Henry Youle Hind

Henry Youle Hind
Born	1823-06-01 Nottingham, England
Died	1908-08-08 Windsor, Nova Scotia
Occupation	Teacher, professor, geologist, explorer, journalist, author
Father	Thomas Hind
Mother	Sarah Youle
Partner	Katharine Cameron

Henry Youle Hind ((1823-06-01)1 June 1823 – 8 August 1908(1908-08-08) (aged 85)) was an English-born Canadian teacher, geologist, explorer, and author best known for leading the 1857 and 1858 government expeditions into the prairie west, including the canoe route survey from Fort William on Lake Superior to the Red River settlement.

Early life and education

Hind was born in Nottingham on 1 June 1823, the son of Thomas Hind and Sarah Youle. He attended local schools in Nottingham before studying at the Public Commercial Teaching Institute in Leipzig from 1837 to 1839, followed by a year at the University of Cambridge in 1843–1844 and further study in France in 1845.

He arrived in Toronto in 1846 or 1847 and secured a position as assistant master at the Normal School, where he taught mathematics, natural philosophy, and agricultural chemistry under the superintendent Egerton Ryerson. He supervised the school's experimental gardens and in 1850 published his lectures on agricultural chemistry.

He married Katharine Cameron on 7 February 1850 at York Mills, Toronto. They had seven children.

Scientific career in Toronto

In December 1851 Hind joined the Canadian Institute and was appointed the first editor of its Canadian Journal, a post he held from 1852 to 1855, making it Canada's first sustained scientific periodical. That same year he was appointed professor of chemistry at the medical faculty of Trinity College, despite having no formal training in chemistry. He later moved to teaching geology and was awarded an honorary MA by Trinity in 1853.

Western expeditions

In 1857 the Province of Canada organized an expedition to assess the agricultural and mineral potential of the northwest. Hind participated under the overall command of George Gladman, and his portion of the work focused on the canoe route from Fort William on Lake Superior to the Red River settlement. The following year, 1858, Hind led his own expedition traversing the Assiniboine, Souris, Qu'Appelle, and South Saskatchewan river valleys, recording the agricultural potential and mineral deposits of the region.

His account of both expeditions, Narrative of the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and of the Assinniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition of 1858, was published in two volumes in London in 1860 and has been recognized as one of the notable works of nineteenth-century exploration literature, offering detailed description of the prairie landscape before agricultural settlement.

Labrador and Maritime Canada

In 1861 Hind led an expedition to the Labrador peninsula with his brother William George Richardson Hind, hoping to identify practicable Atlantic routes into the interior. The results were published in 1863 as Explorations in the interior of the Labrador peninsula, the country of the Montagnais and Nasquapee Indians.

Hind also edited and partly wrote Eighty years' progress of British North America (1863), promoting Confederation, and edited the British American Magazine from 1863 to 1864.

From 1864 to 1865 he conducted geological surveys in New Brunswick, but became involved in a prolonged dispute with geologist Loring Woart Bailey over survey results and allegations of incompetence and plagiarism. He relocated to Windsor in the autumn of 1866, making it his permanent home.

Nova Scotia and later years

In Windsor, Hind worked as a consulting geologist and promoted the mining resources of Nova Scotia. He surveyed the Labrador coast in 1876 and produced a map of Labrador currents that won a gold medal and diploma at the Paris universal exposition of 1878. The government of Newfoundland engaged him for geological surveys from 1877, and he represented Newfoundland before the Halifax Fisheries Commission, subsequently editing the commission's papers.

From around 1878, Hind's published work took an increasingly polemical turn. He issued attacks on governments and officials, alleging conspiracy involving Hudson's Bay Company lands, falsified fisheries statistics, and the Canadian Pacific Railway's treatment of settlers. By 1883 his output had effectively ceased to engage with science or resources.

In his final years he served on the board of governors of King's College in Windsor during the 1880s, wrote the college's history, and received an honorary DCL in 1890. He died at Windsor, Nova Scotia, on 8 August 1908.

In the Papers of the Thunder Bay Historical Society

Hind's work on the 1857 expedition to the Kaministiquia region featured several times in the early volumes of the Society's Papers. At the meeting of 29 September 1923, Alex McNaughton presented a chapter from Hind's account of "Exploration in the Kaministiquia Valley in 1857."

The 1923 volume also reproduced a piece on the log of the S.S. Rescue on its first trip into Lake Superior in 1858, attributed to Hind in his capacity as "Professor of Chemistry and Geology in the University of Trinity College, Toronto."

M. J. L. Black, writing on place names in the vicinity of Fort William, cited Hind's report on the 1850 Mission Treaty with the Ojibway chiefs, and noted that Hind's 1857 writings referred to Mount McKay as "Mount Mackay."

James McCannel described the Dominion Government's organization of a geological expedition under Hind to survey a wagon road from Fort William to Fort Garry. F. S. Wiley likewise noted that Henry Gladman's 1856 exploratory expedition from Thunder Bay to the Red River was assisted by Simon J. Dawson and Hind, both of whom submitted reports on Thunder Bay as a harbour. A further contribution noted that Hind's 1857 government report on the country between Fort William and the mountains described the agricultural possibilities of the Kaministiquia Valley and was among the studies that preceded the 1858 incorporation of the Northwest Transportation Navigation and Railroad Company.

External links

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography