Mountains So Sublime: Nineteenth-Century British Travellers and the Lure of the Rocky Mountain West.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Anyone acquainted with the accounts published by 19th-century British travellers in America will find few surprises in this survey. After all, travellers whose ears and minds were insulted by the peculiarities of American English and the excesses of American democracy brought eyes that had experienced European peaks from the pastoral environments of Swiss valleys. The European tradition of landscape painting reinforced the inclination to regard alpine environments as friendly, jointly managed by a beneficent Creator and His human associates. The mountain landscape of the North American West was vast, untidy, and chaotic. Often it was monotonous, sometimes terrifying, and populated here and there by heathenish knots of diggers, delvers, dam builders, and arsonists whose hands and minds were motivated only by profit. American mountain scenery, therefore, could rarely be regarded as picturesque, though it might at its most impressive be regarded as “sublime.”

Terry Abraham introduces us to a wide variety of familiar and forgotten observers of the American scene: Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and H.M. Stanley, Paul Kane and William Baillie-Groman, James Thomson and W.M. Rossetti, and many others. Their motives for travel were diverse. Some were professional travel writers, others came for the sport; a few came to investigate prospects for investment in ranching, lumbering, and mining, or simply to observe the scene. Above all, we are acquainted with the filters that tinted their interpretations, an exploration that constitutes Abraham’s central quest. Those filters are sometimes evident in the volume’s 35 illustrations.

Mountains So Sublime is recommended reading for those who have an interest in the mountains of the West, whose insight would be deepened by a scholarly work that, while correcting for the distortions of time and place, conveys as clearly as possible a collective eyewitness account of a landscape, now lost, as it was.