Innocuous In Innisfil
Innocuous In Innisfil Has MovedGood Morning #Canada
Today, I learned about Sir George Back, an explorer of Canada’s Arctic, who was born on this day in 1796. Happy 229th birthday, George. He learned to paint as a French prisoner of war and later used that skill for charting Canada's coastline and painting scenery and geography that was discovered. He volunteered to serve under John Franklin in two expeditions to the Arctic in 1818 and again in 1824. Back was responsible for all the surveying and chart making for Franklin's published reports and was promoted ultimately to Commander in 1825. He then took command of his own explorations of the coast of NWT. He retired early due to poor health, which may have saved him from serving on Franklin's final disastrous trip to the Arctic in 1845, where 2 ships and 129 men perished after becoming trapped in ice .
With the decline of the beaver population, trappers looked for new routes to gain a stranglehold on the competition, and #CanadianExplorers pushed west and north, exploring and mapping Canada’s wilderness. The Churchill River formed a major part of this "voyageur highway" in the 18th to 20th centuries after Dene people showed Peter Pond the portage connections between the Hudson Bay watershed and the Clearwater — Athabasca — Mackenzie rivers, which flows into the Arctic Ocean.
