Visiting Old Friends

I last saw my “old friends” this past February, pre-pandemic. The “old friends” I am referring to are the maps, drawings, sketches, and various documents, published in 1825, pertaining to the Lake of the Woods region, in central North America. We had “agreed” to meet in the Foyle Reading Room, the archive/bowels of the building of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS).

Welcome to the Royal Geographical Society. Photo provided by the Royal Geographical Society, with assistance from RGS Press Officer, Lucy Preston.

Visiting old friends is a pleasure. Visiting old friends in new haunts is even better. These documents are time machines, individual voices frozen forever, repositories of forgotten and past perspectives, even works of art. I had previously visited them in various Canadian archives as a doctoral student, when based at McGill University in Montreal. I had looked forward to seeing them again. They are residents in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), here in London, England.¹

The RGS-IBG building on Kensington Gore. Photo provided by the author.

Housing more than two million items in their collections, the RGS aims to further the geographical sciences.² The collections have existed since the society’s 1830 founding when the creation of a “comprehensive library” was enshrined in its constitution.³ Today, it is not only a learned society and professional body but one of the world’s largest and most active scholarly geographical societies. Instruments have been provided by the RGS for use by geographers, and would-be geographers since its inception.⁴ The Map Curator is the “keeper of the Society’s instrument collection.” Initially for the use of members only this changed in 1854 once the “Map Room” was opened to the general public as a condition of an annual grant from the UK Treasury.⁵ Visitors now review maps, books, manuscripts, pictures, and artifacts related to past geographical expeditions in the Foyle Reading Room, which opened in 2004.

The Foyle Reading Room. Photo provided by the Royal Geographical Society, with assistance from RGS Press Officer, Lucy Preston.

I never thought I’d see so many “old friends” again, and in one place. Last time I made do with microfiche versions, reading some documents as PDFs sent to me on interlibrary loan. Regarded as “too junior” to see the real things in person, I had used these documents, maps, and texts to prepare for fieldwork in search of the pictograph sites in the region of the Lake of the Woods located in the Canadian Shield between Ontario, Manitoba, and Minnesota.⁶ The word “lake,” however, is deceptive in several senses. It is more a “sea,” with 14,522 islands and 65,000 miles of shoreline. Its dimensions have changed dramatically since first documented. The waters of its 4,348.6 square kilometers are largely shallow (max 64 metres, around 210 feet). I had a hunch it would be a fun time in the “RGS” and at last I’d get to experience the real deal.

Exterior of Lowther Lodge, which houses the RGS. Photo provided by the Royal Geographical Society, with assistance from RGS Press Officer, Lucy Preston.

I lucked out on the day of my visit, with the English weather being surprisingly sunny and not too chilly. The RGS is located in Lowther Lodge at the corner of Exhibition Road and Kensington Gore. The Society arrived there in April 1913 from premises on Savile Row. These street names, like “Exhibition Road”  and “Prince Consort Road” remind me of different pasts, multiple mindsets, perspectives and attitudes, those of the mid to late 19th century, when the United Kingdom responded to Humboldt’s challenge to improve the individual and transform them into well-rounded citizens of the world.⁷

I arrived at RGS a few minutes after 10 AM, right after its opening time, and walked into the spacious entrance hall, leading to the Foyle Reading Room, a glass Pavilion exhibition space, and the old Lowther building. I showed my membership card, used the Fellows’ book to record my arrival time, and I wrote “Reading Room.”⁸ The previous evening, I had attended the popular Monday night lecture series for Members and Fellows, in the lecture theater. Visiting the RGS during the day entails that everyone must sign in and declare whether they are a visitor or a Member/Fellow. Once I had signed in, I walked a few meters from the front desk towards the  circular staircase which descends downstairs to the collections and the Foyle Reading Room where “my friends” were waiting at a table. I’d already ordered them via the society’s online research portal. We were ready to begin our “conversation.”

The RGS’s Main Hall, in a time before masks and social-distancing. Photo provided by the Royal Geographical Society, with assistance from RGS Press Officer, Lucy Preston.

The size of the large pile of maps and documents on the table reflected the fact that the international boundary and level of the Lake had long been lively topics for discussion. My many months of exploration had focused on the view from the 21st century. As an ethnohistorian, one must do more than just acknowledge that this landscape was far more than the physical shape and its vegetation.⁹ My “friends” could tell me so much more. Some told me that until 1879 the “natural outlets” of the Lake of the Woods were unchanged. That year witnessed the construction of a headrace in a depression in the extreme western end of Portage Bay, in the northwest of the Lake, near Keewatin (Ontario) to generate power.¹⁰ In 1885, the intake deepened and exploited by a sawmill until 1906, when the plant closed. The construction of the Rollerway Dam, on Tunnel Island, (Ontario) at the western outlet of the Lake of the Woods in 1887-88 saw the water level rise by an average of 0.45m (1.5 feet).¹¹ Portage Bay and the western outlet lay about one mile apart. Water had risen above the previous levels by 0.30 m (1 foot) between 1893 and 1898, the earliest period for which continuous records are available.¹² Prior to 1896, the region had suffered from low rainfall. Not until 1899 when a gauge was set up in Warroad, Minnesota in the far southwestern corner was it possible to establish the level of the Lake of the Woods.¹³

Major changes occurred when the Norman Dam (built between 1894 and 1895) raised the mean water level by 1.07 m (or 3.5 feet). That meant a cumulative increase of between 22.86 cm (0.9 feet) in 1899 to 1.83 m (6.0 feet) in 1913.¹⁴ The increase in depth meant that the level could be raised by a foot or more as the prevailing winds pushed the water towards the northeast end of the Lake, a point made by surveyors Albert White and Adolph Meyer.¹⁵ They had indicated the importance of keeping these changes in mind when framing the international regulations for the lake.

“The Lake in the Woods,” Currier & Ives, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Who controlled the water levels and who could use these bodies of water were the subjects of a series of international treaties.¹⁶ The most notable was the Ashburton-Webster Treaty signed in 1842 between the governments of Great Britain and the United States. This treaty intended to create a “workable and lasting boundary” between Canada and the United States.¹⁷The International Joint Commission of the United States and Canada established under Article VII of the Treaty monitors and controls the water levels of the Lake of the Woods.¹⁸

My old friends helped me verify the changes in the shape of the Lake of the Woods. It had morphed from 1825 to 1949. I moved from map to map. Land loss appeared notable as shorelines shifted and whole islands disappeared.¹⁹ Other records told me these were devoted to agriculture. Sturgeon fisheries and wild rice beds, which had sustained generations of Algonquian speaking peoples were also lost. As a result the early 20th century saw these peoples “reclassified” (downgraded) by anthropologists from agriculturalists to hunter-gatherers.²⁰ Their lives as agriculturalists had been previously recorded over centuries by different explorers, geologists, and historians.²¹ These maps tell of catastrophic changes for the Algonquian speaking peoples, long-time residents of the area. These were peoples whose livelihoods had been blighted by the long winters of previous decades, specifically “The Long Winter” caused by the results of Krakatoa. These friends bear witness to the long slow deaths of livelihoods and aspirations rendered impossible by those rising waters.

Why would a historian, ethnohistorian, or archaeologist visit and revisit the Foyle Reading Room? Sometimes a topic demands a long  “sweep” to understand the recent or deep past of small and vast areas alike. The scholarly imagination demands maps, historical photographs of other regions of the world, to assist us in our task. Our old friends: the maps, texts, photographs, and prints are multi-layered, revealing edgy perspectives which demand their unpacking. For in Hannah Arendt’s timeless words, “it is quite true that the past haunts us; it is the past’s function to haunt us who are present and wish to live in the world as it really is, that is, has become what it is now.”²² Our “old friends” have not let us down.

1. The RGS-IBG (Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers) has 16,500 members including Fellows and its work reaches the public through grants, conferences, and publications such The Geographical Magazine and The Geographical Journal. It holds specific collections such as the Wiley Digital Collection. It also works with the Science Museums and Archives Consortium.
2. Women became eligible for membership as Fellows in 1913 and include such women who are well known to archaeologists such as Gertrude Bell, Freya Stark, and Gertrude Caton-Thompson who worked with individuals knows to archaeologists such as Dorothea Bate, Dorothy Garrod, Winifred Lamb, Mary Leakey, and Kathleen Kenyon. Sarah L. Evans, “Terra Incognita: Women on Royal Geographical Society-Supported Expeditions 1913-1970″ (PhD diss., University of the West of England, 2015), 90, 112.
3. G.R. Crone, “The Library of the Royal Geographical Society,” The Geographical Journal 121 (March 1955): 27.
4. Jane A. Wess and Charles W. J. Withers, “Instrument Provision and Geographic Science: The Work of the Royal Geographical Society, 1830-ca 1930,” Notes and Records (2019): 223.
5. G.R. Crone and E. E. T. Day, “The Map Room of the Royal Geographical Society,” Geographical Journal 126 (March 1960): 12.
6. I was told this was the case as I was only a PhD student operating under the auspices of my PhD supervisor, the late Professor Bruce G. Trigger (McGill) and not a fully-fledged researcher.
7. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) believed that a university did not just provide skills or knowledge but played a vital role in building personalities. This is a classic Enlightenment proposition. He passionately argued that devotion to research built an individual’s character. The Humboldt model developed as a consequence of the Prussian administrative reforms of the early 19th century to meet the ambitious goals set for the reconstruction of the Army and the General Staff in the aftermath of the disasters of Jena and Austerlitz.
8. I was nominated as a Fellow in 2015. For more information, see https://www.rgs.org/join-us/fellowship/.
9. I identify as an ethnohistorian and an archaeologist. Everyone generally knows what archaeology is but fewer know the definition of ethnohistory. Ethnohistory utilizes both traditional historical and ethnographic data. An ethnohistorian is someone who uses historical documents, methods and tools but also has a larger group of evidence to draw upon. Hence its practitioners use historical methods and materials in conjunction with source materials such as maps, paintings, photography, music, oral information and traditions, site exploration, archaeological materials and data, and collections held by museums, libraries and archives.
10. A headrace is a waterway that feeds water into a mill or turbine.
11. International Joint Commission, Final report of the International joint commission on the Lake of the Woods reference, (Washington D. C. and Ottawa: Government Printing Office, 1917) 16.
12. International Joint Commission, Final Report, 17.
13. International Joint Commission, Final Report, 22; Albert V. White and Adolph F. Meyer, Report to International Joint Commission relating to Official Reference re Lake of the Woods Lake Levels (Washington D. C. and Ottawa: Government Printing Office, 1916), 104.
14. International Joint Commission, Final report, 18–21.
15. White and Meyer, Lake of the Woods Lake Levels, 106.
16. F. M. Carroll, A Good and Wise Measure: The Search for the Canadian-American Boundary, 1784–1842 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 286.
17. F. H. Keefer, “Letter of Reference. International Joint Commission Re: Levels of the Woods. Brief for Province of Ontario and Dominion of Canada,” 1912, 13.
18. For more information, see Carroll, Good and Wise Measure, chap. 6.
19. Tim E. Holzkamm and Leo G. Waisberg, “‘A Tendency to Discourage Them from Cultivating’: Ojibwa Agriculture and Indian Affairs Administration in Northwestern Ontario,” Ethnohistory 40 (Spring 1993): 175–211.
20. Holzkamm and Waisberg, “‘A Tendency to Discourage Them from Cultivating’”; Tim E. Holzkamm and Leo G. Waisberg, “Agriculture and One 19th-Century Ojibwa Band: ‘They Hardly Ever Loose Sight of Their Field,’” in Papers of the 23rd Algonquian Conference, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1993) 407–24.
21. William H. Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods, &c. Performed in the Year 1823, by Order of the Hon. J. C. Calhoun, Secretary of War, under the Command of Stephen H. Long, U.S.T.E. (London, 1825); J.J. Bigsby, [Lake Saganaga to Lake Lapluie]. Enlarged from the Approximate Map of the Old Route from Lake Superior to the Lake of the Woods, Constructed for the Commission under the 6th and 7th Articles of the Treaty of Ghent (London, 1850).
22. Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address,” New York Review of Books, June 26, 1975.

Alicia Colson

Alicia J. M. Colson is a freelance ethnohistorian and archaeologist with a long-standing research interest in the digital humanities as well as higher education in North America and Europe. She has a PhD in Archaeology from McGill University and a BA Hons in Archaeology, UCL, London. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, The Explorers Club, and the Society of Antiquaries.