Pages from the past
In the late summer of 1942, Clifford Wilson and the editorial team at Hudson Bay House in Winnipeg were busy beavering away on the fall issue of The Beaver magazine.
Featuring a furry fisher on the cover, the September 1942 issue included stories on how to hunt walrus, the Fraser River gold rush of 1858, and the artistic styles of West Coast Indigenous artists.
Since The Beaver was at the time “A Magazine of the North,” it’s not surprising that the issue doesn’t reference the terrible raid gone wrong on Nazi-occupied France that took place on August 19, 1942.
Of the more than six thousand Allied servicemen — including almost five thousand Canadians — who stormed the heavily defended beaches at Dieppe, more than a thousand were killed and about twentythree hundred were captured.
It’s been seventy-five years since the Dieppe raid, and in that time many motives have been put forward for the attack. In this issue, historian and author David O’Keefe offers the primary reason for the raid — and why it failed.
Elsewhere in this issue, historian Heidi Coombs- Thorne recounts the heroic efforts of the Grenfell Mission nurses, who provided health care in remote Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec in the early twentieth century; Carolyn Harris reveals the stories behind the places in Canada named after royalty; and Rachel Poliquin reveals the wacky misconceptions that surrounded New World beavers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
As for The Beaver magazine, the September issue did contain a small item on the Second World War — in the form of a photo essay on page thirty-one, showing troops marching in downtown Winnipeg.
I know this because I looked the issue up in our new online archive, which officially launched last month. More than a year in the making, Canada’s History Archive is a free online database of more than ninety years of The Beaver magazine, plus recent issues of Canada’s History and Kayak: Canada’s History Magazine for Kids.
We invite you to go online at CanadasHistory.ca/Archive to explore the legacy of The Beaver. Whether you’re a researcher, an educator or student, or simply a history enthusiast, the archive offers plenty of opportunities to engage, to explore, and to think critically and historically about the stories and the history it offers.