Discover

'Minaki' is a small unincorporated community in Northern Ontario, Canada. It is located at the point where the Canadian National Railways mainline crosses the Winnipeg River, and was accessible only by rail until about 1960. It was a fuelling and watering point in the days of steam locomotives; now few trains stop in Minaki, though the thrice-weekly Via Rail transcontinental passenger train will stop on request.
Tourism is the economic mainstay of Minaki, with camps, lodges and marinas catering to anglers and hunters. It is the embarkation point for more than 100 water-access cottages on surrounding lakes. The largest group of cottagers are from Winnipeg, about 3 1/2 hours drive away, and from nearby U.S. states.

Contents

History

Local Government

Geography

Sources

History

First nations people have apparently lived on the Winnipeg River in the Minaki area for a millennium or more, judging by the potshards and arrow points that turn up along the shores. The river was a major canoe route for the explorers and fur traders in the early days of white settlement. In the nineteenth century the Hudson's Bay Company had a trading post a couple of kilometres north of the present community.
The modern community of Minaki got its start about 1910 when the National Transcontinental Railway built a bridge across the river near where Skipper Holst had built a hotel a few years earlier and called the place Winnipeg River Crossing. The booming city of Winnipeg was about three hours travel to the west on the railway, and in no time there was a land boom in vacation properties on the small lakes along the railway.
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which operated the line for the National Transcontinental, built a rustic resort hotel that it called the Minaki Lodge and renamed the station Minaki (pronounced Mi-na'-kee), an Ojibwa word that has been variously translated as Beautiful Water or Good Land.
Minaki Lodge and the other tourist resorts and fishing camps in the area were seriously hurt in the 1970s by the discovery of methylmercury in the Winnipeg River, part of the effluent of pulp and paper mills upstream. Anglers were warned not to eat any fish from the lakes of the Winnipeg River; angling plummeted. Over the next two decades, with no more mercury flowing into the river and silt gradually covering the bottom, eating restrictions were relaxed, though the Ontario Ministry of the Environment's regularly updated Guide to Eating Ontario Sport Fish advises children as well as women of child-bearing age to eat fish sparingly and not to eat large fish. As in many other Ontario lakes, regulations aimed at preserving the fishery in the face of intensive angling now require that many fish be released alive.

Local Government

Being an unincorporated community in an area outside the province's named townships, Minaki has no local government. The Minaki Local Roads Board maintains the few roads in the community. There are also a volunteer fire department and a volunteer first response team.

Geography

Minaki is at the boundary where the white pine and yellow birch of the northwestern tip of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence forest meet the jack pine, black spruce and trembling aspen of the boreal forest. Most major stands of white pine were either cut by the Simpson and Short lumber company in the 1920s or destroyed by wildfires in the drought summers of the 1930s. The largest remaining stands of virgin pine timber, the trees that symbolize the rugged north for many Canadians, are on islands where they were protected from both logging and fire. Some areas north of the town have been or are being logged to supply the Kenora Forest Products lumber mill and a Weyerhauser oriented strand-board mill, both in Kenora.
Located about 45 minutes north of Kenora at the north end of paved Highway 596, the hamlet of Minaki is gateway to lakes and rivers of the Ontario portion of the Winnipeg River system, including Gun, Sand, Pistol and Roughrock lakes. Fly-in service is available to the English River and lakes farther north. Area lakes offer bass, muskie, northern pike and walleye. There are also black bear, moose and deer in the rugged woods north of the town.
Many islands scatter the lakes. The main vacation season is July and August, with the August long weekend the peak of the summer season. Anglers also visit in the spring and hunters in the fall. Visitors to Minaki are few in the November-April period, though snow-machine traffic from Kenora to points farther north passes a few kilometres away from the community. Year-round population of the immediate Minaki area is estimated by residents at about 250. At the height of summer, the population of surrounding lakes served through Minaki is several times that number.

Sources

★ Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Guide to Eating Ontario Sport Fish

★ Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Fishing Regulations

★ Native Trees of Canada, Forestry branch, Government of Canada, 1949 (newer editions available)