And there was more to Pacific Canada than southern British Columbia. In 1892 Sir John Thompson—Prime Minister of Canada, 1892-94—was already concerned about the exact boundary with Alaska and raised the issue in Washington. The American Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, agreed to a joint survey, with a report to come in 1895. The Alaskan boundary posed no problem for the northern two-thirds of its length; that was simply a matter of running the line of 141° longitude. The difficulty lay where the boundary went south and east along the Panhandle, from Mt. St. Elias
(Canada’s second-highest mountain at 5,500 metres or 18,000 feet). Canada and the
United States could not agree: did the Americans own the head of the 160-kilometres (100-mile) Lynn Canal or not? Canada claimed it but the Americans occupied it, as had the Russians before the Americans bought Alaska in 1867.
Within a year of that disagreement about the Panhandle, gold was found in the Yukon, in the summer of 1896. There was a big run of it, especially on Bonanza Creek, just off the Klondike River. By 1897 the news was out into the world, and by
1898 miners were pouring in, mostly through those de facto American ports at the head of the Lynn Canal, Dyea and Skagway, and by the respective passes that led northward, the Chilkoot and the White. By
A handsome cpr trestle bridge built on a horseshoe turn, west of Schreiber, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Superior; c. 1890. A bridge like this could require two million board feet of lumber, and not a little skill and daring—which latter the company men are pleased to demonstrate, while the train waits in impressive proximity.
Through the Rocky Mountains, a Pass on the Canadian Highway. An 1887 watercolour by Lucius R. O’Brien (1832-99). A former civil engineer, O’Brien first visited the Rockies in 1882; he returned in 1886 to paint views for the cpr, and in 1888 painted on the Pacific coast. Many of his landscapes are notable for their sense of light.
1898, too, the North-West Mounted Police controlled entry to the Yukon from the summit of the passes, insisting that those who entered Canada have sufficient food, clothing, and gear to handle the rigours of the Yukon.
The NWMP in fact policed the gold rush. Robert Service, a young bank clerk who worked in the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Whitehorse and Dawson City, watched the gold rush and amused himself and his friends by recalling it in ballads, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” and “The Law of the Yukon,” in Songs of a Sourdough (1907). His ballads were a heightened reality:
This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive; That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the fit survive. Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain, This is the Will of the Yukon,—Lo! how she makes it plain!
The Arctic offered more imposing challenges still. Canada’s Arctic sovereignty was set out by a British Order-in-Council on September 1, 1880, and confirmed in a British statute in 1895. Canada became Britain’s residuary legatee in the Arctic, as she had of so much else of British dominions in North America. Canada was not
Possibly the best-known Canadian photograph. Donald A. Smith, vice-president of the Bank of Montreal, is seen driving the last spike into the final rail of the cpr at Craigellachie, British Columbia, at 9:22 am. on November 7, 1885; general manager William Van Horne, chief engineer Sandford Fleming, and assorted officials and workers are looking on. Conspicuously absent are the immigrant Chinese labourers whose toil made possible the completion of the railway through the Rockies.
The first transcontinental cpr passenger train arrived at Port Moody, B. C., on July 4, 1886. The cpr then decided to extend the line to Vancouver, and this picture shows the arrival of the first cpr passenger train in that city. May 23, 1887. (Just three months later the cp steamer Abyssinia, from Hong Kong and Yokohama, tied up at the wharf on the left, and became the first transpacific liner to connect with the railway.)
Prepared or able fully to shoulder the burden, but struck provisional districts of Ungava, Franklin, Mackenzie, and Yukon. It was the twentieth century that would test the limits of Canada’s northern sovereignty.
By 1900 contact with the Inuit people was almost continuous. White men, whalers, had first appeared among them in the sixteenth century, but the real devastation of the Inuit dated from the early nineteenth century when the white man’s diseases—smallpox the most virulent—claimed countless lives. The whalers and explorers brought their alien trade goods with them too, such as axes, knives, and guns, which displaced the Inuit’s own brilliant technology based on local materials. Many Inuit devices are technological masterpieces: the domed snow house, the toggled (detachable) harpoon head, the kayak, and others. The
The ascent of Chilkoot Pass—3,500 feet (1,067 metres). North-West Mounted Police waited at the top to check that each prospector had all the required food and gear. Photo by E. A. Hegg.
Hudson Bay Expedition of 1884, looking south across Nachvak Inlet from Skynner’s Cove, Labrador; H. M.S. Neptune in the foreground. Geologist A. P. Low initiated the exploration of interior Labrador and Ungava in 1884, for the Geological Survey of Canada, and with his coworker Robert Bell—who took this picture—he carried out coastal reconnaissance work from ships of the Department of Marine and Fisheries.
Disruption of the Inuit culture by the white man had already begun. But in 1900 it was still a long way from the igloos of treeless Baffin Island to the farms and forests of southern Canada.
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