Tales from the Frontier

In 1884 a young member of the Geological Survey of Canada was passing through south-eastern Alberta’s badlands when he came upon a singular sight: “I found a head of one of the large extinct reptiles that used to roam over the country,” he wrote, “the first as far as I know that has been found in any part of Canada.” In fact, Joseph Tyrrell had stumbled upon an entire skeleton. Hacking this invaluable find to bits, he filled two wagons with bones for transporting back to Ottawa, but no record survives of what happened to the wagons’ contents. The scrap of skull he carried back himself was sufficient to ensure his title as discoverer of the first Canadian fossil of a meat-eating dinosaur, since dubbed Albertosaurus sarcophagus, while his name—somewhat ironically, given his slapdash excavating techniques—now adorns the palaeontological museum in Drumheller, Alberta.

It is a name that turns up repeatedly in Canadian exploration and business history. Tyrrell’s path-breaking work on North America’s Ice Age glaciers sent him to some of the most remote parts of the continent. Later in life, he fell into a series of get-rich schemes that took him to the Klondike as well as through large swaths of northern Ontario. He ultimately gained extravagant wealth, which, along with his legendary status as Tyrrell of the North, he enjoyed with full vigour right up to age 98, when he died just six weeks before the launch of Sputnik and the arrival of the Space Age.

It is a forbidding life for any author to tackle. Resourceful, intrepid and often impetuous to the point of brazen pushiness, Tyrrell left a trail of complicated manoeuvrings, both personal and professional, that requires a psychologically acute biographer’s eye. In Measuring Mother Earth: How Joe the Kid Became Tyrrell of the North, Heather Robertson maintains the myth-debunking reputation earned through her long writing career and makes it evident she has no intention of shying away from uncomfortable truths about her subject:

Tyrrell’s knack for self-promotion extended to the literary sphere. The first account of his life was by a longtime friend. Surviving correspondence shows that Tyrrell was a close editor, financial sponsor and surreptitious co-author of this biography—a discovery that Robertson uses to great effect in her analysis of his personal foibles. Her discussion of Tyrrell’s early geological career is a wide-ranging one. She gives a sense of just how much of a scientific backwater Canada was in the late 19th century, when creationist sentiments hung on tenaciously, even among the young dominion’s most noted geologists. An iconoclast in his scientific thinking, Tyrrell was forced to downplay the Ice Age theories he was devising on his summer forays with the Geological Survey, so as not to upset his employers. All the while, he was gaining a reputation as an uncommonly expert wilderness traveller, which helped him cut a dashing figure during his winters back in Ottawa’s polite society.

During one of these Ottawa-bound winters, bored with his office duties and frustrated by his repeated failed attempts in gaining a promotion, he took it into his head that it was time to look for a wife. He undertook this new project with his usual strategic savvy. Overlooking his own atheistic leanings, he spent his Sundays touring Ottawa’s Protestant services as he trawled the pews for an attractive candidate. Success came in the Baptist church, where he caught the eye of the pretty, well-off daughter of the minister.

Dollie Carey, twelve years Tyrrell’s junior, was besotted from the start. Perhaps it was Tyrrell’s rugged good looks or the heroic image he had grown skilled at projecting. She herself was as vivacious and innocent as Tyrrell was introverted and worldly. It was an ill-starred marriage right from the start. How Tyrrell thought he could satisfy a young romantic like Dollie is a mystery. She responded to his frequent absences with a barrage of entreaties that he spend more time with her in Ottawa. But these pleas had the opposite effect to the one she intended. Inept at dealing with the prosaic realities of married life, Tyrrell made sure that his wilderness expeditions became ever longer, culminating in his decision to try his hand at northern exploration. Despite the reservations of his superiors at the Geological Survey, he was able to bamboozle them into sponsoring two ambitious expeditions that he led through remote parts of the Barren Grounds. Although the geological significance of those expedition was limited, Tyrrell discovered a previously unknown Inuit band living on Baker Lake, far into the continent’s interior, and managed to navigate two major water courses that until then had been known only through Native accounts. Such feats, which secured his place in the history books, made him less willing to continue in a relatively junior government job.

Tyrrell’s days with the Geological Survey soon ended, after yet more of his attempts to force a promotion proved unsuccessful. The break occurred while he was surveying the Yukon River in 1898. Glimpsing the motley armada of boats and rafts heading downstream toward the Klondike goldfields, he was captivated. He returned to Ottawa to hand in his resignation and borrow funds, leaving behind the hapless Dollie while he headed back to the Yukon in a new guise as mining engineer.

Robertson gives an evocative portrait of Tyrrell’s life in Dawson City. Surviving amidst a townful of slick competitors proved more arduous than anticipated, and for years Tyrrell stumbled from one lacklustre project to another. Meanwhile, he alienated many of the locals by acting as a vocal agent for outside companies whose executives were back in Ottawa feverishly seeking special political favours. Dollie put it well in one of her anguished letters to him: “Oh this old wretched Klondike. How miserable you and I have been ever since it was discovered.” She would have been even more miserable if she had known the full story. Robertson provides indirect but compelling evidence that Tyrrell was desperate enough—not to mention, sufficiently captivated by Dawson City’s easygoing morality—to engage in some extremely dodgy business dealings during these years. It is also possible that he engaged in sexual flings with several of the town’s more than willing demimondaines.

Like so many others, he found it difficult to break the Klondike’s spell. It was not until 1905 that he returned virtually penniless to Ottawa. He and Dollie reconciled, then moved to Toronto, where he salvaged his career by working as a freelance mining advisor. It was demanding work, often for minimal pay, but it allowed him to continue searching for that elusive tip that would transform his fortunes. The moment finally appeared during a conversation in a smoking car on the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, whose night express, running northward from Toronto to mining country, had already been memorialized in Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town—“the windows flashing with brilliant light,” writes Leacock, “and within them a vista of cut glass and snow-white table linen … millionaires with napkins at their chins whirling past in the driving snowstorm.”

In this charmed setting on a February evening in 1924, Tyrrell listened to news of a gold mine near Kirkland Lake closing down despite its good prospects. Within days, he jumped in to take over the mine with a huge investment of borrowed funds. It was a reckless gamble, but it paid off spectacularly when the mine hit a new seam. For the remaining decades of his life, Tyrrell wallowed in the riches he had long striven for. Wealth did not bring out the best in his character, as it stoked his obsession with his own public legend. Still, there were continued accomplishments. Over the decades he gradually donned the mantle of gentleman historian, his unrivalled knowledge of fur trade exploration giving him considerable credibility, first by resurrecting the journals and great map of David Thompson. Then, as a man of means, he continued to rehabilitate the reputations of explorers such as Samuel Hearne, and cultivated influential admirers, including fellow fur-trade enthusiast Harold Innis. His zeal in these projects was not just altruistic: it helped cement his own reputation as the last of the authentic explorer breed.

As his historical work illustrates, there is much that is riveting about Tyrrell’s legacy. Robertson shows in her skillful mining of the documentary record that he was difficult to like, but impossible to ignore. Barbara Belyea uses a similar method in her essay collection Dark Storm Moving West. A literary scholar turned academic historian, she reconsiders aspects of exploration and fur trade history. Several of her essays highlight evidence that can help interpret pivotal historical moments—the context behind David Thompson’s sudden jump from the Hudson’s Bay Company to work for one of its rivals, for example, and the factors that came into play when the American explorers Lewis and Clark chose between two river routes at a key juncture on their transcontinental expedition. Such studies are geared primarily to a professional audience. Others deserve wider notice. In the essay “Mapping West of the Bay,” Belyea provides a fascinating dissection of the differences between European and Native mapping techniques. The schematic maps Natives drew for explorers, she contends, dispensed with European notions of scale not just for the sake of simplicity and convenience (the usual explanation), but because they were part of a long-standing pictorial tradition that privileged disembodied emblematic associations over spatial coherence. The conventions of Native map making have been closely studied in the past; Belyea’s interpretation is unique in the way she incorporates the visual logic suggested by Native art and argues for a distinctive Native cartography.

But most significant is her essay “The Silent Past Is Made to Speak” on recent trends in fur trade history, especially the appearance of several notable macrohistories focusing on the roles of previously overlooked groups: hired labourers, Native women and Métis. In a neat overturning of stereotype, Belyea uses her own distinctive melding of contemporary methodological perspectives—a melding that she discusses in some detail given its importance in appreciating her work—to deliver a thorough going critique of this fashionable form of contemporary historicizing, while remaining sympathetic to the motives of its practitioners. Her analysis has ramifications far beyond the fur trade:

Selective readings are not in themselves the problem, argues Belyea. It is the penchant, as evident today as in the past, to turn such readings into a politically infused version of the truth. It is no surprise to see the pendulum of political fashion swing from one extreme to another in the history of the fur trade. Given its overriding importance in accounts of Canada’s evolution as a nation, the temptation will always exist to make facts fit political agendas, as much in the culturally inclusive, class-defying present as in the Eurocentric, class-bound past. Belyea’s endeavour to achieve a perspective that defies these polarities is to be applauded, just as much as Robertson’s even-handed treatment of Joseph Tyrrell’s virtues and flaws. Both authors prove adept at the task of transforming mythically tinged subject matter into nuanced history.