Artifacts Of The National Story

This rather handsome sleigh is quite a sight here in Canada History Hall.

This portrait was done around 1869 by William Sawyer. William Logan is its subject. Logan was the founder of the Geological Survey Of Canada, created in 1842 to survey the land from sea to sea. The scientific agency is still around today, carrying on the field work that Logan started. Logan's name has long been given to the highest mountain in Canada, found in the Yukon. Around the portrait are several items he owned.

This is a British coat of arms, which stood originally at the Vieux Palais de Justice in Montreal. It dates to the mid 1800s.

This is a bust of Lord Elgin, a governor general during part of the tumultuous years between the 1837 rebellions and the Confederation movement. I've photographed this one before- it was part of a temporary exhibit a year or two ago on that period. 

Three men are grouped together in portraits here, and referred to collectively as the Great Coalition. John A. Macdonald, George Brown, and George-Etienne Cartier were among the brightest lights of the Fathers of Confederation, working to bring together the British North American colonies into one dominion.

Another of their number is close by. This 1868 painting, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, shows the Father of Confederation, orator, and eloquent writer who was assassinated by an Irish nationalist that year. The gun recovered in the case is beneath the portrait.

Shifting back into the First Nations side of things is this item, an elk skin from the 1800s. This was done as a "winter count" by a member of the Blackfoot tribe, an annual record of memorable events told in a circle spinning outward over time. I have seen something similar in a documentary on the American West- it might well be a Blackfoot custom, as that nation is on both sides of the border, or this might have been common in those peoples of the western plains.