Onward! Canadian expansionist outlooks and the photographs that serve them.

• In Event: Photographing Environmental Histories: capturing, presenting, and circulating environmental change in the past and present

Abstract

In the conclusion of his 1873 publication Ocean to Ocean: Sanford Fleming’s Expedition through Canada in 1872, George Monroe Grant writes: “A great future beckons us as a people onward. To reach it, God grant to us purity and faith, deliverance from the lust of personal aggrandizement, unity, and invincible steadfastness of purpose.” (358) Ocean to Ocean, which was widely circulated and quickly re-editioned, is a polished version of Grant’s diary and notes kept while on expedition with Sir Sanford Fleming during his 1872 trip to survey the Peace River region of British Columbia, Canada. The survey’s purpose was to gather information in preparation for the selection of a route for the Canadian Pacific Railway, soon to be Canada’s first transcontinental railroad. In addition to Grant’s diary, which was framed by introductory and concluding remarks, the publication contains reproductions of twelve photographs by Charles Horetzky, nine by Benjamin Baltzly, and three by Frederick Dally, though only a handful of the photographs were taken by Horetzky on the actual 1872 survey. This paper will explore the changing uses and readings of these photographs from the original contexts of their production to their inclusion and circulation in Ocean to Ocean, where they were made to express the expansionist outlooks of both Fleming and Grant, a Presbyterian reverend for who the idea of expansion was one that came attached to religious motivations. By tracing the changes made to the photographs, from the original negatives to their reproduction in the publication, this paper will engage with the notion of photography’s visual cues and vocabulary in the shaping of popular perceptions of the Canadian environment and its settlement.

Author

• Elizabeth Anne Cavaliere, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec