John Ware (1845-1905) was born into slavery, gaining his freedom close to the end of the American Civil War. In 1882, he was part of a crew hired to bring 3,000 head of cattle from the United States to Canada for the Northwest Cattle Company. Ware remained on the Alberta Prairies, working for the Bar U and several other cattle companies where he achieved legendary status for his physical strength, horsemanship and courage. However, documentation of Ware’s life is rare, and the true nature of his life can be hard to discern from the legends built around him. Given the lack of documentary record, the identification of Ware’s homestead and buried cultural remains associated with this cowboy legend provide a unique opportunity to study the lifestyle of this historical figure. This paper will explore the life of John Ware as documented in the historic record, and how techniques of archaeological investigation including ground penetrating radar and traditional archaeological testing were used to identify Ware’s Millarville homestead. What is left in the ground to connect us with this cowboy legend?

The retrospective application of borderland theory to Underground Railroad activities in the Great Lakes Basin offers new insight into this clandestine – and highly successful - system. It is now understood that abolitionists, Black and white, on the US side of the border collaborated with their Canadian counterparts to ensure the safe passage of thousands of freedom seekers between about 1814 and 1865. In this two-part presentation, Drs. Frost and Martelle explore archaeological evidence for the extent of this borderland region, the mechanisms employed to ensure the safe passage of refugees across the “fluid frontier” and for networks that evolved to ensure the safe reception of thousands of refugees from American bondage in their new homeland.

Over the past twenty years, geographers, historians, and archaeologists have drawn on the framework of Black geographies and the tools of critical cartography to explore the social production of Black spaces. Counter-mapping (the collection, analysis, and visualization of social and spatial data) has been used by these scholars to produce alternative systems of geographic knowledge production that contest the power of racism, decenter hegemonic worldviews, and facilitate community building. As part of this growing intellectual and advocacy movement, I  use data visualization tools in ArcGIS to document the stories of Black people fleeing racialized violence and oppression in the United States. Drawing on historical sources, I trace the journey and place-making practices of Black arrivants to the Queen's Bush settlement in Canada West during the nineteenth century. At a methodological level, this talk will offer some preliminary insights into how digital mapping tools can be used to spatialize individual histories. More broadly, I argue that mapping the development of the Queen's Bush settlement disrupts scholarly tendencies to reinforce settler colonial geo-political boundaries by portraying the northward migration of Black people as ending at the U.S.-Canadian border.