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Manitobans Who Made a Difference

(Courtesy of the Archives of Manitoba)

John Duncan McArthur was representative of entrepreneurs from Ontario, who, seeking new economic opportunities, immigrated to Manitoba in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As a complement to his involvement in railway construction in Manitoba, he utilized the transportation and communications improvements facilitated by railways to enhance his other commercial ventures, including over the course of five decades, extensive lumber and milling properties in the northwestern and eastern sections of the province.

McArthur was born and educated in Lancaster, Glengarry County, Canada West (after 1867, Ontario). He farmed before coming to Winnipeg in 1879. His early railway experience came as a member of the "flying gang", repairing the rail line of the Pembina Branch of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). McArthur furthered his education by working on various rail lines all the way to the Rocky Mountains. He became a subcontractor, and in 1889, was awarded his own contract to build the provincially-chartered Red River Valley Railway from Emerson to Winnipeg. Among other railways for which McArthur served as a contractor were the Grand Trunk Pacific (the section between Winnipeg and Lake Superior), the Canadian Northern (the section between Portage la Prairie and Edmonton), the Edmonton, Dunvegan and British Columbia, the Alberta and Great Waterways, and the Hudson Bay (HBR).

Supplementing his economic involvement in the railway industry, McArthur also had interests in the lumber industry, with his sawmill producing railway timbers. About 1880, McArthur and his partner, W. A. Dutton, became the first recorded individuals to cut timber in the region that became Riding Mountain National Park. Although they established a sawmill in the region, they later floated the logs down the river to a mill at Birtle, a distance of 240 kilometres. The mill operated for 15 years, and lumber production was a very significant factor in the development of the area.

In 1901, McArthur followed the CPR to the present site of Lac du Bonnet. Here he bought a brickyard and built a sawmill where the townsite later developed. In 1902, McArthur opened a logging camp near Old Pinawa and established his mill on the Winnipeg River. He shipped lumber and cordwood directly to his lumberyard in Winnipeg. McArthur was aware of the commercial possibilities of the "New Manitoba" in the northern part of the province after Manitoba's boundaries were expanded in 1912. That year, he became the general contractor of the HBR when construction of the project began, with the upgrading of the Canadian Northern Railway line that ran into The Pas, the southern terminus of the HBR. As the temporary "end of steel", The Pas boomed as the warehousing, service, and employment centre for McArthur, whose Hudson Bay Construction Company kept several hundred men working in the northern bush through the winter of 1912-13, preparing the 200,000 railway ties needed for summer tracking.

In 1918, when he realized that the local forests would no longer support logging, McArthur closed his Lac du Bonnet mill. Instead, he secured pulpwood berths near Pinawa and obtained a permit to develop an electrical generation site at Pine Falls that would power his proposed pulp and paper mill. Although McArthur could not realize his dream, others fulfilled it, creating the Manitoba Pulp and Paper Company (currently the Pine Falls Operations of the Tembec Paper Group), which built a mill and company town at Pine Falls in 1926-27. At the time of his death, McArthur was president of the J.D. McArthur Company, the Northwest Lumber Company, the McArthur Land Company, and the McArthur Lumber and Fuel Company, vice-president of the Manitoba Pulp and Paper Company, and a director of the Western Trust and the Beaver Lumber companies. He was buried in St. John's Anglican Cemetery, Winnipeg.