Explorers before Borders

"Long before the white man and long before the wheel
When the green dark forest was too silent to be real..."

(Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian Railroad Trilogy)

There are times I've driven through the mountains on a two lane ribbon of highway with no other traffic in sight, that I've imagined what it might have been look to have been the first person--or at least the first non-aboriginal--through that way.

Simulating that kind of scenario requires a landscape without cities, towns or industrial impacts of agriculture, logging or mining. It also implies an absence of political boundaries.

In the past week I've looked at the Canada-US border from the perspective of a child first crossing it, noting similarities and differences between his home country and the Other Side. Today we're going to reverse this process, and imagine the land without the lines we've drawn over it in our maps and in our minds.

Because of the importance nationality has come to hold in our world, we tend to read this into the stories of people and places from an earlier time. For instance, we note Simon Fraser, namesake of BC's Fraser River, was born in New York and therefore refer to him as an American.

We need to look again. Fraser was born in the first year of the American Revolution to Scottish parents. His father of the same name was a British army captain who was arrested by American forces as a pirsoner of war and died in custody. His mother later moved to Canada, where Simon was apprenticed to the North West Company at age 16.

Fraser can be labeled one way by birth, another by ancestry, and a third by the country in which he apprenticed and served. But the name Canada then applied only to parts of present day Ontario and Quebec.

The territory in which he worked and explored had spheres of influence but ot fixed boundaries. Fraser eventually called it "New Caledonia" after his ancestral Scotland. Today it is British Columbia. But in his time it was a land largely people by a variety of First Nations that dealt with distant trading companies whose representatives charted and laid claims to it.

The newborn United States of America became one of these claimants. The estuary of the Columbia River, which drains a large area of the Pacific Northwest, was entered and named after his ship on May 11, 1792 by American Captain John Gray, who claimed it for the US after exploring about 15 miles upstream.

Gray met and shared this information with British Captain George Vancouver who doubted it. But in October of the same year, Vancouver's Lieutenant William Broughton, sailed more than 100 miles upstream and drew the first detailed map of the lower stream.

In 1805-06 US-commissioned explorers Lewis and Clark described the Columbia from its junction with the Snake River to its mouth. And six years later, North West Company trader David Thompson charter the entire 1200 mile length of the River from its origin in the Rockies.

Fraser's exploration of his own river, which he thought was the Columbia, took place in May 1808, before Thompson who named it after him, and only two years after Lewis and Clark.

So who actually owned the land, and how did the different explorers actually see themselves in this patchwork of claims?

Eventual title to the land was established by political agreement years later, usually without reference to the First Nations who had lived there for centuries. With the exception of Lewis and Clark, who were commissioned by the US, land based explorers Fraser, Thompson and their successors thought less of ownership of the land than of trading opportunities for their companies.

It was the seagoing captains who were most inclined to plant flags whenever they ran into unclaimed terra firma. However, competing national and imperial interests did not stop these seamen from sharing their discoveries with each other, as Gray did with Vancouver.

This situation existed with most European New World explorers. Columbus was sponsored by Isabella of Spain but he was not Spanish. We may call him Italian but that is only partly true, as Italy was not a unified state at this point. Columbus came from Genoa, a city state now part of northern Italy.

Another Italian, Venetian Giovanni Caboto sailed under the sponsorship of England's Henry Tudor (VII) for which we know him by the anglicized form of his name, John Cabot. Like Columbus, he had earlier sought backing from Spain and Portugal.

Most of these explorers had no sense of nationality as we know it. They became subjects to a particular ruler as a sponsor, rather than out of personal loyalty. Birthplace was something else.

Transport and communications professionals in our day may work under the banners of Bell or Telus that have spheres of influence and overlapping interests. But as long as one is not serving two masters at the same time, there is nothing inherently disloyal in moving from one employer to another.

This practice continued with a later generation of land based trail blazers: those who surveyed and built the transcontinental railways. By this time the Canada US border was in place, but this proved no barrier to a W. C. Van Horne coming from the United States to build a Canadian railway, or Canadian James Jerome Hill doing the reverse.

Both took out citizenship in their new places of employment.

Political interests can still trump commercial ones, which is why most states are considered to be "sovereign" and corporations are not. Canada decided to curb free trade and sale of spirits to First Nations in setting up of the North West Mounted Police in 1873.

And when Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, at a final state of the force's formation, changed its name from NW Mounted Rifles to Mounted Police, he made a distinction that would be important in a growing Canadian culture.