Through An Unknown Country Format: Paperback

Reconstructs the 1874–75 Jarvis-Hanington winter expedition across the northern Rockies using the explorers’ own reports and narrative accounts.

Edward Worrell Jarvis and Charles Francis Hanington travelled on behalf of the Canadian Pacific Survey from Quesnel, British Columbia, toward Winnipeg during one of the most demanding seasons imaginable. Their 116-day journey covered more than 3,000 kilometres, including almost 1,500 kilometres on snowshoes, and crossed the northern Rockies through what became known as Jarvis Pass.

Through An Unknown Country brings together Jarvis’s detailed daily reporting and Hanington’s more expansive account of the expedition in a single volume. Historians Mike Murtha and Charles Helm add archival photographs and illustrations that place the journey within the larger history of exploration and railway surveying in western Canada.

Snowshoes, dog teams, compasses and sextants carried the party through mountains, valleys, foothills and prairie without modern communications or rescue. The book is both a primary-source adventure narrative and a record of nineteenth-century Canadian exploration.

Mike Murtha has worked for both Parks Canada and BC Parks and was the planner for Banff National Park until his retirement in 2012. He, along with Charles Helm, is the co-editor of The Forgotten Explorer: Samuel Prescott Fay's 1914 Expedition to the Northern Rockies (RMB 2010). Mike lives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Charles Helm is a medical doctor originally from South Africa, the author of four books on the Tumbler Ridge area, and, along with Mike Murtha, is the co-editor of The Forgotten Explorer: Samuel Prescott Fay's 1914 Expedition to the Northern Rockies (RMB 2010). Charles lives in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Canada.