Joseph B. Tyrell 1858-1957
Peer of Darwin, Huxley, and Agassiz

While exploring Black Lake, Manitoba, in 1892, Joseph B. Tyrrell learned from Chipewyan Indians that beyond their hunting ground to the north was a major river flowing into the area then known as the Barren Lands. He at once devised a plan to explore it, a move that ultimately elevated him from anonymous clerk with the Geological Survey of Canada to global headline maker.

The greatest land explorer of his day, Tyrrell had already achieved considerable fame with his employer since joining the Survey a decade earlier. In the space of three days, in 1884, he discovered dinosaur skeletons to prove that the prehistoric beasts once roamed Alberta and identified the coal mine near present-day Drumheller. The first discovery was the most important find of its kind in North America; the second would become the largest coal deposit in Canada. Both were outstanding achievements for the then 25-year-old native of Weston, Ontario, who overcame severe deafness and poor eyesight to graduate from Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto before articling in law. He found law boring; therefore, to pursue his love of the outdoors, he had his aristocratic Irish father help him land a job with the Survey unit.

In 1883 he made his first trip west mapping the Kicking Horse Pass area. Between 1884 and 1892, he surveyed the breadth of Alberta between Calgary and Edmonton spending six summers heading up teams to map and explore the vast, unknown areas of both northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Winters were spent writing reports in Ottawa where he also enjoyed many social events at Government House.

Studying Samuel Hearne’s journeys from Fort Churchill made between 1770 and 1772 and examining a crude map he had obtained from a Chipewyan, Tyrrell carefully planned his 1893 trip to the Barren Lands. The expedition included his younger brother, James, also an experienced explorer, three brothers, canoeists from the Caughnawaga Indian Reserve, and three Metis from northern Saskatchewan as bearers — “a group,” Tyrrell later wrote, “who knew the value of teamwork.”

Leaving Fort Chipewyan in mid-June, Tyrrell recorded each day’s route. Naming a number of lakes after people he knew, he named one “Carey” for his future father-in-law at a place where they replenished their food supplies from a herd of caribou “for as far as the eye could see.” Another lake, at the point where the Dubawnt River veers eastward towards Hudson Bay, was called “Aberdeen” in honour of the Governor General.

The explorers reached Hudson Bay in September but their adventures were not over. Still 400 miles north of Fort Churchill, they canoed along the shoreline, but furious gales, food shortages, fatigue, and delays almost cost them their lives. After three weeks in Churchill, they left in early November for Winnipeg 900 miles distant and once again encountered bad weather and food shortages before reaching Oxford House. At Norway House the Metis headed home to Saskatchewan while the Tyrrell party carried on to reach Selkirk on New Year’s Day 1894. They were three months overdue. The press headlined their achievement — one that was not to be repeated for another 60 years.

That February, Tyrrell married Mary Edith but, with the financial help of an adventurous Scot and aide-de-camp of the Governor General, he left in the Spring for a second seven-month journey into the Barren Lands to explore the Kazan River. The following summer he was assigned to survey the Lake Winnipeg area but found it “rather monotonous.” In 1896 he went north of the Saskatchewan River to examine the mineral content of Huron rock deposits, that later, at Flin Flon and Thompson, were to become one of Canada’s richest mining areas.

Reading a paper in Toronto to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Tyrrell hypothesized that the ice age was not a single iceberg mass, as had been generally believed, but the “result of glaciation that had formed and radiated out to cover vast stretches of the continent on several occasions,” a concept that subsequently gained universal acceptance and firmly established his reputation in the scientific community.
By then, however, he was disenchanted with his employer. Because he was still classified as a clerk making less than $1,800 a year, his financial circumstances forced him to resign as an aide-de-camp at Government House. He was further annoyed when the maps of his Barren Lands travels were changed and his name removed from them.

In 1898, however, he went on one more trip to the Klondike to survey an area between the Yukon River and the Alaska border. It was at this time that he briefly visited the Klondike to compare the two areas. The gold rush was at its height: he saw a single pan of gravel yield gold worth more than a third of his annual salary. This was one of the factors prompting him to quit the Survey when he learned, on his fortieth birthday, that he was not in line for a promotion.

In 1884, at present day Drumheller, Alberta, James B. Tyrell, in the space of three days discovered the largest coal deposits in Canada and the single most important remains of dinosaurs on the continent. J.B. Tyrell devoted his whole life to the exploration and development of Canada's natural resources [University of Toronto Library]

Through friends, he arranged a $2,000 loan and announced he was returning to the Klondike as a consultant. By March, Tyrrell was in Dawson City where he later became involved with several enterprises including ownership of a gold mine. By 1906, however, it was clear the boom was over. Returning east, he visited Northern Ontario where cobalt and silver had been discovered three years earlier. He set himself up as a consultant, first in Ottawa, then in Toronto where his reputation as an explorer and his work in the Klondike quickly assured his success. Between 1910 and 1924 he also served as resident agent for a British mining company, a post that enabled him to hone his business skills with the same dogged determination that he had shown both as explorer and geologist. This also afforded him an opportunity to visit England where he confronted company officials who had earlier ignored his investment and mining proposals.

When he learned in 1924 that the owners of the Kirkland Lake Gold Mine did not have sufficient funds to dig beyond the 1,000-foot level, Tyrrell arranged new financing, becoming, in his 65th year, its president and general manager. Following a major heart attack four years later, he retired as general manager but remained president until 1955, even attending board meetings up to the age of ninety-eight, one year before his death in 1957. By then the company had yielded almost $40 million in gold bullion. Most of his advanced years were spent on a farm he bought near the present Metropolitan Toronto Zoo, where he experimented with orchids and wrote about mining, geology, and his ancestors in Ireland. For the Champlain Society he edited the journals of David Thompson and Samuel Hearne, Canadian explorers whose diaries and maps he had carefully studied in preparing for his own explorations.

The distinctions bestowed upon him were numerous and varied. He was a Member or Fellow and often Officer in some 15 learned and scientific bodies throughout the world. He was ranked with Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Agassiz by London’s Royal Geological Society when it awarded him the rare Wollaston Palladium Medal in 1947, the Society’s most prestigious award for lifetime achievement.

A mountain and lake in Canada that bear his name also honour a man who devoted his whole life to the exploration of Canada’s natural resources.