LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION:
CANADIAN TRAVEL BOOKS OF THE 1870's
Elizabeth Waterston
Most Canadian travel books take us on imaginary trips through strange and varied regions; but some of these books, written no doubt merely to give the pleasure of vicarious travel, transcend that value, and also the value of documentary social history. They remain readable, as elegant and subtle literary constructs.
There have been two great periods in Canadian history when books written to report on voyages across this country became something more than report, something closer to the great imaginative travel accounts like the Odyssey, Gulliver's Travels, Pilgrim's Progress, Sterne's Sentimental Journey, or Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Between 1799 and 1809, Mackenzie and Henry pushed into strange wild scenes, past Montreal to "Nippissingue," Manitoulin, Lake of the Woods, "Winnipec," and on to the frozen ocean of the North, while Weld and Heriot touched the nearly equal strangeness of new settlements between Quebec and Niagara.1 In that period, these writers explored also the literary strategies which could carry a reader along on the joumey.2 The second great period in Canadian travel and Canadian travel literature was 1870-79, when once again new regions were opened, and new literary methods for commuting experience into expression were tried.
Travel books in that period had to describe spaces and forms never before given literary expression, and had also to suggest the continuity and relationship of these scenes. They had to recount the drama of interchange between travellers and an unfamiliar range of "natives" - Blue-Noses, Indians, Habitants, Ontarians, West Coast prospectors. They had to convey the physical and mental effect of locomotion through space and time in an age when railroad technology was sharpening the sense of movement. Finally, because of contemporary developments in art and psychology, they had to play with the idea of point of view, and to create new variants in the old range of travelling personas: questors, exiles, pilgrims.
Over seventy travellers published books about Canadian trips during the 1870's; of these, perhaps four or five achieved a "literature of exploration." The literary power of the best writers can be assessed if we survey the materials they were dealing with, in common with less effective writers. And an overview of travel books of the decade is fascinating in its own right, as social history of the country just after Confederation .3
One great writer was among the travellers - Charles Kingsley; but his was far from being the strongest report. In the quiet journal of his visit he failed to create an interesting persona. His letters lack the charm, the irony, the drama displayed by Trollope in the '60's, or by Dickens twenty years earlier .4
There were in fact fewer British travellers in the '70's than in the '50's and '60's, for several reasons: the end of British commitment to furnish a standing army in Canada of course withdrew all the charming sportsmen-officers; Mission energy had been partly re-routed to the Orient; South Africa and Australia competed for the interest of the emigrant and businessman. Canadians were for the first time, in the post-confederation decade, urged to travel across their new country, and to write books about their travels. Englishmen produced nineteen books describing coast-to-coast travel in this decade, Scots eight, Irishmen four, an American one, and an Australian one (that I know of); and Canadian travellers published thirteen.
The dominant writers of the '70's were not indeed primarily writers, though they proved as able as any novelist to structure the report of events for variety, suspense, and balance. The best books of the 1870's were written by continental heroes. No mere "sight-seers" - these travellers didn't just "see" sights: they measured, marked, deduced ways into, around, over, or under the sights - Lake Superior wilderness, the prairies, the Rockies.
William Francis Butler, Irish-born soldier, travelled the West first as spy, then as medicine man, and as law enforcer. The adventures he stirred up, and lived through, were matched by the vigour of his prose, strong in suspense, vivid in description, flashing with wit. The Great Lone Land appeared in 1872, The Wild North Land in 1873.
George Grant, a young Presbyterian minister from Halifax, joined Sandford Fleming on the historic expedition commissioned by the Government in Ottawa to co-ordinate the work of survey parties in the mountains, to check the advantages of various passes through the Rocky Mountain barrier, and to confirm the choice of a railway line across the prairies. He pre-empted the perfect title for his travel book: Ocean to Ocean, published 1873.
Charles Horetzky (who travelled for a while with Fleming and Grant) retraced the path established fifty years earlier by George Simpson in his great Hudson Bay Company progress in 1828. He struck up north from Edmonton into the Peace River country, via Fort Dunvegan. His account is dominated by his desire to convert the government in Ottawa to the choice of the Peace River route through the Rockies. Horetzky's Canada on the Pacific (1874) is as forceful in the persuasive as in the narrative mode.
In the excitement of this spate of expeditions and publications, memories of older trips were stirred: the Earl of Southesk brought out his journal of 1858-60, and published it in 1875 as Saskatchewan and the Rocky Mountains. Southesk had toured the North West Territory in 1858-60 (Hind's time, Palisser's time, Cheadle's time), and had travelled in the days when the buffalo herds still offered great sport to the gentleman-hunter. Southesk summarizes for all the western travellers: "Long wearisome riding, indifferent monotonous country, no sport to speak of, hard bed upon the ground, hot sun, wet, no companion of my own class; nevertheless I am happier than I have been for years" (54).
Most of the travel books begin with scenes and characters in the just slightly strange world of the old colonies. There are impressions of blazing snow in the winter sunshine of Quebec, of remittance men "weak in brain power" and Orange Day parades in Ontario. Most writers of the '70's were conscious of working in a popular tradition: they "did" the scenes that Heriot and Warburton and Dickens had done, with a sense of playing on familiar themes. Emphasis is often on tamer, more sophisticated versions of old thrills: winter in Montreal now means fancy skating in an ice palace (White, 146) Shooting the rapids involves an elegant river steamer rather than a canoe. Niagara at best gets mock-heroic treatment: "Tourists were doing the Falls, and touts were doing the tourists" (Butler, 26). Politics now means Ottawa: a dull come-down from earlier visits to Mackenzie and Papineau and Neilson. Roads are still execrable (Morris, 126). Canadians who insist dogmatically on their own worth, seem "quiet" compared to Americans, and "less addicted to extravagance in language and dress; more polite and self-denying, slower-going" (Falk, 88).
In short there was little to charm, little also to terrify the travellers in Eastern Canada. Even the Indians had been reduced to a "quiet, civil, obliging, lazy lot of people" (Rowan, 305). At Lorette, in "a colony of civilized Indians," Chief Paul proudly showed the piano he had installed for his daughter (Chariton, 19). But the Canadian Handbook of 1871 announced a new itinerary: "thanks to the iron horse," the wild forest lands, of Superior, Huron, as well as Saguenay, St. Francis and St. Maurice, could be added to the tour. And beyond even the reach of the iron horse stretched the new lands. A Canadian tour, which once would have concluded with a visit to Lake Huron, was not extendable westward. The old trip through "the Canadas" was now the rather tame prelude to canoe trips along the Athabaska, or horse-back rides across the Grande Prairie "waist-deep in blue-joint wild grass" (Horetzky, 23). The fare at Clifton House barely rated mention from a traveller on his way to a "smoking dish of moose steaks, flanked by a platter of very diminutive potatoes" (Horetzky, 40), or - heaven help him! - to pemmican flavoured with skunk. Travellers passed Superior and Red River, rode beyond Manitoba across the fertile belt of the Saskatchewan River; went north-west beyond the palisades of Fort Edmonton the the Peace River Country; or by the McLeod River area slightly to the south, toward Jasper's House; then pushed through the mountain passes, and finally canoed down the deep canyons, crossed the arid plateau, and reached the little mining settlements of British Columbia.
I
Description became the forte of the great travel writers of the period. In real travels, places are visited because of geographic arrangement or technical accessibility. But the structure of a book depends on the writer's decisions about inclusion proportion and emphasis. Contemporary readers of Canadian travel books could share the writers' efforts to cope with and express those new Canadian realities, so like the fantasies of a dream world: the wastes of snow, the web of rivers, the endless plains, the grotesque Rockies, the sounding cataracts.
All writers wrestled to give their readers a sense of these immensities. "How shall we picture it?" Butler asks. "How shall we tell the story?" (199) Grant specifies:
The plain was not an unbroken expanse but a succession of very shallow basins, enclosed in one large basin, itself shallow, from the rim of which you could look across the whole, whereas, at the bottom of one of the smaller basins, the horizon was exceedingly limited. No sound broke the stillness.... (113)
Grand adds a close-up of jewelling flowers:
Tall, bright yellow, French marigolds, scattered in clumps over the vast expanse, gave a golden hue to the scene; and red, pink, and white roses, tansy, asters, blue-bells, golden-rods, and an immense variety of compositae, thickly among the green grass, made up a bright and beautiful carpet. (63)
Later, in face of the different challenge of looming mountains, the descriptive choices were to be made again. Butler sees a menace:
Solid, impassable, silent - a mighty barrier raising midst an immense land, standing sentinel over the plains and prairies of America over the measureless solitudes, of this Great Lone Land. Here, at last, lay the Rocky Mountains. (GLL, 274-5)
Grant softens the effect:
Instead of being clearly outlined, cold, and grey as in the morning, they appeared indistinct through a warm deep blue haze ... The soft blue of the mountains gleamed through everywhere, and when the woods parted, the mighty column of Roche à Perdrix towered a mile above our heads, scuds of clouds kissing its snowy summit, and each plication and angle of the different strata up its giant sides boldly and clearly revealed. We were entering the magnificent Jasper portals of the Rocky Mountains by a quiet path winding between groves of trees and rich lawns like an English gentlemen's park. (226)
Other writers would add other areas to the Canadian panorama. Horetzky for instance writes of the quagmires of the MacKenzie River watershed, then the Slave country, with ravines and cypress, hilly, swampy, wooded country, "terribly hard upon the poor horses," and the Peace River area with its splendid soil and verdure.
But Butler's description of Canadian places emerges as preeminent for three reasons. First is the power of metaphor. The famous "sea of grass" passage offers a noted example:
The ocean is one of grass, and the shores are the crests of mountain ranges, and the dark pine forests of sub-Arctic regions. The great ocean itself does not present more infinite variety than does this prairie-ocean of which we speak. In winter, a dazzling surface of purest snow; in early summer, a vast expanse of grass and pale pink roses; in autumn too often a wild sea of raging fire. No ocean of water in the world can vie with its gorgeous sunsets; no solitude can equal it (199)
Second, Butler plays with the idea of spatiality. He begins The Great Lone Land with an image of "the wide world." In the brief brilliant eighteenth chapter, when he turns homeward, facing the hill-less country, his mind sweeps to the highlands, to the Himalayas, and then from the strange western sun to the imagined battle on the Seine. "Did the sky mirror the earth, even as the ocean mirrors the sky?" (282) Third, Butler excels in the Gulliver effect the play of contrasts. Swift invented a sequence of contrasted lands. Butler found such a sequence. He exploited the Swiftian ironies of contrasts between regions. In epitome his technique appears in such description as this, which juxtaposes the world of habitable low ground, weird northern barren, and broad sweeping river:
It was dusk in the evening of the 19th of January when we reached the high ground which looks down upon the "forks" of the Saskatchewan River. On some low ground at the farther side of the North Branch a camp-fire glimmered in the twilight. On the ridges beyond stood the dark pines of the Great Sub-Arctic Forest, and below lay the two broad converging rivers whose immense currents, hushed beneath the weight of ice, here merged into the single channel of the Lower Saskatchewan - a wild, weird scene it looked as the shadows closed around it. (328)
II
For Butler, part of the greatness of the land was its "loneness." But for him, and for other travel writers, the second challenge of the genre was the need to convey the drama of strange encounters. The first sentence in Ocean to Ocean alerts us to George Grant's focus on the human experience of interchange. The book begins, "Three friends met in Halifax, and agreed to travel together through the Dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific." And the book comes to its climax when the travellers, penetrating toward Kamloops via the Yellow Head Pass, meet Moberly of the Pacific party, in the Caledonia Valley.
Along the way, Grant does justice to the sense of companionship: the jokes; the food. He absorbs the personalities of guides, cook, and party members; the Sabbath services, and the Saturday triple toasts: to the Queen, to wives and sweethearts, and then to "the Dominion and the Railway!" - "with three times three and one cheer more!" The last part of Grant's story, of the trip down the Fraser Canyon, presents encounters with mining prospectors, with Chinese domestics, with American adventurers, and eccentric west coast personalities like Judges O'Reilly and Begbie.
Such a story of successive interchanges with strangers was of course the staple plot of the nineteenth century novel. But a travel book on Canada focused on a special kind of interchange: the encounter with native peoples. The writers of the '70's explore ways of describing to their readers these real humans, so different from story-book savages.
Stereotypes have not yet been established. The Earl of Southesk can describe an Ojibway, "a miserable object half naked and quite drunk, a bloated, disgusting savage" (17). Equally vivid is Butler's memory of Indians spitting on the door handles of Fort Pitt in hope of passing the smallpox infection back to its white purveyors. The Great Lone Land ends with a ceremony on Moose Lake: "nudity and nastiness," and a magic spell to bring sturgeon to the fishing-nets. Butler describes Blackfeet dress: a tall hat forty years out of style, and a feather from some dowager's turban, plus gold tinsel; a coat with a high collar, tight waist. . . ." He will exchange for this his own deerskin shirt, embroidered with porcupine quills and ornamented with the raven locks of his enemies - his headdress or ermine, his flowing buffalo robe" (GLL, 287-8). Butler is at his best in the famous description of "M. Louis Riel, President, Dictator, Ogre, Saviour of Society, and New Napoleon, as he was variously named by friends and foes in the little tea-cup of Red River, whose tempest had cast him suddenly from dregs to surface" (GLL, 144). He describes that "remarkable-looking face" - the hair, the fanatical eyes; the strange garb: black frock-coat plus mocassins; the strangely intense speech:
a short stout man with a large head, sallow, puffy face, a sharp, restless, intelligent eye, a square-cut massive forehead overhung by a mass of long and thickly clustering hair, and marked with well-cut eyebrows - altogether, a remarkable-looking face. (133)
Horetzky, too, noted changing appearances and manners of successive Indian tribes: the filthy Kitsigeuhles, "a tough hardy set and great carriers" (118); the Coast Indians who spoke a Chinook jargon; the "Hyders" who excelled in carving, canoes, bracelets; Nascars, such as Muskeeboo, who spoke English with a too-strong Yorkshire accent (124). He admired the tall and stately spears and the beautiful masks of Western tribes (120, 131).
Grant expresses affection and respect for the cheerful, energetic guides, but also a general assumption of the doom of their race: [The Indian's] wild wandering life is inconsistent with modem requirements: these vast regions were surely meant to sustain more than a few thousand Ojibbeways" (34). Grant describes "Ojibbeways" waiting to cede their rights at a pow-wow. "Poor creatures! not much have they ever made of the land, and yet in admitting the settler, they sign their own death warrants" (33). Grant distinguishes between the Iroquois from Chaughnawaga, their hair tidy, their dress simple blue jacket and pants, and the Ojibbeways, their hair-growth lank and stiff with fish oil, silver rings in the nose, wearing gaudy sashes and bedraggled feathers. To discriminate between tribes, to recognize the Indian guides as individuals - old Ignace Mentour, once Sir George Simpson's guide, with his two young pupils, Baptise and Toma; to distinguish as Grant does between kinds of half-breeds - these are first stages to realistic vignettes of Indians as dramatic actors of the travel story.
Grant's diary form conveys the human drama of the long trip westward. He treats his fellow travellers as characters in an exciting and entertaining narrative: the Botanist, wildly excited at every new "find," and vastly amusing to the dour teamsters along the way; the Doctor, doling out non-medicinal comforts such as plum-pudding when required; the Colonel, enjoying an occasional ride out hunting with young Frank Fleming; the Secretary (Grant himself), preaching on Sundays, long or short sermons, depending on how long his listeners had been sermonless; and the Engineer, Horetzky, who joined the party late in its progress and left it early because of Fleming's desire to have a report on an alternative route through the mountains.
Then Grant, recording the succession of encounters between this exploring party and the native people, records also a thoughtful exploration of the nature of civilization. He thus adds a further dimension to the travel book as genre. His travellers are humanized by travel - deepened in their sense of human nature by the challenge of new but human exchanges. The reader too is enriched and transformed by the drama of Canadian transactions.
III
Travel itself, rather than set scenes or dramatic interchanges, provides of course the generic base of a travel book. In "real" travels the rhythm of movement and pause is involuntary, reflecting physiological and transportational necessities of sleep and repair. In the book, the rhythm of peregrination can be manipulated. Most travellers in the 1870's had become involved in new antagonisms: man against space, technology against climate.
Over the Prairie went the travel path, via a string of Hudson Bay Posts: Fort Garry to Fort Ellice, 230 miles; Fort Ellice to Carlton - 560 miles. Carlton to Fort Pitt, 90 miles, and so on to Fort Victoria and Edmonton, or via Qu'Appelle to Chesterfield and on to the Old Bow Fort. Either way, 1200 miles over the prairies. Beyond the wild Northwest, the wilder recesses and peaks of the mountains, Rockies, Selkirks and Cascades, challenged explorers to find the best pass through to the Pacific. Beyond the ranges they travelled again through a third Western World.
In these new worlds, the travel books became almost obsessively concerned with travel. Places were reached by a variety of conveyance undreamt-of by earlier travellers. We hear of the "good broad road" beyond Prince Arthur's Landing (Grant, 30). Most of the good-sized lakes had steamer-tugs on them. Grant describes the progress: "The tug led the way at the rate of seven knots, towing, first a large barge with immigrants, second a five-fathom canoe, with three of our party and seven Indians, third a four-fathom canoe, with two of us and six Indians, fourth, same as three, fifth, M----'s and L----'s canoe. We glided along with a delightful motion, sitting on our baggage in the bottoms of the canoes" (32). Around Lake of the Woods, Scots worked as teamsters, loading travellers into strong but cumbersome carts.
Then, on Red River, one encountered the steamer Intemational. The old boat Butler noted, had a tendency to catch on fire, and had the cinder scars to prove it River steamers had been running since the late 1850's - Southesk remembered seeing the first one arrive from Minnesota in 1858. The Intemational looked pretty trim and effective in comparison to the big Hudson Bay Mackinaw boats on the lakes - big, heavy, lumbering, with powerful sweeps and a large square lug-sail (Butler, GLL, 155). Indian canoes offered an alternative way to traverse the land between Superior and Fort Garry; they followed the old traders' route up over the height of land. On shore, in the Red River Valley, the carts caught the traveller's eye. Beyond the settlements at Fort Garry and Winnipeg, one moved in Caravan. Grant describes his experience with six Red River hunters, travelling in "brigades."
In farther western stretches of travel, the carts were left behind at Hudson Bay Company Forts, and the travellers proceeded by horseback, fording the rivers on rough rafts or by swimming, clutching the horses as they went. Through the mountain passes, they moved on horseback where possible. Testimony of earlier travellers - that intrepid band that preceded Milton and Cheadle -was carved into one large spruce tree - "a hard road to travel" (Grant, 206). Grant and his contemporaries, "pegging away along a terrible road with muskegs and windfalls" (232), spilled over into their written accounts a new verve and tension, a narrative drive to match that vigorous push westward. Farther north, another mode of travel elicited equal narrative skill: Butler's descriptions of travel by dog sledge are magnificent.
Butler had described his first foray, along the foaming Winnipeg River, up the seven portages of Rainy River, to Rat Portage, where he could stand in lonely glory waving to General Wolseley, as the expeditionary force swept by in the great war canoes. Then twelve hundred miles over the prairies, "that great, boundless, solitary waste of verdure" (199). Finally, a third trip, in winter, to Cumberland, travelling via Lake Winnipegasis, moving through the sub-Arctic forests to northern Manitoba lands at forty degrees below zero, through a strange world of sleighs, cold, dogs, Indian drivers, and snowy wilderness.
But in the exploitation of the travel motif, it is Horetzky who excels. Travel forms organize his book. Each of the chapters in Canada on the Pacific covers a roughly equivalent geographic push: twelve chapters swing through twelve stages of a Northern sweep through the Peace River Gap, the Rocky Mountain Pass, the Parsnip River bed, and over to the near-Alaskan port of Fort Simpson. We are impelled by vigorous participles:
Finally emerging from the labyrinth of fallen trees, and gaining the summit of a high ridge covered with green timber, along which the path wound, we found ourselves upon the edge of a deep and gloomy ravine, leading in a northern direction, and evidently forming the bed of a small tributary of the Pine River, which we came upon as night began to enshroud the already gloomy landscape in its mantle of darkness. While skirting the edge of the deep gap already mentioned, we had caught occasional glimpses of the little stream flowing beneath at a depth of 1,000 feet. We were accordingly fully prepared for the precipitous descent which awaited us on gaining the edge of the Pine River Valley. The botanist and myself were some little distance ahead of the horses, and had passed the usual path leading down to the water's edge; so after waiting some time, we were not a little surprised to hear voices of our men, far beneath and at the right of us. Not caring to retrace our steps, we plunged boldly down the precipitous banks, and rejoined the others after a descent which we most certainly would not have attempted in broad daylight.
Horetzky exploits his own consciousness of the contrast between his own primitive motions - walking, riding, canoeing, snowshoeing - and the imminent coming of the comforts of steamboat and railroad travel. Because of this consciousness, he is able to involve us, as readers, in strong physical sense of movement: catch of breath, frisson of terror, heightening pulse: all those physiological sensations that we desire - and suffer from - as we read of travels.
Along the Peace River Valley and through the Rockies Horetzky takes us, first in a large and unwieldy boat then by snowshoe. Then over the ice to Babine Lake, up the icy river in a canoe that "leaked like a basket," through fog, at twenty below zero, and past gold mining regions following George Wright's old trail, from an abandoned Hudson Bay Company fort on the Naas River, on foot.
On the coast, Horetzky boarded the Otter, and steamed down past Kitimat, Fort Rupert, Maud Island to Nanaimo, and Victoria, a town of six thousand inhabitants, which boasted "any number of saloons and one or two fair hotels," plus gas and a theatre; he embarked thence for San Francisco, and returned, via American railroads, to Ottawa - an eight-day overland trip. He travelled, of course, with the sense that his travels would help consummate the union of Eastern and Western Canada.
The politicians and the businessmen in their wisdom would eventually ignore both the Peace River and the Yellow Head Pass in setting the route for the Canadian Pacific. But in the meantime, the surveyors, the botanists, the engineers had brought a unique force to the travel books of the 1870's: the sense of energy and movement.
IV
In "real" travels, the persona of the traveller is set: his social status, age, wealth, national background, professional training are not matter of choice. But the persona of the book may be played up or down. The traveller, as naive perceiver or ironic filter, speaks with one of the most familiar voices in literature: as Hythloday, enlightening his willing hearers, or as Ancient Mariner, clutching the horrified but fascinated guest. Of travellers through Canada, the Earl of Southesk, most self-absorbed, is also most self-revealing. He presents moments grotesque and grand, unselected, unsorted.
"A ridiculous thing happened this morning," he says; "I was in the act of washing myself in my india-rubber bath, when suddenly the door flew open, and two splendidly dressed Indians walked into the room as if the whole place belonged to them, but on seeing me they stopped, and stared with all their might. We stared at one another for a moment, then a radiant smile came over their faces, and there was a general laugh after which I continued my sponging, to their evident wonder and amazement What they thought of the ceremony I never happened to find out" (271-2). Then he swings to discussion of a scene in Macbeth - Lady Macbeth washing her hands - and goes on to close analysis of Shakespeare's text. The two entries are unconnected - except that they share a place in Southesk's mind.
The other writers tend to select and censor as they prepare for publication: certainly a persona emerges in the work of Butler, Grant, Horetzky and in many of the lesser writers in the decade, such as O'Leary and Rowan, Trow and St John Molyneux. Butler presents himself as the wily visitor, the spy, the medicine man, the observer from a superior position. Grant casts himself more humbly as "The Secretary," an almost oriental observer open to new wisdom. Horetzky emphasizes Odyssean action and energy. (Horetzky's trip had begun in some discomposure. The best horses and guides had been hired for Fleming's Jasper House expedition; the second-best by a group of Hudson's Bay Company men, also moving toward the north, to New Caledonia on Lake McLeod. Horetzky and the Botanist John Macoun were Undaunted. "'Never mind, my dear Mac,' said I, 'we may steal a march on them...’")
But Southesk's voice is that of a more modern narrator, less selective of a single stance. His voice is that of a private person, not a public-facing personality. Testy, melancholy, self-absorbed, the Earl retained in his journal both the probings of his own moods, and the records of his intellectual explorations. The result is a Joycean mélange, on the model set by Mrs. Jameson in the 1830's, when she interwove summer rambles and winter studies.
Is there something Canadian about this persona? I think so: here is our friend the remittance man, well bom, well connected, well educated, determined to maintain his interests in spite of the teepee, the sod hut, or the barracks. He adds to the Canadian tone his perhaps inappropriate refinements.
V
May I add one note of rash generalization? These travel books, much as I enjoy them, seem to me atypical of Canadian tradition, because in them humanity is limited to one sex. There are no romantic encounters, no love-stories: basically. the travellers of the '70's move through a womanless world.
Now we are aware of the recurrence in American literature of just such a womanless world - from Leather Stocking through Moby Dick to Huckleberry Finn, and we enjoy speculations such as Fiedler's as to why this is so. But the Canadian literary tradition in its mainstream has been different. It has focused on deep, disturbed and significant relationships between men and women.
All the more interesting is this little clutch of manly adventure stories - Odysseys without Circe, journeys without sentiment. The traveller's ardour is for travel, their dalliance with nature; their attainment is space.
No romance, and very little sentiment, blurs the hard edge of these books. They cater to a hunger for tales of real hardship and manly adventures. In characterization, in evocation of setting, in personal digression, and in the narrative drive of travel itself, they approach the great first-person narratives of the eighteenth century, and then add some of the social and political concerns of mid-Victorianism. They are the antithesis in structure of the web-like fineness being exploited in this period of British novelists like George Meredith, or Americans like the young Henry James; but they gave to their contemporaries an alternative pleasure in narrative suspense and progression. Lively, racy, anecdotal, these books communicate both the heroic quality of the men who travelled, and also the unforgettable impression of the dominion the travellers crossed.
University of Guelph
APPENDIX
BIBLIOGRAPHY - TRAVEL LITERATURE
IN CANADA - 1870-1879
Year Author, Title, Publisher
Algar,F. Canada, the New Dominion. London, 8 Clement Lane (Pamphlet.)
1870 Brown, J. C. A Handy Guide for a Fanner and a Labourer. Glasgow.
Duncan, Captain F. Canada, A Lecture ... London, Simpson & Marshall.
Taché, A. A. Sketch of Northwest America. Montreal, Lovell.
White, John. Sketches from America. London, Sampson, Low and Sons & Marston.
1871 Marshall, C. The Canadian Dominion. London, Longmans.
Philpot, J. H. Guide-Book to the Canadian Dominions.
Herring, A. Letters From Abroad. London, Partridge.
Easton, George. Travels in America, Glasgow, S. Marr (reprinted Canadiana 1971).
Dashwood, R. L. Chiploquorgan, or Life by the Campfire. Dublin, R. T. White.
(Roger, Chas. Ottawa, Past and Present. Ottawa)
1872 Anderson, Alexander C. The Dominion of the West. Victoria, Wolfenden, (pamphlet)
(Anderson, William J. The Valley of the Chaudière. Quebec, Morning Chronicle).
(Bennett, Rev. James. Down East: Where to go; What to do; How to do it. Saint John, Chubb).
Butler, William Francis. The Great Lone Land. London, Sampson, Low. Reprint, Coles; also M/filrn
(Davenport, Mrs. M. Journal of a Fourteen Days' Ride Through the Bush from Quebec to Lake Saint John. Quebec, Daily Mercury.
[Bu Canoe from Toronto to Fort Edmonton in 1872, Reprint, 1968.]
(Johnson, R. B. Very Far West Indeed. London, Sampson Low)
(Horetzky, Chas. The Peace River. (Pamphlet))
[[McDonald, Archibald. Peace River: A Canoe Voyage Journal of a Chief Factor ed. M. McLeod. Ottawa, Durie
also titled A Canoe Trip from Hudson's Bay to the Pacific by the late Sir George Simpson.]]
1873 (Anderson, David. The Net in the Bay. London, Hatchards.)
(Browne, C. Ottawa Hotel Travellers Guide. Montreal)
Butler, Sir William Francis. The Wild North land. London, Simpson.
Geikie, J. C. Adventures in Canada. Philadelphia, Porter and Gates (1873?)
Grant, George M. Ocean to Ocean. Toronto, Campbell.
Carlile, W. O., and O. Martindale. A Lieutenant Colonel's Recollections of Canada.
(Adams, A. L. Field and Forest Rambles. London)
Gadsby, John. A Visit to Canada and the United States and a Second Visit to Spain. London, Gadsby.
Monck, Dorset Lady Frances My Canadian Leaves, for private circulation. Dorset County Express. Reprinted University of Toronto 1963.
Croasdaile, H. E. Scenes on Pacific Stories with a Trip Across South America. London, Town & Country.
1874 Borthwick, Rev. James Douglas.... The Tourist's Pleasure Book or, The WaterFalls of Canada its Lakes and Rivers. Montreal, Lovell.
Cameron, Wm. A Month in the U. S. and Canada in the Autumn of 1873. Greenock.
(Crosskill, Herbert Nova Scotia. Halifax, Annand.)
Gillmore, Parker. Prairie and Forest. New York, Harpers.
Horetzky, Charles. Canada on the Pacific. Montreal, Dawson.
Morris, William. Letters Sent Home: Out and Home Again by Way of Canada and the United States. London, Wame.
Verne, Jules. The Fur Country, North Latitude. Boston, J. R. Osgood.
Staner, W. The Gentleman Emigrant. London. Tinsley.
[Kingsley, Charles. Charles Kingsley's American Notes ed. R.
B. Martin, Princeton, 1968.]
Charlton, W. H. Four Months in North America. Hexlam,
Courant office.
Boddam-Whetham, J. W. Western Wanderings, London, R.
Bentley.
1875 MacKean, William. Letters Home During a Trip in America,
1869. Paisley, Priv.
[[Southesk, Earl. Saskatchewan and The Rocky Mountains,
Toronto, Campbell; Edinburgh, Edmonston and
Cadell. ]]
(Sweetser M. F. The Maritime Provinces of Canada.)
Trow, James. A Trip to Manitoba. Quebec, Marcotte.
O'Leary,Peter. Travels and Experiences in
Canada.. . London, John B. Day.
"An Indian Officer" How I spent my Two Years' Leave.
London, Tinsley.
Rogers, R. V. Wrongs and Rights of a Traveller. Toronto,
Carswell.
1876 Anderson, Alexander C. Notes on North-western America.
Montreal, Mitchell & Wilson. (pamphlet)
Davenport, Montague. Under the Gridiron. London, Tinsley.
Hamilton, James Cleland. The Prairie Provinces. Toronto,
Belford, also M/Film.
(LeMoine, James M. The Tourist's Note-Book. Quebec, Grant & Co.)
Ross, Rev. William W. 10,000 Miles by Land and Sea.
Toronto, Campbell, also Coles fascs, 1972.
Rowan, John J. The Emigrant and Sportsman in Canada.
London, Stanford.
(Bigelow, T. Journal of a Tour of Niagara Falls in 1865. Boston.)
1877 Beckett, R. Ten Thousand Miles in Fifty Days.
Croal, T. A. A Book About Travelling, Past and Present.
London & Edinburgh, Wm. P. Nimmo.
O'Leary, Peter. Travels and Experiences in Canada. London,
J. B. Day, (1877?)
St. John, Frederick Edward M. The Sea of Mountains.
London, Hurst & Blackett.
Falk,Alfred. Trans-Pacific Sketches. Melbourne, George Robertson.
Leng, John America in 1876. Dundae, Advertiser.
Norton, C. L. & J. Habberton. Canoeing in Kanuckia. New York, Putnam.
Rae,W. Fraser. Columbia and Canada. London, Daldy, Isbister.
1878 ((MacPherson, Geraldine. Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson, by her Niece. Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1878.))
((Stewart, G. Canada under the Administration of the Earl of Dufferin.))
Trow, James. Manitoba and the North West Territories. Ottawa, Dept. of Agriculture.
[Dufferin and Ava. H. G., Lady. My Canadian Journal 1872-78. Pub. N. Y. Appleton 1891.]
Argyll, Lord Duke of, First Impressions of the New World,
London,
Allen, W. H. (Description and statistics).
1879 Barnes, H. H. Journal of a Trip to Manitoba and Back, June and July, 1878. Halifax, Doley.
Hall, Edward Hepple. Lands of Plenty - B.N.A. For Health, Sport and Profit, London, Allen.
(Robinson, Henry M. The Great Fur Land; or, Sketches of Life in the Hudson's Bay Territory. New York, Putnam's Sons.)
London, J. B. A Tour Through Canada and the United States. Coventry, Curbs and Beamish.
Vivian, A. P. Wanderings in the Western Land -
Legend
[ ] = written in this period, published later.
[[ ]]= written over 10 years earlier, published in this period.
( ) = regional, but with interesting comments on travel conditions.
(( ))= historical, but with some personal reminiscences of travel.
NOTES
1See Literary History of Canada, I, chapters 2 and 3.
2See Victor Hopwood, "David Thompson, Mapmaker and Mythmaker," Can. Lit. 38, Autumn 1968; Roy Daniells, "The Literary Relevance of Alexander Mackenzie," Can. Lit. 38, Autumn 1968; T. D. MacLulich, "The Explorers Here: Mackenzie and Fraser," Can. Lit. 75, 1977, also his unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, York University, 1977. Maurice Hodgson, "The Exploration Journal as Literature," Beaver, 298, Winter 1967. The story of Western travel between 1820 and 1870 is touched on in chapters 7, 8, and 9 of Literary History of Canada, and in R G. Moyles' introduction to chapter 18 in the Literary History of Canada (revised edition) and in countless articles in Beaver magazine, in M. Q. Innis, Travellers West, Toronto, 1956, and Gerald Graig, Early Travellers in the Canadas, Toronto, 1955. See also Bruce Peel, A Bibliography of Prairie References, and R. G. Moyles' selective listing of "Literature of Exploration, Travel and Description" in English Canadian Literature to 1900, Detroit 1976.
3A full bibliography of books on travel in Canada in the 1870's is attached. References in the text of this article appear in parenthesis, giving author's surname and page. Some of the books referred to describe regional rather than coast-to-coast travel, but are included because of the light they throw on travel conditions, or conventions of writing about travel. They appear in brackets in the bibliography. All books listed in the bibliography, together with some 500 others, have been analyzed as to author's nationality and profession; mode of travel; form of recording, illustrating and publishing; areas visited; people and cultural phenomena observed. These details are recorded in an annotated bibliography, stored on computer tape at the University of Guelph Library.
4Dickens, American Notes, London, 1842; Anthony Trollope, North America, London, 1862.