LIZA PIPER AND JOHN SANDLOS
a broken frontier
ECOLOGICAL
IMPERIALISM IN THE CANADIAN NORTH
ABSTRACT
Ecological imperialism is one of the most enduring models of past global
environmental change.This essay argues that the application of ecological imperialism
as an explanation for New World environmental change should not be limited to
temperate regions where the process was so spectacularly successful. Using the
Canadian North as a broad regional template, our analysis suggests that consideration
of both the failures and the limited successes of ecological imperialism are critical to
a more complete understanding of global colonialism. Although the Canadian North
was never subject to the broad ecological transformation that occurred further to the
south, attempts to colonize particular regions did occur in tandem with the successful
introduction of alien species. Ecological imperialism need not be conceptualized
solely as an all-encompassing process of biological transformation. Instead, efforts
to colonize peripheral nontemperate regions can be understood as a product of a
limited application of ecological imperialism in a New World environment.
IN HIS NARRATIVE ACCOUNT of the expedition sent in the summer of 1899 to
secure a treaty with the Cree and Chipewyan people who inhabited lands that
would become part of northern Alberta, the Secretary of the “Half-Breed”
Commission, Charles Mair, suggested that the lower reaches of the Athabasca
River offered ideal conditions for agricultural settlement within Canada’s
northern territories. “The future of the Athabasca,” Mair wrote, “is more assured
than that of Manitoba seemed to be to the doubters of thirty years ago. In a word,
there is fruitful land there, and a bracing climate fit for industrial man, and
therefore its settlement is certain.” Most importantly, there was, according to
Mair, “ample room” for new immigrants who were willing to work the land; the
time had come to extend the reaches of Canada’s agricultural frontier into the
Liza Piper and John Sandlos, “A Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North,”
Environmental History 12 (October 2007): 759-95.
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fur trapping and trading frontiers of the high northern latitudes.1 Mair’s vision
of a taiga forest and tundra landscape transformed into a productive and fertile
plain was repeated time and time again in government survey reports and popular
narratives over the next two decades. For the promoters and dreamers of northern
expansion, the time had come to extend the farming and settlement frontier to
the northward reaches of the country.2
In retrospect, the general enthusiasm for the agricultural potential of Alberta’s
northern forests appears to be largely misplaced. Extreme winter temperatures,
the risk of summer frost, the long distances from major markets, the variable
quality of the soils, and a relatively brief growing season ensured that there was
little land suitable for large-scale agriculture in the Canadian Prairie Provinces
above the fifty-sixth parallel. As one moves farther north and east to the vast
Arctic tundra region, extreme temperatures, continuous permafrost, and nutrient
deficiencies in the soils suggest that agricultural production of any kind is a
futile undertaking. In central and eastern Canada, the exposed granite rock and
thin acidic soils of the Canadian Shield have allowed the northern boreal forest
of spruce, pine, and balsam to extend as far south as the upper Great Lakes, largely
confining farming activity to the most southern reaches of Ontario, a band along
the St. Lawrence River corridor, and parts of the Atlantic Provinces.3
The failure to extend the agricultural and settlement frontier into northern
Canada has provided one of the most enduring themes in historical accounts of
the region. Morris Zaslow, the North’s most prominent historian, argued in two
expansive works that the “opening” of Canada’s “middle north” (that is, the boreal
fringe areas in the northern reaches of the central and western provinces)
beginning in the late nineteenth century was achieved not through a mass
advance of agricultural settlers along a steadily advancing frontier line but
through the tentative expansion of agricultural settlements and industrial
resource exploitation in isolated pockets throughout the region. The more remote
territorial regions north of the sixtieth parallel were, by contrast, hardly subject
to any settlement pressure at all in the early twentieth century; the tentative
colonization of the region was achieved, Zaslow argued, through the slow advance
of southern bureaucratic institutions, southern law enforcement officers, and
the development of mineral and hydrocarbon projects beginning in the 1930s.4
The small number of full-length studies of northern history that followed in
Zaslow’s wake have continued to work this vein, claiming that southern
institutions such as industrial development, the mounted police, and the military
were the most important means by which “outsiders” have asserted political and
economic control over the Far North from the early to mid-twentieth century.5
At first glance, then, the Canadian North seems a poor candidate for a study
of the ecological dimensions associated with European imperialism. Certainly
the wholesale ecological changes that Alfred Crosby has identified with the
introduction of European plants, animals, and disease micro-organisms in New
World environments did not occur on the same broad scale in Canada’s North as
in the temperate latitudes of North America.6 Throughout the large expanse of
the Canadian Arctic tundra and sub-Arctic forests there are few introduced species
Map by Eric Leinberger.
Map 1. Arctic and Sub-Arctic North America
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of plants: native flora such as jack pine (Pinus banksiana) and Labrador tea
(Ledum groenlandicum) dominate even the most southerly extensions of the
boreal forest region. In addition, large populations of native wildlife such as
caribou, moose, and muskoxen are still the most prominent faunal assemblages
in the tundra and boreal environments. In terms of human populations, the
Aboriginal people continue to form a demographic majority over much of northern
Canada (in 2001, for example, First Nations and Inuit people comprised 85.2
percent of the population in Nunavut and 50.5 percent in the Northwest
Territories, the two largest northern political jurisdictions in Canada).7 Thus, in
many respects, the Canadian North can be characterized as a region where
ecological imperialism has failed. Crosby himself dismissed all territory beyond
the Arctic Circle as “useless” to the extension of agriculture, one of several broad
regional environments (including the tropics, deserts, and mountain chains) that
escaped the influence of European ecological invasions in the Americas. Although
Crosby did concede that greater soil fertility and long summer days in the subArctic (50º N to the Arctic Circle, 66º 33’ N) made it possible to grow vegetables
and other crops, he argued that the short growing season and consequent
difficulty raising the world’s important food plants prevented territories at
northern latitudes from becoming Neo-Europes.8
In spite of these underlying environmental conditions, foreign biological
invaders arrived in sub-Arctic and Arctic Canada in much the same ways that
they arrived in temperate North America. Disease micro-organisms travelled in
the bodies of Europeans and seeds arrived mixed with the straw used by the
Hudson’s Bay Company for packing. The intentional introduction of food plants
such as barley and animals such as oxen meant that European portmanteau biota
travelled widely across the North and were assisted by Europeans in adapting to
northern New World environments. Yet Crosby’s work offers limited discussion
of the ecological changes associated with the arrival of Europeans in the Canadian
North beginning in the late sixteenth century. In his most noted work, Ecological
Imperialism, Crosby provides only a very brief and very general analysis of
northern environments. He focuses almost exclusively on Siberia, calling it a
Neo-Europe manqué.
But this is a rather dubious example of a New World environment as it is
joined by land to Europe. Crosby acknowledges that a variety of so-called
portmanteau biota accompanied European colonists to Siberia—everything from
brown rats to Old World crops to epidemic diseases—but he argues that the region
did not experience the full brunt of ecological imperialism because the severe
climate “tended to repel intruders” and prevented the production of food
surpluses that were a precondition for the creation of a Neo-Europe.9 Crosby’s
analysis is thus loosely deterministic: In Siberia, as in other Arctic and sub-Arctic
New Worlds, the harsh northern climate delayed and attenuated the process of
ecological imperialism to the extent that northern environments are presented
as extraneous to the main episode of Europe’s biological expansion. Crosby’s
definition of ecological imperialism, moreover, focuses narrowly on a prescribed
outcome. A Neo-European agrarian landscape must be produced in an
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environment wholly receptive to foreign invaders. Such an analysis neglects New
World environments where recognizable processes of ecological imperialism
precipitated significant social and environmental change on a local or regional
scale without necessarily producing a Neo-Europe.
In recent years several scholars have refined Crosby’s interpretation of
ecological change in the New World to address variations on the general theme
of widespread and massive environmental change in temperate New World
environments. Peter Coates’s account of bison introductions in the Yukon Flats
region of Alaska, for example, and Nancy Jacobs’s work on European domesticates
in southern Africa apply Crosby’s categories of analysis to spaces and biota that
fall outside the confines of the original thesis, suggesting that introduced
biological agents produced important ecological and social changes without
necessarily transforming colonized spaces into fully realized reproductions of
European environments.10 In a review article on plant transfers, William Beinart
and Karen Middleton have further emphasized the need to account for local
variation when analyzing ecological imperialism and to “disaggregate the large
geographical blocks of old world and new world, or of continents.” Beinart and
Middleton also reiterate an argument that Crosby made in his earlier work on
the “Columbian exchange”: Plant transfers in the colonial era may have occurred
as more of a trade-off between Old and New World environments.11 All of this
scholarship suggests that the explanation of ecological imperialism, with its
emphasis on a one-way flow of portmanteau biota and its narrow focus on the
creation of Neo-Europes, is too one-dimensional to account for the myriad ways
in which European organisms have contributed to colonial processes of
environmental change.
Throughout the Canadian North, recognizable processes of ecological
imperialism precipitated significant social and environmental change on a local
or regional scale without necessarily producing a Neo-Europe. Sporadic attempts
to introduce European plants and exotic animals to the tundra and sub-Arctic
forest regions often carried profound ecological consequences in local
environments. In addition, the accidental introduction of countless disease
organisms beginning in the eighteenth century drastically altered Aboriginal
communities and their relationships to the natural environment with social and
economic repercussions spread throughout the Canadian North. The purpose of
this essay is to assess the tentative success of ecological imperialism in the region.
Our investigation of three major categories of alien species introductions in
northern Canada—diseases, animals, and plants—suggests that ecological
imperialism was an important historical process that produced variable and often
localized ecological changes in a region located outside of the temperate NeoEuropes. Here the simultaneous progression of colonization and environmental
change occurred not as an all-encompassing invasion along a single line of
advance, but as series of sporadic and limited changes on the uneven border of a
broken frontier.
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DISEASE
IN 1942, WORK CREWS on the Alaska Highway brought measles into the Teslin
Lake district, infecting 129 people within a population of 135. This outbreak was
followed in 1943 by dysentery, jaundice, German measles, and finally
meningococcic meningitis, which caused the largest number of fatalities. There
were also sporadic cases of mumps, tonsillitis, and ear infections.12 Ten years
later, in the eastern Arctic, measles devastated Inuit communities along Ungava
Bay and on southern Baffin Island. Doctors with the National Department of
Health and Welfare traced the source of infection to children living at the Goose
Bay air base in Labrador. Inuit returning to Fort Chimo (Kuujjuaq) and Frobisher
Bay (Iqaluit) from the base brought the measles with them leading to two separate
outbreaks during which 99 percent of those exposed to the virus fell ill and
seventy-five people died. In 1954, doctors Peart and Nagler described the mortality
rates of 7 percent in the Ungava district and 2 percent on Baffin Island as
“unprecedented in modern times.”13 In Ecological Imperialism, Crosby uses these
outbreaks to introduce the larger discussion of the effects of disease in the New
World and as evidence of his main thesis, that “when isolation ceases, decimation
begins.”14 The notion that the North was isolated previous to the middle of the
twentieth century obscures a much longer interaction of northerners with
foreigners, international politics and markets, and most importantly “invading”
alien pathogens. The Alaska Highway and Ungava epidemics were two among
several major twentieth-century epidemics that represent the culmination, not
the onset, of the process of ecological imperialism in the Canadian North.
The effects of introduced infectious epidemic diseases upon indigenous
populations are well documented in the historical literature and do not bear
repeating in detail here. The estimated impact of these diseases suggests that
they killed between 90 and 95 percent of the indigenous American population.
The indigenous peoples of northern Canada were not spared from the devastating
effects of exogenous diseases upon individuals and communities.15 As elsewhere,
pre-contact health history is uncertain but indigenous northerners certainly
suffered from lower respiratory tract diseases and illness from tapeworms and
other parasites prior to the arrival of Europeans.16 Martin Frobisher’s explorations
in the eastern Arctic in 1576 and Vitus Bering’s explorations and contact with
the Aleuts from the west in 1741 created the earliest connections to European
disease pools. These contacts sufficed for the transmission of infectious epidemic
diseases although little evidence of the first epidemics survives.17
Beginning in the late eighteenth century a pattern of epidemic intensity and
diffusion emerges within the documentary record that positions the North
squarely within the model of ecological imperialism. In 1782 Samuel Hearne
appended a note to his published journal describing a smallpox epidemic in
northern Canada. Hearne claimed, “the Northern Indians, by annually visiting
their Southern friends, the Athapuscow Indians, have contracted the small-pox,
which has carried off nine-tenths of them, and particularly those people who
composed the trade at Churchill Factory.”18 Many nineteenth-century northern
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epidemics, as well as the eighteenth-century epidemic Hearne described, were
the distant end of major North American outbreaks. Measles and whooping cough
epidemics reached the Petit Nord—the area between the Great Lakes, Lake
Winnipeg, and the Hudson Bay lowlands—in 1819 and continued northwest,
causing significant fatalities south of Great Slave Lake by 1822. Concurrent
epidemics of influenza, measles, and dysentery hit the Petit Nord in 1846. In
that year, traders reported influenza and measles along the western shore of
Hudson Bay, while measles diffused north to Fort Chipewyan and west to the
Cordillera region.19
These epidemics spread north along corridors of disease transmission that
corresponded with the movements of whalers and fur traders. In the 1820s,
whalers in Davis Strait began to move westward from the Greenland coast into
Lancaster and Cumberland sounds. Major fur trade routes ran along the western
shore of Hudson’s Bay and inland from Churchill and York Factories. The
Mackenzie River and its upstream tributaries, the Athabasca and the Peace,
provided important inland thoroughfares along which the North West Company
erected posts in the late eighteenth century. Traffic from west to east included
travel overland, activity by whalers along the southern shore of the Beaufort Sea,
and movement through Coronation Gulf. Diseases could travel along different
paths, as in the late 1830s when smallpox likely traveled through the northern
plains as well as via trade networks from the Koyukon in northern Alaska to reach
the Tlingit and western Gwich’in. In general, the commercial geography of the
nineteenth century provided the principal avenues along which epidemic diseases
traveled from urban disease centers in Europe, the United States, and British
North America.20
The extent to which these outbreaks led to depopulation in the North has been
vigorously debated.21 In combination with the impact upon northern demography,
epidemics profoundly disrupted indigenous societies. Accounts of starvation,
hunger, and poor hunts appear alongside accounts of disease. Epidemics with
high adult mortality destabilized social groupings, resulting in the loss of
expertise and authority, while small northern populations made it difficult to
replace these losses. Shepard Krech has argued that epidemic disease in
combination with interethnic hostilities and faunal depletion made the western
sub-Arctic more like than unlike other regions of the New World that had faced
the ecological onslaught of Europeans.22
Yet one crucial element distinguished the role of epidemic disease in northern
history. Ecological imperialism in temperate environments involved both the
disruption (through death, social disorganization, and depopulation) and
replacement of indigenous populations with agricultural settlers. In the Canadian
North, not only did European fur traders depend upon Native men and women
for their role as trappers, middlemen, and provisioners in the fur trade, but there
were also far fewer people interested in settling frozen soils of the Canadian North
than the St. Lawrence Valley or the prairie lands to the south. Thousands of people
did go north in pursuit of mineral riches. During the Klondike Gold Rush, the
population of Dawson City in the Yukon ballooned to forty thousand in 1898.
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Similar surges of newcomers arrived for mineral rushes further east in the
Mackenzie District during the 1920s and 1930s. The resource economy attracted
more transient labor than actual settlers, however. By 1902 Dawson’s population
was down to five thousand and across the North the influxes of newcomers
associated with mining developments appear as little more than isolated peaks
in a longer steadier demographic history.
In the absence of a nineteenth-century demographic takeover by EuroCanadians, northern populations remained small and isolated, and the epidemic
transition of the North was delayed. Paul Hackett and Robert Fortuine have
addressed the character and significance of a more complicated and longer history
of introduced infectious and chronic diseases as manifested in the North. The
periodicity and intensity of epidemic disease in the North from the eighteenth
through the twentieth centuries did not perfectly mirror outbreaks further south.
Geography, isolation, and small populations were the principal factors which led
to variable disease diffusion, rather than northerly latitudes per se. Certain
diseases, most notably scarlet fever, may not have arrived in the North until the
second half of the nineteenth century.23 More commonly, epidemics arose in the
North when only mild outbreaks if any manifested themselves further south. This
is best evidenced by the frequency of epidemics during the late nineteenth century
and into the twentieth century.24 The epidemic diseases most devastating to
indigenous populations were crowd diseases (infections that required large
populations in order to survive, in endemic form, in human communities). Small
populations in the North limited the number of susceptibles and crowd diseases
would spread as epidemics and then fade out. As diseases traveled north
periodically from urban centers, adults and children within particular
communities may not have been previously exposed, leading to increased
morbidity and mortality.25
Major epidemics occurred in the Canadian North through much of the
twentieth century. In addition to the Alaska Highway and Ungava epidemics
described earlier, which were among the last major northern outbreaks, epidemic
influenza, measles, dysentery, typhoid, diphtheria, and even smallpox each killed
many Natives and to a lesser extent newcomers in the North. Influenza was
particularly fatal in the twentieth century.26 The Spanish influenza pandemic had
a surprisingly limited impact in the northern interior, although it destroyed
coastal communities such as Brevig Mission in Alaska and Okak in Labrador.
The southern Yukon and Alaska Panhandle were among the regions hardest hit,
with Native communities disproportionately affected.27 Quarantine measures
implemented by Royal North West Mounted Police officers, post managers, and
missionaries helped keep the Spanish influenza out of the Mackenzie Valley.28
The successes of 1918-1919 were not repeated ten years later when this district
faced an influenza epidemic of its own. At least one in ten people living along the
Mackenzie River died in 1928; Fort Providence lost 20 percent of its population
and many families and some camps were completely destroyed.29 The influenza
arrived on board the Hudson’s Bay Company supply ship the S.S. Distributor which
provided speed and range, but the fuller dispersion of the virus came as a result
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of spring gatherings including Treaty payments that brought Native peoples,
white trappers, and traders together. Then again in 1949, an influenza outbreak
among the eighty-four Inuit inhabitants of Cambridge Bay on Victoria Island led
to seventeen deaths with an additional thirty-seven people admitted to hospital.30
High mortality among Natives distinguished northern epidemics from their
southern counterparts in the twentieth century. In part this reflected the
demography of northern settlements where often the only non-Natives were a
handful of police officers, missionaries, and traders. Furthermore, non-Natives
generally had better access to medical care, fewer dependants, and could leave
the community during an epidemic. The greater susceptibility of Natives to
infectious diseases struck contemporary observers and later chroniclers,
suggesting to each that these were what Crosby describes as virgin-soil
epidemics.31 The presence of twentieth-century virgin-soil epidemics in the North
would support the argument that, outside of the temperate zone, harsher
environments kept foreign invaders at bay until more recently when their final
isolation ceased. Relative to more southerly urban populations there is no doubt
that northerners had less exposure to these diseases. Physicians who took blood
samples from Inuit at the time of the Cambridge Bay influenza epidemic noted
that “results clearly show the low natural antibody level in adult Eskimos in
comparison with the city of Toronto.”32 There is considerable evidence, however,
that by the twentieth century many northern Native populations had suffered
multiple exposures to introduced diseases. These exposures produced acquired
immunity in the late nineteenth century to infections such as measles and
whooping cough. In outbreaks of infectious disease other than influenza, which
mutates frequently enough to thwart acquired immunological defenses, observers
often noted both survivors and fatalities who had been previously exposed.33 The
use of the term “virgin soil” is at best partly accurate in describing populations
and individuals who had experience with the pathogens that devastated northern
communities in the twentieth century.
Referring to twentieth-century outbreaks as virgin-soil epidemics also
obscures the other causes of infectious disease epidemics in the Canadian North.34
Historians and epidemiologists have, in fact, generally recognized the complex
causality at work in postcontact epidemics across the Americas. In the twentieth
century, the synergistic impact of concurrent disease outbreaks were typically a
prerequisite to major incidences of widespread sickness and devastating
mortality rates among northern Aboriginal populations. The simultaneous spread
of measles and influenza, for instance, exacerbated the mortality and morbidity
rates associated with Alaska’s Great Sickness in 1900 and the Ungava epidemic
of 1952.35 More commonly, it was the debilitating effects of endemic tuberculosis
that compounded the impact of infectious diseases among Native northerners.
Tuberculosis and its close cousin syphilis had arrived in the North by the end of
the eighteenth century. By the 1860s tuberculosis was identified as the foremost
killer of native northerners from the Petit Nord to Frobisher Bay (Iqaluit) on Baffin
Island.36 In many instances it was unclear whether deaths in epidemics should
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be attributed to tuberculosis or the more immediate infection. Bacterial
pneumonia also commonly killed Natives and non-Natives during epidemics.
Malnutrition was a major factor in disease mortality, particularly so in northern
environments where the cold climate and labor necessary for food production
required high energy diets, and where shortages of hares, fish, big game or other
dietary staples, were common.37 At times a vicious circle emerged, where disease
intensified malnutrition as food producers fell ill and the resultant hunger caused
additional sickness when people consumed meat from rotting animal carcasses
or other spoiled foods.38 In the early twentieth century, moreover, white trappers
and resource workers competed with Native northerners for increasingly scarce
fish and game resources.39 Exposure and sub-zero temperatures also had more
direct effects in contributing to mortality during epidemics. Climate, nutrition,
and the compounding effects of other diseases each contributed more to high
Native mortality in the twentieth century than a lack of acquired immunity due
to prolonged isolation. Finally, the poor quality of medical and nursing care
contributed to high mortality rates. The Canadian government insisted upon
taking greater responsibility for northern health care in the early twentieth
century but failed to discharge its obligations with either adequate treatments
or sufficient personnel.40
Major changes at mid-century diminished the frequency and severity of
epidemic diseases. New medical treatments, in particular the use of antibiotics
to treat tuberculosis and vaccination against measles, mumps, and diphtheria,
became available beginning in the 1940s. The Dene population began to increase
dramatically in the 1950s and the non-Native population focused at Whitehorse
and Yellowknife grew as mining and other resource activities expanded. By 1971,
Whitehorse had a population of more than eleven thousand and Yellowknife
almost six thousand.41 The relative isolation of northern communities retreated
in the post-World War II period as increasing numbers of transient seasonal
workers kept one foot in urban disease centers and another in northern towns.
Government provided additional medical resources to service the growing nonNative population. Transportation links such as the Mackenzie and Dempster
highways (completed in 1948 and 1979 respectively) and new aviation routes
increased the speed, frequency, and range of movements between northern
communities and southern population centers. By the end of the twentieth
century, the population of northern Canada had become well integrated with urban
disease pools.
The persistence of postcontact epidemics well into the 1950s ensured that
disease micro-organisms had the opportunity to interact with new agents of
economic and cultural imperialism that emerged during the same period. For
many Native communities, the twentieth-century epidemics are historical
markers for the transition from “traditional” to “modern” worlds. The 1928
influenza, for example, killed many Dene elders and accounted for the absence of
their medicine power in the modern world.42 The same influenza outbreak also
destroyed Dogrib fishing camps at Gros Cap; industrial fishers were subsequently
able to establish their main operations at a site freed from the restrictions that
Map by Eric Leinberger.
Map 2. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Transportation Corridors and Twentieth-century Disease Outbreaks in Canada’s North
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otherwise protected Native fishing grounds on Great Slave Lake.43 The Great
Sickness of 1900, the Alaska Highway epidemics, and the 1952 Ungava Bay
measles outbreak each corresponded with major resource developments in their
respective regional environments, in effect facilitating the partial removal of
Aboriginal occupants and their attendant material cultures from the path of an
emerging industrial economy in northern Canada.
Ecological imperialism had different effects in the Canadian North that were
out of synch with the rhythms of postcontact relations in the temperate NeoEuropes. Yet there is no doubt as to the transformative power of the spread of
Euro-Canadian diseases when coupled with social and economic colonization in
the sub-Arctic and Arctic. Native northerners had experience with introduced
diseases dating to the first contacts of the sixteenth century and introduced
diseases had similar devastating effects upon northern populations as they did
further south. The extent of depopulation remains an open question. What is
certain is that agrarian settlement did not follow in the wake of early epidemics.
Resource economies—first oriented around furs and later fish, minerals, and oil—
extended northwards up to the end of the nineteenth century largely relying upon,
rather than displacing, native peoples. Small populations and relatively isolated
communities characterized settlement in the Canadian North through the
twentieth century. Infectious disease epidemics also persisted into the twentieth
century, in part due to the immunological effects of the continued isolation of
northerners, but more importantly as a result of malnutrition, the synergistic
effects of concurrent infections and tuberculosis in particular, the physical
stresses of life in a cold and extreme climate, and the social, economic, and
medical dimensions of Canadian colonization. Disease preceded and accompanied
all phases of Euro-Canadian imperialism in the North, collaborating most
effectively in the 1928-1929 epidemic when influenza catalyzed the
transformation of traditional fur trading societies into more sedentary
communities with greater ties to southern cultural norms and commercial
institutions.
ANIMALS
THE PROSPECT OF RAISING domesticated livestock in the extremely cold and
isolated regions of Canada’s northern forests might appear, at first glance, to be
a questionable undertaking. From the 1890s to the 1940s, however, a combination
of land hunger, railway development, and dry conditions in the southern prairies
encouraged would-be settlers to colonize an agricultural fringe that stretched
along the southern edge of the boreal forest from Quebec to the interior valleys
of northern British Columbia.44 Although these farmers were primarily grain
growers, taking up dairy farming and meat production only reluctantly when
wheat prices plummeted, some locations nevertheless provided the combination
of suitable grazing lands and ready access to local markets or rail lines that was
a prerequisite to the successful introduction of cattle ranches to the northern
boreal region.45 Cattle were raised on a small scale, for instance, in the clay belt
regions of northeastern Ontario and Quebec after World War I, where abundant
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lumber and mining camps provided local markets for meat and dairy products.46
Cattle also were raised for commercial purposes on several Native reserves in
Manitoba’s Interlake region beginning in the 1890s.47 The most productive grazing
area in the southern boreal fringe, however, was undoubtedly the prairie and forest
parkland of northeastern Alberta’s Peace River country. Raising livestock was
not easy here: Deep snow and harsh climatic conditions rendered winter grazing
difficult for even the hardiest breeds of cattle, and large amounts of imported or
locally produced hay were required to carry the animals through to the spring.
Nonetheless, the Peace River region was the most active area of agricultural
settlement in Canada from the 1930s to the mid-1960s, and many of these farmers
imported European livestock in significant numbers after 1941, when government
subsidies supported the conversion of wheat fields to pasture.48 By 1976 the
livestock population in the Peace River Country had reached 480,000 head of
cattle, 75,000 pigs, and 24,000 sheep. In four decades the Peace River country
had become the most successful among the discrete islands of livestock
production that emerged in the southern fringe of the boreal forest.49
Despite the isolated successes in the southern boreal forest, raising livestock
in the taiga forest and Arctic tundra north of the sixtieth parallel proved to be a
more intractable undertaking. Small numbers of cattle were introduced, for
example, as a supplemental source of meat and dairy products in communities
along the Mackenzie River route after the advent of steam navigation in 1887,
but the limited availability of suitable grazing areas or hay lands and the long
distance from markets and processing facilities prevented any major expansion
of commercial animal husbandry north of the sixtieth parallel.50 Sporadic
attempts to develop cattle operations in the Northwest Territories beginning in
the 1970s also failed due to factors ranging from the poor health of one herd owner
to the constant harassment of livestock by summer flies. By 1981 there were only
forty-seven head of cattle in the Northwest Territories. There were, moreover, no
pig farms in the region and only one sheep-raising operation at Trout River as of
the year 2000 with a herd of only seventeen animals. Other than two successful
egg production facilities near Hay River, animal husbandry in the higher latitudes
of Canada’s sub-Arctic forests and Arctic tundra was limited to marginal
operations that served immediate subsistence needs in local communities.51
In the early twentieth century, senior bureaucrats within the Dominion
departments of the Interior and Agriculture began to consider ways of overcoming
the inherent limitations associated with ranching European livestock in the Far
North. They gave serious consideration to the idea of domesticating northern
wildlife on a large scale as the basis for settled agriculture in the region. Animals
such as caribou and especially muskoxen, it was thought, could better withstand
the harsh climate and survive on the sedges and lichens that dominate the Arctic
prairie. The federal government also established breeding programs designed to
cross cattle with bison or yak to create a new range animal that could easily
tolerate cold climates.52
These programs yielded few practical results, but the enthusiasm for stocking
northern environments with exploitable game populations was such that from
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1925 to 1928 wildlife officials with the National Parks Branch and the Northwest
Territories and Yukon Branch collaborated on a program to introduce close to
seven thousand plains bison from southern Alberta to the northern wood bison
range in Wood Buffalo National Park. In the short term, the program was meant
to alleviate overcrowding on the grazing range at the fenced-in Buffalo National
Park near Wainwright, Alberta, but the commercial potential of bison ranching
was never far from the minds of those who promoted the project. Maxwell Graham,
chief of the Animal Division in the federal government and the most fervent
promoter of the bison transfer among senior wildlife officials, argued for the
creation of the original wood bison preserve because “a reserve stock of pure
blood bison of the highest potency should be kept in reserve, so that the ultimate
fixed type of new range animal may continue to pass on to successive generations
the potent qualities of the true bison, hardiness, thriftiness, a valuable robe, and
first-class beef qualities.”53 The addition of the plains bison to Wood Buffalo
National Park would, according to Graham, allow for “re-stocking vast areas
suitable for the propagation of bison at comparatively little cost.”54 Within three
decades, Graham’s dream of productive bison pastures in the northern forests of
Alberta and the Northwest Territories had largely been realized. By 1950 there
were twelve thousand bison within Wood Buffalo National Park and the federal
government began to cull between two hundred and eight hundred animals each
year until cost overruns and frequent flooding in the two park abattoirs prompted
a cessation of the program in 1967. In part the slaughters were meant to control
the spread of the tuberculosis bacilli that had arrived with the Wainwright bison,
but the annual culls quickly developed into a commercial program that actively
sought to develop markets for bison meat in southern Canadian hotels and
packing houses. Although the commercial slaughter program remained a smallscale operation and certainly did not live up to earlier dreams of using native
animals as an agricultural base for settlement in the Canadian North, by the 1950s
the bison population of Wood Buffalo National Park was clearly managed as if it
was part of a large game ranch. This agricultural approach to wildlife management
implied not only the intensive supervision and control of the bison herds, but
also the effective colonization of local human relationships to wildlife as
Aboriginal hunters were forbidden to kill a traditional source of food that had
been appropriated for the purposes of state-sponsored commercial production.55
Game ranching was not the only economic activity that federal officials
proposed as a pathway leading toward northern agricultural development.
Nothing, in fact, captured the imagination of bureaucrats and private promoters
in the early twentieth century more than the idea of importing domesticated
reindeer from northern Europe as the vanguard of a settled and prosperous
agricultural civilization in northern Canada. In large measure, the enthusiasm
for reindeer introductions among senior politicians and bureaucrats within the
Departments of the Interior and Indian Affairs was a response to the success of
American attempts to transform Inuit hunters along the western coast of Alaska
into reindeer herders. In 1892, Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian Missionary and
General Agent of Education for the U.S. Department of the Interior, introduced
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171 Siberian reindeer to Teller, Alaska, in the hope that they would provide a stable
and steady source of food and employment income for a population of Native
hunters who had been devastated by the decline of important indigenous game
species such as walrus and caribou. By 1916, the reindeer herd numbered just
over 82,000 and an Alaskan Bureau of Education Report proudly proclaimed that
the Inuit has been assimilated into a new social and ecological order: “within
less than a generation, the Eskimos throughout northern and western Alaska
have been advanced through one entire stage of civilization, from making their
living by the precarious method of hunting and fishing to the pastoral stage in
which by their own industry they provided against want.”56 Vilhjalmur Stefansson
offered additional inspiration for the reindeer introductions in Canada. Through
late 1918 and early 1919, the famous northern explorer lobbied intensively in
Ottawa to persuade senior Canadian politicians and bureaucrats that a combined
program of reindeer importation and muskoxen domestication not only would
save the Native hunter from privation, but also provide a cheap food supply to
fuel the growth of industry in the Canadian North.57
It was much easier, however, to dream of an expanding commercial empire
based on reindeer ranching than to actually create one. Despite several state-led
initiatives and the implementation of a Dominion policy in July 1918 granting
free grazing leases to those willing to undertake the risky enterprise of Arctic
ranching, all attempts to establish a viable reindeer population in the region
before the end of the 1920s failed dramatically. The Department of the Interior,
for instance, attempted to introduce fifty reindeer to Fort Smith in the
southwestern portion of the Northwest Territories in 1911, but poor forage,
constant harassment from biting flies, and disease had caused the herd to scatter
and die off by October 1913.58 A similar attempt by the Department of Indian
Affairs to introduce reindeer herding as a new industry on the north shore of the
St. Lawrence River at Lobster Bay in May 1917 also met with failure due to poor
grazing conditions and a lack of interest among the Native population.59 One
private sector initiative—an attempt by Vilhjalmur Stefansson and his financial
backers in the Hudson Bay Reindeer Company to import 680 Norwegian reindeer
to Baffin Island in the summer of 1921—failed because the reindeer encountered
only a combination of barren rock and unpalatable mosses when they were
released on their new grazing lands.60 A Royal Commission established in 1919 to
examine the economic potential of reindeer and muskoxen industries in northern
Canada responded three years later to these early failures by recommending that
reindeer be introduced to northern grazing ranges only after careful botanical
investigations of proposed sites.61
By the mid-1920s the Department of the Interior had identified the Mackenzie
Delta as one possible location for an experimental herd.62 The site was attractive
not only because of the abundant forage for reindeer but also because the wild
caribou herds had been decimated in this region to supply whaling ships with
meat in the late nineteenth century. Senior officials in the Department of the
Interior thus presumed that even the introduction of even a small reindeer herd
could provide badly needed food and clothing and also introduce a new modern
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industry to help advance Inuit hunters in the region beyond their “primitive”
state.63 In 1929 the Dominion government purchased three thousand reindeer
from the U.S.-based Lomen Reindeer Company, which in turn hired a Sami herder,
Andy Bahr, to deliver the animals overland to the Mackenzie Delta from Kotzebue
Sound in western Alaska. Bahr spent an astonishing six years driving the
surviving 2,382 reindeer across the northwestern Arctic mainland, delivering
them to their grazing preserve on the west side of the Mackenzie River only in
February of 1935.64
The introduction of reindeer to the Mackenzie Delta seemed at first to be an
unqualified success. The herd increased to 4,585 animals by 1938, and one major
goal of the program was fulfilled when nine hundred reindeer were separated
from the main body of animals to become the first Inuit-owned herd. Five
additional Native-owned herds were established over the next two decades and
the reindeer population totalled nine thousand animals by 1943.65 An information
pamphlet published by the Department of the Interior in 1938 celebrated the
adoption of herding among the Inuit, noting that “the change from hunter to
husbandman is necessarily a gradual process but progress has been made and
the administration looks for further advances in this line.”66 This assessment
proved to be overly optimistic, however, as all the Native herds but one had
declined in numbers and each was sold back to the main government herd by
1956. By 1958 the total herd had declined to approximately six thousand animals
and in 1960 the government sold the herd to private interests.67 The Canadian
Wildlife Service briefly assumed control over the herds after they had declined
to just over 2,700 animals in 1968, but the herd was sold again in 1974 and has
remained a small operation in private hands ever since. 68 The Canadian
government’s goal of transforming the northern Aboriginal economy from
hunting and trapping to herding clearly lay in tatters by the end of the 1950s.
Why did the reindeer herds fail to expand in population and geographic range?
Certainly there is ample evidence to suggest that social and ecological conditions
in the Arctic precluded the possibility of European reindeer acting as a significant
agent of colonization and economic change throughout the region. Not only were
there significant losses of reindeer to wolf predation, but the most prominent
threat to the reindeer operation was the tendency of the animals to run off with
their genetically identical cousins that populated the resurgent wild caribou herds
of the Mackenzie Delta.69 In order to minimize these losses, the Sami herders
employed at the reindeer station adopted the close herding techniques that were
common in their homeland. Under this rigorous regime of supervision, herders
kept the reindeer tightly packed together by moving constantly in a circle around
them. While this technique was effective when applied to the family owned herds
of three hundred animals that were the norm in Scandinavia, the monotonous
labor required to supervise several thousand animals made it difficult to attract
local Inuit to the reindeer project, many of whom preferred the independent
lifestyle associated with hunting and trapping.70 The close herding system also
carried with it undesirable ecological consequences: The concentration of grazing
activity near the base camp of the herders did in some instances lead to
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overgrazing on slowly regenerating fields of lichen that form the reindeer’s main
winter food.71 In 1964 a private owner introduced an open herding system involving
minimal supervision to allow for more efficient grazing patterns and labor
practices. An aerial survey in 1967 revealed that the new management regime
was hardly a success: The reindeer population had declined from approximately
eight thousand to just over two thousand animals, most likely the result of an
increase in predation and straying from the main herds. The Mackenzie Delta
reindeer herders thus faced an irresolvable dilemma. If they left the herd largely
to its own devices, its population would be regulated by predators and chance
encounters with wild caribou that might “carry off” significant portions of the
reindeer population, but if they practiced close herding they were more likely to
strip optimal winter grazing ranges of vegetation and alienate the local Inuit,
who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of the project. The reindeer were,
somewhat paradoxically, both too wild and too dependent on human labor to serve
as an effective broad-scale colonizer of a remote New World environment.72
Nonetheless, the local social, economic, and cultural impact of reindeer
introductions in the Canadian North should not be underestimated. Since their
arrival in 1929, the reindeer have provided important employment opportunities
and a source of relatively inexpensive meat for the Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie
Delta. In 1953, for example, the reindeer industry employed twenty-one Inuvialuit
and ten years later roughly ninety Inuvialuit declared herding as their main source
of livelihood. The amount of meat produced was also significant. Although reliable
figures are difficult to obtain, between 1935 and 1974 approximately one million
kilograms of meat and thousands of hides were distributed for sale to mission
hospitals, residential schools, and to individuals through informal sales and the
extensive distribution network of the Hudson’s Bay Company.73 The reindeer also
have served as an important medium of cultural exchange between the Inuvialuit
and the Sami herders. The present owner of the herd, Lloyd Binder, is the grandson
of Mikkel Pulk, one of the original Sami herders, and the son of Otto Binder, one
of the first Inuvialuit reindeer herders. As Binder’s background suggests, the
presence of reindeer has created a hybrid culture among many Inuvialuit, one
where hunting and trapping is still valued but also one where the alien rhythms
associated with herding, calving, roundup, and slaughter have come to play an
important role in the seasonal round of economic activity. As of the year 2000,
Binder’s reindeer herd numbered 6,500 animals and there are plans to expand
the herd to nearly twice that number. The reindeer evidently continue to shape
the social, economic, and ecological relationships among indigenous people, local
wildlife, and the grazing ranges of the Mackenzie Delta, constituting the most
northerly and the most distinctive of the small pockets of European animal
husbandry that dot the broad expanse of northern Canada.74
PLANTS
THE BOREAL FOREST AND TUNDRA region of Canada has provided a less than
hospitable home for European plants. The high acidity and low nutrient content
of sub-Arctic soils and the harsh climate and permafrost that dominate the Arctic
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ecosystem have precluded the widespread profusion of European weedy species
that multiplied so readily in the nutrient-rich and more alkaline soils further to
the south. That is not to say that weeds failed to establish themselves in the
Canadian North. Dandelions are found right across the sub-Arctic and Arctic,
typically in disturbed areas along road cuts but elsewhere as well, and their bright
flowers often reminded travellers of home. Samuel Hearne, for instance, ate
dandelions, as an “early salad” at Churchill in the 1770s.75 By the 1870s, the British
Admiralty Committee investigating scurvy on Arctic expeditions discussed the
possibility of harvesting Arctic dandelions for their antiscorbutic properties.
Captain Henry Feilden, the naturalist on the Alert, demurred on the usefulness
of dandelions, insisting that “the only dandelion up there (taraxacum dens-leonis),
is so very scarce that there would not have been enough to make a salad of. We
found it between the 82nd and 83rd parallel, but in very limited quantity.” Where
they flourished, dandelions were widely incorporated into European diets in the
North.76
More recent botanical surveys have suggested that a variety of European and
Eurasian exotics also have spread in areas of the boreal forest subject to human
disturbance and with transport links to the south. In Wood Buffalo National Park,
for example, aggressive agricultural weeds such as smooth brome and white
sweetclover were likely introduced along the Slave River shipping route as early
as the nineteenth century, and have spread ever since via roadsides, burned over
areas, settlements, and even bison wallows. At Churchill, Manitoba, a total of 106
introduced species have been transported to the southern edge of the tundra since
the early twentieth century via contaminated grain shipments that arrived with
the railroad for overseas transport. More recently, a total of nineteen alien plants,
including the aggressive cheatgrass, have spread along soils that had been
extensively disturbed in the western Northwest Territories due to the burying of
the 540-mile-long Norman Wells Pipeline beginning in 1983. Finally, recent
botanical studies in Gros Morne National Park in western Newfoundland have
suggested that invasive plants may spread in areas of the boreal forest that have
been subject to natural disturbance such as windfalls, insect outbreaks, and the
trampling of vegetation by moose. In none of these cases, however, were alien
plants profuse, and nowhere did they dominate the complex of vegetation within
the local ecosystem. In Wood Buffalo National Park, for example, the fifty-four
plants that have been introduced to the region make up only 10 percent of total
plant species in the park. In Churchill, only 17 percent of invasive plants managed
to reproduce successfully and all species tended to die out in the absence of
continued soil disturbance. Even in highly disturbed boreal forest sites such as
clear-cuts, native vegetation tends to reassert itself over time either naturally or
through human cultivation. Although invasive plants have undoubtedly persisted
in areas of the boreal forest subject to the long-term disturbance of agricultural
colonization such as the Peace River district, European weeds, for the most part,
spread through the boreal forest in disaggregated and discrete pockets of
disturbance surrounded by an ocean of native vegetation.77
Adapted by by Eric Leinberger from Geoffrey A.J. Scott, Canada’s Vegetation: A World Perspective (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1995); J. S. Clayton et al.,
Soils of Canada, vols. 1 and 2 (Ottawa: Canada Department of Agriculture, 1977); and “Soil Capability for Agriculture,” in The National Atlas of Canada, 5th ed. (Ottawa:
National Atlas Information Service, 1978 to 1995).
Map 3. Major Soil, Vegetation, and Geological Regions Affecting Plant and Animal Distribution in Canada’s North
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The intentional introduction of European plants followed much the same
irregular pattern as the accidental spread of exotic vegetation. In the northern
reaches of the boreal forest, the harvest of cultivated plants from small gardens
provided essential food to people living at northern trade posts and missions,
allowing immigrants to supplement their diets with familiar grains and
vegetables.78 As early as 1827, the explorer John Franklin, while in Fort Chipewyan,
“witnessed the good effects of [an order to cultivate culinary vegetables]; the tables
of the officers being supplied daily, and those of the men frequently, with potatoes
and barley.” Garden production in northern environments was, however, strictly
circumscribed by the short growing season, limited moisture, and temperature
extremes. In addition, the demands of the fur trade made it essential to balance
the labor spent on food production at posts (gardening, hunting, fishing, and
gathering) with the labor demands of the commercial hunt.79 Nonetheless,
successful post gardens could be found along the large lakes of the interior, such
as at Fort Chipewyan and Fort Providence, which benefited from the moderating
influence of massive bodies of freshwater that raised summer temperatures and
delayed fall frosts allowing for a longer growing season than was possible further
inland. Marshes at the edges of rivers also provided hay (mostly swamp grasses)
used to keep cattle through the winter. Hay and berries constituted the principal
native products of the soil harvested by the fur traders. The remaining foodstuffs
were introduced. Potatoes were the staple product of the garden plots. They were
grown as far north as Fort McPherson on the Peel River just south of the
Mackenzie Delta. Hundreds of bushels of potatoes might be produced at a post
garden, in addition to turnips, barley, peas, radishes, carrots, and cabbages.80
Gardening in the sub-Arctic was always precarious, however, and depended upon
a delicate balance among factors such as favorable microclimates, fertile soils,
and the availability of human labor to bring forth a bountiful harvest.
The establishment of mission hospitals and schools in northern Canada
through the late nineteenth century provided an additional institutional base
for small-scale agriculture in the region. With large populations of dependent
pupils and patients to feed, gardens were carefully cultivated to produce a
remarkable variety and quantity of foodstuffs. In 1925 the Anglican mission at
Hay River possessed “a good garden” that supplied several hundred bushels of
potatoes and turnips while a swamp provided hay to the oxen and horses used as
draught animals. In general, mission gardens produced beets, carrots, spinach,
rhubarb, celery, radishes, and even apples at Fort Resolution. In productive years,
large yields fed people in the wider region as when the potato harvest at Fort
Good Hope supplied much of the Lower Mackenzie.81 Children at the schools
labored in the gardens to help provide for their own subsistence, a major
undertaking in the late nineteenth century when food shortages were widespread
in the western sub-Arctic. Girls were typically put to work berrying while boys
hoed the potato fields or cut hay. In contrast to missionary efforts further south,
Roman Catholic Oblates in the North did not intend to transform Dene children
into farmers. As Martha McCarthy argues, “They did not try to induce the Dene
to adopt a settled agricultural lifestyle, though this was ruled out as much by the
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environment as by their philosophy.”82 Nevertheless, the children put to work in
the school gardens learned agricultural skills rather than those more applicable
to life in the bush and thus this labor contributed to alienating Dene children
from their heritage and traditional relationships to the land. Mission gardens
acted as tiny outposts that furthered the ecological and cultural ambition of
newcomers to the North.
The relative success of community gardening in the northern boreal fringe
provided at least part of the inspiration for attempts to extend the agricultural
frontier into northern Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The boom in wheat production on the southern prairies from 1896 to 1913,
combined with concerns over the declining availability of quality agricultural
land for new settlers, also provided a strong impetus for governments to promote
colonization in the northern reaches of the western and central Canadian
provinces. As early as the 1880s the Dominion government’s Department of the
Interior began to investigate the agricultural settlement potential of northern
regions such as the Peace River District and the Mackenzie River Valley.83 Several
provincial governments similarly encouraged agricultural colonization in the
boreal fringe north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, the Little Clay Belt
surrounding the Témiscamingue region on the Ontario-Quebec border, the Swan
River Valley in the Interlake region of Manitoba, and the so-called Great Clay Belt
centered on Cochrane, Ontario and the Abitibi region of Quebec.84 Provincial and
Dominion government publications promoting northern settlement were effusive
in their praise of these fertile belts, in many cases predicting the steady advance
of agrarian civilization into the northern reaches of the country.85 Although there
were some government field agents who countered the optimism of their superiors
with decidedly skeptical reports of farming frontiers in the Ontario Clay Belt or
the Peace River Valley, senior government officials continued to promote and
support northern agricultural settlement until shortly after World War II through
land grants, transportation infrastructure, experimental farms, land clearance
programs, and the provision of community services.86 The Dominion and
provincial governments pursued their northern colonization programs for a
variety of reasons, ranging from a broad ideological commitment to the expansion
of agrarian civilization as a natural course in the evolution of Canada’s national
destiny (an idea that was echoed in particularly strong terms among Quebec
nationalists) to specific policy goals such as the resettlement of soldiers following
World War I or provision of land and farm employment to those displaced by the
economic and ecological turmoil of the Great Depression.87
The success of agriculture in the boreal regions of northern Canada was
limited, however, when measured against the unbridled optimism of northern
colonization advocates. From the 1930s to mid-century, populations in the newly
settled areas abruptly rose and then fell as farms failed and provincial
governments abandoned the onerous expenses associated with state-sponsored
colonization programs. Between 1930 and 1936, for instance, roughly 45,000
people journeyed to the boreal woodlands beyond Prince Albert to begin a new
life in northern Saskatchewan as part of a government-sponsored resettlement
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scheme meant to mitigate the worst impacts of drought and Depression on the
southern prairies. Some found good land to farm, but for most the arduous process
of clearing the forest and the frequent failure of crops due to frost limited the
size and productivity of farms to the barest subsistence level. By 1939 there were
only six hundred farms remaining in the region.88 The depopulation of Great Clay
Belt of Ontario and Quebec took slightly longer but was no less spectacular. Farm
populations surrounding Cochrane and the Abitibi region fell from 55,000 in the
early 1950s to approximately five thousand people in the early 1980s.89 The
relative downfall of the northern farmer has its roots in the economic
disadvantages typically associated with hinterland enterprises: long distances
from major markets, the high cost of imported supplies and machinery, a lack of
local processing facilities, the vagaries of international commodity prices, and
in some cases a lack of good transportation networks.90 The ecological constraints
associated with the northern boreal environment presented even more serious
obstacles to the agricultural colonization of the region. Although many early
observers remarked on the surprisingly favorable summer climate and long
periods of daylight in the great northern river valleys, in reality frost-free periods
ranging from just over ninety down to sixty-five days per year provided a narrow
window for the production of cereal crops such as wheat and barley. Compounding
this problem was the fact that random night frosts throughout the sub-Arctic
forest region could kill off seedlings in the spring or destroy grains and vegetables
as they reached maturity.91 Early promises of abundant fertile soils also turned
out to be hollow. The grey wooded soils of northern Alberta and the clay soils of
northern Quebec, Manitoba, and Ontario often lacked sufficient quantities of key
nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. These soil types also
suffered from drainage problems in many areas as hard clay formed in the subsurface layers below. Low crop yields and poor quality crops were often the result.
The fertile land base was also discontinuous in many boreal regions, particularly
in the Clay Belts where Precambrian rock outcroppings and much larger tracts
of nonarable land broke the landscape into small and isolated patches, hardly
the basis for a broad and constantly advancing frontier line of agricultural
settlement.92 By the post-World War II era, the dream of an expansive agriculture
civilization extending throughout the northern provinces and through the length
of the Mackenzie drainage system had largely died.
Yet the brevity of the northern farmer’s tenure in the boreal woodlands did
not mean that the departing settlers left no mark on the landscape. The clearing
of land and the cultivation of non-Native agricultural plants brought about major
environmental transformations in the regions subject to northern settlement
drives. The number of farms that had been carved out of the boreal forest in
northern Ontario was close to three thousand in the Cochrane region in 1941 and
seven thousand near the Abitibi region of Quebec in the early 1950s. All of these
settlers typically felled trees, burned forests, and seeded alien grasses in an effort
to stabilize exposed soils in advance of crop plantings.93 In Saskatchewan the
deforestation associated with farm clearance and prospecting in the northern
edge of the boreal forest destroyed large tracts of prime winter caribou habitat in
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the 1930s. This, combined with the hunting and fishing activities of a large settler
population that was often desperate for food, severely depleted local wildlife
populations and crippled the subsistence economy of local Aboriginal people.94
Further to the west, agricultural settlement left a more permanent mark on the
landscape. In Alberta, settlement in the Peace River country increased tenfold
from two thousand to twenty thousand individuals between 1911 and 1921,
particularly after a rail line from Edmonton to the head of navigation on the Peace
River was completed in 1914. Extremely bountiful wheat crops in 1926 and 1927,
a decline in shipping costs, and international awards given to Peace River wheat
and oats in 1926 helped solidify the image of the region as the next great
agricultural frontier. By 1931 the population of the Peace River country had grown
to more than fifty thousand people living on close to seven thousand farms.95
Further settlement rushes in the 1960s and 1980s resulted in more clearing of
forest and more conversion of grasslands to cultivated landscapes. Today the
Peace River country remains the most visible pocket of Neo-European agriculture
within Canada’s boreal fringe.96 Over the broad extent of the boreal fringe, farm
failure and depopulation was balanced to an extent by the consolidation of smaller
landholdings into larger and more economically viable agricultural operations.
Thus even today marginal and sometimes isolated farming areas remain
interspersed among the region’s vast forested area. Further to the north in the
Mackenzie Valley, the same patchwork of small gardens and marginal animal
husbandry operations are spread throughout the region as over a century ago.97
In 1936 the historian A. R. M. Lower optimistically described the Canadian
frontier moving northward “not as a line but as a series of expanding circles.”98
Three decades later, it was clear that the economic and ecological constraints on
northern farming had caused many of these frontier nuclei to contract, remain
static, or simply disappear. While there has certainly been a major expansion of
non-Native economic activity in the sub-Arctic, particularly forestry, mining, and
fossil fuel extraction, the ecological transformation of the region through the
introduction of European plants remains limited in scope, confined to a few
islands of European colonization that more closely replicate the dramatic
transformations associated with the process of ecological imperialism further
to the south. Such a scattered archipelago of farming activity did not, as Lower
suggested, represent the vanguard of new colonial frontier based on agricultural
settlement. It did nevertheless produce important environmental changes on a
local scale, propping up European institutions such as the fur trade and
missionary work in some instances, and wholly transforming small sections of
the sub-Arctic forest into islands of Neo-European agriculture and settlement
within a much larger landscape devoted to primary resource extraction and the
hunting and trapping cultures of northern Aboriginal people.
CONCLUSION
OVER THE PAST THREE DECADES, environmental historians have tended to
equate colonial environmental change with the radical transformation of New
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World environments. Although many of the canonical texts within the field have
refined Crosby’s theory to place more emphasis on economic and cultural factors
as important agents of environmental change in colonial environments, few have
questioned the assumption that the process of ecological imperialism in North
America produced environmental change only in the temperate zones with no
discernible effect in other regions.99 And yet the three most prominent pillars of
ecological imperialism—invasive plants, animals, and diseases—were clearly
present in the nontemperate Canadian North; each produced environmental
changes that aided the process of colonization in the region. Many of the impacts
of invasive species in the Canadian North were similar to those in the temperate
latitudes: European plants and livestock provided a subsistence base for settlers
in the boreal fringe, semi-domesticated European animals were introduced as a
means to provide Aboriginal people with a more settled and civilized occupation,
and diseases undermined the traditional cultures of the region’s Aboriginal
people. Although few of these northern portmanteau biota produced broad-scale
environmental changes (and almost none other than disease produced any effect
at all in the tundra region north of the tree line), their introduction to the region
did allow for the creation of a disaggregated network of Neo-European settlement
and ecological transformation throughout the Canadian North. The evidence from
Canada’s North further emphasizes how Crosby’s broad biogeographical strokes
drawn principally according to climate (temperate vs. tropical, Arctic, alpine,
desert settings) are only broadly accurate. Just as there were significant local
successes in the North, there were also likely significant local failures in
temperate environments, a better understanding of which has largely fallen by
the wayside as scholars have embraced Crosby’s approach.100 In order to better
understand the process of ecological imperialism in both temperate and
nontemperate settings, it is thus crucial to analyze the various combinations of
factors that acted to precipitate localized and broad-scale ecological changes
across different regional environments.
If the environmental history of the Canadian North suggests that ecological
imperialism need not be synonymous with the creation of a contiguous NeoEuropean landscape, what, then, are the broader implications for our
understanding of colonial environmental change in Canada as a whole? The boreal
forest and Arctic tundra regions of Canada cover well over half the landmass of
the country. Throughout much of this territory, it was the relatively small-scale
and discrete pockets of European presence—particularly the expanding network
of interior fur trade posts—that facilitated the advance of European colonial
interests throughout much of Canada’s early colonial history. The successive and
marginally successful attempt to colonize the sub-Arctic in the nineteenth and
twentieth century repeated this sporadic process of ecological imperialism in a
pattern that was to become dominant over much of the landscape during the late
period of colonial expansion in Canada. Broader and more encompassing
transformations of colonial environments into relatively extensive Neo-Europes
were much more rare in Canada, limited to relatively discrete temperate areas
such as the southern Prairies, southern Ontario, the St. Lawrence Valley, and
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Prince Edward Island. In much of Canada’s landmass, there has never been a
steady and expanding frontier line of colonization and attendant environmental
transformation. Ecological imperialism instead proceeded as a variable and
erratic process over much of Canada’s land base, producing a sprawling but
inconsistent archipelago of social and environmental change within a much
broader landscape that defied and limited the incursions of human and nonhuman
European invaders.
Piper
Liza Pi
per is assistant professor of history at the University of Alberta in
Edmonton. She is currently researching and writing on disease and environmental
change in the Mackenzie and Yukon river basins after 1860. She has published
articles on northern uranium and gold mining and climate in colonial New
Sandl
andlos
Brunswick. John S
andl
os is assistant professor of history at Memorial University
of Newfoundland, where he is studies the history of the Canadian conservation
movement and the environmental history of the northern Canada. He is the author
of Hunters at the Margin: Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (UBC
Press, 2007).
NOTES
Both authors would like to thank Alan MacEachern, Matthew Evenden, Mark Cioc,
and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and thoughtful
stewardship of this article. Special thanks to Eric Leinberger in the Department
of Geography at the University of British Columbia for drafting the maps and to
Luise Hermanutz of the Memorial Biology Department for her advice on boreal
invasives. Research for this article was supported through the postdoctoral
fellowship programs of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada and the Izaak Walton Killam Endowment Fund.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Charles Mair, Through the Mackenzie Basin: A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace
River Treaty Expedition of 1899 (Toronto: Briggs, 1908), 148.
John Schultz, “Report of the Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Inquire into
the Resources of the Great Mackenzie Basin.” Appendix I, Journals of the Senate of
Canada, 1888; J. W. Tyrrell, “Report on the Country North and East of Great Slave Lake,”
1901. RG 85, vol. 1087, file 401-22, pt. 1, Library and Archives Canada [hereafter LAC];
Ernest J. Chambers, ed. Canada’s Fertile Northland: A Glimpse of the Enormous
Resources of Part of the Unexplored Regions of the Dominion (Ottawa: Government
Printing Bureau, 1907).
For a description of vegetation, soils, and climate in Canada’s tundra and boreal forests,
see Geoffrey A. J. Scott, Canada’s Vegetation: A World Perspective (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1995), 31-120. The limits of the northern prairie agricultural
frontier are discussed on 128-35.
Morris Zaslow, The Opening of the Canadian North, 1870-1914 (Toronto: McClelland
and Steward, 1971); Morris Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada, 1914-1967
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1988).
For an anthology of essays on the North that examines various applications of Zaslow’s
main themes, see Kenneth S. Coates and William R. Morrison, eds. For the Purposes
of Dominion: Essays in Honour of Morris Zaslow (Toronto: Captus Press, 1989). See,
783
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ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 12 (OCTOBER 2007)
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
also, William R. Morrison, Showing the Flag: The Mounted Police and Canadian
Sovereignty in the North, 1894-1925 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1985); Shelagh Grant,
Sovereignty or Security? Government Policy in the Canadian North, 1936-1950
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1988); William R. Morrison and Kenneth Coates, Working the
North: Labor and the Northwest Defense Projects, 1942-1946 (Fairbanks: University of
Alaska Press, 1994). For the history of colonization in the middle north, see Ken Coates
and William Morrison, The Forgotten North: A History of Canada’s Provincial Norths
(Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1992).
Crosby’s earliest work emphasized the successful exchange of different organisms
between the New and Old Worlds. In a 1976 article he focused on disease and virginsoil epidemics and this emphasis likely led to the more unequal exchanges detailed in
his best-known work, Ecological Imperialism. See Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian
Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Publishing Co., 1972); Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the
Depopulation of the Americas,” The William and Mary Quarterly 33 (April 1976): 28999; and Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe,
900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Only in the Yukon, where they make up only 22.9 percent of the territorial population,
have Aboriginal people been relegated to a demographic minority in the Canadian
North. Statistics Canada. 2001 Census of Canada: Analysis Series. Aboriginal Peoples
of Canada: A Demographic Profile (Ottawa: Industry Canada, 2003). Electronic tables
accessible at http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/
companion/abor/canada.cfm, release date, January 21, 2003. Similarly, as of 2005,
Native people in Alaska comprised only 16 percent of the state population, the second
largest racial group after whites. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “State and County Quick
Facts,” http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/02000.html release date, January 12,
2007.
Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 36-40, 305.
Ibid., 36.
Peter A. Coates, “Improving on ‘A Paradise of Game’: Ecological Impacts, Game
Management, and Alaska’s Buffalo Transplant,” The Western Historical Quarterly 28
(Summer 1997): 133-59; Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice: A South
African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
William Beinart and Karen Middleton, “Plant Transfers in Historical Perspective: A
Review Article,” Environment and History 10 (2004): 3-29, quotation on 23.
John F. Marchand, “Tribal Epidemics in the Yukon,” Journal of the American Medical
Association 123 (1943): 1019-20; Julie Cruikshank, “The Gravel Magnet: Some Social
Impacts of the Alaska Highway on Yukon Indians,” in The Alaska Highway: Papers of
the 40th Anniversary Symposium, ed. K. Coates (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1985), 172-87.
A. F. W. Peart and F. P. Nagler, “Measles in the Canadian Arctic, 1952,” Canadian Journal
of Public Health 44 (April 1954): 146-56, quotation on 154.
Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 196-97.
Henry F. Dobyns, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population
Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983);
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1976); Paul
Hackett, A Very Remarkable Sickness: Epidemics in the Petit Nord, 1670-1846
(Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2002); Robert T. Boyd, The Coming of the
Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among
Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999); Theodore Binnema,
Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the
Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001); R. Cole Harris,
“Voices of Disaster: Smallpox Around the Straight of Georgia in 1782,” Ethnohistory
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16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
41 (1994): 591-626; Jody Decker, “‘We Should Never Be Again the Same People’: The
Diffusion and Cumulative Impact of Acute Infectious Diseases Affecting the Natives
of the Northern Plains of the Western Interior of Canada, 1774-1839,” (PhD diss., York
University, 1989).
Tapeworms including Diphyllobothrium latum found in the flesh of freshwater fish
predated European arrivals. Robert Fortuine examines the health of the Alaska native
peoples before, at the time of, and shortly after contact in part 1 of Chills and Fever:
Health and Disease in the Early History of Alaska (Fairbanks: University of Alaska
Press, 1989). Robert Boyd discusses precontact diseases and treponemata and
mycobacteria in particular in Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, 9-13, 15 (Table 2), 6163.
There was also, of course, the Norse landfall on the northern peninsula of
Newfoundland c. 1000 CE. Precisely dated records appear in 1770, when smallpox
spread north from the Stikine among the Tlingit people into Alaska and the Yukon.
Oral history may bear witness to earlier epidemics. Fortuine, Chills and Fever, 227;
Julie Cruikshank, “Glaciers and Climate Change: Perspectives from Oral Tradition,”
Arctic 54 (December 2001): 384.
Samuel Hearne, A journey from Prince of Wale’s fort, in Hudson’s Bay, to the Northern
Ocean. Undertaken by order of the Hudson’s Bay company. For the discovery of copper
mines, a North West passage, &c. in the year 1769, 1770, 1771, & 1772 (London: A. Strahan
and T. Cadell; sold by T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1795), 178. The estimate of “ninetenths” and the range of this particular epidemic has been debated and will remain so
in the absence of northern post records or equivalent documents from the 1780s. See
Shepard Krech III, “The Influence of Disease and the Fur Trade on Arctic Drainage
Lowlands Dene, 1800-1850,” Journal of Anthropological Research 39 (Summer 1983):
126; Jody Decker, “Tracing Historical Diffusion Patterns: The Case of the 1780-82
Smallpox Epidemic Among the Indians of Western Canada,” Native Studies Review 4
(1988): 1-24; and J. Decker, “Depopulation of the Northern Plains Natives,” Social
Scienceand Medicine 33 (1991): 382, for a description and assessment of the value of
HBC post records.
John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819,
20, 21, and 22 (London: John Murray, 1823), 137, 158; Krech, “Disease and the Fur Trade,”
127-28; Hackett, A Very Remarkable Sickness, 199, chap. 7; Renée Fossett, In Order to
Live Untroubled: Inuit of the Central Arctic, 1550-1940 (Winnipeg: University of
Manitoba Press, 2001), 159; Boyd, Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, 145-60.
Richard I. Ruggles, “Exploration in the Far Northwest” and D. Wayne Moodie, Victor P.
Lytwyn, and Barry Kaye, “Trading Posts, 1774-1821,” in Historical Atlas of Canada vol.
1, ed. Geoffrey J. Matthews and R. Cole Harris (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1987), plates 67 and 62; Peter J. Usher, Fur Trade Posts of the Northwest Territories
1870-1970 (Ottawa: Northern Science Research Group, 1971); Decker, “Depopulation
of the Northern Plains Natives,” 382 (Table 2), 388; Shepard Krech III, “Disease,
Starvation, and Northern Athapaskan Social Organization,” American Ethnologist 5
(1978): 713-14.
June Helm argued that female infanticide had, prior to the arrival of Europeans, acted
as a significant check upon sub-Arctic populations. Although epidemic disease did
bring new fatalities to the region in the nineteenth century, the end of female
infanticide (apparent in changed sex and age distribution within the census data, and
from anecdotal evidence) ensured that populations were maintained. In response,
Shepard Krech asserted that the scale and intensity of epidemics among the Dene, as
well as evidence of local depopulation, indicated broad demographic collapse. See June
Helm, “Female Infanticide, European Diseases, and Population Levels among the
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ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 12 (OCTOBER 2007)
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
Mackenzie Dene,” American Ethnologist 7 (1980): 259-85, and Krech, “Disease and
the Fur Trade,” “Disease, Starvation, and Northern Athapaskan Social Organization.”
For a discussion of the depopulating effects of disease amongst the Inughuit see Rolf
Gilberg, “The Polar Eskimo Population, Thule District, North Greenland,” Meddelelser
om Grønland 203 (1976): 1-87; and discussion in Lyle Dick, Muskox Land: Ellesmere
Island in the Age of Contact (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2001), 401-05.
For a discussion of the relationship of ecological disruption to disease, see Krech,
“Disease, Starvation, and Northern Athapaskan Social Organization,” 711, 718-24;
Krech, “Disease and the Fur Trade,” 132, 135-38; and June Helm, “Bilaterality in the SocioTerritorial Organization of the Arctic Drainage Dene,” Ethnology 4 (1965): 351-85.
Krech, “Disease, Starvation, and Northern Athapaskan Social Organization,” 714;
Hackett, A Very Remarkable Sickness, 187-89, 240.
Epidemics manifested in the North in each decade after 1850 until the end of the
century. Many of these remain unidentified, others included scarlet fever (1862-1864,
1865, 1897), diphtheria (1880s), dysentery (1851, 1899), smallpox (1850, 1862), typhoid
(1855, 1898), typhus (1892), and influenza (1889, 1893, 1896). See Fort Simpson
(Mackenzie River) B.200/b/32 fos. 39-51& 96, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives
(hereafter HBCA); Émile Petitot, Quinze ans sous le Cercle Polaire (Paris: E. Dentu,
1889), 103; Arctic Red River, NWT (St-Nom de Marie) Codex Historicus (hereafter SNM)
1892, 1893, 1896, Acc.: 97.109, Item: 1898, vol. 1, Provincial Archives of Alberta
(hereafter PAA); Dick, Muskox Land, 400-401; Cruikshank, “Glaciers and Climate
Change,” 384; Krech, “Disease, Starvation, and Northern Athapaskan Social
Organization,” 712-15.
See Hackett, A Very Remarkable Sickness, Introduction; and Boyd, Coming of the
Spirit of Pestilence, chap. 1, for definitions of terms; Linda A. Newson, “A HistoricalEcological Perspective on Epidemic Disease,” in Advances in Historical Ecology, ed.
William Balée (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 48-49; McNeill, Plagues
and Peoples, chap. 5.
As in the nineteenth century, problems with the identification of disease outbreaks
continued in the twentieth century. Outbreaks of known diseases aside from those
described in detail in the text include influenza (1935, 1943, 1944, 1946, 1948, 1950,
1956); measles (1900, 1902, 1916, 1935, 1948); whooping cough (1918, 1919, 1925-1926);
dysentery (1900); diphtheria (1907, 1923-1924); typhoid (1902-1903, 1918, 1920).
Smallpox was rare but certainly appeared in the west in 1900, arriving on board the
steamers at Nome and spreading to Dawson in the Yukon. See Smallpox in the Yukon
1900-1912, RG 29, vol. 2, file 937013 Parts 1 & 2, LAC.
“Influenza Among Eskimo in the Arctic,” May-June 1919 correspondence, RG 18, vol.
567, file G6, LAC; Mission Diary, January 29, 1919, St. Peter Hay River, Great Slave
Lake, Anglican Diocese of the Mackenzie 70.387, MR 4/1c, (hereafter SPHR), PAA. For
details on the Spanish influenza in Alaska, see Matt L. Ganley, “The Dispersal of the
1918 Influenza Virus on the Seward Peninsula, Alaska: An Ethnohistoric
Reconstruction,” in Circumpolar Health 96: Proceedings of the Tenth International
Congress on Circumpolar Health, May 19-24, 1996, Anchorage, Alaska, ed. Robert
Fortuine and George A. Conway (Anchorage: American Society for Circumpolar Health,
1998): 247-51; Ronald L. Lautaret, “Alaska’s Greatest Disaster: The 1918 Spanish
Influenza Epidemic,” Alaska Journal 16 (1986): 283-43; Alfred W. Crosby, America’s
Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 241-57.
Julie Cruikshank and Lyle Dick both claim that the Spanish influenza did not arrive in
the Yukon and the Thule district of the High Arctic until 1920-1921. High fatalities and
proximity in time to the 1918 pandemic are not conclusive evidence, however, that
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29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
these were outbreaks of Spanish influenza, particularly in the absence of information
regarding the distribution of cases and fatalities. In Dawson City, for example, a
relatively mild outbreak of influenza in the spring of 1919 led Maureen Lux to
distinguish this influenza from the Spanish influenza, which she argues never reached
Dawson. See Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story, 130, n.62; Dick, Muskox Land, 40102; and M. K. Lux, “Disease and Growth of Dawson City: The Seamy Underside of a
Legend,” The Northern Review 3 (1989): 96-117. In the Yukon in 1918 several outbreaks
led to 125 cases of influenza and 11 deaths. Department of Indian Affairs, Government
of Canada, Annual Report 1920, 28. For influenza in the Mackenzie region in 19201921, see Interview of Noel MacKay, September 20, 1978, James M. Parker fonds, 8246, box 2, file 66, University of Alberta Archives (hereafter UAA); Daily Journal of
Activities—St. Paul’s—Fort Chipewyan, Anglican Diocese of Athabasca, 1920-21
(hereafter SPFC), A. 13, item # 11, box 14, PAA.
For descriptions of the 1928 Mackenzie epidemic, see Influenza Epidemic at Good
Hope, Norman, and Simpson, 1928, RG 85, vol. 789, file 6099, LAC; 12-22 July 1928,
SNM, PAA; excerpts from Chick Ferguson, Mink, Mary and Me, Account of Father
Antoine Binamé, OMI, at Fort Good Hope, Charles Parker, “Report for the year 1928,
submitted to the Department of Indian Affairs,” as printed in René Fumoleau, As Long
as this Land Shall Last: A History of Treaty 8 and Treaty 11, 1870-1939 (Toronto:
McClelland and Stewart, 1975), 362, 460-74.
C. E. van Rooyen, L. McClelland, and E. K. Campbell, “Influenza in Canada during 1949,
Including an Account of a Severe Epidemic at Cambridge Bay, Victoria Island, N.W.T.,
Interim Report to the Defence Research Board Being Part of Influenza Research Done
Under Grant D.R.B. 82,” RG 29, vol. 1192, file 311-J2-2, Part 1, LAC.
J. F. Moran wrote from Fort Norman in the midst of the 1928 epidemic: “The Indians
have no resistance whatever.” John Marchand, a physician who detailed the Alaska
Highway epidemics in 1943, drew the important distinction between mistaken
perceptions among locals that Indians lacked resistance to disease in general, and
their specific vulnerability to introduced crowd infections. Peart and Nagler made
reference to the “virgin native population” as a condition that accounted for the
virulence, short incubation period, and high adult mortality in the 1952 measles
outbreak. See Extract from Mr. J. F. Moran’s letter dated at Fort Norman 7th July 1928,
File 5979; Finnie to Starnes, Commissioner, RCMP, Ottawa, August 4, 1928 both in RG
85 C-1-a vol 789 file 6099, LAC; Peart and Nagler, 155; Marchand, 1020. Crosby,
Ecological Imperialism, 196-97.
Van Rooyen, McClelland, and Campbell, “Influenza in Canada during 1949,” 9. See,
also, Marchand, “Tribal Epidemics,” 1020.
For further discussion of the significance of new influenza viruses, see Hackett, A
Very Remarkable Sickness, 179-80.
The usefulness of the term “virgin soil epidemics” in general must be questioned for,
as David Jones has argued, it is profoundly loaded with implications of “purity
infiltrated and destroyed by corruption.” These connotations are particularly
problematic in reference to northern environments and peoples who are frequently
misrepresented as primitive and pure. David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” The
William and Mary Quarterly 60 (October 2003): 703-42. Crosby first employed the term
“virgin soil” to describe epidemics “in which the populations at risk have had no
previous contact with the diseases that strike them and are therefore immunologically
almost defenseless.” Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics,” 289.
Measles and influenza arrived in Alaska in 1900-1901—the latter on board the
steamships traveling north to the Alaskan goldfields and the former from Vladivostok
via the Trans-Siberian railroad—bringing unparalleled hardship to the people of Alaska.
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36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
For detailed discussion of this epidemic, see Robert J. Wolfe, “Alaska’s Great Sickness,
1900: An Epidemic of Measles and Influenza in a Virgin Soil Population,” Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society 126 (April 1982): 91-121; Fortuine, Chills and
Fever, 215-226. For discussions of disease synergy in the Ungava epidemic see Peart
and Nagler, “Measles in the Canadian Arctic, 1952,” 155. See Van Rooyen, McClelland,
and Campbell, “Influenza in Canada during 1949,” for a similar assessment of the role
of “secondary invading micro-organisms” in the Cambridge Bay outbreak.
For a particularly graphic description of the role of tuberculosis in aggravating the
effects of influenza, see Inspector Kemp to Officer Commanding, August 30, 1928, RG
85, vol. 789, file 6099, LAC. For descriptions of nineteenth-century tuberculosis, see
C. F. Hall, Arctic researches and life among the Esquimaux: being the narrative of an
expedition in search of Sir John Franklin, in the years 1860, 1861 and 1862 (New York:
Harper, 1865), 335; “Journal Mackenzies River alias Rocky Mountain 1800-1” [John
Thomson], 5-31 December 1800, in North of Athabasca: Slave Lake and Mackenzie River
Documents of the North West Company 1800-1821, ed. Lloyd Keith (Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2001), 144, 151; Fort St. Mary B.190/a/3 fos.1, 14 and
Fort Vermillion B.224/e/1 fo.3, HBCA as cited in Krech, “Disease and the Fur Trade,”
127. Records from missions in the Mackenzie District showing cause of death
dramatically illustrate the pervasiveness of tuberculosis and its devastating effects,
in killing youth especially, in northern communities. See Register of Burials, 18941938, SPHR, PAA. For discussions in the historical literature, see Hackett, A Very
Remarkable Sickness, 243; Cruikshank, “Glaciers and Climate Change,” 384. See Pat
Sandiford Grygier, A Long Way from Home: The Tuberculosis Epidemic among the
Inuit (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), for details of the
epidemic in the twentieth century. Fortuine and Boyd both discuss the forms of
tuberculosis indigenous to the Americas and possibly found among northern
populations prior to contact. Boyd notes the first case of tuberculosis in the Pacific
Northwest in 1793. Boyd, Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence, 61-62, 78-83; Fortuine,
Chills and Fever, 103, 256-7.
See November and December entries, “Journal” [John Thomson], for an early
nineteenth-century instance when a shortage of hares (likely cyclical) corresponded
to a period of sickness, in North of Athabasca, 143-45. Prior to and during the 1928
influenza outbreak in the Mackenzie district there were reports that game and furbearers were scarce. See C. Bourget, Health Officer, Medical Report for the Great Slave
Lake Agency, from June to September 1, 1928, RG 85, vol. 789, file 6099, LAC; J. R. Bell,
Diary and Field Notebook Great Slave Lake Trip, August 3, 1928, RG 45 GSC vol. 182,
NS 1182, LAC. For discussion of the relationships between malnutrition and disease,
see Robert Dirks, “Famine and Disease,” in Cambridge World History of Human
Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993),
157-63; Newson, “An Historical-Ecological Perspective,” 53.
In the 1928 epidemic, three Inuit at Shingle Point, their immune systems weakened
by influenza, died from eating poisoned whale meat. They ate old whale meat because
of a shortage of fresh meat. J. H. Pearson, Report, Herschel Island, September 18, 1928,
RG 85, vol. 789, file 6099, LAC. For an earlier example, see August 5, 1807, W. F. Wentzel,
“A Continuation of the Journal of the Forks Mackenzies River for Summer 1807,” in
North of Athabasca, 303.
Helge Ingstad was one such trapper and described his and his neighbor’s experiences
with influenza in the summer of 1928 in Land of Feast and Famine, trans. Eugene GayTifft (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1933), 149-55.
Commissioner NWT, August 1, 1928, RG 85, vol. 789 file 6099, LAC; Angela Sidney’s
description of the 1942-1943 Alaska Highway epidemics emphasizes the lack of
appropriate medical care, Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story, 134. See also Kerry Abel,
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41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1993), 197.
Helm, “Female infanticide,” 270; Bureau of Statistics, Yukon Statistical Profile
(Whitehorse: Executive Council Office, n.d.), Table 2.4 “Yukon Population Figures, by
Census Years, Yukon and Communities, (1901-1981).” The critical community size
required for crowd diseases to become endemic is estimated (for isolated communities)
at 48,000 for scarlet fever, 106,000 for whooping cough, and 250,000 for measles.
(Figures from Hackett, A Very Remarkable Sickness, 8). No northern community has
yet reached such size.
George Blondin, Yamoria the Lawmaker: Stories of the Dene (Edmonton: NeWest Press,
1997); George Blondin, When the World was New: Stories of the Sahtu Dene
(Yellowknife: Outcrop 1990); Margaret M. Thom, Ethel Blondin-Townsend, and Tessa
Mackintosh Wah-Shee, Nahecho-Keh–Our Elders (Slavey Research Project, 1997).
Dogrib also abandoned villages that had thrived during the height of the fur trade
along the portage route between Great Slave and Great Bear lakes. The Mackenzie
River, instead, became the principal commercial highway. “Village beside Nidzii,”
Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, Lessons from the Land: A Cultural Journey
Through the Northwest Territories, www.lessonsfromtheland.ca/LandTrail.asp?SiteID
=S02&lng=English.
Burke G. Vanderhill, “The Passing of the Pioneer Fringe in Western Canada,”
Geographical Review 72 (April 1982): 200-17; Henry M. Leppard, “The Settlement of
the Peace River Country,” Geographical Review 25 (January 1935): 62-78.
See Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada, 43-45; Donald Wetherell and Irene
R.A. Kmet, Alberta’s North: A History, 1890-1950 (Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press, 2000), 166-67.
See Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada, 43-44.
Frank Tough, As Their Natural Resources Fail: Native Peoples and the Economic History
of Northern Manitoba, 1870-1930 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1996), 170-71.
For an overview of cattle ranching in the Peace River district, see Wetherell and Kmet,
Alberta’s North, 166-67. For an overview of significant settlement periods in the region,
see Vanderhill, “The Passing of the Pioneer Fringe in Western Canada,” 208.
The livestock numbers were derived from Northern Alberta Development Council,
“Agriculture in Northern Alberta,” Discussion Paper. (September 1978), 24-28.
For a summary of attempts to raise cattle in northern Canada, see William Dickson,
“Northern Agriculture,” in The New North-West, ed. Carl A. Dawson (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1947), 168-69.
Northwest Territories Agriculture: State of the Industry, 2000, a report prepared for
the Territories Farmer’s Association, NWT (2000).
For an overview of these experiments, see C. Gordon Hewitt, The Conservation of the
Wild Life of Canada (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 136-42.
Maxwell Graham, Canada’s Wild Buffalo: Observation in the Wood Buffalo Park
(Ottawa, Department of the Interior, 1923), 12.
Maxwell Graham, “Finding Range for Canada’s Buffalo,” The Canadian Field-Naturalist,
38 (Dec. 1924), 189.
For an overview of the bison slaughters and the Wainwright transfer program, see
Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006); Patricia A. McCormack, “The Political Economy of Bison
Management in Wood Buffalo National Park,” Arctic 454 (December 1992): 367-80;
John Sandlos, “Where the Scientists Roam: Ecology, Management and Bison in
Northern Canada,” Journal of Canadian Studies 37 (Summer 2002): 93-129; John
Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the
Northwest Territories (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).
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56. U.S. Department of the Interior, Report on the Work of the Bureau and Education for
the Natives of Alaska, 1915-16, Bureau of Education Bulletin No. 32 (1917), 8. A copy
was found in RG 10, vol. 6818, file 488-4-4, pt. 1, LAC. For a historical overview of
reindeer herding in Alaska, see Margaret Lantis, “The Reindeer Industry in Alaska,”
Arctic 3 (1950): 27-44; and J. Sonnenfeld, “An Arctic Reindeer Industry: Growth and
Decline,” Geographical Review 49 (January 1959): 76-94.
57. Stefansson ultimately thought that muskoxen ranching had far more potential than
reindeer introductions, but he found that he could make more headway with politicians
by tying the two projects together. For a summary of his ideas, see Vilhjalmur
Stefansson, “Possible new Domestic Animals for Cold Countries.” This memo was
originally sent to Sir Richard McBride on February 9, 1917. A copy that Hewitt
forwarded to Harkin on November 28, 1918, was found in RG 85, vol. 1203, file 401-3,
pt. 1, LAC. See, also, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Northward Course of Empire (New
York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1922). For an overview of Stefansson’s lobbying
activities on the issue of Arctic ranching, see Richard Diubaldo’s, Stefansson and the
Canadian Arctic (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978), 137-42.
58. The reindeer were purchased from Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, a medical missionary who
had imported 250 Norwegian reindeer to St. Anthony in northern Newfoundland to
provide a source of food for local fishermen. See “Summary of Report of Experiment
in Connection with the Introduction of Reindeer into the North West Territories by
the Department of the Interior in 1911 (Location of the Herd at Fort Smith on the Slave
River),” Appendix No. V11, in John Gunion Rutherford, James Stanley McLean, and
James Bernard Harkin, Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Possibilities
of the Reindeer and Musk-ox Industries in the Arctic and Sub-arctic Regions of Canada
(Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1922). The reasons for the failure of the Fort Smith project are
also discussed in a letter from Grenfell to Henry T. Ford, Great Whale Post, Hudson’s
Bay Company, August 6, 1916, RG 10, vol. 4062, file 398446-1, LAC.
59. The purpose of the reindeer program is outlined in a letter from Scott to Arthur
Meighen, December 9, 1919, RG 10, vol. 4062, file 398746-1, LAC. The reindeer were
transferred to Anticosti Island in 1923. For a record of the transfer, see Martin-Zede to
O.S. Finnie, Director, Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch, August 30, 1923, RG
10, vol. 4062, file 398746-3, LAC. The last known sighting of a reindeer on the island
was on 1949. They may have died out shortly after that due to disease. For an overview,
see George W. Scotter, “Reindeer Ranching in Canada,” Journal of Range Management
25 (May 1972): 167-74.
60. The reasons for the failure of the Baffin Island reindeer project are outlined in a letter
from H. R. Charlewood, secretary-treasurer, Hudson Bay Reindeer Company, to Duncan
Campbell Scott, March 13, 1925, RG 10, vol. 4062, file 398746-3, LAC. For a general
overview, see Scotter, “Reindeer Ranching in Canada,” 167-68. For Stefansson’s role,
see Diubaldo, Stefansson and the Canadian Arctic, 152-60.
61. Rutherford, McLean, and Harkin, Report of the Royal Commission to Investigate the
Possibilities of the Reindeer and Musk-ox Industries.
62. In 1929 the Danish botanist, Alf Erling Porsild reported that ranges in the Mackenzie
Delta and adjacent Arctic Coast could comfortably accommodate 250,000 animals. A.
E. Porsild, Reindeer Grazing in Northwest Canada: Report of an Investigation of
Pastoral Possibilities in the Area from the Alaska-Yukon Boundary to Coppermine
River (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1929).
63. See O. S. Finnie, director, Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch to W. W. Cory, July
21, 1926, RG 85, vol. 765, file 5095, pt. 1, LAC. For a published overview of the
Department of the Interior’s agenda with respect to the Mackenzie Delta reindeer
project, see Alf Erling Porsild, “The Reindeer Industry and the Canadian Eskimo,” The
Geographical Journal 88 (July 1936): 1-17.
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64. Notice of the arrival is contained in a telegram from Porsild to J. Lorne Turner, chair
of the Dominion Lands Board, February 24, 1935, RG 85, vol. 765, file 5095, pt. 1, LAC.
For a descriptions of the reindeer drive, see George W. Scotter, “How Andy Bahr led
the Great Reindeer Herd from Western Alaska to the Mackenzie Delta,” Canadian
Geographic 97 (October/November 1978): 12-19, and Dick North, Arctic Exodus: the
Last Great Trail Drive (Toronto: MacMillan, 1991).
65. See the report, “Native Herd 1: Anderson River Area,” no date, RG 10, vol. 4062, file
398746-3, LAC. For the herd numbers, see “Information for the Reindeer Committee,”
no date, RG 10, vol. 4062, file 398746-3, LAC. For discussion of the later Native-owned
herds see Charles Krebs, “Population Dynamics of the Mackenzie Delta Reindeer Herd,
1938-1958,” Arctic 14 (1961): 91-100
66. Department of Mines and Resources, “Canada’s Reindeer Experiment,” (1938), RG 10,
vol. 4062, file 398746-3, LAC.
67. The herd was sold to John Teal, an agricultural researcher from Vermont, and Alfred
Oeming, the owner of a game farm in Alberta. For a summary, see Erhard Treude, “Forty
Years of Reindeer Herding in the Mackenzie Delta, NWT,” Polarforschung 45 (1979):
121-38.
68. See William Nasogluak and Douglas Billingsley, “Reindeer Industry in the Western
Arctic: Problems and Potential,” in Proceedings: First International Symposium on
Renewable Resources and the Economy of the North, Banff, Alberta: May 1981, 86-95.
69. Krebs concluded in 1961 that straying had been the leading cause of losses within the
Mackenzie Delta herd since its establishment in 1935. See Krebs, “Population Dynamics
of the Mackenzie Delta Reindeer Herd.” See also Treude, “Forty Years of Reindeer
Herding,” 127. For an overview of the interactions between caribou and reindeer, see
David R. Klein, “Conflicts Between Domestic Reindeer and their Wild Counterparts: A
Review of Eurasian and North American Experience,” Arctic 33 (December 1980): 73956.
70. References to the difficulty of attracting the Inuit to the reindeer herding project were
found in several documents, including a correspondence from R. A. Gibson, deputy
commissioner of the Northwest Territories, to J. A. Parsons, general foreman, Reindeer,
Station, January 19, 1944, RG 85, vol. 939, file 12513, LAC. See, also, a report of the
Branch Reindeer Committee, January 19, 1944, RG 85, vol. 939, file 12513, LAC. Finally,
see “Extract from Annual Report by Mr. W. E. Hogan, Reindeer Station, 31 March 1945,”
RG 85, vol. 939, file 12513, LAC. The anthropologist Margaret Lantis has argued that
the resistance to reindeer herding in the Mackenzie Delta was tied to deeply held
religious and ethical beliefs regarding caribou hunting. See Margaret Lantis,
“Problems of Human Ecology in North American Arctic,” Arctic 7 (1954): 311.
71. See Erhard Treude, “The Development of Reindeer Husbandry in Canada,” The Polar
Record 14 (1968): 17. For a scientific analysis, see Julian T. Inglis, “The Impact of
Reindeer Grazing on Selected Areas of Winter Range in Successive Years, Mackenzie
Delta Area, N.W.T., Canada,” in Proceedings of the First International Reindeer and
Caribou Symposium, 9-11 August 1972, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, ed.
Jack Luick. Biological Papers of the University of Alaska Special Report No. 1
(Fairbanks: University of Alaska, 1975). Lichens may take thirty to fifty years to recover
from intensive grazing. David Klein has argued the slow recovery of lichens pastures
suggests that the only feasible way to produce meat in the region is through smallscale exploitation of wild animals such as caribou and muskoxen. His study includes
an extensive analysis of the lichen regeneration and the relative failure of the reindeer
industry in North America. See David R. Klein, “Tundra Ranges North of the Boreal
Forest,” Journal of Range Management 23 (1970): 8-14.
72. Treude argues that the herd numbers for 1964 were inflated due to poor estimates of
herd numbers and annual losses, but it seems likely that the sudden shift away from
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ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 12 (OCTOBER 2007)
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
close supervision of the herds played a role in the decline of the herds. See Treude,
“Forty Years of Reindeer Herding,” 130. The growth of the reindeer herd to nearly ten
thousand animals in 1979 suggests, however, that the animals can increase under an
open herding regime. For herd numbers in the 1970s, see Nasogluak and Billingsley,
“Reindeer Industry in the Western Arctic,” 88. Many of the same problems with
overgrazing, predation, and straying with caribou have plagued reindeer herding
projects in Alaska, where herd numbers declined from 640,000 animals in 1932 to
17,650 in 2002. For an overview, see Johnny-Leo L. Jersletten and Konstatin Klokov,
Sustainable Reindeer Husbandry (Tromsø: Centre for Saami Studies, 2002), 73-84.
See Treude, “Forty Years of Reindeer Herding,” 132-33.
For oral testimony on some of the local benefits and cultural changes associated with
the reindeer herding project, see Gerald T. Conaty and Lloyd Binder, The Reindeer
Herders of the Mackenzie Delta (Toronto: Key Porter, 2003). The reindeer population
estimate for 2000 was located in Government of the Northwest Territories,
Environmental Impact Review Board, Public Review Of Kuññek Resource Development
Corporation’s “Revitalization Of The Western Arctic Reindeer Herd” Proposal, Inuvik,
November 27, 2000, 11.
Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wale’s Fort, 457. For two separate examples, see Isabel
S. Shepard, The Cruise of the U.S. Steamer “Rush” in Behring Sea: Summer of 1889
(San Francisco: Bancroft, 1889), 70; and William H. Gilder, Schwatka’s Search: Sledging
in the Arctic in Quest of the Franklin Records (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle and
Rivington, [1881?]), 101.
Great Britain. Admiralty. Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Outbreak of Scurvy
in the Recent Arctic Expedition, Report of the Committee appointed by the Lords
Commissioners of the Admiralty, to enquire into the causes of the outbreak of scurvy
in the recent Arctic expedition, the adequacy of the provision made by the Admiralty
in the way of food, medicine and medical comforts, and the propriety of the orders
given by the commander of the expedition for provisioning the sledge parties (London:
Harrison & Sons, [1877]), 218, Appendix 26. Other weedy introductions included wild
barley and fireweed in the eastern Arctic. For discussions of plants as evidence of
anthropogenic activities including both accidental and intentional introductions in
the Arctic Archipelago see S. G. Aiken, M. J. Dallwitz, L. L. Consaul, C. L. McJannet, L. J.
Gillespie, R. L. Boles, G. W. Argus, J. M. Gillett, P. J. Scott, R. Elven, M. C. LeBlanc, A. K.
Brysting and H. Solstad (1999 onwards). Flora of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago:
Descriptions, Illustrations, Identification, and Information Retrieval. Version: 29th
April 2003. http://www.mun.ca/biology/delta/arcticf/‘. Fireweed is indigenous to the
Western but not the Eastern Arctic. Alestine Andre and Alan Fehr, Gwich’in
Ethnobotany: Plants used by the Gwich’in for Food, Medicine, Shelter and Tools
(Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute and Aurora Research Institute, 2002), 14, 55.
Inuit in Labrador did not eat the dandelion found there according to the Moravian
missionary Samuel King Hutton. See Hutton, Health conditions and disease
incidence among the Eskimos of Labrador (Liverpool: J. Looker, n.d. [1925?]) as cited
in Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Cancer: Disease of Civilization? An Anthropological and
Historical Study (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 57.
Data on the spread and persistence of invasive plants in northern environments was
derived from Ross W. Wein, Gerold Wein, Sieglinde Bahret, and William J. Cody,
“Northward Invading Non-native Vascular Plant Species in and Adjacent to Wood
Buffalo National Park, Canada,” Canadian Field-Naturalist 106 (1992): 216-24; Eva
Beckett, “Adventive Plants at Churchill, Manitoba,” Canadian Field-Naturalist 73
(1959): 169-73; Richard J. Staniforth and Peter A. Scott, “Dynamics of Weed Populations
in a Northern Subarctic Community,” Canadian Journal of Botany 69 (1991): 814-21;
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78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
William J. Cody, Kaye L. MacInnes, Jacque Cayouette, and Stephen Darbyshire, “Alien
and Invasive Native Vascular Plants Along the Norman Wells Pipeline, District of
Mackenzie, Northwest Territories,” Canadian Field-Naturalist 114 (2000): 126-37; and
Michael Rose and Luise Hermanutz, “Are Boreal Ecosystems Susceptible to Alien Plant
Invasion? Evidence from Protected areas,” Oecologia 139 (2004): 467-77. For a
discussion of the regeneration of native vegetation in areas of the boreal forest subject
to clear-cutting, see Ian D. Thompson, James A. Baker, and Michael Ter-Mikaelian, “A
Review of the Long-term Effects of Post-harvest Silviculture on Vertebrate Wildlife,
and Predictive Models, With an Emphasis on Boreal Forests in Ontario, Canada,” Forest
Ecology and Management 177 (2003): 441-69.
For an overview, see Dickson, “Northern Agriculture.” For eyewitness accounts of the
post and missionary gardens in the Peace and Mackenzie River regions from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see George M. Dawson, Report On The
Climate And Agricultural Value, General Geological Features And Minerals Of
Economic Importance Of Part Of The Northern Portion Of British Columbia And Of
The Peace River Country, 1880, CIHM 2368; William Ogilvie. Down the Yukon And Up
The Mackenzie, 3,200 Miles By Foot And Paddle, 1893, CIHM 15789; William Ogilvie,
Report to the Minister of the Interior, Sessional Papers No. 13 (1885), 46-56; W. D.
Albright, “Gardens of the Mackenzie,” Geographical Review 23 (January 1933): 1-22.
John Franklin, Narrative of a second expedition to the shores of the Polar Sea, in the
years 1825, 1826, and 1827 (London: J. Murray, 1828), 304. For further discussion of
seasonal activities at post gardens and the role of imported foodstuffs in freeing labor
from provisioning to be directed towards commercial ends, see Tough, As Their Natural
Resources Fail, 15-17.
Potato cultivation, while ubiquitous, was not without difficulties; as Warburton Pike
wrote on his travels down the Yukon River, “Some attempt has been made at Fort
Selkirk to raise a crop of potatoes and other hardy vegetables, but so far the result has
not been satisfactory, owing to the late frosts of the spring, followed by the great heat
and little moisture of the summer.” Warburton Pike, Through the sub-arctic forest: a
record of a canoe journey from Fort Wrangel to the Pelley lakes and down to the Yukon
River to the Behring Sea (London: E. Arnold, 1896), 212. See Alexander Mackenzie’s
description of the garden at Fort Chipewyan as he saw it in 1788 in W. Kaye Lamb, The
Journals and Letters of Sir Alexander Mackenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970), 242. For further descriptions of fur trade post gardens as seen by visitors
and worked by traders, see Franklin, Narrative, 307; Willard Ferdinand Wentzel’s
Journal of 1805-06, 1 September 1805; Fragment of George Keith’s Journal Biskaga
River, 1806-07, 24 April 1807, and A Continuation of the Journal of the Forks
Mackenzies River, 7 August 1807 all in North of Athabasca, 290, 285, and 303.
For descriptions of the mission gardens, see John Russell fonds, From Hay River post to
Rae, 1925, Acc.# N-1979-073, Northwest Territories Archives (hereafter NWTA); Mission
Diary 1924-25, SPHR, PAA; Walter J. Vanast, “‘Arctic Bodies; Frontier Souls’: Missionaries
and Medical Care in the Canadian North 1896-1926” (PhD diss.: University of WisconsinMadison, 1996), chap. 7; Albright, “Gardens of the Mackenzie,” 16.
Martha McCarthy, From the Great River to the Ends of the Earth: Oblate Missions to
the Dene, 1847-1921 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press & Western Canadian
Publishers, 1995), 163. For discussions of children at work in mission gardens and the
wealth of produce grown in the same, see John Russell’s comments on the mission
garden at Rae. Russell fonds, From Hay River post to Rae, 1925, NWTA; Mission Diary,
15 September 1919; 23 August 1923; 3 August 1920, SPHR, PAA; MacKay interview with
Parker, UAA; Mission Diary, 13-23 September 1922, 19 September 1930, SPFC, PAA.
John Schultz, “Report of the Select Committee of the Senate Appointed to Inquire into
the Resources of the Great Mackenzie Basin.” Appendix I, Journals of the Senate of
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ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY 12 (OCTOBER 2007)
Canada, 1888. See also John Macoun, Manitoba and the Great North-West (Guelph:
World Publishing Company, 1882), and William Ogilvie, Exploratory Survey on Part
of the Lewes, Tat-on-duc, Porcupine, Bell, Trout, Peel and Mackenzie Rivers, 1887-88
(Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1890).
84. For a summary, see J. David Wood, Places of Last Resort: The Expansion of the Farm
Frontier into the Boreal Forest in Canada, c. 1910-1940 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2006); J. David Wood, “‘The Last Frontier: Rationalizing the Spread
of Farming into the Boreal Woods of Canada, c. 1910-1940,” The Canadian Geographer
50 (2006): 38-55.
85. See Ernest J. Chambers, ed., Canada’s Fertile Northland: A Glimpse of the Enormous
Resources of Part of the Unexplored Region’s of the Dominion; Ernest J. Chambers
The Unexploited West: A Compilation of the Authentic Information Available at the
Present Time as to the Natural Resources of the Unexploited Regions of Northern
Canada (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1914). For similar reports, see T. O. Davis, “Report as
to the Value of that Portion of the Dominion Lying North of the Saskatchewan
Watershed and East of the Rocky Mountains.” Appendix I, Journals of the Senate of
Canada, 1906-07; and Ernest J. Chambers, The Great Mackenzie Basin (Ottawa: King’s
Printer, 1908). For Ontario, see Northern Districts of Ontario, Canada. Nipissing,
Algoma, Temiscaming, Wabigon and Rainy River. Their Climate, Soil, Products;
Agricultural, Timber and Mineral Resources and Capabilities With Information as to
How to Acquire Lands . Prepared Under Instructions from Hon. J. M. Gibson,
Commissioner of Crown Lands for Ontario, Fourth Edition, 1897, CIHM 58623.
86. W. M Ogilvie was doubtful that cereal crops and vegetables could be successfully raised
on the plateau above the Peace River Valley due to harsh weather and the threat of
summer frost. See W. M. Ogilvie, “Report on the Peace River and Tributaries in 1891,”
Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada No. 13 (1893), 39. In Ontario, the forester
B. E. Fernow suggested that soil conditions in the Great Clay Belt were variable, and
that the provincial government should pursue a cautious approach to settlement.
Fernow encouraged further research, particularly a broad survey of soil fertility in
the region. See B. E. Fernow, Conditions in the Clay Belt of New Ontario (Ottawa:
Commission of Conservation, 1912).
87. For a discussion of the motivations behind the settlement policies in Ontario and
Quebec, see Burke Vanderhill, “Agriculture’s Struggle in the Great Clay Belt of Ontario
and Quebec,” American Review of Canadian Studies 18 (1988): 455-64; and Peter
Sinclair, “The North and the North-West: Forestry and Agriculture,” in Progress
Without Planning: The Economic History of Ontario from Confederation to the Second
World War, ed. Ian Drummond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). For the
West, see Zaslow, The Opening of the Canadian North, 199-223, and Wetherell and
Kmet, Alberta’s North, 248-49.
88. Bill Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History (Calgary: Fifth House, 2005), 299-302;
Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada, 48-53.
89. Vanderhill, “Agriculture’s Struggle in the Great Clay Belt of Ontario and Quebec,” 458.
90. Zaslow, The Northward Expansion of Canada, 34-35. See also Northern Alberta
Development Council, Agriculture in Northern Alberta and The North Feeding the
North, Results of a Seminar Held September 4, September 5, 1980, The Pas, Manitoba.
91. Dickson, “Northern Agriculture,” 160-61; Wood, “The Last Frontier,” 45-46.
92. For a discussion of soils in the Peace River Country, see Kathleen MacDonald, Potential
for Agricultural Expansion in Northern Alberta (Alberta Agriculture, 1983), 136-37.
For Manitoba, see The North Feeding the North, 29-30. For a broad overview, see Wood,
“The Last Frontier,” 46.
93. For farm numbers in northern Ontario, see Vanderhill, “Agriculture’s Struggle,” 458.
For a description of clearing in the regions, see Wood, Places of Last Resort, 137-39.
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Waiser, Saskatchewan: A New History, 299-302.
F. H. Kitto, The Peace River Country: its Resources and Opportunities (Ottawa:
Department of the Interior, 1930); Wetherell and Kmet, Alberta’s North, 242-43.
96. For a summary of a second wave of settlement in the Peace River Country in the
1980s, see Dawn Bowen, “Agricultural Settlement in Northern Alberta,” Geographical
Review 92 (October 2002): 503-25.
97. For a summary of the conditions that made the remaining farm operations in the
boreal fringe region viable, see Wood, Places of Last Resort, 171-79. For agricultural
activity north of the sixtieth parallel, see Northwest Territories Agriculture: State of
the Industry, a Report Prepared for the Territories Farmer’s Association, NWT (2000).
98. A. R. M. Lower, Settlement and the Forest Frontier in Eastern Canada (Toronto:
MacMillan, 1936), 150.
99. See, for example, William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the
Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Carolyn Merchant,
Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender and Science in New England (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1989); and Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures
of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
100. An important exception is Graeme Wynn, who has suggested that ecological changes
due to biotic transfers were not as uniformly successful on a local scale as Crosby’s
work suggests. See Graeme Wynn, “Remapping Tutira: Contours in the
Environmental History of New Zealand,” Journal of Historical Geography 23 (1997):
418-46.
94.
95.
795