My chapter on Prince Edward Island’s changing landscapes and land use (Top-down History) was featured in the latest episode of the Nature’s Past podcast today. This was a roundtable interview with Jennifer Bonnell, Marcel Fortin, John Lutz, and me. We discussed the changing role of historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) in academic research, and the role of the new book edited by Bonnell and Fortin HGIS Research in Canada. I was able to speak to the advanced geospatial analyses I performed on Prince Edward Island’s environmental history, with the help of William Glen.
Sean Kheraj created Nature’s Past as one of the many digital initiatives of the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE). As he explains in this episode: “To help researchers in the field of environmental history get acquainted with the uses of [HGIS] technology, the University of Calgary Press and the Network in Canadian History and Environment have published a new book called, Historical GIS Research in Canada. You can read our review of the the book here.” The podcast was a really lovely way to cap off this excellent project.
Joshua MacFadyen and William Glen, [pdf] “Top-down History: Delimiting Forests, Farms, and the Census of Agriculture on Prince Edward Island Using Aerial Photography, ca.1900-2000,” in Jennifer Bonnell and Marcel Fortin eds., Historical GIS Research in Canada (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, Canadian History & Environment Series, 2014), 197-223.
The 2013 ice storm left hundreds of thousands of Canadians out in the cold and made some people pause to consider the fragility of urban energy systems in a changing climate. The idea of so many people spending Christmas in the cold made me reflect on some of the better-known cases of Canadians freezing to death in the past. Frankly – and aside from Sir Franklin – most of us likely couldn’t name a single person who died in this way. But one name we should all know is Neil Stonechild. His story, and the stories of other victims of hypothermia, should shape how we think about systemic racism and other social injustice.
Neil Stonechild (1973-1990), Saskatoon, SK undated photo
This month marked the 10th anniversary of the inquiry that brought a police force, an entire city, and many parts of Canada to consider some of these problems. The body of 17-year-old Neil Stonechild was found in an industrial area at the northern edge of Saskatoon in November 1990. He had frozen to death in that position five days earlier, wearing light clothing and only one shoe. His face was bruised his blood alcohol content had been high, and some of his friends and family suspected foul play. They were told that a full investigation had been conducted and that the teen had wandered to this remote location under his own volition. A cold case if ever there was one.
Still, some wondered if Neil had been the victim of a “starlight tour,” or the un-authorized police practice of leaving drunk or rowdy people on the outskirts of the city to dry out. Some could survive the walk, but in the case of Stonechild and several other Cree men, drying out in a Saskatchewan winter meant freezing to death. Prairie winters are unforgiving, to put it mildly. Saskatoon’s average January temperature (from 1977 to 2012) consists of daily lows “around -20°C, falling below -33°C or exceeding -8°C only one day in ten.” On the night Stonechild went missing, the temperature fell to -28°C.
Ten years later Darryl Night told a police officer that he had been left in a field one January evening, and he only survived the -20°C temperatures because he found his way to a power station and called a taxi. Night did not expect anyone to believe him. But days later the frozen bodies of two other Aboriginal men were found in a similar location and the police officer consulted Night and asked him for a full report. This began a long process of investigation and reconciliation that reopened the Stonechild case and culminated in a Commission of Inquiry and a report revealing what really happened to Neil Stonechild. The police officers were charged with a minor offence and relieved from their duties. The police chief was replaced, and a series of recommendations were advanced to build better accountability and begin repairing the trust between First Nations communities and the police.
The stories have been told extensively in the report, books, articles, and the Two Worlds Colliding NFB documentary below. It includes interviews with captivating characters, and the haunting line from one of the mothers of the men who froze in 2000:
But in many ways Stonechild’s story continues. Some challenge the evidence and testimonies used to charge the two officers. Others claim that starlight tours are continuing under other police forces and lives are at risk. The Saskatoon Star Phoenix ran several excellent features on the Stonechild Effect over the weekend. The actions taken by the Saskatoon Police force have been impressive, considering the profoundly strained relations between First Nations and police forces across Canada.
Still, simple changes in technology and even policy will not eliminate racism. We need to ask why officers would employ a risky, illegal, and reprehensible practice with seemingly little to gain? It was not official police policy, and it was not carried out by most or even many officers. The investigation suggests that it may have occurred in periods when the pressures of policing were building and resources were low. Starlight tours were not mentioned in the Stonechild report, but it suggested that this was an unfortunate, and deadly, way to circumvent safe and legal detention.
Historians will note that the police chief at the time of the Inquiry apologized to the victims and their families with a confession. He claimed that although he was initially unaware of any cases of starlight tours, when he began to investigate he found recorded examples as early as 1976. Theirs was not an isolated case.
We are learning all too frequently of course that the first Aboriginals to perish in the care of the state died long before 1976. The roots of these problems run deep. My own research is in Canadians’ experience with the cold. Even there we see that many of the Aboriginal men who were left in dangerous conditions belonged to a group most likely to suffer hypothermia and neglect. Neil Stonechild was a young man with a face that captured the media, but if had been part of the usual demographic of older victims, his story may never have caught the attention of the public, and thus the police.
Accidental deaths by drowning and freezing in Canada, by age. Source: Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database
My article on the ice storm noted that most victims of hypothermia in the twenty-first century are the elderly. When compared to the age range of people who die by drowning, for example, people at risk of exposure to the cold are usually older and poorer. Heat and shelter are in the base layer of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs, and people without access to these basic physiological needs often struggle with poverty and addictions. Like the Aboriginal men and women abandoned on starlight tours, Canadians at risk of hypothermia are very much overlooked and marginalized by large parts of society.
But did people actually freeze in an energy rich country like Canada, and if so under what circumstances? The trend seen in Saskatoon dates back to at least the nineteenth century in Canada. The most commonly reported cases of hypothermia in the age of temperance were also related to poverty and addictions.
Not only did alcohol impair the judgment of someone caught in the cold, but we now know that it expedites some of the heat loss processes that cause death by freezing.[1] Nineteenth century temperance magazines were replete with apocryphal accounts of incorrigible drunkards dying or losing limbs from hypothermia.
The slightly more balanced Globe would occasionally print stories of hypothermia such as the case of Murdoch Martin, a resident of Huron County who “addicted to intemperate habits” was found “lying on the ice, half a mile out on the lake.” The results of autopsy confirmed that “Martin came to his death by taking too much intoxicating liquor, and by exposing himself to the inclemency of the cold weather on the night of February 6th 1868.” The mention of his widow and six children suggest Martin was middle-aged or older.[2]
Not all victims were lost in the rural wilderness, and not all were older. During the particularly cold winter of 1866, the Globe complained that Toronto’s “streets are filled with vagrants during the day, and at night the police stations are besieged with numberless applicants for shelter.” In the middle of this context a 21-year-old woman named Margaret Armstrong was found frozen to death in the yard of Trinity College on Strachan Avenue. She had been recently released from the gaol, where she was “an habitual inmate” and she died through the night, presumably intoxicated.[3]
Official statistics recorded hypothermia with some regularity, but finding the cause of death in the census in the nineteenth century is hardly straightforward. Some may have been included under “alcoholism” or other causes. In 1891 hypothermia was not reported as a cause of death at all, and in 1871 and 1881 it was divided between two ailments: “cold” (Refroidissement in French) and the much smaller category of “frostbite.”
Even when the proper language is identified the veracity of the data remains suspect. Babies were suspiciously prone to death by “cold.” Why would that be? George Emery’s Facts of Life identifies several other problems with early vital statistics, including the inability to self-report one’s own death! James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains shows the fine line between freezing and starving to death on the Plains, and of course the large numbers of each who were omitted by the Census in the 1870s and 1880s Canadian Territories.
In general terms, however, the census data shows that seniors were at high risk of hypothermia in the late nineteenth century. Those who froze to death in the 61-81 age range made up a higher proportion of deaths than any other age group. People in their 60s and 70s were about as likely to die from freezing to death as drowning, and people above 80 were over twice as likely to die from the cold.
Percentage of Deaths by Hypothermia and Drowning 1871-1881. Source: Censuses of Canada, 1871 and 1881, Vol II Population.
While hardly the last word on hypothermia, these data aggregate two trends from census data in two years (1871-1881) where cold and frostbite were recorded as causes of death. It shows that freezing to death was most common among the senior and middle-aged population, but people of all age groups were at risk. The threat of hypothermia was much more evenly distributed across the stages of life than it is today.
To follow the comparison between freezing and drowning in the twenty-first century, the threat of drowning was much more prevalent in the nineteenth century (659 people drowned each year in the 19th century, compared to 93 people per year in the 21st) likely because of safety and navigational changes in the fisheries. Those who drowned were typically working age males, between the ages of 11 and 41. Still, when plotted on a secondary axis the age trends between these two causes of death in the late nineteenth century and the early twenty first century are demonstrably similar.
Writing about this racially and socially unequal affliction from the “front lines” in Saskatoon, as it were, one hardly knows where to begin. Perhaps the simplest way is to acknowledge that we live and work on First Nations land. We have deep rooted systemic problems. We have a history of injustices which come to light with exhausting frequency.
By 2014 we couldn’t ignore what happened to Neil Stonechild. And we can’t ignore the Canadians who are most at risk of hypothermia today. I hope as winter approaches we warm up to the idea of becoming communities who refuse to leave anyone out in the cold.
[1] L. McCullough, S. Arora, “Diagnosis and treatment of hypothermia,” American Family Physician 70 (2004): 2325-32; John Valiant’s account of the one of the toughest timber cruisers in BC demonstrated the protagonist’s hardiness by his ability to pass out drunk in a snowbank and wake up the next day breathing. John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed (Random House LLC, 2009).
I’m happy to report that I have started a new position as Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the University of Saskatchewan. From 2012-2014 I was the NiCHE Project Coordinator, and before that a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, at the University of Western Ontario. It was a great and productive experience with new websites, posters, collections, workshops, and book chapters (in HGIS methods and PEI agriculture) to show for it. Now that the NiCHE Cluster grant has concluded, its website, including The Otter ~ la loutre blog, will continue under an editorial collective.
My new fellowship is with the Sustainable Farm Systems (SFS) SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Dr. Geoffry Cunfer at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon. Here I will build on the work of the Great Plains Population and Environment Project, conducting new research in agriculture on the Great Plains/Prairies and in my own case study of Prince Edward Island. My larger research program has always focused on the limits of agro-ecosystems, from flax production on the edge of the semi-arid grasslands land to abandoned farms “going spruce” in Prince Edward Island. In this vein I will be applying the new methods of socio-ecological metabolism and particularly the Energy Return on Investment (EROI) models developed by the SFS team across five research groups in Europe, Latin America, and North America.
I am an Environmental and Digital historian interested in how global commodities influenced modern agriculture and land use in Canada and the U.S. I’m particularly interested in Canada’s “other oil,” triglycerides, and how the development of new consumer goods created a global oilseed industry, first in flax and cottonseed, but later in soybeans, sunflower, corn, and Canola. The role of the European wheat market is well known in Prairie historiography, but the rapidly growing chemical sector also helped shape the Plains during the Second Industrial Revolution. My research focuses on these transnational specialty crops that appeared first in the lower Great Lakes farm region and then reemerged in the northern Great Plains and Prairies.
Two different types of energy stores on the Plains. Photo: J. MacFadyen, August 2014
By examining the EROI of Plains agriculture, I will be building on another aspect of my recent research. My SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship focused on biomass energy and the land use patterns created by harvesting the most important perennial crop in Canada – firewood.
Flax and firewood may seem like obscure topics, but I argue that small shifts in the consumption of ordinary commodities had major ripple effects across North American landscapes. And I’ve found many like minds in Environmental History. The interest in biomass energy has caught on, if I may, as shown by the many papers on the subject at recent conferences in the field. I’ve also entered what one might even consider a concentration of historians interested in fats and oils. Here in Saskatoon – a centre for oilseed research – historians like Geoff Cunfer have written extensively about corn and cotton, Jim Clifford works on tallow in the British Empire and Patrick Chasse studies palm oil and other agricultural commodities in Guatemala. In Spain, Juan Infante and others from the Andalusian branch of the SFS team, are experts on the history of olive oil in Mediterranean agriculture.
These are just a few of the reasons I’m looking forward to this new position. There’s a lot of excellent environmental history happening here at the U of S, and I hope to continue helping to build the Canadian network here and as a volunteer editor with NiCHE.
Many Canadians had a brush with homelessness, or at least heat-lessness, over the holidays. Over half a million customers across Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick spent Christmas in the cold and dark, and ten days after the 2013 ice storm homes were still coming online. With the region currently experiencing snow storms and extreme cold temperature warnings, Canadians may be thinking about the fragility of urban energy systems and our level of preparedness for extreme weather events. (At least we seem to be intrigued by travel delays, frost quakes, ice mayors, historic frozen negatives, boiling squirt gun experiments, and of course Frozen, as well as more serious local relief efforts such as Coldest night of the year and “In from the Cold” campaigns.)
The ice storm was deemed the largest in Toronto history, but since it follows only fifteen years after a similar ice storm in Quebec and Eastern Ontario these may not be isolated 100-year events. Extreme weather events appear to be on the increase, and 2013 was a banner year. Debates over the Toronto’s preparedness and resilience are ongoing. Anthony Haines, CEO of Toronto Hydro, promised there will be discussions regarding future improvements and “there is no doubt, learning is to be had.” Winter storms can be especially risky when cold weather and power outages overlap, and historically, extreme cold has been far more lethal than floods and heat waves.
I suggest that the kind of learning “to be had” includes a broad understanding of our historical relationships with extreme weather and urban energy supplies, including food and heat. Climatologists will be working to identify the frequency of these weather events, but historical climate data also allow historians to create detailed risk-maps of extreme cold weather events in Canada over time. Historical research in energy, transportation, and urban planning may then show us how Canadians adapted to these challenges over time.
Nineteenth-century Canadians were well aware of the risks of extreme cold weather, which ranged from the ancient belief that you could “catch your death of cold” to the fate that befell most of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Remarking on the latter’s winter march from Moscow, Armand de Caulaincourt said “Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire. … Sleep comes inevitably, and to sleep is to die.”[1]
“Frozen to Death,” Montreal 1872. Source: McCord Museum
That final slumber came to many poor and homeless in Canada when fuel prices were high and temperatures very low. In January 1872, several people, including children, were found frozen to death in poor districts of Montreal, and social reformers jumped on the opportunity to illustrate the effects of urban poverty and alcoholism. The Canadian Illustrated News featured a graphic sketch of one scene discovered by the police; the officers likened the frozen babies to “lumps of marble” and a poet left the following summary:
Only two babies, mere waifs of humanity,
Huddled together, half covered with rags;
A father and mother, half plunged in insanity
By the drink from the bottle they had drained to the dregs.
What of it? Their dwelling was merely a ‘den;’
Broken windows; no firewood; not even a bed.
Can we wonder, if, with the cold atmosphere when
The frost should have numbered these babes with the dead?[2]
Railway companies jumped on other opportunities. The Grand Trunk Railway responded to the Montreal “Wood Famine” by calling foul on the city’s fuel suppliers. For decades these regulated merchants imported fuel on the St. Lawrence River, and naturally raised prices as the supplies dwindled.[3] An early freeze in the winter of 1872, meant that the price of fuel in January was about $12 per cord, or about twice what it cost in July.
The Illustrated News felt this was unfair-market value, and another image shows the city’s poor freezing to death while icy-fuel suppliers charged exorbitant amounts for firewood. As with many problems of this era, railways came to the rescue, circumventing the seasonality of river-based fuel supply, and it helped to have a disaster like the “Wood Famine” to promote new lines to wood markets.
The railway magnate Asa B. Foster gave away 100 cords of firewood, and the GTR subsidized carloads of cordwood at an eighth of its market value. These trains arrived in the ice-locked city with banners flying overhead titled “wood for the poor.” Impoverished families then warmed themselves and cooked their food over the fuel, and the paper called this firewood “more precious than gold to them.”
Like those in the 2013 ice storm, 19th century Canadians found that the right fuel at the right time is priceless. “The Wood Famine,” Montreal 1872. Source: McCord Museum
I am exploring these urban energy chains in my research, and in a recent chapter on wood energy in Canada, I have found a significant discrepancy in the data historians have used to explain energy consumption in Canada. I offer new estimates for biomass energy consumption, and I argue that Canadians remained predominantly hewers of wood (or at least burners of wood) long after the supposed “transition to fossil fuels.” One excerpt and image from that chapter seems pertinent in the aftermath of the ice storm. It shows that even in Ontario’s small mill-towns (which historians claim were among the first to abandon wood energy), a variety of fuel supplies existed cheek-by-jowl.
Part of the urban and small-town fuel footprint is visible in late nineteenth century Fire Insurance Plans. Piles of cordwood ranging in height from 6 to 12 feet were common sights in many mill yards. Certain industries were attracted to cordwood over coal, especially if cleanliness was important to the mill product. The William Hay & Company flour mill in Ailsa Craig, Middlesex County, contained three woodpiles, and the largest held over 400 cords, possibly for multiple businesses. The Crediton Flour Mill, owned by H. Switzer, was also flanked by three piles of cordwood, ranging from 4’ to 8’ high. Blacksmiths and foundries needed a wider variety of fuels, and H. C. Baird’s Eagle Foundry in Parkhill had a large cordwood pile, a small 1-storey coal shed, and a 1-storey “Coke & Sand” building. Large wood and metal fabrication companies like the Ontario Car Company in London powered their kilns, smithies, and machine shops with “wood & shavings” stored in a massive cordwood pile located beside the company’s rail siding in the 1880s. Even in urban and small-town industry, the Canadian energy landscape was very much mixed.
(for a draft copy of the entire chapter contact joshmacfadyen@gmail.com)
Cordwood in Ailsa Craig, Fire Insurance Plan (detail) 1903
Canadian homes and businesses burned large quantities of firewood that went unrecorded, and they relied on the biomass equivalent of modern utility companies. Bringing energy to urban areas has always required elaborate supply chains. Everyone needed a relationship with a supplier, billing and payment systems, transportation grids and storage depots, burning technologies and people to service them. Almost every town had “coal & wood” dealers, and in the 1870s, as Canada began its second wave of railway expansion, some lines were built, and partly subsidized, for the purpose of bringing rural firewood to urban markets.
The fragility of urban energy systems
Torontonians had a small taste of everyday life in the past this Christmas. Today we are used to controlling our energy with a switch, and never having to worry about leaving it unattended, but this is a fairly recent development in cold climates. Solid burning stoves and furnaces were the primary heating source for the majority of Canadians until the post-war period. Most of these technologies worked without electricity. Before oil and natural gas heat sources were more widely adopted and supplied by a grid, furnaces required constant supervision, and all homes with running water had to be closely monitored in the winter months.
The power outages remind us of the major problems that occur when our relatively fragile urban energy supply systems are interrupted. In the middle of a heatwave, the loss of power can lead to spoilage, dehydration, and in extreme cases, death. In an ice storm, Canadians endure property damage from fallen trees and frozen pipes, but they also face more extreme risks such as food shortages, car accidents, and exposure sometimes leading to hypothermia and death. Others try to stay warm with barbeques, generators and even coal, and instead put themselves at risk of house fires and carbon monoxide poisoning. Most public institutions and many larger businesses have generators, but demand soon outstrips supply. Restaurants but can only serve so many people when their suppliers are without power or unable to transport goods.
Twice as many people die from these cold conditions than from extreme heat in the United States.[4] The ratio is much higher in the northern states and in climates like Canada’s.
Frozen (to Death)
Most Canadians are familiar with famous cases of hypothermia such as the victims of the Franklin Expedition, the Scott Expedition, the Titanic (whose passengers technically succumbed to “cold shock” not hypothermia), or perhaps even the Saskatoon freezing deaths, but probably none of us personally knows of anyone who has frozen to death. There are several reasons for this.
First, the Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database shows that an exceedingly small proportion of Canadians die by “Exposure to Forces of Nature.” This is one reason why it seems so shocking to hear of someone who was lost in a blizzard or frozen to death, often within a stone’s throw of safety. Yet in northern climates it is still a very real concern. Of all the accidental deaths since 2000 the overwhelming majority (78 percent) died from “Exposure to Excessive Natural Cold.” Most freezing deaths are men, but some particularly disturbing recent cases have included abused women and children.
However, roughly the same number of victims perish from the cold each year as those who die by drowning, and yet we are much more aware of deaths by drowning. (Oddly, drownings are not included in the “forces of nature” category.) Most of us are willing to risk a swim in the ocean, but not many try sleeping outside in January.
The second reason you’ve probably never personally heard of someone who has died in this way is because of the demography of cold weather victims. A breakdown of the data shows that the largest group of drowning victims are teens and twenty-somethings, but victims of cold weather are older. Most are over the age of 50. And whereas drownings happen at the resorts and beaches of the middle class, cold weather deaths are probably more likely to occur in alleys, abandoned buildings, and other residences of the poor and homeless.
Accidental deaths by drowning and freezing in Canada, by age (the reason you’ve probably never heard of someone freezing to death.) Source: Canadian Vital Statistics, Death Database
Toronto Mayor Rob Ford noticed similar demographics at the city’s warming stations during the outage. “For some reason or another it seems like it’s seniors are the ones that don’t want to go. They just want to tough it out.”
It’s possible that some older residents were made of tougher mettle, but it’s more likely that they are less mobile and less able to “sleep over” at places like warming centres. For those without family the challenges can be threatening. One 76-year old Cancer patient opted to stay put in his freezing basement over the holidays, because his diagnosis (not to mention a fallen electrical wire in his driveway) made leaving riskier than staying. Still, this Austrian survivor of the Second World War claims it was only “the fourth or fifth worst Christmas of my life.” He had a small stove and his son brought some firewood from Waterloo, but still the basement hovered around 10 degrees.
Where do you go for fuel?
For all of their conveniences, we forget how much we rely on hydroelectricity and carbon supply chains (both biomass and fossil fuels) for staying warm and fed in the twenty-first century. Ice storms are a poignant reminder, and when they cause outages for more than a few hours, people start looking for things to burn.
Most gas and oil furnaces are useless without electricity to power the burners and circulate the heat, and most new gas and even wood pellet fireplaces require electricity for the same. Homeowners with open hearths and solid-fuel burning stoves are in luck (apartment dwellers are not), but only if they have a supply of dry firewood and kindling at hand.
People quickly discover that firewood is not a simple commodity. Burning furniture and fabrics is an expensive way to keep warm. They disappear in minutes and do not give off much heat. Firewood requires processing, and there is a surprising range of quality and price depending on whether it is hardwood or softwood, dry or “green,” blocked or split. People offering “free” firewood in the middle of an ice storm may seem like heroes, but if it consists of large, green, ice-covered trees and tree limbs like the wood in this picture it is more yard waste than fuel.
“Free firewood from trees damaged by the ice storm was offered in Oakville, Ont., on Christmas Day 2013.” Photo: RICHARD BUCHAN / THE CANADIAN PRESS
Others, like the Toronto-area businesses who advertised “Mennonite Firewood” in response to the ice storm (and every weather report since), show that the commodities – and the marketing techniques – of the nineteenth century energy chains live on 141 years later.
Kijiji ad for “Mennonite Firewood” January 5, 2013
[1] Armand-Augustin-Louis Caulaincourt, With Napoleon in Russia translated by Jean Hanoteau (New York, Morrow 1935).
[2] Alpha, “Frozen to Death,” Canadian Illustrated News, January 27, 1872, p. 50.
[3] Robert Sweeny and Goupe de recherche sur l’histoire des milieux d’affaires de Montreal. Les Relations Ville/Campagne: Le Cas du Bois de Chauffage (Montreal: Montreal Business History Group, 1988), cv.
[4] Christopher R. Adams, “Impacts of Temperature Extremes,” Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere < http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/socasp/weather1/adams.html>, accessed 1 January, 2014; Edwin M. Kilbourne, “Heat Waves and Hot Environments” in Noji, Eric K., editor, The Public Health Consequences of Disasters, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997: 245-269, 270-286.
Historians are faced with an unprecedented data recall problem. New sources are being digitized and discussed on the web at such a rate that the notes for your current history project are out of date shortly after you write them. The most successful academics are not the ones who know the most information, but the ones who know where to find it and how to analyse it. They are the connectors; making connections between the right people and the best stories at the right time.
This post demonstrates another way you can catalogue the historical information you already know (your library) and access it when you need it the most (1 hour before your writing deadline). Often we find ourselves looking for a reference when the library is closed and all you have are the books on your shelf. It’s a needle-and-haystack situation. Or, maybe a more generous way to frame the problem is that the books we have on hand are the most important contributions to our work, and it could be extremely useful to have a searchable index of the books in a certain collection.
Google Books lets us search and preview the full text of an enormous collection of books, but often this kind of search is too broad. Historians spend their careers screening useful books out from the rest and collecting books according to their research interests. It’s often more useful to search the books in your own collection than it is to search every book that has ever been digitized. Google Books offers this search function too, but it takes a certain amount of prep work. This is the first of a few posts on digital tools for environmental history that will appear on The Otter throughout the fall.
The Library at NiCHE
After cataloguing and organizing over 500 books using the U.S. Library of Congress system, we set out to create a digital catalogue of the NiCHE library that allowed for wireless and off-campus searching using Google Books. Part of our jobs at Western included (Mike) cataloging and (Josh) sitting next to NiCHE’s massive library of over 500 books on history and environment. (Josh has been unable to get any meaningful work done because he keeps getting distracted by one of your books!) Having the books catalogued and organized was a good way to find one when you needed it, but visitors and other people at Western mostly have no clue what books are in the collection. Rather than taking a shot in the dark, looking up a book’s call number, and then getting access to the library in hopes that it’s there, we thought the collection should be catalogued in an online library like Google Books (other examples include LibraryThing, Readerware, Collectorz, GuruLib, and Goodreads).
The reading room
It’s relatively easy to sign up for an account with one of these digital library apps, and entering your titles one at a time is a snap. Of course, entering them one hundred at a time sounds even better, no? This is easier than it sounds. Most books printed in the last forty years were issued a bar code containing their ISBN, a number that ensures you are cataloging the exact title, author, edition (and even binding type) of the book in your hand. The bar code can be scanned with a USB scanner, webcam, tablet, or smartphone. We used an iPad from Western’s Digital History Lab. Over eighty percent of the catalogue was scannable leaving less than a hundred books to be manually entered to our Google Books library.
One of the tools we used for this cataloging process was Zbar scanner, an app for smartphones and tablets that reads barcodes and converts them to ISBN numbers that can be uploaded to Google Books.
If you have never really used a bar code reader or app (such was the case with Mike), then the first experience of creating your digital catalogue can be a bit frustrating. You will need to set time aside for downloading the app and doing a few test runs to make sure things are working properly. It will also take a few books to get the knack of how to hold your device and place your book for fast and easy scanning. Do not fear. The rate and ease at which you are able to scan your books will grow exponentially. Depending on the size and age of your library, it could take you significantly less time to digitize your entire library than it does to read one book. Once your library is created, adding new books is a snap and can be done from anywhere in the world using just about any device with an internet connection.
Basic steps:
1. Create a Google account, if you don’t have one, or since ours is a shared library we decided to create a new account called “nichelibrary”
Paul Sutter was here
2. You can either enter the titles of the book manually by searching for it as you would in a library catalogue
3. Or you can use Zbar scanner on your phone or tablet to catalogue your books more quickly
Zbar scanner app for mobile devices.
4. Tap the camera icon to activate the scanner and hold the phone over the bar code on the book.
Aim for the bar code
5. The app will recognize the bar code and the ISBN will automatically appear for the book
Scanning result
6. You can then check on Google or Amazon to see if the bar code scanned properly and found the correct book
Check the ISBN
7. Then you can click back 2 levels to get back to your collection (NiCHE Library)
All scanned ISBNs
8. Watch out for obscured or damaged bar codes
Obscured bar code
9. Go back to the list of numbers under the collection name tap the new message icon to send an email with the latest books you scanned and a csv file that can be opened in Excel.
10. Open Google Books and sign in to your Google Account.
11. Go to “My Library” and add a “new shelf”
12. Click on the newly added shelf and then click the gear on the right side and select “Add by ISBN or ISSN”
13. Copy and paste the ISBNs from the csv file and click “Add Books”
14. Now you can sort your books, add comments, and… search them. Underneath your profile on the left side you should see a box that says “Search My Library.”
Results
Now you have essentially created a catalogue of all the books on your shelf, and a searchable index to every one of your books in Google’s collection. It is now possible to log into your account, go to My Library under Google Books, and select “Search my library” to find references in the books we have at hand.
For instance, if we try a search for “otter” in the NiCHE library we see that the word appears in 6 out of the 495 books in the collection. (After you all publish your next books we expect references to The Otter will rise substantially.) If you can’t remember where that reference to otters went in Laurel McDowell’s textbook, or if you couldn’t remember if it was in her book or Neil Forkey’s, you can use Google Books to find the reference (and then go to the shelf and read it in hard copy, like a human).
It is also possible to search other people’s collections (provided they haven’t made their collections private). Give it a try. Go to this link to search the NiCHE library. Hopefully your book(s) are there; if not, send us one! Search the shelves for content related to your topic. Again, thumbing through a large specialized collection like this is often more useful than searching the entire English cannon if you’re looking for research that resonates with a community like Canadian environmental historians.
Most people who visit small towns in Ontario tend to think of them as sleepy villages comprised of a few nice restaurants, B&Bs, and people who live there because they enjoy the sense of community and family roots. We know that these settlements exist because they were the location of a mill seat or they were situated roughly a day’s journey by horse & wagon from the nearest urban centre. These were service towns for the farming and resource communities of Ontario before motor vehicles and paved roads made it easier to access more distant cities. The mills and taverns are now replaced by upscale restaurants and boutiques; necessary infrastructure for a growing group of “rurban” residents who want to live, or spend weekends, within a couple of hours drive from their places of work.
Contestoga, Ontario, c. 1900 showing village buildings and flax mill and pond. Source: Woolwich Heritage Foundation, Waterloo Historical Society.
c. 1900, photographer Oscar Stroh stood behind the Schweitzer Hotel on King Street (now Sawmill Road), Conestogo and faced northwest to take this picture of the flax mill on Glasgow Street North. The mill is gone but the Ebel home remains. (Waterloo Region Generations)
It might seem from these preconceptions of rural and small town Ontario that they were relatively stable and static places. Sure, some services declined and local businesses could no longer satisfy all the shoppers from the surrounding area, but generally these towns changed very slowly and the streetscape remains similar to the way it was perhaps a century ago.
Actually the shape and structure of life in these towns was far from static, and in my PhD dissertation I used the case of a relatively obscure plant to demonstrate how. Flax was used for both its fibre and seed, and in Ontario where the fibre was processed by a network of small two-room flax mills it coloured the landscape with its blue flowers and brought hundreds and even thousands of labourers to the fields and mill yards to harvest and process the crop each August. But this post is about organizing historical data for small towns where change over time should be easy to track, but isn’t.
Some time ago I tried organizing my research on the industry in these towns and compiling the owners’ names and locations in a simple database. Again, I thought it should have been easy. Flax was a small industry, it was usually dominated by a single family with multiple mills, and thanks to censuses, directories, and rural newspapers there was a pretty good run of data on the owners and outputs. But this was much more difficult than I expected.
There was a lot of hype around Canadian flax during the American Civil War, and both the production and the number of mills grew from almost zero to dozens in a few years. But every time I found a new list of growers or millers, it was significantly different from earlier lists. Both the names of owners and the location of the mills had changed. And so I attempted to map some of these changes in a historical Geographical Information System (GIS). GIS was a lot of work to learn and although it helped demonstrate where, I needed other sources to explain why there and why then?
It turns out Ontario farmers hated the risk and labour associated with growing this plant, and so millers themselves had to produce much of their own raw material in a system that was sometimes called flax factorship. I explain that in other writings, but here I want to show that it might seem like millers hated growing flax, too. The location of mills in the late 1860s was in roughly the same part of southern Ontario as it was thirty or forty years later, and aggregate census data would tell you it was, but comparing the following two maps of detailed mill locations suggests that it wasn’t.
Just by uploading six different databases into this Google Maps Engine Lite app (see instructions at The Geospatial Historian) we can see that the central concentration of mills was moving westward across Ontario every year between 1865 and 1911. This was partly about the access to raw material – flax – but also about the suitability of small town business communities for incorporating flax production into the gamut of primary and secondary industries.
Flax mills were notoriously flammable, which contributed to the risk of operating a mill and the turnover in ownership over
Burning of a Zurich flax barn, 1901. From the Collection of the Huron County Museum & Historic Gaol.
the years. It also contributed to their prominent place in Charles Goad’s and other Fire Insurance Plans and in another post I will show how mapping these sources helps us reconstruct the surprisingly busy and dynamic texture of small town streetscapes.
These maps show how a variety of sources may be used for determining the location of a flax mill in any given year. For 1865 and 1869 I used business directories, but 1871 was from the industrial schedules of the manuscript census (provided by Kris Inwood at the University of Guelph) and 1897 was from the business accounts of the largest flax miller at that time, James Livingston (available at Sir Adam Beck Archives in Baden, ON). Of course, using a variety of routinely generated sources helps identify errors and anomalies in other data. The different variables inside these datasets also help show the nuances and spatial trends within an industry like flax milling. Not only was it limited to this part of Canada and shifting slightly each year, but the blue markers show concentrations within the concentration by differentiating mills with more outputs. In 1897, the Dominion Linseed Oil mill was importing almost all of the flax seed in Ontario to make oil, paint, and varnish, but clearly the mills closest to Baden were much larger flax seed producers than the new mills in Huron County (The same kinds of trends can be presented by size of workforce or other variables.)
Not only would the aggregate census be unhelpful for the precise location of these mills, the variation between census years was often significant. Even within two or three years there was a great deal of variation in mill location. Turning off one or two layers on each map shows the places where new mills were popping up and disappearing even between census years. The 1897 map (above) suggests one reason for this. Even though there were many small new mills opening each year in Western Ontario, there were also many small mills closing. It was an extremely competitive industry. And finally, the economic infrastructure and industrial landscape of Western Ontario was well suited to emerging new businesses like flax mills, even if they were risky ventures and prone to fire and financial disasters. Mills abounded in these towns and many mills and their sources of motive power and labour could be converted into a flax mill relatively easily. Lumber mills were particularly easy to convert to flax mills, and often proprietors of one were involved in the other.
Once a jumping off point for swimmers, this lighthouse is now 600m from the channel at St Peters Harbour PEI due to coastal accretion. Historical photos courtesy of Carol Livingstone, PEI Lighthouse Society.
At the start of the summer NiCHE asked for our favourite and most meaningful photos from summer research or vacation. OK I’ll bite. I’ve seen some amazing landscapes and images so far this year, being lucky (or maybe foolish) enough to have travelled from Vancouver Island, BC to Twillingate Island, Newfoundland, and spent at least a few hours in seven other provinces. But the most meaningful photos to my research have been of the lighthouse at St. Peters Harbour, Prince Edward Island, the earliest in 1917, another in 1965 (both courtesy of Carol Livingstone), and the latest taken by me in July 2013.
I’ve never actually come across a lighthouse in my research, but something keeps bringing me back to the north shore of PEI, and to St. Peters Bay where this structure is testament to a changing coastline. My research is mostly about how Atlantic Canadian farmers procured fertilizers and fuels from wildlands, but I’ve also been interested in the use of aerial photographs for studying both land use and landscape change. Alan MacEachern and I discussed St Peters and other North Shore landscapes in Time Flies, a poster at the American Society for Environmental History in Toronto this year, and I recently wrote about mussel-mud digging farmers a little further up St. Peters Bay in Land and Sea. The aerial photographs show that the landscape has changed dramatically since 1935, but it wasn’t until I visited this particular lighthouse — ironically difficult to spot on a vertical air photo — that I realized how extensively this coastline was shaped by the sea.
Walking along the shore west of St. Peters Bay, it does not seem obvious that the early twentieth century beach was once over 150 metres landward. But the location of a square tapered lighthouse nestled deep in the sand dunes, and the ruins of a wharf in a shallow barachois pond beyond that provide some clues. Photographs and aerial photos from the last ninety-six years show that the lighthouse was once flanked by flat beaches and the St. Peters harbour fishing wharf (see 1917). Sand was constantly collecting on these shores, banking around the lighthouse by 1965 and filling in the channel to the Bay. The wharf site was abandoned in 1951, but the lighthouse remained an ever-fixed mark, a datum in the rising sand. When I was exploring the site a woman told me that her grandfather once fished from the wharf and her uncles used to jump from the top railing into the nearby channel. Now the wharf is mostly buried and the lighthouse is 600 metres from the channel leading into St. Peters Bay.
The accretion of sand around the mouth of the harbour has long been a problem for local residents. For most of the history of this landscape there was of course no lighthouse or wharf at all. When the Mi’Kmaw first appeared on this location the ocean was much lower and further away, and Prince Edward Island itself wasn’t even an island.[1] By 1719, Havre Saint-Pierre was resettled by Acadians, becoming the original and most important Acadian fishing village on what they called Isle Saint Jean. In 1752 French travel writer Thomas Pichon complained about the limited access for large ships and reported a “sand bar that forms at the mouth of the harbour.” The main approach to unwanted accretion is to build large berms in places that would collect the sand before it entered the harbour. These improvements were demanded by PEI officials in 1857 and carried out by Ottawa in the late nineteenth century. But still, engineers could not keep the sand from covering the wharf, entering the channel, and drifting over the lighthouse walls. Thus, St. Peters lighthouse is slowly going the way of Anakin Skywalker’s movie-set home (to which many say good riddance); Anne of Green Gables’ house in Cavendish, PEI, seems safe enough for now.
Lighthouses were critical infrastructure in the nineteenth century. To many travellers they were more familiar and important than traffic lights are to us today, but now that we mostly travel by land, and navigate by GPS, lighthouses are at risk of disappearing. The risk is not just financial but also environmental. Most PEI lighthouses only make the news when their sandy perch is threatened by coastal erosion. As Federal funding disappears and climate change exacerbates coastal change, the outlook for lighthouses is darker than a night of heavy fog. But some lighthouses actually find themselves further from the ocean every year, and in St. Peters Harbour the lighthouse is a beacon for another kind of landscape change.
The more we learn about climate change, fragile coastlines, and our own unpreparedness for flooding (for example in Calgary and Toronto), the more we know we shouldn’t be building our houses on the sand. Coastal erosion has caused a major disturbance to estuarine habitats and human infrastructure in Atlantic Canada since the early twentieth century. Many parts of PEI’s north shore are eroding at rates of over 1 metre per year, and sea level rise and the increased frequency and intensity of storms in the twenty-first century suggest it will get worse. The human response to this information has not been promising. The proliferation of residential, recreational and other infrastructure in the St. Peters Harbour area suggests that people will build as close to sensitive coastal areas as possible.
St Peters Harbour Map – Showing development and lighthouse, 2010.
People will also build over heritage areas, perhaps even unwittingly, without a better understanding of human ecology and these historical landscapes. Tracing these shifting landscapes is no simple task. The Greenwich section of the Prince Edward Island National Park is located across the mouth of the St. Peters Harbour, and although it presents an excellent historical and archaeological survey of the inhabitants of St. Peters Bay, it does not identify the location of important nearby sites like the 18th century village of Havre Saint-Pierre, the 19th century harbour improvements, or the twentieth century Provincial mussel mud dredge. Environmental history, including methods such as the interpretation of aerial photographs and historical maps, can help identify these sites and their significance to local ecosystems.
Environmental history is required for more than a commemoration of lighthouses and Mi’Kmaw, Acadian, and Canadian homes and fisheries, but also for an understanding of human ecosystems over time. As Matthew Hatvany has argued, coastal change is highly complex and requires an awareness of both long run history and the ways we think about science.
Postscript: I discovered that the title I was planning to use for this piece, “sea change,” was scooped by Lapham’s Quarterly on the same day (The LQ podcast Out at Sea features some exquisite readings by Lewis Lapham). “Washed up” or “Beached” lighthouse didn’t have the same ring to them, so I went with Swallowed by the Seashore.
[1] Kate MacQuarrie, “A River Ran Through it,” Island Magazine 49 (Spring-Summer 2001): 16-25.
Forty years ago, on Christmas Eve 1972, NASA released a gift to the public, the “Blue Marble” image of the whole Earth from space. This photograph was unplanned and originally unwanted by NASA, but it quickly became one of the most reproduced images on Earth.[1]
The Blue Marble: View of the earth as seen by the Apollo 17 crew traveling toward the moon. Source, Wikipedia
The astronauts aboard Apollo 17 were the first humans to find themselves in that sweet spot between the earth and the sun that offers a full view of the planet. It was an unprecedented photo op at 28,000 miles, and it has never occurred since. Other photos and compilations were made of Earth from space, but there is something about the clarity, colour, and serendipity of this photograph that sets it apart. It became the iconic image of the environmentalist movement and the epitome of remote sensing in the twentieth century.
In part three of our series on practical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) guides for historians we look at air photos and remote sensing. Remote sensing is the observation of any phenomenon from a distance, or a study made without handling the subject. In a way, all historians practice it. In geospatial terms, remote sensing is the analysis of geographic data captured from the air or space.
We have always been capable of imagining the landscape from above. One of the earliest maps is an oblique aerial view of the Paleolithic town Catalhoyuk, and bird’s eye views of cities became popular in early modern Europe. Of course these were stylized maps and not actually based on remote sensing. But there is a universal desire to see the world from above, or at least to understand the things we can’t reach. Some of the first Canadian maps created from remote sensing data were navigational charts of coasts and river bottoms. In the late nineteenth century, photogrammetry was used for mapping, especially in mountain terrain. Almost as soon as humans took to the air and to space, aerial and satellite photography blanketed the globe and transformed twentieth century cartography.
In this post we deal mostly with aerial photographs, although recent work has also been done on using satellite imagery in historical research.
What can historians do with historical air photos?
In Nature’s Economy, Donald Worster wrote about the historical impact of seeing the planet’s “thin film of life” in the Blue Marble photograph.[2] The earth we touch, taste, and consume seems universal and unlimited, but sensing the planet from above reveals limits and interdependent systems. From 28,000 miles we are fragile, unique, and alone.
Most historians will be interested in historical images taken a little closer to Earth; there are many and they have many uses. Good historical land use data matters, and remote sensing is one of the historian’s and historical geographer’s primary documents for understanding environmental change.
Air photos are also commonly used as supplements to other historical research. For instance, a 1958 air photo of a small island in Prince Edward Island National Park, shows that the island had quite recently been connected to the mainland by a causeway. A later image of the same landscape showed that the island eroded more quickly as a result. By comparing the three images (before, during, and after 1958) in a GIS, historians can measure the precise rate of erosion before and after the construction of the causeway. Thus, air photos contain information about place, single events that occurred in that place, and more gradual trends such as coastline change. All of this is possible with three photos.
First you’ll need some air photos of your area of interest. There are two main forms of aerial photographs, vertical and oblique. Vertical photos are taken at a 90-degree angle and oblique at something closer to 45 degrees. Both forms were used for surveying and mapping. Vertical photos offered a less distorted image of the terrain, and these became standard practice in the inter-war period.
The good news is that Canada was a leader in aerial photography, so its collections date back to the 1920s and it has a lot of them – a lot, as in over 6 million. That’s also the bad news. Locating the air photos for the right time and the right place for your research can be daunting. Most of these documents can be found at the National Air Photo Library (NAPL), but localized collections also exist in government offices, university libraries, and some museums.
Managing the collection will also take some planning; the earliest air photos were taken at a scale of about 1:15,000 (one 9 inch photo represents over 2 miles of terrain) and overlapped, so a single Prairie township occupied up to 50 photos. A GIS is an excellent tool for displaying, managing, and eventually analyzing the images. If you plan to incorporate air photos into a GIS, be aware that large numbers of high resolution images will take up a lot of processing power.
Fortunately, most air photo collections are labeled and well organized, and in some cases they are searchable using a map index. The Canadian National Air Photo Library’s catalogue is available at NAPL Online. This search engine is a bit tricky to get used to (see search tips), but once you’ve identified your research area on the map, it allows you to display the approximate location and outlines for each air photo. Many of NAPL’s images have already been digitized, and the engine will show low-resolution previews of any digitized photo. From there you will have to record the call numbers and request copies from the library, at a cost.
Other providers offer historical imagery for free, such as the Government of Prince Edward Island, although getting the highest resolution may still require ordering originals from NAPL. See the working list of aerial photo collections in Canadian university, provincial, and municipal archives, at the end of this post.
What programs do you need to view air photos?
This depends on what file format the digitized photos came in and what you want to do with them. There are three main types of digitized air photos, and GIS users group them under “raster” based data.
The first and most common is a 2-dimensional raster image (for example .jpg) without geographic coordinates. These images are no different than a photo of your friends on Facebook. They can be opened in any browser or image preview software, and they are easy to explore. However, since they lack geographic coordinates, you could not incorporate them into a GIS and have them line up with other features. In order to do this you must either “georeference” or “orthorectify” the image which converts it into the second and third raster type.
Georeferenced air photos are the same as the 2-dimensional images, except they have been given geographic coordinates and made to fit the 3-dimensional curve of the earth. They are then saved as a new file format (for example TIFF and GeoTIFF are non-proprietary formats that will open in a variety of GIS programs). We will explain how to assign control points and georeference images in another guide, because it applies to any historical map or image that you might want to incorporate into your GIS. However, unlike maps, air photos are images captured with a lens, and like all photographs they contain distortions. Distances and shapes become distorted as features move away from the centre of the image toward the edges. If geographic precision and accurate measurements are important to your research then you need to consider the third format, orthoimages.
Orthorectified images, often just called “orthos,” are 2-dimensional images that have been given both geographic coordinates and geometric correction to account for the curvature of the earth and distortion in the images. Most GIS software will orthorectify air photos, but it requires more than just control points. Information on the altitude, lens type, and angle of the camera are required for each photo. This was usually recorded in flight logs, but in very early air photos it might not be possible to ascertain. Again, if your main interest is in observing features in the landscape or general land use over time, orthorectification is not required.
Georeferenced and orthorectified images are most commonly saved in GeoTiff (.tif) format, and these are easily opened by GIS programs such as Quantum GIS, ArcGIS, and MapInfo. Other formats include MrSID, an early raster format popular among GIS users, and more recently KMZ (a zipped Keyhole Markup Language format). Images stored as KMZ open in Google Earth and allow quick and easy overlays and measurement.
Go ahead, try it!
The University of Waterloo Map Library has an excellent collection of aerial photos from the Waterloo Region and beyond. To explore their collection of digitized air photos you can navigate through the Air Photos Digitization Project. Once you’ve found an area you would like to open in a GIS or Google Earth you can choose a file format and download it. For example, try downloadingthe KMZ in this section of rural Woolwich township (as they instruct, remove .zip from the filename after downloading) and open it in Google Earth. You will be able to zoom in and out, tilt for a 3D effect, and add layers from Google’s collection.
The Waterloo example is one of the best in Canada at the moment, but as you will see from the list below, almost every Canadian centre has an air photo collection. Go ahead and explore, and if you find some images of the world you know from above, you might want to contact the library and the other guides in this series for help.
Josh MacFadyen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Ontario and the Project Coordinator for NiCHE.
NB: Since writing this post, it also came to my attention that York has an extensive collection of low-level oblique aerial photographs of conservation areas in Ontario taken by Lou Wise.
The University of Waterloo Library has compiled a list of all the Canadian municipal governments that provide open GIS data online. The municipalities offering air photos include Fredericton, Nanaimo, North Okanagan, North Vancouver, Surrey, and Vancouver.
Sean Kheraj created Nature’s Past as one of the many digital initiatives of the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE). As he explains in this episode: “To help researchers in the field of environmental history get acquainted with the uses of [HGIS] technology, the University of Calgary Press and the Network in Canadian History and Environment have published a new book called, Historical GIS Research in Canada. You can read our review of the the book here.” The podcast was a really lovely way to cap off this excellent project.
