Mapping The Mountains
Topographer James McArthur and assistant W.S. Drewry carry photographic equipment to a mountaintop in 1887.
In the fall of 1910, an inconspicuous wooden box, measuring about a foot square, arrived in the basement shipping rooms of Department of the Interior, the Ottawa-based federal agency responsible for monitoring the settlement of western Canada. A red label pasted diagonally across one side of the box read: Glass. Handle Carefully. Although the railway manifest provided no other clues as to the contents, experienced clerks in the room knew the box contained several hundred exposed photographic glass negatives--an entire season's worth of painstaking surveys in one of the most rugged and inhos...