In the beginning, dog sleds were a necessity, as the Porcupine Mining Camp was carved out of the wilderness.
With no roads and no rails, they were used to bring in prospectors and their equipment and settlers and their belongings.
Timmins museum director curator Karen Bachmann says eventually, the idea of racing the dog teams arose.
“And that started in the Porcupine in 1916,” she recounts, “where they used to run the dogs just as a lark and see how things went. But by 1920, the Porcupine Dog Race was the third highest rated race in North America.”
The race was third only to the Hudson Bay race and one between Winnipeg and St. Paul, Minnesota.
“The teams themselves would run a 14-mile route that would start on Pine St. and loop around onto Gold Mine Rd., come into South Porcupine, then loop back through some of the mining properties,” Bachmann continues. “So they actually ran through the Hollinger property, they ran through the McIntyre property and then they would end back up on Pine Street.”
Racing kept going until the 1930s, and would attract crowds of spectators of as many as 4,000 people. The population of the Porcupine back then was about 5,000.