From Far and Wide: A Complete History of Canada’s Arctic Sovereignty
Peter Pigott
In searching for the ill-fated Franklin Expedition in the 19th century, Britain's Royal Navy mapped and charted most of the Arctic Archipelago. In 1874 Canadian Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie agreed to take up sovereignty of all the Arctic, if only to keep the United States and Tsarist Russia out. But as the dominion expanded east and west, the "North" was forgotten. Besides a few industries, its potential was unknown. It was as one Canadian said "for later." There wasn't much need to send police or military expeditions to the North. Not only was there little tribal warfare between the Inuit or First Nations, but there were few white settlers to protect and the "forts" were mainly trading posts. Thus, in the early 20th century, Canada's Arctic was less known than Sudan or South Africa. From Far and Wide recounts exclusively the historic activities of the Canadian military in Canada's North.
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The Pathfinder: A.C. Anderson’s Journeys in the West
Nancy Marguerite Anderson
Fifteen years before the 1858 Fraser River gold rush, a Hudson's Bay Company clerk named Alexander Caulfield Anderson threaded his way through mountain passes and down rapids-filled rivers in search of a safe all-British route through the mountains that separated the HBC fort at Kamloops from Fort Langley on the Pacific coast. Eventually, Anderson discovered four routes, succeeding where Alexander Mackenzie and Simon Fraser before him had failed. Without his explorations, historian Derek Pethick once wrote, British Columbia may never have come into being or become a part of the Dominion of Canada. For Anderson, the cross-country expeditions he undertook were welcome antidotes to a fur-trade life that wasn't quite what he'd expected it to be. As explorer, map-maker, artist and writer, he created a wealth of information to guide those of his time and far beyond, and his work-first in the fur trade, then in the communities in which he lived, and finally as Fisheries Inspector and Indian Reserve Commissioner for British Columbia-was always aimed at improving the future of the people he lived among.
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A Country So Interesting: The Hudson’s Bay Company and Two Centuries of Mapping, 1670–1870
Richard I. Ruggles
Richard Ruggles describes and analyses the mapping activities of more than 160 Company servants and surveyors as well as the contributions of more than fifty First Nations and Inuit who drew sketches and provided original configurations. Also included are annotated catalogues of all the maps known to have been produced by the HBC and sixty-six reproductions of the most important maps and sketches. The HBC was responsible for the largest collection in North America of manuscript charts and maps related to the fur trade and Ruggles has produced the first and most comprehensive study of this unique and rich body of material.
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The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas
edited by François-Marc Gagnon
This book brings together for the first time the illustrated Codex Canadensis and The Natural History of the New World, following Gagnon's argument that both can be attributed to Louis Nicolas, a French Jesuit priest who travelled throughout Canada between 1664 and 1675. The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas shows how the wildlife and native inhabitants of the new world were understood and documented by a seventeenth-century European and makes available fundamental documents in the history and visual culture of early North America.
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Acts of Occupation: Canada and Arctic Sovereignty, 1918-25
Janice Cavell & Jeff Noakes
In Acts of Occupation, historians Cavell and Noakes deliver the engrossing story of Canada's early days of Arctic policy. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped archival sources, they show how one explorer's self-serving ambition fueled unfounded paranoia about Denmark's designs on the north, and ultimately served as the catalyst for Canada's active administrative occupation of the Arctic. A compelling tale that throws new light on a transformative period in Canadian Arctic policy-making, Acts of Occupation offers much-needed historical context for contemporary debates on northern sovereignty.
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