When was thunder bay established

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From about 3, inhabitants each in the late s, the two cities grew rapidly up to , with Fort William in the lead. At amalgamation, each had close to 50, residents. Early settlement was essentially Anglo-Saxon and that group controlled the city's economic and political establishment until the Second World War. While a large segment of the population still identifies as English As of , visible minorities accounted for 4. In addition, Indigenous peoples account for Thunder Bay has the highest proportion of Indigenous residents among major cities in Canada.

Census data likely under represents the number of Indigenous people in Thunder Bay at any given time, as many Indigenous people stay in Thunder Bay on a temporary basis, and are therefore not captured in the census. Indigenous people travel from surrounding communities to Thunder Bay to access services that are inadequate or unavailable in their home communities, including medical services, education and employment. Between and , seven First Nations youth died while attending school in Thunder Bay.

In , the Office of the Chief Coroner completed an inquest into the deaths. It concluded that three of the deaths were accidental, and the cause of death for the remaining four were undetermined. Within hours of discovering the body, the Thunder Bay Police Service deemed the death non-suspicious. It concluded that racism may have influenced police to prematurely conclude that DeBungee died as a result of drowning, instead of investigating the death as a potential homicide. Historically, industries such as natural resource extraction, processing and transportation were important components of the Thunder Bay economy.

The forest industry , including pulp and paper mills and wood-processing plants, was the largest industrial employer. Today, however, the industries employing the most Thunder Bay residents are health care and social assistance, retail, education, and public administration. In , the bridge was destroyed by fire. Fort William was the hub of the fur-trade route to the Northwest. It gained new importance in when the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, and a steadily increasing flow of western grain came into the region for shipment east.

With the completion of the Manitoba to Port Arthur section of the Canadian Northern Railway , Thunder Bay became one of the world's largest grain ports. Lakehead Harbour benefited from the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Keefer Terminal, a lake and ocean freight-handling dock This intervention was pursued under the auspices of the Indian Act which granted the Governor in Council the power to expropriate lands for the purposes of building public works and securing settler economic development.

As historian P. By any measure, this dispossession was extremely violent and traumatic: the Fort William band, which had been using the land for farming purposes, was relocated to rocky and swampy land unfit for agriculture; further, members of the band were forced to exhume a graveyard located on the original reserve site that held the remains of their loved ones so that they could be buried elsewhere; what is more, the relocation split the community in two as they were redirected to two separate locations.

Put directly, then, the forced relocation and land expropriation was a settler colonial developmentalist schema that was violent in every way possible.

I believe that this lack of historical context has facilitated the more racist and anti-Indigenous readings of the settlement. For that reason, the remainder of this article works to situate the forced relocation within the broader history of settler colonial developmentalist schemas that were designed to bolster settler economies and marginalize FWFN at the start of the twentieth century. In , the annual report of the Department of Indian Affairs discussed the Fort William band and other Indigenous peoples in the region as precariously positioned on the margins of a fur trade economy.

This document held that Indians in the region ought to be encouraged to discontinue hunting and trapping because of the. In this same year, the passing of the Ontario Fisheries Act eroded Indigenous access to fish in the region by declaring that fishing licenses had to be purchased by band members. Settlers at Mt. McKay, Thunder Bay Historical Society. Ten years later, in , the situation of the Fort William band was dire enough that a letter was sent to the Superintendent of Indian Affairs.

It read:. We the Indians of the Fort William Band earnestly beg of you to help us, and we trust you will do so. While bound by treaties that were supposed to be negotiated in good faith between equals, in many cases these were exploitative. For example, the Robinson Superior Treaty of reduced the land lived on by the Ojibwa people on the Northern shore of Lake Superior to a small reserve outside of Fort William.

Their removal from their land did not merely cause hardship and a loss of resources, but also promoted violence against Indigenous people and their way of life. Though a well-known community was at Fort William, the Kaministiquia River needed dredging to house ships, and early ice-making would lower the shipping season. Work on the Dawson Road through the rough Northern Ontario land began in In the late 19th century, the twin cities of Port Arthur and Fort William were neighbours.

The towns had a friendly rivalry, and they brought in immigrants from around the world. For example, today Thunder Bay boasts one of the largest settlements of Finnish people outside Finland. This is just one of the many international groups that has contributed to the vibrancy of local culture.

In reply to a plea from the people of Shuniah Township, the Provincial Government passed a law separating a part of the Township to form the Corporation of the Town of Port Arthur in The first turn of sod for the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the town square of Fort William in predicted a future of economic growth in transporting resources across Canada. Built in , the Horne Elevator was the first elevator created at the Lakehead, and by the s, the Lakehead ports handled the most grain in North America, and was among the busiest grain docks in the world.

While the best silver mined came from the Island on the Sibley Peninsula, there were operations in Current River and Shuniah in the late s. As silver mining came to its close and the railway was finished, logging became the top industry.

Bush workers used horse-drawn sleds to pull logs to riverbanks and then move them to sawmills on Lake Superior.

Unfortunately, much mining and logging was difficult on the environment, with specific cost to Indigenous groups. One of the reasons for this was the increasing number of projects that were carried out on First Nations land.