Six months had passed since the Ohio deaths, a lapse of too much time to initiate legal action by the family. I had the photographs developed from the camera I had found floating in the pool at Thunderhouse — just a tight group of fun-loving guys having a great time without a care in the world.
I called Brian McAndrew, the environment reporter for the Toronto Star newspaper, and told him about the research I was doing. Within twenty-four hours he was on a plane for Sault Ste. Marie where I would pick him up in my truck and bring him north to Michipicoten, where my cabin was. The feature front-page story on May 8, 1994, read: “When a line on a canoeists’ map spells death at Thunderhouse Falls.”
McAndrew later told me that the story had provoked more phone calls and letters than he had ever received for any story he had written. He was deluged with story after story about close calls and near-tragedies at Thunderhouse and elsewhere along the river, including one about four guys who actually survived going over the falls in a rubber raft.
The Natural Resources provincial office called me shortly after the release of the story and offered to contribute $10,000 to my research costs. It was also agreed that proper warning signs would be erected at Mattice and on an island before the Thunderhouse portage. The faulty topographical sheet was temporarily removed from Federal stock, pending updates scheduled in the future.
The rhetorical question here is, “Who is at fault?” The obvious problem is twofold: the Canadian government is not providing accurate technical information for backcountry canoe routes, specifically for highly publicized parks and Heritage Rivers; and the canoeing public puts too much faith in topographical charts — maps that were never intended for adventure-oriented recreation.
Long before the white man came to Canada, Native people were scratching crude maps in the sand or on rolls of birchbark. People of the First Nations had a “built-in” knowledge of place and distance and were often employed by early explorers as guides. Early maps etched out by John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and John Davis did not survive; however, in 1604–08, Samuel de Champlain — zealot and cartographer — did give us eleven large-scale charts of eastern “Canada,” drawn to indicate sovereignty over the land and resources therein. Canada was not an easy country to explore because of its vast, rugged topography, extreme environmental conditions, and short travelling season. But not just that, transferring information from a sphere to a flat plane involved advanced mathematics which worked only in open, unforested areas. Errors published on early maps remained uncorrected for centuries, chiefly because of the high cost of changing printing plates. Explorers, too, were not always proficient mapmakers so that a lot of “longitudinal” discrepancies were found in working charts well into the nineteenth century.
The Hudson’s Bay Company’s push for ever more furs prompted the need for more accurate maps of the interior and gave rise to the development of better survey instruments, tools used by the likes of Philip Turnor (1778–79), Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1789–93), and David Thompson and George Vancouver (1793). Much of Canada’s shape and size was well-charted by the turn of the century, although northern Quebec and the Arctic islands remained a mystery.
The Geological Survey of Canada, founded in 1842, went through a period of changes, eventually to become the Topographical Surveys Branch formed in 1883. Burgeoning westward settlement in the United States may have rushed the surveying of Canada by often inexperienced field crews; maps produced in the early 1900s were “so inaccurate that the details were kept secret for 50 years” (Milliken Report). The “Chief Cartographer’s” series of maps, drawn to the 1:250,000 and 1:500,000 scale commenced in 1903. A year later the Survey Division of the Department of Militia and Defence was created with the intent to map all of Canada in the one-inch to one-mile scale (the scale popularized with outdoors people today). In 1902, the DMD had realized the importance of detailed maps during the Boer War. Canada, being short on cartographic savvy, hired R.H. Chapman of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1908 to try and shape up the topographic unit within its Canadian counterpart. There were now three uncoordinated departments producing maps. This continued until 1922, when the formation of the Board on Topographical Surveys and Maps was created to respond to the need for some kind of standardization. The BTS&M evolved into a division of Energy, Mines, and Resources in 1966 (EMR) and it continues to be known by that name today.
Acknowledged as the “map for all seasons,” the one-inch to one-mile series was eventually converted to the popular 1:50,000 scale by photo-enlargement after 1950. By the 1930s, specific geographic areas of northern Canada were being mapped using “air-oblique” methods of range-finding, traverses down the more prominent rivers; methods deemed “sketchy” by the more advanced European cartographers. Photographs depicting water levels during high-flow could not detail many locations of rapids and falls, and consequently some of these discrepancies have not been corrected to this day. W.F. Phelan of the Geographic Survey remarked about pre-Second World War maps that “vagaries of water-courses beyond open-country could not be relied on, but on the whole there was little criticism by those who occasion to use these sheets.”
By the late 1940s, photogrammetry (the science of drawing maps from air photos) improved with the use of “electronic distance measuring devices” or EDMs, where aerial photography now employed overlapping traverse patterns. Maps surveyed between 1945 and 1962, according to the Association of Canadian Map Librarians and Archives in Ottawa, are generally considered “the most inaccurate.” This just happens to include maps covering the greater portion of the Canadian northland!
Today, the use of survey satellites measuring the “Doppler Shift” (change in frequency of sound, radio, or light waves) has improved map accuracy to within inches; that’s great for physical discrepancies, but without information revisions, any updates would not improve maps for the paddler headed for a non-existent portage.
In 1956, the Canadian military found it urgent to map out the Arctic regions because of the mounting threat of nuclear war which would effectively put northern Canada directly between the major powers. These hastily produced maps were very basic and lacked any detail. In 1967, the six-colour map was introduced for “southern Canada,” while the “Wilderness Line” demarked the use of black and white monochrome maps, thus making a clear distinction between settled and unsettled regions. Since the rate of development in the North is slow, revisions were not a priority and would take place every thirty years, unless, as in the case of Thunderhouse Falls, a major development is proposed. Urban maps would be revised every five years. EMR has recently changed their revision policy to every three years.
In 1994, I began my wild river survey research for the Province of Manitoba and Canada Parks, Heritage Rivers branch, which sponsored my first trip down the Seal River. Before any mapping expedition, I make an effort to obtain any current or archival published material and Canada Parks supplied what they had on public file. It wasn’t until I was on the river that I noticed the first quadrant of their map had been produced upside down and backwards. This map had been generated for national distribution, yet had a major error that nobody caught before it was printed and distributed. During this same year, my Missinaibi guidebook was released, correcting all topographic information. In the last fourteen years there have been no canoe-related deaths along the river, chiefly because the Ontario government finally took the initiative to erect proper signage, and supported a concise guidebook that made sure the public was informed.
Canada is a nation of wild rivers. The Missinaibi took the lives of thirty-four people over a seventeen-year period. Over the past three decades there may have been hundreds of deaths across Canada attributed to faulty maps and lack of “duty of care” by parks and provincial government administrations. These same bureaucracies have spent millions of tax dollars on advertising wild Canada and eco-adventure recreation, but almost nothing on accurate, field-truthed support material. Adventurers love to scan maps, longing to find precipitous gradient drops and wild rapids … it’s part of our addiction to rivers and wilderness. Selling maps is big business for EMR, peddling more than 630,000 maps each year. But even if the adventuring public is provided
