Fire Canoe - How The West Was Won

Tickets: $15/person   For more info and tickets

Canadians often ask how did we manage to secure so much territory?

At  the middle of the 19th century, as fathers of a Canadian Confederation  attempted to cobble together a nation of four English- and  French-speaking settlements in the eastern half of North America, the  rest of what would eventually become the Canadian West sat apparently  untamed and available. What defence was there against Fenian incursions?  How could Hudson’s Bay Co. trading posts deflect American expansionism?  What force could hope to out-flank U.S. Civil War armies just across  the undefended border?

Steamboats, that’s what! Or, as aboriginal people called them “fire canoes.” In his book, ,  historian Ted Barris brings the first-hand accounts of captains,  stevedores, engineers, firemen, immigrants, soldiers and carpetbaggers  who travelled the inland waterways of the prairies between 1859 and the  turn of the century. The tales of their sudden…