A Brief History of Forestry. / In Europe, the United States and Other Countries

by B. E. Fernow

The central interior region, dotted with lakes and intricate river systems, is a continuation of the forestless arid and subarid, plains and prairies of the country West of the Mississippi River, toward the north changing by steps into lowlands studded with open treegrowth, and barren tundra frozen all the year, a million square miles answering to this last description. The Pacific Slope is a rough and lofty mountain country, the extension of the Rockies and Coast Ranges, with a variable, in part humid and temperate, in part dry and rigorous climate, more or less heavily wooded, about 600,000 square miles, with the Fraser River in the South forming the most important drainage basin.

The Atlantic portion, south of the plateau-like, bare, or scantily wooded Hudson Bay and Labrador country, with a climate, somewhat similar to North Eastern Germany, is formed by the slopes of the watersheds of the Great Lakes and of their mighty outlet, the St. Lawrence River and its Gulf; the slopes rising gradually northward to the low range of the Height of Land, a plateau with low hills, not over 1500 feet elevation, which cuts it off from the northern country and forms the limit of commercial forest. This region, the bulk of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec—a belt of not exceeding 300 miles in width and about 1500 miles in length, altogether 300,000 square miles—with 93,000 square miles in the maritime provinces, around 250 million acres in all, represents, outside of British Columbia, the true forest region of Canada, and at the same time the centre of Canadian civilization.

Although the Cabot brothers discovered Cape Breton and Labrador in 1497 and 1500, the first settlement of Canadian territory was not made until 1541 by French colonists, after the first Captain-General of Canada, Jacques Cartier, the discoverer and explorer of the St. Lawrence (in 1534), had taken possession of the country for Francis I; but not much progress in colonizing was made until Champlain’s arrival in the first years of the next century. Quebec was founded as early as 1608, and Montreal in 1611, but Ottawa dates its first beginnings not farther back than 1800.

The northern country around Hudson’s Bay was, under the name of Rupert’s Land (after Prince Rupert, the head of the enterprise), undefined in limits, granted by Charles II, in 1670, to the Hudson’s Bay Company, a powerful fur-trading corporation which had not only a commercial monopoly but, except for occasional interference by the French, held absolute governmental sway over the country through 200 years, its jurisdiction at one time extending to the Pacific Coast.

Friction and warfare with the English resulted in the latter acquiring by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Newfoundland, and settling their rights on Hudson’s Bay. The final conquest of “New France” by the English ended French rule in 1763, but the French colonists remained peacefully, and their descendants form to-day, at least in Quebec, the predominating influence. Indeed, in 1774, by the so-called Quebec Act, the first permanent system of self government was established much on the lines of the French feudal system, and the French civil law was retained.

At first, under English rule, the territory, then including the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, formed one colony, but after the war of the Revolution, in 1791, the territory remaining English was divided into two separately governed provinces, Upper and Lower, or West and East Canada. They were re-united in 1840, and continued so until 1867 when the so-called Union or British North America Act effected the present organization of the Dominion of Canada, a federal union, comprising only the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. After various combinations and subdivisions all of the British Possessions in North America, except Newfoundland and its dependencies in Labrador, came into the union, and, in 1882, the union was completed with the then seven provinces (those mentioned with Prince Edward Island, Manitoba and British Columbia) and all the organized and unorganized territory.

In the same year, four territories, Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and Athabasca, in 1895 the territory of Ungava in Labrador, and in 1898 that of Yukon were organized, with a view of their eventual elevation into provinces, the relationships of the federation being quite similar to that of the states and territories in the United States.

In 1905, the Western territories were organized into two provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta.