12 minute read
maps as archives: mapping western Canada
David Murray
Edmonton, Alberta in the 1850s, was a destination for gold panning in the Peace Country rivers of the North West Territories, and by the 1890s a departure centre for the Klondike gold rush via the Klondike Trail, overland to the Yukon. To accommodate the influx of immigrants and visitors, many hotels were constructed. In 2007, we were working on the renovation on the 1911 Pendennis Hotel on Jasper Avenue, turning it into the Ukrainian Canadian Museum and Archives of Alberta. As we stripped out much of the shabby interior we found that a much older wood-frame hotel had been incorporated, intact, into the 1911 building. It was the California Rooming House, re-named the Pendennis Hotel in 1904. Hidden in the building we discovered a trove of historic artefacts left behind by all sorts of visitors to the then North West Territories where (Fort) Edmonton was located, including surveyors, prospectors, settlers, Californian miners, land agents and entrepreneurial chancers.
Among the artefacts hidden in the walls were several maps, including a map of the Peace River Country dated 1879-80 and a 1904 map of the Peace and Athabasca Rivers, both produced by the Geological Survey of Canada. We also found a 1903 map of the Dominion of Canada, published by the Ministry of the Interior before Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905.
The Peace River Country map documented an extensive field trip in 1879-80 to assess the geological structures of western Canada, its mineral wealth and its agricultural potential. This was undertaken by George Mercer Dawson who had joined the Geological Survey of Canada in 1875. The exploratory field trip also provided advice for the construction of a transcontinental Railway to Vancouver on the Pacific Ocean, which, as the Canadian Pacific Railway, was completed in 1886 and is depicted on the 1903 map we found in the hotel. Clearly the Geological Survey of Canada was paving the way for mass European immigration, settlement and the commerce that would soon follow.
George Mercer Dawson was a geologist, author, teacher, civil servant, geographer, anthropologist, and paleontologist. In 1869 he enrolled at the Royal School of Mines in London which was organised and staffed by the Geological Survey of Great Britain to promote, along scientific lines, the development of the mineral wealth of Britain and its colonies. Dawson returned to Canada in 1872 to a position with the Geological Survey of Canada as a naturalist and geologist on the international boundary survey from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. In 1879 he undertook his monumental exploration of the North West Territories, now western Canada, from the west coast to the prairies.
the earliest maps of the west
Earlier maps prepared the ground work for Dawson’s 1879-80 survey. Peter Fidler, a fur trader, surveyor, explorer and cartographer, born in 1769 in Bolsever England, joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1788 as a labourer. He reached York Factory on Hudson’s Bay by ship and was given intensive instruction in surveying and astronomy during the winter of 1789-90 by cartographer Philip Turnor, who was the first surveyor engaged by the Hudson’s Bay Company to work in the northwestern interior of the continent. In early 1791 Fidler spent several months living with the Chipewyans in what was to become northern Saskatchewan, and spent the following winter with them in the area of Great Slave Lake (in today’s North West Territories), learning their language. The ability to transact business with Indigenous Peoples in their own language was a significant step if traders at the time were to successfully complete their work.
The cooperative arrangement between Peter Fidler and the indigenous people he encountered greatly assisted his ability to survey and map the western territories. An example of this are the 'Indian maps' he drafted between 1801 and 1810, now preserved in the Hudson’s Bay Company archives in Winnipeg. His 1801 map, one of many, was first drawn in the snow by Ac Ko Mok Ki, a Blackfoot leader, in February 1801, and copied onto paper by Fidler. This map describes a very large region of the western North American territories. West is at the top. The double line crossing from left to right represents the Rocky Mountains. Two rivers run west from the Rockies and seventeen rivers flow eastward. The line down the centre of the map is the Missouri River. Fidler added many details of the Indigenous tribal populations in the region.
Peter Fidler’s diaries, notes, surveys and maps were sent to the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters in London where, along with other surveys, they were drafted into the official maps of the Hudson’s Bay Company by Aaron Arrowsmith, the reputed British geographer and cartographer who engraved and published many world maps as a record of the geography of the expanding British Empire.
A large map of North America was produced in 1793 with Fidler’s assistance, illustrating Canada’s west as understood at the time, and updated in 1811. Fidler’s surveys and comments about the geography and geology of the West contained extensive information about the numerous extant Indigenous tribes and their territories. Major rivers have both Indigenous and European names. There was no possibility that the coming European occupation could succeed without a knowledge of the geography, the river trading routes, the natural resources and a cooperative relationship with the indigenous people.
George Dawson would have had access to, and knowledge of, these Hudson’s Bay Company maps in 1875 when he began his work for the Geological Survey of Canada.
Dawson’s 1879-80 map provides more detailed information about the Peace District from the prospect of farming, mining and commerce than the earlier maps. The best soils for agriculture are identified, as are sources of lignite coal deposits along the rivers. He reported that 'Gold occurs in paying quantities on some of the bars about this part of the Athabasca River' and 'Fine gold found on this stream' in numerous locations. Every major river and lake on this map has an Indigenous name, but differs from the 1812 map in that there is almost no reference to the territories of the Indigenous Peoples. Dawson was accompanied by Henry Augustine Fitzgerald Macleod, civil engineer and land surveyor, and in his journal he mentions Antoine, a Cree guide, and his son as they spent three days together at a location he called Drift-Pile Camp. As with Peter Fidler 70 years before, Dawson’s journey depended upon the assistance of the Indigenous Peoples. In his diary he mentions two additional Indigenous scouts who assisted with the remaining trip to Fort Edmonton, where they arrived before winter 1879
Dawson included systematic ethnological inventories in his geological surveys, intending his reports on Native peoples to advise government in the formulation of policy. His Sketches of the Past and Present Condition of the Indians of Canada (1879) surveyed the distribution and declining numbers of aboriginal peoples in the light of the apparent inevitability of political dominion in the west by European Canadians. Dawson’s 1879-80 survey map makes little mention of Indigenous Peoples despite all the information on earlier maps, an omission perhaps influenced by what the United States called 'The Indian Question'. Dawson's erasure of Indigenous Peoples as equal nations followed the American example, ascribing to a program of education and assimilation into white society. Influenced by American ethnologists who followed John Wesley Powell on 'the Indian Question' – the wish to promote social evolution to prevent what was seen as the inevitable extinction of Indigenous Peoples – Dawson was against segregation on reserves, which was Dominion government policy at the time, instead subscribing to education and assimilation.
The two 1903 and 1904 maps found in the Pendennis Hotel are very detailed in their geographical mapping of western Canada. The 1903 fold-out brochure and map (above) is titled Where and How and All about it – Information and Facts for the Prospective Settler and was printed in Norwegian, Swedish, German and English, intended for settlement, not exploration. Neither of these maps provide any of the information about Indigenous Peoples that had been so carefully referenced on the earliest maps. Rivers and lakes no longer have their Indigenous names.
The 1904 map, below, had a complete report attached to it, also prepared for the prospective settler. It starts off with 'Practically all the glowing reports on the Peace River region have been based on crops grown in the Peace River valley between Peace River Landing and a point about 15 miles upstream on the north side of the river ...'
This map is found here: https://recherche-collection-search.baclac.gc.ca/eng/home/record?app+indreswescan&IdNumber=936&qTreaty%208%20map
locating the Drift-pile Camp
Drift-pile Cree Nation is a Treaty 8 First Nation with Reserve lands on the south shore of Lesser Slave Lake and is one of five contemporary First Nations with reserve land bordering the lake. Dawson’s diaries and maps have been used by current members of the Drift-pile Cree Nation to search for and potentially locate the 1879 Drift-pile Camp, which Dawson described and noted its coordinates in his notes.
In 2010 and again in 2020, Drift-pile Elders and staff from the Archaeological Survey of Alberta set out to find Dawson's Drift-Pile Camp. Their search was not conclusive in determining the exact location, but the effort was critical to the understanding the area as a significant cultural landscape in the context of Canada’s search for reconciliation. Drift-Pile Camp has now been afforded protections under the Alberta Historical Resources Act.
the maps and the Pendennis Hotel
It is not known who left these maps in the Pendennis Hotel, or how they were intended to be used. They tell an evolving story of the European occupation of western Canada. What they do not contain, from today’s perspective of today's post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission era, is perhaps more telling than what they do contain. The strong cooperative relationship with Indigenous Peoples gradually became less important as the west was colonised and settled. But the treaty maps, such as Treaty 8 territory in which the Drift-pile Camp is located, provide ongoing identification and documentation of historical Indigenous populations in western Canada.
The story of searching for the location of the Drift-Pile Camp brings together the reclaiming of this land by Indigenous Peoples in the twenty-first century with the colonising efforts of the nineteen century, depicted in the early maps. Dawson’s 1879-80 map, as a historic document, has a value that could not have been predicted at the time of its making.
David Murray is an architect in Edmonton, Alberta, who specialises in the evaluation, protection and conservation of historic building resources. He has a keen interest in the human stories that are embedded in his projects.
