What’s in a name? RAT PORTAGE !

 

In Canadian Geographic, Sept/Oct 2002 there is a wonderful article, Poetic Poses, about the Kenora and area photography of Carl Gustave Linde in the early 20^th century. In the article there is an explanation of the Town name change; that the Maple Leaf Flour Co objected to the old name of Rat Portage because they did not want their food product to have “rat” on the bags. The article then repeats the litany of how they created the name ‘KENORA’ from the first two letters of each of Keewatin, Norman, and Rat Portage.

This drew a letter to the editor in the next issue CG Nov/Dec in which Patrick McGee says he had heard it was because of the embarrassment of having Rat Portage engraved on the Stanley Cup. Whether this is true or not, I understand  that The Rat Portage Thistles challenged the Silver Seven in1903, but it was the Kenora Thistles who won the Cup in 1905.

That may be old history to most readers from Kenora, but you old hands may not know that ‘Keewatin’ was Rat Portage before ‘Kenora’! In “The History of Keewatin”,© The Silver Threads Senior Citizens Club, Carillon Press, Steinbach Manitoba,1973, at page 30 the authors state that:

             “When the first settlers came to Keewatin, they knew it not by that name, but by Rat Portage.

            Each year the muskrats portaged … through what is now Keewatin. Three miles east another    settlement sprung up …called Keewatin. There was a mix-up in Ottawa concerning the date stamps for the post offices for the new settlements and as a result they changed names.”

In “Keewatin Reflections”, © Ed Sweet, Total Printing and Reproduction Service, 1981?, quotes a letter written by W.A.Mather a former President of the CPR in which he recounts his early days in Keewatin. At page 4 he is quoted:

            ”My grandfather told me that he had made representations to Ottawa to have a post office and he          gave the name “Rat Portage” because where Keewatin  is now situated was the real crossing of the         rats.” 

In the letter Mather says that the jealousy over the Manitoba/Ontario disputed boundary carried over to the mails and that Kenora people got word of the imminent arrival of the Post Office equipment [in the name Rat Portage] and went west to meet it, stole it , took it to ‘Kenora’ and started a post office. Ed Sweet acknowledges that there have been some far fetched and improbable claims [and varying, as evidenced inthese two accounts] as to how the town(s) got their  names, but that a memoir of WA Mather should be given a certain degree of value.

 

So, on this earth shattering controversy, what is your view? Tell us all by way of the ‘FEEDBACK” above.

russ