Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T21:57:08.772Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Arctic Survey Part III. A Mackenzie Domesday: 19441

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Griffith Taylor*
Affiliation:
The University of Toronto
Get access

Extract

Let us start by comparing the Mackenzie Corridor with that great Canadian highway the St. Lawrence. In the sixteenth century the latter offered the obvious means of entry into the new land of Canada. The pioneers could not have realized the cluster of large towns and cities which was to arise along the great waterway; but most of them were sure that the St. Lawrence would always be the main surface route whereby the resources of eastern and east-central Canada would be reached and exploited. Hence all detailed accounts of the geography of this area in the early days are of special interest, since in general the route is still as important as ever.

It seems to the writer that we of the twentieth century can consider the Mackenzie Corridor in somewhat the same light as the pioneers did the St. Lawrence. There is not much in the way of settlement in the north-west region at present; perhaps the total, including Indians and Eskimo, is less than seven thousand settlers. But of one thing we may be sure, and that is that in the next century the population will increase largely, and that the chief centres of settlement and supply will be much where the pioneer folk built their dwellings.

One of the chief purposes of this study is to put on record in a somewhat uniform manner the main characteristics of all the famous posts along the Mackenzie River, and, in a later paper, along the Yukon River, and this for two reasons. Canadians of today will welcome a detailed account of the way of life of the pioneers in geographical language; while the writer hopes that this somewhat hasty survey will be a sort of jumping-off place for similar surveys made, say, every fifty years in the future.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1945

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

The first two papers in this Arctic Survey by G. J. Wherrett and Andrew Moore, together with a foreword by H. A. Innis about the project, were published in the February number of this Journal. Other papers will be published in August and November, including a second paper by Professor Griffith Taylor, “A Yukon Domesday.”

References

2 Toronto, 1934.

3 Ottawa, 1937.

4 No.89, Ottawa, 1937.

5 Geographical Review, New York, Vol. xxxiii, 07, 1943.Google Scholar

6 Geological Survey Bulletin on Mackenzie River (Ottawa, 1921).Google Scholar

7 See Wherrett, G. J., “Arctic Survey: Survey of Health Conditions and Medical and Hospital Services in the North West Territories” (Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 02, 1945).Google Scholar

8 Camsell and Malcolm, Geological Survey Bulletin on Mackenzie River.

9 Geographic Review, New York, 01 1938.Google Scholar

10 London, 1922, p. 123.