Canada and Australia - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 127

1856. Canadians read British authors like Wordsworth and Lord Byron,
French ones like Jean Jacques Rousseau, and American ones like James
Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.
Audubon visited in the 1830s, and Muir also came. The Romantic tradi-
tion in nature was perpetuated into the 20th century by A. S. Belaney, who
published under the pseudonym of Grey Owl. Actually born in England,
he pretended he was a native Canadian, the son of a Scottish father and an
Apache mother. He married an Iroquois woman. Grey Owl, who worked
as a trapper and a park ranger and authored four popular topics and many
magazine articles on the wilderness.
Early 19th-century painting followed European themes and subjects,
but by about 1830 Peter Rindisbacher began painting Indians and buffalo
near his frontier home in the Red River Colony. Later Paul Kane, inspired
by the American work of George Catlin, painted western Canadian scenes.
During a wilderness trip in 1846-48 with fur traders from Ontario to Fort
Vancouver, he sketched native peoples and scenery, producing a hundred
canvases upon his return. William G. R. Hind worked as an artist for a
scientific expedition exploring Labrador and, in 1862, joined prospectors
traveling to British Columbian gold fields.
References to nature in the national anthem, “O Canada,” composed in
1880 for the National Congress of French Canadians, were slight, mention-
ing only “leaves of red and gold.” A later version sang:
O Canada! in praise of thee we sing;
From echoing hills our anthems proudly ring.
With fertile plains and mountains grand, With lakes and rivers clear,
Eternal beauty, thou dost stand, Throughout the changing year.
The present version, adopted in 1980, has dropped the references to nature.
On the other hand, the flag, adopted in 1965, features a maple leaf, one of
the few nations in the world to give such prominence to a natural symbol.
In 1885 the federal government established Banff National Park, and
2 years later parliament passed the Rocky Mountains Park Act. The exam-
ple of its neighbor to the south in establishing Yellowstone Park was a
major influence. Indeed, some of the language of the law was copied word
for word from the US law establishing Yellowstone Park. The first bird
sanctuary was founded in Saskatchewan in 1887. By then the number of
bison were down to only 2000 animals. In 1911 the national government
established a park agency.