Waking Nanabijou. Jim Poling, Sr.
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 they could let Veronica loose to run and laugh and point at the flowers. For longer outings, they would drive her to Boulevard Lake on the east side of town where people strolled the lakeside or sat and had picnics while looking out over the water.
Isidore walked down the hill from his house to the CNR roundhouse where his locomotives were kept. He could see the rising sun turn the skies above the Giant to the pink of the amethyst so abundant in the area’s rock. Then to a deeper pink purple and finally blood red as the sun lifted above the Giant’s feet. In the evenings, the setting sun sun made it iridescent, then sharpened its features until its cliffs and crevices became visible.
The joy the LaFrances felt at watching Veronica frolic at Hillcrest Park or beside Boulevard Lake evaporated unexpectedly one morning when she was four years old. Veronica’s get-up-and-go personality usually woke the household, but on this morning the house was quiet and there was no sound of activity in her room. Louise and Isidore found her in bed, unusually subdued and chilled and tired. When Louise helped her up, her legs didn’t want to hold her, and as the hours passed, they became more wooden. Within days her legs were paralysed. The doctor whispered the news: infantile paralysis — the dreaded poliovirus — crippler and sometimes killer of children and young adults.
The LaFrances were shattered. Their little family was a dream come true, a dream that had survived the greatest threat to human life of their time — the Spanish flu that in 1918-19 killed 50 million people worldwide. Isidore fell ill with that deadly scourge while on a road trip but recovered. His younger sister in Chapleau caught it and died. Now having narrowly escaped that outbreak, the LaFrances were visited by a new scourge that had appeared as a serious threat to children in 1916. Each summer after that brought new outbreaks that peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Veronica lay in bed for more than two months, unable to move her legs. The only good news was that her breathing remained unaffected, and she was not trapped in one of the iron lungs that lined hospital wards, filling them with the eerie rhythm of velvet wheezing. The poliovirus attacks and destroys motor neurones, sometimes concentrating on the limbs, other times favouring the respiratory neurones. Veronica was fortunate; the virus hit only her legs.
The disease struck Veronica in 1921, the same year it caught Franklin D. Roosevelt, leaving him without the use of his legs. His case showed the world that the disease could strike anyone, and his struggle to regain the use of his legs set a courageous example for others. His legs never did return to normal, but Roosevelt pushed on and became U.S. president, leading the nation through some of its most difficult times.
Veronica recovered. Slowly her legs grew stronger. She began to walk again with the help of crutches and then a brace on her left leg. She learned to pitch the braced leg forward in an attempt to run with the other kids who lived in the Cornwall Avenue area. The leg brace and her drag-kick-and-hop walk were playground novelties when she entered St. Andrew’s Catholic schoolyard just days before her seventh birthday. Few kids had seen leg braces before, although they would appear more and more over the years.
St. Andrew’s was downtown, part of the Catholic institutional complex that