Honoré Jaxon: Prairie Visionary.

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.

Honoré Jaxon was the assumed name of William Henry Jackson, born in Toronto on May 3, 1861. His father, an inept storekeeper, left a trail of failed businesses from Weston to Wingham to Portage la Prairie to Prince Albert. In spite of his financial failures, he managed to underwrite the costs of a first-rate education for his son William, first at the provincial model school in Toronto  and then at University College. Four years of classical studies and exposure to Greek literature imbued in William a keen sense of individual right and responsibility. Those convictions predisposed him to unconventionality. He questioned Ottawa’s management of its western domain, served as secretary of the Prince Albert farmers’ union, and, in 1884–85, became secretary to Louis Riel, a decision that led to a charge of felonious treason. The court, with the support of his family, declared him insane and had him committed to a mental institution near Winnipeg.

Jackson escaped and fled to the United States. While drifting from St. Vincent, Minnesota, to Chicago, he began cultivating a new persona, assuming an Indian heritage and calling himself Honoré Jaxon, Métis crusader for social justice. Chicago in the days of the Haymarket riot (1886) was a hotbed of labour unrest. Jaxon was soon deeply involved in the campaign for the eight-hour workday and the defense of the Haymarket anarchists. While living the lie of his Métis origin, he supported utopian communal schemes, joined the Baha’i movement, fell in love and married in 1898, and, like his father, failed repeatedly in business schemes.

Between 1910 and 1918, Jaxon’s life was, even for a renegade, a surfeit of activity as “new interests followed old ones, like a new coat of fresh paint over the same old, well-recognized piece of homemade furniture.” In the interwar period, he turned to business and land speculation in the Bronx, a move that delighted his long-suffering wife, Aimée. These ventures, too, turned out badly. His old friend Frank Lloyd Wright found Jaxon in his 70s “living in New York in a big barn amid vast piles of stacked newspapers, dreaming of world reform while rats raced past him.” That presaged the end of his story, a mentally unbalanced man in his eighties, living virtually friendless amid heaps of paper in the basement of a Manhattan apartment building, stoking its furnace for employment. Jaxon was finally evicted in December 1951, with his papers, onto the sidewalk, as an unreliable employee and the creator of a Class A fire hazard. The dramatic photograph on the cover of the book is an apt summation of his late life and work.

Donald Smith’s account of Jackson’s life is provocative for its adventurous scholarship and the eternal question it raises: What does constitute a life “well lived”?