The Canadian Northwest in 1811: a study in the historical geography of the old northwest of the fur trade on the eve of the first agricultural settlement

The fur traders of 1811 saw the Northwest as three distinct regions: New South Wales [Hudson Bay Lowlands], the Stony Region [C'anadian Shield] and the Great [Interiorj Plains. To them, the least important of these was New South Wales which was by then functioning primarily as a base from which the Hudson's Bay Company conducted its trade in the Northwest. It was relatively poor in both furs and provisions. Except for migrating ducks and geese, game was both scarce and unpredictable and the three factories maintained there by the company were largely dependent upon provisions from Europe and pemmican from the interior.Apart from the forested margin along its western edge, particularly in the Lake Athabasca area, the Stony Region had always been relatively poor in furs and provisions but, by 1811, it was becoming so hunted out that it was coming to be regarded as more of a barrier than as a productive region in itself - a barrier which had to be crossed to reach the rich provision areas of the grasslands and fur countries of the northern plains. Many of the natives of this area, taking advantage of their geographical position, became "middlemen" and carried the furs and provisions of wealthier countries across their homeland to trade on Hudson Bay.The broken rivers of the Stony Region added to its barrier- like appearance. navigable, river and Mackenzie. In sharp contrast were the three large, highly systems of the Great Plains, the Red, Saskatchewan, These not only enabled the traders to exploit the furs and provisions of the Great Plains but also the fur lands along the western margin of the Stony Region. Two important routes enabled the traders to cross the Stony Region to enter the rivers of the Great Plains. One led from Fort William to Lake Winnipeg and the other from York Factory to Lake Winnipeg. Each was approached from one of the two great waterways which led from the Atlantic into the heart of North America, the Saint Lawrence - Great Lakes system and Hudson Strait and Bay. By 1811, each entrance was controlled by a single fur monopoly, the Great Lakes by the North West Company and Hudson Bay by the Hudson's Bay Company. The latter route was the more economic and the North West Company was then attempting to come to an agreement with the Hudson's Bay Company in order to be able to use it as well.In the Northwest, itself, the two companies competed side by side nearly everywhere in the Red and Saskatchewan countries and in much of the Stony Region. In the Athabasca [ Mackenzi l basin Country, however, the North West Company had so far succeeded in excluding the Hudson's Bay Company from this, the richest fur area in the whole Northwest. The Canadian Company also enjoyed a monopoly in the area beyond the Rockies known as New Caledonia, in which it was then extending its activities.Most of the important trading posts were situated near good fisheries. Exceptions were the bayside factories and a number of posts near the open plains where buffalo were plentiful. All of the principal provision depots and goods stores in the interior were established on lakes forming Part of the "Valley of the Lakes" which separated the Stony Region from the Great Plains. These were Rainy Lake House, Fort Bas- de -la- Riviere, Fort Cumberland, Fort Ile -a -la- Crosse and Fort Chipewyan. In each case, the provisions were brought down stream to the depot with the minimum of effort. Ducks and geese were also plentiful along these lakes during the spring and autumn. The lakeside posts, in common with most posts in the Northwest, were situated near the river junctions. Other posts were usually placed near a sharp elbow in a river or perhaps along its headwaters. In each of the latter cases, the house would probably also be near a portage or an overland Pass. Fierce competition between rival factions led to some fairly irrational choices of location as well.Generally speaking, relations between the trading factions were best where the Indians were most hostile and poorest where the Indians were most friendly. That is, they were best on the plains, where the Indians were not dependent upon the traders and could afford to be reckless in their dealings with them, and poorest in the forest, where the inhabitants could no longer live without the traders' goods. Along the periphery of the trade, which in 1811 corresponded roughly with the borders of the Northwest, relations were poorest of all. For the natives along the trade frontier were anxious that the trade should spread no further geographically because they did not want the natives beyond them- selves, who in nearly every case were enemies, to receive guns and ammunition. Moreover, the peripheral tribes often carried on a very lucrative trade in European goods with their more distant enemy -neighbours, and realized that any extension of the trade might destroy their position as middlemen. To the traders, these middlemen were, at best, mere nuisances who added little to the trade, and they were anxious to penetrate to the Indians of the country beyond them. The peripheral tribes, of course, tried to obstruct the progress of the traders and open hostility was often the result.In order to carry on his trade and, indeed, merely to exist in this harsh new land, the European had to borrow many skills and techniques from the natives. From them, he learned how to use the birch bark canoe and to make pemmican. It was these two things which enabled him to develop his vast transportation system which, more than anything else, permitted him to earn his living in the Northwest. Canoe travel was expensive and only a luxury product like furs could bear the high cost. By 1811, the Napoleonic wars had so depressed the fur markets, that little other than beaver was then worth carrying.The wars had also been responsible for an increasingly serious personnel shortage in the Hudson's Bay Company. This had contributed much to the company's ineffectiveness in dealing with Canadian competition. The company had also been labouring under the handicap of an overly riged organization. Nevertheless, in 1811, it faced the future with confidence. For not only had a more flexible organization recently been adopted by there was real hope that the chronic personnel shortage would soon he solved. Lork Selkirk had just concluded an agreement with the company to supply a large number of men each year in return for a vast grant of land along the Red River for the purpose of establishing an agricultural settlement. In the years to come, it was hoped that the settlement would also provide a source of recruits. The vanguard of the settlers were then wintering along the Nelson above York Factory. During the next century, hundreds of thousands would follow them. And they would change the face of the Northwest. The bold checkered pattern of agriculture would spread across much of the Great Plains, pushing the traders northward and eastward into the Stony Region until all that remained of the old Northwest which had been theirs, was a pile of stones in some farmer's field near the meeting place of two streams, or the fragile remains of a copper kettle below a waterfall, marking the place where a canoe had capsized and a voyageur's song had ended

Understanding the implications of a changing environment on harvested bivalve populations using habitat suitability models

Habitat suitability models are useful to forecast how environmental change may affect the abundance or distribution of species of interest. In the case of harvested bivalves, those models may be used to estimate the vulnerability of this valued ecosystem good to stressors. Using literature-derived natural history information, rule-based habitat suitability models were constructed in a GIS for several bivalve species (Clinocardium nuttallii, Mya arenaria, and Tresus capax) that are recreationally and commercially harvested in NE Pacific estuaries, including in the Salish Sea. Spatially-explicit habitat maps were produced for two Oregon estuaries using environmental data (salinity, depth, sediment grain size, and burrowing shrimp density) from multiple studies (1960-2012). Habitat suitability values ranged from 1-4 (lowest to highest) depending on the number of environmental variables that fell within a bivalve’s tolerance limits. The models were tested by comparing the observed distribution of bivalves reported in benthic community studies (1996-2012) to the range of each suitability class. Results primarily showed that habitats of highest predicted suitability contained the greatest proportion of bivalve observations and highest population densities. Our model was further supported by logistic regression analyses that showed correspondence between predicted habitat suitability values and logistic model probabilities. We demonstrate how these models can be used as tools to forecast changes in the availability of suitable habitat for these species using projected changes in salinity and depth associated with environmental change scenarios. The advantage of this approach is that disparate, independent sets of existing data are sufficient to parameterize the models, and to produce and validate maps of habitat suitability. We believe that these models are transferable across estuaries (such as in the Salish Sea) and bivalve species, and thus can be applied to data-poor systems with only modest investment

Stress-Energy Tensor for the Massless Spin 1/2 Field in Static Black Hole Spacetimes

The stress-energy tensor for the massless spin 1/2 field is numerically computed outside and on the event horizons of both charged and uncharged static non-rotating black holes, corresponding to the Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordstrom and extreme Reissner-Nordstr\"om solutions of Einstein's equations. The field is assumed to be in a thermal state at the black hole temperature. Comparison is made between the numerical results and previous analytic approximations for the stress-energy tensor in these spacetimes. For the Schwarzschild (charge zero) solution, it is shown that the stress-energy differs even in sign from the analytic approximation. For the Reissner-Nordstrom and extreme Reissner-Nordstrom solutions, divergences predicted by the analytic approximations are shown not to exist.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, additional discussio

Mass transport phenomena between bubbles and dissolved gases in liquids under reduced gravity conditions

The experimental and analytical work that was done to establish justification and feasibility for a shuttle middeck experiment involving mass transfer between a gas bubble and a liquid is described. The experiment involves the observation and measurement of the dissolution of an isolated immobile gas bubble of specified size and composition in a thermostatted solvent liquid of known concentration in the reduced gravity environment of earth orbit. Methods to generate and deploy the bubble were successful both in normal gravity using mutually buoyant fluids and under reduced gravity conditions in the NASA Lear Jet. Initialization of the experiment with a bubble of a prescribed size and composition in a liquid of known concentration was accomplished using the concept of unstable equilibrium. Subsequent bubble dissolution or growth is obtained by a step increase or decrease in the liquid pressure. A numerical model was developed which simulates the bubble dynamics and can be used to determine molecular parameters by comparison with the experimental data. The primary objective of the experiment is the elimination of convective effects that occur in normal gravity

The Quantized O(1,2)/O(2)×Z2O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2 Sigma Model Has No Continuum Limit in Four Dimensions. I. Theoretical Framework

The nonlinear sigma model for which the field takes its values in the coset space $O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2$ is similar to quantum gravity in being perturbatively nonrenormalizable and having a noncompact curved configuration space. It is therefore a good model for testing nonperturbative methods that may be useful in quantum gravity, especially methods based on lattice field theory. In this paper we develop the theoretical framework necessary for recognizing and studying a consistent nonperturbative quantum field theory of the $O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2$ model. We describe the action, the geometry of the configuration space, the conserved Noether currents, and the current algebra, and we construct a version of the Ward-Slavnov identity that makes it easy to switch from a given field to a nonlinearly related one. Renormalization of the model is defined via the effective action and via current algebra. The two definitions are shown to be equivalent. In a companion paper we develop a lattice formulation of the theory that is particularly well suited to the sigma model, and we report the results of Monte Carlo simulations of this lattice model. These simulations indicate that as the lattice cutoff is removed the theory becomes that of a pair of massless free fields. Because the geometry and symmetries of these fields differ from those of the original model we conclude that a continuum limit of the $O(1,2)/O(2)\times Z_2$ model which preserves these properties does not exist.Comment: 25 pages, no figure

Mass loss by a scalar charge in an expanding universe

We study the phenomenon of mass loss by a scalar charge -- a point particle that acts a source for a noninteracting scalar field -- in an expanding universe. The charge is placed on comoving world lines of two cosmological spacetimes: a de Sitter universe, and a spatially-flat, matter-dominated universe. In both cases, we find that the particle's rest mass is not a constant, but that it changes in response to the emission of monopole scalar radiation by the particle. In de Sitter spacetime, the particle radiates all of its mass within a finite proper time. In the matter-dominated cosmology, this happens only if the charge of the particle is sufficiently large; for smaller charges the particle first loses some of its mass, but then regains it all eventually.Comment: 11 pages, RevTeX4, Accepted for Phys. Rev.

Retarded coordinates based at a world line, and the motion of a small black hole in an external universe

In the first part of this article I present a system of retarded coordinates based at an arbitrary world line of an arbitrary curved spacetime. The retarded-time coordinate labels forward light cones that are centered on the world line, the radial coordinate is an affine parameter on the null generators of these light cones, and the angular coordinates are constant on each of these generators. The spacetime metric in the retarded coordinates is displayed as an expansion in powers of the radial coordinate and expressed in terms of the world line's acceleration vector and the spacetime's Riemann tensor evaluated at the world line. The formalism is illustrated in two examples, the first involving a comoving world line of a spatially-flat cosmology, the other featuring an observer in circular motion in the Schwarzschild spacetime. The main application of the formalism is presented in the second part of the article, in which I consider the motion of a small black hole in an empty external universe. I use the retarded coordinates to construct the metric of the small black hole perturbed by the tidal field of the external universe, and the metric of the external universe perturbed by the presence of the black hole. Matching these metrics produces the MiSaTaQuWa equations of motion for the small black hole.Comment: 20 pages, revtex4, 2 figure