Canada 150: Surveying B.C.’s vast wilderness
His work still a foundation for modern maps, Frank Swannell also made a lasting impression with his camera
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
In an age of near-instantaneous communications, helicopters and more than 70,000 kilometres of public roads in B.C., it’s difficult for most urban residents (86 per cent of our population) to grasp how inaccessible the province’s Interior was a century ago.
Even today, city folk are irreverently referred to there as the 99-50 Club — that is, 99 per cent of us seldom venture more than 50 paces into the bush from a roadway.
Those who do are urged to carry a compass and topographical map.
Those maps rely on work done by Frank Swannell. He travelled by canoe, horseback and on foot, often with snowshoes, skis or climbing crampons, by stagecoach, riverboat and early automobile to survey B.C. when there were few roads, telephones were exotic, and some regions were so remote and difficult to reach that they may not even have been explored by First Nations.
He was born May 16, 1880 in Hamilton, Ont., to Frederick Swannell and Mary Foster, immigrants from England.
He graduated from high school in Toronto, and studied mining engineering at the University of Toronto. He had a summer job at New Denver in the Kootenays when gold was discovered in the Klondike and he planned to follow the stampede. Instead, he was offered a job in Victoria with a land surveying firm, earned his provincial license, and married Ada May Driver in 1904.
He proved so skilled that by 1908 he had his own business and soon was among the best surveyors.
He was commissioned to survey much of remote northern B.C., leading survey parties despite his relative youth.
He surveyed the Nechako, Stuart, Omineca, Ingenika and Finlay river watersheds. His work was so exact some current maps still rely upon his surveys.
Swannell also kept an astonishing visual record. His collection of 5,000 photographs, accompanied by detailed diaries, provide a vivid record of an astounding feat and a vanished history few of us can imagine, not just of the sternwheelers, pack trains, stagecoaches, canoes and bush camps, but also the people he met — a party on horseback riding home through the snow, “Tremblai Lake Joe” and his family, a First Nations boy dancing at Fort St. James, an old miner on the Omineca gold creeks.
He died in Victoria in 1969 and his sons donated the unforgettable collection to the province. They now reside at the Royal B.C. Museum and Archives.