Facts about Canada

A Few Facts About Canada

Earl Cameron. Sarah Edmonson. Customs in Pre-historic Canada. Tobacco Smoking Among the Indians. Boris Karloff. Daniel Harmon. Mareen Godson. Kerosene. Padded Baseball Glove. McYntire Mine. George Brown,. Wilfred Greenfell

C.B.C. announcer Earl Cameron, once, while reading the National radio news, found himself in darkness because a blown fuse had doused the lights. Unruffled as always, Cameron simply pulled out his cigarette lighter, flicked it on and continued to read.

The soldier who was a woman, Sarah Edmonson. Raised in York County, New Brunswick, Sarah enlisted in a regiment of the Union army using the alias Franklin Thompson. During the American civil war, she served for two years and closely escaped death many times. She was the first woman to receive a pension from the U.S. army and when she died she was buried in a military cemetery with full military honors.

Fort Stewart in Montreal. Photo by Elena

Customs in pre-historic Canada: In pre-historic Canada, about 1000 years AD, the innovation of horticulture profoundly affected the social structure of the indian societies, which become matrilineal. The changes can be seen even in cooking utensils. Indeed, the small and slender vessel encountered by archaeologists in the previous period, suited to the slow cooking of meat, are replaced by large spherical vessels adapted to cooking corn soup. Women are responsible for crop cultivation, and they supervise all stage, from seeding to harvesting. In addition, women prepare pottery, clothing, basketwork, rope, stone scrapers to prepare animal skins. They make as well harpoon points. Both women and men fish, but only men hunt. Women harvest corn, squash and different other beans. As a rule, the camps and the villages are protected by a palisade

Tobacco smoking and Indians: A very interesting characteristic of the Iroquoians is their habit of smoking tobacco. They cultivated a rustic variety for this purpose, different from our tobacco and smoked it in fired clay pipes. Pottery and pipes were decorated, sometimes with nice effigies modelled on the bowl. Fragments of Indian pipes have been found on different sites in Quebec.

William Pratt (Boris Karloff): A young English immigrant named William Pratt joined a touring stage company in 1910 at Kamloops, British Columbia. He invented the name Boris Karloff for himself and went on to become famous as the Frankenstein Monster.

Daniel Harmon in 1811 started the first farm west of the Rocky Mountains. Near Fort St. James. Good yields of potatoes, turnips and barley were obtained.

Maureen Godson of Edmonton started learning how to fly in 1953, when she was 9 years old. By the time she was 10 she was a proficient flyer, Canada’s youngest pilot.

Kerosene: In 1846 Dr. Abraham Gesner at Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, developed a process for distilling Kerosene, as he called it, from a coal-like mineral, Albertite. Later it was to be popularly called coal-oil.

Monument to Canadian Soldiers in Toronto, the Queen Park. Photograph by Elena

The padded baseball glove was invented by Arthur Irwin, a Toronto player, in 1884. He showed up one day with a makeshift pad in a glove. Despite the fact he was kidded as a sissy, it wasn’t long before everybody copied his idea. Irwin wasn’t really a sissy. He just couldn’t figure out another way to play nine innings with two broken fingers.

McIntyre Mine: During the Early days of Northern Ontario’s Gold Rush (1909), Sandy McIntyre found what is now the famous mine bearing his name. He sold out for $25 in order to buy some liquor. Years later, he still passed his time crying in beverage rooms while the mine he discovered produced gold worth 230 million dolalrs.

George Brown: The Honorable George Brown, the founder of the Globe (now Globe and Mail) newspaper was the political arch-enemy of the first Prime Minister Sir. John A. Macdonald, who sometimes over-indulged his habit of drinking. Whenever Macdonald had a bout with the bottle, Brown printed a “sick” notice in the Globe.

Sir Wilfred Grenfell: A plaque erected at St. Anthony, Newfoundland, by the great humanitarian Sir Wilfred Grenfell, after a harrowing experience on a drifting ice pan. Grenfell had to use their bloody fur for warmth until he was rescued: “To the memory of three noble dogs, Moody, Watch and Spy, whose lives were given for mine on the ice. April 21st 1903. Wilfred Grenfell, St. Anthony.