Books by Jay Sherwood

In this highly visual and authoritative work, award-winning author and historian Jay Sherwood returns to the Alberta/BC boundary and the survey of one of Canada's most stunningly rugged landscapes.

In 1917, during Canadas 50th anniversary, there was little celebration in the country as it entered the fourth year of World War I. This conflict had a tremendous economic and emotional impact on the various levels of government in the country and on the lives of many people in Canada. In western Canada, despite the turmoil and uncertain outcome of the war, one of the countrys major surveying projects continued. In 1913 the Alberta, British Columbia, and Dominion governments began surveying and marking the boundary between the two provinces along the Rocky Mountains. British Columbias representative, A O Wheeler, scaled many of the peaks along the Great Divide and did the phototopographic surveying. R W Cautley, the representative for the Alberta and Dominion governments, mapped the boundary through the economically important mountain passes. During the years of 1913-1917, the Boundary Commission surveyors mainly covered the area from Kicking Horse Pass to the United States border.

At the age of sixteen, Ernest Lamarque travelled from England to North America, to begin a life as a Victorian adventurer. Born in 1879 and orphaned at age twelve, he would go on to become an artist, a writer and a surveyor, creating some of the earliest visual records of the people of remote regions of Canada. At seventeen, Lamarque started working as a clerk at Hudson''s Bay Company posts in Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. He recorded his adventures through paintings, sketches and photographs, which would later become invaluable historical resources -- the artwork and photography he created during his three years at the Ile-a-la-Crosse district, for example, are among the earliest visual records of the Metis of the area. As one of British Columbia''s best-known surveyors, he located a route across northern BC during the Bedaux Expedition. He also travelled along and photographed the historic First Nations Davie Trail as part of his work on the location of the initial Alaska Highway. In 1914, Lamarque participated in the important D A Thomas coal transportation survey in northern Alberta that was halted by the start of World War I. This book reveals remote regions of western Canada and its people and places through the eyes of a self-taught man. Utilising unpublished artwork, photographs and written accounts, author Jay Sherwood tells the story of Lamarque''s varied, unusual and interesting life.