A Son of the Fur Trade: The Memoirs of Johnny Grant.

Frits Pannekoek is an associate professor of heritage studies, director
of information resources at the University of Calgary, and the author of
A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of
1869–70.

This is a splendid book that is a must read for anyone interested in the second half of the nineteenth-century Canadian and American West. It pulls the reader from adventure to adventure as with the incredible and larger than life Johnny Grant. He was related to every prominent family through his seven wives and twenty one children. Wherever there was action in Montana and the pre-1905 Canadian West he was there. He had a hand in supplying the Oregon Trail, in developing the ranching frontier in Montana, in its gold rush, and then he moved to Canada to take part in the Riel Rebellion and the movement to Northern Alberta.

As the introduction states, only a handful of Metis memoires survive today and this ranks among the very best. The Grant volume is a very personal memoir dictated to his wife Clotilde Bruneau over several years in the early twentieth century and then passed on through his family who all added their changes. The memoir is divided into 75 chapters, although each is really a small self-contained story which one can readily imagine being told around a camp fire.

Ens has written a masterful introduction which deals with Grant as a person who lived a European, Indian, and Metis life. To Ens Grant was the quintessential Metis caught in the vice of the new capitalism yet unable to make it work for him. As he failed, according to Ens, Grant lived an increasingly Aboriginal life; the memoirs offer even more evidence from a cultural and literary perspective. The volume reveals the Metis art of storytelling at its finest. If according to Ens Grant lived an increasingly Aboriginal life as his businesses failed, perhaps due to racial prejudice and the new economy, we should expect to find the text and its form also increasingly Aboriginal. Is it? My own reading of the text is that Grant behaved no differently from many settlers who moved West and North in pursuit of free land and away from some of the speculators. He was not becoming “less” European, but perhaps more Metis. He had found an identity. He was also a French speaking Metis who, unfortunately, identified with the English-speaking Metis who were on the wrong side of the Riel Rebellion. That would also make his life somewhat difficult and unusual. Who to side with? Who to identify with? This book should make many think about communities, identities, and their formation in the frontier.