Superior Rendezvous-Place: Fort William in the Canadian Fur Trade. 2nd ed.

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.

Few items in the pedagogue’s curricular closet have proved as reliable and durable as the Canadian fur trade. Year after year in their progress through the grades, students were introduced to the beaver, its pelt, and the eponymous hat, and through these to whatever values were currently fashionable amongst the mitred members of the social studies hierarchy. Endless repetitions of the fur trade litany made a significant contribution to the general conviction that Canadian history was dull as ditch water.

The manifold energies released by the advent of the boomer generation, however, changed this as it changed almost everything else. Universities multiplied, graduate history departments swelled, students and their advisers scoured the Canadian landscape for thesis topics, and political history yielded the sceptre to social history in all of its varied and often turbulent manifestations. Fur trade history, thankfully, was transformed by this, becoming in the process a body of knowledge extraordinarily complex in its thematic meshwork, intriguingly subtle in the nuances that could be teased out of the rich documentary record, and full of colours: primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Jean Morrison, historian at Old Fort William in Thunder Bay, has contributed to and benefited from this transformation in fur trade history. Old Fort William, recreated to replicate the establishment in its golden years as the lynchpin in the North West Company’s trade between Montreal and the Athabasca country, is a superb operational example of public history. It is the vehicle for her deeply informed, lucidly written presentation of the complex and intricate aspects of and relationships in the trade at its geographical and operational pinch point. In 17 chapters she reveals the interests and impulses which drove and shaped the trade, its geographical imperatives, the construction of Fort William on the delta of the Kaministiquia River, its functions and interrelated communities, and the threats to, assaults upon, and its fate as a relatively minor Hudson’s Bay Company post. Almost as intriguing as the story of historical Fort William is that of the replica Fort William set in its historical park, whose origins, controversies, and realization constitute the final chapter of this fine work.