Robert Bothwell - The Penguin History of Canada

PENGUIN CANADA

THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF CANADA

ROBERT BOTHWELL is a professor of history and director of the International Relations Program at the University of Toronto. He has written books on a wide variety of topics in Canadian history, from atomic energy (Eldorado: Canadas National Uranium Company and Nucleus) to FrenchEnglish relations (Canada and Quebec) to CanadianAmerican relations (Canada and the United States).

ALSO BY ROBERT BOTHWELL

Lester Pearson

C.D. Howe (co-author)

Canada Since 1945 (co-author)

Canada 19001945 (co-author)

Eldorado

Loring Christie

Nucleus

Pirouette (co-author)

Canada and Quebec

The Big Chill

A Travellers History of Canada

ROBERT BOTHWELL

THE

PENGUIN HISTORY

OF CANADA

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in a Penguin Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2006

Published in this edition, 2007

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Robert Bothwell, 2006

Maps copyright ARTPLUS Design & Communications, 2006

The credits on page 574 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

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Bothwell, Robert, 1944

The Penguin history of Canada / Robert Bothwell.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-670-06553-0 (bound).ISBN 0-670-06553-6 (bound). ISBN 978-0-14-305032-2 (pbk.)

1. CanadaHistory. I. Title.

FC165.B68 2006 971 C2006-905106-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305032-2

ISBN-10: 0-14-305032-X

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To the memory of my teacher and friend, Kenneth McNaught

NATIVE LAND

Montagnais family, early 1600s, as represented by Samuel de Champlain, 1612.

C anada, its been said, has been the victim of too much geography. The second largest country on earth, it stretches from the rainforest of Vancouver Island to the pebbled desert of the Arctic, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the latitude of northern California (though barely) to the Arctic Ocean. Canadas extent, from sea (east) to sea (west) to sea (north), is a rhetoricians dream and an administrators nightmare. Its prosperity, compared with most of the rest of the world, has saved many a politician the trouble of saying something original on occasions of public ceremony. Yet that prosperity, like the population, is unevenly distributed and heavily concentrated in certain favoured pockets. Fortunately, there arent too many people and theres enough prosperity to go around. Perhaps only its sparse population has saved Canada from becoming a political impossibility.

Geography has certainly helped limit Canadas population, but accidents of geology also played a part. The continents of North and South America took their current form millions of years ago, separated from Eurasia and Africa by thousands of kilometres of ocean except for a tiny stretch of shallow water, the Bering Strait, between Alaska and Siberia. Crucially, the Strait wouldnt always be covered in water, for as the climate cooled the northernmost regions of Eurasia and North America became forbiddingly cold. During the Pleistocene ice age most of the northern part of North America was covered in successive glaciations, further isolating the remaining habitable areas of the continentsouth of what is now the latitude of Washington, D.C.from the rest of the world. As water was absorbed into the huge glaciers, the sea level fell and the Bering land bridge grew very large.

The Americas in pre-glacial times boasted an impressive array of fauna, similar to those found in Eurasia and including horses, mastodons, and tigers. Many of these survived the ice age, the more so because no predators existed with the capacity to drive them to extinction. Yet there were differences from Eurasia too, in plant phyla and in the range of animals inhabiting the continent. One such difference was the absence of human ancestors.

The oldest traces of human ancestors have been found in Africa, dating back to long before the Pleistocene era. The first variety of modern humans, Homo sapiens, seems to have evolved around 150,000 years ago, also in Africa. Superseding other human varieties, Homo sapiens spread from Africa into Eurasia, reaching the northeastern corner of that vast land mass, eastern Siberia, about twenty thousand years ago. The climate was cold and the terrain icy, covered with an immense glacier just over three kilometres thick and spreading down from the North Pole. The seacoast was, however, considerably farther out than at present.

Not everything was covered with ice. In particular, the area between Siberia and Alaska (which scholars have dubbed Beringia) was dry, though cold and unpleasant. And even after crossing Beringia, early humans didnt find ice everywhere. Between fifteen thousand and thirteen thousand years ago the ice cap began to retract, opening an ice-free northsouth corridor along what is roughly the line of the Rocky Mountains. Scholars dispute how soon and how much this corridor opened, but certainly by about eleven thousand years ago it was possible to move from Alaska through the interior of northwestern North America, down to the grasslands of the Great Plains and beyond to the temperate climate of northern Mexico.

People did move, but their movements (which may have included movement by sea as well as land) have been difficult to trace and even more difficult for archaeologists to agree upon. Using the most cautious and conservative interpretation, humans reached Alaska around twelve thousand years ago and the southwestern United States eleven thousand years ago. At that time an ice sheet still covered most of modern Canada, east and west, though it was beginning to melt along its southern edges. As the ice retreated, the land exposed became first tundra, then spruce scrub, and finally woodland. Animals followed the advancing forest, and humans followed the animals.