MAGAZINE SECTION . .IL No. 38. 0 = 5 Cents Vancouver, B.C., Saturday, October 2, 1943 T WATERWAYS in northern Alberta the railway line _ ends in the bush, 283 miles from Edmonton. And there . in the minds of many people, Canada itself ended until .years ago. Beyond the end of steel on the Northern Al- la Railways stretched a vast region of forest and muskeg re Trivers were still the only highways to the shores -of Arctic Ocean. lo a few, the bush pilets who served its isolated settle- its and the prospectors who knew something of its natural purces, the great emptiness of the Northwest Territories By HAL GRIFFIN -a challenge. But to most , misled by those who presented empiiness and lack of development as barrenness and pability of development, it was a barrier beyond which ( could not go. It was the Canada, almost a sub-continent pself, that few Canadians knew. lad the Canadian North been developed in the ‘thirties, ie Soviet North was developed, thousands could have been sloyed on projects that would have facilitated the huge ume program of development. Canada had the people the daring and enterprise, but it lacked a government vision. And while Canadians could be proud of their aern pilots, it was Soviet ‘ors like George Baidu- Valeri Chkalov, Alex- | © Belyakov and Sigmund nevsky who blazed the rpolar route in flights the Soviet Union to da. th few exceptions, Ca- —n government officials ! to see in the North one = great strategic areas of tld already being trans- ed by air power. They ‘d upon the. Arctic as a er between North Am- and Asia—a barrier Were not eager to see ounted—and not as the le route of travel be- a two continents. Had | grasped its significance, Yorth might not have re- wed neglected and unde- Hed until the entry of ja into the war forced the Ming of Canada’s last & frontier. THE government lacked ‘sion, so did the industrial Ss Who were never t of extolling the superi- | of private enterprise. * Waterways last spring I ' welders assembling sss at the shipyards by tozen Clearwater River. n the breakup came they iid carry the cats and the ‘building equipment for new highway down the ibaska and Slave rivers fort Fitzgerald. Trucks would take the equipment over the 16-mile portage road, the only break in the water. Ways system between Water- ways and Aklavik, to Fort Smith. And other steamers and barges would take it across Great Slave Lake and down the Mackenzie River, in all more than 1100 miles to Norman Wells, where there were new oil storage tanks along the river banks and oil rigs rose strangely amid the bush. At the sprawling Canol camp at Peace River I saw the cat trains with their sleigh loads of pipe rambling north over the winter tractor road. And from the rough new road to Ross River, more than 1000 miles away, where bulldozers were pushing the highway through the mountains to Norman Wells, I saw the pipeline taking shape, a thin steel artery of the war effort stretching interminably across the wilderness. T° construct the $138,000,- 000 Canol Project — an achievement that ranks with the building of the Alaska Highway itself — United States Army Engineers sent expeditions with tractors, horses and dog teams into the Mackenzie Mountains in mid- winter. Six of the expediti- ons were forced to turn back, but the seventh, using dogs, found a feasible route for the Pipeline from Norman Wells to Whitehorse. Canadians who had been working in the North for years and Americans who Knew nothing of the North worked side by side to build Winter roads over river and lake ice for the tractor trains that carried the pipe and dril- ling equipment to Norman Wells. American troops, many of them Negroes lab- ored in sub-zero tempera- tures to construct the new highways which now are linked to the Alaska High- way. And oil workers from California and Texas and Oklahoma drilled the holes which tapped the great oil field in the Mackenzie River basin. Now, at the end of a sec- ond summers work, the Se MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM MMMM TT EVENTY-FIVE miles south of the Arctic Circle qa new oil field is being developed. Before long oil will be flowing through the new pipeline from Norman Wells to supply American - Canadian military needs in the North. While Americans and Canadians have been building highways across the northern wilds, the Soviets have been’ con- structing the North Pecora railroad through the tundra and forests of their own sub-arctic regions. In the development of the North, where Canada and the Soviet Union have common problems, lies a basis for close cooperation between the two countries. National Film Board Photo Canol Project is nearing com- pletion. Presently the oil will begin flowing towards Alaska, speeding the gather- ing offensive against Japan. It is a magnificent wartime achievement. __ @ Bu the oil field at Nor- man Wells which is now being developed is no new discovery. For the past ten years its first wells have been supplying the radiumz-silver mines around Great Bear Lake and the gold mines at Yellowknife.~ And for ten years before that, since the collapse of the oil boom that followed the finding of oil at Norman Wells in 1920-21, the field had lain neglected and undeveloped. Imperial Oil, whose geolo- gists made the first discov- eries, abandoned the field in 1922 for the California fields, which were closer to trans- portation and markets. But it held onto the most promis- ing claims in the field, 75 miles south of the Arctic Cirele, where there was only river transportation and no markets. While the Soviets were developing their oil fields to supply new cities and industries in the North, Canada did virtually nothing to exploit its own great nat- ural resources. ) HE war has changed all this, There are still vast regions untouched by the new developments, but the western half of the Macken- zie District and the greater part of the Yukon Territory now have highways and air fields which can be supplied from Norman Wells. (Turn to Page Bight) sree ie orn