[Bcma-l] CMA Clip Serv: Prairie 'history book' follows winding route
bcma-l@museumsassn.bc.ca
bcma-l@museumsassn.bc.ca
Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:33:20 -0700
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<b>Prairie 'history book' follows winding route to its</b></span></font>
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<b>new home</b></span></font>
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Jim Hume, Times Colonist, Sunday, June 28, 2009</span></font>
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John Palliser, an Irishman described as tall with a straight-backed
military appearance and a pleasant voice, gave his name to the
Palliser Triangle, an area of Alberta and Saskatchewan featured by
newspapers in recent days as "a drought-stricken triangle of the
Prairies," as though it was a new condition.</span></font>
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It isn't. It was that way in 1857 when the Palliser Expedition passed
through during its three-year exploration of the resources of the vast,
virtually unpopulated Canadian Prairies. Expedition scientists
collected information on plants and animals, the change of seasons,
rainfall, snowfall, frost and wind patterns and later reported on where</span></font>
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crops could be grown, cattle raised and farming communities
established to the British government, which had provided substantial
financial support to the expedition. The "triangle" they reported was
"arid and too dry to support agriculture and settlement".</span></font>
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It was a report with, eventually, an unusual Victoria connection.</span></font>
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Featured heavily in the expedition's final treatise was the work of
Eugene Bourgeau, regarded at the time as one the world's leading
botanists. It had been his responsibility to collect seeds and plants for
delivery to Kew Gardens' acclaimed research centre in London. </span></font>
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Bourgeau also kept a personal botanical record containing the</span></font>
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seeds and plants he had collected.</span></font>
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He kept that collection in a leather-bound book, which years later he
presented to an old friend and colleague named John Lindley, a
professor of botany at University College in London and secretary of
the Royal Botanical Society. The book contained 287 specimens of
plants, seeds and illustrations. Lindley eventually passed Bourgeau's
book on to his daughter Sarah, probably as a gift for illustrations she
had drawn for her father's research papers.</span></font>
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In due course, Sarah married Henry Pering Pellew Crease who,
moved to Canada, settling in the 1850s in Victoria, where his law
practice flourished. When she came from England, Sarah brought
with her the Bourgeau book.</span></font>
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The Crease home became "Pentrelew," a stately mansion built by
Henry for his family. It remained the Crease Fort Street family home
until the last surviving daughter of Henry and Sarah died in the mid-
1940s and Pentrelew was sold.</span></font>
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Hugh Curtis, former mayor of Saanich, first chairman of the Capital
Regional District, head of several provincial cabinet portfolios
including minister of finance in Premier Bill Bennett's government
and now in his mid-70s, was 11 years old at the time.</span></font>
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As the newspaper delivery boy to Pentrelew, he knew "the niece" who
cared for two Crease sisters in their declining years. Following
several days of auctioning off household effects, "the niece"
(remembered as a woman in her 50s) asked Curtis and a few other
"neighbourhood kids" if they would like to see inside the house</span></font>
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they had only viewed with the awe of childhood.</span></font>
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Curtis remembers wandering through the empty rooms and finding in
a cupboard a jumble of turn-of-thecentury newspapers and a battered
old book containing seeds and plants. He was told he could keep it
and he did -- until 1998 when he cleaned out his own collection of
things. He asked Royal B.C. Museum staff if they might be interested.
They were, but not enthusiastically so. After all, the Palliser
Expedition had not really studied B.C. flora and fauna.</span></font>
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Reluctant to add the book to his recycle pile, Curtis tried the
Provincial Museum of Alberta. The response was swift. Within a few
days of his contact, a museum botany expert was in Victoria to check
the book's authenticity.</span></font>
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And in October 1998, the kid who once delivered newspapers to
Pentrelew was flown to Edmonton courtesy of the Alberta museum to
present the nearly discarded, much-travelled, leather-bound Bourgeau
botanical collection to Shirley McLellan, then Alberta's minister of
community development.</span></font>
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Bruce McGillivray, then museum assistant director of collections,
described the Curtis gift as unique. "Even the Museum of Nature in
Ottawa doesn't have anything this old, documenting this part of
Canada," he told the Edmonton Journal in 1998. "What we have is a
real collection of real plants going back to this time period, not</span></font>
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just data."</span></font>
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Bourgeau would be happy to be remembered.</span></font>
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For more about the expedition, see The Palliser Expedition by Irene
M. Spry available online or in public libraries.</span></font>
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