Measuring Mother Earth: How Joe the Kid became Tyrrell of the North - Hardcover

Robertson, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771075391 ISBN 13: 9780771075391

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2007

Synopsis

A vivid, entertaining portrait of the great Canadian explorer Joseph Burr Tyrrell, the man who single-handedly invented the notion of the “Romance of the North”.

In the nineteenth century, exploring the Earth was as exciting and awe-inspiring an activity as space exploration was in the twentieth century. And even as late as the 1880s, vast expanses of Canada remained largely untrodden by Europeans. So joining the Geological Survey in 1882 was the realization of a dream for the short-sighted, profoundly deaf, and egotistical young Joseph Burr Tyrrell.

A romantic, inspired as much by Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novels and by Wild Bill Hickock’s exploits as by the spirited debates about evolution that informed his work, Tyrrell chafed under the strictures of the survey. By the time of the Klondike gold rush in 1898, he was a bitter man, resentful that the survey under George Dawson had repeatedly refused to promote him or give him any plum jobs. He quit and took up prospecting instead, which brought him nothing but misery in the Yukon but handed him a fortune when gold was discovered in Kirkland Lake, Ontario.

His own best fan, Tyrrell did finally achieve the celebrity he ached for. Decked out in a sealskin parka and moccasins, while he burnished stories of his achievements, Tyrrell became the prototype of the romantic hero-explorer later personified by Robert Scott (of the Antarctic). He retired a multi-millionaire and died at the age of ninety-eight, just six weeks before the 1957 space launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the Earth.

About this title

About the Author:

Heather Robertson has written for Canadian magazines for forty years and has written more than a dozen books, including two award-winners: the novel Willie: A Romance (which won the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Prize and the Books in Canada Best First Novel Award) and the biography Driving Force (which won the National Business Book Award). She lives in King City, Ontario.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Imagine: June 21, 1883, somewhere north of the Milk River, North-­West Territories.

Eight hundred and ten . . . eight hundred and eleven . . . eight hundred and twel– erk! Joe’s left foot sinks beneath him. He peers through the bug netting that swaddles his face. Ahead, reeds glisten in the pale green buffalo grass. His boot makes a sucking noise as he pulls it up for the next step. Another miserable swamp! And this country is supposed to be desert. At least that’s what Captain Palliser’s old map says: “No water. High level plain.” But it has poured rain almost every day of the two weeks Joe has been in this Canadian corner of the Great American Desert, and his map ­doesn’t show this shallow gully that he has been following for hours because he’s making a new map, measuring it step by step, one thousand Roman paces to the mile. You’d think the Geological Survey of Canada would use an odometer, but no, he’s a lowly assistant on his first expedition, and his boss, Dr. George Mercer Dawson, says making a pace survey for twenty miles in the stifling heat is a rare educational opportunity.

Joe is sweating so hard his glasses are fogging up. He tugs impatiently at the cord fastening the netting around his neck and flings it back; a corner of the net catches on his glasses and sends them flying over his head. He wheels, but where he had seen tufts of new grass and slim reeds and earth stained white with alkali, he now sees a flat, fuzzy carpet of indeterminate ochres and greens. He squints to catch a glint of sunlight on glass, but the sky is a dull, monochrome grey.

Joe kneels and crawls, groping with outstretched hands, until he has covered a circle within a twelve-­foot radius. No glasses. Here he is, in the middle of nowhere, and he ­can’t see! He gropes in his pocket for his compass. At least he can read it well enough to find his way to the expedition’s new camp, if the camp is where it is supposed to be — but what if the tents are hidden away in a thicket down by a creek? The prairie here is said to be gouged by deep gullies, called coulees, that you almost tumble into before you see them. How can he walk through this strange country when he ­can’t see where he’s going? And if he leaves, he’ll never find his glasses. A blind geologist.

Joe sits and waits. He’s been in this predicament before. Some­one is bound to come for him. The Survey ­can’t simply leave him to rot on the prairie. He can visualize the headlines: brilliant young ontario scientist lost in north-­west. survey director blamed. They ­won’t want his skeletal remains to be found a year or two from now, gnawed by animals and bleached as white as the buffalo skulls he saw piled up at the end of the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks at Maple Creek. Joe has read about grizzlies, and wolves, but he’ll likely die of hunger first. He has a few frogs and leeches for company, but they ­aren’t any more edible than the blackbirds’ eggs he has collected as specimens. The brackish water is drinkable, though he’ll shit his guts out later.

It feels pleasant to rest his aching feet. He rummages in his inside pockets for his pipe and tobacco pouch. A smoke will calm his nerves and keep the mosquitoes at bay. It might even attract some Indians. They ­aren’t far away. He saw a crowd of them at Maple Creek when he got off the CPR boxcar, cocooned in their bright striped blankets, feathers and quills and bits of fur sticking out of their long black hair, staring at the steam engine just like the folks did back home in Weston.

Joe ties his handkerchief to the end of his shotgun and props it up as a signal. A light rain is falling, and even on this bare plain he’ll be hard to spot in the drizzle. He has dreamed of exploring the Great Lone Land since he was a kid at school staring at the blank space on a map of the North-­West over which the cartographer had scrawled “Buffalo Run.” Now here he is, but the Indians say Mother Earth has swallowed the buffalo. There are other explanations for the herds’ disappearance — the railroads, mass slaughter — but still, it is an enigma.

To the west, above the sloping banks of the coulee, the prairie horizon is shrouded in mist. Joe feels submerged, as if he’s sitting at the bottom of a pond. He is, in a way. Not a pond, but a sea, a dried-­up tropical sea that covered this part of North America hundreds of millions of years ago. The land he is sitting on was lower then, and enough fossils have been found in the dry rocks to prove that this ancient sea teemed with shelled creatures unlike anything living in the world today. Joe finds fossils unbearably boring; he prefers to imagine these stony carapaces pulsating, brilliantly coloured, wriggling and burrowing and squirting, paddling along with their hairlike legs, antennae waving, eyes and mouths gaping, closing, tentacles probing among corals and sponges and seaweeds waving in the lazy current. Jellyfish too, giant worms, and translucent blobs, half plant, half animal. What a genius Darwin was to perceive that all life may have begun as a single primordial organism.

About eight miles to the southwest, in a blossoming choke­cherry thicket on the bank of a nameless creek, Thompson, the expedition’s cook, and Graydon, the wagon driver, are cleaning up after lunch. A few mouthfuls of salt pork and bannock simmer in the skillet. The kid should’ve been here long ago. It’s time to move on.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0771075391
• ISBN 13: 9780771075391
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 360