Alone Against the North Read Free Page A

experiences hiking in parts of Canada’s wilderness where no humans had ever previously ventured. Ray Mears, a British survival expert and TV host, has similarly stated matter-of-factly that Canada’s wilderness is so vast that places remain that have never seen a human footprint. Claims like these, if nothing else, fire theimagination and encourage one’s appetite for adventure. But skeptics might well wonder if this is all just romantic wishful thinking. Perhaps it merely reflects some deep-seated human desire to believe that unexplored territory still lies beyond the horizon? An almost mythical untouched place where it is still possible to become the first human visitor? At any rate, that was my original impression on the matter as a young undergraduate. However, as I researched the topic more extensively, I was surprised to learn that most evidence favours the idea that the earth still has places no human has ever been (and not just in Antarctica). Some of these places are tucked away deep in the Canadian wilderness. To assume that each of Canada’s three million lakes, infinite number of ponds, and tens of thousands of other waterways must have been visited by someone is rather naive. (In fact, Canada has so many lakes that no geographer has ever succeeded in counting them all—three million is the currently accepted best estimate.) North America is not Europe or Asia: it was never densely populated, has been inhabited for a much shorter period of time, and has always contained vast uninhabited regions incapable of sustaining significant human populations.
    The most rigorous scholarly estimates for Canada’s population before European contact put the number at a mere 200,000 to 300,000 people (compared with over 35 million today). That would give pre-contact Canada a population density of less than 0.03 people per square kilometre. With such an extremely low population density scattered over such a vast expanse of territory, it is exceedingly improbable, if not impossible, for humans to have covered all that ground in the fewer than 10,000 yearsmost of Canada has been inhabited. Canada’s foremost expert on aboriginal history and culture, anthropologist Diamond Jenness (himself a recipient of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society’s gold medal), noted: “A quarter of a million people cannot effectively occupy an area of nearly four million square miles, and there were doubtless many districts seldom or never trodden by the foot of man, just as there are to-day.” Jenness thus corroborated the view that Canada’s wilderness is sufficiently vast to still contain territory unvisited by any person.
    Jenness’ conclusion is more credible when one considers that those roughly 250,000 inhabitants weren’t evenly distributed across Canada. In pre-contact Canada, approximately two-thirds of all people lived in just two small areas of the country: the lush temperate rainforest of coastal British Columbia and the lower Great Lakes region of what is now southern Ontario. In the Pacific Northwest, the mild weather, abundant resources, and, above all, immensely plentiful salmon runs made it possible for a relatively large population to develop (though that population would be considered small relative to that area’s current population). The territory around the southern Great Lakes, in contrast, supported agriculture, which allowed certain aboriginal groups with cultures based on farming rather than hunting and gathering to flourish. In these regions, the first European explorers found well-established villages, well-worn portage trails, and guides who could tell them about the surrounding country and how to get from one place to another. Elsewhere it was a different story.
    Almost everywhere else, Canada was very thinly populated with huge empty stretches that were uninhabited and unknowneven to aboriginal people. Explorers themselves often remarked on this fact. For example,