Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 95, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 August 1907 — AMERICA'S FUTURE PLAYGROUND [ARTICLE]

AMERICA'S FUTURE PLAYGROUND

The St. Jamea Bay Region Will Become a Paradise for Sportsmen. The most urgent need of Quebec Is a railroad from the St. Lawrence northward to St. James Bay, says Munsey’s. This would open up 70,000,000 acres of land and connect Quebec with Hudson Bay that Inland sea, which Is greater than ten Lake Superiors. The summer travel alone would probably enable such a railway to pay dividends, ns the whole region is a paradise for sportsmen. Here are wild geese, snipe, plover, otter, beaver, mink, deer, marten and bears In large numbers. At one camp an Indian hunter recently shot eighteen bears. And as for fishing ther j are 1,000 lakes and countless rivers , with trout and..salmon.' P ft j Y “We caught ninety-seven trout in ‘orfr haul,” reports a government surveyor. “In the far north,” he says, “we found the pike so tame that we killed them with our paddles.” .For those who wish to hunt big game there are the white whales of St. James Bay. In the good old days of the New Bedford vrhalers, these monsters were worth sl#o apiece to the ships that caught them. It is said that in forty voyages to St James Bay the whalers harpooned $1,000,000 worth of the blonde leviathans. Instead of being a frozen waste, as most Americans believe, this northern region has a lighter snowfall than the prosperous i cities of Ottawa and Montreal. It Is in the latitude of England and Denmark, and farther south than any part of Norway. “I have bathed In (he waters of St. James Bay as late as Oct. 3,” said one of the few enterprising woodsmen who had made the Journey by canoe. This unmapped land will yet be the playground of the continent. Here Is the Nottaway, a river two miles wkle> and 400 miles long, but not nearly as well known as the Kongo. Here is Lake Mistassini, with an area of 1,000 wpinre miles, whore the plash of the white man’s paddle has seldom been hoard. And here are the falls of the Hamilton River, which have broken the silence of this wilderness for ages with a wild plunge than that of Niagara.