Berton - My country: the remarkable past

My Country

With the Overlanders of 62 in B.C.

Canada is a live country, live, but not, like the States, kicking.

Rupert Brooke

Copyright 1976 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.
Anchor Canada edition 2002

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Berton, Pierre, 1920
My country : the remarkable past / Pierre Berton.Anchor Canada ed.
eISBN: 978-0-385-67353-2

1. CanadaHistory. 2. CanadaBiography. I. Title.

FC163.B47 2002 971 C2002-902702-0
F1026.B39 2002

Maps by Jack McMaster

We acknowledge the courtesy of the following individuals and institutions in supplying photographs:

Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society.

Published in Canada by
Anchor Canada, a division of
Random House of Canada Limited

Visit Random House of Canada Limiteds website: www.randomhouse.ca

v3.1

Books by Pierre Berton

The Royal Family

The Mysterious North

Klondike

Just Add Water and Stir

Adventures of a Columnist

Fast Fast Fast Relief

The Big Sell

The Comfortable Pew

The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties

The Smug Minority

The National Dream

The Last Spike

Drifting Home

Hollywoods Canada

My Country

The Dionne Years

The Wild Frontier

The Invasion of Canada

Flames Across the Border

Why We Act Like Canadians

The Promised Land

Vimy

Starting Out

The Arctic Grail

The Great Depression

Niagara: A History of the Falls

My Times: Living with History

1967, The Last Good Year

Marching as to War

Picture Books

The New City (with Henri Rossier)

Remember Yesterday

The Great Railway

The Klondike Quest

Pierre Bertons Picture Book of Niagara Falls

Winter

The Great Lakes

Seacoasts

Pierre Bertons Canada

Anthologies

Great Canadians

Pierre and Janet Bertons Canadian Food Guide

Historic Headlines

Farewell to the Twentieth Century

Worth Repeating

Welcome to the Twenty-first Century

Fiction

Masquerade (pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk)

Books for Young Readers

The Golden Trail

The Secret World of Og

Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)

Many years ago, when I was conducting a half-hour interview program on television, I found myself without an interview; somebody, at the last moment, had begged off. To fill in the missing half hour, I decided to tell a story from the Canadian past. There was no film and few props; I simply sat in a chair and told the tale as one might tell it around a campfire. To my surprise this program brought more reaction than most of the interviews I had been conducting with internationally famous writers, politicians and movie stars. As a result, from time to time I continued the practice of digging into the past and spinning true yarns about my own country.

Eventually, this led to a new weekly half-hour program titled My Country, which is still being shown on the Global Television network in Ontario and on other stations in various parts of Canada. The stories in this book spring out of the research for that program. They are not told in the same way, of course. I had thought at first that I might use verbatim transcripts of my television shows (which were ad libbed from notes) as the basis for these published tales. To my chagrin, I discovered that when the spoken words were typed up they were almost incomprehensible. Each story had to be totally rewritten from the original research, in quite a different style and often from a different point of view. Freed from the fetters of time I have also been able to enlarge on the original tales: the stories in this book are each almost three times as long as the television versions.

There is no particular theme here except the theme of country. My only guide in selecting the pieces that follow was that I enjoyed telling them and knew I would enjoy writing them. They are, I think, good, entertaining stories; but I hope they are more than that. The television series had one important criterion: each tale that we selected had to have some historical, social or geographical significance. I have followed this general rule and tried to enlarge upon it here. I hope that these stories, taken as a group, will give some insight into what kind of country we live in and what kind of people we are. If this is informal history it is also informal geography.

The producer of the television series, who worked on the concept with me and was responsible for the high quality of the result, is Elsa Franklin; she deserves a special note of praise. Our story editor for much of this period was Janice Patton. I am grateful to Peter Such for his valuable advice on The Last of the Red Indians. I wish also to thank my editor, Diane Mew, for her careful analysis of the manuscript and her many useful suggestions, my secretary, Ennis Armstrong for typing my various drafts, and my wife, Janet, for catching a variety of errors in the proofs, which only her eagle eyes were able to spot.

Kleinburg, Ontario
May, 1976

In the first six months of 1921 there occurred an extraordinary event, which made newspaper headlines from Halifax to Vancouver but which is now forgotten. Four men and one woman walked a distance of 3,650 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a race that has never been copied or equalled. They did it for no particular gain or reward and for no particular reason except for personal satisfaction and, perhaps, for the fleeting fame that it gave them.