instead had to make do with the food provided at their encampment outside the palisades or possibly at the inn. We were both struck by how class conscious this frontier society was. Were Americans the same? I recalled later that evening that John Jacob Astor's American fur trading company post which we had visited at Fort Union during Wanderung 6 did in fact have a similar stratification by job class, but perhaps not quite so rigid.

Next to the Great Hall were two almost as grand houses that were summer housing for the partners who traveled into the west to actually trade for the furs. They had to pack out enough goods to trade for the beaver pelts plus enough supplies to survive for the winter. The partners each had a single, fairly large bedroom that was typically equipped with a bed, chair, and writing desk. The beds each featured a wool trading blanket, which I thought was a nice touch. As a group, these quarters look comfortable and possibly luxurious by 19th century standards, but a bit plain and Spartan by modern standards.

Separate buildings were also provided for guides and tradesmen, and the latter building had a tinsmith and blacksmith on either end. We chatted for a while with the tinsmith about the process of pounding brass sheets into dishes or bowls, and he showed me the type of double-headed hammer used for the work. This hammer was hefty, I estimated 10 pounds, and it had a broad pounding head on one side for roughing out the shape and a narrower head on the other side for the finishing shaping. He also showed us a broad ax used for the rough shaping of the logs into square beams. The handle was mounted to the side of the blade so that you could get a straight cut, but that definitely made it a right-handed tool in contrast to most hammers and axes which can be used with equal facility by a right handed or left handed person. The broad ax was also very, very, sharp and I could easily see why the folks using it used metal shin guards to protect their legs; one missed whack and you would otherwise do serious damage to your leg!

A canoe shed held both the huge 36 foot birch bark canoes used on the trip from Montreal to Fort William, and the 25 foot canoes used for the trips from Fort William out to the west. All the canoes were hand made with spruce ribs, cedar lathes or planks, and a covering of birch bark. While I was poking and prodding one, I was surprised that the spruce gum caulking for making the seams watertight felt exactly like black silicone rubber. I was mightily impressed until a docent rather ruefully admitted that they did in fact use silicone sealant rather than the original spruce gum, bear fat, and ash mixture, as it was less brittle and more durable in actual use. If you come in June, July, or August, you can try to paddle one of these canoes in the river that runs next to the fort, and I thought that would be a blast, but we were too late in the season.

To illustrate the 19th century exchange of goods, three rather different stores were located inside the palisade. One contained the trade goods for the Indians who came to trade directly at the fort rather than with the field agents. A second store catered to the senior clerks and their spouses. That store had fine, finished trade goods including, much to our surprise, finished clothing like tweed pants, and expensive dinnerware such as porcelain dishes. The final store was for the lower class workers and contained cheaper trade goods, pipes and tobacco, wool blankets, and coarse durable clothing like corduroy pants.

The apothecary shop had a variety of medicines available at that time including a scale for measuring and a device for making pills. One of the more unusual things was a static electricity generator which, despite the rather damp day, worked well enough to give me a shock. Leyden jars were used for storing the charge so that it could be applied at sites away from the machine. Apparently shocking people was a standard treatment of the time and used for a variety of ills. The doctor's tools were directed mostly at amputation or rather direct invasions of the body for various purposes, and seeing them made me extremely glad for modern medicine.

The powder magazine contained the canon, muskets, powder, and shot for the whole fort, and it was fairly large. It was also the only building to be dug into the ground level and to have a metal roof (for reasons that should be obvious if you have ever fooled around with black powder fireworks and such).

Right next to the powder magazine was an observation tower that would have been used for keeping watch in the old days, I suspect. For us the tower was a great platform for taking pictures of the entire compound. We had a wonderful view of the countryside, and the curious thing was how well they had located the reconstructed fort in an otherwise undeveloped valley just on the edge of town. Since you couldn't see any modern buildings from the observation tower, the illusion of being in the 19th century was preserved.

We reluctantly left the 19th century after about 5 hours at Fort William, and on the way home stopped off downtown to buy some amethyst pieces. Apparently amethyst is mined somewhere in the Thunder Bay area, and many of the pieces had "genuine made in Canada" stamps on them. We picked out 3 pieces that we thought might make nice pendants for Monika and then turned back west to our campground. My brother reported a cafe downtown that was run by a hotbed of anarchists, but he is a lot better at finding those oddball kinds of things than I am. Either that or he makes some of his stuff up! The only thing I saw downtown that really surprised me was a Ukrainian Credit Union, complete with a dual spelling in the Cyrillic alphabet. It is just possible that my brother confused the Cyrillic spelling of "Ukrainians" with "Anarchists", which I suppose is easy enough to do when folks like us try to puzzle something out the Cyrillic alphabet. However, as long as the Ukrainians don't have Weapons of Mass Destruction they should be safe from invasion by the U.S.!

Back at camp, we had fried eggs and low-fat bacon for dinner along with some nectarines we had picked up at a grocery store. My initial impression was that food costs in Canada were about the same or slightly higher as in the U.S. However, there is a stiff 15% sales tax (or Value Added Tax-VAT) on non-food items, or on any food eaten in a restaurant, so you have to take that into consideration when budgeting for your stay in Canada. The rules for when to apply the sales tax are apparently a bit bizarre. Potato chips are not really considered "food", so you have to pay an extra 15% for a bag of chips. However, if you buy 6 or more bags of chips, the government apparently assumes that you can't really be eating all those chips so they are not taxed! So remember the general rule for junk food items is to buy at least 6 of each one and really pig out so that you don't have to pay the sales tax! I expect that there are similar ludicrous aspects of state tax codes in the U.S., but clearly the Ontario tax code also has some quirks.

After dinner we walked over to Kakabeka Falls, and it was definitely an "ooh-aah" thing. An "ooh-aah" thing is anything were you stare at it, go "ooh" and "aah", and that's pretty much it. To be fair, this was a really spectacular waterfall well over 100 feet deep and at least 100 yards across. In fact, I thought it had more impact than Niagara Falls because altho it was on a much smaller scale you could get quite close to the edge of these falls and that gave you more thunder, vibration, and mist. So if you are in the area you really should see the falls and even walk around to see them from both sides to get the full experience, but, that said, I don't think you need to spend more than 1/2 hour doing it.

However, it is also my duty (and I am a slave to duty!) to warm the Gentle Reader that the "ooh-aah" level of the falls is by far the most on weekends during the summer. That is, the amount of water going over the falls is controlled by an upstream hydroelectric dam, and the amount of flowing water is guaranteed to be high only on tourist season weekends. Otherwise, as a placard stated, you could enjoy the scenic beauty of the valley without much water in the falls. But I personally find that to be a bit unsettling, like when we were at Great Falls, Montana, earlier in the year (see Wanderung 6) and really only saw the Great Trickle. If you don't see any water at Kakabeka Falls, you'll just have to be satisfied by imagining it spinning those German built turbines installed in the powerhouse around 1906 (literally "Als Deutschland noch ein Kaiser hat!") and still going strong. My cavils notwithstanding, the power generated is enough to service 22,000 homes or something like that, so I guess the Canadians feel the trade off is worth it. They even turn off Niagara Falls at night after the tourists have gone home, so at least they are consistent.

To continue the "fair warning" theme, Fort William is not typically as busy with re-enactors as on the day we visited. They stage special events roughly every other week during the summer but much less frequently at other times of the year. For any of you interested in planning a visit, unlike our catch as catch can approach, you could check out their www.fwhp.ca website. For instance, they are scheduling a Voyageur Winter Carnival in February 2005, and that sounded interesting if you can take the cold weather! Personally, I think that I along with a multitude of Canadians would prefer to be driving south on I-95 for the winter!

In any case, we finished off our evening by going to a slide show on black bears, which was very interesting. The guy doing the show was an animal control officer for the Thunder Bay region who specialized in bears. He was really sympathetic to the bears and tried to give us the bear's point of view on the situations where bears and humans come into conflict. One thing he displayed that I had not seen before was called a "bear popper" which shot a kind of firecracker charge in the direction of the bear, generally scaring it away. He didn't think pepper spray was all that effective as the wind could whip it around and incapacitate the user rather than the bear, definitely an undesirable result! But apparently Ontario has plenty of bears, between 75,000 to 150,000, so they aren't worried about running out of them any time soon! In fact, Ontario limited spring hunting of bears a couple of years back and citizens are complaining that nuisance bear incidents are now on the increase. Clearly that was a Hot Topic out here but something that had never even shown up as a blip on our radar screens back east! Musing over that we returned to camp after walking one last time alongside the falls area. Back at the trailer we just worked on the computers a bit before turning in for the night. We were able, however, to stay up until 10 p.m., and we were both happy to see that we were apparently coming out of our severe sleep deprivation state. It's so depressing when you fall asleep by 7 or 8 p.m. and miss most of the evening!