Early Life
Wheeler was born on May 1, 1860 at The Rocks, the Wheeler family estate near Kilkenny, Ireland. He was educated at Ballinasloe College, County Galway, and at Dulwich College, London. The family fell upon hard times in Ireland, and in 1876 they sold their estates and moved to Canada, where his father took up the post of harbour master in Collingwood, Ontario. In 1876, at the age of 16, Wheeler met noted land surveyor, Lauchlan Alexander Hamilton, and became his apprentice. In 1877, Wheeler was hired by surveyor Elihu Stewart to work north of the Great Lakes in the Algoma District of Ontario, where he spent the summer paddling a birch bark canoe. In 1878 he again worked for Stewart and traveled from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Battleford, Saskatchewan using Red River ox carts to survey Indian reserves near Battleford and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. In the following three years he returned to Ontario and studied to qualify as a Dominion Land Surveyor. He qualified as Ontario Land Surveyor in 1881; as Manitoba and Dominion Land Surveyor in 1882.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)