Three Hundred Prairie Years: Henry Kelsey's Inland Country of Good Report

David E. Smith is a political science professor at the University of
Saskatchewan and the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents.

This is an ambitious book both in purpose and execution. It commemorates
Henry Kelsey’s journey, in 1691, from the western shores of Hudson Bay
to present-day Saskatchewan. Kelsey was the first European to visit the
Canadian prairies and the first to memorialize his travels to these
parts in a journal. In addition to reproducing sections of that journal,
the book comprises 23 chapters of unusual scope and detail. These
include descriptions of the land, vegetation, animals, birds, and fish
that Kelsey encountered, as well as evaluations of the effect European
contact had upon the natural and cultural landscape. Most of the
contributors are specialists in the environment or lecturers in
geography, anthropology, archeology, or Native studies. The scholarship
throughout is exemplary, and at the same time accessible to the general
reader.

The result is an analysis of great interest. Although much about
Kelsey’s life and travels remains a mystery, what is certain is that
his journey signaled an impending alteration to the region’s
environment that continues to the present. As one author notes, the
prairies have become “one of the most disturbed, ecologically
simplified and over-exploited regions in the world.” It is startling
to be reminded by another author that Kelsey “made the first
observation of the passenger pigeon in what is Saskatchewan.” As these
pages bear witness, much more about pre-contact life than the passenger
pigeon proved “incompatible with civilization.”

The papers have a sober moral to relate, not least for the First
Nations whose traditional life succumbed before the European. If
anything, the lesson is made more sombre by its academic,
multidisciplinary telling.