The New Northwest: The Photographs of the Frank Crean Expeditions, 1908-1909

David E. Smith is a political science professor at the University of
Saskatchewan and the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents.

The last best West could not last forever. The flatland was only a part
of the vast region, however; above it lay the middle north, that
“great reserve” of treed parkland, which explorers, missionaries,
and geologists had long proclaimed “the New Northwest.”

During the Laurier boom, the department of the interior succumbed to
the vision of yet another super land waiting to be developed. Backed by
Frank Oliver, the interior minister, Frank Crean, a civil engineer and
clerk in Oliver’s department, led two expeditions north of Prince
Albert to establish the accuracy of these claims. Crean produced two
reports, jointly published in 1910 as New Northwest Explorations. They
confirmed the potential promise of an economy based on mixed farming.
That finding was later challenged, but the collapse of the boom and the
arrival of war ended both the argument and the dream.

Crean’s reports were accompanied by a collection of vivid
photographs, 89 of which are featured here—the reports themselves are
not reprinted. The photos depict not a new but an old northwest in its
final days. Images of Mounties and missionaries, of Natives and Métis,
are not rare. What is unusual here is the unity of shared experience
they depict. Eighty-five years later, when development of the middle
north remains modest and, even then, comes only at great cost to its
original inhabitants, it requires effort to conceive that such harmony
ever reigned.

These photographs explain why the prospect of a new northwest exerted
so strong a pull on the imagination of Canadians. No Arcadia perhaps,
they nonetheless portray a compelling and not inhospitable landscape.
For the modern viewer the poignancy lies in their subject matter: a way
of life about to vanish whether or not the settlers came.