Describes various explorations in the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia.

Immigration and Settlement, 1870-1939 includes twenty articles organized under the following topics: the "Opening of the Prairie West," First Nations and the Policy of Containment, Patterns of Settlement, and Ethnic Relations and Identity in the New West. The second volume in the History of the Prairie West Series, Immigration and Settlement includes chapters on early immigration patterns including transportation routes and ethnic blocks, as well as the policy of containing First Nations on reserves. Other chapters grapple with the various identities, preferences, and prejudices of settlers and their complex relationships with each other as well as the larger polity.

In 1871, a tiny nation, just four years old—it's population well below the 4 million mark—determined that it would build the world's longest railroad across empty country, much of it unexplored. This decision—bold to the point of recklessness—was to change the lives of every man, woman and child in Canada and alter the shape of the nation. Using primary sources—diaries, letters, unpublished manuscripts, public documents and newspapers—Pierre Berton has reconstructed the incredible decade of the 1870s, when Canadians of every stripe—contractors, politicians, financiers, surveyors, workingmen, journalists and entrepreneurs—fought for the railway, or against it. The National Dream is above all else the story of people. It is the story of George McMullen, the brash young promoter who tried to blackmail the Prime Minister; of Marcus Smith, the crusty surveyor, so suspicious of authority he thought the Governor General was speculating in railway lands; of Sanford Fleming, the great engineer who invented Standard Time but who couldn't make up his mind about the best route for the railway. All these figures, and dozens more, including the political leaders of the era, come to life with all their human ambitions and failings.

This volume is a pioneering excursion into the documentary history of a region of northern Ontario. Previously published original documents on the history of the Thunder Bay area have been of two kinds: accounts of the fur trade before 1821, and evidence supporting rival claims in the boundary disputes of the 1870s and 1880s. Although this collection does not include some illustrative material on these topics, its main purpose is to shed light upon other aspects of northern development, including the best-known and most pervasive problem—isolation from the rest of British North America. This volume deals with events up to 1892, considerably later than any of the other volumes in the Ontario Series. The documents tell the story of the silver mines—from the first rumours of wealth, through the excitement of the Silver Islet era, to the closing down of the mines in the early 1890s—and place the era of transcontinental railway building as part of local rather than national history. The documents also treat the development of numerous communities created through mining activity and railway building, showing how precariously they were based, how jealous they were of rival towns, and how anxious for the favours they might receive from government or company decisions. This collection should provide a basis for continuing research into northwestern Ontario history.