(Book) The Northern Connection: Ontario Northland Since 1902

The Northern Connection: Ontario Northland Since 1902 (published 1992), a history of the Ontario Northland Railway/Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, by Robert J. Surtees.

"In 1900, the lands between Lake Nipissing and James Bay, although not unknown, remained largely uninhabited and certainly unexploited. That changed suddenly in the first decades of this century with the chartering of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway as a provincially-owned enterprise. While ultimately very dramatic in its consequences, the new railway was expected to do little more than link the two lightly populated areas of Lake Timiskaming and Lake Nipissing, and pull this undeveloped sector of the province into the metropolitan influence of Toronto. The railway carried newcomers into the North. These people quickly turned what was expected to be a region of modest settlements, perhaps used for lumbering, into an exciting mining frontier. The T&NO, as it was called, had opened a strikingly wealthy sector of New Ontario.

The railway was the only link among the communities that developed as a result of the new mineral finds, and also the sole means by which these towns were linked to the rest of the country.

Unlike the national railways, all of which had continental ambitions, the T&NO limited its interests to the region it travelled. Both excitement and romance surrounded its expansion into the mining sectors of Lorrain, Elk Lake, the Porcupine, Kirkland Lake and Larder Lake; across the inter-provincial border to Rouyn in the face of fierce opposition from both the Quebec government and the Canadian National Railway; and onto the Bay, to provide Ontario with its only link to salt water. The T&NO fulfilled tasks that lay well beyond the normal scope of a railway: land management, mining regulations, tourism, and settlement. In the process, those men who managed the line assumed a closeness, even an intimacy with the region. Renamed Ontario Northland in 1946, it evolved into a multi-faceted communications and transportation enterprise.

The Northern Connection is a moving account of the history and development of Ontario Northland that weaves its narrative through the stories and experiences of the men who worked on the line."

Robert Surtees has a longstanding familiarity with the North. He spent his childhood in South Porcupine, Ontario, teen-aged years in North Bay, Ontario, and a professional career of twenty-five years at Nipissing University-College, also in North Bay. He obtained professional training at Queen's University (Hon. B.A.), and Carleton University (M.A. and Ph.D.) and has also studied at the University of Missouri and the University of London's Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He continues to teach History at Nipissing University in North Bay, where he and his wife Margaret live with their seven daughters.

Previous publications by Robert Surtees have dealt largely with the history of Canada's Native Peoples. These include The Original People (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); Canadian Indian Policy (Indiana University Press, 1982); Indian Land Cessions in Ontario (Department of Indian Affairs, 1983); Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History (University of Oklahoma Press for the Newberry Library, 1987). The Northern Connection marks his first book on the history of the northeastern corridor of Ontario. He has indicated that there will be others.