"Some countries have too much history," Prime Minister Mackenzie King once said; "Canada has too much geography."
The intense cold and forbidding landscape of northern Canada-thick forests, mountains, frozen tundra-have dis-couraged settlement ever since the first permanent colonists, led by Samuel Champlain, stepped ashore in New Brunswick in 1604. Even the Vikings, visiting Newfoundland some 600 years earlier, found ice-bound Greenland more congenial than "Vin- land."...