The Remarkable Past: Tales from My Country and the Wild Frontier

William A. Waiser is a professor of history at the University of
Saskatchewan, and the author of Saskatchewan’s Playground: A History
of Prince Albert National Park and Park Prisoners: The Untold Story of
Western Canada’s National Parks, 1915–1946.

The 18 tales in this collection, by one of Canada’s premier
storytellers, deal with interesting characters and their amazing or
peculiar exploits. Selected for their human-interest quality, the
stories, previously published in My Country and The Wild Frontier, are
entertaining and informative. Berton, for example, recounts the 1686
overland French assault, led by Chevalier de Troyes, on the English
fur-trade posts at the bottom of James Bay—one of the classic examples
of the French adoption of guerrilla warfare tactics in North America.
Then there is the morbid tale of John Cameron, a Cariboo gold miner who
kept an 1862 deathbed promise to his wife and carried her pickled
remains in a double-lined coffin through the wilds of British Columbia
to their final resting place in Cornwall, Ontario. Another tale
describes the exploits of Mina Hubbard, who, determined to complete the
expedition that had taken her husband’s life, led her own trek across
the rugged interior plateau of Labrador in 1905.

These are but a sampling of the richly told tales that enliven the
collection and support Berton’s claim that Canada’s past is truly a
remarkable one. Few readers would argue with him.