Canada is nearly as big as Europe; it is some thirteen times larger than the combined territories of the country’s two founding nations, France and England. Indeed, size is a basic fact of Canada. Those who wanted to tap the resources of this vast territory and those who later wanted to weld it into a nation had to meet the challenge of developing long-distance transportation and communications systems. From the beginning to the present day, this has been an extraordinary achievement—as well as a very costly undertaking.
Canada’s vast size and northern climate provide an extremely varied landscape. The mossy, shrub-covered land that Cartier observed on the Labrador coast is typical of a large part of Canada north of the treeline: the wind-swept Arctic tundra of northern Labrador, Ungava, most of the Northwest Territories, and the Arctic islands. Although the land had a barren look to it, game was not scarce. The northern forest, where it meets the tundra, was home—as it still is today—to the muskox and once abundant barren-ground caribou, a small, tough, deerlike animal. The herds summer north of the treeline and, unlike the thick-coated muskox, they retreat south to the woods in winter. Here, the arctic hare, arctic fox, wolf, and wolverine are the most important fur-bearing animals. Lake trout, whitefish, pike, and arctic char abound in the coastal rivers. The northern coastal waters are the home of the ringed and bearded seal, walrus (except in the western Arctic), narwhal, beluga whale, and polar bear.
South of the treeline, most of Canada east of Lake Winnipeg and the Mackenzie valley is part of the Canadian Shield, where thousands of years ago large rocky areas were scraped bare of soil by massive continental ice sheets. Between these barren regions the land is covered with an evergreen forest of pine, spruce, and tamarack, known as the “boreal” or northern forest. In the twentieth century Canada’s Group of Seven attempted to capture the essence of this landscape on canvas. Theirs are romantic images. European explorers and early fur traders saw it much differently—they had to come to grips with its harsh reality in order to survive. The great nineteenth-century explorer, geographer, and fur trader David Thompson put it succinctly:
I have called [it] the Stoney Region____It is little else than rocks with innumerable Lakes
And Rivers____The summer is from five to six months, or more properly the open season,
With frequent frosts, and heats, but always tormented with Musketoes and other flies... even the timid Moose Deer on some days is so distressed with the flies, as to be careless of life.
And the hunters have shot them in this state, and the cloud of flies about them so great, and dense, that they did not dare to go to the animal for several minutes.
In the eighteenth century, the Hudson’s Bay Company men regarded this wooded Shield country as a “food desert”; they believed game was too scarce there to support a string of trading establishments.
In the heart of the Shield country, Hudson Bay and lames Bay provide one of the great water entries into the North American continent. From the Nelson River on the west to the Rupert River on the south-east a vast swampland borders these bays and extends inland for distances up to several hundred miles. In the nineteenth century, this insect-infested swamp was dubbed the “land of fog and bog” by Hudson’s Bay trader James Hargrave. Aptly named, it would be the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Canadian base for its first two centuries of operation after 1670. What a shocking and hostile place it must have seemed to men coming from the temperate British Isles. James Isham, a trader for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the early eighteenth century, graphically described the dangerous realities of winter on the bay:
Abt the Last of august... the No. Wt. [north-west] and Nn winds begins to sett in, with unsufferable Cold weather, with hard snow, & great Drifts for 8 month’s togeather,... itt oft’n happens we shall have fine moderate weather, in a winter morning w’n before night approches, a sudden gale will spring up with Drift & snow to that Degree, that if men happen’s to be out, and drest for warm weather, they Run a great Resque of their Lives,—
Several having perrishd, by such sudden Storm____I’have known men to stand at the saw for
Only 20 minuets when their face & hands has been froze so, they have been obligh’d to Retire to the Surgeon to have Such Cur’d or Cutt off &c.
Around Hudson Bay, the traders, like the Native peoples, would have found browsing deer, woodland caribou, and moose which David Thompson described as the “pride of the forest.” Other animals important to them for both food and fur included bear and fox, beaver, muskrat, marten, land otter, lynx, rabbit, and hare— animals that still abound there today. Among the many varieties of fish were lake trout, whitefish, sturgeon, and pike. Ducks and geese could be found in plenty in spring and autumn. The early accounts of fur traders make it clear that large barren-ground caribou roamed the Hudson Bay lowland as far east as James Bay. In season, Hudson and James bays are the nesting places of millions of snow geese and Canada geese. Far inland, between the lower Saskatchewan River and Lake of the Woods, was one of the greatest muskrat-producing areas in the world.
The northern forest merges into an area of mixed deciduous trees that extends all the way into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. It was here that the canoe birch, prized by Native people for its bark, reached its greatest size—fifteen centimetres (6 inches) or more in diameter. Wild rice, a nutritious food for the Indians as well as the Europeans, still grows here, particularly along the Rainy River to Lake of the Woods, while the Gulf of St. Lawrence was rich in cod, mackerel, seal, eel, whale, porpoise, and shellfish.
Where the Canadian Shield and the plains of the western interior meet, there is a string of large, fish-rich lakes, the most famous being Lake of the Woods, Lake Winnipeg, Lake Athabasca, Great Slave Lake, and Great Bear Lake. The plains reach from the United States border to the Mackenzie River delta and westward from the Shield to the Rocky Mountains. This is gently rolling country rising in two distinctive steps, one in western Manitoba—the Manitoba escarpment—and the other, the Missouri Coteau, in central Saskatchewan. Parts of the region, most notably the Red River valley, are extremely flat. In fact, this valley is one of the flattest plains in North America. Formerly the bed of an ancient lake, it is prone to floods on an enormous scale whenever ice blocks the lower Red River during spring runoff—a disaster that happens frequently, because the headwaters of this north-flowing river thaw before the lower reaches do. Early European settlers learned of this hazard the hard way.
Beyond the North Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan rivers, the boreal forest extends as far as the Rocky Mountains and the Yukon. In this wooded region, the Peace River valley was one of the richest in game. “On either side of the river, though invisible from it,” observed the explorer and trader Alexander Mackenzie, “are extensive plains, which abound in [wood] buffaloes, elkes, wolves, foxes, and bears.” Impressed with its pastoral quality, Mackenzie called the Peace River valley one of the prettiest countries he had ever seen. South of the North Saskatchewan and Saskatchewan rivers the forests gradually yield to open grasslands—picturesquely described by the early fur traders as “islands of trees in a sea of grass.” This borderland between forest and plain was known as the parklands, and also—with the grasslands beyond—as the “fire country” because immense prairie fires were commonplace. The parklands and prairies teemed with game, especially the grassland buffalo, the largest North American terrestrial animal, weighing up to 900 kilograms (2,000 pounds). The buffalo massed on the grasslands in the summer during the rutting season and retreated to the bordering woods in the autumn when there was a
Pictographs—paintings on cliffs and cave walls, using natural materials such as ochre—are one of the oldest surviving Native art forms. This pictograph illustrates an Ojibwa legend involving the horned creature Misshipeshu, Great King of the fishes, the Snake Manitou, and a canoe pad-died by five men. Agawa Site, north shore of Lake Superior.
Winter chill in the air. By all accounts the summer buffalo herds were truly enormous. “I saw more buffalo than I had ever dreamed of before,” recounted one prairie resident, in July of 1865, when he encountered a herd in the Battle River country of eastern Alberta. “The woods and plains were full of them. During the afternoon we came to a large round plain, perhaps ten miles across, and as I sat on my horse on the summit of a knoll overlooking this plain, it did not seem possible to pack another buffalo into the space. The whole prairie was one dense mass....” The effect these huge herds had on the prairies was like that of a swarm of locusts; they stripped the grasslands bare as they passed, and bordering woodlands were trampled flat.
In the woods there were moose, elk or wapiti, pronghorn antelope, and mule deer. Beaver thrived on the aspen trees and large packs of wolves preyed on the buffalo herds, killing the young, aged, and infirm. To the west, the Rocky Mountains tower over the plains, extending down to what is now coastal British Columbia. Movement through this dramatically beautiful region of mountains, plateaux, and forests in the days of canoe travel was very hazardous. Most rivers include reaches where water plunges in torrents through narrow, steep-sided canyons, as at Hell’s Gate on the lower Fraser River. Foot passage around these barriers was often highly risky, sometimes impossible. “[At] the place where we made our landing,” wrote Alexander Mackenzie of the Peace River canyon, “the river is not more than fifty yards wide, and flows between stupendous rocks, from whence huge fragments sometimes tumble down, and falling from such an height, dash into small stones,
With sharp points____no alternative was left us... but the passage of the mountain
Over which we were to carry the canoe as well as the baggage____”
Partly because of its rugged character, British Columbia exhibits more geographical diversity than any other region of Canada. Some of the country’s wettest and driest climates are found here. The mountains along the coast, exposed to moistureladen westerly winds, are blanketed by dense rainforest, while the high windward slopes of the Rocky Mountains are clad in evergreen forests of spruce, fir, and pine. In contrast, the plateaux leeward of the coast ranges are more sparsely covered with grass and sagebrush. Nearly all the wildlife found east of the Rocky Mountains was also found here, except for the prairie buffalo, but the mountain goat, sea lion, and sea otter were, and still are, distinct to British Columbia. Whales and seals were found in plenty along the coast, and during the spawning season all the major coastal rivers swarmed with salmon, and with great runs of candlefish, or eulachon, a species of smelt, every spring.
In the early years, the land and its animals were very new to the Europeans. Their exploration of Canada was like a guided tour conducted by Native people who were very much at home in their own land. In a similar way, Europeans were educated by the original inhabitants in the uses of the different animals, fish, and plants they found in the vast land they called the New World. Trade in furs may have been paramount to the intruders, but the means and methods of survival were just as important.
World History
