The Northwest Fort: Fort Edmonton

Ashley Thomson is a full librarian at Laurentian University and co-editor or co-author of nine books, most recently Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide, 1988-2005.

Since her graduation from the University of Alberta in 1981 with an honours degree in English, Janice MacDonald has written songs and published award-winning plays. Now it turns out she can draw (a number of her sketches appear in the present book) and write history.

In The Northwest Fort, she begins by giving her reader a quick overview of the fur trade in Canada, followed by a summary of the trade in the Northwest in the years after 1821, when the Hudson’s Bay Company amalgamated with the North West Company.

Because she wants to give the non-scholar an idea of what life was like back then and because she believes that Fort Edmonton was the most important fort west of Hudson’s Bay (page 25), she then zeros in on the categories of people who were associated with the fort — beginning with the Chief Factor, John Rowand, and continuing with Rowand’s family, as well as the clerks, the tradesmen, and their wives. Concluding the book are profiles of Reverend Robert T. Rundle, a missionary operating out of the fort; Indians who traded with the fort; and finally, Sir George Simpson, the longstanding Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company under whose auspices all the activity took place.

MacDonald’s stories are not without interest. She is particularly effective in describing the lot of women, many of them Métis, many married to whites but abandoned by their husbands upon their return to “civilization.”

MacDonald’s obvious enthusiasm for her subject has not unfortunately prevented certain deficiencies in the text that might have been avoided by a more seasoned writer, or at least a writer with a more seasoned editor.

This reviewer was disturbed by the unnecessarily repetitive narrative — for example, on the amalgamation of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company (page 19 and then page 24). Also worrisome were assertions that were not borne out by MacDonald’s own evidence. The worst example appears on page 48, when she remarks that “John Rowand’s family appears to have fared remarkably well.” Well, the youngest, Henry, died at age sixteen of “suffusion of the brain, a strange and deadly malady” and even considering that, like Henry, the others were “mixed-blood,” their fates were not such that the phrase “remarkably well” is appropriate. Finally, and most serious, is MacDonald’s unhappy tendency to digress from the stated topic of a chapter into areas that appear to bear only the most peripheral relationship with the topic. Example: the chapter on the Indians comes complete with a lengthy section on the types of furred animals that could be trapped by them (pages 109-112).

I don’t want to be too hard on MacDonald. Her book will be of interest to school children and, of course, to visitors to the now reconstructed Fort Edmonton. The Northwest Fort almost bears out the dictum that a university graduate in English can do anything.