WesWorld

Okay, after spending two hours trying to find some detailed maps of the Canadian North, I figure I'll ask and see if any of the resident Canadians will have anything that can help me.

Specifically, I need names of settlements in the Yukon, NW Territories, and what's now Nunavut, but more importantly names of the inlets and bays along the coastlines of those territories.

http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/index.html

...would be a good first stop, I think - depends on how much detail you're after. All sorts of stuff there for the entire country and for individual jurisdictions.

If you've got more specific needs/questions about the territories, fire away - I lived in the NWT and Nunavut for seven years, so am fairly familiar with them.

Took me a while to figure out how to find the map I neded. I've got most of what I was looking for now, only thing I'm missing right now is the bay south of Gjoa Haven that the Back river empties into.

That'd be Cockburn Bay, within Chantrey Inlet.

http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/maps/ref…etailed/map.jpg

And the east-west river that's also emptying into Cockburn bay?

I've got to say, Isn't this area icelocked by pack ice for essentially 100% of the time? Actually the bay around Gjoa Haven is ice free for some of the time, but the staits between that island and the mainland are lethal with many underwater obstacles. Was this part of the world actually accurately charted? Isn't Hudson Bay icelocked for the entire year, begining to free up a bit today, but not in 1930 when average temperature was about 1° lower(?).

I'm aware of the ice situation and other difficulties. I'm just curious and want to make sure I get all the names accurate if I do plan to do anything up there.
From the researching I've done over the past few days, very little of the region hadn't been visited in one manner or another by the 30's. That's not to say it's easy to stroll through the region or anything else, just that various landmarcks are documented.

Hudson's Bay was not icelocked in the 1900s. After all, one of the major points of entry into western Canada before the building of the railroads was Churchill, which is on Hudson's Bay. Did it ice up in the winter? Yep, but that doesn't mean it didn't ice out during the summer, which allowed the Hudson's Bay Company to operate.

Unfortunately none of my sources I have at hand (I'm on the road at the moment) have that river's name. I can get it for you late in the week.

At that time, Gjoa Haven probably had open water for ~1 to 2 months at best, with access only from the east. Further west, I think the passage rarely opened up past Victoria Island at all.

Note: Most of these settlements only existed post-WW2, when the Canadian government rounded up the Inuit and moved them to those locations (and some others now abandoned). If there are historical maps from ~1930 for the Northwest Territories, which Nunavut was then part of, you should refer to them.

Hudson's Bay wasn't completely icelocked either, but note that I think the port of Churchill is something that only came around in the 1960s or so.

Shinra - that other river to the east is the Hayes.

Churchill itself may be relatively recent, but before it there was York Factory (at the mouth of the Hayes), which dates from 1713. And before that there was Fort Nelson, founded in 1682. The point was that Hudson's Bay did not stay frozen, that while it froze up in the winter it thawed and was navigable during the summers.

Much appreciated, thank you kindly (: