West Canada travel guide

If there is such a thing as a Vancouver style of architecture, Arthur Erickson is the man who invented it. Born in the city in 1924, he rose to prominence by winning the design competition for Simon Fraser University in 1963, and has many key buildings dotted around town. In keeping with the frequently overcast climate of the West Coast, which he believed could not take bright colours, Erickson became famous for creating dramatic structures out of potentially dull, mute colours, and concrete and glass canopies. Part of the secret of his success is a strong ability to blend a building into its landscape, as best evidenced by the extraordinary University building in Lethbridge. He also displays a rare knack for designing a building so as to make a statement about its purpose, as demonstrated by the Native Big House design of the UBC Museum of Anthropology (1973-6), and the deliberate openness of the Law Courts complex at Robson Square.

The man responsible for almost all of Victoria’s important buildings, including the Empress Hotel and the Parliament Building was Francis Rattenbury. A first-class draftsman, Rattenbury was a master at manipulating the Château and Beaux-Arts styles that were so popular at the time. This brought him a great deal of work from employees such as the Canadian Pacific Railway, for whom he finished many buildings. He also completed a number of provincial courthouses, such as the ones at Nanaimo (1896), Victoria (1899), Nelson (1905-06) and Vancouver (1906-1911), this last one adapted by Arthur Erickson in 1978-83 for the Vancouver Art Gallery. His main contribution to architecture in BC was not in the originality of his designs but rather his ability to bring a new level of sophistication to building technology and craftsmanship. After a scandal over his divorce and remarriage, Rattenbury returned to Britain in 1929, only to be murdered by his second wife’s lover, who was also his chauffeur.

Born and raised in a disciplined, middle-class Victoria household, Emily Carr (1871-1945) was orphaned in her teens, and went in 1891 to study art at the California School of Design in San Francisco. Her most important of many early travels was to France in 1910, from where she returned with a post-impressionist style of painting. She then continued a tour of Native Canadian sites, rendering a service to humanity by capturing on canvass, ancient villages, longhouses and totem poles that would soon fall into complete neglect. Particularly important are her evocative paintings of what is now Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve .

It wasn’t until 1928 that she slowly began to receive the kind of national exposure and critical recognition that she deserved, though financial success remained elusive. Most people agree that her late work is her best, when she returned to painting nature scenes inspired by the rugged West Coast, in a style that was more free-flowing and expressive. Large collections of her work are held at both the Vancouver and Victoria Art Galleries, and her Victoria house, where she lived with all kinds of animals, can also be visited.

The native people of Canada, and particularly the Pacific Northwest, excelled and continue to excel in all forms of art, but most particularly in the field of carving. The genius of Bill Reid can be seen in various venues around Vancouver. Throughout Western Canada there are many opportunities to experience native art, particularly in the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Kwagiulth Museum on Quadra Island, around the Hazletons in Northern BC, and on Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands). A number of shops in Vancouver and Victoria also carry works by contemporary native artists, and a particularly fine private collection is on display in Swans Pub in Victoria.

While the turn-of-the-20th-century art scene was marked by such major figures as James Wilson Morrice, considered the father of Canadian modernism, a truly Canadian form of painting only arrived with the ascension of the Toronto-based Group of Seven, who sought to draw inspiration directly from the Canadian landscape. Like the European fin de siècle symbolists and post-impressionists, they steered clear of the naturalism that had defined the previous generation, attempting to capture nature’s grandeur through the use of bold colours and decorative patterning.

The original members – Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, AY Jackson, Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, JEH Macdonald and FH Varley – befriended each other in Toronto between 1911 and 1913, and often painted together, their work, romantic and with mystical tendencies, developing along somewhat similar lines. Tom Thomson, who died in 1917 before he could become a member of the group, also left behind a remarkable collection of paintings and oil sketches.

If the group had a leader it was Harris, who began to radically simplify the colour and layouts of his canvasses. By the mid-1920s he had reduced his paintings to a few simplified and nearly monochromatic forms. Ten years later he became the only member of the group, and one of the first Canadian artists, to turn to abstraction. By the time the group disbanded in 1933, however, it had in many ways become as entrenched and conservative as the art establishment it had overthrown.

West Coast mythology is rich and complex, and far too involved to treat with any justice here. A wealth of tales passed on verbally from one generation to the next served to provide the spiritual and social foundation of the group, imbuing existence with meaning and mystery, and helping each individual through the natural trials and rites to which every lifetime is subject. Spiritually, the First Nations perceive the whole of nature as interconnected and alive with sacred significance, thus fostering a loving relationship with the earth and a desire to live off the land without destoying it.

Most of these instructive, frequently humorous and often profound stories involve symbolic animals such as the bear or wolf, but the most important character is the raven or crow. Raven is the creator, as well as a trickster and transformer, making people laugh at themselves and cry simultaneously, by revealing how human greatness is tempered with pride and vanity, and subject to the whims of fate and chance. After the great flood, having gorged himself on shellfish, Raven discovered the remnant of the human race hiding in a clam shell on Rose Spit, Haida Gwaii and coaxed them out with his voice. At first he amused himself with these new playthings but then he helped them to build their culture. A sculpture of the scene by Bill Reid can be seen in the UBC Museum of Anthropology.

The most formidable of the First Nations was the Haida of Haida Gwaii, whose artwork is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable.

Extended families of 50 or more lived together in large, elaborately decorated longhouses, whose interiors were divided by hanging mats, with communal fires and cooking areas shared by all. Containers, clothing and utensils were fashioned from cedar bark, roots, reeds and animal skins and furs, while specialized equipment was designed for catching salmon, hunting deer and elk, snaring birds, and harpooning sea mammals such as seals and porpoises. These, along with gathered shellfish, fruits and roots, provided the people with a fairly broad diet. Ritual dancing, singing and drumming were a major part of life, as were feasts, story-telling and games. Spiritually, as has been well documented, the great animist tradition of the First Nations perceived the whole of Nature as alive with sacred significance.

Their complex social system divided people into two clans: Eagle and Raven among the Haida, Crow and Wolf in many other nations. These are further divided into hereditary kin groups. Marriage within a clan was considered incestuous, so Eagles would seek a Raven and vice versa. In this way there are always ties between clans and between people from distant places. Descent was through the female line, meaning that if a chief wanted to keep his property within the clan, he had to pass it on to his sister’s sons.

Native Americans were (and are) fun-loving people. They would travel long distances to gather and socialize, and today’s native pow-wows are always wonderful celebrations. The most famous ceremony of the coastal people was the potlatch, a celebration that marked major events, from births, deaths and marriages to the raising of a totem pole. The word potlatch derives from the verb ‘to give’, and this was an excuse for an individual to display their wealth by giving things away, be it art, land deeds or slaves. This was a means by which wealth was redistributed, but it was also an investment and a challenge, as those who received would be shamed if they failed to respond with a potlatch where they gave away even more. With the arrival of the Europeans, inequality between tribes and villages escalated to the point that the receivers were ruined both financially and symbolically by their own inability to respond. As a result of these and less noble considerations, like fear and ignorance, the Government outlawed the potlatch from 1884 to 1951. Many items were returned, on the condition that they be stored and displayed in museums. A collection of items resides at the Kwagiulth Museum on Quadra Island.

Alice Munro is mostly a writer of short stories, but her best-known work is the novel Who Do You Think You Are? (1978), which concerns the tough life of a girl growing up in the Prairies. It was runner-up for the Booker Prize, and winner of the Governor General’s Award, which she also received for Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), and The Progress of Love (1986). The latter represented a major distillation of her work thus far, exploring with increased profundity the problems of time, and the narrator’s relation to it, in an instinctive prose that perfectly balances senses of wonder and compassion. Her two subsequent collections of stories, Friend of My Youth (1990) and Open Secrets (1994), built on these strengths and extended her fame far beyond Canada’s borders. The latter won the 1995 W.H. Smith Award as the best book in any category published in Britain throughout the previous year. Her latest collections of stories, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001), Runaway (2004), and The View From Castle Rock (2006) have also won a number of key awards, and continue to cement her reputation as one of the supreme crafters of short stories of our time .

On a field trip as a student biologist, Farley Mowat became outraged at the problems of the Inuit, all of which he attributed to white misunderstanding and exploitation. Such observations led to his first book, People of the Deer (1952), which made him an instant, albeit controversial, celebrity. Since then he has spent a lot of time living in the Arctic with the Inuit people, and has written 26 books, whose views are bitterly attacked by some and highly praised by others. The most famous are Never Cry Wolf (1963), which was made into a moving film, and the novel Lost in the Barrens (1956), written for younger readers. He has also written some very readable accounts of those crazy explorers who obsessively sought the Northwest Passage. Reputedly Canada’s most widely read author, Mowat is a natural storyteller with a graceful, personal, and conversational tone, and his narratives and anecdotes are always fast-paced and compelling.

Margaret Atwood is probably Canada’s most celebrated late 20th-century writer, and has written 15 novels, 13 books of poetry, and numerous other miscellaneous works. She first gained critical and popular acclaim, as well as a number of literary prizes, with The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). A disturbing dystopia set in a post-nuclear wasteland run by a right-wing monotheocracy, it was made into a film in 1990. Cat’s Eye (1988), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, broke literary ground in its exploration of the realm of childhood, replete with shifts of power, secrecies and betrayals. The Robber Bride (1993) focuses on the characters of three very different Toronto women and their evil nemesis. In Alias Grace (1996), which was very popular in Britain, Atwood looked back into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women in 19th-century Canada, Grace Marks. In 2000, Atwood finally won the Booker Prize with The Blind Assassin. In the highly acclaimed Oryx and Crake (2003), Atwood turns her talent to science fiction and the thorny issue of cloning. More prolific than ever, she has since written The Penelopiad (2005), The Tent (2006), and Moral Disorder (2006).

Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje was the forerunner of a burgeoning multicultural strata in Canadian literature. An editor, film-maker and teacher, Ondaatje was originally more a poet than novelist, with 11 books of verse to his name, including The Cinnamon Peeler (1992). His prose style also has an extremely poetic quality: lilting, dream-like, extremely cinematic at times, and textured with richly exotic imagery that gravitates towards the bizarre, the exaggerated, and the unlikely. Earlier works often combine documentary and fictional elements, such as Coming Through Slaughter (1976), which tells of real and imagined events in the life of New Orleans jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden. In the Skin of a Lion (1987), a novel set in Toronto’s golden age, received great critical and national acclaim, but Ondaatje only reached international stardom with The English Patient (1992), which earned him a share of the prestigious Booker Prize (the first ever awarded to a Canadian), and was made into a film that garnered nine Oscars at the 1997 Academy Awards. Anil’s Ghost (2000), set amidst the civil war that tore Sri Lanka apart, also won a handful of major literary prizes, and became an international bestseller. His latest work, Divisadero (2007), set in Northern California in the 1970’s, won the Governor’s General Award.

The late Mordecai Richler established himself as one of Canada’s foremost novelists with the publication of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) about a young Montréal-Jewish entrepreneur. Its dramatic scenes are complemented by a lively narrative pace, and profound characterisation. Other works include St Urbain’s Horseman (1971), Joshua Then and Now (1980), and Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize. Thomas King is the best-known of Canada’s First Nations writers. His most celebrated works are Green Grass, Running Water (1993), and a collection of short stories, One Good Story, That One (1993). He has also edited The Native in Literature (1987), a collection of critical essays, and All My Relations (1990), an anthology of native Canadian fiction. In Canada he is equally famous for penning the hilarious CBC radio show Dead Dog Café – a perfect introduction to native humour and issues.

Margaret Laurence’s many novels, of which The Stone Angel (1964) is the most highly regarded, are wonderful treatments of life in rural Canada. The fiction of Jack Hodgins, while sometimes experimental, displays a playful love of narrative. His novels, such as The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), deal with characters reconstructed from the his Vancouver Island childhood. In his hands, they are eccentric but realistic characters, deployed with stylistic suppleness in life- affirming situations. Leonard Cohen is best known as a singer, but he started life as an exceptionally gifted poet. Stranger Music (1993) gives a good overview of his verse and lyrics. He also wrote two very fine novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). In 2005, he brought out a new collection of poems, Dance me to the End of Love, with illustrations by Henri Matisse.

Pierre Berton, who was born and lived in Whitehorse, Yukon, and grew up in Dawson City amid the debris of the Stampede, is one of Canada’s best-known living writers. Above all, he is renowned for his serious but highly readable popularizations of Canadian history, which combine patriotic verve, colourful detail, and a strong, driving narrative. His first important book was Klondike (1958), a classic account of the 1898 Gold Rush, whose left-overs he grew up with. Among other key moments in Canadian history, he turned his hand to the building of the CPR in The National Dream (1970) and The Last Spike (1971); the settling of the West in The Promised Land (1984); and the Canadian army’s glorious First World War victory in Vimy (1986). Winter (1994), is a celebration of that season and the strength of character that allows Canada as a nation to overcome its harshness.

Canadian fiction’s most rumbustious, larger-than-life character, Robertson Davies is best remembered as a prolific novelist, but for years he was an actor, playwright, essayist and teacher. His work demonstrates Canadian humour at its best, with wry social comment and witty observations on life often carrying greater importance than the slow-paced plot development. His breakthrough came with Fifth Business (1970), which remains one of the Canadian classics. In this and its two sequels, The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975) (known collectively as The Deptford Trilogy), he uses a deep knowledge of Jungian psychology and archetypes to show that matters of the spirit inform and transcend mere worldly concerns. The most highly recommended of Davies’ vast oeuvre is the Cornish Trilogy, comprising The Rebel Angels (1981), a Rabelaisian satire of academia, What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), a profound study on artistic inspiration, and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988). Published posthumously, The Merry Heart (1996) is a charming selection of speeches, reminiscences, parodies, book reviews and essays.

At the start of the new millennium, a fresh breed of Canadian writers is winning international awards and conquering the international market. The trend began with Douglas Coupland’s Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), which came to crystallize the entire post-boomer generation born in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Most popular of the follow-ups are Girlfriend In A Coma (1998), and All Families are Psychotic (2001). In 2001 he put together an interesting book of anecdotes and photos about his native Vancouver, City of Glass. Since then the floodgates have opened. Jane Urquhart has been tremendously successful with The Underpainter (1997), which won the Governor General’s Award and The Stone Carvers (2001), also a world-wide bestseller. But her best work is probably still Away (1993), in which she juxtaposed the Irish potato famine of the 1840s with pioneer homesteaders in 19th-century Ontario to explore the transplanting of Old World myths to the new land. She has also published a book of short stories, Storm Glass (1987) and three books of poetry.

Carol Shields won several prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize with her classic The Stone Diaries (1993). Other favourites are Larry’s Party (1997), and Unless (2002), which has received rave reviews. Rohinton Mistry has been greeted with tremendous international acclaim. Set in India, his novels Such A Long Journey (1991), A Fine Balance (1995) and Family Matters (2002) have won many literary awards, including a nomination for the Booker Prize. David Adams Richards has built a reputation as one of the country’s most gifted writers with novels like Nights Below Station Street (1988), and Mercy Among the Children (2000). John Ralston Saul caused quite a stir in the intellectual world with Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), a brilliant treatise on the problems caused by modern man’s excessive devotion to reason. Other highly recommended international bestsellers are The Cure For Death By Lightning (1996) and A Recipe for Bees (1998) by Alberta novelist Gail Anderson-Dargatz, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) by the highly gifted Dionne Brand, and Anne-Marie MacDonald’s fashionably miserable I Fall On My Knees. Popular on the home front are Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (1996), Nino Ricci’s superb Lives of the Saints (1990), and novels by Galiano Island resident Jane Rule, including Memory Board (1987) and After the Fire (1989). And most recent of all is Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which won the 2002 Booker Prize.

For a collection of short modern fiction by BC writers, there’s West by Northwest: BC Short Stories (1998), edited by D Stouck and M Wilkinson (Polestar). And finally, George Bowering, Selected Poems 1961-92 is an overview of the work of a Vancouver poet who was named Canada’s first poet laureate in 2002.

The openly gay and greatly loved writer Timothy Findley lived much of his life on Salt Spring Island. He was equally succesful as a playwright, and his novels were eclectic. The Wars (1977) is one of the greatest fictional treatments of the First World War; Famous Last Words (1981) deals with the rise of fascism and an international conspiracy during the Second World War; Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984) is a witty and inventive reworking of the Noah myth; Headhunter (1993) pictures a Toronto replete with upper-class violence and evil; The Piano Man’s Daughter (1995) focuses on a young piano tuner forced to face the questions of his father’s identity and his mother’s madness.

In the first century of Canadian writing, techniques tended to reflect literary fashions in England. The best-known book by an early settler is Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), which opens with a warning to prospective immigrants that Canada is not the Eden it is widely promoted as in England, and that the settlers’ lot is a harsh one. Lurking behind the young lady’s steadfast moral vision is a fascination with characters, an acute attention to detail, considerable psychological insight, and a good dose of genuine wit. Those writers best known for their portraits of the Northwest around the time of the Gold Rush were both foreigners: the British poet Robert Service, who romanticized the frozen north, and the American writer of short novels and stories, Jack London.

With Confederation came a quickened interest in the growth of a national culture, most often expressed through romantic rewritings of Canadian history. The most successful turn-of-the-20th-century works were both written for children: Margaret Marshall Saunders’ Beautiful Joe (1894) and LM Montgomery’s international best-seller Anne of Green Gables (1908). Around the same time, Stephen Leacock established an international reputation as a comic writer and lecturer in the Dickensian tradition with works such as Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914). And native poet E Pauline Johnson produced a timeless work, Legends of Vancouver, a collection of stories based on legends recounted to her by Chief Joe Capilano of Vancouver.

Hugh McLennan, who won the prestigious Governor General’s award an unequalled five times, is credited as the first major English-speaking writer to attempt a portrayal of Canada’s national character. His 1941 novel Barometer Rising introduced a period of optimism towards the country’s own culture, progress and role on the world stage. His classic The Watch that Ends the Night (1959) summarizes a new faith in the land, if not the politicians it spawns. Such themes, given impetus by the humanist and anticlerical stances of francophone writers such as Gabrielle Roy, were picked up by the likes of Pierre Berton, Roderick Haig-Brown and Farley Mowat.

Following a heart attack in 1937, renowned Victoria artist Emily Carr began devoting more of her time to writing. Klee Wyck (1941) won her a Governor General’s Award, followed by The Book of Small (1942), and The House of All Sorts (1944). Her very readable journals Growing Pains, The Heart of a Peacock, Pause, and Hundreds and Thousands were published posthumously. Morley Callaghan’s novels deal with two apparently irreconcilable worlds, the self-seeking empirical jungle, and the spiritual realm of trust and faith. Such heady themes are most timelessly treated in Such is My Beloved (1934), and The Loved and the Lost (1951), which is often considered his masterpiece. In 1960, American critic Edmund Wilson identified him as “unjustly neglected” and compared him to Chekhov and Turgenev. Ethel Wilson was born in South Africa, but lived in Vancouver, and is one of the first Canadian writers to truly capture the rugged and unsurpassed beauty of the BC landscape. A strong sense of place is evoked in the unpretentious and lucid style of books such as Swamp Angel (1954), while her characters consistently struggle with the paradox of the human condition. Around the same time, William Mitchell achieved instant recognition with his classic Who has seen the Wind (1947), which magically captures the characters and eccentrics, but especially the beauty and power of the Prairies.

During the 1860s, several key elements came together to make the union of the northern colonies a reality. The emphasis in Britain had shifted to trade and profits rather than military glory and monopolies. The colonies were coming to be seen as financial burdens that had to grow up and take responsibility for themselves. At the same time, Britain’s clear sympathy and tacit support of the southern states during the brutal Civil War of 1861-65 had angered the northern states, at times bringing Britain and the US to the brink of war, with Canada as the battlefield. Newspapers in Chicago and New York were warning Canada: “Just wait till this war is over. You’re next!”

The Treaty of Reciprocity with the US that had helped Canada to survive when Britain ended its protective colonial tariff and began moving towards freer trade seemed unlikely to be renewed, so Canada had to look elsewhere, namely towards the land to the west. In this respect, the railways offered great promise, a possible response to the US threat, and also great profits. It is no coincidence that the leading proponents of Confederacy were also railway promoters. And one of the arguments they used was that of glory, the glory of expansion.

A federal system was eventually agreed on that borrowed from the British and American systems. Like the latter, it would have two levels of government, federal and provincial. But rather than electing a President by a separate vote, they chose to be led by a Prime Minister, who would be the leader of the party with the most seats in the House.

The Province of Canada said yes to union, though there was only a small majority among the French. New Brunswick eventually said yes. The Nova Scotia premier said yes, though without the consent of his people who were basically tricked into the deal. Newfoundland said no. Ironically, the first Canadian land to be inhabited by Europeans, or so we believe, was the last to join the union, holding out until 1949. Canada was called a Dominion after the Psalm 72 phrase “His dominion shall be from sea to sea”, which also provided the national motto A Mari Usque Ad Mari. The very day after Queen Victoria signed the British North America Act in 1867, the Americans ominously purchased Alaska from the Russians.

Asked to join the Confederation, BC requested a wagon trail from Manitoba to the coast. Cartier extravagently offered them a full-scale Trans-Continental railway instead, an offer they couldn’t refuse. The Liberals called the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) “an act of insane recklessness”, and they were right, but glory knows no bounds. The railway skirted the edge of bankruptcy on several occasions. Crossing 5000 km it would become the longest railway on earth, and a marvel of modern engineering. Historian Will Ferguson says: “Ours was a country forged not in revolution but in a landscape traversed. Ours was a victory over sheer geography”. In places the railway had to be blasted out of rock, costing thousands of lives.

Many of Canada’s problems can be traced back to the Constitutional Act of 1791, which cut the large province of Québec in two: Upper Canada in the west (now Ontario) would be English, Lower Canada in the east (now Québec once again) would be French. The problems caused by this apartheid smouldered for 40 years before flaring up as two minor rebellions in the 1830s which, though quickly smothered, had far-reaching effects. The British sent over Lord Durham, whose liberal leanings had earnt him the name ‘Radical Jack’. He recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be united under one government in order to assimilate the French; that leaders of the elected assembly should henceforth assume the role of the governor’s ruling advisors; and that the colonies be given authority over their own internal affairs. He blamed the unrest on an outdated colonial system in Upper Canada, and in Lower Canada talked of “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state”. The two provinces were joined under one government by the 1841 Act of Union, and the 1848 election saw the victory of one of the greatest political alliances in Canadian history: Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine and Robert Baldwin. The capital of the new single province of Canada was eventually decided by Queen Victoria. She chose a small unknown lumbertown called Ottawa. Strategically located on the river border between French and English Canada, it was inland from a possible American attack on the St Lawrence, yet linked to the Great Lakes by the defensive Rideau Canal.

The generally accepted explanation of how North America’s very first people arrived is that they crossed a temporary land bridge between Asia and Alaska. Though some sites in Alaska and the Yukon hint at occupation as long as 25,000 years ago, the most common theory is that this migration occurred about 15,000 years ago, when ice-age glaciation had lowered the world’s sea levels dramatically, creating a whole continent called Beringia. Animals now long extinct, such as the woolly mammoth and giant beaver, fled to this vast oasis of green within a desert of ice looking for food, and human hunters with the same motives followed them.

At least 14,500 years passed before the first Europeans ‘discovered’ this New World, by which time aboriginal societies had spread throughout North and South America. In Canada alone, over 50 languages were spoken, a fact that prompted historian Olive Dickason to comment: “Canada has 55 founding nations rather than just the two that have been officially recognized”. It is certainly useful to band Canada’s First Nations together according to language groups or broad geographical areas, but to generalize about them is about as useful as speaking of Europeans as a single cultural unit.

The stereotypical Hollywood-style image of the painted ‘Red Indian’ warrior with eagle-feather headdress, buffalo outfit, horse and rifle is based entirely on the tribes that lived on the Great Plains of Central Canada. Of these, the most militant and powerful were the Blackfoot Confederacy, who waged almost continual war with the Plains Cree and Assiniboine to the north and east, the Sioux and Crow to the south, and tribes such as the Kootenay and Shuswap who occupied the interior valleys of southern BC, but crossed the Rockies to hunt at certain times of year.

The whole way of life of the Plains Indians depended on the herds of buffalo that roamed the prairies in staggering numbers. Their meat provided the people with food; their hides were used to make clothes, blankets, rafts, and tepees that could be quickly dismantled and carried away when whole villages left to follow the buffalo’s migrations. Painting on buffalo leather was the chief mode of artistic expression: tepees were lavishly decorated with naturalistic and geometric motifs, rawhide shields were symbolically painted with guardian spirits that would protect the warrior and buffalo robes were covered in designs ranging from abstract concentric patterns to representational images.

Ironically, the heyday of the Plains dwellers only came with the arrival of the Europeans and introduction of horses and rifles. But the white settlers also introduced the systematic and wholesale slaughter of the buffalo herds which they used as a means to rid themselves of the aboriginals.

At least 14,500 years passed before the first Europeans ‘discovered’ this New World, by which time aboriginal societies had spread throughout North and South America. In Canada alone, over 50 languages were spoken, a fact that prompted historian Olive Dickason to comment: “Canada has 55 founding nations rather than just the two that have been officially recognized”. It is certainly useful to band Canada’s First Nations together according to language groups or broad geographical areas, but to generalize about them is about as useful as speaking of Europeans as a single cultural unit.

The people of Canada’s Arctic occupy the very last region on earth to be inhabited by humans. The Inuit arrived from Siberia about 4000 or 5000 years ago, and speak the Inuktitut language in an area that stretches from Eastern Siberia to Greenland. Their survival is a testament to their formidable skills as hunters, and a triumph of human ingenuity and perseverance. The traditional Inuit abode, rarely seen today, is the igloo, a strong, elegant, complex structure that can be erected in little over an hour. Seals and whales were the buffalo of these Arctic dwellers, from which they crafted almost every tool for survival. Among other things, they invented the fur-lined parka, snowshoes, dog-sleds and the kayak. These incredible little vessels, made from skins stretched over a frame, are waterproof and virtually unsinkable.

By far the most densely populated area in Canada when the Europeans arrived, with about half of the country’s inhabitants, was the Pacific Northwest. About 16 languages were spoken here, including two that were utterly unrelated to any others, making this one of the most linguistically rich regions in the history of the world. Radically different as they may have been, the West Coast nations had many cultural similarities, although the Haida, from the isolated Queen Charlotte Islands, in Northern BC, were the fiercest, wealthiest, most extravagant and artistically gifted nation of all.

Thanks to a relatively mild climate and an abundant supply of food and materials, the coastal people had enough time and wealth to evolve into incredibly rich and complex societies. Extended families lived in vast, elaborately carved and decorated cedar plank houses, before which stood tall cedar poles covered in rich, anthropomorphic symbolism. People wore weavings, furs, leather footwear and exquisite jewellery, kept their possessions in sumptuously carved cedar boxes, and travelled in long dugout canoes that made them masters of the turbulent ocean and formidable fishermen. They dined on a rich diet of salmon, game, fruit, berries and roots, and enjoyed gambling, dancing, games, ceremonies, music and celebrations . The coastal First Nations has a firmly entrenched sense of social class, with ranks including chiefs, commoners and slaves who were usually prisoners from conquered neighbours. Private ownership covered everything, even such essentials as fishing and hunting rights.

While the English were fighting the 1812 war against Napolean, the Americans saw their chance of capturing Canada. With Britain preoccupied and the US population at 7.5 million compared to Canada’s 80,000, Thomas Jefferson advised President Madison that it was “a mere matter of marching”. On 18 June 1812 they promptly declared war on Britain and made plans for the Conquest of Canada. It was General Isaac Brock and the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh who were to save Canada. In a series of battles in which they were greatly outnumbered, this dynamic duo scared the Americans into submission by exploiting their irrational fear of those wild Indian braves.

In the treaty that followed, Canada and the First Nations were excluded from negotiations, while Britain agreed to return the frontiers to their original positions, allowing the Americans to extend their borders into the Indian Territory that had previously been reserved as native lands. The First Nations had been shafted again, this time for good. No longer needed by the British as allies or a buffer zone, they were destined to be ‘civilized’ and assimilated, or slowly wiped out.

Alexander Mackenzie mistakenly followed the river later named after him, which he called the ‘River of Disappointment’, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. On his next expedition he became the first person to cross the continent north of Mexico. Following the Peace River into the Rockies, he battled his way across the mountains to the Pacific, where on a large boulder he left Canada’s most famous bit of graffiti: Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, 22 July 1793. Simon Fraser was chosen to expand trade into the land west of the Rockies and explore the Columbia River. Between 1805 and 1807 he accomplished the first of these goals, establishing four forts at McLeod, Stuart and Fraser lakes, and Fort George, naming this vast and hitherto unexplored wilderness New Caledonia. The following year, believing it to be the Columbia, he followed the treacherous river that now bears his name all the way to the Pacific. David Thompson founded a series of important trading posts along BC’s windy rivers (including the one named after him) in his pursuit to follow the Columbia River to the Pacific. He finally succeeded in 1811, only to find that the Americans had beaten him by a few weeks.

The differing styles of the opposing fur trading companies was apparent from the very beginning. While the English HBC encouraged native traders to bring furs to them, the French voyageurs went out into the land and learned to live like the natives. The first Canadian explorer to be born in Canada, Pierre de La Vérendrye, was also the first to push west of the Great Lakes and the Canadian Shield into the great Central Plains. In the 1730s and 1740s, he and four of his sons discovered the Saskatchewan River, whose twin branches turned out to be the key to the interior. They went on to found a string of trading posts, including Fort Rouge at the fork of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers, a junction now known as The Forks in the heart of Winnipeg.

With the Company of the North destroyed by Britain’s victory over France, a trading vacuum appeared that was quickly filled by Scottish and American merchants, who hired seasoned voyageurs and picked up where the French had left off. An American named Peter Pond had established a trading post near Lake Athabasca in Northern Alberta, opening up the deep north to the fur trade. Establishing themselves as the NorthWest Company, the Montréal traders dedicated themselves to expanding the fur trade still further, as far as the Pacific and the Arctic. It was their explorers who travelled, charting almost all of the vast land north and west of Ontario, opening it up to later settlement. Of these, three in particular have become household names.

Britain had meanwhile transferred jurisdiction over the Arctic Islands to Canada in 1880, but it wasn’t until the early 20th century that Canada officially extended its boundary to the North Pole. A single mariner claimed the entire Arctic Archipelago for Canada in 1909, but it meant nothing until the area was surveyed in the mid-1930s. As a senior Ottawa bureaucrat noted: “The history of the Canadian North can be divided into two periods – before and after the airplane”.

Despite the burgeoning sea otter trade, and Captain George Vancouver’s extensive charting of the coast, no attempt was made to settle the West until the HBC established Fort Langley (near today’s Vancouver) in 1827, and Fort Victoria in the 1840s. The latter was a purely strategic manoeuvre. The border with the US had been drawn along the 49th parallel from the Great Lakes to the Rockies, but the HBC shrewdly recognized that if this line were ever extended, it would clip the south end off Vancouver Island. In an attempt to get there first, James Douglas was sent to survey prospective sites for a new fort and trading post, and chose a site which he called ‘a perfect Eden’. Douglas was named governor of Vancouver Island on top of his title as Chief Factor of the HBC.

The Company’s fears were soon vindicated. In 1844, US President James Polk was elected on the cry of “54.40 or fight”, a brazen threat that the Union would claim the whole of the mountainous Oregon territory, including most of today’s BC, right up to Alaska, taking it by force if necessary. The matter was ultimately decided by the 1846 Treaty of Oregon, signed by the US and Britain, which extended the 49th parallel straight across, ignoring the natural geography of north-south river valleys. The HBC was obliged to relocate its western HQ to the new Fort Victoria, greatly bolstering its importance.

The first European to arrive on the Pacific Northwest coast was a Danish sea captain, named Vitus Bering, after whom the Strait was later named. Working for the Russian Czar he reached the islands off the coast of Alaska, and his crew returned with otter pelts whose value soon inspired the Russians to set up trading posts in the area. Hearing of this, the Spanish, who had claimed the whole Pacific Ocean for themselves, sent their own expedition to the region, and began trading with the Haida in 1774. Next to arrive were the British, in the form of Captain James Cook, who began charting the west coast of Vancouver Island. He traded with the friendly natives for otter pelts, which his crew later sold in China at a great profit. Cook himself had by then been killed by Hawaiian Polynesians. Word was out and the sea otter, like the beaver, would be hunted to the brink of extinction.

If Canada as a whole owes its existence to the beaver, British Columbia came about thanks to the more obvious incentive of gold, the 1858 discovery of which in the Fraser Valley changed Fort Victoria almost overnight. For 25,000 stampeders en route to the gold fields, this was the only possible stop-over, and the town quickly swelled with shops and hotels, bars and brothels, politicians and newspapermen. Afraid of an American takeover, Governor Douglas issued a public proclamation that the gold fields were Crown property, forcing all miners to register and pay a fee. In doing so he had assumed control of the mainland, a blatant bluff. Britain pointed out that he was overstepping his authority, then backed him up anyway, creating a second Crown Colony called British Columbia in 1866, with Douglas as governor of both.

Soon the new colony was littered with desperate hopefuls panning every creek for traces of the yellow metal. When large deposits of gold were found in the Cariboo, Douglas commissioned the Cariboo Road, a 650-km marvel of engineering and daring, eventually used to haul out millions of tons of ore, much of it from the boomtown of Barkerville, which for many years took its turn as the biggest settlement north of San Francisco. More importantly, the road opened up the grassland valleys and rolling basins of the interior plateau to ranching.

Canada catapulted itself onto the world stage with the accomplishments of its soldiers in the Great War, most famously at Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele, Amiens and the Hindenburg Line. Canada’s contribution of over 620,000 men, 60,000 of whom died, with over 172,000 injured, was extremely high in relation to its population, a fact that further strengthened its international voice. In 1917, Prime Minister Robert Borden, along with South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, demanded that the dominions be given full recognition as “autonomous nations of an Imperial commonwealth”. He also insisted that Canada put its own signature on the Treaty of Versailles, and when the League of Nations was formed, Canada and the other dominions were given seats, much to the annoyance of the US, who saw it as a British ploy to secure more votes.

The inglorious side of the war, often glossed over, was the mass arrest of over 8500 ‘enemy aliens’, including over 5000 Ukrainians who were interred and used as labour in the steel mills of Nova Scotia. In other respects the war years and following decade were a time of positive reform. The Labour and Women’s movements in particular made great leaps forward: in 1916, women won the right to vote in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan, with BC and Ontario following the next year and Nova Scotia a year later. Other provinces followed suit, although Québec women were denied their rights until 1940.

The third strand that has persisted throughout Canada’s history is the plight and struggles of its First Nations. The Indian Act that followed the First World War aimed at nothing short of complete assimilation, forcing natives to relinquish all rights and status in order to vote or even own property. This once proud people had been racked by alien diseases, restricted to reserves, deprived of their traditional hunting grounds, taught in schools where they were discouraged from speaking their own languages, forbidden to continue ceremonies like the potlatch , and denied basic rights such as a vote. In the 1920s it seemed that they were a dying breed.

Yet somehow they survived, with many of their traditions and languages intact. After the Second World War the government decided to revise the Indian Act, and for the first time natives were involved in the discussions. Little came of it, but at least they got the vote in 1960.

The struggle for native land claims began in the 1890s in British Columbia, where no treaties had ever been drawn up as they were further east. Nations like the Nisga’a of the Nass Valley near Terrace never signed their land away and were never conquered, so technically their land still belongs to them. Only in the last 25 years have such claims begun to be taken seriously. When the government of Québec wanted to build a hydro project in the north, they had to negotiate terms with the James Bay Cree and Inuit, who surrendered their rights to a million square kilometres of land in exchange for self government within their own communities, hunting, trapping and fishing rights, and a trust fund of $225 million. In 1987, the Sechelt Inlet Band became the first native group in Canada to be granted self-government within their own reserve lands.

In 1990, Mohawk protesters in the Oka region outside Montréal barricaded roads to a forest that was slated to be cut down, and in the resistance killed a police officer. This led to the formation in 1991 of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The report took five years to complete, and included 400 proposed changes, including the creation of an individual tribunal for land claims. It was finally recognized that the government could hardly be impartial in cases filed against itself. In 1999 the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that Canada was in violation of international law in its treatment of aboriginal rights. In 1999 the new territory of Nunavut was created. More than twice the size of BC it covers two million square kilometres, about a fifth of Canada’s land mass. One of the most thinly populated areas on earth, it has just 25,000 people, 83% of whom are Inuit, who were allowed to retain ownership of 18% of the land. The territory was given self-government and a $1 billion cash settlement. It is the first time any single First Nations group will have a majority presence in a provincial or territorial government.

The most striking aspect of Canada’s involvement in the Second World War was the way in which Canadian troops were so often used as cannon fodder. Churchill sent 1900 of them into Hong Kong as a hopeless ‘symbolic’ defence against the Japanese. In 1942, in what could be seen as a farcical dress rehearsal for the D-day landings, 6000 troops, including 5000 Canadians, were sent on an ill-conceived mission into Dieppe that turned into a bloody fiasco. Over a million Canadians served in all, of which 45,000 died and 55,000 were wounded.

The war had made Canada, along with the US, one of the two richest nations on earth, with the third largest navy and fourth largest air force. At the same time as the Citizenship Act of 1946 defined the people of Canada as Canadian citizens rather than British subjects, discriminatory immigration laws were set up to preserve “the fundamental character” of the country, making it very hard for blacks, Arabs, Asians and Jews to get in.

Perhaps Trudeau’s key contribution to Canadian politics, though, was his firm stance against separatism in Québec, a position that has been upheld by his colleague and fellow Québecois, Jean Chrétien.

In 1976 the Parti Québecois (PQ) was elected as Québec’s government. The following year they passed Bill 101, which banned English on commercial signs and severely restricted access to English-language education. Ironically, a federal bill had already been passed making it compulsory for the rest of the country to have labels in both languages on items as trivial as a jar of jam. In 1980, the PQ held a referendum on separation in which 60% of Québecois voted against sovereignty, but this was far from the end of the affair. During the term of Albertan PM Brian Mulroney, the separatists’ position strengthened due to the premier’s constant pandering to Québec, which was cited as a major reason why dissatisfied conservatives from the West broke away to form the Reform Party in 1987.

The stakes were raised in 1990 when the Bloc Québecois was formed to campaign on a federal level. Another referendum was arranged by the PQ for 1995, and this time the nation held its breath. Just 50.6% of Québec voted against separation, the narrowest of escapes. The issue of two warring nations has been a perennial thread in Canada’s political tapestry, and doesn’t look like going away any time soon.

During and after the Second World War, a trend began by which Canada became more and more linked to the US both militarily and economically. The Ogdensburg Agreement of 1940 established a Permanent Joint Board to integrate North American defences, while the government started courting American money to a degree that was considered shameless. By signing the North American Air Defense Agreement (NORAD), John Diefenbaker pretty much put Canada’s air defences under US control.

Trudeau became more and more concerned by US penetration into the Canadian economy, and made real efforts to increase ties to Britain and Europe, introducing some of the most unabashed examples of economic nationalism since Macdonald. But matters took a dramatic turn with the election of Brian Mulroney, an Albertan Conservative who started Investment Canada to encourage American investment. In 1987 he proposed the Free Trade Agreement with the States, removing almost every trade barrier between the countries, even though 80% of Canada’s exports were already going south. He then won the 1988 election on a platform of closer economic ties with the US, the first time that had ever happened. The White House saw the FTA as “a major victory for the United States”, one US trade rep even saying, “The Canadians don’t understand what they have signed. In 20 years they will be sucked into the US economy”.

By 1993, Mulroney’s popularity had fallen to a record low of 9%, and he was replaced in 1993 by Kim Campbell, Canada’s first female prime minister, who only lasted a few months. Trudeau’s old henchman Jean Chrétien was voted in, and has remained in power ever since. In January 1994, months after taking office, he signed the NAFTA agreement that greatly expanded the Mulroney agenda he claimed to oppose. The effects were immediate: while the US retail giant Walmart moved into every mall in the country, the ancient Canadian stalwart Eatons filed for bankruptcy.

Surprisingly enough, Canada was where the Cold War began. It was a clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, Igor Gouzenko, who revealed to British intelligence officers just how many spies had infiltrated their embassies, governments, and atomic research facilities. He had tried to approach Canadian officials, who refused to take him seriously. But the Cold War was a serious business for a country which, as one Soviet ambassador put it, was “the ham in the Soviet-American sandwich”. During the 1950s, a series of expensive radar lines were built across Canadian Territory, including the Distant Early Warning line, which was entirely paid for by the US, who would not allow Canadian officials even to approach the sites without prior approval. In 1956, Canada’s reputation as a peace-keeping force was cemented when diplomat (and later Prime Minister) Lester Pearson almost single-handedly defused the highly explosive Suez Crisis, for which he earnt the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s clear today that the prosperity of the 1920s was a colossal house of cards which provoked a domino effect of crises when it came tumbling down in 1929. When panic ensued, countries followed the example of the US and retreated behind walls of protectionist tariffs. As a nation whose economy was largely built on exports, Canada was one of, if not the, worst hit countries in the West. The Prairies suffered the most. A bumper crop flooded the market just as demand dried up, pushing prices to an all-time low, then a severe drought began with almost no rain at all for seven years. The Plains region became a dust bowl, afflicted with dirt storms, darkened skies and plagues of grasshoppers. More than 200,000 people were forced to leave their farms. Income in Canada as a whole fell by almost 50%, with 20% of the population living on relief handouts. The jobless rate rose from 4 to 27%. With warmer weather on the West Coast, many of the homeless gravitated towards Vancouver, where they seem to have set up permanent residence on Hastings Street. At this time a new party was formed in Calgary from farmers and unions. Called the Co-operative Commonwealth Fed (CCF) it later merged in 1961 with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the NDP.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau was perhaps the all-time most famous icon of Canadian politics, and dominated the scene from 1968-84. Young, suave and free-spirited, he captured the optimistic spirit of the Sixties.

Though prone to be coldly intellectual, Pierre Trudeau mostly lived up to his purported liberalism. As Minister of Justice he had already brought in key changes that relaxed divorce laws and ended restrictions on homosexuality and access to abortion. In 1971 he introduced the Canadian Multicultural Act, emphasizing the equality of all ‘cultural and ethnic groups’. A few years later, in a landmark piece of legislation, a proposed gas pipeline from Alaska to Alberta was shelved due to native land rights and environmental issues. And in a reversal of former policy, nearly 60,000 Indo-Chinese were allowed into Canada during the Vietnamese boat crisis.

With a great deal of squabbling and difficulty, Trudeau drew up a Canadian Constitution in 1982. Until then the Constitution was still under British jurisdiction. Included within it was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which delineates freedom of conscience and religion; freedom of expression (including that of the press); freedom of peaceful assembly; and freedom of association.

It was the humble beaver that really allowed settlers on the East Coast to survive and expand westwards. In Europe, top hats were all the rage, and the best felt for their fabrication came from the soft underpelt of the beaver. Since the best fur came from the coldest regions, pursuit of the beaver led directly to the colonization of the north and west of this vast new continent. At first native trappers brought furs to trade with the French, but Champlain shrewdly began sending men to live among his native allies, learn their language and customs, and become familiar with the geography. As well as bridging a gap between the cultures, he wanted these coureurs de bois, runners of the woods, to help him chart the interior. They were forerunners of the voyageurs, intrepid adventurers who paddled deep into the continent each year in flotillas of canoes to collect furs.

Two coureurs de bois named Radisson and Groseilliers, maybe at the suggestion of the Cree trappers in the north, realized that instead of taking the longer route to the northwest via the St Lawrence River, ocean-going vessels could sail right into Hudson Bay and load up with furs brought straight to them by native trappers, thus cutting out the middlemen entirely. The French were not interested in the idea, so they took it to the English, and in 1668 two ships were sent to test the idea, one of which, the Nonsuch, made it through to the bottom of James Bay and set up a small trading post. This led to a Royal Charter being issued for a ‘Company of Adventurers’, who were given exclusive trading rights over the lands that drained into Hudson Bay. Named Rupert’s Land, this vast area covered 40% of Canada’s present territory. Founded in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) was the world’s first corporation, very much in the shape of things to come. Historian Peter C Newman has pointed out that “at the peak of its expansion (the HBC) controlled nearly 3 million square miles of territory – nearly a twelfth of the earth’s land surface and an area 10 times that of the Holy Roman Empire at its height”.

The debate is still open concerning which Europeans first reached the so-called New World. It may well have been a group of Irish monks led by St Brendan in AD 565. They almost certainly reached Iceland before the Vikings, and may well have visited the Northeast American Coast, but proof is yet to arrive. The Norsemen had island-hopped their way to Greenland by AD 1000, when sailors on a lost supply ship caught a glimpse of an unknown shore. Eric the Red’s son Leif went in search of this mysterious land, stopping first at Baffin Island, then Labrador, then a heavily forested and pastured land, probably on Newfoundland, which he named Vinland, Land of Wine. His brother later returned and spent the winter getting into a battle with the people they called skraelings, meaning ‘barbarians’. Little more came of it.

In 1497 John Cabot, searching for the ‘backdoor’ route to China, arrived in Newfoundland, or maybe Cape Breton, where he found so many cod that “they sometimes stayed his shippes”. From then on hundreds of ships from all over Europe prowled the Newfoundland waters, but nobody was interested in settling the land.

In 1534 Jacques Cartier led the first of three expeditions to the new land looking for gold and diamonds. Stumbling across a group of Iroquoian natives on a fishing expedition, he set up a wooden cross in their presence and claimed the land for France, a symbolic act understood despite the language barrier by their chief Donnacona, who was enraged. On his third voyage Cartier returned to set up a colony but the understandable antagonism of the natives, together with the harshness of the weather, made him leave again for home, this time with a handful of ‘gold’ that turned out to be the fool’s variety and ‘diamonds’ that were merely quartz.

It wasn’t until 1608 that the first European settlement was established on Canadian soil. Samuel de Champlain set up his habitation at the site of today’s Québec City and refused to give up, even when 20 of his 28 men died of scurvy in the first winter. Determined and energetic, this true founding father of Canada explored the waterways of the St Lawrence and Great Lakes, criss-crossing the ocean to promote his struggling colony. In 1609 the Montagnais Indians asked Champlain to accompany them on an expedition against the Iroquois to the south. It was the first time European weapons had been used against the natives and began a feud with the Iroquois, particularly the Mohawk, that would continue for generations, keeping the future land of ‘New France’ in a state of almost constant siege until a peace treaty was finally signed in 1701. From as early as 1615, Champlain invited the Récollet missionaries to come over and start converting the natives. He said it would “cement their commercial ties with the French as well as save them from eternal hell-fire in the next world”. Their tactic was to relocate the natives on farms, dress them in European clothes and teach them French. It failed utterly. The Jesuits, however, lived among the natives, learned their language, and sought to convert them one at a time. The tactic was far more successful and ultimately perilous for the natives. Chief Dan George later lamented: “When the white man came, we had the land and they had the Bibles. Now they have the land and we have the Bibles”.

Despite many vicissitudes, and thanks largely to the fur trade, New France survived, but it remained little more than a trading post until 1617, when Champlain asked one Louis Hébert to settle the land properly, by farming it. The first century was a tenuous time, during which the colony’s very existence was constantly threatened by the powerful Iroquois Confederacy. In 1667, Louis XIV sent over 1100 of his best soldiers, whose very presence led to a truce and 20 years of peace during which the young colony flourished. At the same time, the king sent about 800 young female settlers, known as Filles du Roi, to redress the balance between males and females. This helped spark a population explosion, and today the majority of Canada’s six million Québecois can trace their roots back to these adventurous women, who were mainly orphans, prostitutes and widows.

The war against France had pushed Britain to the brink of financial ruin. Attempts to make the American colonies contribute towards clearing the imperial debt was the last straw for a people already ripe for self-dominion: the Thirteen Colonies of the Eastern Seaboard broke free from British rule and formed a new political union, the United States of America. The question is not why did they want to break free, but why did the northern colonies not choose to seize the moment. A very important part of the answer is that they were wary of the Americans, a factor that has recurred perennially throughout Canadian history to this very day. English settlers in Canada were happy to have access to so much land, the territory of Québec having just been expanded to include the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. The French had so far been well-treated by the English, who had done little to undermine their institutions and culture. As Henri Bourassa later put it: “It was all very simple; we had to choose between the English of Boston and the English of London. The English of London were farther away and we hated them less”. Both sides considered their neighbours to the south a much less tolerant prospect than the present regime, so when the Americans attempted to take Québec by force in 1775, they were duly resisted, and the attempt degenerated into a fiasco.

The battle for supremacy between the French and English continued for over 150 years, often during times of official peace, finally culminating in the so-called Seven Years’ War (which lasted nine years in North America). The conflict began on the American frontier and eventually spread to Europe and beyond, spawning a web of alliances that fought on four continents, making this the first true World War. Though outnumbered three to one in ships, four to one in troops, and ten to one in money, the French actually seemed to be winning the war, until Britain was rescued by the election of Prime Minister William Pitt, for whom the war became an obsession. Ultimately, the war was won thousands of miles away, with the defeat of the French navy in Europe.

Of the younger geological regions that border the Shield, almost all of the area covered in this book is part of the Canadian Cordillera, meaning the landscapes are utterly dominated by mountain ranges. British Columbia has two main regions, loosely called the Coast and the Interior, each containing many contrasting sub-regions. The Peace River Lowland of the northeast is the only part of BC not on the Cordillera. An extension of the Interior Plains, it belongs in character to neighbouring Alberta.

The Rocky Mountains rise abruptly about 1000-1500 m above the foothills of Alberta, and some of their snow-capped peaks tower more than 3000 m above sea level, the highest being BC’s Mount Robson at 3954 m. The range ends south of the Liard River in northeastern BC, its western boundary marked by the Rocky Mountain Trench, which extends 1400 km from Montana to the Yukon, making it the longest valley in North America. Out of the trench flow the headwaters of many rivers, including the Kootenay, Columbia, Fraser and Liard.

Canada consists of six geological regions, five of which are arranged roughly concentrically around, and partly on top of, the sixth. Far older than the others this central core is the Canadian Shield, which is of Precambrian age, more than 570 million years old. Itself a mosaic of geological sub-regions centred around Archean age rocks (more than 2.5 billion years old), the Shield covers an area of about 4.8 million sq km stretching in a broad band from the Northwest Territories down to the Great Lakes of southern Ontario. Repeated advances of glacial ice have scoured its surface and left it covered with hundreds of lakes and rivers, including the biggest on the continent, making it very easily identified on any map. Also dominating this vast region’s landscapes are slabs of protruding basement rock. Originally formed during rounds of mountain-building activity, these are now among the most stable, and oldest, on Earth. This bare rock, together with its thin soils, muskeg, and insects, has presented a constant barrier to settlement. The agricultural frontier of the prairie provinces and eastern Canada end abruptly at its perimeter. The railway link to the West literally had to be blasted through Shield rock, which also revealed its treasures of gold, silver, nickel, cobalt, zinc, copper and iron ore.

The western section of the Cordillera is dominated by the lofty Coast Mountains and the offshore Insular Mountains. The Cascade Mountains of Washington State end at the Fraser River, then the high, snow- and ice-covered peaks of the Coast Mountains extend northward along the Alaskan Panhandle into the Yukon. These gloriously scenic mountains have peaks, rising to 3000 m in the southern part, while northern peaks such as Mount Waddington rise to over 4000 m. Numerous long, twisting, deep fjords penetrate into the mountain mass along the coast. Only three major rivers, the Fraser, Skeena and Stikine, have managed to cut through the Coast Mountain barrier, the first two of which have provided vital funnels for the only roads and railway lines to reach the Ocean. Northwest of the Coast Range the St Elias Mountains straddle BC, the Yukon and Alaska, containing North America’s mightiest peaks, including the highest in BC, Fairweather Mountain (4663 m), and the highest in Canada, Mount Logan (6050 m). The offshore Insular Mountains, whose highest peak is Strathcona Park’s Golden Hinde at 2200 m, are the partially submerged northern continuation of the Olympic Mountains and Coast Ranges of Washington State. They provide the land mass for both Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Almost all of BC’s population resides in its southwestern corner. The so-called Lower Mainland, dominated by metropolitan Vancouver, contains almost half of the province’s population, and represents its commercial, cultural and industrial core. Together with Victoria and the southeast coast of Vancouver Island, this zone is also sometimes called the Georgia Strait region, which holds a whole 70% of BC’s population.

British Columbia’s vast interior is equally dominated by mountains. In the south are three parallel, north-south oriented ranges known collectively as the Columbia Mountains. The backbone is the Selkirk Range, flanked by the Purcells to the east and the Monashees to the west. Between them, carved out by lakes and rivers, are great valleys such as the Okanagan and the Kootenay, along which most of the population is strung. These tend to have radically differing characteristics of landscape and climate dependant on such factors as the rain-shadows which keep the Okanagan and Thompson Valleys so very dry.

Further northwest is a fourth range of the Columbias, the Cariboo Mountains. Between these and the Coast Range lie the broad, gently rolling uplands of the Interior Plateau that covers much of central BC. This region can be considered a basin because it is surrounded by higher mountains, though its average elevation is still about 1000 m above sea level. Some of BC’s bigger but less interesting towns, such as Kamloops and Prince George, have grown as transportation and service hubs for the isolated subregions that surround them. The northern half of the province is barely inhabited away from the Yellowhead Highway, and beyond Prince Rupert is cut off from the Pacific by the Alaska Panhandle. The Cassiar-Omineca Mountains run between the Coast and Rocky Ranges, broken up by a second relatively flat expanse, the Spasizi Plateau.

East of the Rockies, the foothills quickly slope down to the broad, comparitively flat eco-region of the Interior Plains, which stretches right across Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Alberta can be divided into into four biophysical regions according to physiography, climate, soil and vegetation. The prairie region includes most of southern Alberta, more precisely the land south and east of an arc stretching from Waterton in the southwest to a point along the Saskatchewan border east of Red Deer. This gently rolling grassland is relatively dry and mostly treeless. The terrain varies locally, in places broken by deep river valleys, and rising from less than 300 m in the northeast to over 1460 m in the southeastern Cypress Hills. The parkland region predominates in central Alberta, forming a crescent to the west and north of the prairie region and including most of the North Saskatchewan River drainage basin. This area varies from the flatland of old lake bottoms to rolling landscapes with numerous lakes and depressions. It contains both forested and grassy terrain, with soil and climatic factors favourable to agriculture. West of the plains an area of foothill ridges rises fairly rapidly towards the Rockies. The northern half of the province is covered by boreal forest. Here great rivers and lakes dominate the landscape, draining northward to the Arctic Ocean. Soil and climatic factors make agriculture unprofitable except in the northwestern Peace River region that extends into BC, where parkland conditions create the world’s most northerly grain-growing area.

In sociocultural terms, the province’s more populated lower half can be further divided into two distinct regions, with Calgary and Edmonton as their respective focal points. This is a long-standing division dating to the times when the powerful Blackfoot Confederacy dominated the south, with the Cree and Assiniboine inhabiting the north. In the early days of white settlement, grain farmers opened up the central fertile zone, while the south was more suitable for cattle-rearing on large-scale ranches, a fact that has led to the cowboy culture of Calgary, its nickname of Cow-town, and the famous Stampede. Calgary and southern Alberta were first linked to the east by the Canadian Pacific Railway, Edmonton and the north by the Grand Trunk Pacific and Canadian Northern railways. Later, Calgary became the administrative and financial headquarters for the province’s petroleum industry, Edmonton its exploration and production centre.

The Yukon constitutes the northernmost part of the Cordilleran region. Much of its area is covered by a high subarctic plateau with an average elevation of 1200 m, frequently interrupted by predominantly northwest-southeast oriented mountain ranges and deep valleys. To the east the Yukon Plateau is bounded by the Selwyn and Mackenzie mountains. To the south an area of lower terrain near the 60th parallel separates it from the mountainous areas of northern BC. The territory’s southwest is dominated by the spectacular St Elias and Coast mountains mentioned above, many of them covered by extensive permanent ice caps, including the largest nonpolar icefields in North America. These mighty peaks cut off direct access to the Pacific Ocean, despite its relative proximity. The 2400 m Ogilvie Mountains in the north separate the Yukon and Porcupine Plateaus, the latter hemmed in by the British Mountains to the north and Richardson Mountains to the east. The Arctic Coastal Plain is a narrower eastward continuation of the same region in Alaska, which slopes down to the Beaufort Sea from the British Mountains inland. Much of the north and northwest was part of the Ice Age continent of Beringia, which escaped glaciation despite its northern latitude.

Alberta’s oldest surface landscape is a small outcrop of the Canadian Shield in its extreme northeastern part. This does not end in the northeast, for its rocks form a basement under the rest of the province, sloping down to 6,000 m in the southwest. During the Paleozoic era (544-250 million years ago), Alberta alternated between dry land and sea, and life evolved from simple plants and animals to vertebrates and dryland vegetation. The decay of this plant and animal life, especially during the Devonian period (410-353 million years ago), formed the basis of most of the province’s oil and natural gas deposits. Alternating upraisings of the land and infloodings of ocean waters affected the province during the Mesozoic era (250-65 million years ago). This was the era of the dinosaurs, the period that shaped the badland formations of the Red Deer River valley, and laid down most of the province’s coal resources. The Cenozoic era (65 million years ago to the present) saw the uplifting of the Rocky Mountains, then about 25,000 years ago the last advance of continental ice scoured the terrain, covering the entire province apart from the highest parts of the Rockies, the Cypress Hills and the Porcupine Hills. The final retreat of the ice age, created the current river systems and soils.

During the last ice age, almost all of Western Canada was covered by a thick sheet of ice until about 12,000-15,000 years ago in the coastal lowlands and some interior valleys, and as late as 7000 years ago at higher elevations. The results of continental and alpine glaciation are seen throughout the region in coastal fjords, mountain cirques, ground moraines across the Interior Plateau, and terraces and benches along the interior rivers. Many features commonly produced by glaciers can be observed on or near the Athabasca Glacier in the Rocky Mountains. These include: crevasses; fissures that form from tensile stress in the glacier surface; icefalls, resulting from crevasses formed where the glacier hangs over a bedrock protuberance; and a medial moraine, composed of debris and ice, which is formed where two valley glaciers coalesce. Other features that were formed during the retreat of the glacier (and can be seen nearby) include lateral moraines, formed by debris deposited along the glacier terminus. In addition, glacier meltwater carries and deposits debris, forming such features as deltas and glacial-outwash plains composed of sand and gravel. The Bow Valley itself is also a classic example of the kind of U-shaped valley caused by glaciation as opposed to the more steep, rugged, narrow valleys that were carved out by rivers such as the Fraser.

The continent now known as North America was covered by vast granite mountains up to roughly 600 million years ago. The greatly eroded lake-dotted remains of this rock now constitute the Canadian Shield, which stretches from Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories to the Great Lakes of Ontario. As the Shield had a slight tilt, all the eroded debris was carried westward by streams and rivers, and dumped into the Ocean, slowly building up a ‘continental slope’ that reached a depth of 20 km over 400 million years. The weight of this sediment turned mud to stone, sand to sandstone, and the lime-heavy sea-debris into limestone.

Roughly 200 million years ago, two distinct, equally vast chains of volcanic islands were carried eastwards by the shifting Pacific Plate towards the continent’s west coast. When this 50-km thick platform eventually collided with the North American Plate, it slid underneath it, plunging into the earth’s molten interior. At the same time, the first island chain was broken apart from the heavier plate and smashed violently into, over and through the continental rock, causing it to lift, crumple, buckle and twist itself into the myriad fascinating shapes of BC’s interior mountain ranges. Over a period of 75 million years, the aftershock of this awesome collision caused further ripples of upheaval, as the incoming islands continued to smash into the ancient rock, creating the Western Ranges of the Rockies that are mostly contained in Yoho and Kootenay National Parks. Eventually, they bulldozed their way still further east, building the Eastern Ranges, such as those around Lake Louise.

When the second Pacific island chain smashed into the continent, further chaos was unleashed: a new round of lifting, distorting, rupturing and co-mingling resulted in the Rockies’ easternmost Front Ranges, the rockwall that rears up from the Albertan Prairies, together with the lower foothills. A series of ice-ages (at least three) in the last 240,000 years, have added their own contributions to this on-going work of art, sculpting, shattering, eroding and re-shaping of the mountain contours.

The Columbia Mountains consist mainly of sedimentary and intrusive rocks of Cretaceous, Triassic and Jurassic ages, and they have been well mineralized. The exception is the Cariboo Range, which is composed of sedimentary rocks of Proterozoic age that appear to be less mineralized. Many of the rocks of the interior plateau are lavas of Cretaceous and Tertiary geological ages with apparently little mineralization except around the plateau edges. The Coast Mountain rocks are mostly granitic intrusions of Cretaceous and Tertiary ages and there are some recent volcanoes. The Yukon is geologically very complex but includes three parallel sectors oriented northwest-southeast. In the east, folded sedimentary Paleozoic and Mesozoic formations are set off sharply from the Mackenzie Valley by great faults. The middle sector includes sedimentaries, metamorphics and volcanics ranging from Precambrian to Mesozoic age. Massive plutonic Mesozoic and Tertiary granites make up the core of the western sector.

British Columbia’s last premier, Gordon Campbell, has to rate as one of the most hated in the province’s history. It says a lot about the nature of Canadian politics that he managed to stay in power for nine years, winning three elections. One irate blogger summed up Campbell’s achievements in that time neatly: yes, he lowered income tax; but to pay for it he made massive cuts to healthcare, education, parks, and community centres, increased medical and education fees, closed hospitals, laid off hundreds of civil servants, raised his own salary by 30%, sold off BC Ferries, BC Rail and much of BC Hydro, and sold 600 wilderness rivers to private power companies. He was also arrested in Hawaii for drunk driving, and recently introduced the hated Harmonized Sales Tax. This last move led one opinion poll to place his personal approval rating at 9%, and ultimately led to his resignation in November 2010. At the time of writing, the BC Liberals are yet to elect his replacement.

For a while, Campbell’s neo-Thatcherite strategies did appear to bear some fruit. When he took over, British Columbia was considered a ‘have-not’ province: unemployment was rising, the economy was stagnating, and a deficit was growing, despite ample natural resources. That situation seemed to turn around. The economy was booming a few years ago, unemployment had plummeted, Vancouver-Whistler won the race to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, and the BC government sank millions of dollars into province-wide improvements to public transport. As noted, the economy even weathered the US market crash surprisingly well. It will be interesting to see what happens now that Campbell has gone.

The Indian Act that followed the First World War aimed at nothing short of complete assimilation, forcing natives to relinquish all rights and status in order to vote or even own property. This once proud people had been racked by alien diseases, restricted to reserves, deprived of their traditional hunting grounds, taught in schools where they were discouraged from speaking their own languages, and frequently sexually abused, forbidden to continue ceremonies like the potlatch, and denied basic rights such as a vote. By the 1920s, they appeared to be a dying breed. Yet somehow they survived, with many of their traditions and languages intact. After the Second World War the government decided to revise the Indian Act, and for the first time natives were involved in the discussions. Little came of it, but at least they got the vote in 1960.

The struggle for native land claims began in the 1890s in British Columbia, where no treaties had ever been drawn up as they were further east. Nations like the Nisga’a of the Nass Valley near Terrace never signed their land away and were never conquered, so technically their land still belongs to them. Only in the last 30 years have such claims begun to be taken seriously. When the government of Québec wanted to build a hydro project in the north, they had to negotiate terms with the James Bay Cree and Inuit, who surrendered their rights to a million square kilometres of land in exchange for self-government within their own communities, hunting, trapping and fishing rights, and a trust fund of $225 million. In 1987, the Sechelt Inlet Band became the first native group in Canada to be granted self-government within their own reserve lands.

In 1990, Mohawk protesters in the Oka region outside Montréal barricaded roads to a forest that was slated to be cut down, and in the resistance killed a police officer. This led to the formation in 1991 of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The report took five years to complete, and included 400 proposed changes, including the creation of an individual tribunal for land claims. It was finally recognized that the government could hardly be impartial in cases filed against itself. In 1999 the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that Canada was in violation of international law in its treatment of aboriginal rights. In 1999 the new territory of Nunavut was created. More than twice the size of BC it covers two million square kilometres, about a fifth of Canada’s land mass. One of the most thinly populated areas on earth, it has just 25,000 people, 83% of whom are Inuit, who were allowed to retain ownership of 18% of the land. The territory was given self-government and a $1 billion cash settlement. This was the first time any single First Nations group had gained a majority presence in a provincial or territorial government.

Separatism is one of three strands that continue to dominate Canadian politics. The English speaking majority is still struggling to define its relationship with its French co-founders, the First Nations whose land it stole, and those powerful neighbours to the south.

In 1976 the Parti Québecois (PQ) was elected as Québec’s government. The following year they passed Bill 101, which banned English on commercial signs and severely restricted access to English-language education. Ironically, a federal bill had already been passed making it compulsory for the rest of the country to have labels in both languages on items as trivial as a jar of jam. In 1980, the PQ held a referendum on separation in which 60% of Québecois voted against sovereignty, but this was far from the end of the affair. During the term of Albertan PM Brian Mulroney, the separatists’ position strengthened due to the premier’s constant pandering to Québec, which was cited as a major reason why dissatisfied conservatives from the West broke away to form the Reform Party in 1987.

The stakes were raised in 1990 when the Bloc Québecois was formed to campaign on a federal level. Another referendum was arranged by the PQ for 1995, and this time the nation held its breath. Just 50.6% of Québec voted against separation, the narrowest of escapes.

Despite centuries of striving to defend itself against integration into the United States, a trend began during and after the SecondWorld War by which Canada became more and more linked to the US both militarily and economically. The Ogdensburg Agreement of 1940 established a Permanent Joint Board to integrate North American defences, while the government started courting American money to a degree that was considered shameless. By signing the North American Air Defense Agreement (NORAD) in 1957, John Diefenbaker pretty much put Canada’s air defences under US control. During his reign, Pierre Elliott Trudeau became more and more concerned by US penetration into the Canadian economy, and made real efforts to increase ties to Britain and Europe, introducing some of the most unabashed examples of economic nationalism since Canadian’s first prime Minister, John A Macdonald. In an address to the National Press Club of Washington, DC in March 1969, he said, “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt”.

Matters took a dramatic turn with the election of Brian Mulroney, an Albertan Conservative who started Investment Canada to encourage American investment. In 1987 he proposed the Free Trade Agreement, removing almost every trade barrier between the countries, even though 80% of Canada’s exports were already going south. He then won the 1988 election on a platform of closer economic ties with the US, the first time that had ever happened. The White House saw the FTA as “a major victory for the United States.” One US trade rep went so far as to say, “The Canadians don’t understand what they have signed. In 20 years they will be sucked into the US economy”. By 1993, Mulroney’s popularity had fallen to a record low of 9%. He was replaced in 1993 by Kim Campbell, Canada’s first female Prime Minister, who only lasted a few months. Trudeau’s old henchman Jean Chrétien was voted in, and remained in power until 2003. In January 1994, months after taking office, he signed the NAFTA agreement that greatly expanded the Mulroney agenda he claimed to oppose. The effects were immediate: while the US retail giant Walmart moved into every mall in the country, the ancient Canadian stalwart Eatons filed for bankruptcy.

Canada continues to be defined by the fact that it is not the United States. It is amazing, in fact, that the country can retain any sense of national identity while so completely overwhelmed by the centrifugal force of US money and ideology. Living next door to the world’s number one superpower has never been easy, and though a land-grab seems less likely now than in the past, the threat of a more insidious cultural and economic takeover is as real as ever. Some 200 million people cross the border every year, and over $1 billion of trade crosses it every day. Two recent chapters in the ongoing story involved the complete ban by the US on Alberta beef, as the result of one case of mad cow disease, costing the ranching industry millions of dollars; and a bogus (and allegedly illegal) embargo on softwood lumber, which cost BC’s forestry industry millions of dollars. Stephen Harper, keen to remain on good terms with George W Bush, was keen to commit Canada’s troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fortunately, Canada’s banking system is set up in such a way that the country emerged in relatively good financial shape from the financial collapse that shook its neighbour. In fact, Europe, so far away in geographical terms, was hit much harder.

For an illustrated overview of Canadian species, http://www.cws-scf.ec.gc.ca/hww-fap. The beaver was the obvious choice as Canada’s national animal, as it had a greater impact on the country’s history than any other animal or plant. The reason: beaver underfur is warm, soft and waterproof, the perfect material for making the kind of felt used in top hats. To make the fur softer still, hatters used nitrate of mercury, continued exposure to which made them go mad, hence the expression. With beaver pelts fetching the highest prices, pursuit of the rodents was the leading motive of early colonizers, and led to explorations which opened up most of the northwestern hinterland to settlement. In the process, the beaver population was reduced from ten million to near extinction.

Ten thousand years ago, Beringia was inhabited by giant beavers the size of bears with lower incisors 25 cm long. Today they are still the largest member of the rodent family. Beavers are monogamous and mate for life. Their tails are horizontal, flattened, paddle-shaped and scaly. As well as eye membranes and ear valves, they have structural adaptations at the back of their mouths to stop water from entering the lungs, meaning they can gnaw and carry branches when submerged. They typically inhabit slow-moving streams, where they construct dams, making them one of the only animals beside humans that can build their own environment. Beaver lodges are made of intricately interlaced branches, with mud and grass plastered on the outside, and are almost impenetrable. Rather than hibernating, they stay in their lodges, whose clever design keeps temperatures at an even 8-12°C even when it is -40°C outside. A cache of food is kept nearby, submerged to preserve it. Mainly nocturnal, this most hard-working of animals can usually be seen swimming busily around at dusk.

Without beaver dams, much of Canada’s water would flow unchecked. The beavers thin out dense woods, creating opportunities for a variety of animals and plants. They are therefore a keystone species in temperate and boreal forest aquatic ecosystems.

The list of birds native to Western Canada is extensive. This is a summary of the most notable species.

Waterbirds: Common and red-throated loon, horned and red-necked grebe, cormorant, various species of swan including the trumpeter, geese, American widgeon, mallard, northern pintail, green-winged teal, common eider, various ducks including the harlequin, Barrow’s goldeneye, merganser.

Raptors: Osprey, northern harrier, bald and golden eagles, various hawks and kestrels, peregrine falcon, gyrfalcon.

Shorebirds: American golden plover, lesser yellowlegs, wandering tattler, spotted and upland sandpiper, whimbrel, red-necked pharalope, long-tailed jaegar, various gulls, Arctic tern, black guillemot, belted kingfisher.

Owls: Great grey, snowy, northern hawk, short-eared.

Perching birds: Various jays including blue and grey, raven, numerous swallows including tree, violet-green, bank, barn and cliff, chickadees, American dipper, ruby-crowned kinglet, northern wheater, Townsend’s solitaire, various thrushes including grey-cheeked and Swainson’s, American pipit, Tennessee, Wilson’s and yellow warblers, common yellowthroat, numerous sparrows, junco, snow bunting, Lapland and Smith’s longspur, redpolls.

Other: Spruce and sharp-tailed grouse, ptarmigan, sora, American coot, sandhill crane, northern flicker, assorted woodpeckers and many hummingbirds.

The bison is the largest land animal in North America. A bull can stand 2 m high and weigh more than a tonne. It has curved black horns on the sides of its head, a high hump at the shoulders, a short tail with a tassel, and dense shaggy dark brown and black hair around the head and neck. Another distinctive feature of the buffalo is its beard. Two hundred years ago, the Great Plains aboriginal people relied heavily on the great herds of 30 to 70 million bison that roamed free in North America. By the end of the 1800s, the species was on the verge of extinction. Since then numbers have increased, but the great free-ranging herds have gone forever. Today’s wild herds move freely only within parks and fenced wildlife sanctuaries.

There are two living subspecies of wild bison in North America: the plains bison and the wood bison. Today, there are few plains bison, though some of their traditional routes are still visible from the air in the form of deep paths worn over the years by millions of passing hooves. A herd of about 600 lives at Elk Island National Park, 64 km east of Edmonton, and there are small numbers at Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta. Some commercial ranchers have bred the plains buffalo with cows, resulting in ‘beefalo’.

In historic times, the range of the wood bison was further north, centred in northern Alberta and adjacent parts of BC, the Northwest Territories, and Saskatchewan. In general, the wood bison is darker in colour, less stocky and long-legged, but heavier. Never as abundant as its southern cousin, the total number in North America was probably never more than 170,000. Today the largest free-roaming herds of both breeds is in Wood Buffalo National Park, on the Alberta/NWT border, where there are about 2000 animals. Bison have keen senses of smell and hearing, able to distinguish smells from 3 km away, and are quick to detect changes in their environment.

One of Canada’s most widely distributed large mammals, the caribou is the only member of the deer family whose males and females both carry antlers. They are similar to, and belong to the same species as, the reindeer of Eurasia. Their ability to use lichens as a primary food distinguishes them from all other large mammals, and has enabled them to survive on harsh northern rangeland. An excellent sense of smell enables them to locate lichens under the snow. Large, concave hooves splay widely to support the caribou in snow or muskeg, and also function well as paddles, making them excellent swimmers. In fact, a herd of caribou will often swim across even the widest of lakes rather than walk around them, and often do so to gain some respite from the swarms of insects that make their lives a misery in summer.

Woodland caribou are large, dark animals usually found in small herds in northern boreal forests. Average weights are 180 kg for bulls and 135 kg for cows. In the mountainous areas of Western Canada, they make seasonal movements from winter range in forested valleys to summer range on high, alpine tundra. Clearing of land for agriculture has sadly destroyed much of their habitat, with new growth forest a much more suitable environment for moose and deer. Barren-ground caribou are smaller and lighter coloured, and spend much or all of the year on the tundra. Most of those in Western Canada belong to the porcupine and bluenose herds which migrate seasonally across the Yukon from the tundra to the sparsely wooded northern coniferous forests, known as taiga. They are excellent navigators, unerringly walking hundreds of kilometres in spring to their relatively small calving areas, led by the pregnant cows. In fact, their migration routes have always been so well established that, in past years, native hunters would lay in wait at certain places, knowing the caribou would come. The annual crossing of the Dempster Highway by the porcupine herd in autumn is one of the most spectacular sights imaginable.

The cougar’s range has decreased since European settlement, but is still the most extensive of any terrestrial mammal in the western hemisphere, extending from the Yukon to Patagonia. In Canada this large predator, which can also go my the names mountain lion, puma, and panther, is now common only in western forested regions, where three subspecies occur: one in southwestern Alberta and interior BC, one in the Coast Mountains, and one only on Vancouver Island. The cougar is the second largest cat in the New World after the jaguar, with a body length of around 2 m, and weights of about 71 kg and 40 kg for males and females respectively. One of the cougar’s distinctive characteristics is its long tail, which is useful for balance. Like all cats, cougars are formidable hunters, very secretive, and almost entirely nocturnal, so the chances of seeing one are almost nil.

Of all North America’s large animals, the white-tailed deer is the most widely distributed and the most numerous. Its range extends from the southern tip of the continent well into the northern boreal forest. Far from being endangered, these deers are excessively numerous, and you are almost guaranteed to see their distinctive white rears bouncing away into the bush, or running out in front of your vehicle. Even more common west of the Continental Divide is the almost identical black-tailed deer, which has similar antlers and will sometimes show the characteristic ‘flag’ of the white tail, though usually with less flare. Mule deer can be distinguished by a small white tail with a black-tip, antlers that divide and redivide into paired beams and points, and large ears that resemble those of their namesake.

In general appearance elk, also known as wapiti, are obviously kin to these deer, but considerably larger. An adult bull elk stands about 150 cm tall at the shoulder and weighs around 300-350 kg, with some large bulls approaching 500 kg in late summer. The colour of the elk’s coat ranges from reddish brown in summer to dark brown in winter. They have long, blackish hair on the neck that is referred to as a mane. Male elk are notable for their impressively large antlers, which are grown new each year in just a few months. In summer these are encased by a protective layer of ‘velvet’. Elk are sociable and talkative animals, communicating through frequent grunts and squeals. They are also long-lived, with males surviving to an average of 14 years, and females living as long as 24 years. In autumn the males go into rut as they prepare to mate, at which time they can be extremely aggressive, and should be avoided. While elk inhabit almost the entire region, you are most likely to see them wandering through campgrounds in the Rockies, or grazing in northern wetlands.

Unfortunately, the creatures you are most likely to encounter are voracious biting insects. Though the Tropics are more famous for their mosquitoes, nowhere in the world has bugs worse than those found in Canada. Naturally, such beasties only thrive at certain temperatures, so the further north you go the shorter their season, and places like the Okanagan are too hot for them in summer. Most of Western Canada has horrible bugs for at least a few weeks of the summer. Central BC is particularly brutal, and the whole of the north is afflicted with appallingly vicious insects for a shorter time span. Mosquitoes are annoying mostly for their persistence and whining sound, but black flies can be an even greater torment as they are numerous, harder to kill, and like to go for your eyes. They can be horrible in the Coast Mountains. No-see-ums are so named because you can’t see them, making these a formidable enemy. They’re small enough to get through protective netting, and their bites are extremely painful. Towards the end of the summer, deer flies and horse flies have a brief season. Both are big enough to take a nasty chunk out of you, but they’re slow and fairly easy to kill. For a couple of weeks in spring, the most heinous bugs of all have a brief season in certain regions that includes the Rockies: ticks. Ticks attach themselves to your flesh and suck your blood. They particularly like to hang out in long grass. Signs normally warn hapless hikers of the danger, so do a full body (and hair) check at the end of the day, and wear long trousers. The best way to remove them is very delicately with a pair of tweezers, making sure that no parts of the insect break off inside. The very tiny ticks that carry Lymes disease are practically non-existent in Canada.

Of the three Canadian wild cats, the lynx and bobcat are most alike and most closely related, both probably having descended from the Eurasian lynx. They resemble a large domestic cat, with a short tail, long legs, large feet, and prominent ear tufts. Both cats have large eyes and ears, and depend on acute sight and hearing when hunting. Secretive and nocturnal, these too are rarely seen in the wild, generally inhabiting forested wilderness areas, particularly old-growth boreal forests with a dense undercover of thickets and windfalls. The lynx preys almost exclusively on the snowshoe hare, and numbers of lynx are known to fluctuate dramatically due to this hare’s 10-year population cycle.

Moose are the largest members of the deer family. An estimated half to one million of them live throughout Canada’s forests, though you are most likely to see them in boreal forest, or marshy areas of Northern BC. A bull moose with a full rack of antlers is arguably the continent’s most formidable animal, standing taller than the largest horse, and weighing up to 600 kg, or 800 kg in the Yukon. For all that, the moose is an ungainly, rather whimsical looking beast. Its body is deep at the shoulders, where massive muscles result in a humped appearance. The slim hindquarters and spindly legs look inadequate for the task of supporting so massive a bulk. The head is heavy and huge, its ears similar to a mule’s, its long nose lending the beast a perpetual mournful expression. The upper lip is drooping and flexible, and from its throat hangs a pendant of fur-­covered skin, some 30 cm long, called a bell. In colour the moose varies from dark brown, almost black, to reddish or greyish brown, with grey or white leg ‘stockings’.

In late summer and autumn, a mature bull carries a great rack of antlers which may reach a span of 180 cm. The heavy main beams broaden into large palms which are fringed with a series of spikes usually less than 30 cm long. At this time, like the elk, bull moose enter their rutting season, at which time they are extremely dangerous. The eyesight of the moose is extremely poor, but its senses of smell and hearing compensate for this. On obscure forest roads, moose have a habit of getting in front of a car and walking or running along the road for long distances. Few motorists seem to mind.

Mountain goats are found throughout the mountain ranges of the Cordillera, at elevations where they feel safe from humans and other predators. Their ability to negotiate steep, rocky terrain is unequalled. Pure white of colour, with short, pointed horns, these bearded goats have long, thin faces that seem to wear perpetual expressions of benign intelligence and mild amusement, no doubt one of the reasons for their great popularity with visitors. Though they do not stoop to begging at roadsides like the sheep, your chances of encountering these creatures in the Rockies are very high.

The wild, or mountain, sheep is a stocky, hoofed mammal, about one and a half times as large as a domestic sheep. The most distinctive characteristic of the males is their massive horns, which spiral back, out, and then forward, in an arc. Adult females have slightly curved horns about 30 cm long. North American wild sheep are related both to domestic sheep, which were imported from Europe by early settlers, and to the native sheep of Asia, which is thought to have migrated across the Bering land bridge about half a million years ago. As the great ice-age glaciers moved south from the pole, those animals became isolated in two ice-free areas, one in central Alaska, the other in the United States. The former evolved into the slender-horned Dall sheep, those farther south into the heavy-horned Rocky Mountain and desert bighorns. Today the white Dall sheep is found in mid and north Yukon, while its almost black cousin, the Stone, or black Dall sheep, makes its home in northern BC and southern Yukon. In the Pelly Mountain area of the Yukon, the two breeds merged gradually with each other, resulting in the Fannin sheep of the Faro region.

The southern sheep evolved into seven races, two of which returned to Canada after the retreat of the glaciers. Rocky Mountain bighorns moved north into the Rockies of BC and Alberta. California bighorns expanded into southwestern BC, colonizing the arid mountains and river valleys of the Okanagan and Chilcotin areas. Once a year, around about June or July, the bighorns shed their hair, resulting in a scruffy, bedraggled appearance until the new coat grows in.

Superficially the musk ox resembles the bison, its humped shoulders and long black coat accentuating the shortness of its legs. In fact, it is more closely related to sheep and goats. Although not very tall, musk oxen are relatively heavy owing to their stocky and compact build. Adult bulls weigh 270-315 kg and cows about 90 kg less. Both have impressive, very distinctive horns, which curve downward toward the face then out and up at the slender tips. On the bulls, the base of each horn extends across the forehead to meet as a solid ‘boss’ of horn and bone up to 10 cm thick. Superbly equipped to withstand frigid temperatures, the musk ox remains on the Arctic tundra year round. Fossil evidence suggests that their ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge to North America about 90,000 years ago. An ability to function normally in temperatures of -40°C in high winds and blowing snow is mainly due to the muskox’s amazing coat, which has layers of wool and hair. The insulating woolly layer next to the animal’s skin is stronger than sheep’s wool, eight times warmer, and finer than cashmere. The coarser hairy layer that covers and protects the wool grows to be the longest hair of any mammal in North America. The Inuit name for muskox is omingmak, “the animal with skin like a beard”.

The polar bear is North America’s largest land carnivore. Adult males measure 240-260 cm in total length and usually weigh 400-600 kg, although they can weigh up to 800 kg, about as much as a small car. Adult females weigh 150-250 kg. Polar bears have longer necks, skulls and bodies than their southern cousins, and a ‘Roman’ nose like black bears. Though it looks white, or lemon yellow under a rising sun, polar bear hair is translucent, and reflects the heat from the sun down to the base of the hair, where it is absorbed by the black skin. It sheds water easily, so that after a swim the bear can shake itself dry like a dog. Polar bears are considered to be marine mammals because they depend upon seals and the marine environment for their existence. They feed mostly on ringed seals, but they also catch bearded seals, harp seals, hooded seals, and harbour seals, occasionally also killing walruses, belugas or white whales, and narwhals.

Along with eyesight and hearing believed to be similar to those of a human, polar bears have an exceptional sense of smell, and sniff constantly, testing the air for scent from ringed seal breathing holes, which they can detect through layers of ice and snow 90 cm or more thick up to a kilometre away. When the seal comes up to the breathing hole for air, the polar bear kills it and flips it out of the water with a single blow of its large front paws, which also double up as powerful oars. During spring and early summer, when seals are most accessible, a bear may catch one every 4-5 days. Whatever the time of year, they can slow down their metabolism at will if food is short. Polar bears can be seen around the Beaufort Sea in winter, but the best place to see them is Churchill, Manitoba.

Few people, even those who spend a lot of time outdoors, have seen wolverines in the wild. This contributes to their mysterious reputation and explains why they are the most misunderstood of Canada’s wild animals. The wolverine belongs to the weasel family, and has been described as the fiercest creature on earth, a fearlessly aggressive fighter that will drive bears away from their kills. The wolverine is not long and lean, like a weasel, but short and thick, like a small bear. An adult is about the size of a medium-sized dog, and weighs 12-18 kg, 8-12 kg for females. The typically glossy, dark brown pelt of the wolverine is striking.Two yellow stripes originate at the nape of its neck and sweep along each flank to merge at the base of its long, bushy tail.

Following the discovery of the Cave and Basin Hot Springs by railway workers in today’s Banff National Park, the government was flooded with offers but chose not to grant private title to the lands. Instead, it was decided that the region should be preserved for the benefit of all Canadians. A report by the commissioner of Dominion Lands that “a large tract of country lying outside of the original reservation presented features of the greatest beauty, and was admirably adapted for a national park” led to the creation of Canada’s first national park in 1887. Within eight years, three new mountain reserves were set aside, unavailable for “sale, settlement or squatting”. These later became Yoho, Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks.

The world’s first distinct bureau of national parks, the Dominion Parks Branch, was formed in 1911, and led by JB Harkin from 1911-36. During this time nine national parks were established, including Elk Island (1913), Mount Revelstoke (1914), Kootenay (1920), and Wood Buffalo (1922), and “hereby dedicated to the people of Canada, for their benefit, education and enjoyment”. Further park establishment was sporadic until, in 1961, John I. Nicol became director of the National and Historic Parks Branch. Under his administration, 10 new national parks were created, and the emphasis shifted to the preservation of natural ecological processes above all else. Current policy has continued this shift in emphasis and now stresses the importance of minimal interference from people. These days, if a grizzly mother wants to set up home with her cubs in a Banff campsite that normally caters to 200 people, the campsite closes. National parks are also protected by federal legislation from all forms of extractive resource use such as mining, forestry, agriculture and sport hunting, though fishing is still allowed with a special licence.

By 1970, 20 national parks had either been established or negotiated, but opportunistically, without a vision or long-term goal. This vision was provided in the early 1970s by the National Park System Plan, which sought to develop a system of national parks using the principle of ‘representativeness’. Canada is thus divided into 39 natural regions, each containing a unique set of geological, biological and ecological characteristics, each to be represented by at least one national park. At the moment, 24 natural regions are thus represented, with no progress since 1999. Parks Canada are currently considering the feasibility of creating a National Park Reserve in the South Okanagan-Lower Similkameen area, which would represent one of the missing 15 regions.

British Columbia’s national parks are: Pacific Rim, Gwaii Haanas, Mount Revelstoke, Glacier, Yoho, the Gulf Islands and Kootenay. Alberta’s are Banff, Jasper, Waterton lakes, Elk Island, and Wood Buffalo. In the Yukon are Kluane, Ivvavik and Vuntut.

All of these have their own fees. An Discovery Pass, valid for all 27 parks, including those above, plus 78 National Historic Sites currently costs $67.70, $58 senior, $33.30 youth (six-16), and $136.40 family (up to seven). An annual pass for the Historic Sites alone is $53/45.10/26.50/106.90.

The term provincial park is misleading as it can equally refer to a five-site campground by a strip of highway or a vast area of outstanding wilderness which is every bit the equal of one of the more high profile national parks. This is especially true in British Columbia, the first western province to create provincial parks. Strathcona on Vancouver Island gained park status in 1911 as a result of public support from such groups as the Alpine Club of Canada. Attention then focused on the mountains and glaciers of eastern BC, Mount Robson being declared a provincial park in 1913, followed by Garibaldi in 1920, and Mount Assiniboine and Kokanee Glacier in 1922. The province’s largest park, Tweedsmuir (9810 sq km), gained park status in 1938; Wells Gray, in 1939. As of June 2007, BC had 893 provincial parks and other protected areas, covering 13.09 million hectares, or 13.8% of the province. This is the largest provincial park system in the country, with 340 campgrounds, 11,000 campsites and 6000 km of hiking trails. Alberta has 67 provincial parks, 3 wilderness areas, over 300 recreation areas, 14 ecological reserves and Willmore Wilderness, together encompassing over 10,000 sq km.

UNESCO recognizes the responsibility of all nations to protect places of such unique natural and cultural value and that they are considered part of the heritage of all mankind. In Western Canada Kluane, Nahanni (NWT), Wood Buffalo, the Burgess Shale of Yoho National Park, and Anthony Island (Gwaii Haanas Park National Park Reserve) have been designated World Heritage Sites. The combined boundaries of Yoho, Jasper, Banff and Kootenay national parks and Mount Robson, Mount Assiniboine and Hamber PPs (BC) make up the Canadian Rocky Mountain Parks World Heritage Site. Waterton Lakes National Park has been chosen as a Biosphere Reserve, which designates outstanding examples of natural ecosystems throughout the world.

Alpine zones above the treeline are less inhabited by man, and so popular with animal species. Elk and mule deer are resident only in summer, whereas Dall and bighorn sheep and mountain goats can be seen year-round. Among smaller mammals, a particular favourite is the marmot, a large rodent that often lives on rock-slides in the mountains. These can become tame and curious, approaching humans for hand-outs. Often seen, they are more frequently heard, producing a shrill whistle to warn each other of intruders. The pika is a seldom seen little relative of the rabbit. Birds at this elevation include rosy finches, pipits, and blue grouse. The white-tailed ptarmigan, similar to a partridge, is resident throughout the year.

The boreal forest that runs in a broad band across much of Canada is one of the best places to see many of the species mentioned above, particularly caribou and moose. Thanks to their unmerited reputation, most of the west’s population of wolves has been driven back to these sparsely populated northern forests. Beavers can be seen in any wet forest environment, but are especially common here. Small mammals include muskrat, varying hare, red squirrel, deer mouse and red-backed vole. Frequently seen birds are jays, ravens and grouse. Forest wetlands offer a refuge to ducks, geese and herons, including the great blue heron, with loons, grebes and songbirds attracted to the surrounding undergrowth. There are also plenty of raptors, including numerous types of hawk, and Canada’s largest owl, the great grey. There is a good chance of seeing ruffed and spruce grouse, belted kingfisher, grey jay, robin and other thrushes, black-capped and boreal chickadees, waxwings and finches, several nuthatches, vireos and grosbeaks, and many species of warblers and sparrows. The zone is also justly infamous for supporting some of the world’s most voracious and copious biting insects, including the ubiquitous mosquitoes, black flies and no-see-ums.

The lower slopes of BC’s interior mountains and the Rockies also support healthy populations of the widespread large mammals, as well as many smaller creatures such as coyotes and weasels, porcupines, red and grey squirrels, and chipmunks. Birds are numerous, especially hawks and owls.

The grasslands of Alberta and BC’s Peace River district are the traditional home of bison and the pronghorn, a tawny-gold species of antelope. The size of a large dog, but with a heart twice the size and eyes larger than a horse, pronghorns are the fastest animals in North America, capable of speeds over 100 kmph. The traditional predators of such cattle are wolves and coyotes, both of which you are much more likely to hear than see. What you are guaranteed to witness are large numbers of small mammals such as gophers, groundsquirrels and jackrabbits, which have bred out of control and are much hated by farmers. Occasional ponds or ‘sloughs’ on the plains are important breeding grounds for ducks, grebes, herons, pelicans, rails and many more. Other common birds are the marbled godwit, the curlew, and the prairie falcon, which is a close relative of the peregrine falcon.

The more southerly and sheltered reaches of the Rockies and the dry plateaux of interior BC are home to a lot of coyotes, who thrive on the large numbers of voles and small rodents. Parts of the Okanagan are home to desert species such as the rattle- snake and certain rare amphibians. This is a good area for birds such as warblers, woodpeckers, nuthatches, chickadees and the ruby-crowned kinglet. Birds of prey include goshawks and Swainson’s hawks. Ducks such as mallard, shoveler, and widgeon are common, and rarer birds such as the cinnamon teal can also be seen.

When Captain Cook first visited these shores, the waters teemed with the kind of cute sea otters that like to lay around on their backs adroitly opening up shellfish with their skillful little hands. Alas, the brisk trade in their pelts that followed this first sojourn of a European led the otters to be hunted to near extinction, a crisis from which they have recovered less well than the inland beaver. They can still be seen, though the Vancouver Aquarium is the most likely spot. Colonies of seals and sealions are a more likely spectacle, especially for sea kayakers off the West Coast of Vancouver Island or Haida Gwaii.

Some 22,000 grey whales migrate past the West Coast every year from March to May. Orca (killer whales) are year-round residents, and can often be seen from the Vancouver Island shore, especially in Victoria. The world’s third largest residence of orca pods is in the Johnstone Strait close to Telegraph Cove. Humpback whales are also frequently seen in the Pacific, and further north are blue, beluga and right whales. Dolphins are also spotted. Of the many fish species, the most remarkable is salmon. Divers come to these shores to see the likes of giant octopuses and massive wolf eels. At low tide a large number of colourful critters can be seen in tide pools, especially in sheltered waters such as on the Gulf Islands. The starfish are big, numerous, and come in many colours.

Forests between 1300-2200 m throughout the Rockies’ interior ranges in BC are teeming with deer and elk. Smaller mammals include the golden-mantled ground squirrel, and bird species include Clark’s nutcracker.

The apparently harsh environment of the Arctic tundra is nevertheless rich in animal life and is the best place to see caribou and smaller mammals such as Arctic ground squirrels, and lemmings, ermines and weasels, Arctic white foxes and Arctic hares.

The far north is home to Muskoxen and polar bears, while the Beaufort Sea is home to ringed and bearded seals, and the incredibly graceful beluga whales. Lots of ravens inhabit the north, earning their reputation as crafty tricksters. Predators including the gyrfalcon, the largest falcon in the world, jaegars, hawks, gulls and owls, including the snowy owl. Of the hundred or so bird species to be spotted, most are migratory, including numerous swans, geese and loons. The Arctic tern makes a 32,000 km return migration from the Antarctic, the longest annual migration of any creature.

As well as bears, cougars, deer and elk, and the usual collection of smaller mammals, the temperate rainforests of the West Coast are home to many bird species, including a wealth of woodland species, such as Townsend’s, Wilson’s and orange-crowned warblers, junco, Swainson’s thrush, and golden-crowned kinglet. Rarer birds include the rufous hummingbird. The Gulf Islands are very good places to see golden and bald eagles, but the best place for the latter is Brackendale near Squamish, which plays host to thousands of the salmon-hungry birds every January.