COMPULSORY SCHOOLING. There are five thousand children running around the streets of Montreal who never enter a school. It is now proposed that compulsory education shall be enforced in the great centre of mercantile life, and certainly the principle is necessary. These children are to be our future leaders, and they ought to know something. […]
Category: Unfamiliar History
1867: The First Canada Day welcomes Confederation
As midnight broke on July 1, 1867, there was neither peace nor quiet across the land, on the first day of Canada’s Confederation. From Halifax to Windsor, guns boomed, bells chimed, rifles, pistols, and muskets were fired, bonfires were lit, as millions of Canadians poured out into the streets of towns and villages to […]
How Canada created the oil industry
Epic oil In 1854, Abraham Gesner laid the foundation of the oil industry when he built the first of some U.S. 70 plants that used coal to refine a lamp fuel he called kerosene, a.k.a. coal oil. In Britain, James Young had earlier started distilling a lubricating and solvent from coal. In 1856, two years after […]
You could be jailed for just talking about the Great Uranium Cartel
In the 1970s, continued nuclear power development was still seen by many as essential to the energy needs of an increasing, and increasingly affluent, world population. But supplies of uranium fuel were threatened by a U.S. embargo that compelled U.S. power utilities to use only U.S. uranium. The embargo depressed prices from other sources, […]
A walk across the Northwest Passage
It is September 1969 and I am aboard the SS Manhattan as it sits trapped in polar ice while attempting to complete a crossing of the Northwest Passage through McClure Strait, around the northern coast of Banks Island. The Manhattan is stuck in the polar ice grip for 34 hours before she is released […]
Whitecapping heroes of Wheatley
Those who misbehaved were once in danger of being “whitecapped” by their neighbours—dunked in a well, or walked in snow, and thrashed. When a group of vigilantes whitecapped a leading citizen in the town of Wheatley in southwestern Ontario, they were brought to trial in nearby Chatham. Penalties were urged. Instead, the whitecappers were […]
Dawson Nuggets’ epic Stanley Cup quest
From Dawson City, capital of the Yukon gold fields, 10 men of the Dawson Nuggets hockey team set off on December 19, 1904 on a 4,000-mile, 24-day journey by bicycle, dog sled, train, and ship for Ottawa, in quest of the world hockey championship, the Stanley Cup. They are to pick up one more […]
Travails of Yukon travel
Travel to Whitehorse and the goldfields of the Yukon was often an epic adventure. By rail, it was just 110 miles from Skagway, Alaska over the White Pass and Yukon Railway to the end of the line at Whitehorse, Yukon. Dawson City, at the centre of Yukon gold rush, was more than 250 miles […]
Noxious tumbleweeds a romantic image in Gene Autry’s hit movie and song
Singing cowboy actor Gene Autry made a noxious week a romantic western image. Gene Autry made them a romantic image of the Old West in his 1935 movie and hit song “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” The first singing cowboy movie, it cost just $12,500 to make but grossed a reported $1 million, a big sum in […]
Lonesome life of prairie missionary
A young Anglican missionary, 14 months out from England, talks to a Regina Standard reporter about the challenges of his parish, a prairie wilderness that extends from Calgary to the American border, September 11, 1891. “My parish is 100 miles long and forty miles wide, and at least once a year I am expected […]