Looking back on 2011: My most-widely read online articles
January 1, 2012
Over 1,100 visitors yesterday
November 16, 2011
|
|
|
Views |
|---|---|---|
Motherhood and Apple Pie |
|
351 |
Home page |
|
345 |
Florence Nightingale: Mother of Nursing |
|
145 |
Alexander Graham Bell: Inventing the future |
|
36 |
Sir Alexander Fleming: Countless Millions Saved |
|
28 |
Dr. James Naismith: Father of Basketball |
|
25 |
My Fair Lady |
|
16 |
Thomas Edison: Let There Be Light…. |
|
15 |
Simon Fraser: Canada’s most successful failure |
|
13 |
The Passion of Louis Riel |
|
9 |
Other posts |
|
134 |
Total views of posts on your blog |
|
1,117 |
Yesterday was the most traffic on my blog since I started in just over two years. For the
first time, over 1,100 people dialed in to read the 383 postings. Most of these postings are newspaper articles that I have written over the past twenty-five years for the Deep Cove Crier and the North Shore News. During this past month of October, my blog had for the first time over 25,000 visitors. The first month of the blog in August 2009, I had just over 1,000 visitors. So there has been a 25-fold increase in internet traffic to the site. Thank you so much for your continued interest and support.
Also, as of yesterday, the blog has now had 275,000+ visitors. Here are the favorite articles viewed for the past 30 days. You can read any of them right now by just clicking on the name of a particular article. Your feedback is most welcome. Without readers, writing is not quite the same:
250,000 visitors later
October 16, 2011
As of today, the http://edhird.wordpress.com blog has had 250,000 visitors in just over two years. These are the more widely read of the blog articles:
The Reverend Ed Hird, Rector
St. Simon’s Church North Vancouver
Anglican Mission in the Americas (Canada)
http://stsimonschurch.ca
-previously published in the North Shore News & the Deep Cove Crier
-award-winning author of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’
http://www.battleforthesoulofcanada.blogspot.com
p.s. In order to obtain a copy of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’, please send a $18.50 cheque to ‘Ed Hird’, #1008-555 West 28th Street, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2J7. For mailing the book to the USA, please send $20.00 USD. This can also be done by PAYPAL using the e-mail ed_hird@telus.net . Be sure to list your mailing address. The Battle for the Soul of Canada e-book can be obtained for $9.99 CDN/USD.
-Click to download a complimentary PDF copy of the Battle for the Soul study guide : Seeking God’s Solution for a Spirit-Filled Canada
You can also download the complimentary Leader’s Guide PDF: Battle for the Soul Leaders Guide
200,000 visitors…
July 13, 2011
Within the next 24 or so hours, we will have had 200,000 visitors to this blog (100,000 new visitors since Jan 2011 http://edhird.wordpress.com
Through your dialing in today, you will help us reach that number of people .
This blog started on August 2009, less than two years ago. The next goal will be to have a total of 500,000 visitors which we will hopefully see within the next two years.
There are now 353 articles on the blog that you can check out. Thanks for your support and interest. The most popular articles are as follows:
Marie-Anne Lagimodiere, Louis Riel’s Grandmother
May 8, 2011
By the Rev. Dr. Ed Hird
Mother’s Day always bring to mind exceptional mothers who have made a difference. Well-known author Maggie Siggins holds that the most exceptional Canadian mother of the 19th Century was Marie-Anne Lagimodière (née Gaboury). Her home town was Maskinongé, a small village near modern-day Trois-Rivières in Quebec. In 1807, Marie-Anne became the first women of European background to permanently settle in Canada’s far west. It would take another forty years before another European woman joined her.
With the death of her father when she was 12, Marie-Anne spent the next fifteen years as a housekeeper to a priest who taught her to read and write French, Latin, and do basic math. Such education was rare for women in those days. Marie-Anne did not marry until late in life, from a 19th Century Quebecois perspective. She rejected suitor after suitor until the grand old age of 26. Doing the unthinkable, she married a voyageur Jean Baptiste, and then accompanied him back into the hinterlands of western Canada. They broke the cardinal rule that under no circumstances were Eastern Canadian wives to be involved in the fur trade. Wives in the fur trade were known as ‘fur widows’, only seeing their husbands every four or five years.
Travelling almost 3,000 kilometres by canoe, Marie-Anne faced violent rapids, portages, and deadly storm on her way west. Upon arriving at Pemina, her husband’s ‘country wife’ tried to poison Marie-Anne with a plum pudding. Her hungry dogs ate the pudding instead of Marie-Anne, and all the dogs died!
Living until age 96, Marie-Anne never returned to see her family in Eastern Canada. It is said that she was healthy and wise up till the end. Instead of her dainty dresses, she adopted caribou-skin leggings and embroidered moccasins. Along with learning to make pemmican, Marie-Anne became fluent in Ojibwe and Cree, and helped establish the city of Winnipeg.
She was described in Maggie Siggins’ book Marie-Anne as being ‘one tough cookie’ in order to survive her Western adventures. Shortly after her horse rushed towards a herd of buffalo, Marie-Anne gave birth to her second child in the middle of a prairie field. Another time when a large bear attacked her companion, Marie-Anne fought back and shot the bear dead. Once she and her husband were captured by the Tsu Tinna. Upon escaping, they were chased for five days until reaching the safety of Edmonton. Marie-Anne lived through terrifying conflict between the Hudson Bay Company and the North West Company, in which many forts were burned to the ground. For four summers in a row, swarms of grasshoppers were so thick that the sky was pitch black. All crops, gardens, and greenery were ravaged within a few short hours. During the Great Flood of 1825, Marie-Anne’s house was swept away by the river surge. Trees and cattle were swallowed up. Marie-Anne begged her husband to leave this ‘God-forsaken’ land, but Jean Baptiste replied that if the local clergy refused to leave, they too would hang in there. Remarkably all of her seven children lived to adulthood, with her four sons becoming involved in the thriving family businesses.
Her favorite grandchild was one of Canada’s most famous leaders Louis Riel. He was deeply influenced by the passion and courage of his dear grandmother. She taught him to speak the various first nations languages. She taught him to be willing to risk. As Marie-Anne was grieved by the alcoholic debauchery that she saw at Fort Williams, Louis Riel likewise rejected alcohol abuse. Dying in 1875, Marie-Anne lived long enough to see her grandson Louis’ dream come true: that Manitoba become a province, not just a territory in the Canadian Confederation. This Mother’s Day I pray that like Louis Riel, we may be inspired by our mothers and grandmothers to be pioneers and explorers of Canada’s future.
The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, Rector, BSW, MDiv, DMin
St. Simon’s Church North Vancouver
Anglican Mission in the Americas (Canada)
http://stsimonschurch.ca
-award-winning author of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’
-previously published in the Deep Cove Crier
http://www.battleforthesoulofcanada.blogspot.com
p.s. In order to obtain a copy of the book ‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’, please send a $18.50 cheque to ‘Ed Hird’, #1008-555 West 28th Street, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2J7. For mailing the book to the USA, please send $20.00 USD. This can also be done by PAYPAL using the e-mail ed_hird@telus.net . Be sure to list your mailing address. The Battle for the Soul of Canada e-book can be obtained for $9.99CDN/USD.
-Click to download a complimentary PDF copy of the Battle for the Soul study guide : Seeking God’s Solution for a Spirit-Filled Canada
You can also download the complimentary Leader’s Guide PDF: Battle for the Soul Leaders Guide
Louis Riel and Nicholas Flood Davin
February 3, 2011
By the Rev. Dr. Ed Hird
Davin and Riel were perhaps our most famous Western Canadian pioneers. Louis Riel called for the creation of a new Canadian province. Nicholas Flood Davin called for the hanging of Louis Riel. “Riel is not a hero,”[1] said Davin. “…If Riel is not hanged, then capital punishment should be abolished.”[2] Both died tragically, Riel on the end of a noose, Davin by his own hands.
Born in Kilfinane, Ireland, Davin served as a journalist in the Franco-Prussian war, seeing bodies piled six-deep.[3] Reporters in those days were often arrested as spies, being required by the governments to print false information in order to throw off the enemy. This is one of the reasons why reporters in England were not given bylines, so as to protect the freedom of the press.[4] Davin then became the editor of the new Belfast Times, but was dismissed after being so drunk that he reused his previous article from the Sheffield Times. Davin was so offended that he sued them for wrongful dismissal, demanding 5,000 pounds and being awarded only 50 pounds by the courts.[5]
Being a keen observer of social interactions, Davin surprisingly commented that ‘the pulpit occupied almost the whole ground occupied by the newspaper today…The Editor has superseded the preacher.”[6] After being commissioned by Prime Minister John A MacDonald to study the American residential schools, Davin the future federal MP wrote the infamous confidential Davin Report which resulted in our First Nations being subjected to the Residential School tragedy.[7] The indigenous people already went to day-schools run by various churches, but Davin was not satisfied, racistly saying “The child, again, who goes to a day school learns little, and what little he learns is soon forgotten, while his tastes are fashioned at home, and his inherited aversion to toil is in no way combated.”[8] Sadly both the Canadian government and the Canadian churches uncritically accepted the Davin Report claim that “it was found that the day-school did not work, because the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school. (p. 1)”
By hastily imitating the apparent success of the American native residential schools, great and lasting harm was done. The Davin Report patronizingly said: “The experience of the United States is the same as our own as far as the adult Indian is concerned. Little can be done with him. He can be taught to do a little at farming, and at stock-raising, and to dress in a more civilized manner, but that is all.”[9] The Davin Report is ground zero to the deep wound that we inflicted on the First Nations. With Prime Minister Harper’s apology two years ago, our First Nations have only begun to recover from decades of residential school-inflicted trauma.[10] The impressive new ‘People of the Inlet’ film by the local Tsleil Waututh First Nation shows what great courage people like the late Chief Dan George showed in rebuilding his devastated people.
After serving as a reporter in Toronto, Davin 
became editor in 1883 of the brand-new Regina Leader newspaper.[11] My great-grandmother Mary McLean, after taking journalism at a women’s college in Kirkland Ontario, served as one of Davin’s reporters covering the Louis Riel crisis. My late Uncle Don Allen, who was passionate about history, often told us about this period, noting how sympathetic his grandmother was to Riel’s plight. Davin carried on the British tradition of not listing as a byline the names of the reporters who wrote for the Regina Leader. This was helpful for my great-grandmother Mary in protecting her from arrest by the RCMP when she snuck in disguised as a Roman Catholic priest confessor to obtain an interview with Louis Riel. Mary McLean quotes Davin “the officer in command of the LEADER (saying) ‘An interview must be had with Riel if you have to outwit the whole police force of the North-West’.”[12] Because Davin protected her anonymity, some writers like CB Koester and his fellow playwright Ken Mitchell have popularized the myth that Davin himself disguised himself as that priest.[13] While waiting for my throat operation in May 1982, I spent a week with my late Uncle Don Allen who carefully explained to me about his grandmother’s interview with Louis Riel. “When I first saw you on the trial, I loved you” was said by Riel to Mary McLean, not to the man Davin who was calling for his hanging.[14]
The November 19th 1885 edition of the Regina Leader could not be clearer that Davin himself was not the reporter who was disguised as a Roman Catholic priest. Instead Davin is described several times by the reporter as the proprietor and the editor in chief, both terms prominently displayed by Davin’s name in editions
of the Regina Leader.[15] Mary McLean also writes in the article about another female reporter (code-named Saphronica) who earlier failed to get entrance, most likely referring to Kate Simpson-Hayes, Davin’s mistress.[16]
This confusing of Mary McLean’s Riel interview with Davin forced CB Koester to ‘contort himself into knots’ suggesting that for Davin, there was two Riels, one the rebel who Davin wanted to hang, and another Riel to whom Davin was compassionate.[17] Such verbal gymnastics were entirely unnecessary if one simply acknowledge that it was the female reporter, not the male editor-in-chief/proprietor, who did Riel’s final interview.
After having two children with Davin, his mistress Kate Simpson-Hayes gave the children away and became a reporter in Winnipeg.[18] When Davin then married Eliza Reid, he brought his six-year-old son Henry to live with him as a ‘nephew’, but was unable to 
locate his daughter.[19] In Davin and Kate’s final argument over the daughter, Kate said to him: “You go your way. I’ll go mine”, symbolically pointing to the Winnipeg Free Press building.[20] Davin was so crushed that he bought a gun and shot himself on Oct 18th 1901 at the Winnipeg Clarendon Hotel.[21]
The tragic ending to the lives of both Riel and Davin reminds us that our Canadian history has much pain and trauma which can only be resolved through reconciliation and forgiveness. May the Prince of Peace bring deep restoration to the painful wounds left by Canada’s residential school tragedy.
edhird
