Lot #36: Pierre Berton's Canada: The Land and the People Hardcover 1999 with Canada History Geography, Landscapes Picture Book.

In Pierre Berton's Canada, the acclaimed historian juxtaposes awe-inspiring photographs that show the rawness, multiformity, and sheer immensity of the Canadian landscape with lively historical portraits of 25 figures who played a part in casting or who were formed by that geography. Meet Sir John A. MacDonald, architect of Confederation and founding prime minister of Canada; surveyor Walter Moberly, whose dream of a Howse Pass route for the Canadian Pacific Railway was dashed at the proverbial "eleventh hour"; Robert Service, "bard of the Klondike"; Major A.B. Rogers, a former Indian fighter and prairie surveyor who found the elusive railway route through the Rocky and Selkirk mountain ranges; William Johnston, pirate and terror of the St. Lawrence; Pierre, Chevalier de Troyes, whose guerrilla tactics of "la petite guerre" enabled him to conquer three English forts in James Bay in the 1680s and set the pattern of warfare in Canada until the mid-18th century; Sir Wilfred Grenfell, Labrador's "missionary to the dispossessed; surgeon to the abandoned; adventurer in a foreign clime; saint and healer, evangelist and teacher"; Shawnadithit, the last of the Beothuks; and John Franklin, leader of the most ambitious and tragic expedition to locate a Northwest Passage. These are just a few of the rogues and rascals, drunks and missionaries, visionaries and explorers who were instrumental in founding and forming Canada. Some of these characters--and "characters" is precisely what they were--will be familiar to readers. Others will be delightful revelations. The selection is quixotic and, inevitably, controversial, but it is distinctively, unapologetically Pierre Berton's.