ReCollections: a Parks Canada podcast

Voice: This is a Parks Canada Production. Ce balado est aussi disponible en français.

Fred Sheppard: There’s a place tucked into the foothills of southern Alberta, where the sky stretches wide, and the grass grows tall, where generations of cowboys, cooks, and capitalists have left their mark.

This is Bar U Ranch.

Here, the prairies seem to stretch out endlessly, where thousands of Bar U cattle once grazed over 100,000 acres of prime rough fescue grassland.

Patrick Davis: The grass at the Bar U is the secret to success of the cattle and the buffalo before them.

Corelie Keller: There were people in Eastern Canada that knew that all this grass had nobody eating it. So that's how the beef business came about, getting into the beef bonanza.

FS: I’m Fred Sheppard and you’re listening to ReCollections: Grass Into Money.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped the place we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

We’re standing on a rise overlooking the headquarters of Bar U Ranch National Historic Site, a dozen kilometres or so outside of Longview, Alberta, in Treaty 7 territory. It’s a jaw-dropping scene, dozens of red wooden buildings with white trim catch the eye, vibrant against the brilliant blue of the prairie sky, broken only by the jagged snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains towering over the foothills and grasslands of Southern Alberta.

Meg Stanley: So as you come out of the visitor center, you have this gorgeous view of the Rocky Mountains, which can really distract you quite a bit. But as you look towards the mountains, you're looking down almost the street of a village.

FS: Tucked into a small valley carved out by the cool waters of Pekisko Creek, this group of buildings was once the heart of operations for the massive ranch. There’s no mistaking where we are, the distinctive Bar U brand is emblazoned on the roof of the workhorse barn. Fittingly, it features a letter U with a line over the top.

PD: The special thing about the Bar U is that there's not a single building there that has been brought down from somewhere else.

FS: There are barns to house and feed horses, bulls, dairy cows, poultry and pigs; a blacksmith shop, a bunkhouse with a garden and root cellar, a slaughterhouse, and a post office. At one time, this was one of the biggest population centres in Southwest Alberta. People gathered here to collect their mail, sell some eggs and butter, talk business and hear the latest gossip.

Today, people gather here for different reasons. It's one of the few places in Canada where visitors can experience a slice of life from the ranching industry that once dominated this landscape, as well as other parts of the western provinces.

Ross Fritz: Pretty fine morning for this.

FS: We’re on a horse-drawn wagon tour with Teamster Ross Fritz. He’s been doing this for a while now.

RF: I just completed my 20th year here. 20th season. Yeah, it's a pretty nice ride here.

RF: Whoa! Stand still. I usually start off by welcoming people to the famous Bar U Ranch National Historic Site here of Canada.

It was one of the longest running, most successful of all the corporate ranches and it continued as a large corporate ranch until 1950.

FS: A corporate ranch is a business model where the ownership and profits, or losses, lay with the business and shareholders.

The Bar U first began operations almost a century and a half ago.

RF: For my money, you couldn't have picked a better spot.

PD: So the area of the foothills where the Bar U sits, it's in a valley. I imagine that it was chosen by the Indigenous before to get out of the wind. The wind is very hard on things.

FS: That’s historical carpenter Patrick Davis, who’s been working here for the past 15 years.

PD: My family has five generations that has either worked at the Bar U or did business with the Bar U. And my son started with Parks this year to be the fifth generation.

The mule deer and the white tailed deer find the Bar U just the perfect place to get out of the wind, to get away from coyotes. You've got clean, crisp, cool water with the Pekisko. There's 28-inch rainbow trout in the creek. We have foxes galore all over the site, taking care of the mice for us. And black bear like to wander through the site. And in the past few years, we've had more grizzlies come through the site.

Fred: The animals at Bar U set this place apart from many other historic sites.

PD: Nothing connects Canadians like animals. So I brought a couple of my laying hens, built a little chicken house for them that we move every couple of days onto new, fresh grass. And the kids will sit there and pull grass and feed chickens for hours while their parents are touring the Bar U.

The public can come and see turkeys and pigs and we usually have a baby calf for some reason or another, the mama couldn't raise it. So in years previous, we've getting some powder milk, take it over to roundup camp, put it over the fire, warm it up, and then a lucky kid or two can take a bottle and feed a baby calf.

FS: Here’s Claire Thomson, a Parks Canada historian.

Claire Thomson: It is becoming more difficult and more rare for heritage sites to be able to provide people with opportunities to interact with animals.

I think that's becoming less and less of a reality for a lot of people, that they don't get a chance to interact with the kinds of you know livestock that we used to take for granted, just even a couple generations ago.

FS: In today’s episode, we’ll trace the history of three animals — bison, cattle, and horses — who’ve all left their hoofmarks upon the natural landscape, shaping this place and the people who’ve lived and worked here.

Up first: the Plains bison. Scientific name: Bison bison bison. Also known as: Buffalo. Or, in the local Blackfoot language, iinnii.

The Plains bison is a massive animal, with a shaggy, dark brown coat, distinctive curved horns, and humped shoulders. Weighing in at over 800 kilograms and standing almost two meters tall, it’s North America’s largest land mammal.

FS: Long before cattle were introduced, bison were the most influential grazer in this region.

PD: A massive, massive part of the story of the Bar U was these beautiful big bison animals eating the native grass.

FS: For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples of the prairie grasslands have employed ingenious methods to hunt these huge animals. Bison were a source of food, construction materials, tools, clothing and stories!

The bison population was immense. As author and Parks Canada interpreter Lauren Markewicz puts it in her book Like Distant Thunder: Canada’s Bison Conservation Story:

Lauren Markewicz: “For thousands of years, bison flourished in staggeringly large numbers: perhaps 30 million bison across North America. Sightings of herds numbering over 10,000 and even 100,000 were commonly described well into the nineteenth century.”

FS: Bison were drawn to the rough fescue, a perennial bunchgrass that flourishes in the coarse, mineral-rich soil of the Rocky Mountain foothills.

MS: People will refer to it as prairie wool.

FS: That’s Parks Canada historian Meg Stanley.

MS: It's very well adapted to seasons of good moisture and seasons of poor moisture.

FS: Rough fescue is dense and stiff — it grows in bunches up to a metre and a half tall. And, like its name suggests, fescue is rough to the touch. It’s also tough — shade-tolerant, drought-tolerant, and disease-resistant.

RF: The rough fescue carried this whole country for many, many years.

FS: The roots can grow as deep as 3 metres into the ground in search of moisture.

MS: Those roots go down quite a ways!

PD: Most grasses when winter comes, takes all of its energy and throws it into the roots. Fescue grass throws a lot of the protein up top for the animals to use throughout the winter. And fescue grass can be as high as 5 to 8% protein. So that's how the animals survived on the eastern slopes of the foothills. That and the Chinook winds…

FS: The Chinook is a warm wind that blows down off the Rocky Mountains. In winter, it can lead to major temperature jumps in a short period of time.

PD: The Chinook winds would clear the snow off for the animals to eat.

FS: The bison and the grass were symbiotic — in the vast Prairie landscape, they co-evolved, with fescue grass providing year-round nutrients for the bison, and the grazing bison giving back to the soil in the form of nutrients from dung and urine. Bison wallows, depressions in the ground where they’d roll around in the dirt, also helped preserve precious rainwater in the dry environment. And they grazed a lot: adult bison eat up to 11 kilograms of grass every day.

For Indigenous peoples of the prairies, bison were essential for survival.

CT: The people who were living here for millennia really relied on bison for their livelihoods.

FS: We spoke with Dr. Mike Bruised Head about the importance of the bison. He’s a lecturer at the University of Lethbridge and an elder from the Kainai Nation, one of the nations that makes up the Blackfoot Confederacy.

Mike Bruised Head: [BLACKFOOT LANGUAGE INTRODUCTION] My Blackfoot name is Chief Bird. This is all buffalo country. Blackfoot. Buffalo. Side by side. If it wasn't the enormous numbers of iinnii, the buffalo, we wouldn't be here.

And we honored the buffalo so much. We have societies, the Buffalo songs, the Buffalo spirit that came to them. We embodied the buffalo spirit through our song and ceremonies and paint. You can't get any closer than that.

FS: There’s another place not far from the Bar U Ranch where this relationship has played out for millennia, The Women’s Buffalo Jump National Historic Site near Cayley, Alberta.

MBH: [BLACKFOOT LANGUAGE]. Women's buffalo jump. That's an ancient site.

FS: For roughly 2,000 years, people used this buffalo jump to hunt bison by stampeding them over a small cliff.

MBH: There's a whole story, why the women had their own buffalo jump. It goes way way back.

FS: That traditional Blackfoot story describes the women’s buffalo jump as the location of the first marriages between men and women.

MBH: And that's kind of that's how they met through that buffalo jump.

FS: The full story is beyond what we have time for in this episode, but we’ve added a link in the show notes to a video from the Siksika Nation with the story and some great imagery from the Women’s Buffalo Jump.

MBH: The women were the Buffalo runners.

FS: Buffalo runners were the brave people who ran behind a herd of bison, chasing them off a rocky cliff. At the bottom of the cliff were others armed with bows and arrows.

MBH: And I find that pretty amazing, outgoing, physical women. Heck, they probably shoot pretty good too. They didn't count on the men.

FS: Archaeologists have found thousands of bison bones and bone tools along with pottery, and stone projectile points at the women’s buffalo jump. Similar artifacts have also been unearthed at the Bar U. Jessica Hill: We're finding the same kinds of projectile points here, the same kinds of lithic materials being used here.

FS: This is Jessica Hill.

JH: I'm one of the terrestrial archeologists working out of the Calgary office for Parks Canada.

FS: Jessica showed us around a different part of the Bar U Ranch, where landscape changes like flooding have provided an opportunity for archaeology work.

JH: 2005 was a really bad flood year here at the Bar U, and the creek actually changed its course and really started cutting into this terrace. And then we started to see lots of artefacts, bison skulls, like hearths, boiling pits, all eroding out.

The Indigenous people who were living in this area were coming back to this spot again and again to camp, to process bison. Maybe they're trapping animals on these low terraces. They're probably kind of boggy and getting animals and trapped there and then processing them in this, in this camp.

FS: But starting in the mid-nineteenth century, as European settlers began moving to the prairies, bison populations declined sharply.

CT: There was several different factors that played into the decline of the bison.

FS: Here are a few of the most likely factors:

• overhunting, enabled by rifles, horses, and high demand for bison hides and meat
• farms and railways encroaching on bison habitat
• widespread drought
• competition from horses, and later cattle, who also ate the fescue grass
• Plus, introduced cattle also brought new, infectious diseases to the bison population.

Also…

CT: We do have this like sport hunting and the eradication, actually, that government officials in the US were advocating for as a way to subdue Indigenous people in the US, but that also had wide ranging effects for people within what is now Canada.

FS: In just a few decades, the bison population was pushed to the brink of extinction, from tens of millions to less than a thousand individuals across all of North America. Indigenous life on the prairies, once centred around the bison, became very challenging.

CT: Within people's lifetime, they could see the decline and knew that things were changing for the worse very fast.

FS: Part Two: cows. Latin name: Bos Taurus. Probably first domesticated by humans over 10,000 years ago from their ancestors, the huge, and now extinct, aurochs that once roamed the plains of Eurasia.

As the tragedy of the bison decline played out, the settler population of the West continued to grow, and so did the grass. The ecosystem that co-evolved with bison turned out to be ideal for a profitable new grazer introduced to North America four centuries earlier: cattle.

Here’s Corelie Keller, an interpreter at the Bar U.

CK: All this grass had nobody eating it. So that's how the beef business came about, getting into the beef bonanza.

FS: In the 1870s and 80s, ranches south of the border, in places like Montana and Texas were earning big profits for shareholders, and Eastern businessmen hoped to kickstart a similar industry in Canada.

The Canadian government, for their part, wanted to see the prairie landscapes developed, and in the early 1880s began leasing out large tracts of ranch land for an annual fee of just a penny an acre.

PD: The federal government needed a plan to settle the West. So they gave away cheap leases for these big ranches to come.

MS: Certainly an early inflow of capital that creates a form of a boom. Right, because the leases are very inexpensive. And so people see that as an opportunity to get into this business.

FS: One group of cattle industry insiders from Quebec jumped at the chance to secure a lease for ranchland in the Rocky Mountain foothills. Among them was veteran rancher and businessman Fred Stimson.

RF: He had a brother in law that was in the North-West Mounted Police, and he had told him about all this great, great ranching country, the grass right up, halfway up the horse's belly and no cattle there, and the buffalo were all gone.

FS: Stimson was already exporting beef across the Atlantic from his ranch in Compton County, Quebec, and had the business and political connections to expand his enterprise.

With financial backing from the Allan Family, major players in the shipping industry, Stimson and his associates set out in the spring of 1881 for the nearly month-long journey westward to claim land for a new ranching operation.

RF: The way they had to travel was by train to Bismarck, North Dakota, and then come up the Missouri River by steamboat to Fort Benton, Montana.

FS: From there they travelled another 500 kilometres on horseback.

RF: That was the quickest way of getting here. So that was quite some journey, alright!

FS: Stimson and his partners applied to lease thousands of acres of foothills grassland, and the Northwest Cattle Company was born. Fred Stimson was the resident manager. There was one key thing missing: cows.

In the spring of 1882, Fred Stimson, along with business partner George Emerson and foreman Tom Lynch traveled to Southern Idaho to purchase a herd. They bought over 3000 cattle for $20 each. Tom Lynch was tasked with hiring a capable crew to wrangle the herd back up to Canada.

RF: So he was out looking for cowboys. And so he asked the trail boss of one of the herds there. And he said, well, you got to hire this Bill Moodie and his partner, John Ware.

FS: That’s the legendary Black cowboy John Ware, who was designated a person of national historic significance in 2022. We’ll hear more about him later.

RF: Anyway, he hired them and he gathered up a crew of about 12 cowboys, and they started bringing that herd up north here. They left there in late May.

FS: Three thousand cattle on a journey of over a thousand kilometres, involving river crossings, an autumn blizzard and traversing at least one high mountain pass.

RF: A pretty long camping trip.

FS: On arrival, the cattle were set to pasture, fattening up on the protein-rich fescue grass much like the bison before them. The era of corporate ranching at the Bar U Ranch, of turning grass into money for investors, had begun.

MS: Grass into money is a phrase that gets used to explain the basics of ranching. To turn grass into money, you need cattle, and you need a ranch. You need access to land where you can run those cattle. You need all the skills and talents of the people who know how to manage cattle.

FS: There were many markets eager to get their hands on beef cattle, some nearby, some really far away.

MS: In the 1880s, the first market is Indigenous communities because the bison are gone and people are starving. And then there's the market in the UK where you know, you've had huge industrialization and also a high value placed on protein-rich diets.

FS: In the days before modern freezer technology, live cattle were shipped to the United Kingdom, first by train to Eastern Canada and then by cargo ship across the Atlantic Ocean. Not coincidentally, the Allan family, major investors in the Bar U, were also shipping magnates!

MS: And then after that, the American market. You need markets and transportation and all of the pieces that have to come together to go from having the basic resource, the grass, the land, the cattle, to having a sale at the end of the day.

FS: After 20 years in operation, a new chapter for the Bar U began in 1902. One of the main investors, Andrew Allan, had recently passed away, and his heirs didn’t seem to share the same interest in the ranching business.

Cattleman George Lane, who had once worked as foreman at the Bar U, sensed an opportunity. Lane travelled to Montreal after making financial deals with partners in Winnipeg, and offered $220,000 to take the ranch off their hands.

The resulting sale, one of the largest in the Canadian west to that date, included owned and leased land, plus about 8000 head of cattle, 500 horses, a thousand tons of hay, plus all the buildings and fences that made life on the ranch possible.

Stimson was unimpressed with the deal, saying that the ranch was worth far more and had been “given away” to Lane. But by that point the North West Cattle Company was done, and so was Stimson’s time at the helm. He briefly moved back to Montreal, before running a dairy operation in Mexico City.

Lane was described variously as a “picturesque figure” “considerably over six feet tall” “with brilliant blue penetrating eyes,” and also as “a double-barreled, back-action, high pressure, electrical dynamo at full speed.” During his ownership, George Lane increased the cattle herd to 40,000 — making it one of the largest ranches in Western Canada, earning him the nickname “The Cattle King of Alberta.”

But enough about the wheelings and dealings of the capitalists at the top of the operation. Let’s shift focus to the people paid to get their hands dirty running this huge enterprise.

A quick note: up to this point, we’ve told this story roughly in chronological order. To discuss life and work on the ranch, we’re going to have to generalize a little, which involves a bit of jumping around in time.

Caring for and transporting 40,000 cattle around a huge tract of grassland was a major undertaking. Skilled labour on the ground was key to the whole operation.

PD: That beautiful fescue grass kept the cows going. And then employees came. Then they went to start a new life. Came from out east and then they bought a quarter or moved to town. And that's how this whole west got settled, right.

FS: Here’s archeologist Jessica Hill again.

JH: Archeology has interesting stories to tell about the history or the historic occupations here. We have some really neat artifacts from the cookhouse that talk about the Euro-Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Black Canadians who lived here.

FS: Census records show that the kitchen staff at the Bar U, and many other corporate ranches, were often Chinese immigrants. One, a cook known around the Bar U as “Hop Sing”, probably a nickname, worked during the Lane era and stayed on for many years. He had at least one helper. Their days were extremely busy, not only did they prepare three meals a day for 12 to 25 hungry workers, depending on the season, they had to clean everything up afterwards, look after the chickens, and draw water from an outside pump.

Kitchen staff also planted, maintained, harvested and preserved produce from the garden near the cookhouse. Vegetables like carrots and potatoes were kept fresh in sand in a root cellar, an underground cold storage. Other produce was preserved by pickling or canning for the freezing winter months. Every two weeks or so a steer was butchered to provide fresh meat for the staff meals.

Close to the cookhouse was the building that housed the Pekisko Post Office, which operated at the Bar U from 1886 until 1927. It was a vital community hub not only for the ranch itself, but also for families living nearby.

CK: To come get the mail was kind of a community affair.

PD: No doubt a lot of discussions on how to survive the area went on at the Bar U. Even the corporate ranch was still learning. So they wanted to know what worked and what didn't.

Guys would meet at the Bar U and say, hey, did you have any luck with that type of oats? No. Nope. None. So discussing what worked and what didn't with neighbors at the Bar U helped the area thrive, right.

FS: The Bar U was also a customer for local farmers.

PD: My great grandparents would sell a dozen eggs to a neighbor for $0.25, but to the Bar U, they'd get a little extra, they'd get $0.50. They'd sell butter to a neighbor for $0.50 a pound. To the Bar U, they got a buck. So it was a definite economic driver.

FS: While the overwhelming majority of workers at the Bar U were men, a small number of families called the ranch home. Ann Clifford, for example, wrote a memoir about her life as the wife of the “cow boss” in the 1930s and 40s. She recalled working as the Bar U’s bookkeeper, a busy job that involved keeping track of the timesheets and payroll for more than 30 employees, as well as recording all of the buying and selling of livestock.

MS: People think of ranching in relationship to cowboys but throughout the history of the Bar U, there have been women working on the site and living on the site, raising families on the site , which is work in itself. The wives of the, the foremen and so forth also participated in managing what we would think of as the household economy. So we know, for example, that Fred Stimson, his home was taken care of by his unmarried sister, which is quite a classic story of the 19th century.

FS: For the children living at the ranch, it wasn’t all fun and games. The Bar U was far from the nearest town so at least one family hired governesses to help the children keep up with their schooling. The turnover rate, though, was quite high, at least three of the young governesses moved away after marrying other ranch employees.

MS: So you see areas that are used specifically for families, specifically for sustaining the horses, specifically for living day to day living. You start to see ways in which different areas were used at different times of year and through this life cycle of the cattle as well.

FS: That life cycle dictated everything at the Bar U, and had a major influence on the day-to-day labours of the ranch hands, also known as cowboys. They were crucial to the whole cattle operation. Let’s take a closer look at what each season of their work involved.

Springtime: A time of new beginnings. As the snow on the pasture thaws, calves are born, roughly 9 months after the bulls were released from their isolation pens to spend a short time “socializing” with the cows.

RF: Calving time on a ranch I’ll tell ya is pretty much the most important times of the year.

PD: My favourite season at the Bar U is spring, when the baby calves are coming. It takes about 2 or 3 days for them to get their feet underneath of them, and then all of a sudden, their tails are curled up at their back and they're going across the pasture at 100 miles an hour, because they've got that that mama's milk in their belly and they're feeling good.

FS: Ranch hands saddle up their horses and ride out to the pastures to brand the new calves. In the 1920s and 30s, there were 16 to 1800 Bar U calves born each year, so this was a big task! Using a lasso, they rope the calves to the ground. Some ranch hands got really good at it, going on to compete at rodeos like the Calgary Stampede.

In 1923, the fastest time in the Calf Roping competition went to Jonas Rider, from the Stoney Nakoda Nation, who worked as a ranch hand at the Bar U.

RF: Jonas Rider was known as one of the greatest ropers of all times.

FS: The Calgary Stampede has been designated as a national historic event, recognized as “one of the world’s largest and best known rodeos.” Events like steer wrestling and chuckwagon racing originated with the daily work of ranch hands. In fact, George Lane and the next owner of the Bar U, Patrick Burns, were among the initial backers of the first Stampede in 1912. Back on the ranch, once the calves have been roped to the ground, the ranch hands apply a hot iron, leaving a permanent Bar U brand marking, making it easier to identify the owners.

Summer: The calves, along with their mothers, spend their time munching rough fescue in the pastures. It’s an all you can eat grassland buffet. The bulls are kept separate to avoid any unplanned calving. As the snow melts in the higher elevations, more grazing land becomes accessible. Hay is harvested and bundled for winter feed. During their downtime, some ranch hands practiced with the Pekisko Polo Club on the pitch at the Bar U. In 1909, the team rode to victory over other western Canadian teams to win the Earl of Winterton Cup.

Autumn: is round-up time. Much of the ranch operation goes mobile, with the cooks setting up remote camps centred around a chuckwagon.

MS: It's a cookhouse on wheels and it goes where the stomachs are.

FS: From the round-up camps, ranch hands venture far into the foothills, riding around the vast grassland in search of cattle with the Bar U branding. Definitely best to avoid taking any of the neighbour’s herd, especially after 1919 when the adjacent EP ranch was owned by Edward, the Prince of Wales!

PD: So you got to gather them all up basically in into a big circle and go in there and find your brand and then sort them out and Bar U cows in this side EP cows on that side. But yeah, getting the pairs sorted from thousands and thousands of head, it would have been quite a sight to see.

FS: Cattle that are ready for sale are sent to market by train, and the calves are moved to a calf camp for the winter. The rest of the herd is moved to winter pastures. As the cold sets in, their diet is augmented with hay collected earlier in the year.

During the relatively quiet winter months, preparations are made for the next season. Some employees leave to take other jobs. Those who stay keep busy with maintenance tasks like repairs on the buildings around the headquarters.

In 1882, a formerly enslaved man named John Ware arrived in the Alberta foothills.

RF: Over the years, there's been a great number of really fine cowboys that have came and gone here, some of them more famous than others for different reasons, but probably one of the most notable ones is the cowboy by the name of John Ware.

FS: Little is known about his early life in the Southern United States, but we do know that the highly skilled cowboy was hired in Idaho as part of the crew herding the original three thousand cattle to what would become the Bar U Ranch. Ware stayed on as a ranch hand for two years before leaving for work elsewhere. He eventually purchased livestock and started his own ranch.

Famous in Southern Alberta during his lifetime, stories of John Ware’s horsemanship, neighbourly kindness, and strength have secured his place as a Western Canadian folk hero. Here’s one story about an incident at the Bar U in the earliest days of the ranch that’s taken on near-legendary status.

PD: The story of John Ware saving the cattle, I have no doubt, is true.

CK: During a blizzard, some of the cows took off…

PD: When a storm blows in, whether it takes an hour or two days to blow in, the cattle will walk away from that storm. And if there's no fences or no tree line, they will just continue to walk and keep their butts to the storm. The cattle, they just kept going because the storm kept blowing, cattle kept going and got miles and miles and miles away from the ranch.

CK: And the cowboys, that were all working together, they're like, there's nothing we can do. Like just we're going to freeze to death. So let's just, you know, hunker down and wait for the storm to pass.

RF: But John Ware, he stayed with the herd. I'm not sure how many days it would have taken. Probably two, three, four days, five days. And they ended up in the river bottom. And that's where John got control of them there and held them up there, because it was a good place to keep the cattle. They were out of the wind. There was buckbrush and willow brush there for them to eat. And it was several days later before the foreman and the rest of the crew located them, just a top hand, top cattleman.

FS: In 2022, the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada designated John Ware as a person of national historic significance. The bronze plaque commemorating him can be found at the Saddle Horse Barn at the Bar U. It notes:

“John Ware achieved success in a white-dominated industry largely controlled by well-financed corporations, forging a successful ranching career despite racism, rough frontier conditions, and having been enslaved.”

PD: So my entire time working at the Bar U Ranch, I have looked for signs of John Ware being there. I feel very, very lucky to be working on the windows of the Saddle Horse Barn because John Ware looked out those windows once upon a time.

RF: I've always said, y’know, many times over the years, I wished them old barns could talk. I used to love coming here early in the morning. First thing I'd do, I'd open up the door and them barns and go walking through there. I'm not sure if I was listening for something, or just imagining all the, thinking of all the great cowboys and great people that had passed through those barns.

FS: Part 3: The horse. Equus caballus.

CT: There's this really strong tradition still of horses being used in ranching, especially like in landscapes where vehicles aren't great for getting around or if you have to follow another four legged animal through some pretty rough terrain, a horse is often the best tool to do that in a lot of ways, and often the safest too.

FS: There were, and still are, two main types of horses at the Bar U. Saddle horses, also known as light horses, are the trusty steeds ridden by ranch hands to cover vast distances of foothills grasslands.

PD: You can rope off of them, ride miles and miles and miles with them. And that’s how they moved the cows.

FS: Work horses, or draft horses, are much larger and are usually harnessed up to plow fields or pull wagons.

In 1890, the Bar U had 800 horses, which may seem like a lot, but during the round up, each ranch hand was assigned a dozen or more saddle horses. The work days were so long that they would use horses in rotation, riding one until it was exhausted, then switching over to a new one. New developments on the prairies around the turn of the century meant new opportunities for businessmen with foresight and an interest in horses.

RF: The earlier land leases for cattle operations were getting canceled, and the government was surveying all the land and cutting it up into smaller parcels to get more settlers, more people, more farmers.

FS: The new farmers, as part of their homestead agreement with the federal government, needed to plow the fertile prairie grassland into fields for new crops. In the early 1900s, before modern farm machinery, a strong work horse was the best tool for the job, so much so that it became the standard of measuring ‘horsepower.’

MS: George Lane was very canny. He diversified.

RF: So George seen all this coming. And he loved these big Percheron horses.

FS: This led to a new revenue stream for the Bar U, breeding and selling Percheron workhorses.

PD: They came from Laperche, France: big working, solid horses for plowing up the land, for hauling coal, for hauling lumber.

FS: They were also useful for construction projects like digging irrigation ditches and building dams. The Bar U became one of the larger Percheron breeding operations globally: at its peak in 1916, the ranch had 700 registered Percherons. They were also highly regarded, the ranch won numerous awards from horse exhibitions, one writer claimed they’d won enough trophies “to stock a galleon.”

Some are still here today, spending their days between the corral and the Workhorse Barn or touring around the national historic site pulling a wagon with bench seating for up to 20 visitors. It’s a memorable activity, and not just for guests.

RF: I just love working with these big Percheron horses, I grew up with them. Just been a real great pleasure getting a new team in and training them, you know, and getting them so that they're trustworthy on the site.

FS: Most of the large ranches that opened up during the cattle boom of the 1880s went bust within the next couple of decades. But the Bar U managed to survive through bankruptcies, fires, and blizzards, initially as a corporate ranch, and, from the 1950s onwards, as a family operation. Parks Canada entered the picture in the 1960s.

MS: The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in 1968 identified ranching as something that they wanted to commemorate as an industry of national historic significance.

FS: That commemoration included the ranching industries in parts of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.

MS: And so that began rather an epic tale of buying a ranch. So there was a lot of work put into identifying a ranch and in fact a series of ranches were identified in the 1970s, but none were successfully purchased.

FS: Parks Canada evaluated more than a dozen ranches to determine the best place to interpret this history. This led to an unsuccessful attempt to buy the Bar U Ranch in 1977. Negotiations restarted a decade later, this time with more success. Local ranchers and community members played a key role in the negotiations. At the time, the Board described Bar U as: “arguably the most important single ranch in western Canada [with] much of the best surviving in situ resources of any of the large ranches of the golden age of ranching.”

In 1991, Parks Canada purchased 367 acres of the Bar U, including the headquarters area with 35 buildings constructed between the 1880s and the 1920s. Most were in fairly good condition because they were still actively used. Restoring and maintaining the buildings from the ravages of time and weather is a job that Patrick, as a heritage carpenter, continues to this day.

PD: So, historical restoration carpentry is a bit of a detective work, and you try to do your best to fix something without looking like it's been fixed. Most of these buildings were built by true craftsmen, whether they come from, most of them come from overseas, they've learned from generations overseas. And they come here and continued on with their skills. That is a story in itself. We don't want to mess that story up.

Everything at the Bar U has been restored to exactly the way it was. For instance, you take a window, one corner is rotten. You only take out that rotten window. You try to match the identical wood grain.

So, a couple of the restoration projects that have been fantastic is the Workhorse Barn. This is a barn that was built in 1894. So the whole barn got picked up two years ago, moved off the foundation, foundation fixed, barn brought back.

FS: The root cellar is another good example of a recent restoration project, rebuilt to how it would have looked prior to an unfortunate run-in with a horse. When it was originally constructed…

CK: Some of the workers put their initials and the date in the masonry. It says, “Built September 5th, 1918.”

MS: Our understanding is that it collapsed sometime in the 1950s and apparently it was a horse, took the root cellar out, and the horse, named Rusty, spent about five days in the root cellar before he was found. That's the story.

CK: And then by the time Parks Canada bought it, it was in pretty rough shape.

FS: Parks Canada archaeologists partially excavated the root cellar, learning more about its original construction, layout, and use. They also found a pickling crock, sealing jars for canning, and beer bottles from a Calgary brewery, as well as jars still full of preserves like rhubarb in syrup and pickled asparagus. With this new information, restoration work on the root cellar began in 2015.

PD: It had all caved in. So when we dug it out, the root cellar was lined with stone walls, and Charlie Millar carved his name in there. His brother Fred Millar, I think he was there for 50 years. My great grandfather worked for him, for Fred Millar, which was kind of neat to find.

On the interior we were able to decipher where the log standing up were, because wherever there was a log, they put two noble blades, two blades from a, it's a cultivating machine being pulled by horses. And then they would set the log on top of that and pour a little bit of concrete around that. So we knew exactly where every log on the interior was and it turned out fantastic.

FS: Visitors can now go inside the underground root cellar to see the original inscriptions and displays showing how cooks like Hop Sing used the space to preserve food for the hungry ranch workers.

All this restoration work helps ensure the Bar U is conserved for future generations, of both humans and animals.

PD: Unfortunately, we're feast or famine at the Bar U. It’s either drought or a lot of rain. In my time, 15 years, I have seen 300-year floods at the Bar U, and one thousand-year flood at the Bar U.

FS: That would be the 2013 floods that affected Calgary as well, the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history at the time. Pekisko Creek flooded the headquarters area, affecting most of the buildings.

PD: When I first got there, the Percheron horses, these are 18 hand high 2,000 pound horses were standing in water up to their neck. We were able to get them out.

The last three years have been some of the most devastating droughts that we've seen in our area, ever. Climate change is absolutely real, and I've got to see it in my very short time at the Bar U. We need to learn on the fly here. Like we always have. We've been doing some flood mitigation. We've planted a lot of trees wherever there was historically the cottonwoods. So a lot of our trees have died from drought. But wherever they did stay, the roots were like rebar, and they just held them banks together.

Most of the buildings are built on the right side of the creek. There's a couple on the flood side of the creek that we've built up higher, removed the buildings, built a higher foundation. So hopefully that helps.

FS: From a business perspective, a lot has changed since the earliest days of the North West Cattle Company, marketing, cattle breeding and genetics, feeding, the logistics of getting beef to market, supply and demand economics, the list goes on. But, while the outside world evolves at a rapid pace, the basics of beef production, and the ranching way of life have been slower to change.

PD: It's all about putting pounds on the beef, making new babies, looking after the grass. So the parallels to running cow herd at the Bar U today does not differ that much from 50 to 100 years ago. We are praying for moisture in the spring. We're praying for early grass so we can get the cows off of the bales that we put up the previous fall. We're putting up hay, taking care of the hay land, cutting it, baling it. And then in the winter, we're rolling bales out for the cows to eat. We're rolling straw out to keep the cows bedded. A bale underneath of a cow was worth as much as a bale in a cow. So we try to keep them warm.

FS: One other thing that’s consistent with the historical operations at the Bar U is cattle economics. Not only do the Bar U staff raise cattle on site each year, but, with a little help from the non-profit Friends of the Bar U, they also sell the beef at the end of each season. Only now, instead of going to investors and owners, the proceeds come back to the Bar U to help keep this very special place operational.

Bar U Ranch National Historic Site is open to the public daily from mid-May to the end of September. It’s 100 kilometres southwest of Calgary, along Highway 22, the Cowboy Trail. In 2025, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of Parks Canada welcoming visitors to the ranch.

Explore the 35 historic structures at the Bar U headquarters, including the Blacksmith shop that’s home to many original artifacts from the corporate ranching era. Tour the site aboard a horse-drawn wagon, learn to rope a steer or saddle a horse from Parks Canada staff interpreters who bring the ranch to life. In August, you can watch teams of working cowboys compete for silver buckles and bragging rights at the Old Time Ranch Rodeo.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to consulting producer Joseph Many Fingers, as well as Ross Fritz, Corelie Keller, Dr. Mike Bruised Head, Dr. Claire Thomson, Patrick Davis, Lauren Markewicz and Meg Stanley, who recently retired from Parks Canada after an amazing career sharing the history of Western Canada.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with photos of the site and artifacts, plus resources about efforts to reintroduce bison to the prairies and the foothills, take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections.

I’m your host, Fred Sheppard. Thanks for listening.

Journal Articles and Books

• Clifford, Ann. Ann's Story: A Great Ranching Empire and the People Who Made it Work. High River, Alberta: Forever in Memory Publishing, 1995.
• Dempsey, Hugh A. Napi: The Trickster. Victoria, British Columbia: Heritage House, 2018.
• Evans, Simon M. The Bar U: Canadian Ranching History. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004.
• Gagnon, Erica. “Settling the West: Immigration to the Prairies from 1867 to 1914.” Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, 28 January 2022. https://pier21.ca/research/immigration-history/settling-west-immigration-to-prairies.
• Markewicz, Lauren. Like Distant Thunder: Canada’s Bison Conservation Story. Parks Canada, 2017. https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/ab/elkisland/nature/eep-sar/bison.

News and Magazines

• The Calgary Daily Herald. 16 July 1923, 11.
• The Canadian Press. “Alberta floods costliest natural disaster in Canadian history.” CBC, 23 September, 2013. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-floods-costliest-natural-disaster-in-canadian-history-1.1864599.

Websites

• Government of Alberta. “Old Women’s Buffalo Jump Archaeological Site.” HeRMIS: Alberta Heritage Survey Program. Accessed 9 October, 2025. https://hermis.alberta.ca/ARHP/Details.aspx?DeptID=2&ObjectID=HS%2024310.
• Government of Alberta. “Womens Buffalo Jump.” HeRMIS: Alberta Register of Historic Places. Accessed 9 October 2025. https://hermis.alberta.ca/ARHP/Details.aspx?DeptID=1&ObjectID=4665-0079.
• Government of Canada, Parks Canada Agency. “Old Women’s Buffalo Jump National Historic Site of Canada.” Parks Canada: Directory of Federal Heritage Designations, 2007. https://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/page_nhs_eng.aspx?id=17.
• McCullough, Alan B. “Stimson, Frederick Smith.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol.14. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/stimson_frederick_smith_14F.html.

Government Documents and publications

• A.B. McCullough. “The Ranching Industry in Canada.” Unpublished manuscript, Parks Canada, 1994.
• “The Ranching Industry in Canada: Report on Evaluation of Potential Sites for Commemoration.” Report prepared for the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, November 1989.”
• “Bar U Ranch National Historic Site Alberta, Commemorative Integrity Statement.” Parks Canada, approved November 2000. http://parkscanadahistory.com/publications/baru/cis-e.pdf.
• “Excerpt from the Minutes of December 2021.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Minutes, December 2021.
• Pratt, Will. “John Ware.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Submission Report 2021-16.
• “Chinese Cooks for Bar U.” Unpublished report, Parks Canada, 2024.
• Stanley, Meg. “Bar U Root Cellar: Interpretive Concept, revised September 2016.” Unpublished report, Parks Canada, 2016.
• Yeo, W.B. “Pekisko: Heart of a Rural Community.” Unpublished report, Parks Canada, 1998.

Films

• Foggo, Cheryl, dir.. John Ware Reclaimed. Montréal: National Film Board of Canada, 2020. https://www.nfb.ca/film/john-ware-reclaimed/.

Voice: This is a Parks Canada Production. Ce balado est aussi disponible en français.

Fred Sheppard: August 30th, 2017, the end of a hot, dry summer. A thunderstorm rolls in across Kenow mountain in Southeastern British Columbia. There’s a blinding flash as a bolt of lightning shoots through a century old conifer tree. The sap superheats, expands and explodes, igniting a fire. Strong winds feed the flames, engulfing tree after tree, spreading eastwards across the Alberta border into Waterton Lakes National Park. Over the next five weeks, the Kenow wildfire burns nearly 40% of the park.

Mike Bruised Head: Fire's been around for a long time. From Thunder, from lightning. It's just how you live with it, how you cope with it. Fire’s the boss.

FS: In the aftermath of wildfire, Indigenous knowledge and archaeology are deepening our understanding of the people who have lived and traveled in the Rocky Mountains and foothills for thousands of years. Jennifer Ayles: If you think it's a beautiful place, someone 9,000 years ago is going to have thought it was a beautiful place. We as Westerners came in and made it a park, but it's always been a home.

FS: I’m Fred Sheppard and you’re listening to ReCollections: Archaeology in a Burned Landscape.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped the place we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

In this episode, we’re heading to Waterton Lakes National Park in Southwest Alberta. But the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy who have called this area home for millennia call it something else: Joseph Many Fingers: The Blackfoot call Waterton Lakes National Park. They've had a name for it for thousands of years already. So it's called Paahtómahksikimi. And that word means a sacred lake within. So the sacred lake within the mountains.

FS: Special thanks to our Consulting Producers Joseph Many Fingers (who you just heard from) and Dylan Frank, for helping us to understand this place from a Blackfoot perspective.

Here’s Ira Provost, consultation manager with the Piikani Nation, one of the 4 nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, along with the Kainai, Siksika and the Aamskapi Pikuni. Ira Provost: We as Blackfoot people, and particularly Piikani, we refer to ourselves as mountain people. Waterton Lakes National Park sits in the heart of our ancestral lands, in the heart of our territory. It's a place where we have our stories of creation, and it's where we believe that a lot of our sacred ways and laws were born from.

FS: Waterton Lakes National Park is located in what’s known today as southwestern Alberta, where the Rocky Mountains emerge dramatically from the prairies and the foothills.

Montana’s Glacier National Park is adjacent to Waterton Lakes, just across the US border. In 1932, the two formed the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, the world’s first. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 for superlative mountain scenery and abundant diversity of wildlife and wildflowers. And it’s easy to see why. This sprawling area, nicknamed the Crown of the Continent, is a breathtaking network of craggy mountain peaks, crisp, blue waters, verdant coniferous forests, prairie grasslands, and glaciers.

Waterton Lakes National Park is a stunning, windy jewel in the center of that continental crown. It’s also home to the picturesque Prince of Wales Hotel, a Swiss-chalet-style building and National Historic Site built in the 1920s to welcome train travelers on the Great Northern Line. And at the end of the hot, dry summer of 2017, everything was threatened when that lightning strike on Kenow Mountain sparked a raging wildfire.

For over a month, fire crews fought the blaze from the ground and the sky. When the ashes settled, the Kenow wildfire had scorched a total of 350 square kilometers of pine and larch forest. Once the evacuation order was lifted, the public was allowed back into the park. With much of the tree cover and underbrush gone, many beloved places were unrecognizable. Waterton Lakes hadn’t looked like this in living memory but that’s not to say it’s never looked like this. Fire has played an important role in this area for a long time…

MBH: When the lightning starts a fire, there's a message.

FS: This is Dr. Mike Bruised Head, an elder from the Kainai Nation, and a lecturer at the University of Lethbridge:

MBH: [BLACKFOOT LANGUAGE INTRODUCTION] My BlackFoot name is Chief Bird. The eagle. My Christian and colonial name is Michael Dean Bruised Head, and I am a residential school survivor.

So fire isn't new. Forest fires. It cleans and purifies. Grass fires. Forest fires. That's how it was. We didn't start swearing or cursing. Damn fire. We let it be. There's a natural cleansing process of fire. And so we don't say, doggone it, that darn fire.

FS: The Blackfoot people have many stories of the importance of this place and its long history.

IP: This entire place was occupied and used and sustained and managed, and the coexistence that took place with the people and the natural environment was pristine. It was so elaborate and complex, but also simple at the same time.

FS: Here’s Parks Canada archaeologist Jennifer Ayles.

JA: We see people having lived in this park back beyond 10,000 years, all the way up until the present day. This area, these lands and waters really are very popular throughout time. And we see a lot of people coming to the area to live, to play, to recreate and to sustain themselves.

FS: Now, after the fire, there was an opportunity for archaeology to reveal more. Bill Perry: My name is Bill Perry, and I worked for Parks Canada Archaeological Unit for about 35 years.

FS: Bill told us about the morning he first heard about the Kenow wildfire.

BP: Saw the news that morning as I was pouring myself a cup of coffee and said, everybody would be focused on fighting the fire and saving infrastructure and keeping people safe and all those good things. But on the other end of that, of that news feed, there's Bill Perry thinking this is going to be like Christmas because archeology is just like a needle in a haystack, normally the sites and the artifacts are actually relatively hard to find, which is a good thing. But what the fire did, is that it took away the haystack. And so all you saw on the surface was the, all important cultural needles, if you will.

FS: The year after the fire, Bill put together the Post-Kenow Wildfire Archaeology Project. Archaeologist Dylan Frank was one of the crew members:

Dylan Frank: The landscape was completely bare. And that's what archeologists love, because it makes things much, much easier for us.

[BLACKFOOT LANGUAGE INTRODUCTION] Hello Everyone! My name is Dylan Frank and I am a Cultural Resource Impact Assessment Officer. I was actually born and raised just to the east of the park, about 20 km away in Cardston. But I'm also a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy, specifically the Kainai Nation. It's almost like working in my own backyard.

So imagine if you were looking for a sock in your room in the morning and you couldn't find it, but then you cleaned your room, the sock’s just sitting right there. It was essentially the same for artifacts on the ground, because normally they're all covered with dirt and vegetation. But after the fire came through and brushed all that away, we had artifacts just sitting there waiting for us to discover.

BP: Every morning that you went out, you knew you were going to find stuff because you couldn't help it. If you're thinking of the history of Waterton as a book, that the fire has opened that book to the first couple of pages, and it's just right there on the surface and you can read it.

FS: But it was a limited time opportunity.

BP: We were under the gun time wise. Because what happens after a fire is that it doesn't take long for the vegetation to start to come back. Our amazing Christmas morning, it's just rapidly disappearing. The first couple of years was us racing against the vegetation and recording as much as we could, testing as much as we could before it just disappeared again. But after that, we spent two years focusing on the sites that could tell us the most about how people lived, how they adapted.

FS: With so many archaeological sites, the crew almost didn’t know where to begin.

DF: When people ask where an archeological site is in the park, I often just tell them that the whole park is an archeological site, essentially. And indigenous people weren't localized to just one location, they had a relationship with the entire landscape.

FS: Dylan told us about one of his first day of excavations near the Middle Waterton River.

DF: Me and my five colleagues were all standing on the riverbank, scratching our heads, thinking, where do we even start? The entire area is a site, so everywhere is good. So I took off my hat, threw it in the air and a gust of wind picked it up and it landed somewhere. And that's where I decided I was going to dig.

As I dug down, I found bones and artifacts, and eventually I even found a boiling pit. And a boiling pit would be a hole dug in the ground, and you would line the hole with animal hide, and then you'd fill it with water. And from there you would take heated rocks from a fire and put the rocks into the water. And that way you can cause the water to start boiling. And with the boil you can cook food as needed. So that was a very, very unique and cool thing for me to find by just tossing my hat into the air.

BP: Just watching these guys skip along the landscape. I swear that their feet hardly touched the ground.

FS: The involvement of local Indigenous communities was key to this project.

JA: We wanted to do a lot of work with the nations for a couple of reasons. Archeology historically has been very academic, right? And it's very about Western science, and it doesn't take into account other ways of knowing. We learn so much from Indigenous partners.

DF: It's always a little interesting to explain that Western science isn't above indigenous science and knowledge, because most people grow up and that's the only thing they know. And then they get introduced and it just blows their mind because it's completely different from everything they were taught and raised. So it's just, I guess, a difference of worldviews and just trying to understand how other people perceive things.

BP: You don't often get these privileges in archeology where you can get to work on a sacred landscape like this. You can get to work with a people that are directly related to the people that actually stayed and used these landscapes and so you can sit around a table with the elders, sipping coffee and trading, you know, stories and the humor back and forth. And then suddenly you realize, oh, I know that place. There's an archeological site there.

DF: So the relationship between indigenous people and archeology has kind of been difficult in the past. And that's because archeologists did not consult with the nations themselves. It would always be a non-Indigenous person, going out collecting the information and telling the story to the world, without even involving the people that they're talking about, and in many cases, that caused lots of confusion and stories to be written improperly about these people. And it's just caused a snowball effect of consistently being wrong about who these people actually are.

JMF: I really enjoy hearing the elders’ knowledge, and I enjoy seeing Western science starting to adopt that knowledge that's passed down. The elders were there to provide advice on where good places to look for camps were, and the advice they gave the archeologists at the time provided some new found sites.

JA: They can tell us a story, and we can find the site that goes with that story.

BP: One indigenous plants Elder said, when I was a kid, I was told about some of these plants, but I've never seen them. And so it took a fire like that, behaving just the way that it did in order to bring that out.

DF: We've made sure to put sage in our shoes when we actually visit some of the sacred sites. And that's at the request of the elders that we collaborate so closely with. It's to essentially ward off any bad spirits that might still be lingering around this site.

And another very important part of the project is the Indigenous Archeology Advisory Committee. Elders and knowledge keepers from each of the Blackfoot Nation communities come and give us guidance on how they want to see archeology actually talked about moving into the future, so it's giving them the power to tell their own story once again.

IP: What I would hope is that for places like the national park, to look at their indigenous partners as equal opportunity partners to redevelop and redesign the way in which the indigenous nations interact with the park. There's so much opportunity for, to tap the local Indigenous communities for indigenous knowledge for the sake of preservation and stewardship. For the indigenous nations to work together with parks and to make them better.

FS: Over 5 seasons of archaeology work, the team increased their understanding about the movements and activities of people millennia ago.

DF: The people that frequented this area traveled from all over. We've found artifacts that are sourced as far as North Dakota and South Dakota, and all the way over into Yellowstone and into Idaho.

FS: They found camps that were likely used on and off for centuries. Indigenous groups would have returned to the Waterton area again and again, leaving behind layers and layers of artifacts as the years passed: bones of the animals they hunted, campfire rings, boiling pits, teepee rings, stone tools and debitage, the leftover material from making those tools.

BP: And so over time you get a site that could be 1 to 2m thick and represent 10,000 years of people hanging out on this landscape. I started to realize how dense the archaeology was along these travel corridors and, and how large these meeting area sites actually were, you know, like somewhere about 2 to 3km in diameter. I had, like we had no idea.

JA: It's just really phenomenal to see this blossoming of so many different things happening in this area. This was not just kind of a stopover point in a lot of cases. Some of these massive sites that we're finding really are a meeting point.

BP: The Kootenai and the Kinbasket and the Shoshone and those guys that are primarily into BC and Washington, Idaho. They often came over here to hunt and to trade, but these sites were actually trading hubs, not just travel corridors, and the Blackfoot have tons and tons of stories about this.

FS: In total, the archaeologists found artifacts made from 23 different types of stone. Some made good arrowheads or spearheads, some made good scraping tools, others were used to craft tools out of other stones. Of the 23 varieties of stone, only 3 are found in the Waterton area, suggesting that trade networks were vital for producing the tools needed for everyday life.

JA: This fire has allowed us to see not only these large places where people gathered together to live, to work, to sustain themselves, but we're also seeing how they came to these areas.

BP: Waterton is located in a skinny part of the Rockies where everything comes down to just a few miles in width. But what we found after the fire is that those trails are still there.

JA: We're seeing these trails pop up. We're seeing materials being brought in from other areas.

DF: And these trade routes, essentially they follow the mountain passes.

MBH: Why those trails? They were all started by animals. The buffalo, the coyote, buffalo, elk, the moose, because they're very picky. And so this exploration, what they followed, these are animal trails. And if animals can find a way to go across the mountain, a river, they followed that. And that's what they were, animal trails first, you know, then, you know, human trails and trading routes.

DF: So if you think about it, humans are animals. And when you're traveling, you'll take the path of least resistance. So the mountain passes are where you would go. And so when you're going down these corridors, you'd often encounter other people. And maybe they had a material from South Dakota that you wanted, and maybe they wanted to go hunt bison in the area. And so you made a trade of some sort. And that's how things were brought into the area.

FS: If you’re picturing flat, easy trails in the woods here, think again.

JA: One of the absolute funniest things we learned while we were doing this backcountry work is that we are wimps, because we would be traveling up these trails that have all these lovely switchbacks in them, so that you can take your time and catch your breath and your knees don't hurt. And we would find these old ancient trails. We could see them where the vegetation had gone. And sometimes there would be artefacts on these trails. They would just go straight up the side of the mountain.

JMF: Indigenous ancestors in the past were so much stronger as human beings than we are nowadays, and our elders will tell us that we wouldn't have been able to survive back then.

JA: Here's us hauling our shovels and things up these switchbacks, gasping, and then looking at these trails that just go straight up and thinking, someone hauled a bison up this.

FS: In total, the crew found over 17,000 artifacts. A small percentage were connected to settler activities like metalwork and drilling at the First Oil Well in Western Canada, a national historic site dating back to the early 1900s.

The majority of artifacts, though, are connected to Indigenous peoples in three distinct eras: Pre-contact, the time before the arrival of Europeans, Proto-contact, spanning roughly from the 1500s to the 1800s when European trade goods started to make their way across the continent but before Europeans themselves arrived in western North America. And then there’s the Post-contact era, which we’re living in today.

The majority of the pre-contact artefacts were debitage, those flakes of stone left over from making tools, but there were also animal bones used as tools or showing signs of butchering, as well as complete stone tools like scrapers and projectile points.

DF: A projectile point is a tool that is used mainly for hunting. The first type of projectile point is a spear point, and those were much larger. They were used around 10 to 12,000 years ago, in the time right after the glaciers receded from the area. And so during that time there was actually some pretty large animals, such as mammoths and other megafauna. And so to actually take down a large animal, you needed large tools. You would attach it to a spear shaft or later on an arrow shaft, and then you could use it to thrust, throw and take down an animal in that way.

FS: The shafts were made of organic material like wood, so they decomposed a long time ago. And even if they’d survived the millenia, like the stone arrowheads, they would have burned in the fire.

DF: After the spear technology came the atlatl technology. And that was a great innovation by the people. They essentially took the spear that they were using before and added another lever to it that attached to the back. And once you had that extra lever, you could add an incredible amount of velocity to the operation. And so once you had that, you could whip the spears quite far distances, making it much more efficient and safe for the hunter.

FS: If you’ve ever used a tennis ball throwing device to play fetch with a dog, you’ll probably understand how an atlatl increases throwing power.

DF: And after a while, that technology was replaced by the bow and arrow technology. And that used a much smaller projectile point on the tip. And that's because the bow and arrow technology had much more mechanical force already part of the process. Essentially it packed the same amount of punch as an atlatl being tossed or a spear being thrust. And so the projectile points slowly got smaller and smaller over the years.

JMF: I was able to find my first atlatl point. I was out with Dylan Frank, one of the archeologists and we were actually at a conference and we had a break. So Dylan said, I'm going to go take a look. He's going to go walk around. And I followed him and he overstepped it. And I yelled, Dylan! And you could just see the frustration on him as I yelled at him because he knew what I found. I'm a pretty reserved, calm person, but I think I was yelling pretty good that day. When I found my atlatl point, I immediately made a tobacco offering. With your points, your arrowheads, your spear points, the saying is you don't find them, they'll find you. So when I say that was my atlatl point that was given to me. It's mine but, Parks Canada has it, but everyone knows it's mine.

FS: Not all tools were used for hunting…

JA: Then you see artifacts like scrapers, which would have been used to process hides once the animals had been hunted. Or we see things like mauls, which are these big, huge hammerstone heads that would have been used either as grinding stones or to break open bones for marrow. And that’s the kind of more domestic, as you would call it, side of these activities.

These hunters cannot live in isolation, right? Someone needs to process the materials, cook the materials, make hides into teepees, clothes, moccasins, waterskins. It tells us so, so much more about what's happening on the landscape. We even see things like small scale tools being used by children. These hunters do not spring fully grown from the ground. They were once children, they had to be taught, they had to be trained. So these other artifacts that we see really help us to understand the full gamut of life.

FS: In addition to stone tools, the archaeologists also found artifacts like glass beads, more geared towards aesthetics than utility.

JA: They're super, super tiny and they're really hard to find. But after the fire went through and removed all the vegetation, you could actually see these tiny little white and teal beads sitting in the soil.

BP: It's a real treat when you're walking along and you pick up a metal trade point and you know exactly where it came from, then you start picking up glass beads that were probably part of some ceremonial or decorative piece of clothing.

FS: Jennifer told us about her most exciting find.

JA: It was pouring rain. It was sleety. It was cold. It was absolutely gross. And only one of our volunteers decided to join us because it was gross. And we took him to one of the sites that is a big meeting place where we see lots and lots of campfire rings and things all together. And as we were showing him around, I found a argillite, which is a type of stone, biface tool. So that basically just means a stone tool that's been sharpened on both sides. But it was broken off and as I was looking at it, I thought to myself, I think I know what this is, but it's a little presumptuous without having the tip and the base, which is normally how we identify projectile points. So I didn't really say anything, I just let some people look at it and by the time we got back into town, I had a message from one of my crew members that said, hey, do you think that Biface is Scottsbluff?

FS: A Scottsbluff point is a long spear point, a very old spear point.

JA: And I punched the air. I was so excited because I thought, yes. External validation. It's 9000 years old, and it's the oldest thing I've ever found. And it was just so exciting to find this on such a miserable day. It's the oldest thing we found on the project. And it was just. It was a really cool day.

FS: 9000 years ago, fire would have been a constant in the lives of the Indigenous peoples of this region, making life in the mountains and prairies, with their harsh winters, possible.

JMF: Without fire, survival would be very difficult. We had fire keepers within the camps prior to contact and so these were usually young warriors. They'd set up the camp and they'd get the fire going before the whole camp arrived, because you'd have the elderly and the sick and you know, children that were cold. So by the time the camp arrived, the fire’s going; the camp’s already in the beginning stages of being set up.

FS: Here’s Mike Bruised Head again.

MBH: And some were the fire experts to get that from scratch. Whether they rub two sticks or, you know, they say so even the hand and then the grass, dry grass, and then starting it. That winter camping. Once that fire started, it's never supposed to go out. The importance of fire to survive, to keep warmth, to cook. to light the pipe. So fire is of essence. We use it to smudge today. So you take the spiritualness of fire. It's even in our ceremonies. You take the rocks from the sweat lodge. Fire to heat that up in order for that sweat lodge to have that ceremony. Fire fire fire fire fire.

DF: The Blackfoot people have a very rich history with fire on the landscape. It's been well documented that they did cultural burns in the area to encourage animals to come back or frequent other areas based on the regrowth of vegetation, because after a fire, the regrowth is always incredibly rich based on the carbon in the ground.

FS: Fire helped prevent shrubs and trees from encroaching on the prairie grassland where the bison grazed.

IP: We have done cultural burning in the foothills and on the grasslands. And we've always done that as part of who we are.

JA: These weren't unmanaged landscapes. They were putting fire on the landscape to keep things clear and open.

JMF: That's a practice Indigenous cultures have used especially across the plains, that kept the ecosystem balanced. You didn't have the underbrush, commonly referred to as fuel, that sets off these huge wildland fires.

When I was a kid, I'd laugh at some of the older people because they would burn their lawns and be like, oh, look at that crazy guy, he's burning his lawn. And then within two weeks, he had the greenest grass out of anybody.

IP: In my last, maybe decade, really observing the environment here in southern Alberta, we've had a lot of fires. And now, as you know, and as we all know, they're coming more and more. And there's been an emerging thought about engaging indigenous people to say, is there a solution that we can look at in the cultural ways to help assist with some of those concerns that climate change is presenting?

JMF: We're working with our indigenous partners, specifically the Kainai Lands Department, and they're bringing fire back to the land. So Waterton Lakes National Park has provided that wildland fire training to members of the Lands Department out in Kainai.

When we do a prescribed fire in the park, mostly the big ones will have an Elder come out and do a little blessing ceremony, prayer, before we do that. And we'll also get the trained fire crew from Kainai to come out and help with those fires.

IP: Seeing the mountain on fire, there's almost this spectacle to it, but it's also this feeling that, well, we're not in charge and we need to coexist and to be good stewards of the area that we have because it can change on a dime.

FS: When speaking to members of the Blackfoot Confederacy, one thing comes through loud and clear: a deep personal connection to this place.

JMF: The land is sacred to the people, to our people. And when we look at the mountains, we look at the trees, the water, you know, the rocks. Most people see things that aren't alive. We look at a mountain and we know that's alive. We look at rocks, we know they're alive. So everything has a spirit to the Blackfoot people.

MBH: Now those mountains are getting the respect by tourists, everybody, everybody, that those mountains are alive. I could feel the energy that our people shared and the knowledge that came from the, [BLACKFOOT LANGUAGE] where the spirit comes to you through your pipe, through your ceremony, through your song, and tells you how to and guides you what, medicines to use, what songs and what ceremonies.

JMF: So the indigenous ancestors in the past, they were very fit and very strong mentally and spiritually, physically, emotionally. The four balances in life to keep you as a balanced human being. So when all four are in sync, then you're a healthy person, a healthier person. So that's why I come to the mountains. That's why I come to Waterton is to get grounded.

So when I go out, I will make the offering before my hike. It's just that connection to the land that, it's very powerful, it's something that's been lacking in our communities because and, you know, bringing up the residential school and the reason behind residential schools was to take that spiritual side of things, that connection to the land, to the animals, the air, the water, to take that away from indigenous people, to break them. And that's why we see so much poverty. We see so much substance abuse.

That's why it's so powerful for me to be in the mountains, to do my ceremony and to find that connection to the land. And I've brought many people out to do their first hike to show them where I go. And some people end up becoming very emotional, crying because it's something that's been lacking in their lives.

IP: My wife and I, when we want to get away, when we want to rejuvenate, when we want to reconnect, we go to the mountains. So we love to go out and just be out there. It allows you to, to just feel maybe insignificant among all the big scenery. And it's such a nice, calm place.

So in a sense, when we go down there to connect with the mountains, when we go down there to be with the mountains, it's like that coming home. It's like that unplugging from this place where, you know, we're kind of boxed into this little location, wherever we're at, to go into the, to a place where you're just free. That, that's how you should feel when you go to the park. That's how we feel.

FS: Waterton Lakes National Park is open to the public year-round. It’s a three-hour drive from Calgary, or an hour and a half from Lethbridge.

Stop by the new Visitor Centre to experience interpretive exhibits that highlight Blackfoot history, traditions, culture, and the deep connections to Paahtomahksikimi.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to consulting producers Joseph Many Fingers and Dylan Frank. Thanks as well to Ira Provost, Bill Perry, Jennifer Ayles, Clifford Crane Bear and Dr. Mike Bruised Head, who wrote his PhD thesis on the impact of erasing Blackfoot place names in Paahtomahksikimi, we’ll provide a link in the show notes.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with images of the archaeology work and artifacts, take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections.

I’m your host, Fred Sheppard. Thanks for listening.

Thesis

• Ninna Piiksii, Mike Bruised Head. “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names in Paahtomahksikimi, Waterton Lakes National Park.” PhD thesis, University of Lethbridge, 2022.

Websites

• “Origin of the Beaver Bundle.” Peigan Board of Education, https://piikani.ca/about/origin-of-the-beaver-bundle/, accessed October 21, 2025

Government Documents

• Ayles, Jennifer. “Lessons from the Mountains: The Kenow Fire Archaeological Response in Waterton Lakes National Park.” unpublished paper, Parks Canada, Collections, Curatorial and Archaeology Branch, 2023.
• Clayton, Jenny. “A History of Fires and Fire Suppression in the Area Burned by the Kenow Fire.” unpublished paper, Parks Canada, Indigenous Affairs and Cultural Heritage Directorate, 2020.
• “Climate, Waterton Lakes National Park.” Parks Canada Agency, https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/ab/waterton/nature/environment/climat-climate, accessed October 21, 2025.
• “A History of Logging in the Area Burned by the Kenow Fire.” unpublished paper, Parks Canada, Indigenous Affairs and Cultural Heritage Directorate, 2020.
• “A History of Trails in the Blakiston, Bauerman, and Cameron Valleys of Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta.” unpublished paper, Parks Canada, Indigenous Affairs and Cultural Heritage Directorate, 2020.
• “Kenow Wildfire Timeline, Waterton Lakes National Park.” Parks Canada Agency, https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/ab/waterton/nature/environment/feu-fire/feu-fire-kenow/calendrier-timeline, accessed October 21, 2025.
• Frank, Dylan. “Archaeology in Paahtómahksikimi.” unpublished presentation, Parks Canada, 2023.

Voice: This is a Parks Canada Production. Ce balado est aussi disponible en français.

Fred Sheppard: July 15, 1940, Saint-Paul-de-l'Île-aux-Noix, Quebec. Joseph Gosselin, a ferryboat operator, is watching a summer storm hit the Richelieu River and the island of Ile-aux-Noix. It’s been almost a year since Canada entered the Second World War, but things have been relatively quiet in this part of the world. Gosselin normally spends his July days transporting locals the short distance to the island for picnics near Fort Lennox National Historic Site. But tonight, there's a knock on his door. He's shocked to find a group of military officials demanding his boat to take nearly 300 dangerous prisoners of war to be locked up in the old fort.

The soldiers encircle the boat with barbed wire, then load the prisoners in batches of thirty five men for the crossing. Gosselin asks the soldiers to point their rifles away from him as he pilots the boat back and forth throughout the long, uneasy night. What he couldn’t have known was that many of those supposedly dangerous prisoners were actually European Jewish refugees who had escaped the Nazis.

Rabbi Schild: But to be incarcerated by people who you think are your friends because they think you are your enemy?” Well, that's what I call a typical Jewish schlemiel story.

FS: I’m your host, Fred Sheppard, and you’re listening to ReCollections: The Accidental Immigrants of Fort Lennox.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped the place we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

In the summer of 1940, as the Second World War raged in Europe, British authorities reached out with a special request for their Canadian allies, to accept a number of ships of captured German spies and prisoners of war. The military began preparing a network of internment camps across Eastern Canada, including at Fort Lennox, an isolated island stronghold linked to the War of 1812.

Paula Draper: They remembered coming into the old fort, and masses of bats flying all over the place, where they figured nobody had cleaned it since 1813.

RS: When we arrived on Ile aux Noix, this old fortress with the dank damp dungeons there. We had to wear uniforms with a big red circle on the back and the red stripes, so that if we should manage to escape, they could shoot us more easily.

FS: Among the captured combatants was an unexpected group of prisoners: thousands of German and Austrian Jews, refugees who’d escaped the Nazi regime for a safer life in England, only to be swept up in a societal panic that saw them labeled as enemy aliens, potential threats to the British Empire. 2,300 Jewish men and teenage boys were detained in Canadian internment camps during the Second World War, and more than 800 of them spent time at Fort Lennox.

RS: We thought it’s a huge mistake, and in a few weeks this is going to straighten it all out. And then came that surprise announcement that we were being shipped to some distant country. We were promised freedom after being incarcerated in England but the commanding officer said the only way that you can stay in Canada is six feet under the ground.

FS: Before it was an internment camp, Fort Lennox had a long history as a military fort. Located on Ile aux Noix, or “Walnut Island,” named for the abundance of walnut trees that once covered its 210 acres, It's about 60 kilometres south-east of Montreal, and 15 kilometres north of the US border. Fortifications on Ile aux Noix were involved in colonial conflicts like The Seven Years' War, The American Revolution, and The War of 1812.

The Richelieu River has been a key trade route for Indigenous peoples for millenia. On Ile aux Noix, shards of terra cotta pots and animal bones with evidence of hunting and cooking indicate human presence dating back more than 6,000 years.

Several different forts were built here during the 17 and 1800s, but the buildings that visitors see today, with a star-shaped moat and earthen walls surrounding six stone buildings, were completed in 1829. The fort was named for Charles Lennox, governor-in-chief of British North America who died of a bite from a rabid fox after only a single year in office!

By 1920, the military had not used the fort for several decades, and it was among the first places designated a National Historic Site of Canada. The island became a popular spot for afternoon picnicking, but those day trips came to an end during the Second World War, when the military established a nation-wide system of internment camps, repurposing many large institutional sites like forts, reform schools, prisons, and asylums.

The Department of National Defence transformed Fort Lennox with temporary wooden buildings on the open parade square, high guard towers, and barbed wire fences. The formidable gates of Fort Lennox closed to the outside world, with around 300 internees inside.

FS: We spoke with historian Paula Draper about how the refugees ended up at Fort Lennox.

PD: I'm Paula Draper, I'm an historian. My focus is on Canadian Jewish history and specifically Canada and the Holocaust. The Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 and annexed Austria in 1938, that meant that the Jewish populations of both Germany and Austria were now under Nazi control.

FS: The Nazis considered anyone with one Jewish grandparent to be Jewish, even those who were not practicing or did not identify with their Jewish ancestry.

PD: There were a series of discriminatory laws. Jews were unable to go to school. They were barred from various professions, and many of them started to look for a way out of Germany and Austria. In November 1938, Kristallnacht, the night of Broken Glass, many Jewish businesses and homes were ransacked, and a large number of Jewish men were interned in concentration camps.

FS: We’re going to transition here and talk a little about the life of Rabbi Erwin Schild, one of the voices you heard in the intro. He was born in Cologne, Germany in 1920, and was held at Fort Lennox as a young man. His story helps us understand how this human tragedy unfolded.

RS: Still to this day, I meet people who have no clue, who never heard of such a thing, that Jews were interned in Canada as enemy aliens.

FS: These recordings come from oral history interviews he gave as part of an international effort to collect testimonies from Holocaust survivors, to ensure the world never forgets those events.

Shortly after Kristallnacht, Erwin Schild was forcibly taken from his dormitory at the Jewish Teachers’ Seminary and imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. He was released 6 weeks later on one condition: that he leave Germany. For a month, he anxiously awaited an exit visa. The situation for Jews was getting worse by the day.

RS: We waited each day for the mailman, as Jews have waited for the Moshiach, for the Messiah. Perhaps today he'll bring the visa. Perhaps today there'll be some news.

FS: The news finally came in January 1939, and by February, he made it to London on a student visa to study at a Jewish school called a yeshiva, leaving his family behind. He was 18.

PD: Responding to the horrors of Kristallnacht, Britain opened its doors to tens of thousands of refugees, both Jewish and political. When they entered Britain, some came as students, some were very young. They went to schools, universities, others went into various forms of employment.

FS: Things changed, though, when Britain entered the war in September, 1939.

PD: The British government decided they might have saboteurs among all these refugees, so they started tribunals in which they tried to assess the histories of the people that had come and to determine whether they were in fact dangerous and spies, or whether they were innocent refugees.

FS: The tribunal classified Erwin Schild as a “friendly enemy alien” along with about 70,000 other refugees. For a short time, they largely went about their lives: working, attending school, worrying about friends and family still in mainland Europe. Then, in the spring of 1940, Germany invaded six countries in just six weeks: Denmark, Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

PD: When the Germans overran Western Europe there was panic in Britain. They were concerned that an invasion was imminent. There was a fear that amongst these tens of thousands of refugees, there were some spies, saboteurs, fascists that had not been clearly found by these tribunals.

FS: Rumours of a secret underground army, ready to enable a German invasion, spread throughout the country.

RS: The British populace, which had been critical of the refugees and looked at them with a biased with a jaundiced eye, clamored for the British government, do something. We have thousands of Germans here crawling around speaking German on the street. And so finally, the British government said “collar the lot” was the slogan, And so all the German students, we were interned, we were arrested.

PD: Some were considered friendly enemy aliens, some were considered dangerous enemy aliens, but because they couldn't tell who was who on such a short term basis, they decided to temporarily intern all of these people who had gone before the tribunals. Most of them were men. So we have in 1940, in the spring, tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jewish refugees and some Italian Jewish refugees who were interned for what was supposed to be a short time. People were told that they just needed a toothbrush. They'd be home the next day, but that's not what happened. They were sent to various camps on the Isle of Man and around England.

FS: The refugees didn’t know it yet, but for most, this was the beginning of a multi-year internment.

RS: We were guarded by British soldiers who had machine guns. Also barbed wire surrounded us and psychologically it was horrible. I remember, particularly when we were transported on the bus, when the bus stopped for traffic light, people shook their hands at us. You know, these are the people, these are the Nazis. That began really that psychological suffering that we underwent being mistaken for the Nazis that we hated even more than the British hated them.

FS: Officials decided that, “friendly aliens” or not, refugees were too much of a risk to stay on British soil.

PD: The British government contacted the Canadian and Australian governments and asked if they would be willing to aid the war effort by taking possession of interned, dangerous enemy aliens and prisoners of war.

FS: Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King agreed, as did the Australian government. In the summer of 1940, Canadian authorities prepared for an influx of ships carrying captured German spies and prisoners of war, or PoWs.

But many were actually Jewish refugees. Some even ended up on the same ships as their persecutors.

One of the ships, the Arandora Star, was torpedoed by German submarines and over 800 people were killed. When the press revealed that refugees and anti-Nazis were among the dead, public outcry led Britain to limit these deportations to actual prisoners of war. But for the more than two thousand Jewish refugees whose ships had made it to Canada, there was no clear way back.

The ship carrying Erwin Schild, the Sobieski arrived at Quebec City on July 15, 1940.

RS: Upon our arrival, we were horrified because there, the Canadian Army was prepared to receive very dangerous German prisoners of war, and that's how we were treated. And machine guns all over the place. We had to surrender all belongings. Fortunately, there was a Jewish sergeant from Montreal who was sort of in command of one of the detachments looking after the reception of these prisoners. He saw us coming off the boat, Hasidim with beards and payos and long black coats and so on. Jewish speaking people, and then the people who were obviously Orthodox Jews. And he couldn't believe his eyes.

He started to talk to us, and in Yiddish, we told him our story and said, please go to the Jewish community where they were and tell them that they're keeping Jews prisoners in this country. And he promised he would do that. And he did. He found out afterwards that he had gone to the ___. On his first day off he went to the offices of Jewish congress in Montreal and told them about the arrival of our group.

Meanwhile, while we were being processed, he called out in great voice and high voice, “surrender all your valuables, your watches, and your money.” “[YIDDISH LANGUAGE]” In Yiddish he told us to keep everything in our pockets because we wouldn't be searched, and whatever we keep in our pockets, we can keep.

FS: From Quebec City, prisoners were sent to camps all over Eastern Canada. Eventually, authorities ordered all of the Orthodox Jewish internees who kept the Sabbath and a kosher diet to be housed together at Fort Lennox. That’s how Erwin Schild and hundreds of others ended up there. Upon arrival at the fort, the internees were put to work. Here’s Parks Canada historian Brigitte Violette.

Brigitte Violette: When the first group of refugees arrive at the port, the barracks were not properly set up to house them.

FS: Work crews laboured to improve the run-down fort, and also did maintenance, sanitation, and kitchen tasks. At times, they worked hard to support the wider war effort: manufacturing camouflage nets and training as mechanics. They also built an interior staircase to the second floor of the barracks building, one of the few tangible signs of the internees that still exists at Fort Lennox today.

The barracks is where the internees spent most of their time. This imposing, two-story limestone building is the largest within the walls of the fort. Designed in 1816 to house nearly 600 soldiers, its exterior features a double stone staircase, two rows of neatly arranged windows, and, looming above it all, an oculus window that resembles a giant eye looking out over the grounds. It’s the kind of place that gives a sense of order, power, and the regimented lives of the soldiers, and internees, who once lived here. Inside, the first floor is a wide central hall with vaulted ceilings and a series of alcoves branching off, basically small rooms without doors.

BV: When the fortress was transforming to a refugee camp, the second floor of the barrack was used as the dormitory. So it’s much like it was used during the garrison, the century before. The ground floor was rearranged to include washroom, a kitchen. These were rooms and similar services.

FS: Thanks to a hand-drawn sketch by internee Helmut Kallmann, we know how the prisoners used these ground-floor alcoves. The drawing shows a basic floorplan with a radio room, where internees could gather to listen to updates about the war effort. There was also a kosher kitchen, and a library, likely used as a Beit Midrash, or a house of study. The internees were aged 16 to 60, and came from a wide range of backgrounds.

PD: It was a real smorgasbord of people. And they learned from each other.

RS: The intellectual level in the internment camp was very high. We had among ourselves outstanding professors from German universities, scientists, poets, writers, you know, so it was not dull.

BV: There were numerous professional among them who had led rewarding careers in Europe, or who were attending university in England. So some of these highly educated men gave lectures to the other refugees and this sort of made like a de facto university.

RS: Here we were in a totally self-contained community with the opportunity of creating for us a religious Jewish community. My yeshiva studies went on. There was some interruption, naturally, but the yeshiva in London kept us supplied with the necessary books and library.

FS: Sometimes there were conflicts...

PD: Religious Jews did not work on Saturday, which was their Sabbath, and this caused conflicts with the camp administration.

There was one internee who found an innovative way to avoid work on Saturday. He would refuse to wear the camp uniform and they’d put him in jail where he could relax for the Sabbath, and then the next day he put on the uniform again.

RS: I was right there when one officer said he really doesn't like his position. He would rather be guarding German prisoners of war who have the decency to stand up for their own country, and not like these Jews who betray their country, Germany, or at least pretend that they're enemies of Germany. They were rabble for them. There was a lot of anti-Semitism.

FS: But the internees knew it could be much worse…

RS: There was no physical suffering for us, especially when we knew the bombs were falling on London. We were safe and sound. We had food, we had shelter, and nothing untoward was going to happen to us. Our suffering was psychological, but it was a very strong suffering.

We had no illusions as to what Jews were suffering, in those countries that were occupied by Germany, in Poland, in Russia, in the Balkans, and so on. Long before the world woke up to genocide, we knew that genocide was on the German program. So we were fearful for our parents and for anyone whom we had left behind.

That is why I call this episode the Canadian footnote to the Holocaust. There was no Holocaust physically but the psychological deprivation, that was terrible and the uncertainty as to how the war would end. If we had known that we had to stay in this camp for two years and afterwards the allies will win the war and we'll be liberated, would have been fine, but we didn't know what was going to happen to us.

FS: This mental anguish marked the daily life of internees at Fort Lennox. For nearly a year, they were treated as prisoners of war. For most of this time, refugee rights groups in Britain and Canada protested their treatment with a letter-writing campaign. The federal government bowed to the pressure, and in June 1941, updated their legal status from prisoners of war to refugees.

RS: And then the restrictions were lifted. We could write as much as we wanted. We could get newspapers, we could get radios, and so on, and life became more bearable.

FS: As refugees, they no longer had to wear a uniform and were able to roam freely outside the fortress walls. But they remained under guard and were not allowed to leave the island.

RS: But we couldn't get into Canada. That was out.

FS: To understand why they weren't just released at this point, we talked with a historian of Canadian immigration history.

Harold Troper: I'm Harold Troper, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.

FS: Dr. Troper is the co-author of the book: None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933 to 1948.

HT: The story of Canada's role in the refugee crisis of the Nazi era is just an uncomfortable pair of shoes. It's just too tight and uncomfortable to walk in and defies, as I say, the kind of way Canadians want to see themselves in their past.

And so Canadian immigration policy, don't mistake it for the United Way. It was ethnically selective as well as being economically self-serving. By the time we get to the late 20s and 30s, Canada, like the United States, was closing its doors to immigrants. It was the beginning of the depression. There was a shortage of jobs. The notion was that immigrants take jobs from, that are available to others. The door was gradually closing. The Canadian immigration authorities, their sole understanding of what their role was at that point was immigration restriction. And they were not going to bend. The group that was pounding on the door to get out of Europe were Jews who were looking for a safe haven, a place to go. The world was divided into two parts, that part in which the Jews dared not stay, and that part in which they were forbidden to enter. And Canada fell into that second category.

One could say that in Canadian immigration policy, by the time we get to the late 30s, anti-Semitism was built into the policy itself. From the coming to power of Hitler in Germany in 1933 until after the defeat of Hitler in 1945. Canada knowingly admitted approximately 5000 Jews, which is proportionately the lowest number of any Western liberal democracy. The object was keeping people out of Canada, not processing them to come in. And they did their job very well.

FS: This complicated the release plans for the interned Jewish refugees at Fort Lennox.

HT: It is no surprise that when, it was discovered in a sense that these people that had been sent to Canada were not Nazis or whatever. The immigration authorities were at their wits’ end how to respond. You couldn't just pack them up and send them back. So what do you do with them?

How do you release them and not have them here? And how do you guarantee that they're going to leave the country? Because in the bottom line for the immigration authorities, it was how to get rid of them or make sure that when the war ends, they'd be gone. If Canada wasn't going to admit Jews, it wasn't going to admit them through the back door.

FS: Despite all this, after the internees were recognized as refugees in July 1941, the federal government was obligated to work on a release plan.

Eventually, refugees could be released as students, farm workers or skilled labour for the war effort, if a Canadian family or employer agreed to sponsor them. The Immigration department had to approve each case, so progress was slow.

PD: They were considered temporary residents, and they were warned during this period that they would be reinterned if they broke any rules, or even if they tried to switch jobs.

FS: Erwin Schild was released in early 1942 to continue his studies at the Torat Chaim yeshiva in Toronto.

RS: It seemed a lot longer incidentally, it seemed a lot longer than two years. But two years is long enough, really. You have to be a criminal with quite a crime to be incarcerated for two years. And here we were, confined for nothing by mistake, really, by accident.

FS: For the internees released as students, life in Canada took some adjusting to. But for the labourers, it could be challenging: their status in Canada relied on the goodwill of employers, so in cases of poor working conditions and exploitation, they had little power to complain.

PD: They had to report to the RCMP on a regular basis. Some who married Canadian women found that their Canadian spouses lost their citizenship, and also had to report to the RCMP. Many of the young internees desperately wanted to sign up to fight. It was still the middle of the war but they weren’t allowed to join the army.

FS: Some older refugees found the transition very difficult.

PD: They had to rebuild lives they had totally lost before, and many of them lost their families and not just their parents, but their spouses and their children.

FS: In November 1943, three and a half years after that stormy July night, the internment camp at Fort Lennox was shuttered. The final 50 refugees, labelled as “unreleasable” were sent back to Britain. In 1945, an Order in Council gave full immigration status to the former interned refugees.

PD: The Canadian government was clearly aware of the Holocaust and what had happened and allowed this small group of 996 former internees to stay.

FS: Some returned to Europe or moved to the United States, but many stayed in Canada. Erwin Schild went on to become a much-beloved Rabbi at the Adath Israel synagogue in Toronto, where he led the congregation for more than 40 years.

PD: The interned refugees, once they were released, made tremendous contributions to this country in the cultural, economic, technical, and educational fields.

FS: They include two Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Walter Kohn and Max Perutz, as well as composers, musicians, photojournalists, physicists, architects, cosmologists, philanthropists, the list is lengthy.

PD: They're just a small example of what Canada could have benefited from if they had opened their doors to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust.

FS: Decades later, visitor information at Fort Lennox mainly focused on the site’s military history.

Annick Guerin: My name is Annick Guerin. I'm a team leader in visitor experience at Parks Canada. When I started working, we had one sentence to say “There used to be a refugee camp here during the Second World War,” and that was it. And we would go on to another subject. We would be doing a guided tour and someone would pipe “Well, I used to live here. I lived here in the, during the Second World War.”

A lot of them came over with their families, and they really had this, this desire to share with them what they went through, where they were and how they lived all through, through that experience. I must say, those were the very touching meetings that we had with the former refugees.

And, one of the main things that they wanted to share was the fact that they were extremely lucky in their bad luck, because for them, passing through Fort Lennox was the gateway to coming to Canada. And they knew perfectly well that other people in Germany and Austria didn't have that luck to get out in time. And we really tried to convey that we were so happy to see them and so happy for them to share with us what they knew.

FS: Parks Canada recently created a new exhibit at Fort Lennox, with a section dedicated to the internees. BV: One very special object is a prayer book, that had been showed in our collections for over 50 years.

FS: That prayer book, known as a siddur, was found amongst the roots of a tree during archaeological work at Fort Lennox. We spoke with Daniel Schild, Rabbi Erwin Schild’s son, about the importance of the siddur.

Daniel Schild: The daily siddur is, for a religious Jew, something he cannot leave behind or go anywhere without. Religious Jews know most of the prayers by heart, but they don't necessarily feel totally confident that they know all of them. So having a siddur, whether you're going on a trip or especially in this case where your next location is unknown, having your prayer book that you can use every day would be essential.

FS: Daniel explained how a siddur might have ended up buried beneath a tree.

DS: First of all, when a siddur has to be buried, it's not a happy occasion. It means that the siddur has deteriorated to the point where the name of God has been blotted out, or pages have been removed, or frayed or otherwise damaged. Once they cannot be used they must be preserved. The idea is to bury holy books in ground which has been consecrated for burial, for Jewish people, clearly it's not always possible. Throwing it in the garbage is not an option. We'll give the prayer book a burial by digging a shallow grave and putting prayer books or anything else which are ruined in these graves. So that's basically how a prayer book would end up in a random location where Jews live.

FS: Parks Canada curators and conservators, in consultation with the Montreal Jewish community, decided to display the siddur as it was found, with fragments of paper interspersed between the tree roots. It’s a poignant reminder of the refugees’ time at Fort Lennox. There’s one other place at Fort Lennox with evidence of the refugees, the staircase they built to access the second floor of the barracks. More than 80 years since the internment camp closed, it remains a tangible link between the fort’s British military past and the people who spent years of their lives within these walls, separated from their families and unsure of their futures.

Here’s Daniel Schild:

DS: The story is quite incredible, the absurdity of England sending and Canada accepting Jewish guys who are obviously being persecuted by the Nazis and would have been killed had they returned to Germany and bringing them here and classifying them as an enemy alien and putting them in a separate camp with targets on their back as if they were in somehow a danger to the country, is a total absurdity.

Whether there was an anti-Semitic undertone to this or whether it was just a matter of in wartime, rationality sometimes gets left behind and irrationality takes over. And I think that my father has proven and these guys have proven is: We bring refugees in, many, many will add to and contribute to the country in ways that we cannot envision. And having refugees like my father, who became a member of the Order of Canada, to go from a refugee to a member of the Order of Canada to me is just unthinkable.

FS: Rabbi Erwin Schild summed up his feelings about his time at Fort Lennox in his memoir, published in 2000. We asked Daniel Schild to read it for us:

DS: I hold no grudge against the British. They saved my life. On the whole, internment was not a very tragic experience for me. It removed me from the threat of German bombs that fell on London. Though painful, my experience of life in internment had some positive value. Above all, it brought me to Canada, all expenses paid! Canada has more than compensated me for her initial rejection and her hostile indifference to my overtures. The opportunities she eventually offered me have engendered in me a “true patriot’s love” for her. I sing our national anthem always with deep feeling, and often with tears welling up in my eyes: to keep Canada glorious and free and united, I gladly continue to stand on guard!

FS: Fort Lennox National Historic Site is open to visitors during the summer months. It’s about an hour’s drive south-east of Montreal, plus a short boat ride to Ile-aux-Noix, which is still a great spot for a picnic. You can also learn more about the experience of interned Jewish refugees at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to our consulting producer, Dr. Paula Draper, and to the late Rabbi Erwin Schild, who passed away in early 2024, just two months shy of his 104th birthday.

Thanks as well to Daniel Schild, Dr. Brigitte Violette, Annick Guerin, and Dr. Harold Troper. A big thank you to both the USC Shoah Foundation and the Toronto Holocaust Museum for the oral history recordings of Rabbi Schild.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with some great photos of the fort and the artifacts we’ve discussed, take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections.

I’m your host, Fred Sheppard. Thanks for listening.

Journal Articles and Books

• Auger, Martin F. Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and “Enemy Aliens” in Southern Quebec, 1940-1946. Victoria: UBC Press, 2006.
• Draper, Paula. “The Paradox of Survival.” In Civilian Internment in Canada: Histories and Legacies: An Edited Collection, eds. Rhonda Hinther and Jim Mochoruk. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2020: 309-332.
• “The Accidental Immigrants: Canada and the Interned Refugees Part I,” Canadian Jewish Historical Society Journal 2 (Spring 1978): 1-38.
• Plourde, Michel and Nathalie LaRochelle. “Court-bouillon à l’île aux Noix.” Continuité 178 (Fall 2023): 42-43.
• Schild, Erwin. The Very Narrow Bridge: A Memoir of an Uncertain Passage. Toronto: Adath Israel Congregation/Malcolm Lester, 2001.
• Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Zachor (Remember) Magazine. vol 19, no. 2 (May 2012, special edition: “Enemy Aliens” issue), https://www.vhec.org/zachor/#tab-id-2 (accessed 10 November, 2025).

Dissertations

• Draper, Paula. “The Accidental Immigrants: Canada and the Interned Refugees.” PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1983.
• Whitehouse, Christine. “‘You’ll Get Used to It!’: The Internment of Jewish Refugees in Canada, 1940-43.” PhD thesis, Carleton University, 2016.

Oral Histories

• Schild, Erwin. Interview 18341. Interview by Linda Ruth Davidson. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, August 8, 1996. Accessed April 2024. https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/18341
• Schild, Erwin. Interview 54296. Interview by Paula Draper. Visual History Archive, Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, March 1, 1988. Accessed April 2024. https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/54296

Government Documents and publications

• Charbonneau, André. The fortifications of l'ile aux Noix: a portrait of the defensive strategy on the Upper Richelieu border in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ottawa, Ontario: Parks Canada, Canadian Heritage, 1994. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/36041/publication.html

Voice: This is a Parks Canada Production. Ce balado est aussi disponible en français.

Fred Sheppard: December, 1565. A galleon called the San Juan sits at anchor. The ship is in a harbor known to a generation of Basque whalers as “Buttes.” The sailors have filled the hold with nearly a thousand barrels of valuable cargo but the southern coast of Labrador is notorious for its fierce northwesterly winds. Despite their efforts, they lose control and the ship smashes into the rocks. Into the dark churning waters goes the product of a summer of dangerous, backbreaking work. For more than 400 years, the San Juan, and its story, lie forgotten, just 10 meters beneath the surface, a hidden remnant of a bustling whaling enterprise that once lit the lamps of Europe.

I’m Fred Sheppard and you’re listening to ReCollections: Discovering the Basque Whalers of Terra Nova.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped the place we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

1972, Burgos, Spain. British-Canadian historian and geographer Selma Barkham is in a provincial archive near the Basque country, searching for evidence of a centuries-old connection to North America.

Selma has been preparing for this research for many years, learning Spanish and moving her four children to a new continent. No easy feat for a single mother in the 60s and 70s!

All of that effort is finally paying off. She’s finding 16th century documents with names of ports that aren’t in the Basque Country, or on modern maps at all. She’s also coming across decades worth of records showing hundreds of galleons shipping cargo to Europe from a dozen overseas ports, each packed full with barrels of ‘Grasa de Ballena,’ whale oil. It’s beginning to look like these ports along the “Gran Baya of Terra Nova,” now the southern coast of Labrador, were the heart of a major business enterprise.

Michael Barkham: This whaling industry really just hit her in the face. It jumped out at her from all these documents that she was finding, she didn't expect to discover a full scale whaling industry in Atlantic Canada before the foundation of modern Canada.

FS: In this episode, we’re looking at Red Bay National Historic Site, on the southern coast of Labrador, a site that UNESCO calls “the earliest, most complete and best preserved testimony of the European whaling tradition.” We’re exploring the dangerous labours of the Basque men who chased whales and how dedicated researchers worked to reveal the story in the 1970s and 80s.

Marianne Stopp: It's at Red Bay where we have a sense of the breadth of colonial enterprise along the northeastern seaboard. This was an enormous enterprise, the vastness of it, the numbers of vessels, the thousands of men who came every year.

FS: But first, what were the Basques doing in coastal Labrador in the first place? It all began with the cod…

To learn more, we spoke with Dr. Michael Barkham, historian and geographer.

MB: In 1497, the Venetian John Cabot, or Giovanni Caboto, sailed across the Atlantic in search of Asia. Instead, he found a land where he said there was so much codfish, you could actually catch it with baskets.

Within 15, 20 years, believe it or not, European fishermen, some French, some Portuguese, some Spaniards, some Basques, had already started or established a small European cod fisheries along the Atlantic coast of Canada.

What happens is that the Basques not only see cod and catch cod, but they start seeing whales.

FS: And unlike the other European fishermen, the Basques had experience with hunting whales commercially. They were skilled shipwrights, masterful fishermen, adventurous seafarers and experienced merchants. Their homeland, the Basque country, is a mountainous region on the Atlantic coast of Europe, with parts in both France and Spain.

MS: Before they crossed the Atlantic, they were whalers off of the Bay of Biscay.

FS: This is Dr. Marianne Stopp, who retired from Parks Canada in 2023. We heard from her a little earlier.

MS: I've been working as an archaeologist and an historian in the area of Labrador history and prehistory for many decades.

FS: Marianne worked as an underwater archaeologist at Red Bay in the early 1980s. She was among the earliest women in Canada to do that job.

MS: They already had a long tradition of venturing out into open waters after large mammals and fish.

FS: Intrigued by reports of vast whale populations in Terra Nova, now the Atlantic coast of Canada, Basque merchants and mariners sensed a golden opportunity.

MB: And that whaling industry grows. It reaches its peak between 1560 and 1585, which is a 25 year period, a quarter of a century, when there were about 25 or 30 large galleons going annually to hunt whales with perhaps 2000 men and boys on board and occupying some 12 ports along the south coast of Labrador and Quebec, and hunting or killing up to about 400 whales, which translated to about 20,000 barrels of whale oil.

MS: That product was used basically for lighting Europe, churches, larger municipal buildings.

FS: In the years before electricity, whale oil lamps were very important. The oil had other uses as well.

MS: It was a product that came to be needed to keep the machinery of a developing Europe in place and moving.

FS: Whale oil was used to lubricate that machinery, and also helped with processing wool. Baleen, the bristly food-catching filter inside the whale’s mouth, was used in European fashion, like the ‘Farthingale Sleeve’ where it gave body to the puffy sleeves of 16th century outfits. Think of the portraits of Queen Elizabeth The First and others in Shakespearean England. But primarily, the whale oil enterprise was all about bringing light to the lamps of Europe.

MS: The oil was very valuable. It's on par with today's oil industry.

FS: It’s hard to put a current dollar amount on this industry, but whale oil was clearly valuable enough that thousands of Basque men braved the harsh North Atlantic each year to go get it.

MS: These were not people plucked off the street and forced to go into the whaling industry. These were people invested in making a profit.

FS: There was a real incentive to work hard: everyone involved, the crew, the galleon owners and the outfitters, earned a cut of the proceeds. The more oil that made it back to Europe, the more everyone stood to profit.

The Basques shipped their bounty in galleons, large, wooden, multi-decked sailing ships.

MS: These Basque whaling vessels are so important. They were like the Ford F-150 that we have on the road versus Cadillacs. They were not fancy vessels.

FS: In Terra Nova, the galleons doubled as floating warehouses and sleeping quarters. They needed to be moored somewhere safe during the whaling season, usually from June to late autumn, when the coastal waters were free of ice. Red Bay was ideal.

Red Bay is a natural harbour that cuts into the coastline of southern Labrador. It’s protected by nearby Saddle Island, a treeless, kilometer-wide rocky outcrop about 300 metres off the mainland. Cindy Gibbons: It's a very sheltered harbour, and I think that's one of the reasons why it played such a key role in the whaling industry and in other fisheries over the years.

FS: This is Cindy Gibbons, Cultural Resource Management Advisor for Red Bay National Historic Site.

CG: I grew up in Red Bay. I have worked with the Basque whaling site there since I was in high school.

There's also an inner harbor, which gives really good shelter, especially in high winds and we call it the basin locally. Those two features make it a really good harbor for ships, for fishing, for any maritime activity really.

FS: The natural protected harbour has been a draw for a very long time.

MS: Since about 6,000 years ago, we have evidence of people being on Saddle Island and also on the mainland portion of Red Bay and every single culture group that has ever spent time in Labrador has a presence in Red Bay, as they have in so many of the other harbors in southern Labrador. We have the archaic peoples, we have intermediate early First Nations groups, the Dorset, gross water sites are found in that region. Later Inuit sites are found in the Red Bay harbour area. There are many fire pits on Saddle Island itself that appear to date to later First Nations presence.

FS: Despite this archaeological evidence, much of it discovered while excavating Basque sites, what we don't have is firm evidence of any direct contact between Indigenous peoples and the Basques at Red Bay.

However, some European documents recount stories of contacts between the Basques and Indigenous peoples in other parts of the region around this time period. It was a complicated relationship: there are references to trade between the groups and the emergence of simplified trade language to communicate. There are also references to violent interactions.

Above the waterline, Red Bay is rocky, a mostly treeless shoreline, with bogs, low hills and red rocks peppered with rusty lichen.

MS: The landscape around Red Bay today is a fairly barren landscape.

FS: French explorer Jacques Cartier also noted the lack of vegetation, describing the region in 1534 as “the land God gave to Cain, along the whole of the shore, I did not see one cart-load of earth.” But beneath the ocean surface is a bustling marine ecosystem with fish, like cod, herring and caplin, seasonally home to seals, porpoises, dolphins and whales. Gulls, cormorants and eider ducks fly by and, occasionally, polar bears come ashore.

MS: The Basques were drawn to Red Bay. They were actually drawn to many places along the southeastern coast of Labrador because they gave easy access to the open waters of the Strait of Belle Isle, where the whales passed up and down.

FS: The Strait of Belle Isle, or, as the whalers called it, Gran Baya, the Grand Bay. The body of water that separates Labrador to the north from the island of Newfoundland to the south. You might remember this region from our episode on L’Anse aux Meadows, the only confirmed Viking-Age Norse settlement in North America. It’s across the Strait, on the Newfoundland side.

Up to a hundred icebergs, calved from glaciers in Greenland, drift into the Strait each spring and summer. But spotting icebergs was not the main focus of the whalers manning the lookouts on Saddle Island. Their eyes were peeled for signs of migrating Right whales and Bowhead whales.

They were an ideal catch, both species are relatively slow-moving baleen whales with plenty of fatty tissue called blubber to render, or liquify, into oil and, they usually floated to the surface when killed.

MS: The hunting was not done from the larger galleon. It was done from this small, close to the water, low freeboard vessel that would have men rowing it, with the weapons needed to kill these whales.

FS: They called these smaller vessels chalupas. A sturdy and adaptable boat that could be rowed or equipped with sails.

MS: Thousands of whales were killed at this time from these tiny vessels.

FS: Chalupas were about eight meters long, and two meters wide; much smaller than the 13 to 20 metre whales they hunted. The vessels were sturdy, but could still be capsized by the whales, something that’s quite evident from a grave discovered on Saddle Island containing the remains of seven men. The crew of a chalupa, not coincidentally, was often seven, including at least one harpooner to target the whale.

CG: These were tough guys and they would position themselves at the bow of the boat and throw the harpoon into the whale.

FS: Their methods were part of the Basque tradition of whale hunting.

MB: During the Middle Ages, they developed the techniques of how to catch these huge monstrous animals in the sea, and the Basques gradually developed the technique that we think of when we read Moby Dick, which is a harpoon tied to a rope that is then tied to a small whale boat.

FS: French explorer Samuel de Champlain witnessed a Basque whale hunt in Terra Nova in 1610, writing: Voice Actor: “As soon as the harpooner sees his chance, he throws his harpoon, which penetrates very deeply into the whale. Directly the whale feels itself wounded, it goes to the bottom, and if by chance in turning, it strikes with its tail the shalloopa or the men, it crushes them as easily as a tumbler. It sometimes drags the shalloopa some eight or nine leagues, travelling as fast as a horse.”

MB: And when it comes up for air, you harpoon it again.

CG: Because the more wounds in the whale the faster it became weak enough to approach and kill.

MB: And then eventually, you just lance it and bleed the whale to death.

CG: And then a rope was attached to the tail, so that it could be pulled back. They would sometimes join together several chalupas and crews to tow a whale back to port.

FS: Even though the whale carcass floated, this likely took many hours. Once back on shore, they would get to work on removing the blubber.

CG: They would slice off the fat with huge flensing knives, which were probably about a foot long blade. So the blubber strips, it was cut off into sort of manageable sizes and taken on shore.

FS: To this day, discarded whale bones from this time period line the beach known as the “Bony Shore.” Next came the process of rendering the blubber into oil.

MS: One of the main structures that Basque whalers were building at every one of their stations were these tryworks, these places where large cauldrons could be set into stone foundations, fires built under them.

FS: The foundations were simple masonry about a metre high, made from local stone and clay from the Basque Country. The copper cauldrons were also brought over from Europe and could render around 170 litres of whale oil.

These tryworks, or rendering ovens, also kept the people stirring the cauldrons out of the elements.

CG: The rendering ovens were built very close to the shore, as close as was practical with the high tides.

MS: And over these units would be a roof of some sort, so that they could continue working through all weather. And those roofs were covered by a very European-looking red roof tile.

FS: Those red roof tiles would prove, centuries later, to be extremely important to Selma Barkham’s discovery of the whaling industry in the Strait of Belle Isle.

Once the oil was liquified…

CG: It was kind of ladled into vats that were half filled with fresh water, and then the oil would float on top of the water and any impurities or dirt would settle down into the water. And then the oil was skimmed off the top and ladled into barrels.

FS: The wooden barrels were carefully assembled by skilled coopers to prevent any leaks. Archaeologists have found remnants of their workshops on Saddle Island.

CG: And then the barrels were sealed, and the oil was light enough that the barrels could be floated out to the ship.

FS: Picture a typical summer’s day in Buttes, as the Basques called Red Bay, with crisp winds coming off the water, a lingering fog bank in the distance and swarms of blackflies hovering overhead! It’s an intense hub of activity for hundreds of men, butchering whales, assembling barrels, and transporting blubber to the rendering ovens. Imagine the smell for those stirring the greasy cauldrons, smoke mixing with rendering oil, adding to the lingering aroma of discarded whale carcasses decaying in the briny waters nearby. Quite the sensory overload!

When a galleon’s hold was full, with up to two thousand barrels of whale oil, the crew could celebrate a successful season and set sail for European trading ports.

CG: They were trying to get as much whale oil as they could in the ship before weather forced them to go back to Europe.

FS: The harsh Labrador winter was well worth avoiding. In the 1540s, the early years of the Grand Bay whale fishery, the Basques could fill a galleon’s hold during the relatively mild months of June to September. But as time went on, the risk of getting caught in winter’s grip increased as they started staying longer into the fall, due in part to a declining number of summer whales.

MS: The resource waned. They had been fishing thousands of whales and that population was probably impacted.

CG: At some point, they realized that there was another population that migrated south through the Strait of Belle Isle in the fall, beginning in October. And that's what kept them there later. So eventually the focus shifted to that fall hunt.

FS: But even that population was finite.

MB: By the 1580s, really, the whalers are beginning to realize that there are less and less whales. Because the documents talk, first of all, of some ships coming back no longer full. Whereas in the 1560s and 70s, they were expected to make a full cargo.

FS: The profit incentive pushed crews to make risky decisions about how long to stay. Some didn’t make it out in time.

MB: The first known overwintering occurred in the winter of 76/77, when, according to contemporary accounts, several hundred of the best and strongest whalers were caught in the slush, and the water coagulated, it said [Basque word] so we couldn’t get our ship out.

CG: The harbours became choked with ice and frozen before a lot of the ships could leave, because they had stayed so late to get as much oil as they could.

FS: Crews forced to overwinter were unprepared for survival on the bleak coast, and many died. One unlucky whaler, Juan Martínez de Larrume, dictated his will in the harbour of Buttes on June 22, 1577. It’s one of the oldest known wills written in North America. Voice Actor (in Basque Language): “In the name of God, amen, let it be known by this written letter of testament and last and ultimate will that I, Juan Martínez de Larrume, inhabitant of the town of Orio, being ill in bed but sound of my natural mind that it hath pleased Our Lord to give me, ordain and establish this my said testament in the following way.”

FS: In his will, Larrume requested funeral rites at his family’s tomb, even if death occurred far from the Basque country, which it did. He seems to have survived the worst of the freezing winter, only to die as a new whaling season began.

Between the dwindling number of whales and geopolitical factors like the Anglo-Spanish war forcing Basque galleons into naval service, the writing was on the wall for the industry.

MB: Just as a sort of a nail in the coffin. There's a wonderful quote from 1613 from the province of Gipuzkoa to the King of Spain, saying that “our sailors are finding the whale fishery of the Grand Bay of Terranova very exhausted.” Which describes the situation quite clearly.

FS: As profits dwindled, so did investors’ interest in sending whaling crews across the Atlantic. The whale oil boom of Terra Nova went bust.

Centuries passed. Red Bay harbour and its access to fish and seals remained a draw for European and Indigenous people. Beginning in the 1700s, first the French and later the English established seasonal bases of operations for cod fishing and fur trading. In the first half of the 1800s, fishers from Newfoundland established the community of year-round residents that remains to this day.

But the story of the whale oil rush of the Gran Baya of Terra Nova was lost in the mists of time. Until the twentieth century, when Selma Barkham, the researcher we told you about earlier, moved to Canada.

MB: In 1950, aged 23, she visited relatives in Canada and ended up settling in Montreal, where she eventually was appointed librarian of the Arctic Institute of North America at McGill University. So there In 1953, she met a young English architect, Brian Barkham, who funnily enough, had already an affection for the Basque Country. In 1954, Selma and Brian married, and two years later, 1956, they traveled to the Basque Country to visit Brian's good friend Don Pio, who mentioned “Oh, did you know that there was an ancient Basque presence in Terra Nova in Atlantic Canada?” So that little idea, that little kernel stuck in Selma's head. However, in 1964, about eight years later, tragedy struck in that Brian suddenly died. Selma, at the age of 37, was widowed with four young children under the age of ten.

FS: If you haven’t guessed it yet, historian Michael Barkham was one of them.

MB: She ended up being hired as a historian by National Historic Sites of Canada. And that way, she participated in the reconstruction of Louisbourg.

FS: You can hear more about Louisbourg in our season one episode, Enslavement and Freedom at the French Fortress.

MB: In the archival documentation on Louisbourg, she found that many of the French cod fishermen hailed from the Basque Country. But, it turned out very little was known about those voyages. She decided that what she really wanted to do was to do her own research in the archives of France and Spain, to try to uncover the almost unknown Basque expeditions to Canada during the 16th and 17th centuries.

That's how in 1969, barely five years after Brian our father had died, Selma moved us children to Mexico by car, the plan being to learn Spanish for her future archival work.

FS: Then, in 1972, after three years of practicing Spanish, the family travelled by ocean liner to Bilbao, in the Basque region of Spain.

MB: She taught English to make ends meet, and then suddenly, out of the blue, she received a thousand Canadian dollars from an anonymous Canadian donor.

FS: Her friend and former boss, Jack Richardson, had facilitated the donation. Here’s Michael reading one of Selma’s letters for us:

MB: “Dear Jack, your friend's miraculous cheque has turned the tide. There's an absolutely fabulous amount to do here.”

FS: Michael recalled one memorable archive in the small Basque town of Oñati, run by a single priest.

MB: Now, people think, oh, an archive, you go in and you press a button and it says Terra Nova, you know, and there's all sorts of, people will bring you things. And no, this was just an old building with a whole bunch of old documents. You had to take your own lamp and you could hear the termites eating away the wood, because it was wooded shelves with all these 16th and 17th century documents on it. And at night, it was so silent, you could hear the munch, munch, munch.

FS: Michael and his 3 siblings spent a lot of time there.

MB: We just sat on the table, copying these documents, or looking for the word Terranova.

FS: But it was in the provincial archives of Burgos where Selma had her first eureka moment. When she realized that a surprising number of the Basque expeditions were heading to Terra Nova not in search of codfish but instead, a much bigger catch, whales.

What tipped her off was insurance documentation for ships and their cargo, and plenty of it, a testament to the savvy business practices in 16th century Spain.

MB: Over the years, Selma researched in some 40 archives, mostly of the Iberian Peninsula, from Bilbao and Burgos to Madrid, Seville and Lisbon. And gradually she would uncover thousands of previously unknown manuscripts including insurance policies, lawsuits, wills crew agreements, list of provisions and equipment, etc, etc. She really never could have imagined so much documentation.

FS: She also suspected there must be physical archaeological evidence out there, somewhere.

MB: There had to be evidence, I mean, with all these 25, 30 whaling ships going to the Strait, to 10 to 12 ports along the coast, 2000 men a year, 200 small whaleboats and maybe 400 whales a year. There just had to be remains of this industry.

FS: She also had a hunch as to what type of evidence might be found.

CG: The documents that she had read referred to the ships bringing thousands and thousands of roof tiles to Labrador every year.

MS: These are red earthenware, unglazed lengths of curved ceramic. They would have been brought in the ships and then used in Labrador as roof material for the various structures that the Basques built.

FS: Structures like the rendering ovens.

CG: There was no record of them going back. They were coming out on the ships with the supplies, but of course going back, the ships were filled with oil, so anything like that would have been left behind. To her way of thinking, somewhere on the coast of Labrador, there were thousands and thousands of roof tiles from the Basque Country.

FS: After five years of gathering documentary evidence, Selma wanted to visit Terra Nova to search the landscape for physical signs of the Basque whalers.

CG: She was using charts from the 16th century and place names from the documents and comparing it with modern day charts and place names, and she concluded that these whalers must have been coming to the Strait of Belle Isle, a place that they called the Grand Bay.

MB: So, backed by her research so far, she organized an archeological survey expedition to southern Labrador with a grant from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

FS: July, 1977. Selma travelled to Labrador, hitching a ride along a dirt road near the Strait of Belle Ile.

CG: She was a young woman with practically no money, just arriving in Labrador with a few documents in her hand and looking for red roofing tile, it's the most amazing story.

FS: But she wasn’t traveling alone. Selma brought two of her teenagers along, including 18-year-old Michael.

MB: I do remember it was the summer Elvis Presley died.

FS: Arctic researcher Graham Rowley and his family later joined the expedition. As it turned out, they didn’t have to search for too long.

The Barkhams’ first discovery came at West Saint Modeste, a small coastal community not far from Red Bay.

MB: We're surrounded by blackflies. The wind is blowing. It's chilly up there. Rummaging through the cabbage patches, by the fishing houses next to the water were pieces of red tile. Earthenware tile, which we immediately recognized because they still use them on Basque farmhouses. And there were some quite large pieces. They clearly weren't bricks. They were rounded in some sections. But it was an amazing sense, I think, for Selma, and I can't really speak for her, but I can speak for myself as an 18 year old who had spent most of half of his life, listening to the word Terra Nova and going in and out of archives already. It was just an amazing sense of, well, here it is. I mean, this is it. It's the proof.

FS: The evidence became even more convincing with a find at a place called Schooner Cove. This time the Barkhams were joined by a pair of archaeologists: Dr. Jim Tuck from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Dr. Robert McGhee from the Archaeological Survey of Canada.

MB: Selma had pinpointed it was called Balea baya, which is the Bay of the Whales. We again, just walking along the shores, looking at the erosion, I suddenly saw a piece of metal sticking out from the overhang. Jim did a quick excavation of that, and there sure enough, was the tip of a harpoon. It was a harpoon in with tile, whale bones, baleen, and some of that black, grimy blubber. You couldn't have asked for a better calling card. It's just lying there. I am a harpoon and I am lying in amongst some tile and some baleen. Just to make it easier for you.

FS: These finds were just the first of many.

MB: That summer we explored several harbors along the south coast of Labrador and Quebec and there, sure enough, Selma discovered archeological remains of Basque whaling bases, including at Red Bay, which really confirmed all her historical work in Europe. So that really was the eureka moment.

FS: After these finds on the shore, Selma shifted her focus to the water, searching for shipwrecks. Brandy Lockhart: She found specifically a reference to two wrecking events that occurred in Chateau Bay and Red Bay. They weren't called that at the time, but she was able to, through her research, determine that those were the most likely areas.

BL: My name is Brandy Lockheart. I am an underwater archeologist with Parks Canada, and I am currently the lead archeologist for Red Bay. The documents described the cargo and stated that one of these in particular went down when it was already full of whale oil.

FS: One of those wrecks was the San Juan, the galleon we told you about at the beginning of this episode.

CG: The vessel had been fully loaded at the end of a whaling season in 1565 and was ready to sail home when a north wind struck.

MS: There is a particular type of storm that hits the Strait of Belle Isle that is very dangerous. It comes in very quickly.

CG: In studying the documents, Selma concluded that it should have been on the shores of Saddle Island, given the direction of the wind and where the ships would have been moored.

FS: And so, in 1978, a year after the initial discoveries of Basque artifacts…

CG: She requested that a Parks Canada underwater archeology team visit Red Bay.

FS: The hunt for the San Juan began.

BL: The underwater archeology team came and did a survey in the Bay to see if they could find any evidence of these wreck sites.

FS: Part of the survey involved pulling a diver behind a boat on a tow board, scanning the ocean bottom.

BL: It's like underwater water skiing.

FS: After three days of searching, the team, led by Robert Grenier, found a shipwrecked galleon just off the coast of Saddle Island. Grenier later wrote in Canadian Geographic magazine: “Was it possible that 400-year-old remains could be located that easily, so quickly and exactly where they were expected to be?”

MS: On a very clear day, if the light is hitting the water in a certain way, you can actually see it from the surface. No bodies were found. No one died in this shipwreck. It wrecked in a storm very close to shore. And, all of the men would have been able to get on to Saddle Island quickly. We call this vessel the presumed San Juan.

FS: The presumed San Juan.

BL: In archeology, it's really a lot easier to determine that something is not what you are looking for. We don't have any evidence that says it's not the San Juan. So we presume that it is. But perhaps someday we might find evidence that says, oh, actually, there were two wrecks in there that were the exact same breadth and length and description.

FS: These discoveries, both terrestrial and underwater, played a major role in Red Bay being recognized as a National Historic Site in 1979.

For the next several summers, archaeologists from Memorial University, led by Dr. Jim Tuck, excavated terrestrial sites around Saddle Island and Red Bay. With the help of hired locals, they learned much about the whole operation by examining the remains of rendering ovens, cooperages, a lookout point, a cemetery, and more.

Meanwhile, Parks Canada’s underwater archaeology team excavated the presumed San Juan, eventually determining it to be the oldest European shipwreck found in North America north of Florida. Between 1978 and 1985, Parks Canada logged 14,000 dive hours in Red Bay’s icy waters, fully excavating the wreck. By project’s end, they had analyzed and documented 3,000 of the ship’s timbers.

MS: It was of huge interest to study how the ship had been built. You have to appreciate that at that point in time, no one had ever studied a 16th century vessel in detail. The construction of this vessel was hugely interesting for people, not just in Canada, but across the Atlantic as well.

FS: We’ve used the term ‘underwater archaeology’ many times now, so let’s take a moment to discuss what archaeology under water actually involves…

MS: The main differences between underwater and terrestrial archeology, I would say, are in just about every way. The way one has to approach the site is different. One is in diving gear, weighted down with tanks and weight belts. So there is a real danger of damaging the site with one's fins or by landing too hard. The methodology is slightly different. We're still mapping underwater, just as one does on land, but the pencils and the erasers and the paper, which all function quite well underwater, they do have to be held down so they don't float away.

At Red Bay, we often had the unique funny experience of seeing small fish, these quite ugly little fish called sculpins come along and try to swallow our erasers. And that was always fun. But the erasers were tied down so they didn't get away with much.

BL: We also have specialized paper, waterproof paper so that we can write our notes underwater, the same as on land.

One of the bigger challenges though with the underwater writing is that you're wearing gigantic gloves, often, especially in Red Bay, we’ll wear three fingered mitts. The temperatures in the water can be down to minus two degrees.

MS: There were a number of new technologies that were in use on the underwater site that were first time things for Canada and also sort of entered the mythology of cutting-edge archeology for underwater sites in North America. One of the things that was developed by one of the members of the Marine Archeology Unit at Parks was this system of warm water flowing through our suits. Having the warm water flow through increased the amount of time one could stay underwater by many, many factors.

BL: Throughout the underwater archaeological excavation they very meticulously documented the specific location of every timber and every artifact found on the site.

MS: There were smaller items that came from the wreck as well. Ceramic vessels, for instance. Things like walnuts. Walnuts are a very common food in the Basque Country. Still are, and so we had some insight into what they were eating. There was shoe leather fragments, meters and meters of rope, hemp rope, a compass housing was found.

FS: The compass housing, called a binnacle, is a wooden cabinet that protected the compass, a crucial navigation tool that helped ensure the ship was heading in the right direction.

MS: Seeing these items underwater during our many dives, it was always very stimulating. There was always an awareness, with every swish of your hand as you moved dirt from rope line or timber, something could emerge that was fascinating.

FS: For example…

MS: It was a clear, sunny day, which wasn't very frequent in Red Bay, the rays of the sun seemed to hit the water in a way and come to the bottom in a certain way. As I was getting ready to go to the surface, I noticed something on a ship's timber, I swam over and realized that it was an etching of probably that very vessel that a Basque whaler had carved into the side of the ship.

FS: One of the Basque whalers had drawn his worksite, the galleon. This remarkably detailed etching depicts the ship at anchor, complete with masts, rigging, and anchor lines, plus a chalupa moored to it. A piece of graffiti at the moment the whaler etched it, four hundred years later this artwork is a rare glimpse of a 16th century ship as seen through the eyes of someone who knew it well.

MS: Quite an exciting moment of my time there.

FS: After spending hundreds of years in the cold, salty ocean, a wooden object like the etched timber requires conservation work to avoid deterioration.

BL: So any wood that comes up out of the water, you don't want to allow it to dry out because the water within the cells is really maintaining the structure of the wood. If the water has a chance to dry out, evaporate, it can actually become very fragile and can shrink. So any artifacts that come out of the water, we put them right back into either a tub of water or wrap them up so that that water stays within the wood.

CG: We used sphagnum moss to keep the objects wet during transportation. The team had turned an old fish merchant’s warehouse into a field lab.

FS: Cindy’s first job with Parks Canada was working in this makeshift lab, helping to catalog the finds.

CG: The bottom floor of that was just covered with tanks. Holding tanks.

FS: The objects in those tanks were treated by a team of Parks Canada conservators. Many artifacts have since returned to Red Bay for public display, including one vessel small enough to conserve in its entirety.

During the excavation of the presumed San Juan wreck site, archaeologists also found several smaller boats, including chalupas.

BL: One of those was raised, so every timber was taken up, and brought to the surface and brought to the conservation labs. It's now actually on display at the visitor center in Red Bay.

FS: The presumed San Juan was in remarkably good condition for a 400-year-old shipwreck, but it was too big and too fragile to be raised to the surface in one piece.

BL: Conservation of wooden objects is very time consuming. So taking that into consideration, they decided that they would try to rebury the entire shipwreck. The environment that the ship was found in is actually very good for conservation. It's very cold, it's dark.

FS: It’ll remain protected beneath the waves and also beneath a “geomembrane” which looks like an enormous black tarp.

BL: The geomembrane that we use, they're actually created for tailing ponds. They're impermeable. They're very durable, very thick.

FS: The geomembrane creates an anaerobic environment.

BL: So if we can create an environment where there's no oxygen, that limits the type of organisms that can live there, but if we put enough sand and then a non-permeable covering over top of that, the wood will actually last another several hundred years. And our job every five years when we go back is to make sure that that reburial mound that they created is still in good condition.

FS: As you can imagine, the seasonal influx of researchers had quite an effect on Red Bay, which had a population of 365 people back in 1981.

MS: There was a concerted effort to involve community families and their children to work on the site. Our cooks were women from Red Bay who kept us quite happy baking the world's most wonderful bread. You can't imagine how delicious their bread was. There are many ways of feeling welcomed and we certainly experienced some lovely ones.

FS: Cindy Gibbons was growing up in Red Bay at this time.

CG: Having these researchers around was part of our life. Some of my earliest memories are this site being explored and discovered and Selma Barkham trekking to our front garden with trowels.

Apparently the day after I saw them poking around our front yard, I took spoons from my mother's kitchen and went, started digging my own holes. I don't really have a recollection of that, but apparently I did that. It kind of got me hooked. I started working with Parks Canada Underwater Archeology when I was still in high school and it really shaped my life.

MB: The archeological work had a big impact, really on the town, they hired some local students and some men to manage equipment on the barge that was anchored over the ship.

CG: It helped a lot of my generation, not necessarily that we all became involved in history and archeology. Some of us did. But just the fact that we figured out through all these people who were coming every year that there was a world outside and there were opportunities.

FS: In 2013, UNESCO recognized the Red Bay Basque Whaling Station as a World Heritage Site.

CG: World Heritage recognizes that a site is important on the world stage. It's important to human history overall. Not just to the people who live at the site or even just to the people of Canada. It's important to the world.

BL: This site has provided us with so much information about Basque shipbuilding that we didn't have before. And if we don't take care of these sites, we just won't have access to that anymore. It's a limited resource of knowledge.

CG: The designation came because it's a really good and well preserved example of early industrial-scale whaling. And really, that started in southern Labrador with the Basques.

FS: Cindy watched the UNESCO announcement at the local school along with many residents of Red Bay.

CG: It was amazing. Probably about 50 people in the room at 7:00 in the morning.

FS: In a town with a population of 142 according to the 2021 census, that’s a lot of people.

CG: That really brought home the sense of commitment that the town of Red Bay and its residents has towards this site.

MS: None of this would have happened were it not for Selma Barkham. Without her spirit and determination, there would never have been a test pit dug on the land site, let alone a diver go down in Red Bay Harbour. Most of what we know about the economics of whaling, about the number of men on these vessels, the amount of oil that was brought back from Red Bay to the Basque Country, the merchants involved, the lawsuits that took place. This rich, multifaceted picture that we have of Red Bay is through her research largely, continued by her son, Michael Barkham.

BL: When you're walking on Saddle Island, there were people there in the 1560s actually doing this job and actually whaling and rendering oil right there where you're standing. And you can still see a lot of the clay tiles along the shorelines, or you can still see the holes where the tryworks were.

FS: Red Bay National Historic Site is open to the public daily from early June to early October. Stop by to see the redeveloped Visitor Centre with new exhibits and original Basque artifacts like leather shoes, barrels, a harpoon head and an astrolabe. There’s also the restored chalupa used by the whalers.

Take a boat ride to Saddle Island to walk the interpretive trail with stunning views of the harbour and see for yourself the site of North America’s first oil boom, with archaeological sites like rendering ovens and the final resting place of the presumed San Juan.

Red Bay, Labrador is an hour drive from Blanc-Sablon, Quebec, which has a regional airport and a ferry terminal for travel from northern Newfoundland. If you’re up for an extended road trip, the drive from Montreal is around 27 hours.

There’s also a collection of Basque whaling artifacts on display at The Rooms Provincial Museum in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. Thanks to our consulting producer for this episode, Dr. Michael Barkham. A big thank you to Dr. Marianne Stopp, Cindy Gibbons, Brandy Lockhart, John Higdon, Dr. Meghann Jack, Kirby Ryan, and Philip Bridle.

Selma Barkham was recognized with many awards in the years following her discoveries, including the Order of Canada, for uncovering “a period in Canadian history about which almost nothing was known.” Selma passed away in 2020.

Archaeologist Dr. Jim Tuck had a formidable career as a field researcher and teacher who inspired thousands of students at Memorial University and in the community of Red Bay. He passed away in 2019.

Robert Grenier was the head of Parks Canada’s underwater archaeology team during the Red Bay excavations and for many years after. As the committee stated when he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004: “The innovative methods he developed made the Red Bay site an international model for scientific research.”

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with photos of the site and artifacts, take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections.

I’m your host, Fred Sheppard. Thanks for listening.

Journal Articles and Books

• Barkham, Selma. “Burgos Insurance for Basque Ships: Maritime Policies from Spain, 1547-1592.” Archivaria, no. 11 (Winter 1980).
• Biggar, Henry Percival. ed.. The Works of Samuel de Champlain. vol. 2 (Toronto, 1936): 328-332. Arranged and translated from Champlain’s original Second Voyage of the Sieur de Champlain, chapter 3.
• Delmas, Vincent. “Indigenous Traces on Basque Sites: Direct Contact or Later Reoccupation?” Newfoundland & Labrador Studies 33, no. 1 (2018). https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/NFLDS/article/view/28683.
• Grenier, Robert. “The Basque whaling ship from Red Bay, Labrador: a treasure trove of data on Iberian Atlantic shipbuilding design and techniques in the mid-16th century.” Trabalhos de Arqueologia 18: Proceedings. International Symposium on Archaeology of Medieval and Modern Ships of Iberian-AtlanticTradition. Instituto Portugués de Arqueologia, 2001, 269-293. http://parkscanadahistory.com/publications/redbay/proceedings-2001.pdf.
• Martijn, Charles A., Selma Barkham, and Michael Barkham. “RESEARCH NOTE: Basques? Beothuk? Innu? Inuit? Or St. Lawrence Iroquoians? The Whalers on the 1546 Desceliers Map, Seen through the Eyes of Different Beholders.” Newfoundland Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 195-96. https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/NFLDS/article/view/151/259.
• Pope, Peter E.. “Bretons, Basque, and Inuit in Labrador and northern Newfoundland: The control of maritime resources in the 16th and 17th centuries.” Inuit Studies 39, no. 1 (2015): 15-36.
• Schwarz, Fred. “Saddle Island West (EkBc-16): A summary.” In Government of NL, Provincial Archaeology Office, 2024 Provincial Archeology Office Annual Review, 23 (April 2025): 272-85.
• Tuck, James A. “Archeology at Red Bay, Labrador 1978-92.” Archeology Unit, Memorial University, 2005.

News and Magazine Articles

• Barkham, Selma, and Robert Grenier. “Divers find sunken Basque galleon in Labrador.” Canadian Geographic 97, no. 3 (Dec-Jan 1978-79): 60-63.
• Barkham, Selma. “The Basques: Filling A Gap in our History Between Jacques Cartier and Champlain.” Canadian Geographical Journal (Feb-Mar 1978): 8-17.
• Boeckh, Sherry. “Selma Barkham’s Treasure Hunt.” Montreal Gazette. 15 March 1980, 169-71.
• CBC Archives. “Basque Whaling Site Uncovered in Red Bay, Labrador in 1985.” The Journal, CBC News, 4 November 1985. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.3332669.
• “Dr. Selma Barkham to Be Honored.” MUN Gazette 25, no. 17 (29 April 1993).
• Kean, Gary. “Basque Whaling Exhibit Curated by Discoverer’s Son.” The Telegram: St. John’s, 2 December 2023.
• Lanken, Dane. “Selma Barkham Traces Our Basque Heritage.” En Route, May 1984.
• Maze, Stephanie. “Discovery in Labrador: Whaling Port: A 16th-Century Basque and Its Sunken Fleet.” National Geographic Society 168, no. 1 (July 1985).
• McGhee, Robert. “Early Whalers of Labrador.” Heritage Canada Magazine, Feb-Mar 1983.
• Namer, Terence. “The Mystery of the San Juan: Detective Story at Forty Fathoms.” Heritage Canada Magazine 5, no. 4 (October 1979): 19.
• Sullivan, Joan. “Enterprising Researcher Rewrote a Chapter of 16th-Century History.” The Globe and Mail 93 (23 May 2020).
• Tuck, James A., and Robert Grenier. “A 16th-Century Basque Whaling Station in Labrador.” Scientific American 245, no. 5 (November 1981): 180-91. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1181-180.
• Tuck, James A. “The World’s First Oil Boom.” Archaeology 40, no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1987): 50-55.
• Wadden, Marie. “Selma Barkham.” CBC News, 25 June 2013. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.427912.

Websites

• Office of the Governor General of Canada. “Mr. Robert Grenier, Order of Canada, Officer of the Order of Canada.” https://www.gg.ca/en/honours/recipients/146-7328. (accessed 17 October 2025).
• Office of the Governor General of Canada. “Mrs. Selma de Lotbinière Barkham, Order of Canada, Member of the Order of Canada.” https://www.gg.ca/en/honours/recipients/146-127. (accessed 17 October 2025).
• Statistics Canada. “Census Profile for Canada, Provinces and Territories, Census Divisions and Census Subdivisions, 1981 Census - Part B.” Accessed 12 February 2025. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/English/census81/data/tables/Rp-eng.cfm.
• Trudel, Marcel. “Cartier, Jacques (1491-1557).” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. Accessed 11 February 2025. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cartier_jacques_1491_1557_1E.html

Government Documents

• “Basque Whaling Sites in Labrador.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Agenda Paper 1979-01.
• Grenier, Robert, Marc-Andre Bernier, and Willis Stevens (eds.). The Underwater Archaeology of Red Bay: Basque Shipbuilding and Whaling in the 16th Century, vol. 1-5. Parks Canada, 2007. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.946496/publication.html.
• “World Heritage Nomination for the Red Bay Basque Whaling Station.” January 2012. https://whc.unesco.org/uploads/nominations/1412.pdf
• Proulx, Jean-Pierre. “Basque Whaling in Labrador: an Historic Overview.” in The Underwater Archaeology of Red Bay: Basque Shipbuilding and Whaling in the 16th Century, vol. 1. Parks Canada, 2007, I-25-96.
• Ringer, R. James. “The In Situ Archeological Remains.” in The Underwater Archaeology of Red Bay 1, eds. Robert Grenier, Marc-Andre Bernier, and Willis Stevens (Parks Canada: 2007): 1-178.

Voice: This is a Parks Canada Production. Ce balado est aussi disponible en français.

Fred Sheppard: From the 9th to 11th centuries a group of norse people plundered, ravaged and conquered much of Northern Europe and beyond. They were Scandinavian warriors with fleets of ships, who gained the reputation as savage seafaring pirates. And, you may know these people as Vikings. But what you may not know is that one group of Norse explorers were the first Europeans to set foot in North America.

I'm Fred Sheppard and you're listening to ReCollections - The Saga of Vinland.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped what we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

In this episode, we're going back a thousand years to The Viking Age, and exploring the first European settlement in North America. Welcome to L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site on the island of Newfoundland.

Now, one thing before we get going, the word Vikings, is not the right word to use for this group of Norse explorers. Viking refers to the act of ransacking villages and conquering lands. In the Old Norse language, Viking translates to something like: “pirate raid.” But, not every Norse person from that era spent their time as a Viking. Most of them were farmers and merchants - only a select few set out to raid and conquer other lands. So, instead of referring to this group as “vikings”, we're going to call them the Norse.

The Norse originated from the area known today as Scandinavia - the European countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Their influence reached its height between the years 800 and 1050, when they established vast trade routes and colonized lands to their East and West, crossing long distances in their ships.

Older history textbooks often mythologized “The Age of Exploration” when Europeans like Christopher Columbus, Jaques Cartier and John Cabot quote unquote “discovered” the New Worldbeginningin 1492. So let's bust that myth: no one can “discover” a place where people have lived for millenia.

And based on evidence from L'Anse aux Meadows, the Norse - who also did not “discover” North America - arrived nearly 500 years before Columbus.

And where the Norse landed was the Northern tip of Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula.

We know this place as L'Anse aux Meadows - a small village roughly 1000km northwest of St. John's - the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador. L'Anse aux Meadows, or L'anse aux Meadeaux is an interesting mix of languages, partially explained by the fact that the region was home to fishing activity by first the French, then the English. To work out the details of this unique name, we got in touch with a local.

Loretta Decker: There's an older map which refers to L'Anse aux Medea. So in all likelihood, L'Anse aux Meadows was actually named after a French fishing vessel.

FS: This is Loretta Decker, a Parks Canada interpreter at L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site. Her family has lived in L'Anse aux Meadows since her great-great-great grandfather William Decker founded the village around 1835.

LD: L'Anse aux Meadows was a small fishing community. Everybody fished and at the time. You could go out and boat to various communities if there was no ice. If there was ice or snow, you could go on dog team and if it was in the fall or the spring you had to walk. So, you might walk 23 kilometers to see your girlfriend.

FS: Loretta is one of 16 year-round residents of L'Anse aux Meadows today.

And while it gets a little busier these days during tourist season, it's still the kind of place where you can encounter a herd of caribou - that's what happened to Loretta the day we talked to her!

Since the 1960s, L'Anse aux Meadows has evolved from a boat-access only fishing village into the home of the only officially recognized Norse settlement in North America, which led to a pair of important historical designations - it was named a national historic site in 1968 and a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1978.

But before the Norse made it here, many Indigenous nations lived in the area for thousands of years. Which is why several generations of villagers thought the raised dirt mounds in a nearby field were the remains of an ancient Indigenous camp. It would take a couple of Norwegian researchers to reveal what they really were…

But, why did the Norse ever come here in the first place?

Back in the Viking Age, the Norse colonized or invaded much of coastal Europe, Asia and beyond, eventually establishing a major settlement on the island of Iceland. One Norse explorer, Erik the Red, moved to Iceland with his family when he was a child. In his adult years, he murdered one too many people and was exiled. Now an outlaw, he decided to sail West, eventually establishing a small colony on faraway Greenland. And one generation later, his son, Leif Ericsson, led an expedition to explore even further west.

And we know all of this because of a series of epic tales known as The Icelandic Sagas. These Sagas are stories of the Viking Age passed down for centuries. But like the game of broken telephone, some of the details changed over time. Finally, a couple of centuries after the events took place, someone wrote them down - so while some parts are archaeologically verifiable, many are not. We'll focus on the two that mention North America, collectively known as the Vinland Sagas.

Here is Loretta again - our Parks Canada interpreter with the Vinland story.

LD: There was a trader called Bjarni. And he had been intending to spend a winter with his father in Iceland. When he arrived in Iceland, his father was no longer there. His father had moved to Greenland, so he took his ship and his crew, and he sailed for Greenland. Having never been there, he didn't really know what Greenland was like, but he got blown off course in a storm. And he saw this land and they described the men really wanting to go ashore and he just refuses and they see a number of mythical creatures and things like that too in the sagas.Then they sailed past a long beach and all this wooded area. And you know, there was valuable timber there obviously, but again, he wouldn't go ashore. This is not Greenland. And then finally, they spotted some other land of flat stones. That was a useless land, the saga says. They didn't go ashore. This is not Greenland. But eventually he makes his way back to Greenland and he describes the land that they saw and the resources that they saw there. So Leif Ericsson, who is the son of the sort of self-proclaimed chieftain of Greenland, Erik the Red, he decides that he's going to go. But he said they did better than Bjarni because they actually landed. So when they landed, the sagas talk about the dew from the grass and how sweet it was and the Meadows, and they were brought their sleeping bags ashore.

The sagas describe Vinland as a bountiful place, full of valuable resources to the Greenlanders like timber and fur. And the L'Anse aux Meadows encampment was very likely part of the Vinland region. It was a prime location, with fish, fresh water, and wood....the keys to a successful coastal settlement, but the site had even more going for it.

LD: So the Norse chose L'Anse aux Meadows as the site of their base camp because it had certain advantages that are not always apparent to modern people. L'Anse aux Meadows is on the tip of the great Northern peninsula that juts out into the ocean, there are a number of islands off shore, in fact, four large islands not that far off shore, that are almost like landmarks.

FS: Choosing a location was obvious. Easily described landmarks ensured that the Norse Greenlanders could navigate their way back. They built their settlement on a site overlooking a bay - on a clear day, it's possible to see as far as Labrador. There were rolling hills with long grass and shrubs, a forest nearby, and to the west, a stream running down from a bog to the ocean - today, it's called Black Duck Brook. Given L'Anse aux Meadows proximity to what's now known as Iceberg Alley, there were probably icebergs floating by each summer.

The Norse built 8 longhouses, most of them living quarters, that looked like they sprang organically from the earth, with grass growing from the sharply peaked roofs.

LD: The original sod structures at L'Anse aux Meadows were built in the Icelandic style. And that means it's a timber frame with layers of peat sod, peat walls, peat bricks, essentially. And that's just strips of peat that's cut up from the bog and they're just cut up into pieces about six, eight inches thick and about four feet long.

FS: Peat occurs naturally in bogs and other wetlands, and is made from layers of decayed plants. When harvested and dried, peat can be formed into bricks, which the Norse used for strong, insulated walls.

LD: And they're just laid in the walls. Like you would lay bricks.

FS: All that insulating peat in the walls and roofs, along with an interior fire pit, were important for keeping the Norse warm through a northern Newfoundland winter. All told, this settlement could support around 80 residents.

A couple of the buildings had a bit of a different use. After sailing down from Greenland, the Norse needed to mend their ships - and to do this, they required wood and metal. So, one of the houses was set up to process iron. In this house, the Norse built a furnace and a kiln to make iron tools and nails - nails that were needed to repair their ships.

This settlement was most likely used as a base camp for Leif Ericsson's expedition and others that followed, allowing for further exploration along the Gulf of St. Lawrence. It was also a place to gather timber, fix their ships, and load them up with resources to bring back to Greenland - hard labour that required strong men.

But women also had important roles in Norse society at the time, cooking, mending clothes and keeping up with the washing and cleaning - and the sagas mention some women joining at least one of the journeys to Vinland. With all the work of keeping the settlement running and exporting resources, it was probably a lively and busy place. But, after a few decades, it seems like the Norse abruptly abandoned their North American camp and never returned.

Use of the Norse settlement area continued after they left, this time by First Nations groups, including the ancestors of the Beothuk. Innu from Labrador occasionally came to the area to hunt and trap, and Inuit from Labrador came to trade.

Beginning in the early 1500s, French ships came seasonally to fish for cod. In the late 1700s, year-round settlements with families began popping up around the Northern coast of Newfoundland, including the village of L'Anse aux Meadows. By the 20th century, 900 years after the Norse left, the search for Viking outposts had become a popular pastime for some adventurers, historians and archaeologists.

In the early 1900s, a Newfoundland businessman named William Azariah Munn studied the sagas and the coastline of Newfoundland and Labrador, trying to find traces of the long lost Vinland. He published a theory in the St. John's Daily Telegramin 1914 that the L'Anse aux Meadows area was the location of Leif Ericsson's encampment, but it took another half-century before any conclusive evidence was found. Enter: Helge Ingstad.

Helge began his career in Norway as a lawyer, but he had greater ambitions and a thirst for adventure. After selling his law practice, he spent several years as a trapper in Canada's Northwest Territories, and later became the governor of a region called Erik the Red's Land - a part of Greenland that was briefly annexed by Norway in the 1930s. Shortly after, he was named governor of Svalbard.

In 1941, Helge married archaeologist Anne Stine Moe. Together, they explored the remains of ancient Norse outposts along the western coast of Greenland that corresponded to the sagas. Their adventures led to a search for Vinland, using a map created by an Icelandic scholar in the 1500s and Munn's pamphlet from 1914 as references. Helge and Anne Stine spent the late 1950s scouring the Canadian coast by boat, plane and foot to find the fabled locations of Helluland, Markland and Vinland.

HELGE INGSTAD: And there was disappointments all the time

FS: This is Helge telling a documentary crew from the National Film Board of Canada about the search.

HG: And when I asked people about the ruins, many of these fishermen in Newfoundland, they kind of shake their head and thought the man was crazy, hunting for such a thing instead of doing some honest work. The very last place I came to, that was a place called L'Anse aux Meadows. It was a very isolated place, there was no roads, they lived all by themselves. And there I met the very fine old timer, George Decker was his name. Yes he said right away, here's some ruins. There was a terrace close to a little creek called Black Duck Brook, beautiful thing. On this terrace you could see very very fine outlines of something that must have been houses.

FS: If the name ‘Decker' sounds familiar, you're right. George Decker, was another relative of Loretta Decker.

LD: My grandfather was George Decker and he helped lead the Ingstads to the site. So he showed them where there were obvious remnants of buildings, you could follow the outlines of walls. And for generations, people knew that at some point indigenous people had occupied that land, they knew nothing of the Norse of the Vikings. They had no reason to speculate it was anybody other than indigenous people from some time in the past.

FS: Over the next eight years the Ingstads, working with a team of archaeologists, uncovered the secrets of L'Anse aux Meadows - work that Parks Canada later continued. All the archaeological material excavated during this early period belongs to the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Birgitta Wallace: My name is Birgitta Wallace and I was first staff archeologist, then later senior archeologist.

FS: Dr. Birgitta Wallace is now retired from Parks Canada, but was one of the lead archaeologists during the early excavations .She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia with her husband, who she met while working at L'Anse aux Meadows. Her involvement began when she met Anne Stine at a conference. They realized they shared a passion for Norse history and archaeology and Anne Stine hired Birgitta to assist with the excavations in 1964. Birgitta left her job at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and traveled to the small village of L'Anse aux Meadows.

BW: There was no electricity in L'Anse aux Meadows. There was no road to it, as I said. It was really isolated.

FS: Even in the 60s, L'Anse aux Meadows was still a very small town with no hotels, so Birgitta stayed with a local family.

BW: The daughter in the house Mildred, the 14 year old girl, laughed at me because I didn't know how to operate a kerosene lamp. There was of course, no running water or facilities of any kind.The actual excavation was rough. The weather was mostly really cool and wet that summer. We had a little hut on the site at the time where we could make coffee, actually, we made tea. And we lived from tea break to tea break, digging, freezing. So the actually digging was pretty miserable really, but we laughed a lot

FS: The team spent the next few years excavating the remains of buildings, looking for conclusive evidence that the site was Norse. Birgitta, though, was confident.

BW: I knew it was Norse because I had seen identical type ruins in Iceland. However, in 1964, when I was there, Anne Stine had asked me to dig a trench just outside the biggest house. But with me that year, was a young boy whose father had been active in trying to support work on the site and he dug and he found things. He kept saying, holding up a stone, is this something, or is this something. And then he held up a stone, which was a little donut shaped soapstone piece with a hole in the middle. And he said, Birgitta is this something?And I recognized that it was a spindle, a Norse type of spindle whorl, a kind used in the Viking period. And I said, Oh, Anne Stine, come here! And she came over and she said, are you crazy? And we hopped and danced.

FS: This spindle whorl was a common European tool used for spinning wool into thread, an artifact that could definitely be linked to the Norse, useful for creating cloth for clothing and sails for ships.

BW: So, that was actually the first really diagnostic item found. And that was a great consolation to all of us, I think. That was really exciting.

FS: Further into their excavations, Birgitta and her team found a broken needle made of bone. Both the spindle whorl and needle - important tools for making and repairing clothing - lend credibility to references in the sagas about women in Vinland, including the story of Gudrid, who gave birth to a baby named Snorri. If true, Snorri may have been the first recorded European born in North America. The excavations also turned up a bronze cloak pin. In the day before zippers, bronze pins were commonly used to fasten two ends of a cloak together. A wool cloak, like a short cape, draped over one's shoulders was a way to keep warm in cold climates. One of the most interesting finds, however, was a single, intact iron nail.

BW: We were really excited to find a whole nail and in such a condition. You could see that it was hand forged, but otherwise it looked just like a modern nail.

FS: Iron was essential for the Norse and their way of life. It was the raw material needed for tools that allowed them to farm, hunt, build ships and more.

LD: So iron was very important to the Norse people because it helped them build ocean going ships. The boards for the ships were overlapped and nailed one on top of the other. And then those seams were caulked with tar and sheep's wool and provide the watertight seal. And that ship would have required the iron nails to make that ship technology work.

FS: It's worth noting that Norse boats also used trunnels, which are essentially wooden nails that fared better in damp ocean environments. Instead of rusting, like iron nails, the cold, salt water preserves the wood. Now, iron artifacts are hard to date, making it difficult to place the found nail to the proposed Norse settlement timeline. But there are clues that indicate the nail was made by the Norse at L'Anse aux Meadows.

BW: If it hadn't been where it was, about depth of fifty five centimeters or so, way below the surface and among artifacts that we knew were Norse, we would have thought it was a modern nail. But it really made us think, this nail probably was made right here.

FS: The creation of iron is a big undertaking even with modern technology - and for the Norse, it was an extremely laborious process. Essentially, the Norse had to collect iron, in the form of bog iron nuggets, from nearby Black Duck Brook and the surrounding bog. Bog iron looks like brown rocks, and forms in peat bogs. All the decaying plants decompose and produce tannic acid, which extracts iron from the bedrock below creating something like an iron soup. When the iron forgewater starts flowing into the stream, it meets oxygen, and a chemical reaction creates iron oxide, in the form of lumps of bog iron. These lumps are collected and smelted, which is a process that involves roasting the iron at high temperatures to remove impurities. The concentrated iron is removed and the leftovers - called slag - are discarded. Bars of iron are later forged, super-heated and hammered into a shape like a nail or a knife.

And after comparing the properties of the slag piles found around the site to the properties of the nail, archaeologists found a perfect match, concluding that the nail was forged using bog iron found at L'Anse aux Meadows. This is exciting because it means this nail represents the earliest known evidence of iron smelting anywhere in North America.

One question that remains unanswered is: did the Norse and Indigenous peoples of the area ever meet? There isn't much evidence, but one group of artifacts found at L'Anse aux Meadows may provide a clue: three butternuts and a burl of butternut wood. A butternut is a type of walnut that's native to Eastern North America - but notto the Island of Newfoundland, perhaps serving as evidence that the Norse continued their explorations further south where butternuts grow, or that they traded with Indigenous peoples.

For at least 3000 years, many different Indigenous cultures, including pre-Inuit groups such as the Groswater and Dorset peoples, and First Nations peoples such as the Beothuk and their ancestors have lived on the coast of Labrador, the island of Newfoundland and around the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. To understand more about the indigenous history at L'Anse aux Meadows, we spoke to Dr. Jenneth Curtis, an archaeologist for Parks Canada who has studied the excavations of Indigenous sites at L'Anse Aux Meadows and the surrounding areas.

Jenneth Curtis: So we find essentially the remains of their campfires, the fired rock and charcoal and heated soils that are left behind as traces of that. And along with that, some of their tools that were left behind and some of the evidence of tool making activities. So one of those objects was a wooden harpoon shaft, which is a really interesting find, and it's very unusual to find a whole harpoon shaft made of wood. And that is on display at the L'Anse aux Meadows visitor center.

That harpoon shaft carbon dates to 3000 years ago, during the habitation of the Groswater people. But, closer to the time of the Norse…

JC: So, the indigenous people who were likely living in the area around 1000 years ago would have been the ancestors of today's first nations, the Innu of Labrador and the Beothuk who were living on the Island of Newfoundland, and those groups were engaged in a seasonally mobile pattern. So at L'Anse aux Meadows, regularly coming by in the summertime to hunt birds, collect eggs, access wood resources.

FS: As to whether the Norse and any of these people met, it's a bit unclear.

JC: So we've said that we don't have direct evidence of the Norse meeting indigenous peoples onsite, but one of the things that I find really interesting is that they must have known that other people were there before them. When they arrived on the site at L'Anse aux Meadows, they would have seen the remains of a large cooking pit on the terrace that the First Nations had dug a couple of hundred years previously, and actually situated one of their sod houses right next to that, that big hole on the terrace. So certainly the Norse would have known that someone was there before. Likewise, the indigenous peoples who came by the site after the Norse had been there, they would have seen the sod houses, the remains of the wood and other artifacts that the Norse had left behind when they were there.

FS: There are several possible explanations for why the Norse did not stay at L'Anse aux Meadows. Their population in the Greenland Settlements was small, so leaving for Vinland Voyages meant fewer hunters and farmers at home. Greenland was already a long way from their trading partners in Iceland and Norway, so they may have only wanted an outpost for exploring Vinland and exporting resources. Conflicts with at least one group of First Nations peoples may also have influenced the decision not to return.

We might never know the true reason why they left, but evidence of their stay has intrigued researchers and visitors alike for decades.

If you're lucky enough to visit L'Anse aux Meadows, it's worth taking a few minutes to imagine just how different the Canada we know today would look if the Norse had stayed. And if you're not yet convinced that a visit should be on your bucket list, let's hear from someone who calls the place home.

LD: L'Anse aux Meadows is a very special place for me and always has been. And I feel like that's where I belong. I'm most comfortable and most at ease and happiest by the water in L'Anse aux Meadows.

FS: There are also some truly epic sunsets, delicious berries like bakeapples and partridge berries, and even the occasional iceberg drifting by.

L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site operates daily from June to October. To get there, you can fly into St Anthony Airport or drive 4 hours north of Gros Morne National Park along route 430, the Viking Trail. Visitors can tour the archaeological site and spend some quality time with the Norse re-enactors at the reconstructed sod huts of the encampment. To see the amazing archaeological objects we talked about, drop in to the Visitor Centre or if you're in St-John's, stop by The Rooms, the Provincial museum of Newfoundland and Labrador.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to Loretta Decker, Darrell Markewitz, and Dr. Jenneth Curtis. An extra special thank-you to Dr. Birgitta Wallace for helping with this episode and for her lifelong contributions to Norse history and archaeology. Her tireless efforts have brought this fascinating chapter of history to the world stage, and in 2015 her work was recognized with the Smith-Wintemberg Award, from the Canadian Association of Archaeologists, their highest honour.

Also, a big thanks to the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador for the use of their archaeological collections and the National Film Board of Canada for the audio clips of Helge Ingstad. I'm your host, Fred Sheppard.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with artifact imagery and maps of the area, take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections.

Journal Articles and Books

• Bowles, Graham, Rick Bowker, and Nathan Samsonoff. “Viking Expansion and the Search for Bog Iron.” Platforum 12 (2011): 25–37.
• Krauskopf, Konrad B. Introduction to Geochemistry. New York: Mcgraw-Hill, 1979.
• Kristensen, Todd J., and Jenneth E. Curtis. “Late Holocene Hunter-Gatherers at L'Anse Aux Meadows and the Dynamics of Bird and Mammal Hunting in Newfoundland.” Arctic Anthropology 49, no. 1 (2012): 68–87.
• Larsson, Mats G. “The Vinland Sagas and Nova Scotia: A Reappraisal of an Old Theory.” Scandinavian Studies 64, no. 3 (1992): 305–35.
• Stanton, Mark R., Douglas B. Yager, David L. Frey, and Winfield G. Wright. “Formation of Geochemical Significance of Iron Bog Deposits.” Chapter E14 of Integrated Investigations of Environmental Effects of Historical Mining in the Animas River Watershed, San Juan County, Colorado, edited by Stanley E. Church, Paul von Guerard, and Susan E. Finger. U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Professional Paper 1651, 2007. https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/1651/downloads/Vol2_combinedChapters/vol2_chapE14.pdf.
• Thomson, Ornolfur, and Bernard Scrudder, eds. The Sagas of Icelanders. New York, New York: Penguin Group, 1997. Accessed at: https://archive.org/details/sagasoficelander0000unse
• Wallace, Birgitta. “L'Anse Aux Meadows and Vinland: An Abandoned Experiment.” In Contact, Continuity, and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of North America, edited by Patricia Sutherland, 207-238. Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2003.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “L'Anse Aux Meadows, Leif Eriksson's Home in Vinland.” Journal of the North Atlantic 2, no. 2 (2009): 114–125.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “The Norse in Newfoundland: L'Anse Aux Meadows and Vinland.” Newfoundland Studies 19, no. 1 (2003): 6–43.

News and Magazine Articles

• Martin, Douglas. “Helge Ingstad, Discoverer of Viking Site, Is Dead at 101.” The New York Times, March 30, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/30/world/helge-ingstad-discoverer-of-viking-site-is-dead-at-101.html.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “Viking Farewell.” Beaver 86, 6 (December 2006/January 2007): 16-24.
• Wallace, Birgitta. “Finding Vinland.” Canada's History(February 2018): 20-37

Films

• Maud, Ralph, dir. The Man Who Discovered America. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1981. https://www.nfb.ca/film/man_discovered_america/
• Pettigrew, William, dir. The Vinland Mystery. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1984. https://www.nfb.ca/film/vinland_mystery/

Government Documents

• Rick, John. “The L'Anse Aux Meadows Site, Newfoundland.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Agenda Paper 1968-40, 109-110.
• “L'Anse Aux Meadows - an Archaeological Review and Status Report.” HSMBC, Agenda Paper 1967-5, 79-81.
• Stopp, Marianne. “The Norse Greenlandic Navigator.” Heritage Conservation and Commemoration Directorate, Parks Canada, 2014.
• Stopp, Marianne. “The Norse Greenlandic Shipwright - Resource Notes.”Heritage Conservation and Commemoration Directorate, Parks Canada. 2014.

Voice Actor: This is a Parks Canada production. Ce balado est aussi disponible en français.

Fred Sheppard: Yukon Territory, 1896

Voice Actor: Gold!

FS: San Francisco, 1897

Voice Actor: Sacks of gold from the Klondike!

FS: Declared the front-page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Voice Actor: Half a million dollars in dust on one steamer

FS: 1898, a hundred thousand people, including many intrepid women, braved unimaginable hardship to make their way to Dawson City at the heart of the Klondike Gold fields.

A small percentage made a fortune, most did not. A more reliable income came from mining the miners - hotels, restaurants, dance halls and saloons arose from the permafrost, along with a number of brothels. And in the 1970s, Parks Canada bought one!

Karen Routledge: That's a good question, why does Parks Canada have a brothel?

FS: I'm Fred Sheppard and you're listening to Re:Collections - A Ruby in the Rough.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped what we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

Today, we're visiting the Dawson Historical Complex National Historic Site in Dawson City, Yukon, to learn more about one of its most scandalous buildings: Ruby's Place, a former brothel that operated in the mid 1900s and was run by an extraordinary woman, Madam Ruby Scott.

A quick note before we get started, in this episode, we will be discussing sex work, but not in graphic detail. Listener discretion is advised.

Dawson City, “the Paris of the North,” at one point Canada's biggest city west of Winnipeg, where fortunes were made and fortunes were lost. Located in the Yukon territory, it's about 100 kilometres east of the Alaska border, on the shore of the Yukon River where it merges with the Klondike River.

The area now called Dawson City has been home to the Indigenous ancestors of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in since long before the influx of settlers in the 1800's. For millennia, they've relied on salmon and caribou, maintaining a reciprocal relationship with the land and its occupants.

Small mountains and fir trees surround the town. On the north end, there's a visible scar on the hill from an ancient landslide, known as Ëdhä dädhëchą or Moosehide Slide. For centuries, It's been a convenient landmark for river travelers that features in many Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in oral histories.

Dawson is only 250 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle. It's known for midnight sun in summers and in winter, the dark polar nights are punctuated by Northern Lights dancing in the sky.

Today, the roads are mostly gravel, with the exception of Front St, which was paved in 2009. The sidewalks are raised wooden boardwalks, and the downtown storefronts wouldn't look out of place on a Western movie set.

Ruby's Place, the former brothel, is on Second Avenue, just south of the British Bank of North America and the Dawson Downtown Hotel. The two-story wooden building is white with dark green trim, and features two bay windows jutting out from the bedrooms on the second floor. It's not hard to imagine the resident sex workers looking out at the streetscape below, waiting for the next man with a pocketful of cash to come calling.

But, Before the town and buildings, this swampy land was the site of an epidemic of Gold Fever.

KR: In North America, in the 1800s, looking for gold was a major activity. People were fanning out all over the continent trying to find gold.

FS: This is Parks Canada historian, Karen Routledge.

KR: Gold was seen as a very stable kind of wealth and also one, that, when it was placer gold, meaning that when it was found as nuggets in the creeks, anybody could, in theory, strike it rich and extract it themselves. So from the 1870s onward, there were miners coming into the Yukon Territory to look for gold.

FS: In 1896, the Klondike Gold Rush kicked off when a substantial deposit of gold was found in Rabbit Creek near Dawson, an area that's now Discovery Claim National Historic Site.

The following summer, the San Francisco Examiner broke the news, creating an instant frenzy with reports of ships laden with gold nuggets found in the Yukon. And by the end of 1897, tens of thousands had arrived at the port of Skagway, Alaska, determined to traverse the treacherous overland route to Dawson.

For most, the first of many challenges was the Chilkoot Trail, an important trade route for the Tlingit people. The 53 kilometre trail, today a national historic site and backpacking destination, winds its way up from Skagway over the Chilkoot Pass and on to Bennett Lake, which straddles the BC-Yukon border. The stampeders, as the gold rush travelers were called, hauled heavy equipment and supplies by foot, often dealing with deep river crossings, blizzards, avalanches and frigid temperatures.

Once at Bennett Lake, the stampeders constructed rafts and boats to float 800 kilometres down the Yukon River to Dawson. For many, the ordeals of the journey proved too much - of the hundred thousand stampeders, less than half made it to Dawson.

KR: Dawson is where it is, not because it's a great place for a settlement - it's actually quite swampy and it's been flooded many times. It was the closest good place for a steamboat landing to the goldfields. And all of the goods that came in and out were coming in by Steamboat.

FS: At the height of the gold rush, Dawson's population was 30,000.

KR: If you look at photos from that time, you can see tents up the hillside, just every piece of available ground. There's someone on it.

FS: Today, the population is down to just 2300 year-round residents.The stampeders, mostly men, came from many different backgrounds. There were also some very strong-willed women who braved the Chilkoot Trail.

Nancy McCarthy: You've got Martha Black, you have Émilie Tremblay, you have all these women who came up to make their fortune.

FS: This is Nancy McCarthy, a curator at Parks Canada. She's worked extensively with the Dawson Historical Complex artifact collection.

NM: So you had the dance hall girls, you had the prostitutes, and then you had women who opened hotels and had legitimate businesses of their own. It wasn't just it wasn't just gold. It was to make their fortune in the town as a result of the gold rush.

FS: One reliable, though technically illegal, way of making a living in boomtown Dawson was to engage in what's colloquially known as “the world's oldest profession”.

NM: You had a lot of these men who were instant millionaires, they need something to do. So they would drink, they'd go to, bars and saloons and they wanted the company of women

FS: Sex work has a long history in resource boomtowns in North America. We spoke to historian Doctor LK Bertram from the University of Toronto about the history of brothels in the Canadian Northwest.

LK Bertram: Between about 1873 and 1914, historians agree that there was a system of sex worker prostitution economies in the Canadian West that we call vice toleration, which meant that the police created red light districts and ran them with a number of different entities, including madams, business partners, property owners.

FS: A madam is the owner and operator of a brothel.

LKB: They basically set aside these places in different towns so that people could go and spend their money. And they believe that these were essential parts of these towns and that a town without a red light district, basically was doomed to failure. People wouldn't want to stay in a town like that. A lot of people would go to the next town to spend their money.

FS: In Dawson's early days, sex workers were welcomed into the city, mostly operating in the unofficial red light district on Second Avenue. Many worked out of saloons, small private cabins or on the streets. In a few cases, a business like a laundry or a cigar store served as a front for sex work.

Here is Nancy again.

NM: They were regulated, they were medically examined once a month, I believe, and that was to stop the spread of venereal diseases and other diseases. And so they paid a fine and they didn't mind because the fine went to a charity.

FS: This fine was a bit like a licence fee, allowing sex workers to work freely. The proceeds went towards patient support at Dawson hospitals.

As the gold rush came to an end in 1899, the population drastically declined, and Dawson transitioned into a town of seasonal mine workers with families. This changed how sex workers were viewed.

NM: Dawson became more settled and businesses started opening up, wives started joining their husbands, it turned into a community. The tone is changing and they're called brazen - the brazen women. They were in an area around Second Avenue called Paradise Alley, and the business owners didn't like them hanging around. They didn't like the signs. So they started a campaign to get rid of them and it was successful.

FS: Police crackdowns and onerous fines forced sex workers out of downtown Dawson. Many moved their operations outside city limits for several years to an area across the Klondike River known at the time as Klondike City or by its more derogatory name, Lousetown.

Neither of these names were the original. The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in called it Tr'ochëk and used the area as a seasonal fishing camp for generations, until the newcomers displaced them. From mid-summer to late fall they'd harvest and dry chinook and chum salmon, treat moose and caribou skins, and prepare foods for winter storage. Today, the cultural landscape of Tr'ochëk is recognized as a National Historic Site.

As the nature of employment in Dawson shifted from small-scale independent miners to salaried employees of corporate industrial mining, the business of sex work followed a similar trajectory. The model ofindividuals offering their services declined, and by the 1930s, brothels, businesses headed by a madam who employed the women, became the dominant form of sex work.

Ruby's Place wasn't originally built as a brothel - constructed in 1902, after a fire destroyed most of the buildings on Second Avenue, it initially operated as a laundromat and rooming house. When you see Ruby's Place today, it fits right in with the Dawson aesthetic, and to someone who doesn't know the building's backstory, it's indistinguishable from the many mixed commercial and residential buildings that dot main streets.

Shelley Bruce: When you approach Ruby's, what you find is actually a rather handsome two story building. It's built right up against the boardwalk.

FS: This is Shelley Bruce, a built heritage advisor for Parks Canada. Shelley works to understand the history of heritage buildings, and to ensure their conservation for years to come.

SB: It has a false front design, and a false front is a really interesting form of architecture that you find in small communities and quite typically up in the north, where literally the front wall of the building extends taller than the rest of the building.

FS: A false front is a decorative facade to make a building, when viewed from the street, appear more impressive than it actually is. It's a lot cheaper and quicker than building the whole structure to a high standard.

SB: On the front elevation, you find two doors, one on the right, one on the left. It's a very symmetrical facade design. The second story consists of what are called Oriel Windows. It kind of looks like what most people would call a bay window, and it juts out from the front elevation.

FS: In 1935, Ruby Scott purchased the building.

We only know a little about Ruby's life before she arrived in Dawson. She was born Mathilde de Ligneres in northern France in the 1880s. She worked in various places, with stints in Paris, Strasbourg, San Francisco, Honolulu, and Keno City, another mining community in the Yukon. She ran brothels in at least some of these places.

Shortly after buying the building, her brothel opened for business, competing with other Dawson madams like Bombay Peggy. Ruby was a generous and lavish woman, whose larger-than-life persona became a well-known fixture of the mining town.

NM: The photos of her when she's younger, she's quite glamorous. And then as she ages, she looks like, you know, your grandmother. There's photos of her inside her house with the doilies and there's one photo in particular where she's making a cake and there's a child in the photo. She projected an image of a very warm and caring, nurturing person.

FS: We spoke to two people who grew up in Dawson, and have childhood memories of Ruby.

Marvin Dubois' grandfather moved to Dawson in 1897. 50 years later, his parents bought the Downtown Dawson Hotel, just down the street from Ruby's.

Marvin Dubois: Ruby comes into the picture like this in a very natural way. We hadn't started school yet, okay, so we were very little and Ruby was close by. She knew mom and dad and she knew us, and we knew her. And she had a little dog called Chi Chi .

FS: Marvin now lives in Belgium, but his two sisters are still in Dawson so he visits frequently. As kids, they knew there were women who worked for Ruby but weren't aware of the nature of their work . What Marvin remembers mostly is Ruby's generosity.

MD: Summertime we're all playing and somehow we learn maybe from other kids that if you bring flowers to Ruby she'd give you a chocolate bar. There were wildflowers at the right time of the summer all over the place. So we put together a big bouquet, go down the alley, and that's just where we played and knocked on her back door. And she came. We gave her the flowers. I don't remember exactly what happened, but I'm sure that she said they were just magnificent, you know, and she was forthcoming with the goods and we were as happy as can be.

FS: Lenore Calnan owns the Raven's Nook, a general store just a block away from Ruby's Place.

Lenore Calnan: Dawson was a great place to grow up. We were allowed to roam about just about anywhere you wanted to go. You were safe. Didn't have to fear of anything other than if it was wild animals.

FS: Lenore has fond memories of Ruby

LC: Ruby was a well known, liked and respected lady in the town. And as a child, we would occasionally be invited in to have tea and cookies with her. I remember her parlour, if you will, being overly decorated. It was, you know, crocheted doilies and tiny porcelain figurines everywhere. And you were deathly afraid that you might bump something over and break it. But she was just a delightful lady.

FS: Among the adults, Ruby was known for her extravagance. She often wore expensive fur coats and diamond rings - but was also incredibly giving. During the second World War, she sent care packages to Dawsonites in the armed forces. She was known as a skilled cook, and often hosted dinner parties for her neighbours, with French wines and a roast goose or turkey.

Ruby also knew how to have a good time. She'd arrive at local bars, buy a round for the house, and proclaim

Voice Actor: I make money from the boys, so I spend it with the boys!

FS: The central object of her affection was her small white pekingese dog Chi Chi. She's holding him in almost every photograph. Ruby would bring him to church, and when chi-chi died, she convinced the priest to let her bury him beside the cemetery.

While the details about Ruby's past are a bit blurry, we know even less about the women who worked for her because they were rarely mentioned in historical records.

As the madam of the house, Ruby was responsible for her employees, ranging from 2 to 8 at a time. They typically came in the spring for the mining season and left as the long, dark winter approached - though at least two stayed and married locals. Some worked for multiple years, but most were only with Ruby's Place for one season. We asked LK why so little is known about these women.

LKB: This is a really important question and there's a secret answer to it. And one of those answers is that they don't want you to know. These women hid themselves. They hid their true identities. This was like a strategy that they use to protect their futures.

And the money could be really unbelievable. The money could also be terrible. But in a society that was so unequal during this period, especially a woman who maybe had been abandoned by her husband or who had kids to support. There's no other way she can get that kind of money. And the wages that are offered to them in so called legitimate economies are starvation wages in many, many respects. And many women understood that this was really one of their only best options. And so the one thing that a lot of these women have in common is just that financial strategy. And those are the stories that you don't hear a lot about because those women hid where they went after the sex trade.

FS: We have one clue of how some of their earnings may have been spent: an artifact, a dress from the 1930s, that was uncovered in the walls of Ruby's Place during restoration work. This dress, probably repurposed as insulation, would have been in fashion during Ruby's time. It is impossible to know who wore the dress or where it was purchased, but it tells an interesting story about fashion in the North

Here's Shelley again.

SB: The dress that was found in the walls is a woman's lightweight summer dress, it looks like it's full length, short sleeves. It has a tie that would have tied around the waist. It's a lovely shade of sort of pale purple or lavender, and it's in a bit of a check pattern.

FS: The dress is labeled Billie Burke sportswear. Actress Billie Burke is best remembered for her role as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, in the film The Wizard of Oz -and like many celebrities today, she had her own fashion line.

We do have a few details about two of Ruby's staff who worked there the longest - Cecile Hebit was fined $50 in a 1962 court case, leaving a trace in the city's records. Another, named Liberty, made an impression on the wife of a local RCMP officer, who remembered her as “pretty” and “nice.” She reflected:

Voice Actor: It was such a godsend to have people like that because there were so many men and that made it so much safer

FS: But Ruby's Place was much more than just a brothel. It served as a lounge where locals could get a drink and socialize. And as LKexplains, brothels, or bawdy houses, like Ruby's, played another important role.

LKB: So these places were actually almost like sexual education schools. And madams, and sex workers prided themselves on this part. You know, the society that they lived in was so oppressed. And they saw their role as a humanitarian one in which they were teaching people the basics of sexuality. And some sex workers actually saw themselves as protecting other women. Often a lot of young men would go to bawdy houses for their first sexual experience. And these workers believe that if these men could get off on the right foot, if they could kind of learn a little bit about sexuality and about like the really important things also like disease prevention and birth control, that this would not only protect the men, it would also protect the women that they were with.

FS: Daily life was often quite different than the Hollywood myth of boom town sex workers

LKB: Well, it's really important not to glamorize life for most people during this period. Like, life was very difficult and sex workers, because they had this really precarious relationship to the law. The police could turn on you at any moment. A client could turn on you at any moment. It could go from being good to ok to bad all on the same day. Like when we have these memoirs of workers and madams around, they often report things like it was profoundly boring, like they would have to sit and wait for clients to show up.

FS: We don't know where these women came from, or how Ruby was able to attract new recruits each year. We also don't know if any Indigenous women worked at Ruby's, but LK thinks it's unlikely.

LKB: You know, when I tell people what I do, when I tell them, oh, I study the history of sex work in Canada, they often want to talk immediately about Indigenous women. And what they don't know is that the sex work economies in the Canadian Northwest, they were strictly segregated. Indigenous women were absolutely not permitted in most of the towns to step foot inside these establishments.

I believe that it's because prostitution economies equaled money and money equaled power at this time. And also it created this close proximity to European men that the Canadian government saw as very dangerous. They feared that if indigenous women and European men could create these kinds of bonds that, you know, a lot of people formed in bawdy houses because they were like social clubs, you would get to know people. People would fall in love sometimes. They would be business partners. If Indigenous women were doing that with European men, that could mean new political allies.

FS: In the 1930s and 40s brothels were regulated with the help of Dawson's resident doctor, Allen Duncan, who would routinely inspect the women for sexually transmitted infections. If an illness was discovered, they would be detained in a hospital.

In Dr. Duncan's memoir, Medicine, Madams and Mounties: Stories of a Yukon Doctor, he recounts the story of a man who came to see him. He told Dr. Duncan that he was hired to replace the windows at Ruby's Place. All was well when he worked on the first floor, but when it came time to replace the second-floor windows however, he couldn't help but watch some of the women as they worked - and instead of a cash payment, he opted to “spend time with the women.” Unfortunately, he caught something, leading him to Dr. Duncan's office for treatment.

By the 50s, Dawson recognized brothels as a necessary function in the community, as long as they paid a rooming house license fee. This toleration policy continued until Reverend Taylor of St. Paul's Church arrived in town. He was horrified to learn that brothels operated openly with tacit approval from the City of Dawson, and wrote to Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent to complain - prostitution was technically a federal offence. The resulting RCMP crackdown led to fines and charges for Ruby's, and had an undesirable effect on her bottom line.

Meanwhile the population of Dawson continued to dwindle, dipping to 881 by the early 60s. At the same time, the corporate mines began to shutter, and the influx of seasonal workers petered out. Exhausted with all of these legal and economic headwinds, Ruby decided to close her brothel after 27 years in business.

LK told us what typically happens when brothels close their doors.

LKB: When the bawdy house closes and people start to sort of like picking up whoever at the bar, then that educated element goes away. And then we see spikes in sexually transmitted infections and really serious ones and also spikes in unwed pregnancies. The fact that Ruby's survived that long shows that she was still really providing a service in this town and one that people felt was essential.

FS: Ruby reopened the building as a boarding house, and continued living there until 1969. At the age of 84, she moved into the local retirement home, where she continued to be a fixture of the community. She was described as the “unofficial hostess” for the home, dressing up for dinner every night.

Ruby passed away five years later. Throughout her time in Dawson, she became friends with the local priest, Father Marcel Bobillier, who remembered her fondly. He wrote the following entry in his journal after performing Ruby's funeral service:

Voice Actor: Iput to rest the soul of my dear friend, Ruby Scott, originally from the Amiens area, who had been living in Dawson for nearly 40 years. She had turned 89 years old on the eve of her death. She was a woman with a heart of gold who I visited almost every day. I had invited her to dinner at a restaurant the week before she died. She fell in her room and broke her hip. She was transported to Whitehorse but died on the operating table. She was so well known and appreciated for her kindness that the church was nearly full. Even the American priest and the Anglican minister came to her funeral mass.

FS: While Ruby was winding down her business, and the mining industry dwindled in the early 60s, the gold rush era loomed large in Canadian mythology. Parks Canada decided to take an active role in preserving that history.

Here's our historian Karen

KR: Dawson was commemorated for its association with the Gold Rush. The Klondike gold rush was one of the last gold rushes in a series of gold rushes around the world, mainly in the 19th century.

Klondike National Historic Sites is a collection of sites in and around Dawson, Yukon. It includes Dawson Historical Complex, which is basically the historic downtown of Dawson, the SS Keno which is a river boat. And it also includes Dredge Number Four National Historic Site just outside of downtown in the Goldfields. And the last historic site there is Discovery Claim, which is the place where gold was found in 1896.

FS: Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Parks Canada purchased a representative sample of buildings to provide visitors with a sense of what Dawson was like in its heyday.

Shelley - our built heritage advisor - told us why Ruby's was included:

SB: Ruby's was chosen because it's a really unique example of a fairly typical commercial building that one would have found in Dawson during the 1896 to 1910 era. They may have a false front, which sort of makes the building appear grand and big in comparison to what's actually going on behind. So Ruby's is known as being one of those really good examples.

But the reason it's really designated is because of its most well known use, and the building is best known as a house of prostitution.And that was its primary purpose from 1935 to 1962. But, Ruby's is one of those really rare surviving examples.

FS: The ground floor consisted of a parlour, kitchen, and Ruby's personal living space. The upstairs featured three bedrooms and a bathroom, living quarters and “workspaces” for Ruby's employees.

SB: I think of some of the houses of like my aunts and my grandma at the time.

FS: Ruby's Place projected Ruby's flair for the extravagant.

SB: The main floor is essentially this riot of color and pattern and texture.The walls are painted sort of this peachy pink color. There is floral linoleum, and the furniture has any number of different types of floral patterns in like pinks and blues and whites. There's throw cushions in contrasting colors. There's a whole bunch of lamps attached to the wall and on pieces of furniture. And the riot of color just continues up on the second floor. We see a lot of floral prints on these overstuffed pieces of furniture like armchairs and couches. In the rooms for the staff, you'll see like a double bed, an armchair, a dresser, some lamps.

FS:Maintenance work has been an ongoing challenge since Parks Canada took ownership of Ruby's Place. Dawson, like much of northern Canada, is built on permafrost, meaning the ground is permanently frozen, at least, it's supposed to be

SB: So permafrost is ground which largely remains frozen over time. As the climate has changed, we have started to see a number of different effects. Temperatures are becoming warmer, and the condition of the permafrost is of concern because as temperature rises, the ground is not able to stay frozen in the same way or for as long.

FS: A building with a shifting foundation isn't likely to stay standing in the long run, so in 2018 Parks Canada began a conservation project to mitigate the issues caused by thawing permafrost.

Ruby's Place was temporarily moved, and the wood foundation was replaced by piles, a network of posts drilled deep into the ground to the bedrock below. The permafrost layer will move and shift with time, but the bedrock should be a solid anchor.

During this conservation work, several items were found in the walls of the building, including the dress we mentioned earlier, and a newspaper, a 1906 edition of the San Francisco Examiner. It could be a remnant of Ruby's time in San Francisco, or possibly the reading material from one of the women, but in a way, it's a fitting homage to the sensationalist journalism that kicked off the stampede to Dawson in the first place

Voice Actor: Sacks of gold from the Klondike!

FS: Today, the exterior of Ruby's Place looks much like it did in its golden years, only lifted a few extra feet off the ground, with a new staircase to mask the piles. It's not open for visitors, but there is a large window display that tells the illustrious story of the site.

Ruby's Place and the legacy of Ruby Scott continue to shine in Dawson.

KR: I think it's really important to preserve Ruby's Place because it speaks to a kind of work that was always present in Dawson, that was female dominated and mostly female run. And there are so few records of these women who worked as sex workers. And Ruby's is one place where we can experience a little bit of their story, even if they didn't leave a lot of records behind.

FS: Parks Canada conserves nearly two dozen buildings around Dawson. In a northern boom town where many residents stayed only a few years, these places are a tangible reminder of their presence, their hard work, their joys and their struggles.

SB: Without protecting these buildings, the streetscapes would be very, very different. You would not have a sense of what that frontier rustic boomtown experience would have been.

FS: It's important to remember that the Dawson area has a history that long predates the frenzy of the Gold Rush era.

KR:It's also an important place in what we would now call the history of colonialism. The Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in have recently put forward a UNESCO nomination for Dawson and some other nearby sites to be a World Heritage site, with the reasoning being that Dawson and these sites represent an important stage in human history, which is the indigenous experience of an adaptation to European colonialism. So it's a site that means a lot of different things to different people. And one of the things we're trying to do at Parks is tell a bigger variety of those stories than we have told in the past.

FS: Dawson City is located 525 kilometres northwest of Whitehorse. There are flights to Dawson airport year-round - or you can drive if you fancy a long road trip - it's about 27 hours from Edmonton, Alberta.

The Klondike National Historic Sites are open to visitors year round, but most events and tours are offered from May through September.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to Nancy McCarthy, Karen Routledge, Shelley Bruce, Marvin Dubois, Lenore Calnan, Jeff Thorsteinson, Dylan Meyerhoffer and Dr. LK Bertram. For a deeper dive, Dr. Bertram has an article about sex work in Canadian boomtowns in the Journal of Social History called “The Other Little House”.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with photos of historic Dawson and Ruby's place please take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections. We've also got a self-guided driving tour of the Dawson area as part of Parks Canada's Mobile Guided Tour app

I'm your host, Fred Sheppard. Thanks for listening.

Published Sources

• Bertram, LK. “Pioneer Ladies (of the evening).” In Palimpsest,edited by J.J. Kegan McFadden, 85-95. Winnipeg: Platform Gallery, 2013.
• Bertram, LK. “The Other Little House: The Brothel as a Colonial Institution on the Canadian Prairies, 1880-93.” The Journal of Social History56, 1 (Fall 2022): 58-88.
• Bertram, LK. “The Madam Who Shot the Mountie.” University of Toronto Magazine,June 25, 2019. https://magazine.utoronto.ca/research-ideas/culture-society/the-madam-who-shot-the-mountie/
• Cameron, Allen. Medicine, Madams and Mounties: Stories of a Yukon Doctor. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 1989.
• Dobrowolsky, Helene. Hammerstones A History of the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in. Dawson City: Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in, 2014.
• Graeme, Toni. Women who Lived and Loved North of 60. Victoria:Trafford Publishing, 2000.
• Porsild, Charlene. Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998.
• Ryley, Bay. “From Regulated to Celebrated Sexuality: Can-Can Girls and Gold Diggers of the Klondike 1898-Present.” Canadian Woman Studies14, no. 4 (1994): 58-61.
• Ryley, Bay. Gold Diggers of the Klondike: Prostitution in Dawson City, Yukon, 1898-1908. Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1997.
• Tr'ondëk-Klondike World Heritage Site Nomination Advisory Committee. “Tr'ondëk-Klondike: UNESCO World Heritage List Nomination for Inscription.” Dawson City: Tr'ondëk-Klondike World Heritage Site Nomination Advisory Committee, 2021. http://tkwhstatus.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/T-K-Nomination-DossierLow-Res.pdf

Unpublished paper

• McCarthy, Nancy. “The Oldest Profession.” Unpublished paper, Dawson City Museum, 2005.

Government Documents

• Anderson, S. “Summary Record Report: Ruby's House, Dawson City, Yukon Territory.” Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Technical Services Branch, 1971.
• Ruby's Place, 233 Second Avenue, Dawson City, Yukon. Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office, Heritage Character Statement 1988-012(E).
• Guest, Hal. “A History of Ruby's Place, Dawson, Y.T. with some Comment on Prostitution at the Klondike 1896-1962.” Parks Canada, Microfiche Report Series 91 (1983).
• Lemay + Toker, Williams Engineering, WSP, Pinchin, and TetraTech. “Recommendation Report Dawson Historical Complex National Historic Site: Dawson Daily News, Ruby's Place, St. Andrews Church, Third Avenue Complex.” Parks Canada, 2019.
• National Historic Sites of the Yukon Field Unit, Commemorative Integrity Statements. Parks Canada, approved November 1997.
• Parks Canada, Architectural & Engineering Services, Built Heritage, Cultural Resource Management, and Project Delivery Services-East. “Dawson Historical Complex National Historic Site of Canada, Dawson City, Yukon: Building Condition Report, Ruby's Place, 2018.” Parks Canada, 2018.
• Priesse, Peter. “Around Town: The Archaeological Investigation of Four Structures in Dawson City, Yukon.” Parks Canada, Microfiche Report Series 392 (1987).
• Mattie, Joan. “Nineteen Dawson buildings: (1) Dawson Daily News, (2) Telegraph Annex, (3) K.T.M. Building, (4) Bank of British North America, (5) B.Y.N. Ticket Office, (6) Robert Service Cabin, (7) Customs House, (8) Macaulay House, (9) Black Residence, (10) Commanding Officer's Residence, (11) St. Andrew's Manse, (12) St. Andrew's Church, (13) Ruby's Place, (14) Third Avenue Hotel Complex, (15) Harrington's Store, (16) Mme. Tremblay's Store, (17) N.C. Company Warehouse, (18) Bigg's Blacksmith Shop, (19) West's Boiler Shop.” Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office, Building Report 88-12.
• McCarthy, Nancy. “Scope of Collection Statement: Moveable Resources Associated with Dawson Historical Complex National Historic Site of Canada.” Curatorial and Collections Section, Parks Canada, 2008.
• Real Property Services, Heritage Conservation Network, Western Region. “Heritage Recording Report: Ruby's Place Dawson City Building Complex, Dawson City, Yukon - Project Number R.014745.030.” Winnipeg: Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2011.
• Thorsteinson, Jeffrey. “Ruby's Place Cabins, Dawson City, Yukon.” Supplemental report to FHBRO Building Report 88-12. Parks Canada, 2019.

Primary Sources

• Quotes about Ruby from Father Marcel Bobillier's Journals. Yukon Archives. Father Marcel Bobilier fonds. 88/43. Journal XV. 30 June 1974.

FS: In November 2018, a devastating storm from the Pacific Ocean with hurricane-force winds made landfall on the islands of Haida Gwaii, the homeland of the Haida Nation.

James Maguire: One of the Supernaturals from the southeast sent one of his minions out, broke the tops of a lot of these trees out, and created a lot of tree throws. It felt like a tragedy, like one of the most sacred sites that I know on Haida Gwaii had taken some damage.

FS: The damage to the village site on SG̱ang Gwaay island was shocking - massive trees lay scattered around like pick-up sticks on the mossy ground, their roots exposed to the elements for the first time in well over a century. It looked like a total disaster…

JM: But in the face of tragedy, you can work something out to make the best of the situation.

FS: I'm your host Fred Sheppard and you're listening to ReCollections - The Living Landscapes of SG̱ang Gwaay.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped what we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

In this episode, we'll discuss injustices inflicted upon Indigenous peoples. Listener discretion is advised. For our indigenous listeners, the Hope for Wellness Help Line is available at 1-855 242-3310 or hopeforwellness.ca

Today, we're going to Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, National Marine Conservation Area Reserve and Haida Heritage Site off the north coast of BC to learn more about a new collaborative archaeology project on the island of SG̱ang Gwaay.

This episode was made in collaboration with Gwaii Haanas Cultural Resources Advisor Camille Collinson, who, as a member of the Haida Nation, has helped us understand and incorporate the rich Haida worldviews, as well as ongoing conversations about challenges and resilience in Haida Gwaii communities.

But first, let's talk about the Haida language, and the place names you'll hear throughout this episode. Haida is considered an endangered language with very few fluent speakers left, but it was once spoken throughout the islands of Haida Gwaii - which translates to the Islands of the Haida people. Gwaii Haanas, the protected area means Islands of Beauty, and SGaang Gwaay is Wailing Island. You've probably noticed a common factor - Gwaii, meaning island, is a very important word in this part of the world!

Haida Gwaii is an archipelago, a chain of over 150 islands around 700km north of Vancouver and separated from the mainland by the shallow Hecate Strait. Gwaii Haanas protects the southern two-thirds of the archipelago, from seafloor to mountain top.

These rocky islands enjoy a lot of precipitation, and their temperate rainforests are covered in carpets of green moss and ferns towered over by huge trees like sitka spruce, red cedar and hemlock.

We will never do justice to describing the majesty of this place. Instead, here's someone who knows it well.

JM: Picture yourself in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now. Waves crashing all over the place, and you think you're lost and you think you've gone as far as the earth will provide you. And then on the horizon, a little rock sticks out of the ocean that the supernaturals left there.

And, you get closer to that rock and the ocean and you realize it's a series of rocks in the ocean. And on that series of rocks in the ocean, is this lush and beautiful forest and… and a Galapagos-esque style, natural wonder and diverse ecosystems. And on that, for all eternity of time, the Haida people have existed alongside. And so we are as much part of that forest and that ocean and the sky as the tree and as the eagles and ravens. And from the dawn of what we understand as existence we have moved and worked with and worked alongside and been fed and and and have fed the ecosystem of this place.

My name is SGaan Kwahagang. My English name is James Maguire. I'm of the Skidans Ravens clan.

FS: James works with the artifact collections at the Haida Gwaii Museum.

SG̱ang Gwaay - once briefly known as Anthony Island - is located in the south-west of Haida Gwaii. It's home to the village of SG̱ang Gwaay Llnagaay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Llnagaay means ‘village.' This village has been evacuated since the 1880s, and what remains today are mortuary poles and remnants of wooden longhouses.

Mortuary poles are red cedar logs carved with images of animals and supernaturals, to honour a high ranking person like a chief or matriarch after they've passed. The remains are placed in a burial box in a cavity at the top of the pole, which is raised to stand about 15 meters above the ground.

You might be familiar with the term ‘totem pole', but the Haida prefer talking about the specific type of carved pole, like mortuary poles, house poles and memorial poles.

Paul Rosang: I'm Paul Rosang. I'm from Skidegate. My Haida name is [spelling unknown for Haida name], which means Wolfman in English translation. And my role is pretty much to give people information about the place.

FS: Paul is a guardian at SG̱ang Gwaay, and was the first to return after the 2018 storm. He arrived to a scene of unrecognizable destruction: Hundreds of trees, many of them coastal giants, lay criss-crossed on top of each other, root systems ripped out of the earth, with some roots reaching as high as a 3-storey building.

PR: It was like landing on the moon.

Just to come out on the back beach and see that amount of trees down at once, it felt like I was in a totally different place, it wasn't the same anymore

FS: A visitor shelter was completely flattened, and a boardwalk was dangling from the trees.

PR:It looked like the old wooden roller coaster in Vancouver. It was like, wow.

FS: But what a visitor might view as devastation, or James might see as a visit from a supernatural, an archaeologist recognizes as a unique opportunity.

SGang Gwaay is one of several Haida cultural sites open to visitors. Since the early 1990s, its poles have been visited by thousands, but out of respect for the village's importance, archaeology work has been limited. Until now.

Camille Collinson : It definitely gives us a chance to sort of explore SG̱ang Gwaay in a way that hasn't really been looked at in the past.

From an archaeological standpoint, SG̱ang Gwaay hasn't had any excavation units done in it aside from when they straightened the poles.

My name is Camille Collinson, I am a cultural resource management advisor for Gwaii Haanas.

FS: the village was evacuated nearly a century and a half ago, tree roots have grown around the decaying floorboards of Haida longhouses. When the trees fell and the root systems were raised high in the sky, the floorboards were exposed, providing a glimpse into the history of this fascinating place.

Here's Jenny Cohen, the lead Parks Canada archaeologist working at SG̱ang Gwaay.

Jenny Cohen: All in all, over 100 trees came down in and around the village and we started an emergency archaeology program to salvage the vulnerable exposed artifacts.

FS:The result: the Living Landscapes of SG̱ang Gwaayarchaeology project, a multi-year collaboration between the Haida Nation, the Haida Gwaii Museum and the Government of Canada.

JC: So, nature has created disturbance, and it actually allowed us this window to look in and see what is in the sediment.

FS: SG̱ang Gwaay is one of hundreds of villages that line the shores of Haida Gwaii, where the Haida people have lived for a very long time. Archaeologists have found evidence of human settlement from more than 13,000 years ago, but the Haida presence on the archipelago likely goes back even further.

We spoke to the executive director of the Haida Gwaii museum to learn more about the origins of the Haida people.

Nika Collison: Good morning. My name is Jisgang. My English name is Nika Collison. I am Haida from the [spelling unknown for Haida name] clan.

Today's Haida weren't the first iteration of human beings that [spelling unknown for Haida name] taught us, that the first time humans arrived, they came out of the air. And we didn't quite make it. But the supernatural beings were there. The second time we came was out of the earth. And again. Things happened. The [spelling unknown for Haida name] were still there, but we weren't the ones for today. And then the third time humans arrived was out of the ocean. And that is the people of today. We come from supernatural beings that came out of the ocean and over many generations became more human. To bring us to today.

FS: To better understand the human history of Haida Gwaii, a good place to start is with the dynamic interplay of land and sea, both on the archipelago and on the mainland of North America.

Our archaeologist Jenny, again.

JC: In Haida Gwaii, sea levels were about one hundred and fifty meters lower at about 14,000 years ago

During the last Ice Age, there's a lot of ice buildup on the continent, which actually kind of weighted down that landform.

And if you think about the Earth's crust under a molten core, it's kind of like a water bed. So if you put pressure in one area it bulges up another area. So, Haida Gwaii was kind of that area that got elevated. So, relative sea levels here were much lower when they were much higher on the continent, which was being pushed down.

As glacial ice melted on the continent, basically the continental landform rose in relation to sea levels. Haida Gwaii started falling because that pressure was taken off. At the same time, there's other factors like the amount of water in the ocean. So all this ice would have been locked up in the glaciers

FS: When the Ice Age came to an end around 10,000 years ago, sea levels began rising as much of that glacial ice melted.

JC: They actually transgressed and went about 15 metres above modern and kind of stayed there for about 4000 years. And then for the past six thousand years, they've been slowly dropping.

FS: The key takeaway is that over the millennia, sea levels on the islands have been both higher and much lower than where they are today.

One constant through all these sea changes has been the presence of the Haida people.

The Haida relied on the land and sea. An abundance of salmon, shellfish, and other sea life provided food security, and allowed for healthy populations and long-term villages.

They developed relationships with other First Nations up and down the Pacific coast, enabled by ocean-going canoes carved out of giant red cedar trees.

At SG̱ang Gwaay, evidence of humans goes back a long way.

Here's Camille with more.

CC: Human occupation on SG̱ang Gwaay dates back to 10,700 years. And in between then and the present, there are a lot of time gaps in between. It would be really interesting to see how we could fill in those gaps,

FS: As far as we know from Haida knowledge holders and archaeologists, SG̱ang Gwaay was used repeatedly as a seasonal hunting and fishing camp for the last 5400 years. Somewhere around 100 AD, the village was built and then continuously inhabited until the late 1800's. That's 1700 years, over 10 times as long as Canada has been a country!

Ki'iljuus:It was a hunting site. So people camped there to begin with and so they would hunt the sea lions, the birds, the seals and probably the sea otters, the whole of the islands waters were very full of resources

My Haida name is Ki'iljuusand I am part of the [spelling unknown for Haida name]. That's the name of my clan. It's an Eagle clan.

FS: Ki'iljuus worked in Gwaii Haanas for many years, and has held various leadership roles within the Haida community.

K: For three years, I was elected to the Council of the Haida Nation, So it was very nice, and I brought up different things that the hereditary leaders had asked us to do and looked at how we could make things better in being stewards of the land.

FS: SG̱ang Gwaay Llnagaay is on the east side of the island. It's a prime location for a village, on a large bay protected by a small island about 10 metres away. Longhouses surrounded the main bay, allowing for easy canoe access in and out. A secondary bay to the south provided an alternate access when weather or tides were better on that side of the island.

Paul Rosang and his wife Aretha Edgars are the watchmen at SG̱ang Gwaay. They spend five to six months of the year living at the village site and are traditional knowledge holders, explaining the village's significance to visitors.

The watchmen program was developed to keep an eye on important cultural sites throughout Haida Gwaii, and is based on a historical role in Haida villages. Traditionally, Watchmen were posted at strategic positions to raise alarm when enemies approached. If you look at the very top of Haida poles, there are often three human figures wearing tall cedar bark hats - the symbol of the watchmen.

Paul described what village life in SG̱ang Gwaay may have been like when the longhouses were filled with people..

PR: So with the archaeological crew actually being there, it's kind of cool because you get all these paths that get worn, so people walking back and forth between different sites. So that gives you a real good idea of what it probably looked like when it was occupied, like…. And then to hear all that activity going on in the village, it gives me kind of goosebumps right now. And I try and tell my guests when you go there, to try and picture the place with 300 people. So there are kids on the beach running around. You got people that are doing fish or prepping food or carving a pole or doing just daily activities. So you'd imagine what it sounded like. That's what a village sounds like.

FS: Here's Jenny with an archaeologist's take on SG̱ang Gwaay village.

JC: So the village itself has 17 recorded house remains that are still visible and measurable on the ground, but through ethnographic records, there were 20 houses that were discussed and talked about, so they're known. So the village has two rows of houses. One row that's closer to the ocean and then one that's on a back raised terrace and overlooking the bay. There's also a water reservoir, so a waterway that runs through as a freshwater source and to the south of the village is large, flat area. That's pretty clear, and that would have been a cultivation area for potatoes and tobacco. And there's also remnants of domestic apples on site, too. So in addition to the native crab apples, so there's various degrees of vegetation management, and there's still remnants of that on site today.

FS: In 1774, the first European ship, captained by Juan Perez of Spain, arrived on the shores of Haida Gwaii.

This meeting led to a series of nation-to-nation trade relationships, first with the Spanish and then with the British, Russians, and eventually the United States. The Haida supplied Europeans with animal furs, and artwork like jewelry and carvings, while Europeans traded metals, guns, alcohol and food like flour and sugar.

One of the main trade items was sea otter pelts. A strong demand in Europe meant the Haida could negotiate high prices. Over the next few decades, sea otters were hunted nearly to extinction, which led to a domino effect on the marine environment, including a hyper-abundance of sea urchins that were no longer eaten by otters. All those urchins ate a vast amount of kelp, a giant seaweed that forms an ecosystem known as kelp forests. In some places, the kelp disappeared completely, creating an urchin barren, something like an undersea desert. Today, with a little help from biologists, both sea otters and kelp forests are returning to Haida Gwaii.

By the mid 1800s, other resources, like minerals, seafood, whales and timber became the focus.

As Europeans met with the Haida, diseases like typhoid, measles and smallpox spread throughout the archipelago. This, along with the collapse of the sea otter trade, led to a gradual decline of SG̱ang Gwaay's population.

Then, in 1862, the most deadly wave of smallpox swept through the archipelago and much of coastal BC.

Here's Nika to describe this dark time.

NC : So before 1862, our oral historians have taught me that there was anywhere from 30 to 50000 Haida.

And so in 1862, colonists knowingly spread smallpox along the coast. This is documented by the colonists themselves, as is the fact that they withheld vaccines specifically from the Haida, from our people.

When the illness is so thick in your village that there's a blue haze as people are dying. You can see it in the air. And you're being basically told you're not human.

The survivors of SG̱ang Gwaay. There's only about 30 of them, which is less than a household left there. And they moved up in the later 1800s because all the main villages the survivors had to join together in either Skidegate or Masset.

K: When people died off like that, I often talk about it being like a fire in a library. So think of your library downstairs and having a big fire and you had 30,000 books. And some are manuscripts, some are just proposals, some are books and knowledge, some are periodicals, some are just textbooks or just stories. But that's what happens when you kill off people. You destroy their library, and that's what happened to us. And so when the haze dissipates, you're left with less than 600 people.

FS: In just a couple of generations, the series of epidemics decimated the Haida population, taking a horrendous toll on their culture and their way of life. The 600 displaced survivors eventually regrouped in two villages in northern Haida Gwaii, where the majority of Haida people live today.

Another major blow to the Haida people came in the form of the federal Indian Act of 1876.

K: First for thousands and thousands of years, the things we learned was because we're island people, ocean people. Our laws were all oral, they weren't written anywhere. But when you have a law in place for thousands of years, it just becomes a part of how you live with your land and your water. And because Europeans could not see our laws, they said we had no laws. They put their laws on top of us. And they had the Indian Act and that became part of how they controlled us and kept us in one place.

FS: The Indian Act was an attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples across Canada into colonial society. It banned traditional cultural practices and languages and required families to send their children to residential schools. Many Haida children were sent to St. Michael's school in Alert Bay, about 500km away.

On Haida Gwaii, reserves for the Haida were created around the two main villages of Skidegate and Masset, a tiny fraction of their homeland. The pass system, which made it mandatory for Indigenous peoples to obtain written permission to leave their reserve, restricted access to most of their traditional territory and cultural sites.

The rest of the lands and waters of Haida Gwaii were sold into private hands or expropriated by the government.

The Indian Act is still on the federal books, but many amendments over the years have loosened restrictions on Indigenous culture, and restored freedom of movement around traditional territory.

The years since have seen a resurgence of Haida culture, rebuilding connections with traditions and language. Governments have also made major improvements in listening to Haida knowledge when deciding how to manage the lands and waters - including the creation of protected areas.

In the 70s and 80s, logging was planned on Athlii Gwaii –then called Lyell Island - despite being part of an area proposed for protection. Fed up with government inaction to stop the logging, a group of Haida took a stand by blockading forestry roads. Things came to a head in 1985 when 72 Haida people, including elders, were arrested. Eventually an agreement between Canada and BC paved the way for protecting Gwaii Haanas under the National Parks Act.

K: And they they got to a point where the feds wanted to make it a national park. And our people that were at the negotiating table said, we don't want a national park. We know what happens to people who live within the context of a national park and how they can't use the land. We want to use our land. It was kind of a turning point.

FS: These concerns were heard and the result was the Gwaii Haanas Agreement, a commitment to protect the area while ensuring the Haida can engage in traditional activities throughout the lands and waters of Gwaii Haanas.

CC: When Gwaii Haanas was established back in 1993, it was established by the Government of Canada and the Council of the Haida Nation. Both parties argue that “No, I own this land” and they agree to disagree. Instead of arguing with each other about who owns the land, they came together to co-operatively manage this area. We always try to stay true to the Gwaii Haanas Agreement and that we make sure that we involve members of the Haida community because this is Haida territory we're standing on. And it's important to always honour that in our work and to always work in good faith with each other.

FS: The Gwaii Haanas Agreement is still in effect today, and includes SG̱ang Gwaay as part of the national park reserve. Since 1981, SG̱ang Gwaay has also been both a National Historic Site and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The first thing you see when you enter the main bay of SG̱ang Gwaay is a beach, covered in pebbles, broken seashells, and sea-battered driftwood. The beach gives way to tall green grass and even greener moss, with cedar-hemlock forests looming in the distance. Rising from the grass are dozens of weathered mortuary poles, featuring cascades of carved animal faces that tell stories of long ago. Behind the rows of poles are mossy depressions outlining the longhouses where the 300 villagers took shelter from the elements. A series of white clam shells placed on the ground form a path for visitors to keep a respectful distance from the fragile remains of SG̱ang Gwaay Llnagaay.

CC: SG̱ang Gwaay is just a beautiful showcase of Haida material culture, the architecture, and the art. It's also a showcase of the stories too, the poles which are still standing tell a great story of the people who lived here, the clan stories and significant environmental events.

FS: The Haida consider this place more than a village site, since the remains of so many ancestors and their spirits reside here. Everyone seems to sense this deep importance. Many find it impossible to describe the experience of spending time at SG̱ang Gwaay … but two of our experts were willing to try.

Barb: It was absolutely spellbinding.

FS: Ki'iljuus described her first time on the island.

K: I came in on the little float plane and I got off and you look up and you see these silvery things in amongst the green trees,, you know, spectacular. Because I'd never been to a village, an old village that had poles standing. I brought my youngest son. He was two. I brought him with me. And we spent the day there. It was very special.

PR: The moment… first time I've ever been a Watchmen there, just walking into that village. It's just the sense of…. I can't even put it into words. It's the feeling you get when you're there. It's very welcoming. It's just a sense of belonging there, really.

It's just I've been there for so long. It's just I call that my home

FS: That's Paul again - he's been a watchman on SG̱ang Gwaay for over 15 years.

He explained what SG̱ang Gwaay means in the Haida language.

PR: It's Wailing Island. It's a woman wailing crying.

FS: When things are just right, the wind makes the wailing sound when blowing through a hole in a rock.

PR : So the tides got to be at the right level. The wind's got to be blowing the right way. So all these combinations and all these different elements that have to be perfect… but that's what it sound s like, is a woman crying at a distance and I've only heard it twice.

It's definitely somebody mourning. It definitely… make your hair stand up.

FS: Part of Paul's role as a Watchman is to give tours of SG̱ang Gwaay:

PR: So I'll just give you a lowdown on the village that there was 20 long houses here at one time, probably about 300 people. So if you look down in the bay, you could see its big horseshoe there with all those nice poles. But every one of the poles used to be seen here in mortuary poles.So there's five different kinds. You've got the beautiful house frontal pole, and you got that mortuary pool with the big cavity at the top where the chief's remains would be put in the top of the pool.

FS: The storm dramatically changed the village landscape, though work crews have since removed much of the debris. Amazingly, the damage to poles and house-remains was minimal.

PR: Over 245 trees that came down in this one storm. So trees that are huge, like four or five feet at the butt, big spruce. So once one tree starts to go, it's just a big effect. Like it destroyed lots of stuff but to not touch anything in the village. Definitely makes you feel like something, somebody watching over that place.

JC:This is like one of the few moments in my life where it literally took my breath away and it was hard to breathe.

FS: That's Jenny, telling us about her first visit after the storm.

JC: How much it had changed and how destructive it felt with all these trees lying on the ground, with their branches just covering all these features and the poles were kind of drowned in this chaos of vegetation. The roots were lifted up, and some of them were, you know, 10 meters tall, just towering over my head. It just made everything feel so small and so exposed and vulnerable.

FS: The Living Landscapes project launched shortly after, aiming for a deeper understanding of Haida resource use and management over the millenia. The findings will guide the long-term goal of restoring the island's eco-cultural landscape.

The initial focus was excavating the root balls that lifted the floorboards of two longhouses. A root ball is the root system of a tree plus all the dirt and debris that came up with it.

Much of that archaeology work has centred around House 10

JC: We just call it House 10 for short, but it has a name and it's called People Wish to be There house.

And so these houses all had names in the village, and not all of them are remembered, but this is one of them. So, People Wish To Be There House is kind of in the middle of the village.

FS: House 10 was a typical Haida longhouse. The beams and posts were made from large cedar poles, and the walls, floor and roof from cedar planks. The front featured a frontal pole with carvings of an eagle, a cormorant, a whale, and three watchmen keeping an eye on things from the top. A rounded door built into the bottom of the pole was the main way in and out of the house. An opening in the roof allowed smoke to escape from an interior fire pit. There were bunk beds and shelves throughout the interior, and food was kept beneath the house for cold storage.

House 10's frontal pole was removed in the 1930s, part of a wider trend of outsiders taking objects from Indigenous cultural sites. One reason for the Watchman program is to prevent this kind of behavior. Repatriating artifacts is an ongoing project for the Haida Gwaii museum.

JC: Before the storm, the house was really not that well defined. You can see where there's multiple house beams from the roof and they look just like moss covered logs and a few standing posts that were leaning. At the time. everything was covered in moss.

FS: After the storm, the house remains changed quite dramatically.

JC: So at House 10, there are two tree throws, root balls, that were in the house directly. And so these basically… expose the sediment of the house floor.

And so what we did this past year was to excavate into that root ball.

Standing next to this tree throw, the root ball, it's towering over my head. So we had to use a ladder to reach some of these higher parts of the root ball.

FS: James, from the Haida Gwaii Museum, assisted and advised Jenny's team.

JM: I had gone down for a nine day stint down in the field to get up to date about the things that had been identified and providing context to things as they come out of the ground, providing a cultural understanding to what we're looking at, you know, the village that we're in.

We have an opportunity in this one to do a little bit more bridge-gapping in the knowledge between oral histories and technologies to identify where other older sites might be.

FS: The team uncovered numerous artifacts from House 10. One intriguing find was some Haida artwork - two fist-sized pieces of a jet black stone called argillite.

JC: Going back to these floorboards, I saw this rock wedge between the two and thought, Well, OK, here's another fire crack rock. But then I took a closer look and there is this little groove a little notch out of it, which is really unusual. And as I pulled it out, I saw that that groove is actually carved out and it was part of an eyeball that was carved in this little figure. And so we just saw the back corner of this eye and a little bit of the shoulder of this figure. And on that shoulder, there's a really intricate detail work.

The face was missing from this piece, though, and it looked like the rock had cracked off. One of those finds where it kind of took my breath away a little bit. Everything got really quiet and everyone knew something really cool was being found. And then the next day there was this flat rock right next to this large sea mammal bone. And as we pulled it out, it revealed a nose and two eyes, and it fit perfectly with the back piece.

FS: Argillite is a type of sedimentary rock that's basically compressed clay. It's found on a single mountain in northern Haida Gwaii - and nowhere else in the world. Today, the Haida have exclusive rights to the quarry.

When polished, argillite has a uniquely beautiful black sheen. Over the past century, carvings by renowned Haida artists like Charles Edenshaw, Claude Davidson, and Bill Reid have been featured in museums and galleries around the world.

With a broad aesthetic appeal, argillite carvings were an important trade item for the Haida

Here's James's take on the carving.

JM: There's quite famous argillite carvers that do come from SG̱ang Gwaay. Chief Ninstints. was one of the last survivors of that village and ended up becoming quite a famous argillite carver. But at the time that village was at the height of power, population and prosperity, it wasn't a widely practiced thing throughout all Haida existence.

Argillite carving is a direct descendant of reacting to colonial empire control. The popularity of argillite carving comes from it being deemed an acceptable art form to sell at a Victorian market.

FS: Another interesting find from House 10 was a collection of seeds from edible berries and medicinal plants.

JC: Under the floor too, there is… in these black silts, a couple concentrations of like really dense seed concentrations. So these seeds wouldn't have just gone there naturally. They're too large and too concentrated.

FS: It's possible that villagers kept a seed bank to grow plants for food and medicine.

James suggested another possible explanation.

JM: Many different types of seeds, all in a layer stacked on top of each other, would have been, you know, berries or jams that were dehydrated, maybe, and then wrapped in like traditional kind of saran wrap, which would be skunk cabbage and then layered up underneath in like a cellar system, which is right under the floorboard of the longhouse.

FS: Skunk cabbage is a wetland plant with broad waxy leaves. It gets its evocative name from the smell of its vibrant yellow flowers, attractive to pollinators with a taste for rotting meat.

JM: I was thinking it's just stacks of berries that had been dehydrated and then would have been wrapped in skunk cabbage, and then this cabbage over 120 years disintegrated and just the seeds of the different types of berries had been left in piles and layers of different types.

You know, stacking them in preparation for consumption over the darker months when they weren't growing. And in an expectation that you were going to be consuming them. You know, the sad thing is they never got to be consumed.

FS: There are other artifacts that speak to the time when SG̱ang Gwaay was home to approximately 300 people, including glass beads, pieces of metal, buttons, pipes and bottles. Some would have been produced on site or nearby. Others were created far away, the result of a trade network that connected Haida Gwaii with Asia, Europe and beyond.

JM: This is really fun to picture in different times and different eras I really love seeing a button that I could have on my blanket, coming out of a floorboard in a longhouse that one of my friend's ancestors could have been dancing and it fell off, and here we are, today, picking up.

FS: The newly-recovered artifacts from SG̱ang Gwaay are being stored at the Haida Gwaii Museum for analysis and safe keeping. Over the next few years, the Living Landscapes team will conserve these objects and the field work will continue.

JC: We're looking at extending the excavation at House 10. So we get that bigger picture of house activity. We're also looking at a couple of other houses in the village that were impacted.

FS: The team also hopes to learn more about the earliest human history of the island.

JC: Going out of the immediate village and looking inland on these raised beach sites when sea levels were higher, that would have been the shoreline and people might have been located in those locations. There is one of those raised beach sites that we have identified already and we've dated it and it's about 5000 years old. So part of the plan is to go back to that site and do a small, limited excavation and compare that with how people were living in these more recent times.

JM: When we're sifting through the floorboards and a glass bead comes up or a button comes up, you know, that would have been on a blanket during a potlatch. These are the things that we do today and when we're able to witness the continuity of culture, and we're able to bridge those gaps between us, we don't feel so foreign. Colonialism made us feel foreign in our own territories … in a lot of ways made everything that we did illegal in our territory. So, we were meant to feel that way. So we're in this kind of era of reclaiming and reconnection and repatriation in our own minds.

FS: One amazing aspect of this collaborative project is the opportunity for everyone involved to learn from each other.

JC: I'm learning a lot from the Watchmen and local Haida, about carving techniques, about oral tradition, the knowledge of the people who have lived here in the past, their histories and how the knowledge gets passed on. Learning about maybe alternate uses, so you see a lot of historic items that were maybe trade items and they might have been repurposed, not in the way that it was intended by, say, Europeans who traded those goods, but then repurposed for Haida, and their own interests.

JM: I'm excited to move forward from this year, having met the crew, having met the people that we are going to be working with. I'm excited to invite them into our facility and work with them to analyze the findings, and build a more pointed timeline scientifically to match up with our very detailed timeline with oral history.

FS:The collaborative nature of this project is reflective of the cooperative management y of Gwaii Haanas as a whole. When the Gwaii Haanas Agreement was negotiated, it was the first of its kind. It worked so well that today it serves as a model for newer cooperatively managed sites across Canada.

CC: You know, it's not easy to work collaboratively, a lot of times, but I feel like it's the most constructive way to work. I think we do our best work when we do collaborate. It requires a lot of communication, sometimes it requires some disagreements. But I think it's the most important aspect of our work - to ensure that we always collaborate with the Haida community. It's always so important to bring everybody together because we're all here for the common goal and that is to take care of Gwaii Haanas.

FS: One of the challenges of doing that is climate change, and the rising sea levels that may be coming. The Haida people, though, are resilient – they've been dealing with huge sea changes on Haida Gwaii for at least 13,700 years.

One thing we can confidently say won't stand the test of time, is the remains of the longhouses and poles at SGaang Gwaay Llnagaay, and that's part of the management plan. In keeping with Haida tradition, they will be allowed to return back to the earth.

K: My thought process is that everything came from the earth. So it has to go back to the earth. And so that's part of respect and responsibility.

JC: The takeaway is to allow it to go back to nature. But, you know, allowing non-invasive interventions to slow that process is OK, … a lot of these structures are made out of wood, a lot of the material will decompose and it's not meant to last forever.

JM: We need to breathe more life into these villages as the reminders and the lessons of the past go back to their natural resting places. It's our responsibility, I think, to bring back new life to these villages, and raise more poles, bring more life back, feast them and throw new beads on the ground for archaeologists 500 years in the future to find, and see the continuity of our culture from 15,000 years ago all the way down to today. We're coming out of a really dark period in our history, we have now an opportunity to shine some light on these areas that we hold so sacred.

K: It's a beautiful, beautiful paradise for me, I see the beauty in spite of the woundedness. I know a lot of the stories and it reminds me of the people who came before me, and how blessed I am to be part of the land, the ocean and the people.

FS: A visit to Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, National Marine Conservation Area Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, is a bit of an undertaking, as any trip of a lifetime probably should be. The first step is taking a ferry or plane – or your own boat – to Haida Gwaii. There are several licensed tour operators who can arrange transport from there.

Travelers require a trip permit and need to attend an orientation session to explore Gwaii Haanas and SG̱ang Gwaay. You can visit sites independently or with a guided tour. Trip options range from a single day to a week or longer, and can include hiking, kayaking and visiting cultural sites.

The Council of Haida Nation asks all visitors to take the Haida Gwaii Pledge, at haidagwaiipledge.ca

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. Our consulting producer is [spelling unknown for Haida name]Camille Collinson. Big thank you to Jisgang Nika Collison, SGaan Kwahagang James McGuire, K'iiljuus, [spelling unknown for Haida name] Paul Rosang, Jenny Cohen, Daryl Fedje, Gid yahk'ii Sean Young, Stephanie Fung, the Saahlinda Naay / Haida Gwaii Museum and the Gwaii Haanas Archipelago Management Board.

To get the latest on the Living Landscapes archaeology project, follow the Gwaii Haanas Facebook page.

You can also visit parks.canada.ca/recollections for show notes and a documentary video of the Living Landscapes project.

I'm Fred Sheppard, thanks for listening.

Publications

• Acheson, Steven. ““Ninstints” Village: A Case of Mistaken Identity.” BC Studies67 (autumn 1985): 47-56.
• Boyd, Robert. The Coming of the Spirit of Pestilence: Introduced Infectious Diseases and Population Decline among Northwest Coast Indians, 1774-1874. Vancouver: UBC Press; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.
• Clayton, Daniel. Islands of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000.
• Collison, Jisgang Nika. Athlii Gwaii - Upholding Haida Law at Lyell Island.Vancouver: Locarno Press, 2018.
• Council of the Haida Nation. “Haida Land Use Vision, Haida Gwaii Yah'guudang [respecting Haida Gwaii].” Haida Gwaii, 2005. https://www.haidanation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/HLUV.lo_rez.pdf
• Duff, Wilson and Michael Kew. “Anthony Island, A Home of the Haidas.” Province of British Columbia, Department of Education, Report of the Provincial Museum 1957, 37-63.
• Fedje, Daryl and Rolf Mathewes. Haida Gwaii Human History and Environment from the Time of the Loon to the Time of the Iron People. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005.
• The Great Bear Rainforest Education and Awareness Trust. “The Fur Trade Era, 1770s-1849.” Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, n.d. https://greatbearrainforesttrust.org/backgrounders/
• Kalman, Hal. A History of Canadian Architecture: Volume 1.Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994.
• MacDonald, George F. Haida Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996.
• Swanky, Tom. Canada's “War” of Extermination on the Pacific. British Columbia: Dragon Heart, 2012.
• Swanky, Tom. The Smallpox War in Nuxalk Territory. British Columbia: Dragon Heart, 2016.

Websites

• Council of the Haida Nation. “History of the Haida Nation.” Accessed March 2023. https://www.haidanation.ca/haida-nation/.
• Quentin Mackie. “Duff and Kew: 1957 article on SG̱ang Gwaay Town.” Northwest Coast Archaeology, December 23, 2009. https://qmackie.com/2009/12/23/duff-and-kew-1957-expedition-to-sgang-gwaay/.
• Bill Reid Centre, Simon Fraser University. “Monumental Art of SG̱ang Gwaay.” Accessed January 2022. Archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20211202192434/https://www.sfu.ca/brc/virtual_village/haida/sgang-gwaay--ninstints-/monumental-art-of-sgang-gwaay.html.
• Stewart, Lillian. “Anthony Island.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Historica Canada. Article published November 17, 2010; Last edited March 4, 2015. Accessed March 2023. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/anthony-island.
• UNESCO World Heritage Convention. “SG̱ang Gwaay.” Accessed March 2023. https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/157/.

News Articles

• Hume, Mark. “Footprints uncovered off B.C. coast could be the oldest in North America.” The Globe and Mail, June 22, 2015. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/footprints-uncovered-off-bc-coast-could-be-oldest-in-north-america/article25069583/.
• Wilson, Lee. “Archaeologist make historic find in Haida Gwaii.” APTN National News, September 24, 2019. https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/archaeologist-make-historic-find-in-haida-gwaii/.
• Film:
• Husband, Vicky, producer. Ninstints: Shadow Keepers of the Past, Haida Gwaii. Victoria, BC: Spreitz-Husband Productions, 1983. https://legacy.uvic.ca/gallery/spreitz/ninstints-skp/

Government Documents

• Archipelago Management Board. “Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site: 2007 State of the Protected Area Report.” Haida Gwaii, 2007.
• Council of the Haida Nation and Parks Canada. Gwaii Haanas Gina 'Waadluxan KilGuhlGa Land-Sea-People Management Plan. Haida Gwaii, 2018. https://www.haidanation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Gwaii-Haanas-LSP-Plan-2018_EN_lowres.pdf
• Dick, Lyle. “The Maritime Fur Trade in Southern Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands), ca. 1787-1920” Parks Canada, Western and Northern Service Centre, 2005.
• Haida Nation and Parks Canada. Gwaii Haanas Visitor Guide. 2021. https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/bc/gwaiihaanas/https://pcweb2.azureedge.net/-/media/pn-np/bc/gwaiihaanas/WET4/visit/GHVG2021_EN_Digital.pdf
• MacDonald, George. “The Haida Village of Ninstints, Queen Charlotte Islands. Report and recommendations to the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.” HSMBC, Supplementary Agenda Paper 1981-SUC(P).

Voice: You're listening to a Parks Canada Podcast. Ce balado est aussi disponible en français.

Fred Sheppard: 1815. Mount Tambora, Southern Indonesia.

The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history sent masses of ash and smoke billowing into the atmosphere, blocking the sun and dramatically altering weather patterns across the planet.

One of Tambora's many effects was a change in ocean nutrients in the Bay of Bengal, causing a strain of bacteria to mutate, and triggering a cholera pandemic that eventually infected millions around the world.

17 years later and 12,000 kilometres away, the looming threat of disease prompted the establishment of an immigration quarantine station near the port of Québec City … on an island called Grosse Île.

I'm Fred Sheppard and you're listening to ReCollections: The Quarantine Island.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped the place we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

Not many historic sites can trace their origin stories to a catastrophic volcanic eruption, but then Grosse Ile and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site in the province of Quebec is no ordinary place. Over its 105 years of operation, it was the gateway for more than 4 million immigrants on their way to new lives in North America... A landscape of great hope and great tragedy, and a response to public anxiety about newcomers, the story of Grosse Ile charts the evolution of medical science and technology, punctuated by a series of deadly crises …

And it all began with a pandemic.

By 1832, cholera had spread across Asia and Russia and was wreaking havoc on Western Europe, the point of departure for most immigrants to North America. It was only a matter of time before the disease reached the bustling port of Quebec City. The search was on for a place to inspect and detain incoming ships and people to prevent the disease from gaining a foothold in North America.

Grosse Ile was the perfect spot. 50 kilometres downstream from Quebec City, it was en route for ships arriving from Europe via the St. Lawrence river. It had a good supply of fresh water, and as an island, was naturally suited for keeping newcomers isolated from the mainland.

Grosse Ile is French for ‘Big Island' - probably because it features Telegraph Hill, one of the highest points around.

Tidal waters lap against its rocky beaches and the scent of pine trees fill the air. It's a peaceful spot, but winters can be harsh, with fierce, cold winds.

Evidence of Indigenous presence on the island, like arrowheads, fragments of ceramic tools and traces of fires, dates back to at least the 1200s.

This region of the St. Lawrence River is part of the traditional territories of several first nations who used the island as a fishing and hunting site on their travels up and down the river.

Europeans began settling the St. Lawrence area in the early 1600s, and Grosse Ile was used as farmland for a couple of centuries.

In 1832, with cholera anticipated on ships arriving from Europe, the government expropriated the land and directed the military to establish a quarantine station

Cholera is a bacterial infection spread by contaminated food and water that causes severe dehydration through vomiting and diarrhea. If left untreated, it can lead to death in just a few hours. Back then, it was fatal in up to 50% of cases. Today, with modern sanitation methods, cholera is much less common. And when outbreaks do occur, improved treatments and vaccines usually keep the death rate below 1%.

Throughout the first months at Grosse Ile, workers hastily constructed several wooden buildings at the Western part of the Island to accommodate new immigrants, including a 48-bed hospital, a morgue, and a very basic quarantine shelter – called a shed – for up to 300 people sleeping in close proximity.

There was also housing for the military and staff at the centre of the island, and a battery of cannons to force ships to stop for inspection.

The majority of immigrants traveled by ship in cramped steerage class for the weeks-long journey from Europe. Disease, hunger, and seasickness took a toll, leaving many physically and mentally exhausted. To top it off, large vessels were unable to land on Grosse Ile, so passengers had to disembark into rowboats for the final leg of the journey. One immigrant described the turbulent waters as “akin to a boiling cauldron” and at one point that first summer, several people drowned when a rowboat overturned.

The passengers traveling in Cabin class, the first class on trans-Atlantic passenger ships, were of a higher social status and paid a premium for the luxury of space. On top of better accommodations and meals, cabin class had one major perk: these passengers were presumed healthy and could remain onboard while the others completed their quarantine on the island.

The English writer Susanna Moodie, a cabin passenger, immigrated with her family in August 1832. Here's her description of Grosse Ile:

Voice Actor: A crowd of many hundred Irish emigrants, Man, women, and children who were not confined by sickness to the sheds were employed in washing clothes, spreading them out on the rocks and bushes to dry.

The men and boys were in the water, while the women, with their scanty garments tucked above their knees, were trampling their bedding in tubs, or in the holes in the rocks, which the retiring tide had left half full of water.

The confusion of Babel was among them, We were literally stunned by the strife of tongues.

FS: As the summer progressed, the crowded hospital and quarantine facilities struggled to keep up with the number of arriving immigrants. Some healthy people contracted cholera while in cramped quarantine shelters. Others who were contagious but not showing symptoms passed medical inspection and carried on to Quebec City, leading to… a cholera epidemic, the exact thing that Grosse Ile was supposed to prevent! It soon spread to Montreal and around North America. By the time the pandemic subsided at the end of 1832, it had claimed more than 3000 lives in Quebec City alone.

Over the next 15 years, authority for the quarantine station transferred from the military to the government , and facilities improved. The number of buildings doubled, with 200 hospital beds and accommodations for 800 healthy immigrants. In normal times, this was sufficient to house the new arrivals - but it wasn't enough to deal with the crisis that developed in 1847...not even close…

In the early 1840s, a fungus-like organism called potato blight began decimating potato crops across Western Europe.

One of the worst hit areas was Ireland, where a single potato species, the Irish Lumper, was the main source of food and income for most of the 8 million residents. The huge loss of crops became known as the Irish Famine.

Many of the starving, impoverished Irish farm families were unable to pay rent on their land. They were evicted by the English landlords, and many had no choice but to emigrate on the crowded ships bound for North America.

Malnourished people are more likely to contract illness and infections. In early 1847, Grosse-Île's Medical Superintendent, Dr. George Mellis Douglas warned his superiors to expect

Voice Actor: a greater amount of sickness and mortality.

FS: It didn't take long for his prediction to come true . A steady stream of “coffin ships” – so-called because of the vast number of sick and dying passengers aboard – began arriving once the ice on the St. Lawrence River had thawed.

We spoke with Parks Canada historian Yvan Fortier about the coffin ships of the Great Famine:

Yvan Fortier: Ships would leave Ireland with real human cargo. There were ships with less than ten square feet per person. People were stacked three or four rows high, with minimal clearance. Many were already weak and undernourished prior to the trip. It was a matter of having one or two people onboard who had a disease to transmit it to an overwhelming number of the others. The name Coffin Ships designates these ships with people dead and dying on their beds…left there because it required even more strength to throw them into the sea.

FS: Of the many diseases aboard the coffin ships, the most common was Typhus, a bacterial infection spread by lice. It was also the most deadly.

Ships packed full of immigrants arrived en masse, forming a line that stretched for kilometers down the St Lawrence River. Workers raced to construct new buildings, but Grosse-Île was not prepared for the huge numbers requiring inspection, quarantine and treatment.

A letter dated June 1 st, 1847, reveals the desperation. It was written by Alexander Mitchell, captain of the Argo,one of the ships waiting in line.

Voice Actor : Gentlemen things are really getting worse. There is not one of my sick removed out of the ship. The only relief we get is in carrying them to the grave, which is a daily occurance. I have three corpses onboard; and have more or less everyday we must now resign ourselves to our fate whatever it may be.

There are about 35 vessels, all of the sheds and hospitals on shore are full of sick already. There are at least 12,000 passengers here.

FS: Eventually, the facilities on Grosse Ile became so overwhelmed that iImmigrants who appeared healthy were sent straight to the mainland, while the sick were treated on site – at first in hospitals, but soon in sheds and tents originally intended for healthy newcomers.

One immigrant described what he witnessed as a child on Grosse Ile:

Voice actor : I am an old man now, but not for a moment have I forgotten the scene as parents left children, brothers were parted from sisters, or wives and husbands were separated not knowing whether they should ever meet again.

FS: The Journal de Quebecpublished an anonymous letter, likely from a nurse working in one of the hospitals:

Voice actor: I cannot describe the horrors and misery I saw… at least thirteen thousand terrible cases of typhus, in addition to smallpox and measles. People died right before our eyes. The bodies were taken to the dead house in wheelbarrows.

FS: Throughout that tragic year, nearly 100,000 immigrants, the vast majority of them Irish, arrived at Grosse-Île.

When the chaos finally relented, the toll was grim: 5,424 people had been buried in Grosse Ile's cemeteries, many in mass, unmarked graves. Thousands more died at sea and on the mainland.

In the years that followed, disease outbreaks flared up and died down in North America and around the world, and the quarantine station remained the first stop for most European immigrants and travelers.

1867, 20 years after the Irish famine, the government of a newly-unified Canada focused on attracting more and more European immigrants to satisfy labour needs and to settle the prairies and other lands taken from Indigenous peoples.

A network of immigration stations developed across the country, including Partridge Island in New Brunswick, Pier 21 in Nova Scotia - and William Head in British Columbia. These facilities allowed authorities to screen immigrants and to assist those granted entry with establishing new lives.

We spoke with Dr. David Monteyne, an architectural historian from the University of Calgary. His latest book focuses on Canadian immigration stations.

David Montenye : The importance of Grosse Ile continues after Confederation, but it becomes less important in a way to the immigration story and more important to other stories such as nation building.

So essentially Canada sees quarantine and controlling the immigration process as a way that they can regulate independently from Britain

FS: Thanks to some leather-bound medical registry books in Parks Canada's collection, we know that Grosse Ile processed many Europeans in this time period. Most came from England, Scotland and Ireland, but there were also patients from Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Germany and Italy as well.

In 1866, a new doctor named Frederick Montizambert arrived at Grosse Ile, first as an inspecting physician, then promoted to the top job of medical superintendent in 1869, a position he held for 30 years, overseeing a major modernization drive.

YF: He arrived with a very strong presence. He is in a way the linchpin that changed and steered Grosse-Île in a completely different direction.

FS: During his tenure, Dr. Montizambert incorporated advances in medical science and technology to improve operations on Grosse Ile.

He became an early adopter of Germ Theory - one of the most important medical developments of the nineteenth century. The idea that microorganisms like bacteria, invisible to the naked eye, can cause illness is widely accepted today, but was revolutionary at the time. Up to this point, the leading theories of why people caught diseases focused on the balance of humours – fluids like bile and blood – within the human body.

Christine Chartre: It is based on the theory of humours. Nature, temperature or your organs. When there is an imbalance, there is disease.

FS: This is Christine Chartre, a Parks Canada historian who specializes in disease at Grosse Ile.

CC: When we can restore that balance, health will be regained. So consider that vomiting, diarrhea, all that, it is nature manifesting the problem.

FS: Miasma, bad air or pollution caused by stagnant water, was another common explanation for illness prior to germ theory.

Dr. Montizambert utilized the concepts of germ theory to make quarantine more efficient and effective by introducing disinfection procedures and medical labs, and ensuring the ill were isolated to avoid infecting the healthy.

CC: At the end of the 19th century. We found the causes of many infections like, dysentery, diphtheria, and other diseases and we developed tests that could confirm which disease someone with, lets say, a fever, pain in the body, headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, et cetera, had.

That was an advance in terms of treatment.

FS: Many of the buildings and machines constructed under Dr. Montizambert's leadership can be viewed at Grosse Ile today.

We spoke to Margot Wright, a descendant of Dr. Montizambert, who shared some stories about his life and career:

Margot Wright: I am the great, great niece of Dr. Frederick Montizambert.

He sounds like he was a character. He certainly had a strong character and pushed for public health and modernizing public health.

Fairly early on, he actually got sick from his interactions with immigrants who were coming in. He got typhus and recovered, which was quite something because some of his colleagues, doctors who were vetting the immigrants got sick and died, and perhaps because he was young and strong, he survived

FS:After three decades at Grosse Ile, Dr. Montizambert was named Canada's first Director General of Public Health. He even managed to maintain a sense of humor.

MW: There's a lovely story at the end of his obituary where a friend of his, who I believe was the head of public health for the province of Ontario, the two of them used to go out for lunch when he was working in Ottawa. And at the end of lunch he would say, “this inconsiderate government expects us to work between meals”. So I thought that was kind of funny.

I think he was a smart man, an accomplished man, and he pushed for things that I'm glad he pushed for. I'm glad that he believed in modern science and that he wanted to make this country safer, not just for its own population, but for the immigrants who are moving here by insisting on public health and a modern approach to public health. So I'm proud of that.

FS: Dr. Frederick Montizambert is recognized as a Person of National Historic Significance for his many contributions to medicine and science.

To illustrate the quarantine experience, we'll follow the story of two immigrants as they arrive at Grosse Ile in the early 1900s: John Morris from England, traveling in first class and Mary O'Leary from Ireland, traveling in steerage class.

These are fictional characters, but we've based their story on real experiences of immigrants.

It's May of 1912. John opens the window of his ocean liner cabin for a breath of fresh St. Lawrence air. He's spent the past 10 days in a first class cabin, sleeping on fancy linens and feasting in the dining room with full table service. The introduction of steamship travel has drastically reduced the amount of time passengers spend at sea.

Sick passengers have been found on the ship, and, to everyone's dismay, a period of quarantine is announced.

DM: When a ship came over with immigrants from Europe, it would come up the Saint Lawrence and the doctor would come out from Grosse Ile and inspect the ship. So if there's any diseases on board he would quarantine the ship and people would stay at Grosse Ile for whatever period of quarantine.

FS: After a short shuttleboat ride to the island, John takes his first step on Canadian soil. He's greeted by the Grosse Ile staff, who usher him and his belongings to the two-storey disinfection building. Looking back at the wharf, he notices the steerage passengers wearily stepping onto the quarantine island.

One of them is Mary, who left her home in Ireland with hopes of a better life in North America. She's more than ready to be off this ship, after 10 days sleeping in a cramped room filled with bunk beds. To escape, she spent most of her days taking walks on the deck.

Once the passengers have disembarked – most to the disinfection building, while the obviously sick are taken directly to hospital - Grosse Ile staff quickly begin disinfecting the ship.

YF: As for the ships, instead of brushing them with soap, which could take forever, mercury bichloride would be used to disinfect, which makes it much faster, and would allow quicker access to the Port of Quebec

FS: Mercury bichloride was the primary disinfectant used at Grosse Ile. It's good at killing microorganisms, but highly toxic to humans in anything but tiny amounts. It's not widely used today where safer alternatives like bleach are available.

After the bichloride wash, the interior is fumigated with sulphur dioxide gas to kill any unwanted stowaways like rats and lice.

Before entering the wooden disinfection building, John, Mary and the other healthy passengers place their belongings into numbered bags. Staff pack these bags into large wire-mesh boxes, and put them onto railcars, ready for disinfection.

A medical officer explains the process.

Voice Actor: First thing, your luggage and yourself must be disinfected. When you got off the ship, you separated your luggage into numbered bags. And at this very moment, those bags are heading to the steam chambers to be subjected to dry steam. The steam is heated at 115 degrees celsius to kill any forms of disease. Your belongings will stay at that temperature for 40 minutes.

FS: Dry steam, also called saturated steam, is produced by super-heating water. It contains less than 1 percent moisture - so it's more like a blast of very hot air than a steam sauna. The process works a bit like pasteurization, using heat to kill pathogens.

The dry steam chambers are steel boxes, about 7 meters deep, with tracks on the floor so the railcars can be pushed in and pulled out.

The medical officer explains the next step: a disinfecting shower.

Voice over: This comes in two stages; you can undress in privacy in the first cabin. And then give us your clothes to disinfect. After that, you'll enter the shower room for a 15 minute shower.

FS: The passengers are escorted to the shower room where 44 steel stalls are divided by a wood floor corridor. Each stall has a metal door with chicken wire around the top … to prevent anyone from peeping in on their neighbours.

Inside, there's a showerhead that sprays water from above, as well as three curved horizontal bars, which look like metal hula hoops lined with nozzles, each at a different height.

Suddenly, the jets turn on, spraying their bodies from above and from the side with a mixture of hot water and diluted mercury bichloride.

John appreciates the hot shower after a long journey, but Mary, like many of the steerage passengers, is a bit uneasy - she's only ever bathed in a tub, with water heated over a fire.

After 15 minutes, the showers end and staff return the disinfected clothing to disinfected owners.

Once dressed, Jon and Mary are issued disinfection certificates and are reunited with their luggage. Medical staff inspect each immigrant for signs of disease and check for the tell-tale scars that show they've been vaccinated against smallpox – a legal requirement to enter Canada, championed by Dr. Montizambert.

Mary hasn't had a smallpox vaccine, so the doctors give her the inoculation she needs to be allowed into Canada.

Afterwards, they head to the nearby accommodations where they will complete the mandatory quarantine period with daily medical exams.

DM: On Grosse Ile, instead of dormitories, you have a third class hotel, which is sort of shared rooms with maybe three or four people. You have a second class hotel and you have a first class hotel which is relatively posh and resort-like.

FS:John's cabin-class ticket provides him with a private room in the first-class hotel, perched above the rocky shores of the island.

DM: The idea was really to maintain that first class experience as much as possible. Really emphasize the views of the river and the countryside from the hotel. There's a veranda across the front of the first class hotel so people can sit out there and enjoy it as a resort.

The first class hotel is catered, often probably by the ship's cook. On the ground floor, there's a big dining room where people would come down and the fireplace, full table service. Upstairs, there's more of a ballroom kind of space where leisure activities would occur

FS: Mary walks to her third-class hotel and finds her bunk in the large, dormitory style room. There are no lounges or gathering spaces – but she's able to go for walks to Telegraph Hill when she needs a break from the other immigrants in quarantine.

DM: Most people traveling in third class on the ship, would never have had a hotel experience. So they weren't necessarily expecting first class resort experience.

They never expected anybody to kind of serve them or take care of them

FS: In the early morning of the fifth day of quarantine, Mary wakes up with a fever and discovers some small red bumps on her arms. She alerts the hotel staff, who call an ambulance to take her to a hospital on the other side of the island. Keeping the hospitals away from the hotels was part of the strategy to prevent the spread of diseases.

A black horse-drawn carriage, Grosse Ile's ambulance, pulls up outside her hotel. In a haze of dread and discomfort, Mary climbs in and awaits her fate.

The ambulance follows the road across the island, passing by a guardpost, a cemetery and the village where the Grosse Ile staff live with their families.

DM: There was a school, there were little chapels, all the things that you might expect in a village.

FS: Nearing the eastern end of the island, the hospitals come into view.

As they approach, the ambulance driver rings a metal bell with a foot pedal to alert the medics to prepare for a new patient.

A doctor gives Mary an examination and confirms her fears – she has contracted smallpox, probably due to exposure on the ship, before her vaccination.

Smallpox is an infectious viral disease spread from person to person, characterized by high fevers, body aches and a painful rash of open sores - also called pustules - in the mouth and body. It's been tragically responsible for vast numbers of deaths throughout history, and it decimated Indigenous populations across North America after European colonization.

Mary is taken to the Smallpox Hospital, a long building made entirely of wood, with large windows featuring river views. It's one of several hospitals, and one of the oldest buildings on the island, dating back to the days of the Irish famine.

White is the dominant colour scheme for all of the surfaces inside the building…

YF: The buildings were whitewashed inside and out. Why? Because lime helps fight against microorganisms that could get lodged in shingle roofs, and in siding.

FS: Whitewash - also called limewash - is a type of antiseptic paint that humans have used for thousands of years. To make it, limestone is crushed into a powder and mixed with water, then used to paint surfaces.

Voice Actor: Hello. Welcome to the hospital Number four, I am Sara Wade, I'm the head nurse here on the station. You've been through the medical inspection on the boat with the doctors. Probably checked your eyes, the color of your tongue, if you are having any fever and if you have any swollen lymph nodes, which would be a sign that you are fighting an infection. But if you're here, it's probably because you are contagious with smallpox, since we found cases on your ship, we bring you here and you'll be in the beds for 2 to 3 weeks, depending on how long you need to recover. Everything will be disinfected at the end. You as well. Because even the powder of the pustules when they dry out can be contagious. Same as for the droplets of water in the air. That's the reason why you are not in the main hospital, isolated from other patients, because it is a very contagious disease.

FS: The nurse guides Mary through the hospital.

DM: It's an open ward. So all the beds are in a row. Typically, it goes bed, window, bed, window, bed, window. So everybody can see each other. And there's lots of windows for cross ventilation. So typically they'd be quite breezy and cool. And there would be a nursing station at one end of the wards, so the nurse could sort of survey everybody at once.

FS: They enter the last room where Mary is immediately overwhelmed by the colour red. The walls are red, blankets are red, even the windows have ruby-coloured glass.

The concept of the red room is similar to a photographer's “dark room” which requires the absence of light to develop photos from negatives. Red light is perfect in a dark room - it's the closest you can get to full darkness, while still being able to see what you're working on.

In the smallpox hospital, all this red made the space more comfortable for patients with pustules on their eyes and eyelids, making bright sunlight unbearable. It may have also reduced scarring.

For the next month, Mary slowly recovers. There's no drug therapy for smallpox, but the nurses provide cold-water baths and cover her rashes with petroleum jelly. At her weakest point, she's given a liquid diet of milk, water and barley….and opiates for the pain.

Meanwhile, at the first class hotel, John continues to wait, never developing any symptoms of disease. He isn't totally clear how long his quarantine period will last and he's getting impatient.

DM: By the 19th century, most people are talking about a fortnight. So two weeks. But again, it's totally dependent on the situation.

And then sometimes it might be longer. So for instance, if more cases start to show up, then you have to kind of restart the quarantine period. So it can get extended and extended three weeks, four weeks and so on. So it's really unpredictable, which, needless to say, drove people crazy.

FS: Once Mary has fully recovered, she continues on to the port of Quebec City by shuttle boat. John completed quarantine weeks earlier.

DM: Once you're done your quarantine, You go up to Quebec City, where there's a building right on the waterfront, a pier building, similar to Pier 21 in Halifax, which survives - the one in Quebec City does not. And there you would go through your medical and civil inspection. Your medical inspection at the pier building is much more “Is this a healthy person who's going to be a contributing citizen?” And then the civil inspection is “Do you have a bit of money to get you started? Do you have maybe a job lined up or land that you're planning to homestead? “, those kinds of more not medical questions. So you pass through those things in Quebec City.

FS: After recovering from her ordeal, Mary opted to settle in nearby Montreal. For John, like many, Quebec was just another stopover on the immigration journey across Canada and the United States.

John and Mary are fictional, but their stories are drawn from historical records and from the buildings and landscapes visible on Grosse Ile today. The voices you heard were historians and Parks Canada interpreters, not archival audio.

As contagious diseases became less prevalent throughout the 1920s and 30s, the need for a quarantine station decreased.

DM: It hadn't been used very much for the previous couple of decades. So there's a few reasons. One: People are just generally healthier. There's medical inspections abroad now by the 1910s and 20s. So immigrants are having health checks done and physicals done before they even get on the boat. So there's less likelihood of disease, And then I think, you know, related to fewer patients, you also get fewer immigrants. There's a huge boom in immigration in 1910 to 1913. Then World War One hits. Of course, there's no immigration, and it takes a few years in the twenties before immigration starts to resume. And by the late 20s there's a lot more immigration going on. But it's nothing compared to the numbers before World War One and with people being healthier and so on. There's just not really anybody being quarantined at Grosse Ile. So there's some interesting debates in parliament about whether to keep it open. And for a long time, they keep it open in some ways for the sake of the image. Like we are protecting our borders still. But the reality is it's not being used very much. So ultimately, they finally decide it's not worth keeping it open.

FS: The quarantine station closed for good in 1937.

In the following years, Grosse Ile became, among other things, an agricultural research facility and even a government quarantine station once more - but this time for farm animals imported to Canada.

In 1974, Grosse Ile was named a national historic site and, in 1990's, Parks Canada completed a massive restoration project that included renovating a chicken coop back into the smallpox hospital with the red room. Figuring out how to restore the facility was challenging because a fire in the 1870s destroyed many of the original buildings and most of the records - that's why those medical register books we mentioned earlier are valuable for immigration researchers.

The thousands of immigrants who lost their lives at Grosse Ile and on the journey there have not been forgotten:

In addition to the remaining buildings, there are two memorials and three cemeteries on the island today.

A Celtic cross made of granite stands 15 metres above a rocky bluff on Telegraph Hill, in memory of Irish immigrants who came to Canada during the Great Famine. Erected in 1909 by an Irish fraternal organization called the Ancient Order of Hibernians, it looks like a standard cross, but with a stylized circle around the intersection point.

Parks Canada added a second monument in 1998 - a low wall of stacked stones, 10 meters across, encircled by a glass panel with the names of nearly 8,000 people who died at the Grosse Île quarantine station over its century of operation.

Yvan gave us a tour

YF: If you fly above it, you would see two distinct arcs of a circle. As if it were a Celtic cross. And the stones recall the character of the very old, practically Neolithic monuments of Ireland. Moving inwards, we walk through a passage that goes from east to west depicting the arrival from Ireland. The passage towards the junction is meant to represent the rise of souls to heaven.

FS: The cemeteries on Grosse Ile are the final resting place for many immigrants. The largest is known as the Irish Cemetery, and was used until 1847. More than 6,000 people are buried here.

Today, Grosse-Île is a place of pilgrimage for people from all over the world, a place to celebrate the dreams and aspirations of immigrants traveling to new beginnings in North America… and a place to remember those who lost their lives on the journey.

Grosse Ile and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site is open from May to October. You can access the island by boat from Berthier-Sur-Mer, 45 minutes from Quebec City, or by plane from nearby Montmagny. Visitors can tour the disinfection building, the hotels, the village, and the smallpox hospital with its layers of whitewash and the striking red room. You can also pay your respects at the memorials and cemeteries while taking in the views of the St. Lawrence that Susanna Moodie described as

Voice Actor: “ the glorious river…Nature … lavished all her noblest features in producing that enchanting scene.”

FS: ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to Yvan Fortier, Christine Chartre, Dr. Jason King, Gabrielle Martel-Carrier,Laura, Shaun, and Rhys Nixon. Thanks as well to Dr. David Monteyne, whose book For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers: Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canadais a great resource to learn more about quarantine stations across the country.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with photos of the buildings, monuments and artifacts, plus maps of the island, check out the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections

I'm your host - Fred Sheppard. Thanks for listening.

Journal Articles and Books

• Chilton, Lisa. Receiving Canada's Immigrants: The Work of the State Before 1930. Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 2016.
• Errington, Jane. Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.
• Forster, Merna. “Through the Eyes of Immigrants: an Analysis of Diaries and Letters of Immigrants Arriving at Grosse Île and the Port of Quebec 1832-42.” MA thesis, Université Laval, 1991.
• King, Jason. “'Une voix d'Irlande': Integration, migration and travelling nationalism between Famine Ireland and Quebec.” In The Famine Irish: Emigration and the Great Hunger,edited by Ciarán Reilly, 193-208.Dublin: The History Press Ireland, 2016.
• Mac Lean, Margaret G.H., and David Myers. Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site: A Case Study.Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/10020/gci_pubs/grosse_ille.
• Mark-Fitzgerald, Emily. Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.
• McGowan, Mark. Creating Canadian Historical Memory: The Case of the Famine Migration of 1847.Ottawa: The Canadian Historical Association, 2006.
• McMahon, Colin. “Recrimination and reconciliation: Great Famine memory in Liverpool and Montreal at the turn of the twentieth century.” Atlantic Studies11, no. 3 (2014): 344-364.
• Monteyne, David. For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers: Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870-1930. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021.
• O'Gallagher, Marianna and Rose Masson Dompierre. Eyewitness: Grosse-Île, 1847. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Livres Carraig Books,1995.
• O'Gallagher, Marianna. Grosse-Île: Gateway to Canada, 1832-1937. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Livres Carraig Books, 1984.
• Quigley, Micheal. “Grosse Ile: Canada's Irish Famine Memorial.” Labour/Le Travail 39 (spring 1997): 195-214.
• Trigger, Rosalyn. “Irish Politics on Parade: The Clergy, National Societies, and St. Patrick's Day Processions in Nineteenth-century Montreal and Toronto.” Histoire sociale/Social History37, no. 74 (2004): 159-199.
• Vallée, Marie-Hélène. “Peu nombreuses mais essentielles: les travailleuses salariées de la station de quarantaine de la Grosse-Île, 1891-1924.” PhD thesis, Université Laval, 2006.
• Vekeman-Masson, Jeannette. Grand-Maman raconte La Grosse-Île. Sainte-Foy, Québec: Éditions La Liberté, 1981.

Government Documents and Publications

• Anick, Norman. “Grosse Île and Partridge Island, Quarantine Stations.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Submission Report 1983-19.
• Bergeron, Yves, and Renée Martel. “Lieu historique national de la Grosse-Île, programme de collection des artefacts historiques.” Environment Canada, Parks Service, Collections Management, Quebec Region, 1991.
• Charbonneau, André. “La station de quarantaine de la Grosse- Île (1832-1937) : bilan et perspective.” Québec City: Parks Canada, 1987.
• Charbonneau, André, and André Sévigny. 1847, Grosse Île: a Record of Daily Events.Ottawa: Canadian Heritage and Parks Canada, 1997. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.889550/publication.html
• Chartré, Christine. “Le traitement des maladies contagieuses à la station de la Grosse-Île, 1832-1927.” Cultural heritage and built heritage, Québec City, Parks Canada, 2001.
• Chartré, Christine. “La désinfection dans le système quarantenaire maritime de la Grosse-Île : 1832-1937.” Cultural Heritage Management, professional and technical services, Québec region, Parks Canada, 1995.
• Ethnoscop. “Lieu historique national de la Grosse-Île-et-le-Mémorial-des-Irlandais : inventaire archéologique dans le secteur des lazarets (76G).” Report prepared for Parks Canada, 2015.
• Parks Canada. Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada, Management Plan 2017. https://parks.canada.ca/lhn-nhs/qc/grosseile/info/gestion-management-2018.
• Parks Canada. Section Histoire et Archéologie, bureau régional de Québec. “Le Patrimoine architectural de la Grosse-Île.” Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office, Building Report 90-31.
• Parks Canada. “Grosse Île NHS Information Supplement.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Supplementary Report 1992-OB-10.
• Plourde, Michel. “Ét étude de potentiel paléohistorique (Amérindien) de la Grosse-Île - Projet 89-1535.” Canadian Parks Service, Environment Canada, 1990.
• Prud'Homme, Chantal. “Etude du paysage de Grosse-Île.” Public Works and Government Services Canada, for Parks Canada, Québec region, 1995.
• Sévigny, André. “Étude polyphasique des aménagements de la Grosse-Île: 1832-1980.” Parks Canada, 1991.
• Sévigny, André. “Frederick Montizambert, homme-relais de la bactériologie et pionnier de la santé publique au Canada (1843-1929).” HSMBC, Submission Report 1998-14.

Primary Sources

• Anonymous author. Letter to the editor. Journal de Quebec, June 17, 1847. Cited in André Charbonneau and André Sévigny, 1847, Grosse Île: a Record of Daily Events.Ottawa: Canadian Heritage and Parks Canada, 1997. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.889550/publication.html
• Loe Smith, William. Pioneers of Old Ontario. Toronto: G. N. Morang, 1923, 208-9. Cited in David Monteyne, For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers: Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870-1930. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021.
• McCullough, John W.S. “Dr. Frederick Montizambert, C.M.G., I.S.O., M.D., F.R.C.S.E., D.C.L.” Canadian Public Health Journal 20, no. 12 (December, 1929), 634.
• Mitchell, Alexander. Letter to the editor. Quebec Morning Herald, June 1 1847.

Fred Sheppard: This episode discusses sexual assault and race-based violence related to the slave trade - though not in graphic detail. Listener discretion is advised.

West Africa, early 1700s - a young African woman, we don't know her name, sits by a fire. Gazing into the flames, she'd never imagine that her fate lay an ocean away, as the owner of an inn and tavern in foggy Nova Scotia… the first black businesswoman on record in Canada.

But between then and now, she'd be kidnapped, sold into the Atlantic Slave trade – one of the most horrific of human experiences – then spend 19 years enslaved in a French fortress with a name imposed by her enslavers.

This is the story of the woman who became known as Marie Marguerite Rose.

Afua Cooper: The image that Canada loves to present of itself is this place that received fugitive slaves from the United States. That's a celebrated story. But Canada had its own history of enslavement.

FS: I'm your host Fred Sheppard and you're listening to ReCollections - Enslavement and Freedom at Fortress Louisbourg.

This episode was made in collaboration with Dalhousie University's: A Black People's History of Canadaproject.

Parks Canada is known world-wide as a leader in nature conservation, but we do much more than that. Together with our partners, we commemorate the people, places, and events that have shaped the place we now call Canada. Join us to meet experts from across the country as we explore the sites, stories and artifacts that bring history to life.

In this episode, instead of terms like slave and slave owner, we'll use enslaved person, and enslaver to try to recognize the humanity of historical figures. Terms like ‘slavery' and ‘the slave trade' are sometimes necessary when discussing human beings treated as objects to be bought and sold.

1757, the fortress town of Louisbourg, capital of the French colony of Ile Royale.

Voice Actor: officials proceeded to Marie Marguerite Rose's apartment at 9 o'clock in the evening of August 27th where they found Marie's body. The court officials immediately began to conduct an inventory of the items in the house.

Voice actor: Item, two necklaces, one of pearls, the other of garnets.

Item, two pairs of silk stockings, one white and the other gray.

FS: Imagine a complete list of all of your possessions, as you left them on the day of your death.

Voice actor: Item, a man's shirt, new, having only one sleeve, the other being attached with a pin. Item, a barrel containing some raspberries.

FS: What would it say about your time on earth?

Voice actor: Item, two old calamanco petticoats, one of them red, a pair of panne trousers, together with a book entitled Le cuisinier royal, and an old chest.

FS: Historians love a probate inventory document, like the reading you just heard. A person's possessions can tell us a lot about their lives and what they valued. The inventory of Marie Marguerite Rose is the only one we know of from a once-enslaved person at Ile-Royale. It provides some clues to her remarkable story of resilience, linking eighteenth century Louisbourg to the wider French empire, where salt cod, sugar, rum, and yes, people, were traded as commodities, transported between Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe.

Marie-Marguerite was one of at least 400 people enslaved in the French colony and one of only six to gain freedom.

To piece together her story, let's start with the location: a fortified port on an island in the Atlantic Ocean.

The island is part of the traditional territory of the Mi'kmaw Nation who call it Unama'ki], which loosely translates to “Land of Fog.” Today, it's known as Cape Breton, part of the maritime province of Nova Scotia.

The Fortress of Louisbourg was established in 1713 on a peninsula on Cape Breton's eastern shore, part of the colony of Ile Royale, near what's now the community of Sydney.

Louisbourg held a strategic location: a deep sea port on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the main entryway to the colony of New France, in what's now Quebec. Easy access to the valuable Atlantic cod fishery didn't hurt, and it became the capital of Ile Royale in 1719.

In the eighteenth century, as France and England fought for control over North America, the French went all-in on defenses - Louisbourg was fortified with high stone walls and had troops permanently stationed to withstand attack. But it wasn't enough to keep Louisbourg in French hands – in its 45-year existence, the British captured it twice, and after the second battle, destroyed the fortifications.

AC: Louisbourg is really a unique place. I mean, it guards the Gulf of the Saint Lawrence, the entry to Canada.

FS: This is Dr. Afua Cooper, historian and professor of Black Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

AC:It's symbolic and it's emblematic to me of the struggle in the 18th century between France and England and the creation of this world of slavery, the creation of this world of trade, the movement and migrations that you see all across the Atlantic.

FS: The slave trade was big business in France and throughout its empire, and Louisbourg played a central role. Its fishery produced a rich harvest of cod. The best bits were exported to the lucrative European markets. The less desirable cuts of dried, salted fish were shipped south to the French colonies in the Caribbean to feed enslaved people there, whose labour produced the coffee, sugar, rum and molasses exported to Europe and North America. Most enslaved people at Louisbourg began their lives in these Caribbean colonies, transported and traded like the commodities they produced.

But …this was not the case for Marie Marguerite, who spent her early years in Guinea, West Africa before being captured and sold into the slave trade at 19.

From there, she was forced into the ruthless sea journey known as the “middle passage,” part of the Trans-Atlantic trade route between Africa and the Caribbean . Treatment of the enslaved people was horrendous - overcrowding, food shortages, violence, disease and death were widespread on these ships.

We don't know which French Caribbean colony she ended up at, but shortly after arriving, she was sold to one of Louisbourg's elites, baptized as a Catholic and assigned the name Marie Marguerite Rose. Her original name, along with much of her life story, remains lost to history…part of the dehumanizing efforts of the enslavers.

In the French and British colonies that eventually became Canada, a total of around 4000 Black people and 2700 First Nations people were enslaved. The majority of the Indigenous people enslaved by the French lived in the New France colony, but at Ile Royale, 90 percent of enslaved people were of African descent, due to the close trade links with the Caribbean.

Marie Marguerite was enslaved in the home of Jean and Magdeleine Loppinot, an upper class Louisbourg family with 12 children. She was likely responsible for most domestic tasks, like sweeping the floors, cleaning, preparing meals, cutting firewood, collecting well water, keeping the house fire burning, gardening, and providing childcare.

Charlene Chasse : When I talk about Marie Marguerite Rose, I feel a great connection.

FS:This is Charlene Chassé

CC:I am an interpreter at the Fortress of Louisbourg. I self-identify as an African Nova Scotian.

FS: Charlene shares Marie Marguerite's story with visitors.

CC:I feel like this woman went through hell to be taken from slavery, taken and brought up here. Dear Lord, I'd think I'd be coming to the other end of the world, as the temperatures would drop, as you come up the coast of Louisbourg and then to be enslaved, and not being your own property, not having your own mindset, you're at someone's beck and call 24 seven.

FS:Around 3% of Louisbourg's population was enslaved. Most were domestic labourers like Marie Marguerite – servants, nursemaids, cooks, gardeners. The plantation labourthat we often associate with cotton, tobacco, and sugar crops in the United Statesand the Caribbean didn't exist in Canada, but the work was still brutal, as Afua explains:

AC: Let's think of the wear and tear on the body of doing this kind of work every single day, not getting enough rest, not getting enough nutrition.

FS: Reconstructing the lives of enslaved people is challenging. Evidence and details are hard to come by. Enslaved people appear in population data, but they're usually unnamed, or simply listed as possessions. Archaeologists have found artifacts like tools and household objects connected to enslaved people … but since most were unable to own property and were illiterate, they rarely left behind written sources like journals or letters.

Ken Donovan:The last thing slave owners wanted to do was teach a person how to read and write. Because when you learn how to read and write, you're empowered. You really are.

FS: This is Ken Donovan, a retired Parks Canada historian. To learn about the lives of enslaved people, researchers like Ken have to piece together bits of information from documents like birth records, baptisms, wills, court records, bills of sale, and newspaper ads for runaways.

KD: So this is how we learn about what I call incidental documentation. A little bit here. A little bit there. You just have to pick away at it. looking for one thing and you come across a person that had been enslaved.

AC: So all across Lower and Upper Canada, the Maritimes, you could find newspapers. And in these newspapers enslavers were advertising for their runaway slaves or sending notice that we want to buy people, we want to buy black people as slaves or they want to sell.

FS: Enslavers also left probate inventories with details about enslaved people in the household, like their age, gender, skills and the amount they could be sold for.

Another glimpse into Marie Marguerite's life comes from a baptism record - 2 years after arriving at Louisbourg, she gave birth to a son named Jean-Francois. His paternity is listed as “inconnu” or “unknown” - though the child's “father” was very likely Marie Marguerite's enslaver.

At least 35 children were born to enslaved mothers at Louisbourg. Enslaved people often slept under the same roof as the men who enslaved them. For enslaved women and girls, sexual abuse was a constant threat.

AC: When you look in some of the records of birth for enslaved people, you have these enslaved women who have children who are described as mulattos or fathers unknown. Now, what's that? What's this “father is unknown”? You know, what's - what's that all about?

The priest should be ashamed of themselves for even writing that because they know who the father is.

So many of those children that the women got pregnant with whose father is unknown, was as a result of rape. So you live in the household of the master. You might be living in the basement or in the attic or there's a little dark room that you sleep in. You are vulnerable. The woman is sexually vulnerable to the men. And I'm not saying men weren't sexually abused. I mean, research is coming out now that showing that did happen too. But the bulk of that kind of abuse we know was to women and not just women. Sometimes we're talking about young girls, young children, age 11, who were raped by their enslavers.

FS: Jean-Francois, as Marie Marguerite's son, was born into enslavement, adding to the enslaver's personal wealth. When he got older, Jean-Francois lived and worked alongside his mother. Sadly, we don't know much about his short life, only that he died of unknown causes just before his thirteenth birthday.

The vast majority of enslaved people in Ile Royale died in enslavement. Only a small fraction ever had a taste of freedom. For Marie Marguerite, that freedom came around the age of 38, after 19 years of forced, unwaged service.

To replace her, the Loppinots purchased a 12 year old boy named Amable Louis Cezar.

As with many details of Marie Marguerite's life, we don't know exactly how she was freed. Throughout the French empire, enslavers would sometimes manumit—or grant freedom – to an enslaved person if they were sick and could no longer work - though this was rare. In some cases, an enslaved person would work for someone else in addition to their enslaver to save enough money to buy their own freedom.

Marie Marguerite married a Mi'kmaq trader named Jean-Baptiste Laurent soon after, so it's possible that he purchased her freedom.

This was the case with another Louisbourg couple, Jean Baptiste Cupidon and Catherine Francoise. He was a formerly-enslaved ‘freedman' who entered into a contract with Catherine's enslaver, paying for her freedom over the course of a year. The couple offered their belongings – and themselves – as collateral until the payments were complete.

As for Marie Marguerite and her husband, there is a lot we don't know about their life together, like how they met and whether he lived in Louisbourg before the marriage. We do know the couple rented a half-timbered house with a yard and garden near her former enslavers for their inn business as well as their home.

Much of what we know about Marie Marguerite's life as an innkeeper comes from a letter she never received.

Anne Marie Lane Jonah: From where I start my inquiry for historical women, there's a level of challenge finding information. For women of color there's like a quadrupled level of challenge.

FS: This is Anne Marie Lane Jonah, a Parks Canada historian based in Halifax.

AMLJ: So it is a personal letter.

FS: The letter, from a French business contact, was discovered in a British archive centuries after her death.

AMLJ: What he's writing to tell her is that the last time he left, he left on a ship and was immediately captured by a British privateer.

FS: Privateers were like mercenary pirate crews sanctioned by the crown, authorized during wartime to attack ships of enemy nations and seize their cargo.

AMLJ: And he had this long, circuitous route, to finally get home in southwestern France. So he's writing to tell her that he won't be back, that that the war is going to prevent him from returning.

FS: In the days before modern postal systems, people often sent letters on private ships.

AMLJ: He mentions that he has left with her a trunk full of goods and a procuration, which is in the French court, is like a power of attorney. So he's saying, “I'm not going to get back, so please wrap up my business for me.” And he asks her to sell the trunk and he asks her as well to get the money that he's owed for his share of a privateer. So he's asking her to go on his behalf and talk to merchants of Louisbourg about business and trusting her to be able to manage all of this. So it takes our perception of her as an innkeeper, definitely gives us a sense of how embedded she was in the business community of the town: that she was known, that she was trusted, that she could go to M. Himbert who was one of the wealthier merchants and settle this deal.

And then he concludes his letter, even though he's made it very clear he's not coming back, that he still is waiting for the honor of seeing her again one day. This is a form of politeness, but it goes beyond the usual business letter. It definitely has a sense of a regard for her and that for him, seeing her and talking to her is a pleasure.

Suddenly, I feel like you see her a little better. You can see her walking down the street to go meet this merchant to take care of business.

FS: But this letter never made it to Marie Marguerite, because the French ship it was on was also captured by English privateers, which is how it ended up in a British archive…and from there, into Anne Marie's research.

It's unlikely the letter would have made it to Marie Marguerite one way or the other. She died suddenly in August 1757, the same year it was written.

Enslaved people generally didn't live long lives. Marie Marguerite was around 40 when she died – young by today's standards, but for a woman who had experienced hard labour and exploitation, she likely outlived many of her peers.

We don't know how she died or what became of her husband, but we can be certain that he didn't stay too much longer - only a year later, Louisbourg faced its final battle. In a pivotal turning point of the Seven Years War, British forces laid siege to the fortress, eventually capturing and destroying it. Just one year later, the decisive battle at the Plains of Abraham near Quebec City effectively ended French colonial ambitions in what's now Canada.

Interestingly, there was a twelve year old enslaved boy named Olaudah Equiano aboard one of the British naval ships. He went on to be an exceptional figure in the abolitionist movement against slavery, and wrote about his experience at the Battle of Louisbourg years later.

Voice actor: We arrived at Cape Breton in the summer of 1758: and here the soldiers were to be landed, in order to make an attack upon Louisbourgh. My master had some part in superintending the landing…

The French were posted on the shore to receive us, and disputed our landing for a long time; but at last they were driven from their trenches, and a complete landing was effected. Our troops pursued them as far as the town of Louisbourg. In this action many were killed on both sides…

Our land forces laid siege… at last Louisbourgh was taken.

FS: The British destroyed much of the fortifications to prevent anyone from retaking it. For two hundred years, toppled stone walls were the only remnants.

But in the 1960s, Louisbourg' s fortunes began to change.

Cape Breton's once-thriving coal mining industry was in decline. To help revive the regional economy and provide new employment for the miners, the Canadian government proposed rebuilding the Fortress of Louisbourg as a living history museum.

What visitors see at the national historic site today is a carefully researched reconstruction of one quarter of the original town. Military, commercial, and domestic buildings line the streets, offering an interpretation of life in the fortified port during its heyday.

The reconstruction was a massive undertaking, spanning over twenty years - but luckily the French bureaucracy of the 1700s kept detailed plans and maps to work from. It's notable that a society that prided itself on reason and good governance saw no contradiction with allowing slavery at the same time. That contradiction lasted nearly another century - slavery was banned throughout the French empire in 1848. In most British colonies, including British North America, slavery was abolished only 14 years earlier - in 1834.

The reconstructed Fortress opened to the public in stages, beginning in 1968. In the early days, visitors didn't hear much about its history of enslavement.

The interpretation generally focused on the upper class sections of town. Later, Parks Canada began looking into a broader spectrum of Louisbourg society.

Here's Ken, the retired Parks Canada historian.

KD: Charlene and I worked for years. I'm literally saying that for years, because we had to educate people in Cape Breton about slavery.

We developed scenarios and tours based on Marie Marguerite Rose's life to develop an interpretive scenario, because we had good evidence on her life.

We did have a slavery tour for a number of years. I think we had 27 people in about 14 different houses where you walked along the streets and say “see this house here? This is where so-and-so lived.”

And then when we did recognize Marie Marguerite Rose as a person of national historic significance, we bussed people in free into the site, black people from Whitney Pier in Sydney. So it was quite a celebratory moment really

FS: Charlene again.

CC: It really didn't affect me until later on. I started working here,, you do a slavery tour, you talk about slavery. But then it started to touch home a little bit more. It made me want to do a little bit more research on where these people came from and what they did. And it's my passion.

It's properly interpreted because we give it our all. You have to step up to the plate and you have to make sure you're going to give it 110%. These people deserve dignity. They didn't have it during their lifetime. They didn't have it during the time they were on this earth. So I'm here. I'm going to show you and tell you how they were. And I'm going to show you that these people were human beings just like any other person on this earth at that time. Just that some people in their mindset, they were a different color. They spoke a different language. They came from a different country, a continent. So they're going to be treated different because they believe that they didn't have any morals, any brains, and they were considered animals.

FS: An important stop on any tour of Louisbourg is by the plaque commemorating Marie Marguerite Rose as a person of national historic significance. It's in a grassy field where her inn once stood, a reminder of the place where travelers and merchants looking for a bed and a meal could meet and discuss the day's business.

The plaque reads, in part:

Captured in Africa at the age of 19 and transported to Ile Royale, where she was sold to a member of the colonial elite, Marie Marguerite Rose is seen to be a key figure of the initial phase of Black slavery in Canada… Rose's experience speaks to the presence of slavery on Ile Royale and in Canada, where an estimated population of 1,375 Black slaves existed during the French Regime.

Buildings are not the only things reconstructed at Louisbourg. Costumed interpreters like Charlene share the story of this place with visitors. To help them look the part, Elizabeth Tait, a curator of textiles for Parks Canada, creates replicas of historic clothing – including two dresses based on Marie Marguerite's probate inventory.

Elizabeth Tait : What's interesting about her inventory is that the garments are French, but the materials were a little bit unusual. I was surprised how much cotton was in her inventory, and it's quite possible that that was the Guinea influence.

FS: Some of the more colourful items mentioned in the inventory may be connected to Marie Marguerite's west African roots, where producing indigo dye was important work for many women.

FS: Ken and Charlene again.

KD: She has dye, blue dye. And we know along the coast of Africa, particularly the west coast of Africa, people wanted very colorful clothing.

CC:Bright colors. So when you look at it, her roots come back in the way she dresses and the way she looks after her household.

FS: Charlene described Marie Marguerite's outfits:

CC: She would have a bonnet, a wool vest, woolen skirt, woolen socks, a chemise, a petticoat. When they did her inventory, they found that she did have some silk stockings. She had a neckerchief that had some lace on it. So we assume that these things came from somebody that gave it to her, a slave does not come across a silk stockings or a lace, because that's handmade lace. So you wouldn't have it on every day. it's unbelievable when you get in that costume and you walk around. You feel middle class. No corset, thank God.

FS: curator Elizabeth again.

ET: One of the things that I liked the best in that inventory is that she had married and there's a description of a man's shirt and one sleeve is pinned in place. And so I just assume that she knew how to sew and was actually making her husband a shirt. It's nice. Like it's a very human. it just sort of makes… it makes her more immediate to us.

FS:These historic costumes help tell the story of life in Louisbourg.

CC:The clothes are a big part of us. That's what people identify. When they come here, they want to step back in history.

FS: It's clear that Charlene feels a deep personal connection with this African woman born centuries ago, thrust into a life in a faraway place she neither wanted nor chose...

A similar sentiment came through when speaking with Afua:

AC:This story is so tremendous. It's so unique because when she died and she had an estate. She left clothing, she left groceries, so to speak. She was manumitted two years before she died. And so in that two years, she set herself up. She got married. She established a tavern and an inn. So to have the evidence such as this. I just think it's tremendous. And because of that. Parks Canada has plaqued her existence, has plaqued her story, has plaqued her life. I mean, she died. That is unfortunate. She never got to see her homeland again. But I feel heartened. I'm glad that she established a business. I'm glad that she got married, glad that she has had this love relationship. It makes me happy.

So it was rare because enslaved people typically just went through this life of slavery, this life of brutalization and death. And we don't know much about them, you know, not leaving much evidence behind.

FS: Enslaved people in Ile Royale were stripped of their names, their identities and their histories. They were forced to adapt to lives they did not choose and could not control. Yet, they were individuals, with personal stories and identities they likely kept hidden from the enslavers. They had a significant presence in a place like Louisbourg, but sadly we know very little about most of these women, men, and children who lived and died in enslavement.

CC: More people have to know. More people have to know about slavery in Canada. It wasn't just the French. The British also brought their slaves over here. If we don't know our history we don't know where we're going. And everybody should dig into their history and find out where

they're going.

AC:I was born and raised in Jamaica. My heritage is slave heritage. My ancestors were enslaved. They went through these things. You know, I'm sure some of them ran away. I'm sure some of them were killed. So this is the work that I've chosen. It's not just an academic gesture, it's also a real personal thing for me.

CC:I've been here now for almost 20 some years. You couldn't ask for a better or magnificent job than what I'm doing here. When you open, you say everyone goes to their office and have the corner window. Well, I have a view that you can't even pay for. No skyline could do it. No nothing. It's absolutely beautiful.

FS: Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site is open to the public year round, but for the full interpretive experience, it's best to visit in the summer months. It's a 5 hour drive from Halifax, or you can fly to nearby Sydney, Nova Scotia. Visitors can tour the reconstructed fortified town and learn from the costumed interpreters who bring the site to life.

ReCollections is produced by Parks Canada. A big thank you to our consulting producers, Dr. Afua Cooper, and Dr. Karolyn Smardz Frost who is an archaeologist and historian specializing in North American Black transnationalism.

And thank you to Charlene Chasse, Ken Donovan, Anne Marie Lane Jonah and Elizabeth Tait.

For loads of extras, including a Google Arts and Culture exhibition with photos and historic maps of the fortress, take a look at the show notes or visit parks.canada.ca/recollections

I'm your host, Fred Sheppard. Thanks for listening.

Journal Articles and Books:

• Cooper, Afua. The Hanging of Angélique, the Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal.Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007
• Donovan, Ken. “Slaves and Their Owners in Ile Royale, 1713-1760.” Acadiensis 25, no.1 (autumn 1995): 3-32.
• Donovan, Ken. “Slaves in Île Royale, 1713-1758.” French Colonial History5, (2004): 25-42.
• Donovan, Ken. “Slaves in Cape Breton, 1713-1815.” Directions: Canadian Race Relations Foundation4, no. 1 (summer 2007): 44-45.
• Donovan, Ken. “Slavery and Freedom in Atlantic Canada's African Diaspora: Introduction.” Acadiensis43, no. 1 (winter/spring 2014): 109-115.
• Donovan, Ken. “Female Slaves as Sexual Victims in Ile Royale.” Acadiensis 43, no. 1 (winter/spring 2014): 147-156.
• Games, Alison F. and Adam Rothman. “What is Atlantic History?” In Major Problems in Atlantic History: Documents and Essays, edited by Alison F. Games and Adam Rothman.Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2008, 1-2.
• Lane-Jonah, Anne Marie. “Everywoman's Biography: The Stories of Marie Marguerite Rose and Jeanne Dugas at Louisbourg.” Acadiensis 45, no. 1 (winter/spring 2016): 143-162.

Government Documents:

• Cousineau, Jennifer and Meryl Oliver. “Introduction to Fortress of Louisbourg National Historic Site, Nova Scotia.” Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office, Building Report 09-267.
• Gallinger, Mikaela. “Chloe Cooley.” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Submission Report 2021-03.
• Gelly, Alain. “Olivier Le Jeune (-1654).” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Submission Report 2021-02.
• Gelly, Alain. “Marie Marguerite Rose (vers 1717-1757).” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Submission Report 2007-12.
• Maheu-Bourassa, Alexie. “Mathieu Da Costa.”Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Supplementary Report 2020-05.
• Schwartz, Mallory. “The Enslavement of African People in Canada (c. 1629-1834).” Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Submission Report 2019-16.

Primary Sources:

• Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. London: Olaudah Equano, 1789. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15399/15399-h/15399-h.htm
• “Proces-Verbal de l'inventaire et vente des effets laissés par la nommée Roze négresse, femme de Baptiste, Indien, 27 aout 1757.” Fond des Colonies, Centre des Archives' d'Outre-Mer, G2, Dépôt des papiers publics des colonies; greffes judiciaires Baillage de Louisbourg, DPCC GR vol. 212, dossier 552, folio 2 verso and items 3 and 11.
• Pierre Lapouble to Mme Jean Baptiste Laurent. 26 février 1757. Letter 30. Public Record Office
• (PRO)/Admiralty 264-30. The National Archives, Kew, UK.

Fred Sheppard: Hello listeners, and welcome to a special episode of ReCollections. We’d like to introduce you to a podcast from our friends and colleagues over at Library and Archives Canada. It’s called Discover Library and Archives Canada. For over a decade they’ve been publishing episodes about topics as diverse as UFO sightings in Manitoba, historic Canadian comic books and the evolution of the sport of curling. One centres on Irish Immigration to Canada. If you enjoyed the ReCollections episode The Quarantine Island about Grosse-Ile and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site, have a listen to The Shamrock and the Fleur de Lys.

Today, we’re sharing an episode with a different Parks Canada connection. The title is Bill Mason, Wilderness Artist. Our curators are excited about this one because the Parks Canada artifact collection contains a piece of Bill Mason history - a small carved canoe featuring an Indigenous man and his gear. Bill Mason was the mastermind behind the beloved 1966 National Film Board documentary Paddle to the Sea. The Oscar nominated film shows the journey of the carving from Lake Superior all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, passing through the great lakes, the St. Lawrence River and even over Niagara Falls!

The carving - one of several used in filming - was donated to Pukaskwa National Park, along the north-east shore of Lake Superior in Ontario. It’s a nod to Bill Mason’s love of the area, which he featured in his 1983 documentary called Pukaskwa National Park. Today, the carving is on display at the Pukaskwa Visitor Centre at Hattie Cove.

Check the show notes to learn more about the two films, and how to plan your visit to Pukaskwa National Park.

Discover Library and Archives Canada podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe for lots more stories about the treasures in their collection.

I’m Fred Sheppard, thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy Bill Mason: Wilderness Artist.