Canadian Exploration Literature.

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.

In her introduction to the second edition of her anthology, first published by Oxford in 1993, Germaine Warkentin surveys the literature of exploration since 1993 and offers a convincing rationale for the proliferation of studies and re-evaluations of conventional wisdom. The northwest was first transformed after 1870 by the forces of settlement, whose dynamics produced a landscape of family farms, villages, and towns, knit together by railways and dotted with a myriad of lofty grain elevators. The social and economic stasis which had emerged by 1945 was then progressively undermined by the technological revolution in the implementation of agricultural production, which encouraged the enlargement and consolidation of farms. Improved roads, family cars, and consolidated schools served by buses left the older infrastructure of schools, churches, halls, and small service centres to wither away as populations declined. At the same time, inserted into this changing agricultural landscape were the new economic drivers of potash mines, oil and gas wells, pipelines and pumping stations, and new technologies which made possible the exploitation of heavy oil reservoirs in Saskatchewan and vast bitumen resources around Fort McMurray in Alberta. The processes of settlement remind us, Warkentin suggests, that “the narrative of exploration is not a simple one of human progress…but a troubling metaphor for that process of inquiry from which the human mind…never rests.” Although this survey of the literature constitutes the only original addition to the documents, it reminds us that our immersion in the challenges of the recent past must raise questions which prompt a revision of the way we read and interpret the history of exploration.

Valuable as Warkentin’s short introduction to the second edition is, the excerpts from the writings of such luminaries as Radisson, Henday, Alexander Henry, Samuel Hearne, Peter Pond, David Thompson, Daniel Harmon, Alexander Mackenzie, John Franklin, Frances and George Simpson, Letitia Hargrave, Hind, and Palliser remain pure gold, as do the succinct and incisive introductions to these documents and the careful endnotes following them. They are the stuff out of which students may themselves begin to extract the questions that will drive inquiry in the future.

Highly recommended.