J.B. Tyrrell (1858-1957)

Abstract

Great explorers are like great poets and great athletes. They often possess a kind of brilliance and genius that manifests itself early in life. Although J.B. Tyrrell lived for almost a century, he had completed his famous discoveries by the age of 36. ... Tyrrell's first field seasons with the GSC (Geological Survey of Canada) were spent in western Alberta. In one amazing week in June 1884, he discovered both the major coal deposits around Drumheller and the famous dinosaur remains. Every summer for a decade Tyrrell travelled the west, eventually working his way northward to Athabaska country in 1892. ... In 1893 Tyrrell, his brother, and six canoemen struck north from Lake Athabaska in three canoes, [into the Barrenlands, literally feeling] their way through true terra incognita, paddling the shores of the lakes looking for the outlets of rivers, poking through thin leads of open water along the shore of ice-filled Dubawnt Lake, and following the northward flow of the great river, always hoping but never certain that they would not end up on the Arctic coast. [This profile describes the life and exploits of a man described as] ... one of the last explorers to record the extent and nature of the Canadian landscape in the old style. He grasped the significance of the achievements of Hearne and Thompson because he travelled and worked as they had. Before Tyrrell's own life was out in 1957, the kind of exploratory work he had accomplished was being done by large parties supported by bush planes, helicopters, radio communications, air photos, and sophisticated sensing and surveying equipment. The circumstances necessary for the flowering of the kind of exploratory genius possessed by J.B. Tyrrell no longer exist.