Window on Our Past

The Last Forty Years – Final of 4-part series

December 1, 2022

Part One: The Timber Frontier
Part Two: For Capital & Honest Enterprise
Part Three: Pine Falls Pulp & Paper

On a log drive, no date.
Photo Credit: Winnipeg River Heritage Musuem

This article was done in partnership with the Winnipeg River Heritage Museum, the Whitemouth Municipal Museum and the Lac du Bonnet & District Historical Society. It appeared in the November 17, 2022 edition of the Lac du Bonnet Clipper.

In 1928, Abitibi became the sole owner of the Manitoba Paper Company mill at Pine Falls. J.D. McArthur’s original pulpwood berths remained largely untouched, covering a vast territory with Little Black River in the north, Manigotagan and Bird Lakes to the east, and the Bird River in the south. The Maskwa River, one mile north of St-Georges, was a main tributary for transporting logs to the Winnipeg River. The annual spring log drive brought thousands of cords of pulpwood to the mill. Men with peaveys and long pike poles maneuvered the logs along smaller streams to the main river. These logs drives were miles long and took upwards of ten days to complete. The steam tug, Phyillis Williams, was used to bring logs in from Lake Winnipeg.

The Manitoba Paper Company had to pay dues on the pulpwood cut on their crown-granted limits. Between 1926 and 1934, only 196 cords came from these timber limits. The rest of the pulpwood was cut and hauled by the area’s residents.

Alex McIntosh, who had taken over McArthur’s Lac du Bonnet holdings in 1924, fulfilled some of the mill’s early pulpwood contracts. He operated a small sawmill and was a Lac du Bonnet lumber merchant.

Wood was loaded onto boxcars at Whitemouth and Lac du Bonnet for shipment to Pine Falls. The road was completed through to Lac du Bonnet in 1931, and by the early 1940s, pulpwood was no longer accepted by rail. It had to come by truck.

In River Hills, general store owner, George Grubert, leased government land and hired local men, of them 150 were Indigenous, to cut and haul pulpwood. During the Depression, he accepted pulpwood as payment at his store.

Grubert had four small semi-trucks and hauled pulpwood 24 hours a day. From River Hills, a round trip to Pine Falls in winter took from early morning to midnight. Trucks regularly slid off the road at St-Georges, where the road was high and narrow. With so many trucks waiting to get through, it took no time at all to unload the logs, get the truck back on the road and reloaded.

After 1940, the forest between Whitemouth, Lac du Bonnet and beyond was depleted, affected by drought, fires and over-harvesting. The majority of the pulpwood had to come from the company’s berths. Between November 1944 and July 1946, the Manitoba Paper Company utilized German prisoners of war at three wood cutting camps northeast of Pine Falls. The POWs cut over 43,000 cords, approximately 32% of the wood used at Pine Falls.

In May 1949, after a year of political debate and negotiations with the federal government to remove their stipulations on the power site, construction began on the Pine Falls hydroelectric generating station. During a March 1950 inspection of the site, Roxy Hamilton, MLA for Rupertsland, asked if the design included a bridge over the Winnipeg River. It did, but there was no timeline for its installation. MLA Hamilton’s persistence secured $150,000 of government funds for the completion of the bridge.

In the ninety miles of Winnipeg River between the Ontario border and Lake Winnipeg, the only bridge was at Lac du Bonnet: a single-lane tramway bridge with planks between the rails for cars to drive across.

The generating station and bridge officially opened in March 1953. The bridge accessed the Broadlands and Chevrefils districts on the east side of the Winnipeg River, in addition to Manigotagan and the mining towns around Bissett.

The Manitoba Paper Company also benefited from the bridge. As the cutting areas in the pulpwood berths became further from the rivers, it was more cost effective to haul the logs by truck, directly from the bush to the mill. The last log drive on the Winnipeg River, and in the province, happened in May 1965, and with it, southeastern Manitoba’s lumbering legacy passed into history.

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