Canada Descriptive Atlas, Ottawa, Rand McNally Color Maps, 1922

The Piece

Canada Descriptive Atlas, issued by direction of the Hon. Charles Stewart, Minister of Immigration and Colonization, Ottawa, Canada, 1922. Pictorial paper wrappers printed in chocolate brown with a double rule border in orange and black, the title in cream, and a single maple leaf in full autumn color at the center with its stem curving down into the imprint.

The maps are the reason to own it. All of them are color lithographed by Rand McNally and Company of Chicago, printed in the soft salmon, sage and buff of American commercial cartography of the period, and each carries its own scale bar and plate number. North America at 575 statute miles to the inch, with the Dominion picked out in rose against a yellow United States. Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland at 245 to the inch, from Rand McNally's New Eleven by Fourteen map. Ontario at 133 to the inch, running from Lake Erie up to Hudson Bay. Quebec at 33. New Brunswick and part of Quebec at 26. Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and part of New Brunswick at 26, with Sable Island floating alone in the Atlantic.

Look at the Dominion map and Newfoundland is a separate country, outlined in its own color. It stayed that way until 1949.

Between the maps run halftone photographs chosen to sell a place: the Quebec Bridge carrying the Canadian National Railways across the St Lawrence, the Dominion Observatory at Ottawa, a tobacco field in western Ontario with pickers working the rows, a logging train in British Columbia, hydraulic gold workings in the Yukon, and a studio portrait of a young woman in a white cap with a sheaf of wheat across her arm, captioned A Modern Ruth.

At the back, five dense columns of type: the population of every Canadian city, town and principal village according to the census of 1921. Canada, 8,788,341. Toronto 521,893. Winnipeg 181,646. Vancouver 117,217. Calgary 63,305. Edmonton 58,821. Then down through the small places, Athabasca at 425, Gimli at 609, Shoal Lake at 750.

History & Provenance

This is a recruitment document. Canada wanted people, and the Department of Immigration and Colonization existed to go and get them. Every page is doing a job: the climate is dry and invigorating, the valleys are fertile, the soil grows wheat, there is oil near Norman on the Mackenzie found in the fall of 1920, there is pulp wood that needs only transportation, and the grazing value of the great prairies is now attracting attention. Even the photograph of the girl with the wheat sheaf is an argument.

The cover dates it to 1922 and the minister named on it narrows it further. Charles Stewart was born at Strabane, Ontario on 26 August 1868 and died at Ottawa on 6 December 1946. He was Premier of Alberta from 30 October 1917 to 13 August 1921, lost the province to the United Farmers, and went to Ottawa, where Mackenzie King took him into cabinet in December 1921 as Minister of the Interior and Mines. He held Immigration and Colonization from 20 February 1922 until 17 August 1923. So this atlas cannot have been issued before late February of 1922, and the title page year closes the other end.

The timing matters. This is Canada after the war and before the Depression, in the stretch when the prairie provinces were still filling and the railways were still pushing north. The Yukon section is candid about it in a way the rest of the book is not: Dawson City founded 1896, still the capital, the population reduced considerably from the great days of 1898, the whole territory down to about nine thousand people.

One note for a buyer. This is a government colonization pamphlet written in 1922, and the section on the Northwest Territories describes the people living there in the terms of that time, which are not the terms anyone would use now. It is offered as a historical document.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Six Rand McNally color maps from 1922, clean and bright, in a book whose binding has already let go. That is the whole proposition and it is a strong one. The paper the maps are printed on has held its color far better than the wrappers have, and the salmon and sage palette of that period is exactly what people frame.

It reads as a historical object too. A government pamphlet printed to persuade Europeans and Americans to move to Canada, naming the minister who signed off on it, listing every village in the country by population, and mapping Newfoundland as a foreign nation. Open at the Dominion map under glass and it does real work on a wall of maps or in a study.

Be clear about the condition. This is not a sound book and it will not become one. It is a set of good maps and a readable document in a cover that is coming apart, priced accordingly, and what happens to it next is up to whoever buys it.