The Savage River: Seventy-One Days with Simon Fraser

Christine Linge MacDonald, a past director of the Toronto & District
Parent Co-operative Preschool Corporation and a freelance writer, is an
elementary-school teacher in Whitby.

Originally published in 1968 in the long-running Great Stories of Canada
series, Savage River is a novelized account of Simon Fraser’s
exploration of one of Canada’s most dangerous rivers. Campbell
provides detailed descriptions of the Fraser River, about which another
canoeist later wrote, “I should consider the passage down to be
certain death, nine times out of ten.” As Daniel Francis points out in
the foreword, “Campbell follows [Fraser’s] journal closely; in a way
her book is a dramatization of Fraser’s own words.”

Fraser and his men face some extraordinary hardship: bitter cold,
back-breaking portages “shouldering eighty ninety-pound packs over a
very rough trail,” scarce food, the constant threat of unpredictable
Natives, and unending pain: “[every man] suffered agonies from cut and
blistered feet.” But the greatest antagonist is the savage river,
which they have to navigate when the portages are “tortuous trails up
the high hills.”

Campbell succeeds in painting a vivid picture of the West Coast
wilderness in 1808, and the complex relationship between the explorers
and the knowledgeable, but wary, Native peoples on which much of
Fraser’s success depended. The addition of photos or drawings of the
challenges Fraser faced, and pictures of his gear and canoes, would
augment the reader’s appreciation of this great adventure.
Recommended.