October 1, 2025
PAGEVIEWS 513492
SINCE 2011 TO 2025
WAY TO GO, GUYS AND GALS
history of Nipigon, and the Nipigon Museum displays
October 1, 2025
PAGEVIEWS 513492
SINCE 2011 TO 2025
WAY TO GO, GUYS AND GALS
TOP OF THE
FENCE
Chapter one is over for Mr. Log… he’s prisoner
now in a raft… and he has 60 miles to go
down Lake Nipigon… towed by tugs which must be “catty” too to run the
rafts through the islands and shoals … through storm and wind on this junior Great
Lake. The Abitibi tug captains pull the
giant rafts as trickily as a cat runs along the top of a board fence. Mr. Log is still a long distance from the
Sleeping Giant, whose shoulders protect the harbour of Thunder Bay Mill.
At the end
of Lake Nipigon is Virgin Falls … a dam and the big, tumbling Nipigon River
with canyon … now Mr. Log is turned free from the raft … spilled … let run over
the dam, down, down, down stream … over more dams … through rapids … sometimes
he is tamed and controlled by booms
across the face of the river … and all the way the lumberjacks bully him … keep him moving until he reaches another
storage pond in Helen Lake. Again he
must be nipped into a raft and caught in the tear-drop “O” shape of booms. And here nibble footed “catty” Bob Matchett
dances on his back and helps ready him for the biggest ride of all… across
sometimes surly Lake Superior … and up to the Thunder Bay Mill where Abitibi
employees look out at the Sleeping Giant. And in the office files of the Port Arthur
Woodlands Division are listed the tens …
hundred … of thousands spent on improving his journey … money spent on dams, booms, piers, dredging, cleaning banks
, dynamiting.
And in the handsome brick building of the Abitibi Thunder Bay Mill in Port Arthur where I tried to see the Sleeping Giant … here in his last resting place, Mr. Log see stenographers … pretty ones too … who would throw their ink wells at you if you called them “catty”. Yet, such is the romance of paper that their very jobs depend upon men … rough, tough men hundreds of miles away who boss the rivers and float their golden boom islands past the feet of the Sleeping Giant … men who are flattered when you say to them "Pretty Catty"!
The end
GUTS AND GRACE
As far as Port Arthur goes this story starts in Lake Nipigon...that lovely lake
beloved by
moose hunters and fishermen. On one of
its many feeding rivers… say on a frosty November day a cutter swings his axe
against a tall spruce… bites into it with bucksaw… shouts “timber”… the tree
crashes and then the great odyssey begins.
Teamsters and caterpillar tractors haul the logs to the Ombabika
River. Now the log sits quiet and patient
upon the ice for month after month… until May arrives… the sun breaks the grip of ice… Mr. Log is on
his way. Oh, he doesn’t move fast… he’s
jostled and jammed with thousands of others like him… sometimes dynamite is
used to free him from the Chinese puzzle of fellow logs. This nature-given conveyor belt of the river
has its own moods and twists and currents.
The winds help him too, blow panic upon the logs… and old man sun joins the
circus… sucks up the water in summer… slows the conveyor belt and even brings
in the long dry summer arms of the banks to arrest the merry sail of Mr. Log.
The
lumberjack swats and sweats and swears and gives Canada a vocabulary that would
put Webster and Hollywood Press agents to shame. As Mr. Log on his colourful jaunt to the jaws
of the mill flirts, stops and stares at obstacles, his back is pricked and prodded with sharp
pike poles. His bark is scarred from
the catty dance of steel boots. Drama;
Colour; Pulp and Paper is not only our biggest business… it is our most
Canadian of shows. Here is the ballet of
brawn. Here tough rugged men do the
arabesque on a floor of rolling spruce.
Here is drama with the backdrop of white water, and props taken from Nature’s burly and
beautiful storehouse.
The stage is
mighty and magnificent. Man against
nature. The orchestral accompaniment
comes from the strange company of the outdoors… a medley of the musical silence
of the bush… the drone of the mosquito … the timpani of rolling water… the throaty vengeance of the
frog… the swish of trees… the call of the wilds… and thrown upon this scene are
the dimensions of smell… the nostalgic smell of slow rot and quick growth… and
the dimensions of colour… floral and faunal.
Sunset and sunrise peeking through the screen of green.
And Canada
cries for expression in its personality! And the newsboy calls “paper” on
corners rancid with friction-mad rubber burnt gasoline and choked with crowds.
And newspapers are the carriers of democracy.
True! Liberty must march with
newsprint or die. The purveyor of Liberty is born not amid the thundering
thousands, but deep within the kingdom
of trees. Drama? Colour?
Story? Where art thou, Mr.
Canadian dramatist? Point thy pen to the
pageant of paper and thou will write pungent prose.
Mr. Log has
come down the river. With thousands he
takes rest in the storage reserves of Lake Nipigon. The tugs wait for the winds to blow him over
and into the v-shaped mouth of the booms
which trails behind them. When the winds
blow and the logs follow, Catty men like Bob Matchett close the mouth of the V…
turn it into an “O” and the logs are caught inside.
to be concluded in part five TOP OF THE FENCE
LIKE A BALLET DANCER
That serves
to introduce a former Maritimer Bob Matchett .
They say he is a “Pretty Catty”. He only weighs 160 pounds, but, if you
could see him jumping like a ballet
dancer up there at Lake Helen at the mouth of the Nipigon River you’d see why
he is “Catty” and strong a little bull. Lake Helen is a long way from Thunder
Bay mill where I tried to see the Sleeping Giant … but, it’d that distance that
gives colour to our story of being “Pretty Catty”. The Abitibi men of Thunder
Bay use the familiar boom to move their logs.
A boom is a great enclosure made by chaining giant boomlogs together.
Just like freight cars are coupled together.
The wood floats within this great frame of linked big timber…. The book is towed by a boat…. A boom is
really a huge catwalk which bobs behind the boat …just like a cat that’s afraid
of getting wet… just like a cat… as sure
footed, as agile, with the miraculous
control of muscle, Bob Matchett came to
this tremendous Superior country looking for work in 1937.
Today, he is foreman down at Lake Helen.
Quick on their feet these men, and they do their job just as quietly and as unobtrusively as
the famous Black Cat in the black
room. They are partners in the People’s
Paper.
ROUGH, BURLY, MAGNIFICENT
Now, a
Maritimer may eat a lot of herring bones and codfish and so on…but, they also
feed on pride… and I was ready to defend
my “homeland” when the papermaker softened the blow and sparked my curiosity. “ Some pretty smart fellows come out
of the Maritimes,” he said…” we’ve got
some PRETTY CATTY guys up here.” By this time I was about ready to rouse the
Sleeping Giant and go to war… imagine anyone calling a Maritimer “Catty”. Why that’s a female term… and women hate it…
if you say to a woman that’s she’s “catty” … that’s an invitation to get
out the back door and stay out… but fast. There are few words in the English Language that
arouseth a woman’s scorn as the the label “catty”. Imagine calling a man
“catty” ! I soon learned that in this
rough, burly magnificent land of the
lakes where men are men… I learned that
to call a man “catty” was to pay him
the highest compliment in the
roughest toughest of all games. It is a lumberjack’s word of respect and I would
only call a lumberjack a “sissy” if I were in the other end of a
transcontinental telephone line.
You see,
that newspaper you read every day is born out of two parts. It was processed in a great roaring mill
where the machines rumbling at
breathless speed take the wood … make it into a porridgy mush … turn it into
running liquid and then into dry shiny paper.
They call that the Mill side of operations. At Thunder Bay Paper Mill in Port Arthur city
limits they have one of the most modern streamlined operations in the
world. In fact their grinder room is the
very newest thing in paper making.
“PRETTY CATTY”
The People’s
Paper
Canada
March 16,
1949
John Fisher
Scans:
“Pretty
Catty”
These men
are rough and tough, They Boss the
rivers. They run the rapids and shout
defiance at the world’s biggest fresh
water lake. They know the Sleeping
Giant, too. He-men these , and yet the
finest compliment you can pay them is to say “Pretty Catty”.
ANNOUNCER’S
INTRODUCTION: Extra! The People’s Paper,
a radio edition for your entertainment
. The People’s Paper headlining John
Fisher, your favourite story teller, with true tales about you and your
friends.
Tonight John
Fisher takes giant strides from Lake Nipigon to Port Arthur and has a story
which will give the Sleeping Giant pleasant dreams…he talks about men who are proud to be called “Catty”.
And these
men are part of Canada’s largest family , the pulp and newsprint family
…325,000 wage- earners in mill and bush. This great industry has an
investment of over a billion dollars in
mills and power plants that cannot be
moved…they cannot operate without pulpwood…Therefore conservation of the
forests is of vital interest to the industry.
Every Canadian pulp and paper mill is pledges to a 10 point plan of
forest conservation to bring about perpetual harvests from our greatest natural
asset…our forests. Canada’s pulp and
newsprint leaders jointly sponsor this program.
Abitibi Power and Paper,,, Great Lakes
Paper… Ontario Paper…Ontario-Minnesota Pulp and Paper and Spruce Falls
Power and Paper.
Well in our
bushlands John Fisher has found some mighty unusual men… Extra!! PRETTY CATTY!
JOH FISHER:
We were peering out the window. We
looked straight into the silver fingertip of Lake Superior. Through the haze of winter we sought the
Sleeping Giant. I had seen him from the
air when the steel green waters slapped at his feet in summer.
Now I wanted to see him in winter
dress. But Jack Frost beat me to it. He had thrown
a protective haze around this sleeping giant… this great rock promontory
… resembling a slumbering giant whose bulky frame guards the gateway to the
boundless plains of the West.
In Port
Arthur, Ontario, they scarcely ever sell a postcard without this dormant guardian in the background. He is a symbol of the majesty of Lake
Superior. The silhouette of this rock is
the signal to water born commerce that the world’s greatest inland waterway is
about to stop. Here is a part of Canada
where Nature went on a rampage and
scattered and tossed her rocky children …here the Sleeping Giant stands as the
dean of mighty Superior.
It was from
a window in Thunder Bay that I tried to see the Sleeping Giant… instead there
in the spotless, modern mill of the Abitibi Power and Paper I heard these
ancient tales and superstitions. We could not see him… for an hour though, I
listened to these Thunder Bay
Papermakers rave about the beauties and legends of our Lakehead country.