The Palliser Expedition

The Palliser Expedition is one of the great works in Canadian exploration literature and the only full-scale account of the British North America Exploring Expedition. This lively narrative tells of the famous adventures of John Palliser, one of the first to explore and document vast areas of what is now western Canada.

Palliser and his colleagues accumulated a wealth of new scientific and geological knowledge, providing some of the first detailed information about the plants, animals, soil, rocks, and climate of the land they had traversed. They discovered formerly unknown passes through the Rocky Mountains, and determined that much of this immense country was suitable for settlement.

Spry describes what was known about the prairies in the late 1850s and why the British government accepted Palliser's proposal to dispatch a team to the area between Lake Superior and the Pacific Coast. She explains what the expedition learned during its three years, offering at the same time an intimate understanding of these men and their perspective on the region. Much more than the story of a scientific survey, The Palliser Expedition provides a revealing look at the western interior in the last years of the Old Northwest before it became home to countless thousands of homesteaders.

Among the many and varied honours, Irene Mary Spry (1907-1998) received honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto (1971) and University of Ottawa (1985). The latter degree was conferred at the same time that a book in her honour entitled Explorations in Canadian Economic History of the University of Ottawa Press had been presented to her. The Governor General of Canada appointed her Officer of the Order of Canada in 1992 not only for her long and inspiring career as writer, teacher and scholar but also for her prominence in the Canadian and international women's movements, because of her active involvement over several decades with the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada and the Associated Country Women of the World.