|
Teaching aim: To highlight the importance and the changes in transportation and communication systems in historical and contemporary perspective with special emphasis on the impacts of changing technologies.
Keywords: Historical trade routes, waterways, the early of railway period, changing importance of different transportation systems: railways, motorways, airports |
Spatial dimensions within Canada are enormous; thousands of kilometres north to south and east to west.
Across Canada there are five and one half time zones: when it is 12 noon
in St. John's, Newfoundland, it is 6:30 in the morning in Victoria, British
Columbia.
Lets look at various means Canadians
have and are using to tie themselves together from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. In the days before mechanization, the birch
bark canoe [1] adopted by Europeans from Native peoples, was for many years a basic means
of transportation right across Canada, and using it the fur traders steadily
enlarged their zones of operation. You may be able to claim territory,
but you cannot build a modern country by canoe alone. Nevertheless, water
carriage has continued to be important. With such a wonderful gateway as
the St. Lawrence River leading to the Great Lakes, Canada possesses a magnificent
eastern water entrance from the Atlantic Ocean, almost 3800 km long, right
into the interior of the continent. Already in the 1820s, serious canal
building was started in order to improve this route, and was continued
at opportune times until in 1959 the present Great
Lakes Waterway - St. Lawrence Seaway [2] was completed unfortunately. In the West there is no equivalent water
gateway.
The railway [3], was the first modern vital, effective, bond that strongly bound the eastern and western parts
of the country together. Transcontinental communications were transformed
across Canada when the Intercolonial
Railway connected Montreal to Halifax in 1876, and the Canadian
Pacific Railway [4] linked Montreal to Vancouver in 1885. Before then, United States railway lines had been used for many years, especially after the Union Pacific railway to San Francisco was completed
in 1869. Accompanying, and sometimes preceding, the railway was the telegraph
wire, so that when long distance transcontinental railway lines went into
operation information could be moved instantaneously from one settled part
of Canada to another. The formidable natural obstacles to bridging Canada
by land had been the Canadian Shield and the Canadian Cordillera, but the
railway builders overcame those barriers. The Shield did not give up its
recalcitrant role easily. For many years it remained a severe hindrance
in connecting eastern and western Canada by other means of communication,
but in due course the Shield, and thus Canada, was bridged by other technologies.
The first connection from eastern to western Canada by telephone [5] was successfully accomplished in 1916 using U.S. hookups to get around the thinly occupied
Shield where there were no lines, but finally in 1932 a telephone line
for an all-Canada connection was completed across the Shield. Those telephone
lines also made radio communications across Canada possible without resorting
to U.S. hookups. Scheduled air travel from Montreal to Vancouver was begun
in 1939, and from Montreal to Halifax in 1941. Oil pipelines linked Alberta
to the main markets in eastern Canada (going south of the Shield through
the United States for a considerable part of the distance) and to the Pacific
coast in the 1950s, and a cross country television link was achieved by
the end of that decade. It was not until 1960 that the Trans-Canada
Highway [6] was completed, and in 1980 the Globe and Mail newspaper of Toronto,
using satellite communications to link printing plants located in other
Canadian regions to Toronto made it possible to distribute its newspaper
to people in most parts of the country every morning. Improvements in electronic
transmission continue to be made; in 1990 fibre optic cable connections
were completed across the country. Communications via satellites
stationed over Canada is the latest means of communicating via television,
telephone, fax and computer links accross Canada.
Establishing connections northward
in Canada has been a challenge equal to the great efforts made in building
east - west communications. Explorers searching for the Northwest
Passage [7] and adventurers hoping to reach the North Pole had been travelling north and west by ship
since the sixteenth century. Roald
Amundsen [8], a Norwegian, was the first to navigate the Northwest Passage in 1903-06,
and Robert Peary [9], an American, claimed to be the first to have attained the North Pole in 1909. The Hudson's Bay Company [10], a fur trading enterprise, was founded in 1670 in Great Britain, and soon was organizing
annual voyages to the coast of Hudson Bay, bringing in trade goods and
carrying away furs. In the nineteenth century, whalers were active in the
eastern and western Arctic and Hudson Bay, and fur traders travelled along
the Mackenzie River to establish trading posts in the western Arctic. The
North-West Mounted Police (called the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police [11] after 1920) and missionaries also made their way to the North, by ship in the eastern Arctic, and by canoes and boats on the Mackenzie and other
rivers and lakes in the western Arctic.
Steam
and internal combustion engines [12] made journeying northward by ship and railway easier, but the most profound revolution in travel in the North came with the airplane, beginning in
the 1920s. Bush pilots, using small airplanes equipped with pontoons in
summer to land on lakes and rivers, and with skis in winter to land on
snow and ice-covered lakes and rivers, became famous in Canada. Bush
planes [13] provided quick communications for the first time to isolated communities, and assisted
in the search for and initial development of northern mines by moving men
and equipment quickly as needed. Today, all somewhat larger northern
communities have airplane landing strips and terminals, and the north is
efficiently tied together by scheduled air services.
Heavy goods are brought to the north
each summer by ship in the eastern Arctic, and by barges and tugboats operating
on the Mackenzie River system in the western Arctic. A few railway lines
extend northward. In 1922 a line was completed to
Fort McMurray [14] on the Athabasca River to connect with the Mackenzie River water transportation
system; in 1929 to Churchill on Hudson Bay as an outlet for prairie grain;
and in 1932 to Moosonee on James Bay to give Ontario access to the North.
Other railways have been built to great mineral deposits to bring the ore
to market, including a line to iron ore deposits at Schefferville, northern
Quebec, in 1954, and a line to Hay River and base metal deposits at Pine
Point, Northwest Territories, in 1964. A few main roads have been constructed
in the more densely populated western Arctic, including the Alaska Highway,
built very rapidly in 1942 by United States army engineers during World
War II, a road to the gold mines at Yellowknife [15] in 1961, and a road almost to the mouth of the Mackenzie River on the Arctic Ocean in 1979. In the
east, a road was completed in the 1970s to Radisson, Quebec, in connection
with the James Bay hydroelectric project. Winter ice roads, built each
year in December on the ice of lakes and rivers and lasting until March,
became very important after World War II for bringing heavy goods to Native
communities, and in developing new mines and then in operating them. Nowadays,
airplanes all year, barges and ships in summer and ice roads in winter
for heavy goods, and television and telephones by means of satellites,
keep the various communities of the North connected with the outside world
and with one another.
|
Questions for further consideration:
|
[1]
http://www.nativetech.org/brchbark/bigcanoe.htm
[2]
http://www.greatlakes-seaway.com/en/home.html
[3]
http://www.cprheritage.com/photo_graphics/welcome.htm
[4]
http://www8.cpr.ca/cms/default.htm
[5]
http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory/History1.htm
[6]
http://freespace.virgin.net/john.cletheroe/usa_can/can/tch.htm
[7]
http://www.voicenet.com/~jstewart/nwt/nwt.html
[8]
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/mum/dioramen/e_amund.htm
[9]
http://www.matthewhenson.com/1911.htm
[10]
http://www.gov.mb.ca/chc/archives/hbca/about/hbca.html
[11]
http://www.rcmp.ca/history/history_e.htm
[12]
http://collections.ic.gc.ca/maritime_museum/commerce/cpcn.html
[13]
http://collections.ic.gc.ca/sgraham/home.htm
[14]
http://www.fortmcmurrayhistory.com/index.htm#return
[15]
http://www.gov.nt.ca/RWED/gallery/minerals/pouringgold.htm
| TOP | CONTENT | VGT HOME |