Arizona republican., 1907-09-01

When the Cobalt country was open ed up the government ran up little spur railroad from North Bay to the camp and for the first time made it possible to reach the reservation by rail. The opening up of the Temagami country is thus in a way a by-product of the mines at Cobalt. Before the Cobalt rush the reservation was an in cessible wilderness. It is still a wild erness, but it is no longer inaccessible. To get an idea of the reservation which many think rightfully should bear Champlain's name, picture to yourself a tract of virgin forest twice as large as the state of Rhode Island. | lying in the heart of the wilderness be- tween Toronto and Hudson's Bay. stocked with deer and wild fowl as a result of government protection, and accidentally brought within a days ride of Chicago and New York. because at the farther end of it some one found silver and some one else built a rail- road to reach the ore. Through the heart of this virgin forest now run the rails of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontorio railway, but they barely skirt one edge of the reservation and pass to the east of the true game country. So large is the park that the entire I"Cobalt" region itself is lost in one corner of it and the daily trains that
 now puff and rattle on their lonely way from Toronto to Latchford and
 Haileybury send no echoes across the wooded slopes to the west that are still haunts of moose and caribou. 
 ernment, by way of official amen.
 The reserve is just 300 miles north
 of Toronto. It is 50 miles wide and 50 miles long and has an area of nearly million and a half acres. So wild
 is the countr:' that in this enormous expanse there is exactly one farm. There will probably never be another. Hunters may come and mighty men with the rod; settlers will eventually be drawn here, hunting for the min cral deposits and the rich timberland,
 but no farmers will be there to dis
 pute possession with them, to blow
 their claims or drive their game away There is a singular appropriateness
 in the reservation of this land as a
 memorial, for the Temagami country
 is the oldest in the world. This is
 speaking literally and in a geological
 sense. The granite and the limestone
 of its southern lakes were gray with age millions of years before the table
 land of Colorado and Wyoming heaved
 itself uo into the Rocky Mountains or
 the little island. that today is Gin
 cinnai. lifted its head above the
 waters Of the then Inland Sea. So old are the rocks of this region that no
 trace of fossil life can be found in
 them. and il is onl-' in the so-called Huronian formations to the north
 about Lake Temagami itself. and Lady
 Evelyn Lake, that the first life forms begin to appear-petrified crustacea and minute marine creatures that swarmed the prehistoric seas of Can ada before the advent of the first fish and long uncounted ages before the earliest winged reptiles, the ancestors of the hoofed and feathered game that
 now abounds ir its woods.
 All this is written in books of geoI-
 ogy and can be read-with the help of l maps and Greek lexicon. But it is
 written more indelibly in the country
 it self, in the rocks and lakes and streams of this last wilderness.
 Never was there such a land of lakes
 and streams. The map of the reserva- ' ton looks as if it had been splashed with a bucket of quicksilver. Lake ] Temagami has an area of a hundred
 square miles. Its twisting. writhing
 shoreline is long enough. if pulled out
 straight. to reach from New York har-
 bor to Los Angeles. Yet this is only
 one of thousand lakes. Lady Evelyn
 Lake, Bay Lake, Rabbit Lake and
 Anina Nipissing are replicas in minia-
 ture-and between all and binding | them into comfortable fellowship is a net work of silver streams. emptying
 into one another. and finally into the
 Montreal and Ottawa rivers to make 1 their way thence to the St. Lawrence ! and tire sea.