The Life, Events, and Players in the North-West is comprised of several smaller collections within Bruce Peel Special Collections that contain materials related to the history and culture of the north-west of what would become Canada.
The Frontiersmen Collection is organized by country—Canada, England, Australia, New Zealand, and India—and includes correspondence, financial and legal records, meeting minutes, newsletters, and a variety of military forms, as well as photographs, maps, banners, and medals. It is home to the official Charter Certificate for the founding of the Legion of Frontiersmen Canadian Division, whose headquarters are located in Edmonton. The highlight of the collection is a group of nine field diaries penned by Roger Pocock dated 1905-1917. This collection is closely related to several others housed in Bruce Peel Special Collections, specifically the Sir Samuel Benfield Steele Family Archive and the Roger Pocock Archive. It continues to grow thanks to ongoing donations.
Legion of Frontiersmen
This collection offers an expansive view of the experiences of Chinese immigrants to Canada, particularly in the Prairie Provinces. While many narratives of Chinese immigration to Canada focus on the construction of the CPR, the emphasis here is on the numerous and diverse roles that Chinese immigrants played in Canada's history. This collection explores the Chinese experience through immigration, entrepreneurship, schooling, and other elements of daily life. Among other things, it is made up of photographs, scrapbooks, business documents, personal correspondence, immigration records, magazines, books, phonograph records, and event programs. A great deal of credit is due to Helen Kwan Yee Cheung, who encouraged donations from the local Chinese community thus helping to build a uniquely community-based collection.
The archives reflect Dorothy Livesay's earlier work as a poet and consist of poetry manuscripts and typescripts, business correspondence, and typescript drafts of several publications. These records span from 1919 to 1974 and are arranged into four series: Poems: Typescripts and Manuscripts; Poems: Notebooks; Correspondence with Ryerson Press; and Publication Drafts and Author's Prints.
Livesay, Dorothy
This archival collection is composed of textual and graphic materials related to the Hudson's Bay Company, the fur trade in Canada, and early European settlement in Canada. The collection includes correspondence between high-ranking employees at Hudson's Bay Company fur trade posts, personal correspondence between settlers or Hudson's Bay Company employees and their families, and Hudson's Bay Company reports, proclamations, contracts, and others records. The involvement of Indigenous peoples in the Canadian fur trade is also described throughout this collection. With a few exceptions, most items within the collection were created during the early- to mid-1800s.
