Dark Storm Moving West

B E LY E A

DARK STORM ± MOV ING

DARK STORM

B A R B A R A B E LY E A Barbara Belyea is a faculty professor in the English department at the University of Calgary. Her multidisciplinary interests include literary theory, the history of publishing, fur-trade exploration and the history of cartography.

MOVING WEST

The essays in Dark Storm Moving West trace three phases of exploration in western North America: naval and fur trade ventures on the Pacific coast; traders’ progress along interior rivers and lakes; and the transcontinental Lewis and Clark expedition, which used maps based on fur trade surveys. Author Barbara Belyea poses challenging questions about the fur trade’s rapid expansion as well as Native/non-Native definitions of space and communication of traditions. In this book Belyea introduces Peter Fidler as an important documentary source by frequent reference to Fidler’s journals, maps, and reports, most of which are still unpublished.

MOVING WEST

DARK STORM

WEST±

www.uofcpress.com 978-1-55238-182-3

BA R BA R A BE LY E A

DARK STORM ± MOV ING

WEST±

DARK STORM ± MOV ING

WEST±

ba r ba r a b e ly e a

© 2007 Barbara Belyea University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 www.uofcpress.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free 1-800-893-5777.

The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Belyea, Barbara Dark storm moving west / Barbara Belyea.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55238-182-3 1. Fur trade–Canada–History. 2. Fur trade–West (U.S.)–History. 3. Fidler, Peter, 1769– 1822. 4. Northwest, Canadian–Discovery and exploration. 5. West (U.S.)–Discovery and exploration. 6. Northwest, Canadian–Description and travel. 7. West (U.S.)– Description and travel. I. Title.

Printed and bound in Canada by Kromar Printing Ltd. This book is printed on Chorus Art Silk paper

FC3212.B44 2007

Cover design, page design and typesetting by Melina Cusano

971.2’01

C2007-903533-7

Dark Storm Moving West is dedicated to Helen Neill and Maruta Jacobs, two excellent friends.

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ACK NOW L E DGE M EN T S

xi

DA R K S TOR M : A N I N T RODUC T ION

1

MYTH AS SCIENCE: T H E N O RT H W E S T PA S S AG E

Science did not defeat the myth; by the late eighteenth century the myth had become a scientific hypothesis. Peter Fidler joined fur traders in yet another search for a northwest passage.

15

D AV I D T H O M P S O N , H B C S U RV E Y O R

In 1797 Thompson deserted the Hudson’s Bay Company for its rivals. His reasons for doing so are clues to late eighteenth-century business practices and scientific claims. Fidler stepped into Thompson’s shoes as the HBC’s leading explorer and surveyor.

31

DECISION AT TH E M A R I A S

During their trip west, Lewis and Clark puzzled over Arrowsmith’s map of North America. Lewis doubted Fidler’s “varacity”: Fidler’s surveys were thought to be Arrowsmith’s source for the upper Missouri River.

51

M A P PI NG W E S T OF T H E BAY

By 1800 several fur traders, Fidler among them, were recording their routes as sketch maps that resembled Native cartography more than contemporary European maps.

89

T H E S I L E N T PA S T I S M A D E T O S P E A K

Historians have imagined HBC posts as mixed-blood communities and the men of HBC brigades as working-class. Fidler’s Saskatchewan River journals paint another picture.

109

OU T SI DE T H E CI RC L E

Here’s one about Coyote and the anthropologists. Fidler plays the classic ethnographer.

131

NOTES

175

SOURCES

185

INDEX

ACK NOW LEDGEM ENTS

This book owes more than I can say to many people who shared their skills and knowledge, who responded to my requests with patience and generosity, and who kept me going with their friendship and interest in the project. I deeply appreciate my association with Ted Binnema, whose standing as a historian and insight into Fidler’s scientific importance led to our three-year SSHRCC-funded research. I am indebted to Richard Ruggles, G. Malcolm Lewis and Joyce Szabo: their publications and helpful conversations are the groundwork of whatever merit the Dark Storm essays can claim. I am also grateful to Bill Lang for his long and steady interest in my work. Judith Hudson Beattie supported the Fidler project with her special knowledge of Native cartography and her permission to publish the many HBCA maps included here. Ed Dahl and Glyn Williams did their best to guide me in use of Library and Archives Canada and The National Archives. Bronwen Quarry, Jeffrey Murray, Sylvie Robitaille, Vyrtis Thomas and Alex Wackett were most helpful in providing copies of archival documents. At the University of Calgary Press, I am especially grateful to John King, Peter Enman, and Melina Cusano, who are responsible for the beautiful layout of this book and its large, readable maps.

IX

DA R K STOR M : A N I N T RODUCTION

Peter Fidler first saw the Rocky Mountains in November 1792 – a jagged line “stretching from SSW to WbS ... similar to dark rain Like clouds rising up above the Horizon on a fine Summers evening.”1 He used a familiar image to describe this unexplored barrier at the plains’ western limit. Dark clouds, the advancing line of a prairie storm, can be seen from some distance before they rain down on the observer. Economic, political and social conditions attributable to the fur trade were experienced as a similar delayed effect. At first, trafficking with Europeans may have brought benefits to Native people, but before long the trade proved destructive to those who had welcomed it. The essays in Dark Storm Moving West examine the fur trade’s rapid westward expansion across North America. For a time the fur-trade partnerships between Natives and non-Natives seemed balanced in terms of power and mutual benefit. But the fur business was a capitalist enterprise that needed more and more resources – hence the drive to explore the farthest reaches of the continent. From Hudson Bay, Lake Superior and the Mississippi River, Europeans and Americans followed a web of waterways north to the rich fur region of Lake Athabaska and farther north to the Arctic Ocean, as well as west to the Rocky Mountains and farther west to the Pacific Ocean. The Dark Storm essays trace three kinds and phases of exploration: first, naval and fur-trade probing of the Pacific coast;

XI

second, traders’ progress along interior rivers and lakes; and third, the transcontinental Lewis and Clark expedition, which used maps based on fur-trade surveys. Each of the essays has a guiding idea. “Myth as Science” considers the intellectual climate in which both disparagers and advocates of a northwest passage could make scientific claims. The second essay examines the scientific training of the first Hudson’s Bay Company surveyors. In “Decision at the Marias,” a map claiming to register “all the New Discoveries” of the HBC surveyors gave pause to Lewis and Clark as they tried to reconcile this scientific document with information provided by Native cartographers. “Mapping West of the Bay” explains the radical difference between European and Native map conventions by suggesting that space is a culture-bound concept. “The Silent Past is Made to Speak” looks at ways in which documentary evidence is used to link past events and conditions with present issues and values. The last essay, “Outside the Circle,” explores the cultural limits of documentary evidence and the counterclaims of oral tradition. All of these topics have been studied before, many times. Here I consider them as they cross disciplinary lines and impinge on each other.2 The order in which the Dark Storm essays appear is more or less the order in which I wrote them. One essay would establish a position which the following essay would test, expand or reconsider. Sometimes I would see the shortcomings; sometimes others would point them out. For example, when I gave an early version of the “Silent Past” essay at a conference, a member of the audience asked what I had to say about Native oral traditions. Not much, I had to admit. But the question got me thinking, and “Outside the Circle” is the response. The sequence of essays is the trace of the

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DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

questioning, destabilizing process by which I worked through the topics and problems. The shape of the book is a series of tentative responses that overlap like fish scales, or like shingles on a roof. I developed this habit of mind while writing my doctoral dissertation. Ten years later, when I turned from literature to history, I looked for a level of debate among historians that would match discussions among literary theorists. At that time, as with literary debate, the most lively engagement with historical ideas and methodology was to be found in France. Historians associated with the journal Annales ESC provoked criticism in the late 1960s, a challenge which fostered new kinds of historical writing in the early 1970s. I learned from both sides. Among the Annales historians, Fernand Braudel made me aware of the importance of topography and climate in determining past events and conditions. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s study of Montaillou demonstrated how even a marginal peasant society could reveal complex layers of relationships and simultaneous “mentalités.” I also appreciated Michel de Certeau’s ironic analysis of the Annales historians’ institutional power, Paul Veyne’s distinction between the scientific datum and the historical fact and, most of all, Michel Foucault’s refusal to interpret documents according to a reality subtext that guaranteed their truth and value. Instead Foucault defined the proper activity of history as a focus on the documents themselves, their classification and analysis, with attention to radical shifts of concepts and attitudes. More recently I have read and re-read Greg Dening’s brilliant studies of Marquesans, Tahitians and Bligh’s men on the Bounty. Dening is master of the mobile point of view.3 The books of these historians were not open on my desk as I wrote Dark Storm, but they were not far from my mind. For the last

twenty years, their probing of disciplinary methods and assumptions has encouraged me to question generally accepted ideas, “facts,” disciplinary aims and cultural values. All are tossed like balls into the air – and they stay in the air rather than serving as anchor-points for proofs and demonstrations. Anchored discussions are much safer: their pattern is familiar from long tradition, and in each case the aim is clear from the outset. Doctoral dissertations usually follow this pattern of single theme, repeated proofs and stable perspective. The problem or complex of problems that the dissertation addresses is quickly laid to rest in a few introductory pages; the rest is elaboration and confirmation of the initial theme.4 In its long and short forms (the book and the journal article), the dissertation model dominates academic writing. Most academic research using this model is thoroughly argued but overly cautious and open to errors of judgment. The thesis nostrum is safe but too simple: one theme cannot fit all the problems that a reasonably sophisticated book-length discussion must consider. In Dark Storm Moving West, my subject is the exploration of northwestern North America. Exploration presupposes unknowns; it entails risks. To discuss the subject adequately, I must take risks. So I consider situations and problems that may not have ready answers, or any answers at all. Questions spawn more questions; proofs laying one problem to rest generate other problems, often methodological, that reflect disciplinary aims and cultural beliefs. I follow where the question leads, not where the thesis applies. The Dark Storm essays pursue topics across national borders and disciplinary frontiers. The essays are not bound by a central theme; instead they glance off one another, each commenting on the rest by its difference and divergence.

My frequent trips to the University of Calgary, all in a day’s work, bisect Fidler’s route along the Rockies’ front ranges. Thus two connecting (not unifying) figures “haunt” the Dark Storm essays. One is Fidler, who appears in this book as he does in archival documents: he is cited here and there, now and then; his journals provide useful evidence while the man remains elusive. The other figure is the title metaphor. Everyone who lives in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains knows that prevailing winds come from the west and that the biggest storms blow in from the southeast. The figurative dark storm moving west is the European-American reach across the continent. However benign it seemed at first, however romantic it appears in retrospect, the fur business was a rapacious force. Its Puritan virtues (thrift, hard work and ambition) furthered an exploitive, high-profit trade whose staples were luxuries (tobacco, furs and “high wines”). Harry Robinson describes the exchange in a few choice words: They tell the Indians to get fur. Put in trap and get fur. Then they buy that and trade ’em. They trade, you know. They cheating the Indian at that time.5

The fur trade’s new horizons were measured by ever more precise surveys; its new territories were subject to ever more efficient structures of control. The period of exploration which mapped the North American West was the early stage of a total revolution. Concepts, attitudes and values which originated in Europe now direct and determine our experience of a vast region where, just two centuries

INTRODUCTION

XIII

ago, they were no more than hints of a distant civilization. Tracing these ideas and values to the period of fur-trade expansion is not difficult; attentive readers can find the links on every page of the following essays. But living in this borrowed and degraded culture takes all the mental agility we can muster. We need to face up to its complexities and contradictions, its ambiguities and tensions. No single theme or thesis is explanation enough; in fact, such wilful simplification is misleading. We must invent methods of enquiry that can account for the past with appropriately subtle intellectual tools. The questioning format of this book is my attempt to respond appropriately to our complex and troubled past.

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DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

MYTH AS SCIENCE: TH E NORTH W EST PA S S AGE

In histories of northwest coastal exploration, John Meares has a place beside the closet geographers who irritated Cook during his third voyage and whose speculations Vancouver finally disproved. Meares’s contention was that Cook had not dispelled hopes of a northwest passage to be found between the deeply indented Pacific coast and Hudson Bay: “we have the most incontestable proof that the geography of Hudson’s Bay is but yet imperfectly known and that with Baffin’s Bay we are wholly unacquainted; so that the idea of the discovery of a North West Passage still continues to have a reasonable foundation.”1 Soon after Meares’s Voyages ... to the North West Coast of America appeared in 1790, a vitriolic pamphlet denouncing the book circulated in London; the pamphleteer was George Dixon, who had rescued Meares from disaster in Prince William Sound a few years before. Dixon questioned Meares’s professional competence; he accused Meares of ingratitude, dishonesty and fudging cartographic facts. Meares replied mildly if mendaciously to Dixon’s charges. Dixon published Further Remarks. What Dixon could not tolerate was the “confused heap of contradictions and misrepresentations” that he read in Meares’ Voyages. “I naturally expected

1

Philippe Buache for Joseph-Nicolas Delisle. Carte des Nouvelles Découvertes au Nord de la Mer du Sud, 1752. Library and Archives Canada NMC 21056.

to find my knowledge of the geography of the North-west coast increased,” Dixon protested; in such works, “we naturally expect, not only agreeable entertainment, but information which may be depended on.”2 When Dixon demanded true, scientific facts from Meares’s Voyages, he did no more than accept and repeat a pattern of exploration that Cook had forcefully presented in his own published journals. Most of us are familiar with Cook’s contempt for the “pretended Strait of Juan de Fuca” and the “pretended Strait of Admiral de Fonte” as “vague and improbable stories, that carry their own confutation along with them.”3 Yet these stories had convinced JosephNicolas Delisle, who presented them to the French Académie des Sciences in 1752 as plausible leads for further exploration.4 Cook was more inclined to trust charts of “the late Russian discoveries,” though he found that the Russian maps were also erroneous and misleading.5 As he explored north of N65º in conformity with his instructions, Cook grew more and more impatient, sure that investigation of “Cook’s River” was not useful, especially “to us who had a much greater object in View.”6 Hindsight allows us to consider Cook’s acerbic remarks in the light of Vancouver’s similar comments. Vancouver confirmed what Cook had suspected: “Had any river or opening in the coast existed near the 43d or 53d parallel of north latitude, the plausible system that has been erected, would most likely have been deemed perfect; but unfortunately for the great ingenuity of its hypothetical projectors, our practical labours have thus far made it totter.”7 Together Cook and Vancouver seem to bracket with scientific good sense the imaginative dreams and theories that prompted their explorations along the northwest coast. Cook’s reputation did not

suffer even when the continental coastline of his charts was found to be a maze of straits and islands – both Dixon and Meares honoured Cook before accusing each other. The key to Cook’s enduring authority is not the coastline of what is now British Columbia – its capes and bays, its islands and deceptive straits. Cook’s greatness seems unassailable even now because he repeatedly declared his allegiance to a scientific method of exploration. His published Voyages established the formal criteria, rhetorical and graphic, by which “the sober dictates of truth and experience” were communicated and judged. Dixon accused Meares of betraying these principles. Vancouver’s four summers along the northwest coast, which earned him a reputation for “scrupulous veracity,”8 consisted of a strict and formal obedience to Cook’s rules of evidence. Cook’s authority thus lay in his insistence on a scientific method, not in the details of his discoveries. The scientific exploration that Cook pioneered owed as much to the new format and style of his publications as it did to his use of perfected instruments, his successful management of disease and his diplomatic interaction with various indigenous tribes. As mariners and commanders, Cook’s contemporaries Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de la Pérouse paralleled the achievements of Cook’s expedition. But Cook became the standard by which explorers have been measured ever since. He did so by insisting on sober cartography which invented and hid nothing – no speculative features, no artfully placed cartouches, no descriptive legends, instead blank space for unknown territory and a minimum of text. And as of his second expedition, Cook also insisted on presenting his journals as daily logs. Previously, rough men of the sea were expected to employ editors, even ghost-writers,

MYTH AS SCIENCE

3

to ensure that “polite” readers, those able and ready to buy costly quarto editions, would be entertained as well as edified. Dampier’s and Anson’s Voyages had been popular publications; the Hawkesworth collection of circumnavigations by Byron, Wallis, Carteret and Cook (his Endeavour expedition) was aimed at the same market.9 Dr Hawkesworth followed the model of Charles de Brosses, who had presented his Histoire des navigations aux terres australes in 1756 as “a series of separate voyages ... Each voyage is given as a continuous narrative but almost always in the first person, in the explorer’s own voice, as if he had written his own account in this seamless way.”10 Cook rebelled against such heavy editing. He used the introduction to his second Voyage as an opportunity, not so much to thank his nameless “friends” and modestly excuse his shortcomings, as to declare his scientific bias. The published account of his second circumnavigation would not be “as if ” he had written it; it would be his “own words,” corrected but not paraphrased, so that the “candour and fidelity” of “a plain man” whose authority came from having been “constantly at sea from his youth” would not be obscured or misrepresented.11 His education had been shipboard experience and his merit lay in seamen’s skills. But Cook did not simply echo Bougainville’s assertion that geography was “a science of facts” gained by mariners on arduous, risky voyages. By insisting on a plain style that could record his achievements without embellishment, Cook subscribed to the Royal Society’s repudiation of rhetoric in favour of a precise, emotionally neutral prose shorn of tropes and other embellishments.12 Readers were encouraged to believe that Cook’s second and third Voyages were immediate transcripts of the explorer’s experience (directed by rational aims) and his observations (refined by the latest instruments).

4

DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

Cook’s advocacy of a scientific writing style in the preface to his second Voyage makes it easy to overlook his acknowledgement of helpful “friends,” chief of whom was his editor, Bishop John Douglas. The published second Voyage was far from a direct account of occurrences written up day by day, as the events took place. Analysis of the multiple drafts shows that perhaps during long days of plain sailing, certainly after his return to London, Cook himself reworked his journal several times with the British reading public in mind. But revision was not limited to Cook’s own changes: as he set off on his third expedition, Cook gave Douglas blanket permission “to make such alterations as you see necessary.” Douglas took Cook at his word.13 For the posthumous third Voyage, Douglas reverted to the models of De Brosses and the vilified Hawkesworth, blending comments of the expedition’s surgeon-naturalist into Cook’s journal text, just as Hawkesworth had combined the journals of Cook and Joseph Banks. Perhaps to preserve the impression of unvarnished authenticity, Douglas named as collaborators only James King, who had assumed command of the expedition, the artist John Webber and Henry Roberts, who was “principal assistant Hydrographer to Capt Cook.”14 He carefully omitted to mention the Admiralty’s choice of two experts to oversee reproduction of the drawings, views and smaller charts. One of these men was Banks, naturalist of the first Voyage and since 1778 president of the Royal Society; the other was Alexander Dalrymple, the East India Company’s hydrographer, Fellow of the Royal Society and an advocate of exploration to discover a northwest passage.15 Dalrymple kept himself well informed of the latest discoveries. Cook’s third expedition, commanded by James King, returned to England in October 1780; within days of its arrival, Dalrymple

Henry Roberts, supervised by James Cook. Chart of the NW Coast of America and the NE Coast of Asia explored in the years 1778 and 1779 ... 1784. UBC Verner collection V1784N.

took King to dinner at the Royal Society Club.16 The picture of the leading officer from Cook’s last voyage and the leading closet geographer dining side by side in company with some of Europe’s foremost scientists should provoke some reassessment of the opposition between armchair theorists and hardy mariners fostered by Cook, imitated by Vancouver, and accepted by later historians. Dalrymple’s status as a Fellow of the Royal Society, admitted five years before Cook, should also give pause.17 A riffle through the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions reveals the Fellows’ curiosity about a wide range of natural and cultural phenomena. There are reports on determining the shape of the earth and geographical position by observation of various heavenly bodies, several of them by Edmund Halley, who had undertaken the world’s first scientific voyage in 1699–1700.18 John Hadley and the Dollonds announced the quadrant’s invention and its later refinement in the journal’s pages.19 Improvements in navigational instruments kept pace with publication of the first Nautical Almanac by Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal and then president of the Royal Society.20 Side by side with papers announcing these astronomical and navigational breakthroughs, the Philosophical Transactions include observations of rainfall in Rutland, comments on the cuckoo (by Edward Jenner, of smallpox fame) and the mechanics of birdsong, speculations about deformed foetuses and curious fishes in Hudson Bay, an account of the Lisbon earthquake, recommendations for musically gifted children (by Charles Burney, whose son sailed with Cook), mention of long-lasting acorns for export to the American colonies and analysis of the ink of ancient manuscripts. There is also a letter on bees by Arthur Dobbs, who had lobbied for exploration of a northwest passage.21 We still recognize this range

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DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

of topics as scientific, although the amateur status of almost all the contributors and their less than rigorous methodology set many of the papers outside the limits of modern science. Even at the time, the Council of the Royal Society issued a disclaimer: the Council, it stated, accepted contributions to the Transactions “without pretending to answer for the certainty of the facts, or propriety of the reasonings contained in the several papers so published, which must still rest on the credit or judgment of their respective authors.”22 Clearly the aims of the contributors were scientific, but the criteria by which their observations might be judged were still at a formative stage. From its establishment in the late seventeenth century, the Royal Society had taken great interest in reports of exploration beyond Europe. To mark the transit of Venus in 1769, Cook travelled to Tahiti while Christopher Middleton and William Wales, both FRS, reported on the climate of Hudson Bay.23 Shortly before Cook set out, an officer of Byron’s circumnavigation wrote an account of Patagonian giants for Mathew Maty, secretary of the Society, who later provided the map of “late Russian discoveries” that misled Cook in Bering Strait.24 Since they were curious about freaks (remember those deformed foetuses), the Fellows welcomed Philip Carteret’s update on the Patagonian giants also addressed to Dr Maty: “We measured the heights of many of these people,” reported Carteret; “they were in general all from six feet ... to six feet seven inches, but none above that.”25 Cook wrote off the Patagonians as being of normal height and “perhaps as miserable a set of People as are this day upon Earth.”26 We may be tempted to conclude that Byron and Carteret fuelled the myth of giants and that Cook, coming after them, substituted fact for legend. Yet all three expeditions – Byron’s, Carteret’s and Cook’s – produced eyewitness reports, thus satisfying

the need for “ocular demonstration” demanded by Royal Society science. Carteret had even measured the giants. The three reports were inconsistent, even contradictory: readers of the Transactions would have had difficulty in deciding on their accuracy, given that all three apparently respected the formal criteria of scientific truth. Trying to weigh inconsistent, even contradictory reports was all in a day’s hydrographic work for Dalrymple. If, rather than condemning him as a fatuous dreamer, we try to see how Dalrymple worked to decide between conflicting but equally scientific evidence, we may be better able to understand the complexity of lateeighteenth-century exploration. Dalrymple realized that Hearne’s journey down the Coppermine River, cited by Douglas, limited the hypothesis of a passage to the sea north of the river mouth – what Dalrymple called “the North of America.” In his introduction to Cook’s third Voyage, Douglas had not ruled out a passage in high latitudes. Less easy to understand, for those who accepted Cook’s judgment as infallible, was Dalrymple’s renewed consideration of a passage “through America.”27 However, in the five years since Cook’s third Voyage appeared, several maritime fur traders had visited the northwest coast. Their journals and charts stacked up evidence against the continental coastline drawn on Cook’s map between 48º and 65° North latitude.28 Cook had rejected the possibility of a passage, not only along the coast he surveyed north of N65º but also south of this latitude, which he did not survey. Cook was impatient and contemptuous of the De Fuca and De Fonte legends; rather than disprove their claims he simply dismissed them. Defying what had by 1789 become the Cook legend, Dalrymple remarked thoughtfully, “It is so much easier, to treat with derision, than to investigate.”29

Dalrymple could not accept Cook’s contemptuous severity: the maritime fur traders Hanna, Colnett, Dixon, Duncan, Barkley and Meares were discovering that the line of Cook’s continent was a deep margin of islands, inlets and perhaps large navigable rivers. Among the traders were officers who had sailed with Cook; their testimony was orderly and “ocular”; what is more, the traders themselves were comparing the coastal features they encountered with the discredited legends. An account of Dixon’s voyage published in 1789 seemed scientific enough. Dixon had sailed up this coast with Cook in the Resolution; his book was dedicated to Banks; it included an appendix on natural history, as well as another appendix, just like Cook’s, logging the route of his ship along the coast. The introduction proclaimed Dixon’s wish that “a plain narrative of facts, written at the time when the different occurrences happened, will prove interesting, though deficient in smoothness of language, or elegance of composition.”30 In all these features of his published Voyage, Dixon imitated Cook. At the same time, Dixon believed in a northwest passage; he thought he might have found a western entrance at the latitude of the Queen Charlotte Islands. He mapped a coastline east of the islands, dotting it with names such as “Port Banks” and “Cape Dalrymple.” Dixon referred to an account of Spanish coastal explorations, by this time translated and published by Daines Barrington FRS, and condemned its “palpable falsehood.”31 Although patriotism, social pressure and personal loyalty stopped him from saying as much of Cook’s account, intelligent readers could connect the dots. Dalrymple’s Plan for Promoting the Fur-Trade, in which he reviewed the evidence for a northwest passage, mentioned Barkley’s discovery of Juan de Fuca Strait, quoted Hanna’s account of Fitzhugh Sound in the latitude of De Fonte’s archipelago, seriously considered Dixon’s

MYTH AS SCIENCE

7

Peter Pond. “A map showing the communication of the lakes and rivers between Lake Superior and Slave Lake in North America.” In Gentleman’s Magazine (London, March 1790). UBC Verner collection 1790G.

discovery of “an Archipelago of Islands and the strongest indications of a large River, in the place where such are described by de Fonta.” Dalrymple had met with Dixon and may have read the account of his voyage in manuscript. Given such fragmentary but fairly reputable leads, Dalrymple’s conclusion was not unreasonable: “This [evidence of the maritime fur traders] gives some countenance to that too hastily exploded Narration [of De Fonte]!”32 Dalrymple’s next step was to judge and integrate the new evidence of a broken coastline with what was known of the continental interior. For the longitude of the west coast of Hudson Bay he relied on the observations that Middleton and Wales had reported to the Royal Society.33 For information about lakes and rivers of the interior, Samuel Wegg FRS, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, gave access to the company’s records. Dalrymple consulted Native maps while he fretted over Hearne’s few observations and high latitude for the mouth of the Coppermine River. To this evidence Dalrymple added his privileged access to one of Peter Pond’s maps: Pond’s Slave Lake was placed far to the west and joined to a westward-flowing river.34 Dreams of a passage had danced in the head of the Québec envoy who forwarded Pond’s map to the Home Secretary: “You will readily conjecture what River the above Slave lake River is known by, when it empties into the Ocean. To save you much trouble I will tell you it is Cook’s River.” Another of Pond’s maps, published in 1790, drew a river plainly linking (albeit by a dotted line) Great Slave Lake and Prince William Sound.35 But Dalrymple would not be tempted. His own Map of the Lands around the North Pole left a huge blank between W110º and W140º, at the latitude of Pond’s Slave Lake.36 In the Plan, Dalrymple cautioned that “the disposition of filling up parts unexplored, is one

of the Curses to which Geographers are subject.... What I have here said,” he warned, “must not be misunderstood to imply, that I believe, or even suppose, there is a Sea-Communication from Hudson’s-Bay to the Pacifick Ocean.”37 His reasoning echoed Douglas’s: “no passage existed so far to the South as any part of Hudson’s Bay,” and Hearne’s map positively argued against any passage “through America.”38 We come again to Meares. Dalrymple made no mention of Meares in his Plan for Promoting the Fur Trade; Dixon may have warned him off with the same arguments used in the Remarks and Further Remarks. In any case, Dalrymple was too intimately acquainted with the evidence on which Meares had based his published charts to be taken in by them. In 1790, thanks to Wegg, Dalrymple would have known that an expedition was under way to survey the Athabaska region – a Hudson’s Bay Company initiative led by Philip Turnor and assisted by Peter Fidler.39 Meares repeated phrases of Dalrymple’s Plan in the text of his “Observations” published later that year. But Meares arrived at a much more sanguine conclusion: “the practicability, as well as the possibility of a North West Passage still remains, as far as my judgment goes ... the idea of the discovery of a North West Passage still continues to have a reasonable foundation.”40 As on Pond’s published map, the second of Meares’s three maps showed an enormous Slave Lake due north of the Queen Charlotte Islands, and a river route to Prince William Sound.41 Lest we too hastily condemn Dalrymple for erroneous judgment and Meares for fanciful exaggeration, it is worth noting that Pond’s maps impressed not only the closet geographer and the “scallawag” fur trader. In the same year Aaron Arrowsmith, soon considered Britain’s most reputable cartographer, published a map of North America which showed the same configuration of Slave Lake and a river leading from it to Prince William Sound.42 MYTH AS SCIENCE

9

Alexander Dalrymple. “Map of the Lands Around the NorthPole.” In Alexander Dalrymple. Memoir of a Map of the Lands Around the North-Pole (London: G. Bigg, 1789). UBC rare books collection.

John Meares. “A chart of the interior part of North America demonstrating the very great probability of an inland navigation from Hudsons Bay to the West coast.” In Voyages made in the years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North-West coast of America ... (London: Logographic Press, 1790). University of Edinburgh Library special collections JY368.

Meares’s other two maps omitted Great Slave Lake in favour of an enlarged “Arathapescow Lake” more in line with Dalrymple’s Map of the Lands around the North Pole. Meares offered no rationale for the alteration of his source maps or the inconsistency of his own maps. “I cannot find any other method of reconciling them,” commented Dixon, “than by supposing that parts of them are taken from different authorities, and the remainder probably laid down from your own survey ...” Dixon was left with grave doubts: “If you mean to shew the world the charts now in question for examples of your skill as a professional man, they, I am afraid, will give the nautical part of it but an indifferent opinion of your abilities in that line of life.”43 For Dixon and for Dalrymple, Meares failed the test that would allow him, as Cook had done and as Vancouver was to do, to set his own corrective experience against previous authority. At the same time, however, Meares undermined the pattern of exploration suggested by Cook himself, repeated in Douglas’s introduction to the third Voyage and ever since praised as Cook’s major achievement. No scientific line could be drawn between hypotheses of a northwest passage and the “practical” experience of exploration. Dalrymple, the closet geographer, was not only far more cautious but also far more skilled at observation and mapping than Meares, former naval lieutenant and west coast explorer.44 Even Dixon, who had sailed with Cook, was induced by the correlation between his own discoveries and De Fonte’s archipelago to hesitate, as Dalrymple did, before ruling out the possibility of some truth in this legend. We end with Vancouver, who silenced all discussion of a northwest passage “through America.” Like Cook, Vancouver was a professional disbeliever. “The enthusiasm of modern closet philosophy, eager to revenge itself for the refutation of its former fallacious speculations,

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ventured to accuse Captain Cook of ‘hastily exploding’ its systems,” he wrote in the introduction to his Voyage.45 Vancouver proved that such speculations were erroneous, though not without some puzzling moments. In the first months of his survey he inched up the coast from N46º to N48°, searching for the strait that Meares and Duncan had described, as well as for the fabled river of the west. Vancouver missed the river, then met the Boston tradeship Columbia Rediviva and spoke to its captain. Robert Gray’s charts and eyewitness report confirmed the existence of both river and strait. But Vancouver was unrepentant. “It was not a little remarkable,” he observed, “that, on our approach to the entrance of this inland sea [the Strait of Juan de Fuca], we should fall in with the identical person who, it had been stated, had sailed through it”46 – stated, that is, by none other than Meares. Vancouver’s reading of Meares’s Voyages parallels Cook’s use of the misleading maps of “late Russian discoveries.” North of N65º Vancouver also had Cook to refer to, and he was determined to prove Cook right. He did so, after considerable trouble, and renamed “Cook’s River” as “an inlet. ... Thus terminated this very extensive opening on the coast of North West America.” Vancouver’s final comment was again a reference to Cook: “had the great and first discoverer of it ... dedicated one day more to its further examination, he would have spared the theoretical navigators, who have followed him in their closets, the talk of ... a northwest passage existing according to their doctrines.”47 Yet Vancouver had not disproven all earlier claims. The Columbia was indeed the great river of the west, the Strait of Juan de Fuca did exist, and a long sea passage shown on Meares’s maps actually separated Vancouver Island from the mainland. Vancouver could not admit that closet geographers or the “liar” Meares had been right about any of these features.

Vancouver, who had the Cook books spread before him at all times during his own voyage, repeatedly praised the great navigator’s record as a fine example of inductive thinking – the “geography of facts” that Cook apparently subscribed to, in contrast to the “hypotheses and the favourite opinion ... of a north-eastern communication.”48 Vancouver suggested that there were two incompatible ways to explore the world – one way, by devising fanciful and illusory “hypotheses” and the other way, by open-minded, inductive, factual observation. He commended Cook’s “judicious opinions, influenced as they were, by no prejudice, nor biassed by any pre-conceived theory or hypothesis, but founded on the solid principles of experience, and of ocular demonstration.”49 But Cook did not proceed in this way: the southern continent and the northwest passage were the scientific hypotheses he tested. Vancouver was just as committed to testing a hypothesis. His detailed coastal survey was carried out in response to instructions that still held out hope, albeit faint, of a northwest passage.50 Vancouver’s concept of scientific method was an oversimplification; it belonged to scientific prejudice rather than scientific practice. The success of two contemporaries cast a faint shadow on his success. Claiming to have proven beyond doubt that there was no northwest passage, Vancouver sailed home to news that Alexander Mackenzie, one of the “Canadian Traders,” had realized Pond’s dream of an overland route from Great Slave Lake, and that Alexander Dalrymple FRS had become the Admiralty’s official hydrographer.51

MYTH AS SCIENCE

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Reindeer Lake, 21 May 1797. Although snow still covered the ground, geese were again flying north. A long hungry winter in a crowded hut was ending for Malcolm Ross, Hudson’s Bay Company Master to the Northward, and David Thompson, the company’s leading surveyor. Ross had chosen retirement; he would travel to York Factory and wait for the ship from London. At some point during the winter, Thompson also opted for change. In May he turned his back on the HBC and set out for the nearest post of rival “Canadians.” Ross noted the younger man’s parting words in his post journal: “This morning Mr David Thompson acquainted Me with his time being out with your Honours and thought himself a freeborn subject and at liberty to choose any service he thought to be most to his advantage and is to quit your service and enter the Canadian company’s Employ.” In his own journal Thompson wrote simply, “This day left the Service of the Hudsons Bay Co and entered that of the Company of Merchants from Canada May God Almighty prosper me.”1 Over forty years later, in his retrospective Narrative, Thompson claimed that the Hudson’s Bay Company had little use for his surveying skills. The company, he wrote, was long content to apprentice poorly trained boys before hiring Philip Turnor, a “fully competent” surveyor who mapped Lake Athabaska in 1790. The HBC’s “mean

15

David Thompson. “Map of the NorthWest Territory of the Province of Canada, 1792–1812.” 1814. Archives of Ontario.

selfish policy” had alienated Turnor as well as Thompson himself. The HBC “might have had the northern part of this Continent surveyed to the Pacific Ocean, and greatly extended their Trading Posts,” but in losing its two leading surveyors it failed to do so.2 In contrast, the “liberal and public spirit” of Thompson’s new associates could be seen in the success of Alexander Mackenzie’s expeditions; for the work of two summers, Mackenzie received a knighthood and established his own company in Montreal. Thompson saw his defection not as opportunism but as a sense of destiny. “In early life he conceived the idea of this work,” he stated in an advertisement for his maps. “Providence has given him to complete, amidst various dangers, all that one man could hope to perform.”3 The easiest response to Thompson’s career decision in 1797 is to believe him and to accept the reasons he offered for making this move. J. B. Tyrrell, the first editor of his Narrative, did not question Thompson’s retrospective comments. After all, how else could Thompson have personally surveyed from Hudson Bay to the Athabaska region, from Lake Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains, from the St. Lawrence River to the Columbia River? The young surveyor’s defection led to his achievements as “the greatest land geographer.” Thompson’s second editor, Richard Glover, argued instead that he was prone to “failure” and left the HBC in embarrassment. Apart from these two explanations, Thompson’s decision has not been carefully examined.4 I, for one, suspect that Thompson’s reasons for leaving the company he had served for thirteen years may have had more to do with immediate circumstances than with any vision of a providentially guided career. In contrast to Thompson’s complaint that the HBC was indifferent to his ambitions as a surveyor, contemporary letters

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document the London Committee’s extraordinary attention and favours: Thompson was given instruments, rapidly promoted and paid a large salary as soon as his newly gained expertise was reported. At the same time, however, a lack of clear direction characterized administration of the company’s affairs inland from York Factory and hampered northern exploration for almost a decade. Frustrated by his superiors’ confusion and hesitation during these critical years, Thompson hoped for more opportunities with the Montreal traders. Thompson was sent to Churchill in 1784 just as the Hudson’s Bay Company was attempting to reorganize its inland trade. Ten years before, in response to stiff competition from Montreal, the company had built Cumberland House on the Saskatchewan River and had appointed Samuel Hearne as its first master. Hearne soon became chief factor at Churchill and was still in office when the new apprentice arrived. A year later, Thompson was transferred to York Factory and went inland in 1786. This was the period of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s expansion up the Saskatchewan River, marked by the construction of ten new posts in 22 years.5 To administer the distant trade frontier, the company shifted the command of York Factory trade to its senior official on the Saskatchewan River, and appointed a “Resident” at York whose principal function was to supply the inland posts. William Tomison, an Orkneyman in the company’s service since 1760, became the “Inland Chief,” while running the factory fell to Joseph Colen, a 36-year-old Londoner sent to Hudson Bay the year before. Colen expressed “the highest sense of gratitude” for an appointment he had expected and prepared for. His acceptance letter formulated his awareness of the skills that were needed to function as one of the company’s key administrative links: “I hope by a steady

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rectitude of conduct in the management of your concerns at this place, so as to encrease your Trade, lessen your expence, and to make happy all under my care.”6 For his part, Tomison confessed to the London Committee that he was “wanting in words to express [his] gratitude for the Honour which they have been Pleased to confer” and added, “I hope nothing shall ever prevent me from having a due sence of Mr Joseph Colen’s good abilities, and further hope that no Anemosetes or misunderstanding shall ever subsist between us.” 7 Tomison’s comment on his new relationship with Colen was shrewd and prophetic. The London Committee had not expected Tomison’s narrow focus on the Saskatchewan River as the main region of inland trade, nor had they counted on Colen’s energy and initiative. Although both leading officers insisted that more men and supplies were needed to compete successfully with the North West Company,8 Tomison was also convinced that “it will be labour lost in attempting the Conveyance of goods up the Churchill River,” while Colen was anxious to satisfy the Committee’s clearly stated desire to expand into the rich Athabaska region.9 For the next ten years, “Anemosetes” between Colen and Tomison locked the inland trade in an unprofitable impasse. This long dispute was much more than a clash of personalities: it was the effect of the company’s inadequate direction and its vague distribution of responsibilities before the advent of systematic corporate management, realized by Andrew Wedderburn’s restructuring in 1810. The HBC’s Committee in London, consisting of the Governor, the Deputy Governor and the seven principal shareholders, aided by a corresponding secretary, not only dictated policy but also insisted on making all decisions beyond those of daily post routines. In this respect it was far more centralized than the North

West Company’s coalition of partnerships supplying goods and trading furs. The Committee’s hands-on approach burdened them with work that could have been, and later was, delegated to subordinates. The Committee members themselves decided on the trade goods sent to Hudson Bay, arranged for the fur returns to be auctioned, reviewed all employees’ contracts and set their wages, tried to understand North American geography, cultures and political changes, made payments to employees’ families and brokered employees’ investments. As the Committee’s marks in journals and letters (underlined passages and marginal fist signs) attest, much time was spent reading and comparing the post journals.10 Faced with more and more documents from an expanding trade territory, Committee members were often overwhelmed by the amount of information that was sent to them and by its impenetrable foreignness. Yet the power of decision was not delegated in any rational or practical way to the company’s men on the ground.11 The company’s centralized and crudely hierarchical administration, when it was not subverted, caused enduring problems. Pressures of supply and demand obliged the overseas employees to exercise some initiative in order to satisfy the company’s appetite for large fur returns. In trade negotiations with Natives, flexibility was assured by the “overplus” practice, which allowed factory chiefs and post masters to adapt their trade to various circumstances. In contract negotiations with the men, Tomison, Colen and others were often compelled to hire when men were available as well as to employ a system of “bounties” in recognition of extra work and useful skills. The lack of local knowledge and experience was not limited to the Committee. “I am ignorant of what is transacted many hundred miles distant,” complained Colen; “what intelligence I get, is

from heresay.”12 In 1796 he chided Ross and Thompson, sent to find a new route to Athabaska: “I should have been ignorant of your Destination last Winter, had not Mr Stayner [the factor at Churchill] paid me a Visit, he acquainted me with your Pursuits which if true gives me more Information than York Papers give me.”13 In any case, Colen lacked the personal experience needed to interpret such reports. He had travelled no farther than the first portage on the Hayes River;14 he could not have had much more idea of conditions on the plains or in the maze of northern lakes than the shareholders who met in the Fenchurch Street boardroom. Colen and the Committee were forced to imagine the regions and situations for which they were making critical choices. They were also obliged to trust their inland employees. For example, Colen’s instructions to William Walker, who had many years’ experience inland, appealed to Walker’s own discretion: “In all your pursuits let the Honble Companys Interest be your first object; your prudence will direct you the proper steps to pursue for their advantage.”15 Oddly enough, such latitude was cause for friction. Isolated, urged in general terms to pursue the interests of his honourable employers and then left to exercise his own judgment, each inland trader thought of his work as a solemn duty and any criticism or correction as an enduring slight to his reputation. York Factory’s ambiguous leadership exacerbated this problem. Given the split command between Tomison and Colen, it was all too easy for them to react with indignation rather than devise or submit to a general plan. In 1794 Colen reported that “on ... representing to Mr Tomison, that more Canoes could be manned, to convey down furs he declared that he would suffer no one to dictate to him.” To which Colen added, “If this is the case the Honble Committee has appointed a Council [at York Factory] to no purpose

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Philip Turnor. “A Chart of Rivers and Lakes above ork Fort ...” 1787. HBCA G.2/11.

– they might as well appoint so many Cyphers to Conduct their business if the Caprice of a single Individual, mearly for oposition sake is to set aside all orders of the Council, & positive commands of the Committee.”16 In the long run, however, Tomison’s anger was less destructive than Colen’s sly solicitation of his subordinates. This contretemps with Tomison was narrated to Malcolm Ross in a long chatty letter that conveyed not only news but opinions and conjectures, the whole designed to enlist support for Colen’s opposition to the Inland Chief. Colen acknowledged that the local, practical knowledge gained by inland employees merited positions of responsibility, but regretted that several of these experienced men lacked skills of reading, writing and accounting that by this time were also necessary to the position of inland trader. The proliferation of posts meant the appointment of more masters, together with steersmen who would assume the position of “occasional master” in summer while the traders went down to York. Several steersmen rose in the service, a pattern of advancement of which Tomison was the leading example. Colen pointed out its shortcomings when Edward Wishart, an Orkney steersman at Sipiwesk Lake, refused to take over as summer master. “He was one that necessity compelled me to engage, for want of a person more capable,” Colen noted in the York Factory post journal. “He cannot write his own name and being obliged to apply to the men to read his Letters of Instruction, exposes him to their ridicule and contempt.”17 Wishart’s was not an isolated case.18 Thompson and Peter Fidler kept journals at South Branch House for a steersman turned master who signed these documents with an X.19 As the inland trade expanded and as the London Committee struggled to administer an increasingly complex organization,

the journals, accounts and surveys which were sent back to London became increasingly important tools of knowledge and control. Personnel were hired and promoted as they were able to serve the company’s gradual bureaucratization; the old trader profile was no longer sufficient. George Sutherland, for example, was denied promotion because his poor grammar and limited vocabulary prevented him from writing adequate reports.20 Colen’s preference for English employees indicates his mistrust of the “time serving men,” those who limited their service to one or two contracts, most of whom were from the Orkney islands.21 From 1784, the year of Thompson’s arrival at Churchill, to 1797, the year of his defection, seventeen writers and apprentices were contracted for service at York, Churchill and their subsidiary posts. Most were from London and the Middlesex countryside; of the others, two from Cirencester can be traced to Colen’s family and connections; only one was an Orkneyman.22 All of these young men had been taught reading, penmanship and simple accounting; those from the Grey Coat Hospital in Westminster could also claim training in mathematics and navigation. The fact that all but one of them were English (together with Fidler, who was quickly added to their number) opened a cultural breach between masters and men that slowly widened during the last years of the century. The new writers and apprentices were fast-tracked into positions of authority. Within five to seven years of their arrival at Hudson Bay, most of these young Englishmen became traders, Thompson and Fidler were appointed company surveyors, and Thomas Stayner rose to be factor at Churchill. The company was especially attentive to its Grey Coat apprentices; great hopes were placed on their ability to map the trading zones inland from Hudson Bay. The Grey Coat boys arrived at the

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bay factories over a period of sixteen years: Joseph Hansom was sent to Churchill in 1769, John Hodgson to Albany and George Donald to Moose in 1774, George Hudson to York in 1775, David Thompson and George Charles to Churchill in 1784 and 1785. The Grey Coat Hospital was a charity school for orphans, one of many designed to make poor children literate and to prepare them for useful occupations. The mathematical emphasis of the Grey Coat school imitated that of nearby Christ’s Hospital, at which William Wales FRS was mathematical master. One of the Grey Coat masters of mathematics had published Elements of Navigation in 1754; a copy of this work was presented, together with a quadrant, to each Grey Coat apprentice when he left the school. In 1791 Thompson ordered a new edition of this work “carefully revised and corrected by William Wales”; he noted in his Narrative that the school copy presented to George Hudson “had vanished long ago,” and that the training George Charles had received was rudimentary.23 By disparaging his schoolmates in the Narrative, Thompson was setting up his version of the momentous meeting with Philip Turnor, the company’s first official surveyor, in the fall of 1789. Thompson had been left at Cumberland House nursing a badly broken leg; in October, he recalled, “two canoes arrived from York Factory, bringing Messrs Philip Turnor, Hudson and Isham, the former to survey the country to the west of the Athabaska Lake with Mr Hudson for his assistant.” Thompson was eager to learn from the “excellent master” who was “one of the compilers of the Nautical Almanacs” devised by Nevil Maskelyne FRS. “Under [Turnor],” he continued, “I regained my mathematical education and during the winter became his only assistant. Mr Hudson unfortunately for himself was too fond of an idle life, became dropsical and soon died.”24 Most

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readers of the Narrative slide over the careful wording of this passage and assume that Thompson immediately enjoyed an exceptionally close relationship with Turnor. Contemporary HBC documents suggest a different story. A full decade before Thompson met him, Turnor had spent the winter of 1778–79 at Cumberland House with Hudson and Joseph Hansom; there he had instructed them in practical astronomy, the same training he was later to give Thompson. In May 1779, Turnor surveyed one hundred miles up the Saskatchewan River with Hudson as his assistant. Hansom was drowned a few weeks later when he went with Turnor to survey the lower track to York Factory. In the fall of that year, Turnor surveyed the Albany River with John Hodgson as his assistant; he wintered at Moose Factory in 1780–81, surveying the coast of James Bay and inland routes southwest of Moose, with George Donald as his assistant. Meanwhile Malcolm Ross took George Charles with him to explore a route from Churchill to Cumberland House; Turnor drafted this route on his “Chart of Rivers and Lakes above York Fort ...” completed in 1788.25 Thus Turnor’s work as the first official HBC surveyor involved all of the Grey Coat apprentices sent for land service to Hudson Bay. However, there is some truth to Thompson’s criticism of George Charles’s training if we read it as an assertion that none of the Grey Coat boys except Thompson learned to be “fully competent” surveyors. At best they could draft a plan of approximate locations; the “Accurate Map” drawn at Albany in 1791, attributed to John Hodgson, and much less accurate than Thompson’s surveying, is representative of their work.26 In 1787 the London Committee hoped that Thomas Stayner, 29 years old, sent to Churchill as “Assistant & Writer,” would succeed Turnor as the company surveyor;

[ John Hodgson]. “An Accurate Map of the Territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company in North America.” 1791. HBCA G.2/28.

Stayner was therefore paid £30 a year, twice the sum usually allotted to writers. Stayner, wrote the Committee, “has made a proficiency in Navigation & the construction of Charts.” George Charles was to be kept at Churchill for writing and warehouse duty; now Stayner, not Charles, was to accompany Robert Longmoor on exploration inland from the factory and “also frequently to be ordered at the Factory to take Distances of the Moon from the Sun & Stars & deduce the Longitude from them, a fair Copy of his Observations & Calculations is to be sent to Us yearly.”27 Stayner found life at Churchill unbearably harsh. There is a note beside his name in the 1789 List of Servants at Churchill: “Begs to return, Constitution is weak – vide Surgeons Certificate.” But the Committee would not let him go so easily; they insisted that “Mr Thos Stayner must stay his Contract out.”28 The company needed Stayner to play a part in its latest plans for northern exploration. In the same mail as their refusal to break Stayner’s contract was a letter to Robert Longmoor, second at Churchill, announcing an expedition “in the Track of the Canadians & to their furthermost Northern Track.” Samuel Wegg, the Governor, wanted to know more about “a Large Lake ... mentiond by Mr Hearne in his Journal ... under the name of Daubent or Slave Lake ... we are inform’d it is resorted to by the Esquemaux who trade with the Sloop in summer.”29 A new expedition approved in 1789 would be led by George Hudson. Like Stayner, Hudson had requested to return to England “on account of indisposition.”30 Colen’s letter to the Committee in August 1788 indicates that Hudson and Charles Thomas Isham, son of a former chief at York Factory, boarded the ship for London: “Messrs Hudson and Isham who returns,” wrote Colen, “can inform your honors more on Inland affairs than it is possible for me to know.”31

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Nine months later, in May 1789, the Committee notified Tomison that they had “Engaged Mr George Hudson & Mr Chas Isham the former ... to Command a party to the Northward towards Slave Lake, & Trade there.”32 Returning with them to York Factory was Philip Turnor. Stayner overcame his constitutional weakness and volunteered to assist Turnor on the northern expedition. Turnor accepted him; as he informed the Committee, “I am in hopes I have made a prudent choice. I shall use every means in my power for instructing him in taking Lunar Observations &c and hope to find him in time more capable than my self.”33 Malcolm Ross was designated to succeed Hudson as master of Cumberland House when the expedition got under way. From this point on, a curious shifting process overtook the long-anticipated northern expedition. Tomison, who was against the expedition and who had asked for a year’s leave, did not sail to England; instead he returned to the Saskatchewan River as “Chief Inland.” Hudson, Turnor and Stayner arrived at Cumberland House on 7 October 1789, too late to travel farther north that year as they had planned to do. Stayner continued up the river. According to Hudson, he was “to make Discovery in settling the Latitudes and Longitudes of places”; according to Turnor, he was to join a Native band going to the Rocky Mountains.34 In any case, Stayner spent the winter at Manchester House, while at Cumberland House Turnor gave lessons to Thompson, still recovering from his accident nine months before. Hudson, disparaged and neglected, drank a good deal and quietly died – much to everyone’s surprise. Summing up these events, Richard Ruggles writes that “three young men, all trained in making astronomical observations, were assigned to Turnor’s expedition. From among them Turnor was to

choose a mapping assistant.”35 Ruggles’s brief account suggests a different kind of indeterminacy from what was actually at work. Turnor’s first choice was Stayner, who decided he preferred trading to exploring. Turnor never considered Hudson for the role of assistant; Hudson’s death made no difference, he wrote, to decisions for the northern expedition. Thompson had been left at Cumberland House because of ill health, not for Turnor’s instruction; although he earned the surveyor’s praise, Thompson was still unfit for arduous travel. As winter turned to spring, only weeks before the expedition was to set off, Turnor was still without an assistant. On 5 June 1790 Peter Fidler arrived at Cumberland House in a brigade of fur-laden canoes bound for York Factory. Fidler had contracted for the company’s most menial position in answer to Colen’s appeal to the Committee for “some careful steady Englishmen [to] be sent out as Labourers: – men of fair Character and those who can bear fatigue.”36 At York, though paid as a labourer, Fidler demonstrated that he was in “every way qualified [to be a writer], being a good Scholar and Accountant, and conducted himself with much propriety.” Colen suggested that Fidler replace Thompson at Manchester House “if David Thompson should not be sufficiently recovered to attend as Writer.” Fidler was sent to South Branch House to keep the journal there, as Thompson had done the year before.37 And now he was at Cumberland House, once again hard on Thompson’s heels. Nothing is known of Fidler’s education, but it is safe to say that his mathematical skills must have been impressive. Only four days after meeting him, Turnor was writing to the Committee that “Peter Fidler is going with me to the Northward he is a very promising young Man.” Nor was Fidler seen as a poor substitute for Thompson; on the contrary, Turnor shifted his expectation

of a successor from Stayner when he wrote to Colen that Fidler now seemed “a likely person to succeed me in such undertakings.”38 The northern expedition finally left Cumberland House in September. Turnor, Ross and Fidler followed the North West Company’s route to Ile à la Crosse and wintered there; the next summer they moved on to Lake Athabaska and Great Slave Lake. Meanwhile a sea expedition led by Charles Duncan headed north to Chesterfield Inlet. Duncan was one of the maritime fur traders who, with John Meares and George Dixon, revived hope of a northwest passage in the decade after Cook’s exploration of the Pacific coast.39 The Committee’s instructions to Duncan indicate what Governor Wegg and Dalrymple were seeking: a connection between Chesterfield Inlet and a great inland lake, from which a river might flow to the Pacific Ocean. Duncan carried a letter to East India Company officials in Canton, just in case he found a navigable waterway.40 Turnor took this project seriously and was characteristically optimistic about Duncan’s chance of success. In March 1791 he wrote to Colen, “By the account you give of Captn Duncan I shall not be surprised if he makes some valuable discoveries ... I should be pleased to be recommended to his acquaintance and Correspondence.”41 In Turnor’s opinion, Mackenzie’s description of his Arctic voyage confirmed the London Committee’s expectations of Duncan. “Mr McKenzie says he has been at the Sea but thinks it the Hyperborean Sea [Arctic Ocean],” Turnor wrote in his journal, then added, “but he does not seem acquainted with Observations which makes me think he is not well convinced where he has been.”42 This journal entry has been quoted many times to indicate Turnor’s superiority as a surveyor; Mackenzie would spend the winter of 1790–91 learning the skills that Turnor had taught to his assistants.

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Shewditheda, copied by Philip Turnor. [Map of Great Slave Lake]. 1791. HBCA B.9/a/3, p. 83.

But the comment may have been prompted by the geographical idea behind the Committee’s instructions to Duncan. Turnor suspected that Mackenzie’s river flowed northeastward from Great Slave Lake because he was prepared to believe in a water route between the inland lake and Hudson Bay. Turnor therefore warned the Committee that “A Mr McKenzie with Six men ... think they have discovered a river runing out of the Slave Lake into Hudsons Bay upon which discovery the Canadians talk of trying to get a free trade into Hudsons Bay.” Native reports appeared to justify Turnor’s interpretation. Turnor heard from a Dene man at Ile à la Crosse that a river flowed northeast from Great Slave Lake. In July 1791 Shewditheda, a second Dene man, drew a map for Turnor which confirmed the first man’s story. Echoing the mid-century theory of Arthur Dobbs, Turnor surmised that the river fell into Chesterfield Inlet.43 The inland lake, called Arathapescow Lake on Hearne’s 1772 map, Araubaska Lake on Pond’s 1785 map, and finally Great Slave Lake and Slave Lake on Pond’s later maps, was the huge hinge between a route west to the Pacific Ocean and a route east to Hudson Bay. Turnor was now a player in the age-old quest for a northwest passage. Colen wrote to him of the Canadians’ “great Discoveries to the Northward” and added, “I sincerely hope altho’ they have the start of you, Your skill, Experience and perseverance will surpass them in just Observations and ... gain you a lasting Name.”44 Of more immediate commercial importance than a passage via Great Slave Lake was a possible route between the Athabaska region and Hudson Bay. In the same journal entry that includes a copy of Shewditheda’s map, Turnor announced his decision to return to Lake Athabaska in order to “examin the extent of her Eastward as I am informed that there is a way out of the East end

of it to Churchill.” By mid-August Turnor and Fidler had found an eastward-flowing river. “The Indians say there is a near way to Churchill water by proceeding up this river [Fond du Lac River],” reported Turnor. The route lay “through a chain of small Lakes to the Deer Lake [Reindeer Lake] and the Canadians have been at that Lake and winterd in it some years back and mean to Winter there again.” Fidler noted that they “put up about 1 mile up the river that falls into this lake which Mr Dalrymple calls in his map the Stone river.”45 This was the route that Thompson and Ross tried so hard to survey between 1792 and 1797. While Turnor, Fidler and Ross explored north and east of Lake Athabaska, Thompson was employed at York Factory. Colen wrote to the Committee that “David Thompson’s accident prevents his return Inland. if your honors will permit his stay at York, he will be of infinite service ... The multiplicity of Writing to be done at this factory occasioned by the numerous Settlements ... requires a steady person and a good accountant.”46 A future comparable to Stayner’s – eventual promotion to be chief of a bayside factory – seemed assured. But Thompson was determined not to subside into the dull role of writer. Turnor had written to Colen that Thompson “can give proof of his own Abilities”; Thompson lost no time in demonstrating them.47 On the way down to York from Cumberland House he took careful observations, sent them directly to the Committee and promised to map the route within a year. The Committee forwarded his observations to Dalrymple and replied to Thompson that “a good Survey & Map of the country Inland will always be particularly acceptable to us.” The following year, even before they received the map, the Committee presented Thompson with instruments for observation and drafting.48 Not even Turnor had been so

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favoured; he, Fidler and Ross were loaned instruments and warned to return them when they left the service. In his letter of thanks, Thompson requested more instruments and proposed a survey trip that would not require much walking: “I am willing, and I flatter myself capable ... to go and inform you of the situation of your newly erected settlements.”49 This was precisely the task assigned to Stayner in 1789; Thompson carried it out in 1793–94. His survey of the Saskatchewan River from Buckingham House, the newest and westernmost post, down again to York, may have prompted Turnor to alter his large composite map of HBC territories in 1794.50 By this time, Thompson had proven that he could travel in harsh conditions as well as map accurately. In May of that year, the Committee promoted Thompson to the position of “Surveyor” at a high salary of £60 a year; they authorized the repair of two watches without cost and gave him an excellent third watch.51 At last, after decades of disappointing apprentices and Turnor’s relatively short periods of work in North America, the company had an energetic, well-trained surveyor who might reasonably be expected to serve for many years. The Committee could not have done more to express their approval and encouragement. In 1792 Thompson went on his own “journey of discovery” up the Nelson and Churchill rivers. Colen’s instructions, based on information from Turnor, Ross and perhaps Fidler as well, outlined the route to be surveyed: “You are to take that Track from the Miss a nippee [Churchill River] to the Athapiscow Lake [Lake Athabaska] in which the Deer Lake [Reindeer Lake] lies....”52 For the company, the advantage of this route was twofold: it would be a much shorter passage to Lake Athabaska from either York Factory or Churchill than the route followed by Turnor, and it would avoid

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Cumberland House, where Tomison’s interference was preventing any further exploration from the Saskatchewan River. By 1792, the animosity between Colen and Tomison was undisguised. Colen had complained of it to the Committee, who finally admitted there was a problem. “We see the propriety of all your Remarks,” they wrote to Colen. “In short you must talk the matter over dispassionately with him if that has not the desired effect, We shall finally pursue Vigorous Measures to put an End to it.”53 To Tomison they wrote, “We perceive (it is with concern that we are under the necessity of mentioning it) frequent Obstacles in the way to oppose or frustrate the best adopted measures and we should have been more Explicit on this Head were we not persuaded that the bare Intimation of it will be a sufficient inducement to you to put a Stop to such injurious proceedings in time.”54 Tomison ignored this “bare Intimation”; Colen failed to talk with him “dispassionately.” For their part, the Committee merely deplored the want of “that Cordiality & Agreement so necessary to promote the general Advantage & Happiness of all.”55 Nothing was done to remedy the administrative impasse. No seniority was established; Tomison was not retired, nor did Colen leave York Factory until 1798.56 The Committee failed both of their officers: the company had no efficient sense of corporate hierarchy and certainly no way of resolving differences. Meanwhile Thompson and Ross tried repeatedly to establish a route to the Athabaska region via Reindeer Lake.57 The maze of rivers and lakes in this region is a geographic metaphor for the complex problems and vaguely conceived obligations plaguing the company at this time. In 1795 Thompson turned again from the Saskatchewan River to exploration of the “Rat Country” northwest of York Factory and southwest of Churchill. Six years after Fidler had replaced him

on the only successful northern expedition, Thompson managed to reach Lake Athabaska. But a new problem surfaced. Stayner, now chief at Churchill, informed Colen that Thompson and Ross were interfering with inland traders sent from his factory. Colen backed down immediately. “In order to put a Stop to Dissension in future,” he wrote to Thompson, “I have withdrawn from all the Stations to the northward, except that of pushing forward to the Athapescow: this also I will readily relinquish when M r Stayner is able to establish a Footing in that Country.”58 But his canoe overturned in rapids and the route he had followed was of questionable utility. Now Colen was informing him that the return to Athabaska might be pre-empted by Stayner’s men. This was the letter that Thompson interpreted as Colen’s refusal to use his surveying skills.59 Ross delivered it as he and Thompson made their way to Reindeer Lake. During the long winter of 1796–97 the two men had plenty of time to mull over missed chances and slim possibilities. With Thompson’s departure, Peter Fidler became the Hudson’s Bay Company’s only official surveyor.60

DAVID THOMPSON, HBC SURVEYOR

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DECISION AT TH E M A R I AS

In early June 1805, as they travelled up the Missouri River towards the continental divide, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark came to a fork where two rivers of comparable width and force flowed together. The captains paused at this junction, unable to decide which river was the “main stream” of the Missouri and which was the tributary. They were determined to fulfill Thomas Jefferson’s instructions as exactly as possible: “to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean ... may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent.”1 Punctilious to a fault, the captains interpreted this mandate narrowly: for them, this order meant following the Missouri to its source, where a portage across the divide would lead to the Columbia watershed. The upper Columbia River would mirror the upper Missouri, and would flow west to the sea. After nine days of hesitation and uncertainty, Lewis and Clark declared that the river approaching them from the southwest was the Missouri. Lewis named the other river Marias, and called it one of the Missouri’s “most interesting branches.”2 Their observation and definition at the Missouri/Marias confluence exemplifies the process of exploration to which Lewis, Clark, and contemporary European fur traders were committed. All were field agents in a larger enterprise of scientific classification by which “unknown” regions

31

of the earth were mapped and described. At the same time, contact with Native informants revealed spatial and topographical concepts at variance with their own, together with knowledge that scientific surveys could not absorb or interpret. Historians of the Lewis and Clark expedition have been accepting and uncritical of the captains’ mandate and what they achieved. In 1806, Jefferson announced to Congress that Lewis and Clark had “traced the Missouri nearly to it’s source, descended the Columbia to the Pacific ocean, ascertained with accuracy the geography of that interesting communication across our continent, [and] learnt the character of the country.”3 Jefferson professed scientific aims for the expedition; historians have since followed his lead in praising its success. In 1952, Bernard De Voto praised expedition members as heroes because “they had filled out the map” and had pursued “scientific objectives” during two years of hardships, dangers and adventures. De Voto called the Missouri/Marias decision “a remarkable act of the mind [that] must be conceded a distinguished place in the history of thought. It is the basic method of science.”4 John Logan Allen contrasted Clark’s field surveys with earlier geographical “lore” gleaned from speculative cartography and “sketchy native data.” In Passage Through the Garden, published in 1975, Allen considered the expedition leaders to have been “a pair of trained and intelligent observers [who] gathered and analyzed geographical information in what can only be described as a scientific method.” Allen echoed De Voto in calling the decision at the Marias “a brilliant piece of deduction from a fuzzy set of facts [that] illustrates ... the competence and intelligence of its commanders.”5 Paul Russell Cutwright established Lewis and Clark as “pioneering naturalists” who charted flora and fauna according to Linnaean categories.6 Although

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DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

his studies of contact with Native groups have tempered earlier interpretations of the captains’ success, James P. Ronda continues to see the expedition as a scientific breakthrough and Clark as mastering not only European mapping skills but also an understanding of Native cartography.7 Gary E. Moulton’s edition of the expedition’s journals and maps praises the captains’ science and specifically endorses Allen’s account of the decision at the Marias.8 Like Allen, Warren Heckrotte has studied the map sources of the expedition’s geographical knowledge. Heckrotte is more aware than Allen of the publication histories and the complexity of “speculative” map compilations consulted by Lewis and Clark. But Heckrotte too defines the captains’ achievements at the Missouri/Marias junction as a triumph of science: “these critical few days in the expedition can stand as the mark where the conjectures of [Peter] Fidler and [Aaron] Arrowsmith were swept aside and replaced by accurate factual detail.”9 The expedition’s use of maps is of particular interest in understanding the problem facing Lewis and Clark at the Missouri/Marias junction. Allen presents the accepted view of the captains’ cartographic achievement: he outlines a progression from the hearsay of Natives and traders, to speculative mapping, and finally to scientific geography: There are really three ways of knowing about areas geographically: a system of coherent knowledge based on accurate data and long acquaintance, a system of more or less coherent knowledge based on simple logical and theoretical constructions, or a system which is largely incoherent and based on desires, ambitions, long-standing myths and traditions, or pure rumor

and fantasy. ... The captains [Lewis and Clark] would replace conjecture and speculation, wild reasonings of theoretical and logical frameworks, with scientific observation. They would fill in many blank spaces on the maps of the Northwest with facts recorded and verified rather than guessed at or hoped for.10

Allen’s progression, rather confusingly described in reverse order, is to be understood as three levels of geographical knowledge ranging from rumour to speculative deduction to scientific observation. The captains’ job was to replace the first two levels, inherited from Native “lore” and from earlier maps, with the third, gained from “actual” field surveys. Pointing to the inadequacy of the first two sources and the triumphant achievement of the captains’ own mapmaking, Allen then simplifies the business of exploration into a duality between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. When the captains ventured beyond the lower Missouri, “from an area ... actually well known into one ... less known (in a real or empirical sense),” they found themselves in the frontier zone of speculative cartography, where they were obliged for the moment to rely on Native “data.” However, Allen maintains, as they moved into unknown territory – that is, into territory previously described only by hearsay and conjecture – their own observations, obtained by scientific methods, allowed Lewis and Clark to distinguish between “real knowledge” and dubious “perceived knowledge.” Allen claims that the process of discovery was this process of scientific evaluation: previously held geographical ideas were proven to be “real” and true, or spurious and inadequate. But Allen’s formula is too simplistic. In the face of “myths ... traditions ... rumor ... conjecture and speculation,” what was “real knowledge” and what

was dubious, “perceived knowledge” was not always clear.11 Science alone, in the form of the recent maps they carried with them and the state-of-the-art instruments they used for their surveys, failed to deliver a dependable verdict at the Missouri/Marias junction. As scientific observers, Lewis and Clark were provided with instruments, manuals, catalogues, blank tables, base maps and questionnaires. All of these tools prescribed what they would observe and how they would classify their perceptions. Their instruments were far from “crude and unreliable,” as Moulton maintains; Lewis and Clark were as well equipped as any contemporary surveyors working on the British Ordnance Survey or on Napoleon’s map of Egypt, and they were much better equipped than contemporary explorer-cartographers in the fur trade.12 The scientific aims they pursued were inherited from the Royal Society in London, reinforced by Jefferson’s connections with the Académie des Sciences in Paris, and prescribed by members of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. The American overland expedition would link the United States with the coastline explored by Cook, Vancouver and the maritime fur traders. Jefferson saw a model for his own project in Alexander Mackenzie’s transcontinental crossing a decade before. The journals of this fur-trade opportunist, published in 1801, were well received in scientific circles despite Mackenzie’s ignorance of botany and his shaky surveying skills.13 Jefferson decided that the American expedition would use its commanders as field agents: they would be surveyors, field cartographers, reporters and specimen collectors for the experts in Philadelphia. Although Jefferson admitted that Lewis was not “regularly educated,” this shortcoming tends to be glossed over in histories of the expedition, as it was by Lewis himself. The president’s former

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33

Aaron Arrowsmith. Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1802. first state, 1802. Library and Archives Canada NMC 19687 (detail).

secretary was confident that he and Clark could provide “accurate information” on the geography, mineralogy, botany and zoology of the trans-Mississippi West. Lewis has been taken at his word ever since, despite the expedition’s imprecise astronomical observations, its uncatalogued biological collections, and years of delay in publishing any account of the western “tour.”14 Certainly both Lewis and Clark aspired to scientific discovery and subscribed to the aims and biases of contemporary empirical investigation. Clark’s previous training and Lewis’s crash course in surveying ensured that their maps would be based on route traverses confirmed by astronomical observations and drawn according to the modern European cartographic convention. But as they filled in blanks of their tables and base maps, both Lewis and Clark were constrained as much as empowered by the scientific disciplines for which they were field agents. Just as Lewis’s landscape descriptions drew on a standardized vocabulary of the picturesque, so the expedition’s records were reflective of prescribed scientific observations.15 The nine days of indecision at the Marias River illustrate the conflict between the captains’ loyalty to scientific cartography and their awareness that the maps that they carried were confusing and misleading. Lewis and Clark were trying to locate Native landmarks on maps that relayed Native “information” in European cartographic space. We can pause here with Lewis and Clark, weighing their decision. The captains were convinced that the watershed portage they sought lay at or very near the source of the “true genuine Missouri.” They had passed the south branch (Yellowstone River) and “the River which scolds at all others” (Milk River), both of which had been described by their informants at Fort Mandan. Now they were

looking out for the great falls. The captains had not anticipated a river flowing from the northwest, muddy like the lower Missouri, swollen with runoff so that it was a considerable size – an unexpected river that cast doubt on the identity of the others they had already passed.16 Surprised and puzzled, they unrolled the maps in which they had greatest confidence: they consulted Nicholas King’s compilation drawn in 1803 especially for their expedition and the first issue of Aaron Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1802.17 The captains’ difficulties were twofold: first, they had to reconcile the King and Arrowsmith maps to each other and to the Missouri River that they had surveyed to this point; and second, they had to account for the difference between scientific mapping and Native geographical knowledge of the upper Missouri. Beyond the Mandan villages, King’s map was a close copy of Arrowsmith’s first issue of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802. Like Arrowsmith’s, King’s map shows a series of mountain peaks, from “The King” (Chief Mountain) south of the fiftieth parallel to “Bear’s Tooth” (Beartooth Mountain) north of the forty-fifth parallel. From this line of peaks eight streams flow to the east, following courses that are marked by dotted lines. The eight streams join together at various points to form two large rivers, the “Missesourie” and just south of it, the “Lesser Missesourie,” which run together not far above the Mandan and Pawnee villages. Arrowsmith’s depiction of the entire region from the South Saskatchewan River to the southernmost tributary of the Missouri issuing from the “Bear’s Tooth” is conjectural, indicated in the European cartographic convention by the use of dotted lines. King’s map shows the “South Branch” of the Saskatchewan River

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35

as a solid rather than a dotted line, and it labels the region south of the “Bear’s Tooth” tributary as “Conjectural.” King’s “Conjectural” notice marks as tentative and unknown only the region south of the “Bear’s Tooth.” Peter Fidler’s route from Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains in 1792–93 is shown on both maps, although Fidler’s farthest point south is not clearly marked on either. Misled by King’s map, Lewis and Clark concluded, erroneously, that Fidler had explored and surveyed as far south as the “Bear’s Tooth.” When the upper Missouri did not assume the configuration shown on these maps, Lewis was quick to doubt Fidler’s “Varacity.”18 Clark’s map drawn at Fort Mandan in 1805 reveals the extent to which the captains had already questioned and reinterpreted King’s and Arrowsmith’s image of the region by the time they continued up the “Missessourie River” in late March.19 The “Lesser Missessourie” is renamed the “Yellow Stone River” on Clark’s map. Some distance above the Missouri/Yellowstone junction is a northwestern tributary identified by a phrase: “The Indians call this the River which scolds at all others.” On Clark’s 1805 map there is no doubt which river is the “main stream”: a darker, thicker line traces the Missouri’s course from the southwest. Arrowsmith’s influence can be seen in Clark’s depiction of the mountain streams feeding into “the River which scolds at all others”: on the 1802 map, they flow on either side of the “3 Paps” (Sweetgrass Hills), on Clark’s map from “The King.” The “main stream,” which passes south of “The Tooth,” is intersected by a light line identified as “The war path of the big Bellies Nation.” The conjectured course of the Missouri River is Clark’s most interesting deviation from the pattern of rivers shown on Arrowsmith’s and King’s maps.

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DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

As they headed west from the Great Bend of the Missouri, the captains reviewed the network of tributaries that Arrowsmith had drawn to represent the Missouri watershed. Then they once again compared their maps with Native landmarks they had learned about at Fort Mandan. Hidatsa visitors to the fort had told them that close to the continental divide they would pass great falls and come to a division of the river into three forks. Hesitating at the Missouri/Marias junction, “examining [their] maps,” Lewis and Clark tried to integrate imperfectly understood details from their Native informants into their scientifically authorized image of the western interior. The long pause at the Marias, maintains Allen, was due to “the failure of the Indians to mention the outliers of the Rockies or to tell them about the Marias River.”20 More plausibly, it was due to the captains’ failure to reconcile the Mandans’ and Hidatsas’ knowledge of the upper Missouri with the watershed pattern of their official maps. At any rate, Lewis and Clark continued their efforts to rationalize Native and scientific cartographies. They looked for Native landmarks above the Marias, and they tried to fit these marks into a topographical scheme inherited from European mapping. Obedient to Jefferson’s instructions, Lewis and Clark were looking for the Missouri’s “main stream” and a short portage route across the continental divide. Clark’s 1805 map pushes the Missouri to W119º and marks only one mountain range between its source and the Pacific coast. On Clark’s map, “The war Path of the Big Bellies,” an overland route, crosses this range through a wide pass before turning northwest to the Columbia River. Clark copied the course of the Columbia from King’s interpretation of Arrowsmith’s conjectural line on the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802. The captains’ major problem was crossing the divide.

William Clark. [Route map of the Missouri and Marias rivers.] 1805. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale Collection of Western Americana. Lewis and Clark Expedition Maps and Receipt.

Akkomokki, copied by Peter Fidler. “An Indian Map of the Different Tribes that inhabit on the East & west side of the Rocky Mountains ...” 1801. HBCA G. 1/25.

Jefferson’s project, the last subarctic search for a northwest passage, called for discovery of a “direct & practicable water communication.” Only a short portage was acceptable. According to their maps, the likeliest pass and “water communication” was considerably north of the Missouri’s “main stream,” in territory that Britain claimed. The pass lay just north of “The King” (Chief Mountain); once across it, west of the divide, “The Indians say they sleep 8 Nights before they get to the sea.” On King’s map, this northern pass seems a tempting possibility: A tributary of the Missouri is drawn from “The King” to the major northern tributary of the Missouri, named the “River which scolds at all others” on Clark’s 1805 map. Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries held out no such promise, however. The British cartographer drew a ridge marked “Lands Height” between the northernmost tributary of the Missouri and the river flowing east from the pass into the Saskatchewan River system. South of this height of land, Arrowsmith’s “Little River” (Milk River) flows past the “3 Paps” (Sweetgrass Hills) into the Missouri system. Wary of venturing into British territory, Lewis and Clark opted to follow the advice of Native leaders at Fort Mandan, and to discover a pass of their own by exploring the “true” Missouri. They hesitated at the Marias River. On the ninth day Lewis discovered the great falls some distance up the southwest branch. This discovery confirmed their faith in Native information: they pursued their course up this branch until it forked, again as the Mandan and Hidatsa leaders had informed them. What was remarkable about the captains’ decision at the Marias was their reliance on this Native knowledge, which did not disappoint them. This preference was a radical departure from the scientific spirit and aims of the

expedition as it had been conceived by Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society. As Ronda points out, “the Indians’ information proved not only accurate but invaluable.” Allen, seconded by Moulton, downplays the Mandan and Hidatsa advice. Allen calls it “sketchy native data,” and argues that “their [the captains’] estimation of the accuracy of their [the Native informants’] data was excessive.”21 Ronda is an exception among Lewis and Clark historians who consider the decision at the Marias to have been a triumph of science, grounded in the logic of the “main stream” and the mountain portage of their instructions. Since the captains were following the Missouri to its source, since the Missouri was said to have its source in the Rocky Mountains, and since the southwest branch was without the turbidity that betrayed a long course through the plains, therefore the river from the southwest was the Missouri and the other must be a tributary that might or might not originate in the mountains. Lewis and Clark could perform this feat of logic, says Allen, because by this point in the journey they were demonstrating “a growing ability ... to differentiate between the geography as it had been imagined ... and the geography as it actually was.” Moulton supports Allen’s interpretation: “the captains’ keen geographic intuition led them to distinguish correctly between the Marias and Missouri rivers. More than a week’s worth of investigation at the rivers’ confluence proved the leaders correct.” According to Allen and Moulton, the captains were “correct” because they discerned the Missouri watershed pattern “as it actually was.”22 Allen and Moulton insist on the captains’ loyalty to the scientific axioms that dictated the expedition’s aims and evaluated its discoveries. They are right to do so. More problematically they

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equate scientific values with what “actually was.” As we have seen, the captains did not simply progress from conjecture and speculation to proof by field observation. Instead, they rejected details of King’s and Arrowsmith’s depiction of the Missouri in favour of the landmark descriptions provided by their Native informants, while continuing to imagine the pattern of the Missouri that Arrowsmith’s map suggested. Allen admits that “the strength of a preconception ... allowed [Lewis and Clark] to diminish, in their assessments of the region, those features of the western environment which did not match the pre-exploratory image.”23 Lewis and Clark did not perceive the Missouri watershed “as it actually was” but as it was represented by familiar, conventional map signs. They identified the streams they saw before them by matching them with the usual depiction of river systems in scientific European cartography. Allen summarizes the conception of the Missouri watershed that Lewis and Clark developed during the winter at Fort Mandan: three major channels were understood as funneling the wa-

Allen adds, “This was a crucial rearrangement of the alignment of the Missouri and its tributary streams ... [a] refinement of earlier lore.”25 But the radical departure from previous conceptions was still to come, on the banks of the Marias. For the moment, this “rearrangement” was simply a variation on the river theme of European cartography. Science conceived of rivers in terms of watersheds, each river gathering volume from a number of smaller streams and flowing down to another river or the sea. Map signs were established on the basis of generally held geographical concepts such as those in John Playfair’s popular Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, published in 1802. In describing rivers that “descend over the most rapid slope” – rivers that are “most subject to irregular or temporary increase and diminution” – Playfair reiterates the concept of a system that concentrates a proliferation of smaller streams. “When we trace up rivers and their branches towards their source, we come at last to rivulets, that run only in time of rain,” he remarks, emphasizing the watershed or collection basin as the operating principle of this pattern.26 Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis implied this pattern of rivers and valleys:

ters of the mountains into the Missouri system. The southern

40

reaches of the farther West were drained by the Yellowstone ...

Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, you will take
The central portions of the region were tapped by the Missouri

ful> observations of latitude and longitude, at all remarkable

itself, the river described by the Indians as leading to the waters

points on the river, & especially at the mouths of rivers, at rap-

of the Columbia. And through the northern sections of the ter-

ids, at islands, & other places ... The interesting points of the

ritory west of the Mandans ran the Milk River, the channel

portage between the heads of the Missouri, & of the water of-

“through which, those small streams, on the E side of the Rocky

fering the best communication with the Pacific ocean, should

mountains laid down by Mr. Fidler, pass to the Missouri.”

also be fixed by observation.27

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24

Lewis and Clark imposed this scientific sense of a watershed system on the Missouri and Columbia rivers they were sent to explore. Lewis followed this scientific pattern in his “Summary view of the Rivers and Creeks” written at Fort Mandan during the winter of 1804–5. The explorers’ image of the upper Missouri may indeed, as Allen claims, have integrated new “data,”28 but it was still modelled on the European watershed. For example, Lewis provides the following notice of the Cheyenne River, which the expedition had passed in October 1804:

familiar pattern. Thus the Yellowstone River, at its source a mountain stream, closely resembles the Cheyenne, a river of the plains, by the time it joins the Missouri: from it’s source it takes it’s course for many miles through broken ranges of the Rocky mountains ... after leaving the Rocky mountains it descends into a country more level, tho’ still broken, fertile and well timbered ... the river [then] enters an open level and fertile country through which it continues it’s rout to the Missouri.30

The Northern branch of this river penetrates the Black hills, and passes through a high broken well timbered country to it’s source, the Southern fork takes it’s rise in the Black hills, on their E side, and passes through a broken country covered with timber, ... then entering an open fertile and level country it continues it’s rout to the Missouri.29

As Playfair does, Lewis traces a river from mouth to source and/or from source to mouth indiscriminately, but either way, the river is defined and named by its nature at the mouth. Towards the source, it proliferates into smaller streams; these small streams and any lower affluents are tributaries of the downstream river. Each of the tributaries “falls” or “discharges” or “disembogues” into this “main stream.” Lewis’s summary descriptions of rivers yet unexplored follow the same model. During the winter of 1804-05, Lewis questioned Mandans and visiting Hidatsas to ascertain “the subsequent discription of [the Missouri], and it’s subsidiary streams ... their connection with each other, and their relative positions.” Whatever the Native responses, Lewis recorded them as further examples of the

This description combines Lewis’s observation of other Missouri tributaries and Native reports of the “Mee’-ah’zah, or Yellowstone river” with the concept of a river system advocated by contemporary science. Similarly, the “river which scolds at all others” owes its detail to Hidatsa reports but its design to the scientific model and careful perusal of King’s and Arrowsmith’s maps. ... a river falls in on the N. side called by the Minetares Ahmâh-tâh, ru-sush-sher or the river which scolds at all others. this river they state to be of considerable size, and from it’s position and the direction which they give it, we believe it to be the channel through which, those small streams, on the E side of the Rocky Mountain, laid down by Mr Fidler, pas to the Missouri.31

Trying to picture, as Fidler had done with “Blackfoot” maps he had solicited three years before, what Native cartographers told him in terms he could understand, Lewis imagined several rivers marked

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Philip Turnor. “... Map of Hudson’s Bay and the Rivers and Lakes Between the Atlantick and Pacifick Oceans.” 1794. HBCA G.2/32.

Aaron Arrowsmith. Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1796. Library and Archives Canada NMC 97818.

on Arrowsmith’s map as affluents of the larger “River which scolds at all others,” which in turn emptied into the Missouri. This was the pattern of tributaries inscribed on Clark’s map during the winter of 1805. At some point in the captains’ effort to translate information from Amerindian maps, Native images of the Missouri watershed were disregarded and only certain details were retained, to be inserted into a European map space as incongruent features. While it is possible to trace, by a comparison of Arrowsmith’s, King’s and Clark’s maps, the series of interpretive changes that formed the captains’ image of the upper Missouri watershed, the stages by which Arrowsmith’s image was formed are far less evident. The Arrowsmith map that Lewis and Clark carried with them was the fifth state of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America, first published in 1795. The three states dated 1796 extended south only to the forty-sixth parallel and clearly marked the “Western Point of Mr Fidler in 1792” north of “The King.” From 1796 to 1799, Arrowsmith’s depiction of the Rocky Mountains terminated with “The King” and his Missouri River trailed into the prairie just west of the Great Bend. Arrowsmith was assiduous in seeking out more information for updated states of this map. He did not confine his researches to the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose help is acknowledged in the map’s cartouche. In 1801 he engraved another map to illustrate Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal.32 On this second map, the still conjectural course of the Columbia River is drawn from Mackenzie’s Pacific route at about N53º south to the Vancouver expedition’s survey of its mouth at N46º. The Rocky Mountains are extended to the same latitude, and eight streams as well as two from “The King” are shown flowing east from the Rocky Mountains. Arrowsmith developed these streams

into a hypothetical Missouri watershed on the map that Lewis and Clark carried with them. Determining how and from whom Arrowsmith obtained information about these small rivers is a puzzling problem. Allen points to Peter Fidler, whose track was marked on all the states of Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries dating from 1795 to 1802. But Allen’s attribution is far from informed: “Peter Fidler ... apparently followed instructions received from natives during his travels in the Canadian West ... Fidler’s map was available to cartographers of the last few years of the eighteenth century.”33 Even Heckrotte is vague: he remarks that “this new information on the geography south of 50˚ must have come from the Indians, through Fidler, since there is no record of any explorations in these regions.”34 Fidler’s knowledge of the Saskatchewan watershed was communicated to Arrowsmith at least twice, perhaps three times, over a period of ten years. From November 1792 to March 1793 Fidler wintered with a “Pikenow” (Pikani) band along the front ranges of the Rockies. From their southernmost point of travel he was able to see Chief Mountain, called “The King” in his journal. Fidler related details of his trip to Turnor, who included Fidler’s “track” on his comprehensive “Map of Hudson’s Bay and the Rivers and Lakes Between the Atlantick and Pacifick Oceans ...” drawn for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1794.35 Turnor’s huge manuscript compilation was the base map for Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries, the first state of which was published the following year. The southernmost feature of the Rocky Mountains on Arrowsmith’s first state, as on Turnor’s map, was “The King.” Fidler sent an “imperfect” map of the upper Saskatchewan River to the London Committee in 1795. On Arrowsmith’s three issues dated 1796 (the second,

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third and fourth states), which appeared between 1796 and 1799, the Rocky Mountains still terminated at “The King.” But some time between 1799 and 1801, before he published the map in Voyages from Montreal, Arrowsmith added to his own working copy of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries: he extended the Rockies southward and he drew twelve streams emerging from the eastern side of the mountains. He also noted three observational fixes from Mackenzie’s trip to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile Fidler surveyed the South Saskatchewan River and requested the first of five Native maps of the region between the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers, drawn by Akkomokki, Akkoweeak, Kioocus and an unnamed “Fall Indian” (Atsina) visitor.36 In March 1802 Fidler plotted his survey of the Saskatchewan River and his journey to the Rocky Mountains. That summer, Fidler sent his new map of the Rocky Mountains to the HBC Committee, in care of its corresponding secretary, Alexander Lean. This map was in six sheets, with “an extra sheet and half annexed to the above, shewing the Rivers and other remarkable places to the Mississury river, which is taken solely from Indian information.” Fidler also sent Lean a copy of Akkomokki’s map drawn in February 1801. “This Indian Map,” he commented, “conveys much information where European documents fail, and on some occasions are of much use, especially as they shew that such & such Rivers & other remarkable places are, tho’ they are utterly unacquainted with any Proportion in drawing them.”37 The HBC ship carrying Fidler’s maps to Lean reached London on 23 October 1802. Fidler’s own map is now lost, making it impossible to know Arrowsmith’s precise debt to him. In mid-December 1802, Lean wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and to Alexander Dalrymple, hydrographer of the Royal Navy, announcing that

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he had sent Fidler’s “Maps & Papers” to Arrowsmith, who “considers them as important in ascertaining, with some degree of certainty, the sources of the Missisoury.” Lean added, “they also convey much curious Information respecting the Face of many Countries hitherto unknown to Europeans.”38 These letters acknowledge Native “Information,” apparently copied from Akkomokki, that Fidler had transferred to his “sheet and half.” But as we consider the links from Arrowsmith to Fidler to the trader-surveyor’s source for his “curious Information,” we must pose two big questions. Were the maps that Fidler sent to Lean in 1802 indeed used to update Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802? And how could the “curious Information” of the “sheet and half ” be read by Arrowsmith, Lewis and Clark? The first of these questions is about timing. Heckrotte has argued convincingly that Jefferson consulted the first issue of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802 (the fifth state of the map) while he planned the overland expedition, and that Lewis and Clark carried the first 1802 issue with them. The second 1802 issue (the sixth state of the map) did not appear until June 1803, whereas the first 1802 issue was published within a few weeks of the HBC ship’s return to London after its summer voyage to Hudson Bay. Arrowsmith may have had just enough time at the end of 1802 to engrave new information on the plate before running off copies of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802 (the fifth state of the map). However, no new information appeared on the 1802 map that Arrowsmith had not already added in manuscript to his own copy of the 1796 map prior to publication of Mackenzie’s map. The only important change on the first 1802 issue (the fifth state of the map) is the hypothetical Missouri watershed:

streams flowing from the Rockies north and south of “The King” are now drawn as solid lines to the Bow River, and the remaining Rockies streams are linked as dotted lines and labelled “River Missisury.” But Arrowsmith did not follow the pattern of Akkomokki’s map; the tributary pattern that appears on the 1802 states is purely imaginary. Surprisingly, the 1802 update still shows a long stretch of the South Saskatchewan River as a dotted conjectural line, despite Fidler’s careful survey of this river in 1800. The inescapable conclusion: Fidler’s “Maps & Papers” sent in 1802 made little if any change to Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802 (both the fifth and the sixth states of the map). Nor does Fidler’s earlier 1795 map appear to have influenced Arrowsmith’s depiction of the Rocky Mountains and the streams flowing east from them. No change was made to this region of the map until some time after 1798, the watermark date of the third 1796 issue (the fourth state of the map) that Arrowsmith used as his working copy. The source of Arrowsmith’s information added at this time is entirely unknown. The second question concerns interpretation. Lewis and Clark saw the pattern of rivers in European cartographic terms: each river had small sources and a larger mouth, tributaries formed a larger river, and the whole watershed was identified by this “main stream.” By “annex[ing]” an adapted version of Native maps to his own survey in 1802, Fidler reduced the Native image of this region to information, and assimilated it into the framework of mathematical space and conventional signs that defined European scientific mapping. At the same time, Fidler’s decision to include Akkomokki’s map with his own in his dispatch to Lean may well indicate his recognition that the Native mapmakers were registering more geographical knowledge than he could assimilate into his own cartographic image. Fidler’s copies

of Apatohsipikani maps drawn in 1801 and 1802 are largely unmodified examples of Native cartographic convention.39 River courses are drawn as straight or gently curved lines of equal thickness that form a trellis or lattice pattern unlike the watershed model described by Playfair and visualized by scientific cartographers. The river lines depict routes or obstacles for travellers moving along them or across them respectively. The even, firm lines indicate that all the streams contribute equally to the memorable design. Like Fidler, Clark requested and collected maps from Native leaders he met with. And like Fidler’s, Clark’s copies are hybrids of Native and scientific mapping conventions. They are stages of the same process of reformulation and attempted assimilation which had contributed over the previous decade to Arrowsmith’s published image of North America. On one of the first Native maps in Clark’s collection, originally drawn by the Mandan chief Sheheke in January 1805,40 the Native trellis pattern of rivers persists, but Clark has copied each of the rivers as undulating lines. This compromise is characteristic of Clark’s copies of Amerindian maps. The wavy arc of the Clark Fork River, for example, appears first on a “Sketch given us May 8th 1806 by the Cut Nose” and is repeated on Clark’s own maps drawn in 1806 and 1810.41 The extent to which these traces can be construed as signs of intercultural understanding – Ronda’s “common ground” – is arguable. There were moments such as the pause at the Missouri/Marias junction when Lewis and Clark were driven to suspect the insufficiency of their own understanding, and to credit their Native informants with giving reliable directions. But such moments did not last. Native geographical knowledge was used to fill in the blank space of “actual surveys,” not to re-think conventional signs or concepts. It is

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difficult to appreciate just how wide a gap there must have been between the Native peoples’ ways of seeing land forms and the explorers’ insistence on their own geographical patterns. Like Fidler and Lewis, like Arrowsmith, like Allen and Moulton, we tend to assume that our perception of geographic patterns is a direct understanding of natural phenomena – that we are accurately seeing what is there to be seen. We need to remember that Lewis and Clark came west laden with scientific baggage, the chief elements of which were their preconceptions – their “logical and theoretical constructions,” to use Allen’s phrase again.42 We have inherited this unreflective way of seeing, now perfected by our scientifically correct topographical maps and geographical information system. Akkomokki and Kioocus, who drew camps and warpaths for Fidler, were under no constraint to imagine the streams they crossed as tributaries of a major river. But Lewis and Clark were looking for the “true genuine Missouri.” The logic of their choice at the Marias occasioned the expedition’s long detour past the Missouri’s great falls to its three forks, the Lemhi Pass crossing and the Bitterroot trail. Shorter, easier routes across the mountains could have been found by following well-worn Native trails used for war and seasonal buffalo hunts. The captains’ reliance on scientific geography actually slowed their progress. Although they had great faith in details of Native information gathered at Fort Mandan, they were less curious about the very different conceptual patterns of Native knowledge. The “remarkable act of the mind” that led Lewis and Clark to the sources of the Missouri was indeed a triumph of science. Another “remarkable act of the mind” is left for us to accomplish: to admit that geographical features are not so much perceived as imagined.

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We “see” hills, lakes, rivers and coastlines in the shapes and relationships we have been taught and now unthinkingly accept. To reconceptualize them according to the forms and relationships suggested by Amerindian maps is perhaps impossible, since our verbal and graphic vocabulary of rivers – terms such as source, branch, mainstream, affluent, tributary, watershed, and the lines of varying thickness used to depict watersheds on maps – reflects the hegemonic model of empirical science. But we can at least try to gain some distance from what has been praised as the process of discovery, the process by which scientific explorers reduced knowledge to information, pulverizing Native designs into “data” which they inserted into their own “correct” geography. The captains’ dilemma at the Missouri/Marias junction was the dilemma of all exploration and frontier cartography: the coexistence of cultures, and the fact that one kind of knowledge cannot be wholly integrated and subsumed into another. Lewis suspected Fidler’s “varacity” when the periphery of Arrowsmith’s map became his own centre of interest. The captains were intent on replacing both Native knowledge and previous constructions with their own “actual observations.” At least, this is the progression outlined by Allen. However, as we have seen, the American explorers’ scientific mapping simply continued the patchwork compilation that had produced Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries. From 1806 to 1810, Clark was engaged in the same process of combining surveys with reports from traders and Native informants, selected and rationalized to conform with scientifically acceptable concepts and conventions. Clark’s great map of the West was engraved by Samuel Lewis and published in 1814 to illustrate the Biddle/Allan text. Arrowsmith very soon transferred the information of this map

to his latest update, the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1814.43 In their journals, Fidler, Lewis and Clark expressed a qualified awareness of and confidence in Native geographical knowledge. On their maps, whatever Native visitors to Chesterfield House and Fort Mandan said about the upper Missouri River, whatever they drew, pointed to and named, was transformed out of recognition or rejected in favour of a “correct” scientific view. All we can do now is to reconstruct a tentative, one-sided account of the explorers’ efforts to assimilate Native knowledge into their own image of the West. The other voice of the dialogue is missing, and that absence is our loss.44

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In the summer of 1802, Peter Fidler sent two maps to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s head office in London. One was his survey of the Saskatchewan River; the other was a map of the upper Missouri River drawn by Akkomokki, a “Blackfoot chief.” Fidler justified sending the Native map by writing that such maps “conveys much information where European maps fail ... though they [Native cartographers] are utterly unacquainted with any proportion in drawing them.”1 Fidler was not the first European to appreciate the radical difference between European and Amerindian mapping conventions. By the late eighteenth century, more than a few fur traders were cartographically acculturated: they were familiar with characteristics of Native mapping and imitated them when drawing their own maps. We can look first at the fundamental difference between the two conventions and then at the process of acculturation traceable in traders’ maps drawn over six decades, between 1760 and 1820. Almost all extant Amerindian maps were drawn for Europeans and non-Native Americans, either as route-finding aids or as territorial claims. That these maps were makeshift, drawn on various kinds of surfaces and not to scale has troubled historians, who emphasize their sketchy spareness rather than their precise utility, their diverse materials rather than their design. This emphasis on ephemeral crudeness reflects a distinction between civilized and

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Philippe Buache. Carte Physique des Terreins les plus élevés de la Partie Occidentale du Canada ... 1754. Library and Archives Canada NMC 13295.

primitive cultures that has endured since the Enlightenment. Many historians continue to look at Amerindian maps as if they are early stages of an evolution towards the scientific accuracy of modern European maps. But this is to oversimplify. Even during the Enlightenment, in its Paris heartland, two cartographers responded very differently to copies of Native maps sent from North America. In 1754 Philippe Buache published an extraordinary double map of the fur-trade route from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg ultimately derived from maps that three Cree chiefs had made for the Sieur de la Vérendrye. Entitled Carte Physique des Terreins les plus élevés de la Partie Occidentale du Canada, it was backed by the authority of the Académie des Sciences.2 One version of the route was a composite, still recognizably Amerindian, of the Cree maps. The second version replotted the route on a European map of the Great Lakes. By including the Native-style map, Buache indicated that his understanding of a foreign convention was limited, that his interpretation might be erroneous, that the source map might represent knowledge that his own convention could not convey. A more typical European response to Native mapping is Jacques-Nicolas Bellin’s Carte de l’Amérique septentrionale, issued in 1743 and again in 1755. Bellin’s credentials were as good as those of Buache; he was an engineer of the Marine and a Fellow of the Royal Society.3 In depicting the same fur-trade route from Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, Bellin inscribed the Native pattern of landmarks on a measured European space, as Buache did in his second version. The line separating survey and Native report, known and unknown, was not marked; in any case, the unknown interior was treated as yet-to-be-discovered territory already defined in terms of European

space. Poorly understood Native knowledge was artfully subordinated to the map’s scientific pretensions. Buache acknowledged the foreign map convention; Bellin and other European cartographers tried to assimilate the information it conveyed. Bellin’s surreptitious borrowing is nevertheless easy to detect because Native maps look so different from European ones, and that look stays with the transferred features. Since the fifteenth century, European maps have been based on a principle of spatial equivalence: the surface of the map represents, according to a mathematical ratio, the surface of the earth. The map’s graduated frame limits and defines this space; each point on the map can be related to a geographic location by a system of coordinates. Thus the entire surface of the European map is significant: even blank spaces have geographical meaning.4 In contrast, the surface on which the Native map is drawn is insignificant. The shape of the map – its meaning as a coherent image – is determined by a clearly connected network of cartographic signs. There is no spatial correlation between the map design and the ground on which it is drawn. Hence there can be no question of scale, a concept that is fundamental to European scientific cartography. On the maps drawn by Buache and Bellin, the river and lakes of the canoe route clearly form a chain pattern that survives their transfer into the European cartographic convention. The Amerindian convention bears some resemblance to our own schematic maps. All of us have drawn little directional sketches, showing someone how to get from A to B, and we frequently use bus and train guides as well as “you are here” plans for complex areas and buildings. The London Underground map has been a model for hundreds of similar guides to transport systems all over the world.5 Users of transport guides are unconcerned that junctions are not

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Jacques-Nicolas Bellin. Carte de l’Amérique septentrionale ... 1755. Library and Archives Canada NMC 16926.

really at right angles, or that distances between stops are not really equal. These schematic maps operate on a linear rather than a spatial principle, and to this extent they are like Amerindian maps. But it would be erroneous to match approximate form to familiar function – to assume that route finding is the only purpose of Amerindian maps, as it is for transport guides. We need to remember what Buache acknowledged – that maps are purely conventional, and that conventions are culturally bounded. What a line or a circle represents in one culture is not what it represents in another: the sign is the same, but its significance translates poorly and never entirely. Moreover, convention determines perception: we do not see geographical features such as lakes and rivers with the naked eye; we see them as we have been taught to see them.6 Hence there is no universal measure of accuracy or basis of comparison between terrestrial forms and ways of seeing or mapping them. Appeal to scientific cartography as a standard by which Native map images are to be understood guarantees that they will be misunderstood in all but the crudest and most practical sense. Native maps represent a worldview very different from that produced by European maps, whether topographic or schematic. Just as Bellin tried to assimilate Native knowledge while Buache recognized it as belonging to a foreign convention, responses to Native maps by William Clark and Fidler form a contrast in the early years of the nineteenth century. James Ronda claims that Clark was able to find “common ground” with Native cartographers.7 Returning east in 1806, Clark collected Amerindian maps to fill in the blanks of his own surveys. His copies show undulating rivers and tributary watersheds where the originals must have shown curved lines in a lattice network. Clark absorbed as much as he could of the knowl-

edge to be gained from Native maps in order to add this information to his comprehensive map drawn in 1810. Meanwhile Fidler’s long acquaintance with Native mapping taught him to understand the Native convention as much more than a crude wayfinding device that would be supplanted by European surveys. For example, although the three “tracks” between York Factory and Lake Winnipeg had been surveyed several times by 1806,8 Fidler still thought it worthwhile to ask for and transcribe Chachaypaywayti’s map of the same route. Fidler did not ask for this Native map as a provisional sketch to serve until an “actual” survey could be made; instead, Chachaypaywayti’s map was to supplement previous company surveys by its very different design.9 Buache had intuited what Fidler knew well: that the formal, conventional differences between European and Amerindian mapping precluded any superficial and misleading equation of specific map signs. To place Native map signs and patterns in European map space, as Bellin, Clark and others repeatedly did, was to ignore the fact that these map conventions were fundamentally incompatible. Several scholars have commented on the appearance and construction of Amerindian maps. Gary Moulton’s opinion of the Native maps Clark copied – that they were “no more than rude drawings on animal skins or stick scratches in the dirt” – echoes the disdain of historians of cartography such as Leo Bagrow and P. D. A. Harvey, who view European scientific cartography as an evolutionary advance over all other forms of mapping.10 Mark Warhus recently published the first and only monograph on Amerindian maps, but his commentary is narrative rather than analytical: Warhus uses the maps as keys to the tribal histories of their makers.11 In his catalogue of maps in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Richard Ruggles

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Unknown Cheyenne artist. “Bear Foot rescued by Last Bull.” 1871–76. United States Military Academy Library. Bourke collection.

includes Native maps with those drawn by Europeans; he does not comment on their formal differences.12 A welcome overview is the work of G. Malcolm Lewis, whose survey of Amerindian maps is comprehensive and thoughtful. Lewis is the only scholar to have commented perceptively and in detail on Native map design.13 For Lewis, cartographic space is a problematic issue. He warns that “there is always the danger of imposing Western geometric concepts on indigenous representations.” He realizes that Native cartography does not reflect the spatial concepts – “metric scale, standard units of measure, standard orientation, and systematic projection” – that have driven European cartography for the last five centuries.14 At the same time, Lewis considers it “danger[ous] ... to imply that there are two fundamentally different ways of spatial thinking: Western and ‘other.’”15 Since these two statements are contradictory, Lewis is ultimately persuaded that there are not “two fundamentally different ways of spatial thinking.” In other words, space is space, and the historian’s job is to discern the consistent operation of spatial representation in strange and unusual forms. Repeatedly Lewis hints at the radical difference of Amerindian maps, and repeatedly his scientific conception of space subverts these insights. He provides a valuable lead to understanding the different space of Native maps when he suggests that “in the absence of graticules and grids, route networks served as the structural base on which it was possible to mentally situate small areal and nodal features.” Yet having said this, he organizes the various kinds of networks into “a hierarchy from very simple to highly complex: single-path networks, single-branch networks, multibranch networks and circuit networks.” The patterns are ranked by the extent to which the paths are spread over a territory and permit the spatial choices familiar

to users of Western scientific maps. Lewis’s interest extends to “attempts to ‘scale’ ... single-path and single-branch networks according to travel time,” none of which, he concedes, can be proven.16 At the same time, Lewis is intent on placing Native maps in their own indigenous context. He looks for “maplike features” in Native graphic arts, but decides that petroglyphs and pictographs yield only doubtful map signs. Bird’s-eye views by Amos Bad Heart Bull are more rewarding, since they include American survey lines. Two drawings by Honanistto (Howling Wolf ) combine “maplike” rivers with small scenes of grouped figures on the river banks.17 In each of the drawings the river – the “maplike feature” – is in plan, while most of the human and animal figures are in profile, representing what may have been a peace-treaty meeting. Can these images be defined as maps? At most they incorporate cartographic signs rather than operating as a cartographic design. Moreover, the fact that these drawings postdate Honanistto’s extended exposure to European ways of seeing diminishes their importance as examples of traditional ways of seeing. To establish an indigenous context for Amerindian maps we need to consider surviving artifacts that are the least influenced, rather than plainly influenced, by European cartography and ways of seeing. The footprints and hoofprints in Honanistto’s peace-treaty pictures are interesting clues. The drawings’ luxuriant foliage and oblique perspective of buffalo running and hide-tanning reflect non-Native pictorial influences, but the hoofprints recall Plains images that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. A hoofprint tradition of rock art is found at sites from the Missouri River to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. A later “biographic” tradition of mounted warriors and their tracks can be found not only at more

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Making Medicine. “Indian Prisoners at Fort Marion being photographed.” 187677. Smithsonian Institution. National Anthropological Archives NAA ms 39B.

Wohaw. “Kiowa Portraits.” 1877. Missouri Historical Society. Art Collections 1882.018.04.

Howling Wolf. “Howling Wolf Killing Warrior in House.” [Howling Wolf in Boston]. 1877. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College. Gift of Mrs Jacob D. Cox, 1904. Howling Wolf Ledger Page 1904.1180.10.

recent rock sites, but also on painted robes dating from the early nineteenth century, drawings collected by Father Pierre-Jean De Smet in 1842 and in ledger books.18 The De Smet drawings show battles and single combat as complex designs made up of traditional figures and highly conventional “shorthand” signs: hoofprints, footprints and rows of guns indicate sieges and ambushes. The figures and signs were borrowed from contemporary rock and robe art; only the medium changed, from rock to hide to paper. The drawings on paper, from De Smet’s collection to the ledger books of the 1860s and 1870s, are perhaps the richest source of Native designs that are still faithful to the traditional practice of imposing images on undefined, unframed surfaces. The captured and recaptured ledger books, together with drawings by Native prisoners in the 1870s, have been the subject of several historical studies. In repeated skirmishes with American troops, Plains warriors plundered ledger books and pencils from the bodies of American officers and quickly mastered a new graphic medium. They drew mounted figures in the biographic tradition on the pages of these stolen books, whether or not the pages were already filled with notes and lists. In the Native drawings, millennial traditions governed the style and placement of the figures; at the same time, contemporary clothes and arms were minutely observed and accurately depicted. In subsequent battles, American soldiers stole the books back. For both sides the ledger books became trophies; possessing and re-possessing them was like counting coup. By 1875, however, the Kiowas, Cheyennes, Arapahos and Comanches were forced onto reservations. Honanistto and his father Minimic, southern Cheyennes, were leading figures of resistance to American encroachment onto the Plains. They and seventy other

defeated warriors were imprisoned for three years at Fort Marion in Florida. The prison director encouraged the inmates to draw images of their past life on the Plains as well as of their adaptation to civilized ways.19 Some of these images repeat the patterns of Plains graphic traditions; others explore the foreign concepts of landscape depiction and perspective that painting, engraving and photography impressed on the vulnerable, curious Native artists. A few of these men, including Honanistto, continued to draw after they left prison; the two images that Lewis examines in detail date from Honanistto’s return to the reservation after prolonged exposure to non-Native concepts of space. As traditional images, rock, robe and ledger arts give particular importance to connecting signs. Animal and human tracks, transference of visionary power, arrow and bullet trajectories show the slaughter of an animal, otherworld protection, the defeat of an enemy, the rescue of a fellow warrior. The tracks and lines join the various figures into complex narrative or visionary images. We might be tempted to consider such images as scenes but for the fact that the figures move in undefined space, not in a landscape. No “stage is set,” as Lewis claims, in traditional Native drawing. Figures appear in relationships that obviate ground lines; they are transparently superimposed or stacked rather than set in receding planes. The use of pictographic shorthand (disembodied hands and weapons, heads rather than full bodies, name signs like cartoon balloons) means that the images must be read as an assemblage of separable components rather than viewed as scenic tableaux.20 This kind of image requires a response that is closer to map-reading than to perception of threedimensional space in a two-dimensional medium.21 So little significance was traditionally accorded to the drawing surface that both

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Amerindian cartographers and ledger artists repeatedly ignored the edge of the paper on which they inscribed their complex images.22 Horses’ hooves and hindquarters might or might not be included; far more important was the sense of unhampered motion conveyed by the projected figures of horse and rider. This sense of immense, unbounded space was all the more remarkable considering the small format of the ledger books. Such radically different conceptions of space in traditional Native drawing and European art correspond to the radically different conventions of Amerindian and scientific cartography. The Native sense of space and ground is the complete antithesis of European map construction, which uses the frame or edge of the map to define the space within it in mathematical proportion to the geographic area it represents. The radically different Amerindian conception of space is seen most clearly in ledger drawings of gun warfare. As with earlier forms of combat and the brief, rough ceremony of counting coup, the bullet touches the defeated enemy. But the bullet is too small and too swift, it is launched from too great a distance, to be seen as it touches. The gap between weapon and object could be disconcertingly great, as shown in the “negative” space – the blank centre – of some drawings. Native artists satisfied their need to show the link between combatant figures by depicting the gun’s coup as a synecdoche (the whole gun is shown to signify the bullet), by showing links in the form of hoofprints, and/or by drawing in (that is, making visible as a connected pattern) the invisible tracks of numerous bullets.23 In these ways, the artist could still produce a traditional image that depended on configuration (linking the figures) rather than on spatial location in a scene.

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When they arrived in Florida, the Plains warriors encountered a social, architectural and artistic sense of space that was utterly foreign to them. Bear’s Heart and Making Medicine, two other Cheyenne prisoners, depicted the regimentation of the American army and of prison drill. The Native warriors had fought disciplined lines of soldiers only to be transformed into such lines themselves. Their drawings show the walls of Fort Marion coexistent with the paper’s edge, in contrast to disregard of this edge in earlier ledger drawings and Native maps. In his image of prisoners photographed, Making Medicine shows both the “negative” space and the enclosed space that American armies were imposing on the Plains tribes. The power of photography was analogous to the power of gunfire: across a foreign blank space, the Native prisoners were positioned, shot and captured in the photographic frame. The Kiowa artist Wohaw contrasted the freedom of the warrior moving in undefined space with the framed, static poses of the photographs at Fort Marion.24 The warrior-artists’ last resistance was to perspective, a spatial construct that most of us accept unthinkingly. The imprisoned artists considered perspective to be an alien treatment of space. Occasionally they experimented with it: they sometimes drew figures in landscape, just as they played with the edge of the page. Like a coat they could put on or remove, a second language they could speak or ignore, the devices and techniques of European representation provided Amerindian artists and cartographers with a choice. Some of the drawings made at Fort Marion are evidence that this new sense of space intrigued the artists. But most are evidence that they found traditional ways to refuse it. Instead, figures are depicted in a combination of profile and plan; distance is shown by stacked figures rather than by receding planes. Foreshortened figures are relatively

Akkoweeak, copied by Peter Fidler. Map of the upper Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers. 1802. HBCA E.3/2, f. 103v.

Akkomokki, copied by Peter Fidler. Map of the upper Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers. 1802. HBCA E.3/2, f. 104r.

Kioocus, copied by Peter Fidler. Map of routes between the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers. 1802. HBCA E.3/2, ff. 104v-105r.

Unnamed cartographer, copied by Peter Fidler. Map of Indian tents on the upper Missouri River. 1802. HBCA E.3/2, ff. 105v-106r.

Akkomokki, copied by Peter Fidler. Map of tribes on the Missouri River and west of the Rocky Mountains. 1802. HBCA E.3/2, ff. 106v-107r.

few; even when they do appear, they do not establish pictorial planes that dominate the image as a whole. “Scenes” of hunts may not be scenes at all but tallies of animals hunted, like the tallies of horses raided. The hunter and animals do not move in a single geographical space; instead they are placed like emblems in association with each other.25 The Fort Marion artists were acutely aware of this distinction. Like Wotaw, Honanistto included both Native and European conceptions of space in a single drawing of his life as a prisoner. His self-portrait as a warrior appears on the right side – traditionally the controlling side – of the image, while his self-portrait as a hospital patient in Boston, at the moment of his greatest vulnerability, appears as a framed subdivision to the left.26 The hospital bed is rendered in a crude perspective that is limited to the small enclosed space. Floating above it in undefined space is Honanistto’s “howling wolf ” name-sign, while a traditional path of footprints links the imprisoned, bedridden figure to the free horseman. His gun, shield, lance, silver ornaments and feathered war bonnet are drawn beside the mounted figure as emblematic signs of his former status. Like most ledger drawings, surviving Native maps adhere to the conception of space inherited from an ancient graphic tradition. Akkomokki and two other “Blackfoot” cartographers drew the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers together with landmark peaks as a configuration of lines in unbounded space. The maps of these three cartographers outline the tribe’s considerable knowledge of the uplands lying between the two river systems and vaguer awareness of rivers beyond the continental divide. Kioocus drew the Pikani war route to enemies camped along the Marias River and southwest to the great eastern sweep of the Rockies. Akkoweeak linked the upper Saskatchewan system and the Missouri’s northern branches by

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the line of the front ranges. On two of the maps, which were drawn in Fidler’s rough Chesterfield House journal for 1801–2, pencil lines can be detected beneath the ink lines. It is possible (pace Warhus) that Akkomokki and Akkoweeak drew these maps on the back pages of Fidler’s notebook, and that Fidler simply fixed the design by re-tracing it in ink. A pencilled sketch-map of the Red Deer, Bow and Milk rivers, showing a path from the northern rivers past the Sweetgrass hills, also appears in this journal.27 This third map can be ascribed with reasonable certainty to Akkomokki, since features of the sketch also appear on Fidler’s copy of the map naming Akkomokki which was sent to London. Half a century later, an unknown “Assiniboine Warrior” drew a mirror-image map of the Sioux war route against the Pikani along the north bank of the Missouri to the Marias River.28 Like Clark, the anonymous copyist of the Assiniboin map made the rivers undulate and added compass directions. But the pattern and space remain Amerindian. Even in the late nineteenth century, maps of the same region were still drawn traditionally. A northern Cheyenne cavalry scout known as Crazy Mule traced the retreat of Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce band, and depicted an abortive horse raid by Sitting Bull’s people.29 The horse raid is shown as a classic image of linked figures that clearly reflects the designs of rock, robe and ledger art. A second late-nineteenth-century map, drawn by a Hidatsa leader called Lean Wolf, testifies to the persistence of essential characteristics of Amerindian mapping. On a visit to Washington in the early 1880s, Lean Wolf was asked to record his life on the Missouri.30 He drew the river in the same lattice style that Fidler copied from the maps of Akkomokki and Akkoweeak. Lean Wolf documented his horse raid by drawing himself as a head and name-sign at his village on one

Moses Norton. “Moses Norton’s Drt of the Northern Parts of Hudsons Bay laid dwn on Indn Information ...” 1760. HBCA G.2/8.

Matonabbee and Idotlyazee, annotated by Moses Norton. “Captain Mea to na bee & I dot ly a zees Draught. CR.” 1767. HBCA G.2/27.

[Andrew Graham]. “A Plan of Part of Hudson’s-Bay & Rivers, Communicating with York Fort & Severn.” [1774]. HBCA G.2/17.

bank of the river. His route upstream to the Yellowstone River was on foot, shown by a conventional dashed line. A track of hoofprints registers his return route after a successful raid. No copyist’s interpretation has intervened in the cartographic record of this raid: it is certain that Lean Wolf held the pencil and drew the lines himself. These six maps of the upper Saskatchewan and upper Missouri rivers communicate a sense of space that is traditionally and characteristically Amerindian.31 They show space not as a mathematically measured territory dependent on sky referents but as a purely terrestrial pattern communicated by means of a configured image. Map signs and figures are displayed according to the plan-and-profile combination that dominates prehistoric media and nineteenthcentury ledger art. There is no “common ground”: European and Amerindian conceptions of space are essentially different and remain incapable of merged combination. The two map conventions are often superimposed, uneasily juxtaposed or translated as European-seeming signs on a European graticule. However, no degree of modification in drawing geographic features (Clark’s wavy rivers, for example) can alter the independence of the Native map image from the surface on which it is drawn. This is why “translated” copies such as Clark’s are misleading, and why Lean Wolf ’s map and Fidler’s notebook images are illuminating. European cartography could not assimilate Native cartographic knowledge beyond a simple route-finding equivalence, although mapmakers from Bellin to Aaron Arrowsmith made the attempt. To map users schooled in European scientific cartography, the Amerindian map convention challenges a conception of space that is considered axiomatic, and offers a chance to look with new eyes at the geographical features it records and defines.

Fur traders who spent many years or a lifetime west of Hudson Bay were more likely than short-term explorers such as Lewis and Clark to appreciate the distinctive qualities of Amerindian maps. The Native cartographic convention influenced the way inland traders perceived geographical features and recorded their own discoveries. Eventually traders not only copied Native maps; they even adopted certain characteristics of Amerindian cartography in drawing their own. J. B. Tyrrell comments, for example, on one of the small maps Fidler drew in his journals: “Fidler’s map of Cumberland Lake gives a general idea of its shape, though it is neither on a definite scale, nor is it oriented in any definite direction.”32 We can recognize characteristics of Native mapping in this description. Of the European traders who copied and adopted the Native convention Fidler was the most important, but he was not alone. Personnel of the Hudson’s Bay Company began to copy Amerindian maps when their attention focussed on the hinterland behind the Bayside forts. Directives to search for a northwest passage, to locate mineral resources, and to compete more strenuously with Montreal traders led the chiefs of Churchill and York to interview Native visitors and to send their own employees inland to trade and explore. In 1760 Moses Norton, chief at Churchill, the Métis son of a former chief, sent a parchment map of the Arctic to London.33 The simple, sweeping lines of this map represent the north coast of the continent and seven rivers draining into the Arctic Ocean, as well as the Nelson and Saskatchewan rivers flowing into Hudson Bay. The map’s endorsement, that it was “laid down on Ind n Information,” suggests that Norton or some other company official drew the map according to what Natives had told him about the northern interior. But the lines are drawn in pencil, the names written in ink – a

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Samuel Hearne. “A Map of the Inland Country to the Nh Wt of Prince of Wales’s Fort” ... 1772. HBCA G.2/10.

combination that suggests not only conversation but graphic collaboration. The map itself is more authoritative than the endorsement: its design is strictly Amerindian. The same can be said for a large map drawn on packing paper by Matonabbee and Idotlyazee, two inland visitors to Churchill in 1767.34 This second map is also drawn in pencil; certain features such as the northwestern copper mines are highlighted with wax colours and the annotations, apparently made in two stages, are in ink. Again the design is purely Native. Both of the maps drawn during Norton’s term of office ignore the shift in coastal direction, from north-south along Hudson Bay to west-east along the Arctic Ocean. Like the warpath maps of Akkomokki, Kioocus, the Assiniboine Warrior and Lean Wolf, they trace routes that cross a number of rivers. On the maps of the Arctic, the image is formed by the intersecting pattern of the routes and rivers. The map image is not formed by registering locations on a map space defined by mathematical coordinates or even by cardinal directions. During the period of early inland exploration, two maps of the Hudson Bay coastline and inland river routes inland, dated 1772 and 1774, were sent from York Factory to London. They are attributed to Andrew Graham, master at Severn and occasional chief at York.35 On the 1774 map, angular territorial boundaries demarcate the homelands of six inland Native tribes. Tribe and territory were European concepts; on the 1774 these concepts are imposed on small migratory bands who lived in the Shield forests and on the prairies.36 Yet the fundamental structure of the map is a pattern of linked rivers and shorelines that owes its strong figurative impact to Amerindian convention. The double lines from Hudson Bay to the Saskatchewan River do not represent a river system in the European geographical

sense; instead they indicate a pair of established trade routes, composed of linked rivers, lakes, portages, meeting places and camps.37 The configuration of the routes from York Factory to Lake Winnipeg – Lewis’s multibranch network – would be drawn repeatedly, in whole or in part, on company maps during the next half-century. Samuel Hearne drew two of these multibranch maps, the first in 1772 and the second in 1775, as records of his trips from Churchill to the Coppermine River and from York Factory to Cumberland Lake.38 Hearne’s Narrative, published in 1796, indicates that the explorer had some formal training in European cartography. Before he left Churchill, he scored a large sheet of parchment as a grid of parallels and meridians, and “left it blank,” to be filled in as he moved across the continent. On his trips he carried a quadrant, compass and watch for running surveys – that is, he planned to take occasional observations and fill in the space between fixes with measured directions. In fact, Hearne observed very little during his two years with the Dene; although his map of the northern journey is traced on a European grid, the directions and distances are approximate at best and often erroneous. Instead Hearne’s “strict enquiry of the natives” led to an emphasis on the connecting points of rivers and lakes rather than their direction and position. His questions were tailored to Native cartographic priorities: “to find out the communication of one river with another, as also their connections with the many lakes with which that country abounds.”39 Like Bellin, Hearne blurred the frontiers of discovery on his maps by indiscriminately marking information gained from his own survey and from his Native guides. Hearne’s 1775 map is also a measured graticule; apparently a model of precision, it marks off the degrees of latitude and longitude

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Samuel Hearne. “A Map of some of the principal Lakes River’s &c leading from YF to Basquiaw ...” [1775]. HBCA G.1/20.

and divides each degree into tenths. This map shows the work of marine surveys, perhaps Hearne’s own: the shoreline of Hudson Bay is marked with small crosses to indicate rocks and shoals. But inland, although it still follows European cartographic convention, it is not the transcript of surveys. The regularly undulating rivers, even in their lower reaches close to York Factory, indicate only a general southwest direction. But the sequence of lakes and the links between rivers is clearly detailed, and portages are indicated by short strokes across the rivers. The cartouche, featuring Adam and Eve in a medallion, explains that “all the strokes thus – which cross the Rivers, and goes from Lake to Lake denotes Carrying places, and the arrows Points the way the Current Sette.” Despite its European appearance, this map represents only the fur-trade “tracks” rather than the multiplicity of rivers and lakes in this region. The strokes and arrows are signs borrowed from Native cartography.40 Company mapmakers had reached this stage of familiarity with Native cartography by the time Philip Turnor was appointed as the HBC’s first official surveyor.41 Turnor drew a map of the route from York Factory to Cumberland House in 1779, revised it in 1787, and seven years later combined his own and other traders’ surveys in an enormous composite map of “Rivers and Lakes Between the Atlantick and Pacifick Oceans.”42 On all three of these maps Turnor omitted all the lakes and streams in this region that were not links in the transport routes. His maps feature the same beadlike sequences of lakes and rivers that Norton, Graham and Hearne drew, and that recall the extreme selectivity of Native cartography. The reason is not hard to find. By the late eighteenth century, Hudson’s Bay Company employees placed the same value on waterways in this region as their Native trading partners did. Not only did certain sequences

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of rivers and lakes form transport corridors for moving goods and furs, they also imposed a memorable pattern on what was otherwise a geographical maze. By the 1790s the Hudson’s Bay Company actively promoted survey work by any employees who showed interest and ability. John Hodgson, a former Grey Coat Hospital apprentice, and Edward Jarvis, the surgeon at Albany Factory, explored the watershed southwest of this factory. In 1791 two regional maps, one of which is attributed to Hodgson, were sent to London. Hodgson’s “Accurate Map” shows the Hudson’s Bay Company’s inland explorations up the Saskatchewan River and southwest to Lake Superior.43 Although it is a conic projection, which is unusually sophisticated (almost all the HBC maps drawn on a graticule are Mercator projections), the “Accurate Map” shows inland route as chains of lakes and rivers connected to each other in a vast multibranch network. Although the shoreline of Hudson Bay is well surveyed, the interior network, including a deformed and disoriented Lake Winnipeg, is not accurately placed on the graticule. Yet access points of the river routes flowing into and from Lake Winnipeg are carefully indicated, and by the selective patterns they impose, the links between Lake Winnipeg, Lake Superior and James Bay reflect the traditional emphasis of Native maps on movement and memorable sequences. Hodgson’s map is a composite: European and Amerindian conventions operate on the same map. These conventions are not combined; they are juxtaposed. The second Albany map, also drawn in 1791, is attributed to Jarvis and Donald McKay, who had defected from the “Canadians” to the Hudson’s Bay Company.44 Lake Superior is deformed and the route to Montreal is foreshortened, while linking features such as

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Lake Nipigon and Lake Winnipeg are emphasized and also placed on the grid with reasonable exactitude. Overall the interior features of the Jarvis/McKay map have the same configurative structure as those on Hodgson’s map. The function of the two Albany maps is the same – to show the linked network of inland waterways. In this respect they continue in the company’s tradition of familiarity with Native mapping, even to the adoption of certain Native map signs and characteristics on maps drawn by company personnel for company use. After several years in the trading areas of Albany and Moose factories, where he worked with Hodgson and Jarvis, Turnor set out via Cumberland House to survey the Athabaska-Great Slave Lake region. Fidler was appointed Turnor’s assistant for this expedition and became a company surveyor in 1795. By the time Fidler began to map the continental interior, not only were traders familiar with the Amerindian cartographic convention but they had developed, as we have seen, a style that borrowed from this convention for their own maps. There were degrees and differences in the traders’ cartographic acculturation. Following Mackenzie’s example, David Thompson used Native maps only as provisional guides. In 1809, he noted that Kootenays (Ktunaxa) west of the continental divide “drew me out a Sketch of their Country, & to near the Sea,” but he did not copy this map or incorporate its design into his own maps.45 Instead, he limited his mapping to the data of scientific surveys – his own, Vancouver’s and Clark’s. In contrast to Thompson, Fidler always worked within the rich diversity of his company’s cartographic tradition: he surveyed and mapped in the European convention, he copied Native maps, and for company use he drew maps that imitated the Native convention.

[Edward Jarvis and Donald McKay]. “A Map of Hudsons Bay and interior Westerly particularly above Albany.” 1791. HBCA G.1/13.

Peter Fidler. [Map dated 12 June 1809 made during a journey from Cumberland House to York Factory.] 1809. HBCA E.3/4, f. 4d.

Fidler was an exceptional surveyor in that he had an immediately visual as well as mathematical comprehension of geographical features. To the first journal he kept, a survey from Cumberland House to Lake Athabaska, Fidler added a recording device of his own: he inserted little maps into his journal text.46 He was especially attentive to the shape of lakes formed by the outcrops and declivities of the Canadian Shield; their irregular shorelines could not be recorded as efficiently in words or numbers. Fidler’s lake maps register specific shapes, unlike the smooth circles and ovals of Chachaypaywayti’s map or the frilly, regularly irregular lines of speculative European cartography. Fidler’s small maps do not illustrate the text; they parallel and in some instances substitute for verbal description. His integration of map drawings with his lists of courses and distances is unique; his journals demonstrate, more imaginatively and fluidly than those of Turnor or Thompson, the ways in which visual, mathematical, and verbal modes of notation work together to produce coherent, representative map images in the European convention. The small maps, sketchy and without orientation, are also reminiscent of the Amerindian mapping convention. Fidler’s survey data and graphic designs are most fully integrated in his last exploration journals. In 1807 and 1809 he surveyed for a river route between Churchill and Athabaska as well as for a new route from Cumberland House to York Factory. His entry on 12 June 1809, for example, records progress down the Minago River to Cross Lake, along the middle track to York Factory. The entry includes the usual list of compass courses and timed distances, with notes on currents and land features – all the information required in a survey journal. But after the initial phrase, “at 4 AM got underway & went as under,” this entry is laid out as a map, ending with a note

on the far edge of the map that takes up the narrative text again: “& put up at 5 PM.” Comments written below the map, anchored by capital letters (A, B, C ...) placed next to certain map features, work to transform the narrative of the journey into a description of geographic features. In a similar entry on 18 July 1807, the image of the river, combined with compass directions and distances in the same way, is spread over three pages.47 The map images of these entries are akin to Native cartography even as they are a stage of the European survey-to-map process. The key Native feature is the lack of relationship between the map image and the journal page. The maps of both sample entries for 1809 and 1807 are what Lewis would call “single-branch networks.” Their features do not occupy the measured, mathematical space of European scientific cartography; instead the compass directions shown between the sketched shorelines remain textual signs of the written survey, while the shorelines form a long string image of the route that is independent of the journal page, the support surface on which it is drawn. In these journals, Fidler’s survey record and his small maps are operating side by side, utilizing essentially incompatible cartographic conventions, neither of which is dominant. Fidler’s journals also include maps drawn by Natives, fellow HBC traders and “French” rivals from the North West and XY companies. His collection of traders’ maps shares a Native-derived idiom that can be traced in sketches by Joseph Howse, James Bird and James Swain, who were Fidler’s fellow masters at posts on the Saskatchewan River.48 As he surveyed various tracks to York Factory, Fidler solicited maps of its connections with the middle track as drawn by Ahchapee, Ookemowathin, Towwekishequih and Seeseep, but also by John Charles, Hugh Sabbeston and William

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Jean Findley, copied by Peter Fidler. Map of rivers and lakes across the continental divide. 1806. HBCA E.3/4, ff. 16v-17r.

Chynkyescum, copied by Peter Fidler. Map of a route from Lake Athabaska to the continental divide. 1809. HBCA E.3/4, ff. 14v-15r.

Aaron Arrowsmith. Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1814. Library and Archives Canada NMC 48902 (detail).

Peter Fidler. “A Sketch a la Savage of the Manetoba District.” 1820. HBCA B.51/e/1, ff. 1v-2r.

Hemmings Cook.49 On all of the maps Fidler copied, the rivers and lakes are shown as string and lattice patterns, Native signs for rapids and hills are used, and features are linked into a single, distinctive image rather than being positioned relative to a mathematically significant space. To Fidler and other inland traders, the Amerindian map convention was more familiar and useful than historians of cartography have acknowledged. Altogether, from 1801 to 1810, Fidler copied 20 maps drawn by Native cartographers and 16 Native-like maps drawn by his colleagues. One of the rival traders’ maps is “Drawn by Jean Findley 1806” and traces a route over the continental divide.50 Findley’s map is the most mysterious of Fidler’s copied sketches. In form it resembles a map of the “Stony Mountains” and the Athabaska River by “Chynky,es,cum a Bungee Chief,” and a sketch of James Sutherland’s track from Edmonton to Acton House, both of which were copied with Findley’s map on neighbouring pages of Fidler’s journal for 1809. The straight line along the top of the map is not the eastern edge of the Rockies, as it is on the maps of Akkomokki, Akkoweeak and Kioocus drawn for Fidler in 1801 and 1802. That edge has moved down the page and is now labelled “last or 1st Ridge of the Stony Mount[ain]s.” A second ridge appears as a parallel line, and between them are the Kootenay Plains. A trail – “a Track cut thro’ thick woods” – is drawn down the far side, and a trading post labelled “D. Thompsons House 1806” is shown between two lakes. Issuing from the two lakes is a curving river, linked to two lower lakes and a fall, which joins the Columbia River near the top of the page. To the north a second trail leads up the North Saskatchewan, across both ridges of mountains, to “a Large river” that also joins the Columbia.

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Ruggles identifies “Jean Findley” with Jaco Finlay, a Canadian freeman who cut a trail for Thompson from the Kootenay Plains across Howse Pass. Thompson did not travel over this pass until June 1807, although he had sent men across it to report on trade prospects as early as 1801. The HBC traders learned of Thompson’s undertaking by whatever means they could. Fidler recorded a verbal account of the initial crossing in one of the Chesterfield House journals; in December 1806 Bird wrote from Edmonton House that Thompson intended “to cross the Mountains ... and follow the Columbia River to the Sea.”51 Findley’s map shows Thompson’s conjectures about rivers west of the continental divide at the time he crossed Howse Pass. In a matter of weeks, however, Thompson deduced that the river issuing from the two upper lakes and the “Large river” to which the Iroquois had travelled was one and the same, the longsought Columbia River named by an American fur trader who had explored its mouth in 1792. The Hudson’s Bay Company finally crossed the continental divide in 1810, when Joseph Howse wintered on Flathead Lake. A cartographic record of this HBC venture must have reached Fidler, who sent a map of “the Rocky Mountains from Acton House to Howse’s House and the Great Fall” to London in 1812.52 Like his extra “Sheet and a half ” of the Missouri watershed drawn in 1802, Fidler’s 1812 map was compiled from second-hand knowledge, since he had not seen any part of this region for himself. Fidler’s 1812 map is missing; we can only speculate that the smooth line of the upper Columbia River (so unlike the branched watersheds and caterpillar mountains of Clark’s and Thompson’s maps), the two passes across the divide and the location of “Howse’s Ho[use]” on Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1814 are derived

from Fidler’s lost map, and that Fidler’s source was Findley’s map or one which also borrowed from the Amerindian convention.53 In 1819 the London Committee sent out two kinds of cartographic aids to its North American personnel, now organized into trading districts. Blank ruled Mercator projections and “Traced Copies” of Arrowsmith’s Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries were intended to help company administrators prepare the “Topographical Sketch, or Plan” that was required of each district.54 The Committee’s suggestions came to nothing. Many traders had no idea how to fill in a ruled graticule or to add their own new discoveries to Arrowsmith’s map. But more than a few of these traders could and did draw maps that imitated the Native convention. For his part Fidler, veteran of many inland journeys, trained surveyor, collector of Native and company maps, chose to draw his district plan as a “Sketch a la Savage.”55 He could have drawn a surveyed map. But in making this choice, Fidler acknowledged the Amerindian maps which had long influenced and enriched his own cartographic practice as well as that of his colleagues.

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T H E SI L E N T PA S T IS MADE TO SPEAK

History is an exercise in hindsight: we look back on past events and conditions, choosing among them and arranging them in a “significant” pattern that accounts for changes from past to present. This line is not smooth, direct or easy to construct. The mass of insignificant details persists, always threatening to disturb the design imposed on the archival record. Moreover, histories must invent where evidence is missing as well as negotiate radical shifts in concepts and values. How can historians be true to the mass of details, or the lack of evidence, and at the same time produce a view of the past that is relevant to the present? The temptation to cut a clear swath through the archive, to reduce scattered and multifarious otherness to an understandable simplicity, is seldom resisted.1 In the late 1960s, the interest of Canadian fur-trade historians shifted radically from exploration and commercial rivalry to an emphasis on the hitherto silent partners of the fur companies’ success. Arthur J. Ray led this movement; he combined economic history with current studies in anthropology to profile Native participation in the trade between 1670 and 1870. This new interest in Native traders stimulated research into the fur-trade roles of Native women and their Métis children. A third silent constituency, the fur trade’s “working men,” is the subject of a more recent study.2 By their attention to groups who had previously played walk-on parts or had simply been overlooked, several publications marked a new

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direction for what we can call the historical record – that is, for the series of questions that researchers ask of the past. We should not for a moment underestimate its determinative power. Historians find their answers in the archival record, but they find their questions in perceived gaps or errors of previous historical research. And they always find what they are looking for. Pursuit of a historically defined problem is most rewarding, and least hampered, in macrohistorical studies, that is, in works surveying a social group or institution over long periods of time. Conversely, microhistorical studies are likely to be more nuanced in their conclusions as well as more attentive to the archival record. Pioneering studies of fur-trade women and working men can be tested using a microhistorical focus: a limited period (the decade from 1792 to 1802), a single river, albeit a long one (the Saskatchewan River) and attention to a single fur-trade enterprise (the Hudson’s Bay Company). Publication of Sylvia van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties and Jennifer Brown’s Strangers in Blood established a new direction in fur-trade studies. Van Kirk and Brown claimed to have found a great deal of evidence for an aspect of the fur trade that earlier historians had considered unimportant. These two pioneering studies examine documents of the fur trade to discover the role of Native women and the emergence of a culturally distinct Métis population. Van Kirk and Brown present overviews that span two centuries of fur-trade activity and cultural exchange. They sift out references, for the most part brief, circumstantial and hitherto ignored, to women’s roles in the fur trade. We learn that Native women were, in Van Kirk’s phrase, “active agents” of commercial expansion westward. Van Kirk argues that relationships between British traders and local women were

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thought to have ensured trading alliances with Native groups, while women’s skills (tanning hides, making pemmican, sewing moccasins, netting snowshoes) contributed to the seasonal routine of life at the posts.3 Both Brown and Van Kirk assert that marriage, which they repeatedly define as solemnly contracted, “lasting and devoted unions,” was an essential and enduring feature of the fur trade. By 1821, Brown claims, “practically all officers of the Hudson’s Bay and North West Companies, and many lower-ranked employees as well were allied with women born in the Indian country. Such alliances were by then, in fact, normal adjuncts of fur trade social life.”4 Both historians find their fullest documentation in mid-nineteenth-century journals, letters, drawings and photographs. By this time, the Victorian ideal of a stable, lifetime relationship was extended to furtrade marriage.5 What of the role of women on the trade frontier during our “test” decade, 1792–1802? Given the large number of Métis families who can claim fur-trade personnel among their ancestors, Brown’s assertion that “practically all officers ... and many lower-ranked employees” were “allied” with Native women seems amply justified. Several compilations have been made of Métis genealogies, one of which is Warren Sinclair’s collection now in the Glenbow Archives. Among Sinclair’s carefully documented sources are the earliest records of Métis families in the West, dating from 1813, found in the parish registers of St John’s Assiniboia. Sinclair lists 474 Métis family names.6 Most non-French Métis surnames can be traced to individuals who were HBC post masters and “writers” during the 1790s. Alliances between Native women and the common men are another question. In 1796, midway through our test decade, 124 men were sent to Saskatchewan River posts from York Factory; by

1799, the number of men had increased to 160.7 If we compare the lists of servants inland with Sinclair’s Métis families, we find 36 correlates with the 124 men in 1796, and 44 correlates with the 160 men in 1799. We can then estimate that roughly a third of the HBC men sent inland during this decade fathered and acknowledged Métis families at some point in their fur-trade service. Whether these men established families in the 1790s or later is uncertain. Most of the men serving inland from York Factory during the 1790s were hired on two- to five-year contracts that were rarely renewed beyond two terms. A minority stayed several decades, a few dying on the job. James Spence, Magnus Twatt, James Gaddy and Malcolm Ross are known to have had families before 1800. These four individuals were members of the first brigades to establish posts inland from York Factory in the late 1770s. All of them wintered year after year with Native bands and served as “occasional masters” during the summer months. They formed an unofficial group distinguished from the “time-serving men” but not fully acknowledged as officers, rather like the petty-officer class of ships’ crews. Apart from the officers and steersmen like Spence and Gaddy, it appears that few families were found at the HBC’s Saskatchewan River posts during the 1790s.8 Company journals written during our sample decade by Saskatchewan River post masters William Tomison, George Sutherland, James Swain, Henry Hallett, James Bird and Peter Fidler make almost no mention of women and children at the posts. I have found only a few references to women and children in thousands of daily entries written by seven different HBC traders over a period of ten years. In the Buckingham House journal for 1795–96, Swain records that Spence, a steersman and “occasional master” who died in November, willed his property to

his wife and children. Fidler notes the next year that the Buckingham House tailor made clothes for “the late James Spense’s children” and for “Jas Gaddy’s boy.” At Cumberland House in May 1798, “the Women finished making 56 Gallons of Pitch” – the only record of women’s contribution to post maintenance or trade in these journals. Malcolm Ross spent the winter of 1798–99 at Cumberland House and camped nearby with his family; they are mentioned in several entries of the Cumberland House journal that year. In 1801, Fidler went up the South Saskatchewan River with 18 men in two boats to build Chesterfield House. All of the men slept under the boats except Fidler, one other man, and his hunter Benjamin Bruce, whose eldest child was born that year. The three who slept away from the boats probably had families with them; the other 16 men probably did not. In 1802 Fidler travelled to Hudson Bay, “taking down all my family to leave at the Factory with the Womans friends” – the “Woman” was Fidler’s wife Mary.9 There is no other mention of women living at the posts in these journals. Van Kirk and Brown explain the post journals’ sparse references to women and children as reticence induced by the London Committee’s condemnation of liaisons with Native women. “In spite of the rules,” Van Kirk insists, “Indian women were often found within the forts.”10 Brown maintains that “the Hudson’s Bay Company ... demanded both celibacy and chastity from its Bay employees, seeking to impose monastic as well as military order on their lives there. ...The growth of fur-trade domesticity in Hudson Bay ... spread and flourished despite the efforts of a non-colonial company to suppress it.”11 We are left with a choice: either we can assume that the Saskatchewan River journals of the 1790s reflect an incredible degree of censorship and repression of daily facts of life,

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Peter Fidler. Plan of Nottingham House. 1804. HBCA B.39/a/5b, flyleaf.

or we can suspect that relatively few “lower-ranked employees” had families living at the posts. The option of few families seems more plausible. If Native wives made regular contributions to the business of running the posts, then regular mention of their skills would have been appropriate in the post journals. The occasional contribution was duly noted, as were the visits of Native women who came to trade. There does not seem to have been a ban on mentioning women whenever their activities were seen as relevant to the trade and maintenance of the posts. What we read instead is that men hunted small game, gathered wood, cooked, prepared pemmican, made clothes, netted snowshoes, collected roots for sewing canoes and pitch for caulking them – all jobs assigned to women in Native societies. It is reasonable to infer that the men undertook these jobs because women were not there to do them. That there were few families at the HBC posts may also be deduced from the allocation of living space. Several Saskatchewan River journals record construction of posts usually consisting of one house of modest dimensions surrounded by a palisade, the living and working environment for 20 to 60 men. Tomison’s Buckingham House was a single building 63 feet long and 26 feet wide, surrounded by a palisade originally 100 feet by 100 feet. Tomison was building to an established pattern: Buckingham House and its enclosed “yard” conform closely with the plan of earlier HBC posts on the Saskatchewan River. In 1795 Edmonton House, from the outset a larger post than the others, consisted of “a dwelling house built 60 feet in length, 24 in breadth and 17 feet high, and another house of 32 feet long and 18 wide and 16 high.” The palisade of Acton House, constructed in 1799, is said to have measured

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David Thompson. Plan of Kootanae House. 1807. Archives of Ontario F443, notebook no. 18, p. 267.

100 feet by 90 feet. Fidler’s Chesterfield House shared its palisade with the XY Company and consisted of a single building measuring 43 feet by 30 feet, partitioned into a victual shed, a trading room, Fidler’s own “Cabbin” and the men’s “cabbins” located in “the Mens Apartment.”12 The term “cabbin,” used by both Tomison and Fidler, has proved misleading. In her account of excavations at Buckingham House, Trudy Nicks assumes that “a number of men’s cabins were built” in addition to the main house. Recently Peter Francis and Jack Porter make the same assumption concerning the layout of Acton House; they are convinced that “the presence of only one main habitation structure associated with the initial fort occupation is unlikely.” No archaeological evidence of small huts (timbers or hearths) has been found either at Buckingham House or at the site thought to be Acton House. About the layout and uses of rooms, Nicks remarks that “neither digging in the ground nor in the archives has revealed much about building construction.”13 However, although they are frustratingly laconic on this subject, the HBC post journals contain more evidence of construction than Nicks was able to find in the late 1960s. The answer to the problem of “cabbins,” for example, can be found in one of Fidler’s rough Nottingham House journals, which includes a scale drawing of the post built in 1802, only a few months after Fidler had left the South Saskatchewan River. Nottingham House measured 58 feet by 17 feet: the master’s “Cabbin” occupied one end of the building; the “Men’s House” with two “Cabbins,” each measuring 8 feet by 7 feet and lined with bunk beds, was at the other.14 Van Kirk is puzzled by HBC post construction and concedes that “the fur-trade posts had never been planned to accommodate

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large numbers of women and children”; family arrangements at the posts were “makeshift.”15 We are asked to believe that family life was the norm although posts continued to be built and run as if it were not. For most of the men, it is more reasonable to assume that relationships with Native women, when they occurred, were casual and short-lived. The lists of servants kept between 1792 and 1800 show that the majority of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s “lower-ranked employees” sent inland during this decade were young men in their twenties who returned home after one or two contracts. Liaisons between company men and local women may have occurred during visits to Native camps and during shifts at hunting camps, although Fidler’s journal of four months with Apatohsipikani in 1792–93 makes no mention of women with him or his fellow winterer John Ward. Thomas Stayner’s journal of 1789–90 provides a rare glimpse of life at a hunting camp serving Manchester House. Stayner spent several weeks living in James Spence’s tent, which accommodated six men as well as “two females” and three children. Stayner describes one of the “females” as a mother of three children, the other as a 14-year-old girl. The mother was very probably Spence’s wife Nostishio; the girl was probably their daughter, since they had four children by 1795. There is no mention of other women at the camp.16 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the social structure that Stayner describes at the hunting camp was the same as that of the post. For twenty-five years, Many Tender Ties and Strangers in Blood have convinced their readers that women were omnipresent in and essential to the fur trade. What both authors downplay is the very large proportion of the documentary record that says nothing at all about women’s fur-trade roles. The uneasy fit between the archival evidence and the questions asked of it is due to the powerful ideals

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of racial and gender equality that the two historians project onto the past. The final paragraphs of Van Kirk’s book refer to a court ruling in 1886 which cited fur-trade marriage as an irregular social practice. Van Kirk protests that the judge’s remarks “give little credence to the strong bonds of affection and duty which characterized many of the lasting unions between European traders and their native wives.”17 Brown and Van Kirk are critical of nineteenth-century European “bourgeois” attitudes that devalued fur-trade alliances and promoted formal, life-long contracts of marriage with British women. Ironically, both defend the fur-trade tradition by emphasizing country marriages that fulfilled the European bourgeois ideal of “lasting unions.” Value is not inherent in past situations; it is lent to events and conditions after the fact, in hindsight, by historians. Van Kirk and Brown interpret the past for us. Few of us would disagree with their values of equality or even with their ideal of lasting relationships. But we might well question their projection of these ideals onto the radically different societies of the Saskatchewan River two centuries ago. Recently Brown has reconsidered “the multiple, contested and some times elusive meanings” of fur-trade family relationships. She concludes that the partners might have had different views and definitions of these alliances. The Native woman and her family may “have viewed the connection as a marriage” while “the fur traders carried on with their view that real marriage was something else.” In other words, the European may not have considered his commitment to a Native woman as exclusive or valid beyond the time of his company contract, while the woman and her family regarded it as an alliance involving kinship privileges and obligations. “It is possible, in fact,” Brown concludes, “that ‘the custom of the country’

was a relatively late construct born of hindsight, as nineteenth-century traders and twentieth-century scholars brought retrospective symbolic order to a receding social world.”18 Brown’s revision of her earlier assertions remains speculative. Nevertheless her conclusion that the enduring country marriage is a “construct born of hindsight” effectively refutes what Many Tender Ties and Strangers in Blood set out to prove. Another group of “silent” participants in the fur trade is the large body of labourers, canoemen, bowsmen, steersmen and tradesmen whose manpower and skills allowed the Hudson’s Bay Company to push inland from York, Albany and Churchill factories in the wake of rival Canadian traders. Edith Burley’s Servants of the Honorable Company, published in 1997, is a macrohistory of these “workers.”19 Burley briefly considers the company’s early arrangements at the Bay and then looks more closely at the second pre-Confederation century, from 1770 to 1870. The range and emphasis of Burley’s book are exactly those of Van Kirk’s and Brown’s, and like their studies of women in the fur trade, Servants of the Honorable Company has gained immediate and wide acceptance. Burley presents a double thesis: first, that HBC employees in Bayside posts and inland played the servant role in a master-servant relationship resembling that of pre-industrial English households, and second, that opposition to this subservient role ranged from individual recalcitrance to collective mutiny. In proving her first point, Burley resorts to an unlikely model; in arguing her second, she evokes a labour/management polarization that postdates events and conditions of the late eighteenth century.

Burley states the thesis of her book in one succinct introductory paragraph; it is worth quoting this passage in full before discussing the points one by one. The HBC was a conservative, paternalistic organization based on the relations of authority characteristic of pre-industrial society. Fur trade historians have observed that the company’s posts resembled the pre-industrial households of seventeenthcentury England, which were characterized by vertical ties and an absence of class divisions... Masters of the posts assumed the role of patriarch and, as such, claimed the right to take wives and establish families. Their subordinates resembled servants in British households. They were young, had little private life, were expected to remain unmarried, and had few opportunities to establish relationships with their peers, even fewer than their counterparts in Britain ... The HBC never abandoned its hierarchical organization, always hired a proportion of its employees on long-term contracts that tied them to it in a master-servant relationship, and never ceased to believe that men from pre-industrial societies were the most desirable [employees].20

As with Brown’s and Van Kirk’s studies of fur-trade women, we can read Burley’s macrohistory with reference to the “test” decade of HBC expansion westward from Cumberland House to the Rocky Mountains. Burley maintains that the Hudson’s Bay Company was a conservative, paternalistic organization, and there is considerable support for this assertion in company correspondence between 1792 and 1802. During this decade, despite the extension of its activities across

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an ocean and a continent, the company was still a small organization. Administrative details as well as general policy were handled by the London Committee, consisting of the Governor, a Deputy Governor, seven members elected from the shareholders, and a secretary. Relying on information contained in “general letters” on trade at the bayside factories, journals from the inland posts and special reports on exploration, the Committee judged the work record and wages of all employees as well as the quality and price of its trade goods and furs. A company agent, working first in Leith, later in Stromness, was contracted to hire and pay hundreds of Orkneymen engaged for overseas work. The job of keeping records fell to a single overworked secretary who was responsible as well for all official communication not only with the hiring agent but with suppliers, the “servants” overseas and their families in Britain. The Committee were satisfied with this simple administration: they assumed that they were in firm, because direct, control of all aspects of the company’s operations. Such complacency could benefit only the Committee and the shareholders it represented; the “servants” risked considerable losses. A few financial discrepancies were brought to the Committee’s attention but it is likely that many more were never questioned. Only the London office had a cumulative record of wages due; although they were given annual notes (which could easily be lost), the men had to rely on memory for a tally of work and wages, in the end trusting to the company to give them their due. In 1794 Alexander Lean, then the Committee secretary, wrote to the Stromness agent, David Geddes, that it was not normal practice “to send Accts Curr t to the Servants in the Orkneys ... for no other reason than to save much writing.”21 The London Committee appeared to be, and in matters

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such as this no doubt were, paternalistic in claiming to safeguard their employees’ rights and well-being as well as the shareholders’ money. From time to time accounts current had to be issued, not without grumbling from Lean and, for us, a glimpse of how they were drawn up. Lean explained to Geddes that they “Require much time to complete [I] being obliged to examine and Refer to all the Factory books ... and going Regularly through the whole and their dependent Settlements ... which occasions the Regulations of these Accts very tedious and troublesome.”22 Geddes had his own tallies to defend. For example, in 1799 William Flett, an “Excellent Servant. A good Canoe builder, Steersman, and Occasionally Pilot to & from Inland”23 who had served the company for sixteen years, pointed out that the balance of his wages was short five pounds. Lean’s first response was to “apprehend [Flett] must be wrong” because the records he and Geddes had kept agreed, but he dutifully reviewed the case and discovered that in fact Flett was owed eight pounds.24 Except for Flett’s persistence and Lean’s scrupulous review, the man would have lost a not inconsiderable sum: eight pounds was payment for a year’s work early in Flett’s service overseas. Very occasionally the company’s error was to the employee’s advantage. In December 1795 Lean wrote to Geddes, “Wm Leach ... was credited £4. 2. 0 for sundry Bills in 1794 consequently he is over paid by this sum which you will get back from him if you can.”25 Burley also considers the organizational model of overseas posts. These, she says, “resembled the pre-industrial households of seventeenth-century England,” the masters of which “assumed the role of patriarch,” while the men “resembled servants in British households.” Burley cites three fur-trade historians who recently used the household model of “pre-industrial” society to explain the

company’s organization.26 These three authors did not conduct independent reviews of documentary evidence; instead they simply cited the work of another historian, as historians often do. Their one authority is Jennifer Brown’s Strangers in Blood. In her introduction, Brown states that “the company post took shape as a largescale ‘household,’ a unit of social and economic organization basic to seventeenth-century English society.” In turn, Brown cites as her single authority Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost, published in 1965.27 The household model for HBC post organization therefore relies not on the evidence of period documents but on Laslett’s questionable history – questionable because Laslett himself provides little evidence, none of which is relevant to the eighteenth-century North American fur trade. Laslett builds his house on sand, Brown builds hers on Laslett, Burley and company build theirs on Brown: the resulting structure is anything but solid and reliable. Brown insists that “there are intriguing resemblances between these [English household] units and the Hudson’s Bay Company posts that slowly spread along the coasts and interior waterways of the Northwest.”28 Laslett states unequivocally that the end-date of his study is 1710; moreover, his focus is on the social organization of rural England, not on the development of overseas trade.29 It is a stretch of the imagination to believe that a viable commercial venture could first adopt a pattern of agrarian organization and then retain it half a world away during two more centuries of tumultuous change. Nor would the majority of HBC employees in North America have been familiar with or responsive to the farmhouse-family model that, according to Laslett, formed the backbone of seventeenth-century English life. Burley ignores glaring differences of period and place by typing both Laslett’s subjects (English country folk) and her own (the

HBC workforce) as members of “pre-industrial” societies. According to the company’s lists of servants, 80 per cent of the manpower at the Saskatchewan River posts during our 1790s test period came from the Orkney Islands. The London Committee considered Orkneymen to be “hardy” and content with low wages; according to Burley, these traits define Orkney culture as comparable to that of “pre-industrial” England. Burley argues that even by the early nineteenth century industrial institutions and practices were unevenly distributed in Britain: certain areas had revolutionary economies while others maintained a centuries-old way of life. Her picture of patchwork industrialization ignores eighteenth-century agricultural improvements and industrial capital’s colonizing outreach: regions that seemed untouched by industry were in fact drawn into its economic web. Links between Orkney landowners, usually absentee, and tenants did not reflect the household warmth and closeness that Laslett calls a “love relationship” between master and servants.30 Burley mentions that Orkney “had long had international trading links,” one of the most important being its contribution of manpower to the Hudson’s Bay Company. One or two HBC contracts, she maintains, allowed a young man to return to Orkney with some savings, marry, and settle back into the “traditional” agrarian society he had left five or more years before.31 But collectively this drain of manpower may well have had a negative effect on Orcadian society. Far from benefitting a “traditional” society, Orkney’s overseas connections sapped social cohesion, as contemporary observers were not slow to point out.32 A valuable contemporary source of information on economic conditions in Orkney is Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland, a collection of parish reports published in 1795.33 The Rev. William

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Clouston, the church of Scotland minister in Stromness, contributed a carefully researched profile of the port at which HBC ships stopped twice yearly to trade and take on men for service in North America. Clouston described a transitional society. Although rents paid in kind and by service were feudal vestiges, work in Orkney was increasingly focussed on trade and off-island opportunities. Far from seeing the Hudson’s Bay Company as supporting “pre-industrial” life, Clouston recorded complaints that the company paid low wages and drained Orkney’s manpower. The problem, he argued, lay with an island economy “where there are not manufactures, or improvements in agriculture.”34 Its lack of self-sufficiency – self-sufficiency is said to be one of the marks of a “pre-industrial” society – forced hundreds of men abroad. The picture of Orkney in the 1790s is of an economy dependent on its offshore connections and a social fabric weakened and distorted by the absence of many men overseas. There is no evidence that former HBC employees settled into “traditional” households on the Laslett model when they returned home. Burley’s picture of company organization draws on two incompatible models. She follows Brown in suggesting that the customs and expectations of a “pre-industrial” society prevailed even as Britain itself was shifting to an economy based on industrial capitalism. But when she considers disputes and rebellions, she shifts to a nineteenth-century model of commercial organization that sharply divides management and labour. “ The coexistence of these models is explained by a double perspective: the first model corresponds to “the view from the top” (the post as perceived by its officers), the second to “the view from the bottom” (the post as perceived by the “working men”).35 Burley splits the perception of family and household into the masters’ complacency and the men’s concern to defend

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themselves in a system that they were to serve but that did not serve them. Burley’s argument is curiously like Brown’s revisionist description of alliances between European traders and Native women: just as the women considered themselves to be married while the men might not, the officers viewed their subordinates as members of a family while the men did not. We may wonder how marital and working relationships endured as dominant patterns of the fur trade if they were characterized by such pervasive misunderstanding and cross-purposes. Burley overlooks the company’s own designation of all HBC employees in North America, from the factors of the bayside forts to the humblest outpost labourer, as “servants.” The overseas trade operations were the company’s “service” to its shareholders.36 Burley zigzags between a model of household paternalism and a paradigm of class struggle, but neither pattern adequately explains fur-trade society in North America. We can gain a clearer sense of the company’s labour relationships at Saskatchewan River posts of the 1790s by considering, first, the age profiles of post personnel during this decade; second, the various working relationships by which the post and its trade were maintained; and third, the resolution of occasional conflicts. The attitudes, age and experience of most Saskatchewan River post masters on the Saskatchewan River during the 1790s preclude a paternalistic master-servant relationship. It is always risky to infer the emotional quality of formal relationships – to assume that kin will support each other, or that post masters were kind and just to the men under their direction. Robert Longmoor’s men accused him of brutality; Turnor and Thompson deplored George Hudson’s incompetence and fondness for drink. Nor were the posts always run by older, experienced traders whose age and experience were greater

than those of their men. Certainly William Tomison, who dominated the Saskatchewan River trade as the “Inland Chief ” during our test decade, had been in the company’s service since 1760.37 But Tomison was exceptional among the Saskatchewan River post masters of the 1790s. In 1795, while Tomison built Edmonton House, James Bird, aged 23, was building Carlton House and James Swain, aged 20, took over Buckingham House. In 1799, John Peter Pruden, aged 20, became master at Carlton House.38 Peter Fidler, aged 25, was made master of Buckingham House in 1796. A list of the men wintering under Fidler’s first command shows an age range from 18 to 35; over half of the men were older than the master and more than a third were over 30. Most of these men had been in the company’s service for longer than Fidler’s eight years. As with contemporary sailors, experience created a strict if informal ranking that was quite different from the company’s official delegation of power.39 This “anomalous” age profile was created by the London Committee’s decision to appoint young Englishmen as writers and masters rather than promote long-serving Orkneymen. Not before 1800 did Fidler’s years of service equal or exceed those of his men.40 In order to govern the men assigned to them, post masters needed more than their titular power, more than the threat of fines, rough punishment or dismissal: they also needed to demonstrate a personal authority that was based on fairness and psychological acuity. Fidler’s record during this period is exceptionally revealing of labour relationships because some of his original journals have survived. Every day or at least every few days, a master would record the post’s weather, any trade or visits, and the men’s activities; this rough journal often contained details that were omitted in a fair copy made for the London Committee at the end of the winter season. Fidler’s

rough journals name his men, detail their activities, note their debts and record their misdemeanours. Burley might argue that, as master, Fidler was giving “the view from the top” even in the rough journals, and that the men’s perception of events and conditions would have been quite different. But such an interpretation would overlook the fact that in 1788 Fidler had been hired for five years as a labourer, a contract which gave him at least some idea of “the view from the bottom.” The same is true of Tomison and the “occasional masters” who ran the posts during the summer: all of them had worked their way up from contracts as steersmen and tradesmen. These instances blur the line that Burley draws between the masters who gave orders and men who obeyed them. Fidler’s journals hint at a structure of company relationships that is more flexible and complex than the opposition of a superior (whether patriarchal or overbearing) and an undifferentiated group of subordinates. A rough journal exists for the season 1796–97, when Fidler was appointed master of Buckingham House. The master settled in for the winter with thirty men; he was to promote what trade he could with visiting Native traders, as well as to build canoes and boats for the spring return to Hudson Bay. The daily tasks he assigned are described in the journal; the men’s skills and experience are noted in the York Factory list of servants for that year.41 The thirty men at Buckingham House were organized and ranked in three ways: for navigation (thirteen middlemen, seven bowsmen, seven steersmen), for usual work at the post (three labourers, a tailor, two carpenters, a smith), and for canoes and boat construction (two of the steersmen were skillful canoebuilders, and a specialized boatbuilder was brought in from York Factory). Thus there were three teams or organizational substructures determining the work and relationships

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of the thirty men. These substructures overlapped: once at the post, the canoe crews turned to tasks of provisioning, post maintenance and trade: steersman Magnus Spence was the post’s leading hunter; Gilbert Laughton, the smith, was also an expert carpenter and boatbuilder; James Gaddy, a steersman listed as “trader and linguist,” worked with Fidler in the post’s trading room, although he never rose beyond the rank of “summer master.” Fidler himself had been listed as a labourer and had acted as a summer master. To draw a firm line between management and labour in the case of Fidler and Gaddy, or Gaddy and Spence, or even Fidler and Laughton is to distort the fluid interdependence of such relationships at each post and the way they functioned within the larger structure of the company’s overseas service. Burley may be closer to the mark when she briefly draws a parallel with the navy, considering instances of employees’ collective resistance to be very like ships’ mutinies. Such rebellions were called mutinies in company journals and letters; even individual refusal or recalcitrance could be called “mutinous.” Burley comments that “the word ‘mutiny’ is usually associated with the armed forces or seamen and involves the curtailment or overturning of constituted authority.”42 Strictly speaking, “mutiny” is a term particularly reserved for seafaring rebellion, and shipboard life is an apt analogy for fur-trade service. Organization of a ship’s crew – the various ranks of seamen, cross-sectioning the crew into watches, the specialist roles of master, carpenter, boatswain, and their mates – is paralleled by the organization of men at each fur-trade post.43 The Bayside factories were run like ships in port. Inland routefinding, called “navigation,” employed methods practised at sea; certain phrases in post journals and traders’ letters used sailing terms and expressions; customs such as a

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dram at certain points on a journey and dividing a dead man’s possessions for sale were sailors’ customs. Even a thousand miles inland, the sea was not far from men’s minds. There is good reason to link “mutinous” behaviour at prairie posts of the Hudson’s Bay Company with contemporary sea mutinies, especially the harbour-bound naval mutinies at Spithead and the Nore from February to June 1797. Word of these uprisings would have reached all of the bayside forts and the western hinterland by summer’s end. The Great Mutiny – really two separate acts of resistance by crews of the Royal Navy – took place during Britain’s war with post-revolutionary France. Calm, non-violent, organized into representative bodies while retaining the discipline of their ships’ companies, the mutineers in both ports insisted on negotiating with the Admiralty for higher wages, better food and just treatment from officers.44 Burley comments insightfully: “The seamen were not revolutionaries. They were demanding fair treatment, as were the HBC men when they engaged in what their officers regarded as mutiny.”45 Three aspects of the Great Mutiny are relevant to conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company during the 1790s: the men’s collective action, rhetoric used in negotiations, and resolution of the two rebellions. What shocked the Admiralty and the British government was the conception of representative equality that the crews immediately assumed in both ports. Two delegates were sent from each ship to a “parliament ship,” and the assembled delegates then elected a spokesman for all of the mutineers. As representatives, the delegates and the leader were the seamen’s servants; the numerous, ragged “people” of the ships had become the masters. Perhaps just as shocking to the Admiralty, and to the crews themselves, was the lack of

differentiation in this new order: equality meant disregard of the complex differentiations and substructures that defined a working ship’s company. Even as they sent their delegates to the parliament ship, the mutineers refused to realign their previous and enduring loyalties. Daily shipboard discipline was maintained; the crews continued to be identified with their ships and their profession as defenders of king and country. The mutiny was to settle specific if longstanding grievances; the parliament was simply a way to organize the mutiny. The language in which the first mutineers protested these grievances was for the most part fluent and tempered; it carefully set the tone of each stage of negotiations. In February the ships at Spithead formalized their demands by submitting a “humble petition” to the Lords of the Admiralty: “Your petitioners ... relying on the goodness of your Lordships again humbly implore your Lordships’ consideration ... and such a complyance of their request as the wisdom and goodness of your Lordships shall think meet.”46 In April a new petition respectfully hardened the edge, reminding the Admiralty and the government of the seamen’s usefulness in time of war: “your Lordships’ petitioners do unanimously agree in opinion, that their worth to the nation, and laborious industry in defence of their country, deserve some better encouragement than we meet with at present.”47 The Spithead rebels were rewarded with higher wages and “forgiveness” of their insubordination.48 Six days later, seamen refused to sail naval vessels at the Nore. The Nore seamen expressed their mutiny in revolutionary terms rather than adopt the prayer-book rhetoric of the successful Spithead petitioners. “Brothers!” proclaimed an anonymous Address to the Seamen of the Fleet, “No people can be more devoted to their Sovereign

& Laws. But an abuse of these laws by wicked and designing Men have imposed upon our gracious Majesty’s good disposition have been the cause of all our discontents.”49 The Nore delegates signed a declaration in June with a rallying cry: “We remain, Dear Countrymen, Yours affectionately, Your Loving Brothers, Red For Ever!”50 Instantly labour historians feel at home with the turn of events and the turn of language. Gone is the Spithead obsequiousness; the Nore sailors’ protests sound like the voice of a new proletariat, and their red flag of protest anticipates the Bolshevik uprising 120 years later. But hindsight and hunting for a “significant” historical pattern cannot explain the outcome of the Great Mutiny. At Spithead the seamen gained modest concessions; the Nore rebellion achieved nothing more than had been gained in early May. Faced with the government’s obdurate refusal to consider more reforms, the Nore mutiny imploded. One by one the ships pulled away from their blockade of London shipping and the crews gave themselves up to “justice.” Over 500 men were charged with mutiny; 35 were hanged. Comments by Lords of the Admiralty during the months of mutiny indicate their view of its resolution: although the pot had boiled, the lid was on again. These events had been “a very severe Lesson ... [that] a relaxation of discipline will sooner or later produce mischief.”51 The “animal” had proven wily and dangerous, but “complaints which were brought forward in a moment of ill-humour may now be suffered to drop.”52 At the height of the Nore rebellion, a vice-admiral was certain that once “returned to their duty ... [the mutineers] will no longer show themselves ungrateful for all that has been so liberally granted to them, but [each] will strive ... to show his loyalty to his King, and his love to his country, by returning to [a] state of obedience and discipline.”53 Odd as it may seem

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to us, events exactly followed the admiral’s prediction. Defiance had no part in the reaction of Richard Parker, “President of the Fleet” at the Nore, when he heard his death sentence. “I submit to your sentence with all due submission,” he replied to his judges. “I most sincerely hope that my death may atone to the country and that all the rest of the fleet may be pardoned and restored to their former situations.”54 In a last letter to a friend, Parker wrote, albeit with a touch of irony, “I cheerfully forgive the vanquishers the bloody use they intend to make of their victory.” Then he added, “perhaps it is policy in them to do it.”55 Was the Nore mutiny a failure? Was it nevertheless a step towards justice for the working class? Or was it resolved in a way that we, struggling with hindsight, find difficult if not impossible to understand? Both this massive naval resistance and contemporary HBC mutinies suggest that order, not class, is the key to late eighteenth-century British rebellions. We may be puzzled by Richard Parker’s “due submission.” For seamen and sealords alike, Parker’s death would not only end but cancel the mutiny; instead of conflict and divisiveness, the social order would be once again whole and operative, like the complex structure of a working ship’s company, “all ... restored to their former situations.” Like the sailors, the “vanquishers” who commanded them had their place in the social order; resistance to disruption of this order was no more nor less than an exercise of the Admiralty’s proper role: “perhaps it is policy in them to do it.” If we are more at ease with the bold rhetoric of the Nore than the prayerful petitioning at Spithead, it is because we prefer to see the conflict as an early instance of class struggle rather than try to understand a vanished sense of social order.

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By 1797, the year of the Great Mutiny, the Hudson’s Bay Company was facing mutinous resistance from its overseas employees. Competitive expansion had taken the company so far inland that its capital expenditure and manpower were stretched to the limit. David Geddes, the hiring agent at Stromness, found it difficult to recruit new men while the war with France continued and the Royal Navy proposed better terms. Men posted along the Saskatchewan River saw their own advantage in the company’s vulnerability; when their contracts expired, they bargained hard for higher wages, adequate provisions and extra payment for specific jobs. The lists of York Factory servants inland show that many requests to return home at the expiration of contracts were commuted into new agreements.56 A threat to leave the service was the simplest bargaining position; the more skilled the servant, the greater the company’s loss if no agreement could be reached. In 1797, the year of the naval mutinies, the York Factory post journal notes that two men “would not on any terms agree ... [and] went home in consequence”; at the same time another man “has requested to be recalled he may perhaps be inclined to stay another Contract he is very clever in managing A Boat in Rapid Currents.”57 The following year John Moore, a boatbuilder whose contract paid £25 per year, complained, “the duty required of me is too hard for any one man”; even so, he declared his willingness to do this duty if paid £36 per year (an unprecedented, unreasonable increase) and appealed to “your honors generosity.”58 In this instance the company was deaf to the man’s appeal and Moore sailed home. If several men could demand higher wages at the same time, their bargaining position was improved by such a “combination.” Early in the decade, the company dealt with combinations simply

and swiftly by refusing to negotiate. Wartime conditions soon forced the company to consider the men’s demands. In 1797 George Sutherland, acting inland chief, wrote to York Factory that he had “called all the men 22 in number whose times expire this Season, and offered them the Company’s Terms but not one would agree except [a young canoeman] ... they are determined to see the Ship.” Clearly a combination was in effect but there was no question of dismissal; Sutherland would wait for a new opportunity to engage the 21 men who were holding out. “I make no doubt,” he commented, “several will come Inland in the Fall at the same terms now offered them.”59 The last years of the eighteenth century were marked by unrest among masters as well as men. Tomison’s refusal to support exploration north of the Saskatchewan River, his capricious rule of the Saskatchewan River posts and his sharp tongue provoked resentment in the other masters, not only Ross, Fidler and David Thompson, who were ambitious to explore and map the Athabaska region, but also Sutherland, Bird and Joseph Howse, who wished for better administration of inland trade. Thompson protested by defecting to the North West Company; Ross and Sutherland wrote long accusatory letters which were forwarded to the London Committee; Bird and Howse contented themselves with dark comments in their letters to each other.60 Although their frustrations were focussed on Tomison, the old trader cannot have been the sole cause of tension, especially at this time. The ambiguity of administrative roles in the HBC service repeatedly led to administrative confusion exacerbated by immense distances and limited communication. During the period of inland expansion, before its “retrenchment” reforms in the early nineteenth century, the Hudson’s Bay Company struggled to operate without a careful delegation of duties that would later be

formulated as middle management procedures. On the Saskatchewan River frontier, administrative confusion translated into personal conflict and general uncertainty. The post masters, isolated from each other for all but a few days of the year, had only the seasonal routine of travel and trade to fulfill their need for a sense of order. Apart from whatever “Domestic Happiness” they enjoyed, they lived lonely, precarious lives, conscious of being “shut out from the society of the busy world.”61 When the civilized order that made them gentlemen and gave meaning to their frontier ambitions was threatened by subversive, disorderly forces of war and rebellion, the post masters’ response was to set up their own combination against a superior whose language was abrasive and whose power of decision blocked their own plans and desires. Wartime scarcity of provisions, trade goods and manpower did nothing to allay the Saskatchewan River masters’ tense uncertainty. Even Tomison was unsettled by these conditions and by transatlantic events: “May you all have good news from England,” he wrote to Colen at ship time in July 1798.62 In 1799 Howse informed Bird that there would be no new recruits for the coming year. “I am almost afraid to look forward to the consequences,” he commented, hinting that he would like to criticize “the Conduct of those higher in command.” Instead he appealed to a sense of solidarity among the masters: “I must ... express my most ardent Wish that our petty animosities & Silly Competitions may never supercede a due consideration of the purposes for which we come into this Country.”63 Bird, Fidler and Howse had occasion that year to act together in dealing with a combination against Fidler’s expedition to build a new post at Lac la Biche. “Great part of the people absolutely refuse to go and we have sent down the three most culpable [to York

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Factory] to make a proper example of them.”64 A jointly signed letter addressed to the Council at York Factory underlined the seriousness of the men’s defiance, the “mutinous disposition” of the ringleaders and the masters’ solidarity. “We are fully persuaded,” wrote Bird, Fidler and Howse, “that this is a most important Crisis, it were superfluous in us to say that it demands no inconsiderable share of attention.” The issue, in their view, was to “know whether for the future the Servant is to comply with the orders of his Master, or the Master to act under the immediate direction & Control of his Servants.”65 Like the Admiralty’s comments on the Nore mutiny, the language used to account for the situation seems (to us) to fit poorly with the forces in conflict. The men’s determination to negotiate their contracts and the sailors’ demands for better food and higher wages were not attempts to direct and control the working relationship, but simply attempts to safeguard their own interests. Burley makes this point clearly, but she does not explain the intense – we might think excessive – fear to which the rhetoric of repression gave voice and legitimacy. We may be surprised by the outcome of the Saskatchewan River combination “Crisis” in 1799. Condemned to go to York Factory for exemplary punishment, the three ringleaders refused this trip also; instead they sat at Cumberland House doing nothing. Howse was determined to get some work out of them and to keep them from deserting to the North West Company. They were good servants, after all; as usual, the finest men had led the combination. A week before he copied and sent the masters’ joint letter to the York Factory Council, Howse acted on another impulse: he sent the men upriver to Bird at Buckingham House. Bird explained this move to Fidler, now on his way to Lac la Biche. “Mr Howse very Prudently

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gave them a Canoe and Cargo and sent them after us,” he wrote. Then he announced his own part in the resolution: “they now go across from this place to the Red Deers Lake [Lac la Biche] with Canoes and Goods” – to winter with Fidler after all! 66 The rhetoric was all about exemplary punishment; the practical resolution was to set good men to work again at exactly the work they had refused. Rebellion was negotiated at Spithead, abandoned at the Nore, set aside in the case of Fidler’s men. The Nore seamen submitted to the Admiralty despite their strategic advantage, and the men who had combined against Fidler wintered with him, in spite of their grievances, rather than deserting to rival traders from Montreal. We cannot explain these outcomes in terms of class struggle or what we consider would have been most advantageous to these men. For all of us, hindsight has overtaken the way in which such conflicts were actually perceived and resolved. We disagree that the Great Mutiny was merely “a moment of ill-humour,” just as we fail to see the combination against Fidler’s trip to Lac la Biche as a “most important Crisis.” The details of the events remain, but their value for participants and contemporaries has been obscured by projecting onto them the social patterns and values of our own time. It is a hard fact that nothing survives the passage from past to present intact. Historical probing is always at odds with the mass of the archival record. By their coverage of long periods and large geographical areas, macrohistories such as Van Kirk’s, Brown’s and Burley’s seem to be comprehensive treatments; in fact, they are highly selective. Their criteria of selection have been determined by hindsight, history’s most valuable tool and its most powerful seduction. Historians need to ask questions appropriate to the documents they consult, resisting the urge to impose their own values uncritically

and to translate what evidence they find into their own terms. The line between past and present is a hazardous intellectual frontier. The job of historians is to guide us to the bounds of a foreign country, and to let us wonder at its strangeness and variety.

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In 1881, following decades of war between Americans and Plains tribes, a Hidatsa warrior named Lean Wolf joined a delegation to Washington. Experts at the Smithsonian welcomed him as a specimen of moribund Plains cultures and encouraged him to recall his experience of pre-reservation life. While reminiscing, Lean Wolf drew a map of his horse raid on Fort Buford. His own village is shown as a group of circles, Fort Buford as two squares, and a camp of tents near the fort as more circles.1 There is nothing arbitrary about these cartographic signs; they schematize the architectural forms of the village, fort and camp. At the same time, circles for Native structures and rectangles for the fort suggest a simplified division between Native and non-Native, them and us. The circle stands for Native beliefs, customs, government and way of life. Non-natives, whatever their cultural origin, remain outside the circle. Present-day Native activists have insisted on this division. Vine Deloria Jr explains that “the Plains Indians arranged their knowledge in a circular format”; they marked this pattern in the ceremony of the pipe offered to the four cardinal points, the sky and earth, and the centre of the circle – “the center of the ritual action ... the ‘here and now.’” The ceremonial goal was, and is, “to make whole again what has now become ... chaotic.”2 Taiaiake Alfred summarizes the cause of this disorder: “Indigenous people today are seeking to transcend the history of pain and loss that began with the coming of

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Lean Wolf. “Map showing the course of a horse raid that he made from the Hidatsa village at Fort Berthold to the Sioux village at Fort Buford.” 1881. Smithsonian Institution. National Anthropological Archives NAA M2372 Box 11.

Europeans into our world. In the past 500 years, our people have suffered murderous onslaughts of greed and disease. Even as history’s shadow lengthens to mark the passing of that brutal age, the Western compulsion to control remains strong. To preserve what is left of our cultures and lands is a constant fight.” Both Deloria and Alfred appeal to pre-contact traditions as ways “to reclaim our intellectual, political and geographic space.”3 Lurking at the edge of the circle are the anthropologists who study Native cultures. Their position is voluntarily, functionally marginal, yet they claim to understand physical, social and even spiritual aspects of the cultures they observe. Decades of anthropological debate focussed on the paradox of participant observation has not shifted the discipline’s fundamental position. Present-day anthropologists are still not far from Frank Cushing and James Walker, model observer-participants of the 1890s. Cushing learned to speak Zuni “not perfectly but fluently and easily” in ten months and was admitted to Zuni fraternal societies. He was also busy by night “with my more proper pursuits. I am making more progress in the study of the inner life of these wonderful savages.”4 Cushing supposed that by speaking Zuni and mimicking Zuni behaviour he had crossed into the Native circle of knowledge – that he was able to discern the pattern of their “inner life.” Yet by this very assertion he maintained his marginal position, just outside the circle looking in. For Cushing the Zunis remained “wonderful savages.” Cushing’s “proper pursuits” of observation, transcription and analysis kept him on the outside, and he insisted on these “pursuits” despite Zuni disapproval: “An old, bush-headed hag approached me, and scowling into my face made a grab at my book and pantomimically tore it to pieces. ... The sketching and

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note-taking were essential to my work. I was determined not to give them up.”5 Meanwhile, Walker was engaged in what he and his mentor Clark Wissler regarded as salvage ethnography among the Oglala Sioux (Lakota). Walker arrived at the Pine Ridge agency five years after the massacre at Wounded Knee. As a physician, he was particularly interested in the claims and success of Lakota medicine men. When they saw that Walker treated their traditional practices with respect, Lakota elders allowed him to take notes, later accepted him as a traditional medicine man, and eventually dictated to him their secret knowledge. “The holy men required me to comply with the rites and ceremonies which they prescribed,” recalled Walker. “I did so sincerely ... When I was pronounced a holy man and worthy, then the holy men instructed me relative to their lore.”6 By 1925, Walker was the only one of the elders still alive. “I want to finish this work” of collecting Lakota myths, Walker wrote to Wissler. “I believe none other has quite as thorough information ... relative to their ancient traditions as was given to me.”7 As participants, both Cushing and Walker were invited into the circle of the Native societies they studied. As observers, both had ethnographic agendas which kept them at the edge of that circle: they learned the “lore,” and then they wrote it down. A century later, anthropologists now acknowledge problems and some failures. They write up their fieldwork experiences in dialogic, fragmentary, inconclusive formats, but the bottom line continues to be the transformation of social customs and lived experiences into anthropological artifacts – “the book, the article, the lecture, the museum display, or sometimes nowadays the film.”8 In 1973 Clifford Geertz adopted a fashionable semiotic approach that

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linked American ethnography to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and to trends in other disciplines. The Interpretation of Cultures, in which this theoretical shift was announced, is still widely read and accepted as an anthropological paradigm. Geertz’s famous essay on “thick description” defines culture as a “web of significance”; the ethnographer’s job is to analyze social behaviour as a system of meaningful codes, a “structure of signification” that can be read like a “manuscript” or “document.” The work of analysis is thus interpretive, a “fiction.” Yet Geertz is confident that this “fiction” is not “scholarly artifice,” because it invokes “the power of the scientific imagination to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers.”9 An uneasy mix of science and “imagination” still rules the profession, while Geertz’s textual emphasis points to what has always been anthropological practice: “The ethnographer ‘inscribes’ social discourse; he writes it down,” Geertz declares. “In so doing, he turns [social discourse] from a passing event ... into an account, which exists in transcriptions and can be re-consulted.”10 Geertz’s synonym for “culture” is “context.”11 James Clifford repeated this emphasis in 1986, in a collection of essays called Writing Culture. “Writing has emerged as central to what anthropologists do both in the field and thereafter,” Clifford notes, and then admits what Geertz denies, that ethnographers’ interpretive “fictions” are indeed “scholarly artifice”: “Their focus on text making and rhetoric serves to highlight the constructed, artificial nature of cultural accounts.”12 Anthropology is thus a doubly semiotic process: ethnographers read the cultures they study as if they were texts, and then produce texts of their own. According to a series of interviews conducted in 1992, ethnographers define themselves in terms of writing because writing makes

them different from the people they study. One survey respondent stated that “Anthropologists are those who write things down at the end of the day”; another explained, “My primary identity is someone who writes things down and writes about them. Not just hanging out.” A third confessed, “I [write field notes] as a protective device. My way of turning off.”13 Writing diligently and professionally so as to document their fieldwork observations, ethnographers tend to accumulate a mass of material. Here is an inventory of one man’s work: Physically, the corpus of data I have acquired over the years fills 10 file boxes with 5 x 8 inch sheets of paper. Three boxes contain basic data of many types, classified according to the HRAF [Human Relations Area Files] indexing system ... A fourth file contains nearly 400 dreams from more than 40 informants, while a fifth holds TAT [Thematic Apperception Test] protocols, all taken from tapes, of 20 informants. A sixth box contains data, much of it taped, on health and medical practices and beliefs. Two more boxes are filled with nearly 200 years of vital statistics. ... Finally, two boxes are filled with over 3000 slips, each of which contains basic data on a single person.14

At some level, not too far down, all those people whom an ethnographer observes and questions must be aware that their lives are reduced to notes, that their dreams are documented, that they become “vital statistics” of various kinds. Some resist, like the “bush-headed hag”; some turn writing to their own account (so to speak), like the Nambikwara chief in Tristes tropiques. Lévi-Strauss concludes that the chief’s imitation of writing showed “genial” insight: the chief

understood that writing was, among other things, a tool of subjection. By “borrowing [the written word] as a symbol,” the chief “wanted to astonish his companions, to convince them ... that he was in alliance with the white man and shared his secrets.” Lévi-Strauss wrote off this attempt as a “mystification” – a “piece of humbug.”15 He was quick to dismiss the Nambikwara chief ’s parody of writing because the chief mimicked without mastering the process of recording speech on paper. The ethnographer could not see the chief as his counterpart, positioned just inside the Native circle, looking out. The degree of imitative participation is much less critical than the anthropologist’s mental reserve, particularly his or her sense of wider “context,” hence superior culture and greater power. “We are not, or at least I am not, seeking either to become natives ... or to mimic them. ... We are seeking ... to converse with them,” declares Geertz.16 But conversation with the other, as it appears in the anthropological artifacts of book and film, is conducted by “staging dialogues or narrating interpersonal confrontations,”17 a process in which the ethnographer is always director or narrator, that is, always controlling the encounter. Thus ethnographic observers, mimics or not, impose their own cultural aims of collecting and archiving onto foreign ways of life. “If anthropological interpretation is constructing a reading of what happens,” Geertz warns smoothly, then to divorce it from what happens ... is to divorce it from its applications and render it vacant. ... A good interpretation ... takes us into the heart of that of which it is an interpretation. When it does not do that, but leads us instead somewhere else – into an admiration of its own elegance, of its author’s cleverness, ... it is something else than what the task at hand ... calls for.18

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The Nambikwara chief could not write, though he claimed to. Geertz cannot recognize himself as the clever author. What inscribes/describes/circumscribes the difference between the Native subject and the anthropologist is the function of discourse on each side of the circle. For well over a century ethnographers, convinced that the cultures they studied were dying and soon to disappear, have been intent on preserving what they consider to be cultural elements surviving from times of greater security, prosperity and integrity. Rituals, customs and the arts were carefully annotated and photographed. In recording these cultural expressions, ethnographers could not avoid the fact that so many of the key cultural elements consisted of, or were linked to, enactments and performance. But they could – and did, and still do – overlook theoretical inconsistency and the practical effects of their preservation procedures. How, they assume, are these cultural signs to be studied except by some form of recording? The sketchbook and notepad, the tape recorder and camera capture and preserve ephemeral phenomena. In the last twenty years anthropologists have discussed the difficulties and risks of transcription.19 But I have not come across a single admission of defeat or decision to abandon this documentary enterprise. Quite the opposite: under Geertz’s influence, the anthropologist is defined more openly and plainly in terms of writing. Very little time and effort have been spent reflecting on why attempts to record oral traditions are necessary or desirable.20 For the moment, let us assume that documentary capture of cultural phenomena is a good thing and limit any criticisms to the quality of such capture. Transcriptions of conversation and spoken arts can be obtained by crude or sophisticated means, just as they can

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be analyzed perfunctorily or with great sensitivity. At the crude end of the scale is George Bird Grinnell’s transcription of a Blackfoot (Pikani) story published in 1892. Grinnell had “devoted much time and effort to the work of accumulating from their old men and best warriors the facts bearing on the history, customs, and oral literature of the tribe.”21 Grinnell praised the rhetorical skill of his informants. The storytellers’ “attitudes, gestures, and signs are so suggestive that they alone would enable one to understand the stories they relate,” he reported. “I have seen these storytellers so much in earnest, so entirely carried away by the tale they were relating, that they fairly trembled with excitement. They held their little audiences spellbound.”22 But nothing at all of these performance features is conveyed in Grinnell’s transcription of the story of Napi and the bird that could juggle its eyes. One day, as Old Man was walking about in the woods, he saw something very queer. A bird was sitting on the limb of a tree making a strange noise, and every time it made this noise, its eyes would go out of its head and fasten on the tree; then it would make another kind of a noise, and its eyes would come back to their places.23

Grinnell defines narrative as a sequence of events, and he recounts this sequence with the greatest economy. Paraphrase replaces performance. Grinnell has not stripped away the incidental features of a single presentation, to leave the reader with the essential, textual story. He has substituted a bare diegetic summary for a dramatic presentation. And he is not alone: what Grinnell does to the story of

Napi and the marvellous bird is what all ethnographers do when they transcribe oral exchanges and performances. While Grinnell was collecting Blackfoot stories, Cushing recorded a tale current among the Zuni that was similar to the one about Napi and the bird. In this story, the Coyote sees two ravens playing a game. Now, on top of this standing rock sat two old Ravens, racing their eyes. One of them would settle himself down on the rock and point with his beak straight off across the valley to some pinnacle in the cliffs of the opposite mesa. Then he would say

in telling it. The performer’s gestures are also prescribed; he or she may well have pointed to the rock and shown the eyes’ trajectory by a sweeping hand motion. “Swelling up his throat” and “ducking his head” could be shown by bodily movements. Less successful are Cushing’s lapses into pseudo-archaic language (“whereupon,” “yonder,” “go ye my eyes”) and the eruption of “inordinately” into an otherwise plain-speaking tale. But overall, his transcription at least hints at features that must have been part of the performance. Thirty years later, Ruth Benedict’s Zuni Mythology reduced Cushing’s transcription to a summary that resembles Grinnell’s treatment.

to his companion, without turning his head at all, “You see that rock yonder? Well, ahem! Standing rock yonder, round you,

Two Ravens were racing their eyes. At the word of command

go ye my eyes and come back.” Then he would lower his head,

their eyes encircled a distant point and returned. Coyote begged

stiffen his neck, squeeze his eyelids, and “Pop!” he would say

to do it too, and they pecked out his eyes and deserted him. He

as his eyes flew out of their sockets, and sailed away toward the

stumbled about and finally found yellow cranberries which he

rock like two streaks of lightning, reaching which they would

mistook for his lost eyes. Therefore his eyes are yellow.25

go round it, and come back toward the Raven; and as they were coming back, he would swell up his throat and say “Whu-u-uu-u-u-u,” – whereupon his eyes would slide with a k’othlo! into their sockets again. Then he would turn toward his companion, and swelling up his throat still more, and ducking his head just as if he were trying to vomit his own neck, he would laugh inordinately; and the other would laugh with him, bristling up all the feathers on his body.24

Cushing’s transcription is far more suggestive of performance than Grinnell’s. Cushing has specified the sounds that the birds are supposed to have made, and that the Zuni storyteller probably made

Benedict’s linguistic incompetence may have had something to do with her willingness to paraphrase so minimally and dully. Although she claimed to have “first-hand acquaintance with Zuni beliefs and behaviour,”26 Benedict could not speak Zuni; she collected stories from an informant who dictated to her in English, “while, with flying pencil and aching arm, she wrote down verbatim hundreds of pages of translated tales.”27 Moreover, when she relied on Cushing’s collection, Benedict worked not only in translation but with previous transcription. More recently, ethnographers and linguists such as Dell Hymes have worked with similar material.28 Hymes is attentive to what he imagines the performance to have been like, but

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in most cases only the sequence of events receives attention, while performance features are relegated to considerations of “context,” if they are considered at all. Stories told by very different performers to very different audiences are catalogued as variant forms according to the pattern of events and the fictional situations they recount.29 Napi’s encounter with the wonderful bird is thus seen as a variant of the “same” story of Coyote and the ravens. Differences of performance and reception are ignored because they cannot be transcribed. Cushing’s text is more evocative than Grinnell’s or Benedict’s, and the transcriptions of Hymes and Dennis Tedlock are more evocative still, but they can only hint, like good reviews, at performances we have missed. Tedlock has gone much farther than previous or even contemporary ethnographers in recognizing the importance of performance. Gesture and “context” are not accounted for, but he pays close attention to the rhythms and intonation of oral delivery. The performer’s speech is transcribed in lines that represent phrasing and pauses for breath; lines spoken loudly are printed in capital letters, while lines almost whispered are printed in a smaller font. Tedlock’s well-known transcription of the Zuni tale of Coyote and Junco begins with these lines:

AT STANDING ARROWS OLD LADY JUNCO HAD HER HOME and COYOTE Coyote was there at Sitting Rock with his children He was with his children

and Old Lady Junco was winnowing. Pigweed and tumbleweed, she was winnowing these. With her basket

she winnowed these by tossing them in the air. She was tossing them in the air.

while Coyote Coyote was going around hunting going around hunting for his children there when he came to where Junco was winnowing.30

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By transcribing in this way, Tedlock not only emphasizes performance values but also suggests that the purpose of the performance is voicing and dramatization. Delight in verbal sound and rhythm is not limited, as in Cushing’s tale, to special words inserted into a prose narrative. Like crowds at the festivals of ancient Greece, Amerindian audiences who heard a traditional tale were not waiting to discover the outcome of the fictional sequence; this they knew very well already. Tedlock takes performance into account and concedes that any recording technique betrays the conditions, purpose and interaction of live performance. But the fact remains that Tedlock transcribes for print publication. In documentary form, stripped of spectacle, sound and “context,” the creative, adaptive nature of most oral communication is frozen and effectively de-natured. Performance exploits a range of possible diegetic connections and narrative points of emphasis; the resulting always-old, always-new story is told with a rhetorical intensification of everyday language. Ethnographers have collected traditional stories because they are impressed with such cultural density. But their intervention ensures that the richness of performance is compressed to the paper thinness of texts. Transcribed, translated, catalogued, commented and commodified, this oral tradition now reaches a new “audience” of readers outside the circle. At this point, our working assumption that documentary capture is a good thing needs to be questioned. It should be clear by now that performance is not a superficial, passing aspect of an enduring textual entity, an aspect which can be ignored (Grinnell and Benedict) or, given certain hints and concessions, legitimately represented on the page (Cushing and Tedlock). The text is not the bottom line on which the performance is built. No matter how much a

text is suggestive of performance or oral tradition, it is not a performance and not what constitutes oral tradition. Textualizing performances reifies and removes them from a process of personal commitment and change. Genuine oral tradition is not retrospective; it is revisionist. Rather than searching for sources and retextualizing archival details, it mirrors the belief and practice of the present-day community. Determined to privilege the oldest (for him the most authentic) accounts of Lakota religion, James Walker reacted to the profoundly oral habits and attitudes of his informers with some impatience. Walker was keen to preserve “original” texts, from which he hoped to construct a comprehensive account of the Sun Dance and other Lakota ceremonies. Walker saw the work of his translator, Clarence Three Stars, as destructive: I have had Clarence Three-stars translate each of the manuscripts by [Long Knife, called George Sword] ... but his work is not at all satisfactory to me for he has given so liberal a translation that it has destroyed the ethnological value of the work. He first rewrote the work adding what he thought Sword had left out, and then he gave in his translation what he thought Sword should have said. Thus the original spirit and meaning was not only lost, but perverted.31

Walker was uncomfortable with the fact that all Lakota narratives and rituals were commentaries and improvisations. He noted that “there was no fixed form for the [Sun Dance] ceremony ... it was performed in a similar way each time, and ... each performance embraced some features, but ... some [performances] were much more elaborate than others.” There was no authoritative “original” for the

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Sun Dance against which “variants” might be measured. Walker compared descriptions of the ceremony given to him by several elders: “In giving to one Indian the description of another which differs from his,” Walker reported to Wissler, “the latter agrees that the description not his is right as well as his own, and usually says that either way is right.”32 The P/not-P logic of western civilization cannot stomach such complacency. Urgency to save what could be saved of spoken arts and other oral exchanges, to defend them from their own transience, has been the usual motive for ethnographic transcription. The word is always dying on the breath by which it lives and is communicated. It is always subject to change because it exists in memory and performance, both of which depend on living performers and a living audience.33 James Walker convinced the Lakota elders (because he was convinced himself ) of the magical power of writing to perpetuate cultural values and knowledge beyond the grave.

are in no way involved with Lakota culture except as an anthropological construct. The conviction that Native cultures were in serious decline (as they were, in many respects) motivated the efforts of many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers and limited their interest to vestiges of the pre-treaty period. In the early 1930s, David Mandelbaum spent several months living on Cree reserves in Saskatchewan. He could have adopted the participant-observer role that Cushing played with gusto and that Walker also assumed in his own way. Instead Mandelbaum chose to overlook the immediate situation of reserve life during the Depression and to question elders about a previous era. The ethnographic focus [of his study, Mandelbaum wrote later] is on the buffalo-hunting way of life and not on the experiences of the Plains Cree on reservations as I witnessed them ... My field notes include observations on that situation; I was

The old men who had lived the plains buffalo culture, who

in it, temporarily part of it, and could scarcely avoid noticing its

had fought against the US Army, who had learned and practised

nature. But, following the example and suggestions of my men-

the exclusive rites of Lakota religion, would soon die; Walker,

tors, I concentrated on the older culture.35

consecrated as the last of these holy men, would die also; but the notes and essays that Walker collected would be – and now are – references for Lakota descendants.

34

All this is true. It is also true that the secret practices of Lakota holy men are now revealed and readily available in cheap paperback format, albeit in translation, to anyone in the world who cares to read about them. Those readers include thousands of people like me who

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Mandelbaum devoted most of his fieldwork to interviews with three elderly informants who had been hunters, warriors and medicine men before their people were confined to reserves. His book is a record of informants’ reminiscences, communicated via interpreters, rather than a report of his own observations. Not only is Mandelbaum’s account at several removes from direct, lived experience of the events and conditions it records, it is also coloured with Mandelbaum’s own values, notably a non-Native nostalgia and a curiosity tinged with

skepticism. Just as Walker had done, Mandelbaum discussed some of the “magical acts” that established a medicine man’s spiritual credibility and power to cure. But while Walker slowly came to accept such practices and participated “sincerely” in shaman ceremonies, Mandelbaum saw them as tricks. He remarked that … the shamans themselves took a thoroughly practical attitude toward these feats. One of his informants told of a medicine man’s Houdini-like ability to release himself from binding ropes. [The shaman] asked someone to put up a conjuring booth. ... Then they carried him out on a blanket to a little hill some distance off. Two young fellows wrapped him in a buffalo hide and tied him all around. Then they laid him with his head toward the booth. ... It was getting dark. As soon as the young men tied him they ran to the booth as fast as they could. But before they got there, he was inside. Then you could hear the different spirit powers talking.36

Mandelbaum appended no comment to this incident; he didn’t have to. His readers were protected from belief by the passage of time (the incident dated from the pre-treaty period), by the informant’s previous admission that there were tricks of the trade, and by narrative layers (Mandelbaum himself did not witness the incident; it is told as reported speech). The incident becomes a curious bit of “lore” in Mandelbaum’s book. Mandelbaum produced an ethnographic study of the scientific sort that anthropologists now claim to have rejected and superseded. “The ethnographic writer less automatically appears as a privileged recorder, salvager and interpreter of cultural data,” Clifford declared

in 1992, repeating his earlier insistence on a “shift away from the observing eye ... [Now] the writer’s ‘voice’ pervades and situates the analysis.”37The participant-role has apparently displaced the observer-function, hence the increased use of a polyphonic, dialogic style in writing up ethnographic reports. The question is whether ethnography has changed fundamentally from the classic, “privileged” operation, or whether ethnographers have simply found trendier ways to present the same process in their books, articles and films. A 1980 edition of Walker’s papers, including essays written for him by Lakota elders, transforms the Pine Ridge physician’s research into a dialogic rather than a synthetic exercise, which his 1917 published study of the Sun Dance certainly was. Mandelbaum willed his field notes to the Saskatchewan Archives in 1987; it is just possible that an edition of these notes would give a different impression of the ethnographer’s relationship to his Cree subjects. Clifford admits that the longstanding anthropological aim to “salvage” cultural beliefs and practices is “implied by the very practice of textualization,” whether presented as scientific conclusions or problematic dialogue. Foreign cultures are attractive precisely because they are foreign; their differences offset negative aspects of the ethnographer’s own culture. Thus “the very practice of textualization” is problematic. Clifford cannot see beyond “the confusion of fieldwork, its inescapable reflexivity, and the struggle to register data.”38The heart of the problem is that the ethnographer’s “struggle” to record the lives of others is not the same as or equal to the subjects’ struggle to live their own. In the last analysis, the crucial difference between written and oral traditions, between text and performance is not a negative quality (the absence of intonation and gesture in written records,

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a lack of consistency in performance) but a relationship. Texts are artifacts disseminated to an anonymous and unpredictable public; performance is always personal, direct, immediate, and its audience is limited by space and time.39 Because performance is personal – because I am speaking to you, I as speaker must match the actions of my life to my words, and you as audience must take my words to heart. The mutual presence of speaker and audience, and the link that this presence forges between words and action, make ephemeral performance into a powerful force. Taiaiake Alfred has linked personal commitment to cultural survival when discussing tradition with a west coast activist. The activist remarked, “If we don’t get a sense of who we really are from the old teachings, then all this tradition stuff is just going to become watered down in a couple of generations. ... The traditional culture is only going to last, I think, as if it were in a glass box.” In Alfred’s rejoinder is the key to a tradition rescued from the museum case or an ethnographer’s files of data and dreams. The glass-box future, “that’s what I call folklore,” replied Alfred. “It’s all just folklore unless you act on it. ... Don’t preserve tradition, live it!”40 Outside the circle are the ethnographic fiction writers; inside it are those for whom culture, action and self are indivisible. I remember waiting on a winter’s day in the lobby of the Old Y in Calgary. Also sitting there were a middle-aged Siksika man and his wife. The lobby was warm and quiet, the chairs were comfortable, and the couple had a bottle of something discreetly stowed in the hollow of a pedestal ashtray. We got to talking. I had just read Grinnell’s Blackfoot Lodge Tales and said I had enjoyed reading about Napi, whose spine is the Rocky Mountains and whose nose is a hill overlooking the city. Grinnell’s summaries make the world’s creation into a solemn process (Grinnell calls it “The Blackfoot

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Genesis”), but the man at the Old Y just laughed. “Oh, that Napi,” he said, “he was a horny old bugger!” I was astounded. It was as if the shutter of a camera had opened for its fraction of a second, and for that instant I could see the world framed in a completely different way. The great Creator as a shameless, clever, bumbling, enterprising procreator. God as a trickster and the world as a huge, wonderful joke. Bottomless layers of humour and irony. And then the shutter snapped shut. Of course Native activists, anthropologists and storytellers are moving with the times. In the spirit of adapting to the modern world, several Native spokesmen, including Taiaiake Alfred, have chosen to write about Native tradition and history. Deloria, so quick to point out differences and oppositions between Native and nonNative cultures (and to find the latter wanting), perceives a need to preserve traditional stories as written texts. In keeping with oral tradition, Deloria respectfully refrains from quoting the stories that elders have told him because “the stories belong to them, and so I do not want to be the first person to put the story in print.” At the same time, he tries to persuade “elders to give us some of their knowledge before they pass on.”41 It is worth noting that Deloria’s elders are descendants of the “last” Lakota elders who communicated their knowledge to Walker. If these latter-day elders still have unpublished oral traditions and history to pass on, oral communication is not the moribund art that anthropology has claimed. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Deloria favours print just to be sure. Deloria urges Native distance from non-Native institutions, condemning “Congress, anthropologists and Churches” for repression and misunderstanding of Native cultures. However clearly he claims to draw the circle of us and them, Deloria’s background and

profession belie this clear distinction. Bea Medicine, a Lakota anthropologist, acknowledges her double vision, from inside and outside the circle, far more frankly. “The ambiguities inherent in these two roles ... speak to the very heart of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ in anthropology,” writes Medicine. Medicine’s essay collection, Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native” reveals and reflects how individuals inside the circle are responding to the irresistible culture on the outside. She grew up “cognizant of living in a society that was different from the one in which I would eventually interact.”42 For Medicine ethnography is not an exercise in nostalgia, as it was for earlier anthropologists such as Mandelbaum; its purpose is to strengthen an awareness of tradition in order to aid the Lakota and other Native societies to weather inevitable “acculturation or culture change.”43 Medicine’s work as a lecturer and advisor has resulted in links between reserves and neighbouring cities, Native representation in public institutions and the law, and opportunities for specialist training to do the jobs that outsiders did within Native communities. The circle line has become permeable, even fluid, as long-imposed restrictions and attitudes are challenged and new values are explored. “Our sheer survival has hinged upon a flexible ability to segment, synthesize, and act in changing situations,” Medicine maintains.44 The shift from oral tradition to writing is one of these survival strategies. It is a universal truth that real change is often denied or presented as more of the same. Betty Bastien, a Kainai anthropologist whose book, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, is a guide to rediscovery of her cultural tradition, is certainly part of the new Native context that Medicine welcomes. But Bastien does not openly acknowledge a new bridge culture between Native tradition and the non-Native

outside world. She presents her work as a way to communicate and strengthen the oral tradition of the elders. Convinced that “knowledge arises in a context of alliances and reciprocal relationships,” Bastien organized a research seminar composed of tribal leaders, members of ceremonial societies and college students with the aim of “reconstruct[ing] the process of Siksikaitsitapi ways of knowing.”45 Bastien emphasizes the personal and oral nature of this tradition: “the knowledge of the people is not passed on through the written word but orally through those who have experienced the way of life of Siksikaitsitapi.” Students must earn the privilege of hearing the stories. A relationship between elder and learner is always implied; the elder can judge if the learner’s commitment and preparation are sufficient for certain kinds of knowledge. “There are many things I do not tell people,” one elder told Bastien; “they do not have the right to be told these things.”46 The Lakota elders’ gradual admission of Walker to their ways of knowing is parallel to the process that Bastien describes. While the Lakota medicine men were opening themselves to the new possibilities of writing, what impressed Walker was the strangeness, the different operating “rules,” of oral tradition. To his teachers Walker offered an equally strange mode of cultural conservation. Almost a century later Bastien brought graphic and taped media into the Kainai seminar meetings. At every stage she combined oral and written forms of communication. She approached the elders “in the traditional manner of asking for their guidance and teachings”; then she “gave them a letter in person formally inviting them to the convocation.” At the first meeting, traditional food was served

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while I took care of the recording, coffee and notes. ... I had prepared a document ... from which I read. I then asked for permission to record. They agreed to the recording ... They also said that if I wanted to use their names in the document, this would be appropriate. ... As a result, they supported my dissertation research as well as this book.47

Members of the Kainai seminar adopted this protocol with the same broad acceptance as they enjoyed coffee with their pemmican. Bastien sees no difficulty with recorded communication despite her emphasis on personal trust and oral transmission of knowledge. Nontraditional modes of communication are considered valid if they are seen to be in the service of Native tradition. Bastien explains, echoing Medicine, that “the traditional forms of teaching have changed ... due to the constant influence of the surrounding and dominating contemporary society.”48 As an anthropologist, Julie Cruikshank was surprised at three Yukon elders’ ready acceptance of “technology.” Transcription, which involved recording and reading back a written text, she first saw as “an issue,” then discovered that the three women whose narratives are presented in Life Lived Like a Story “ha[d] an agenda every bit as clear as that of the ethnographer”: all of them wanted to produce a written form of their stories.49 Translation also seemed to be a problem until Cruikshank realized that the elders were intent on communicating to a readership who could no longer understand their aboriginal languages. She came to see the merit of their “lively, colorful ... highly metaphorical ... nuance[d]” English.50 Cruikshank repeatedly states that the process of taping, transcribing, editing and publishing these stories, both personal and traditional, was a long and

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close collaboration.51 At the editorial stage, however, Cruikshank’s own ideas of text and book were imposed with little reflection. The three elders told traditional stories at key points in their personal narratives in order to exemplify values or to explain a turn of events. Although she interleaves the traditional tales and personal stories, Cruikshank treats the two kinds of narratives quite differently: the life-stories are presented as prose accounts; only the traditional stories are printed in phrase-lines approximating Tedlock’s format. “As a written style [the phrase-lines] may be better suited to poetry and to traditional narrative than to discussions of experience.”52 Here Cruikshank unthinkingly reflects the prose/poetry division in modern European and American literature, a strictly textual convention which is foreign to oral tradition. As she discusses them in her introduction, Cruikshank’s notions of narrative are sketchy, limited to Lévi-Straussian assertions about myth and mind. “Oral testimonies are very different from archival documents,” she comments. “They are cultural documents in which much is implicit, in which metaphor and symbol play a role in how ideas are presented.”53 Far from distinguishing oral narratives from written texts, this statement considers both forms as “documents” and appeals to linguistic strategies (metaphor and symbol) which are both oral and textual. Life Lived Like a Story works by textualizing tradition; it marks the three elders’ adaptation to a world in which “paper’s going to talk” to their descendants. But blurring the real difference between talk and text does not produce clear editorial practice. Repeatedly assured that the book is a collaborative effort, the reader is presented with texts which still claim to be indigenous “oral testimonies” although they have been processed according to literary, non-indigenous concepts and standards.54

Write It on Your Heart, Wendy Wickwire’s transcription of stories told to her by Harry Robinson, shares some of the characteristics of Cruikshank’s edition but is more successful in suggesting the oral form of the narratives. Robinson made over 100 recordings for Wickwire; from this collection she edited 23 texts. In Harry’s view, he is one of the last of the old storytellers. ... As more and more of his listeners, native included, understood only English, Harry began telling his old stories in English to keep them alive. ... [A book] was one way to leave his people with this testament to their past.55

At the end of the book is a series of contact prints showing Robinson in performance. His hands are never still: he indicates size, number and direction as well as gesturing for emphasis. The photographs, like the text, hint at what we are missing; the book is a shell, not the essence, of Harry’s storytelling. Inevitably. This said, Wickwire develops an editorial interface for Robinson’s stories that ranks with Tedlock’s in its intuitive sensitivity to phrasing and what I would call narrative generation. The stories of the collection are given a characteristic textual form that indicates in some measure the rhythms and structures of Robinson’s storytelling. The line length usually determined by a syntactical unit, while single words, anaphora and repetition indicate narrative emphasis.

See? He tell ’em a lie. He’s got to tell ’em lie, He’s got to tell ’em something. He’s got to fool ’em, you know, to kill ’em.56

Wickwire refuses to summarize or abridge; instead, like Tedlock, she retains the traditional circuitous structure that works by stating an event or idea simply, amplifying it with imaginative details, sometimes commenting on it, and finally restating it before moving on to the next story element. Junco winnows pigweed in the story that Tedlock transcribes; in a story from Robinson’s collection, Coyote oversleeps. He has propped his eyes open with a twig, But he sleep, but his eyes were still open. So, he overslept. He sleep there a long time. By God, he wake up and his eyes were sore and dry and he get that out. And his eyes, he move them till they get kind of wet. They’re dry, you know, because they’ve been open so long. And they get sore from the stick, from the toothpick. More like a toothpick.

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Small.

And the Indians over there, they know where that is.

And he has to work on his eyes for quite a while

Then when they survey the railroad, that CPR,

till they get all right.

and they tell the white man,

Then he look around

“Looks like your surveying, your line is right on our history.

and he see that the sun was way up.

We could show you.

It’s kind of late.

We want you to miss it.

57

We want that to be that way all the time.”

The details of the twig and the dry eyes are elaborations on the statement that Coyote oversleeps. In performance, the storyteller is free to improvise on the statement. When Wickwire recorded this performance, Robinson described and commented on the twig; in another performance he might well have improvised in another direction, or not elaborated at all. The improvisation arcs away from the statement and returns to it before moving to another incident. But the improvisation is not a gratuitous addition to the “essential” story event that Coyote oversleeps. Instead the statement is a provocation for the performer’s art; the “essence” of the performance lies in the cleverness, the aptness, the imaginative creation of the improvisation. Consciously or intuitively, Wickwire has understood the interaction of tradition and creation in performance. In his story of young Coyote’s trip to the moon, Robinson comments on the landing pad, a rock near Lytton. The process of narrative generation allows the storyteller to move not only from event to event but also, by simple association, from any one aspect of the story situation to any other. Objects, concepts, names and descriptive details as well as events can act as narrative hooks. Coyote’s landing place prompts Robinson to mention the railway survey that ran close to Coyote’s rock.

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So they went over there. They know, the Indians, They know. They seen ’em. But when they get there with the white man, they could never see ’em ...58

A hint of the spontaneous inventive process that is the trademark of performance has survived in the book. One of the most engaging characteristics of this process is Robinson’s integration of ancient stories and modern details. Not long after God has thought up the world and all its creatures, Coyote hears someone talking. Coyote hear that, but he never see ’em ... But he hear that speak just like nowadays you hear the radio. That’s supposed to be on the air.59

Always the charm is in the phrase: Robinson has heard the expression “on the air” used by radio announcers. The big step from traditional Native storyteller to published Native writer has been taken in the last four decades. N. Scott Momaday and Thomas King are among those who have led the way.

What distinguishes Momaday and King from non-Native writers is their incorporation of traditional story elements into their narratives. Momaday says he loved to hear his father tell traditional stories. He told me many of these stories over and over because I loved them. But it was only after I became an adult that I understood how fragile they are, because they exist only by word of mouth, always just one generation away from extinction. That’s when I began to write down the tales my father and others had told me.60

The familiar reason for writing down tradition, given both by Deloria and by researchers engaged in salvage ethnography, is presented once again. The assumption, whether it is true or not, is always that stories which have endured for centuries, perhaps millennia, are doomed to die with the current generation. But Momaday is not engaged in salvage work and he does not leave the tales untouched. He weaves his father’s traditions, his family’s genealogy and his own memories into a history of the Kiowas’ beginnings and migration to the southern plains. The Kiowas are material for the writer, and Momaday is a writer first and last. “The way I deal with [a situation], finally, is to write about it – to imagine it and write a story about it,” he explains.61 For his part, King owes a huge debt to Harry Robinson which he freely acknowledges. All My Relations, King’s collection of Native short stories, is dedicated to the Okanagan storyteller. King says of Robinson that he “is able to make the written word become the spoken word by insisting, through his use of rhythms, patterns, syntax, and sounds, that his story be read out loud, and, in so doing, the reader becomes the storyteller.”62 Short

of polling the readership, King’s assertion cannot be proven or disproven, and he freely confesses that he doesn’t know who his readers are.63 How many readers break their almost lifelong habit of silent, visual scanning to speak the words of a certain text aloud? In any case, even speaking aloud, the reader of Robinson’s stories would not be speaking from memory, with all of the flexible alternatives that memory permits, and the interaction would be with a text, not with a living audience. At best Wickwire and King are able to create a semblance of oral tradition; any claim that a text can do more is unfounded. In tune with new Native directions, King believes that tradition needs renovation. The Native writers who have earned a place outside the circle as well as within it seem to have the best of both worlds. In one sense they do; to ensure their own survival they have mastered a foreign culture. In an unacknowledged but very real sense, they have had to trade in the old tradition for a new model. In more than a few stories Coyote dies but is brought to life again. As Robinson tells it, God says to Coyote, You come alive. Then when you come alive, you alive again and you go. ... Then you look for another job to do. ... I give you the power so you can do a lot of things.64

The circuitous pattern of narrative generation, the fluid associations that suggest details, objects, ideas and events as discursive moments, the ready invention and improvisation that comes with audience interaction, the teller’s physical presence and personal commitment to

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the words – all of these essential aspects of traditional performance have been exchanged for the wider readership and putative permanence of texts. Robinson’s story of the Flood claims that “Coyote is the only one that stands on the world/ when the world was flood.”65 It’s a fine point whether one survives by building a boat or finding high ground. King remembers it: in Green Grass, Running Water Coyote appears again when the dam breaks and “the water rose out of the lake like a mountain.” The flood wipes out the old snarl of problems and makes way for new possibilities – for new problems too. “ ‘I didn’t do it,’ says Coyote,”66 but we all know he is lying, fooling, reshaping the world so it can begin again. As a coda to this essay, I would like to consider Peter Fidler’s account of five months spent with “Muddy River Indians” (Pikani) during the winter of 1792–93. Like Cushing, Fidler had a chameleon’s talent for adapting to his hosts’ culture. He learned languages quickly and easily; he was affable, flexible, with a fund of good humour. He was interested in Native cultures, sharply observant and able to elicit explanations for the “cultural signs” he noted. In other words, an ideal ethnographer. As a fur-trade employee, Fidler’s presence among the Pikani was not unusual: since the mid-eighteenth century, the Hudson’s Bay Company had sent young men to winter with Native bands as encouragement to trade. But Fidler’s careful documenting of Blackfoot customs and rituals, as well as relationships within the band and with other tribes, is exceptional as the detailed record of a powerful Plains tribe in prosperous pre-treaty times.67 His identity as a European with scientific and commercial aims aligned him with other traders and allowed him to maintain a private, critical distance from the Natives with whom he shared the external aspects of their lives. Within this prescribed ethnographic

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framework, Fidler directly observed and participated in a way of life that Walker, Mandelbaum and others had to imagine while listening to the recollections of old, defeated men. Fidler and John Ward set off from Buckingham House, a new Hudson’s Bay Company post on the North Saskatchewan River, in early November 1792. Fidler was equipped with trade goods, astronomical instruments and two blank memorandum books for use as a journal. In his first entry, Fidler listed the goods and instruments; he also noted that neither he nor his companion “know a single word what the Indians say that we are going with – time only can enable us to Learn.”68 But Fidler was a quick study and his superiors knew that; the winter before, he had lived with a Chipewyan (Dene) band west of Great Slave Lake, and had come away reasonably fluent in a difficult language.69 Linguistic skill repeatedly earned Fidler’s praise. The “most intelligent Indian” he had ever met was proficient in five languages, and he noted that although one of the Apatohsipikani chiefs was born Cree, “he speaks this Language as well as his own mother’s tongue.” 70 When a decision to kill or spare some “Snake Indian” (Shoshoni) visitors was discussed, Fidler took his place in the circle and “spoke strongly in favour of their safe return.” 71 The Cree man may have acted as his interpreter on this occasion, only five weeks after Fidler had begun to live with the band. But Fidler was soon recording the Blackfoot names of landmarks and noting conversations that only his increasing acquaintance with the language would have made possible. That Fidler ascribed such importance to linguistic competence is readily appreciated by anyone who has had to sink or swim in a foreign culture. Fidler realized that language was the key to any understanding beyond superficial observation. In his journal, he

first stated what he himself observed; then he reported explanations given by the people he was travelling with, at times adding his own opinion of the answers. For example, Fidler noticed that one of the Shoshoni visitors had “hair which dragged on the ground when he Walked – but our Indians say that it is chiefly Buffalo hair woven with his own.”72 Thus the Shoshoni’s exotic, extravagant appearance was given a prosaic explanation. A second example is one of many instances: Fidler noted that “the South end of the Buffalo Lake bearing WSW¼W ... about 7 miles ... off – this is the course & distance assigned by the Indians – I could not see the Lake myself.” 73 Fidler regularly supplemented his own geographical record with Native reports and maps. A third example is Fidler’s description of a game marked on the ground near the Oldman River: On my enquiring concerning the origin of this spot the Indians gave me surprising and redeculous accounts – they said that a White man – (what they universally call Europeans) came from the South many ages ago – & built this for the Indians to play at that is different nations whom he wished to meet here ... they also say that this same Person made the Buffalo.74

To his explanation of this game Fidler felt constrained to add a comment about its validity. Spiritual matters usually prompted a skeptical reaction from European traders, who regarded all belief beyond a deistic Christianity as primitive superstition. Fidler’s sketchy understanding of Blackfoot culture led to impatient contempt: he assumed that Napi, called White or Dawn-haired Man, was a reference to Europeans. Ironically, Fidler’s Pikani hosts valued precisely the skills and knowledge that made him skeptical of their stories and

ceremonies. They were proud to have Europeans accompany them and wanted to show them off to the long-haired Shoshoni man. “As we was moving along riding,” wrote Fidler, a Muddy River Indian met us & stopped our horses ... he wished us to strip all our old clothing off & put on our very best ... we came up to all the Men formed into a large ring & the Snake Indian in the middle. all smoking together in friendship – when we approached they all got up & invited us to sit down amongst them.75

Fidler knew well the role he should play. When invited to smoke with the Shoshoni, he lit the pipe with a magnifying glass and alarmed the visitor with this display of magic. The Pikani were not slow to take advantage: “they told the Poor fellow such unaccountable stories relating to our conjurations that was very redeculous.” Fidler was persuaded to take out his sextant and exhibit its power also. The Shoshoni man’s fear was gratifying. “He jumped up & wished to be farther from me – as he thought I was something more than common”76 – something, we can guess, like the trickster of his own fund of stories. For all his easygoing adaptability, curiosity and careful reporting, Fidler remained at the edge of the cultural circle, quick to label attitudes “redeculous” and ready to indulge his sense of a good joke. At a second pipe ceremony, this time with visiting “Cottona haws” (Ktunaxa) at the Oldman River, Fidler mimicked, tricked and inwardly snickered as he invented a ritual on the spot:

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the Chief man filled a Pipe & smoked ... he then made several Signs with his Pipe Stem – when he took 4 good hearty wiffs & gave it to me ... & made me understand that I should light it & make the same ceremonies with the Pipe as we did in our own country ... I made several curious motions with it that they could not comprehend or myself either however as I kept my gravity, tho’ with great difficulty during the ceremony ... these people appeared to be highly pleased.77

A month after this meeting, Fidler was offered another chance to exercise his skepticism. As a gesture of peace, several young men had gone with the Shoshonis to their country and had not yet returned, though they had been expected for some time. The Pikani chief decided to consult a conjuror – not a man of their own tribe who founded his predictions on the motion of a dried eagle blown by the wind, a trick that everyone, Fidler and his hosts alike, saw through easily – but a “Blood Indian” (Kainai) man well known for his art. Fidler described in detail how the man was bound up: This man was laid upon his back in the Tent & all his toes upon both feet was tyed together with strong Sinnew – his

The conjuror was placed in a small square tent erected inside the Chief ’s tipi. A rattle was placed beside him; the tent was closed and tied down. The men of the band sat in a circle, watching for movement. “Surprizing to relate,” noted Fidler, within twenty minutes the conjuror was able to sound the rattle; in fifteen minutes more he stood erect in the tent and shook it “as if he was determined to shake it all to pieces. ... Then he announced that the Spirit had condecended to favour him with what answers he required to demand – he then told in a natural tone so as to be understood, that the Young Men would arrive in 2 days more ... that they would have been here sooner but that the Legs of some of them was sore – & infit for walking.”79 Like a good ethnographer, Fidler observed, recorded, and commented on this performance as he had done previously, carefully noting down ceremonial details, enquiring into their cultural significance, maintaining an appropriate distance and reserve. But on this occasion he could not contain his astonishment. The conjuror’s trick, if trick it was, was inexplicable by all the rules of science that Fidler could invoke.80 Chastened, the young trader lingered in the Chief ’s tipi to watch a third pipe ceremony, performed

Arms was then put before him & all his fingers tyed together in the same manner – he was then Sewed up in a Buffalo robe – &

in a manner I had never before seen – a small Sod of earth

after this above 40 fathoms of strong Line was folded about him

was dug up within the Tent – the Pipe was filled but not lighted

in every part to secure him – not a part was to be seen but his

– of their own Tobacco – when 5 men all at the Same time with

head – & it appeared impossible that he could never extricate

very grave & pious countenances took hold of the Pipe stem

himself from all these bandages.

& directed it first to the hole recently made in the earth ... the

78

Stem was then directed to the Zenith – the Nadir – the 4 Cardinal Points beging at the quarter of the rising Sun & ending at

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the North – all the while the whole 5 Old Veterans humming a kind of hymn – in a pensive & melancholy tone – they then pointed the Stem towards the fire – & Rising when fire was put to the Pipe & they smoked out of it & passed it round to every person.81

Fidler was not invited to share in this passing of the pipe, which he inferred was “a very solemn religious ceremony.” The old men suggested two or three times that he leave but he stubbornly refused, “being determined to see the whole process.” When asked later about the meaning of the ceremony, “they would not give me the least satisfaction.” Fidler therefore speculated on what it meant, drawing on his general sense of what was important to these people: This certainly must have been a religious business – perhaps imploring the Maker of all to continue their health – to grant them a long Life – to never let them want any Buffalo & to protect & shild them against all Enemies.82

was a trickster (he was in league with “demons”) as surely as Fidler himself had played the trickster’s role for the Shoshoni visitor. Fidler lamely wrote off the conjuror’s success as “more by chance than by any knowledge that he can pretend to.”83 Fidler’s winter with the Pikani band allowed him to observe and participate in a way of life he could not begin to understand. Anthropology claims to reduce otherness to a comprehensible pattern, a “web of significance.” It might be more accurate and honest to admit that while cultural patterns can be recorded and catalogued, for the outsider their “significance,” what they point to, remains elusive. The line dividing inside and outside, us and them, is always there. When I drive home from work at the University of Calgary, I travel from Napi’s nose to a town wedged in Napi’s backbone; thus the trickster god touches me in my daily life, and who is to say he does not? To sense this power is to share the awe that the Shoshoni man felt, and that Fidler felt, when they reached the edge of their understanding. The trick is to respect the line. We sense more truths than we live by, certainly more than we can understand and explain.84

Fidler was making this up. His physical presence had been tolerated at the ceremony; in every other respect he had been left outside the circle. Still mystified by the conjuror’s skill, Fidler suspended judgment of the prediction for the two days allotted before its fulfillment. During this time the band travelled to the specified meeting place. Fidler was obliged to report that “the Chiefs son & all the Young men returned & arrived safe here – some of them had swelled legs with walking.” Again he was amazed by what he called the conjuror’s “consultation with demons.” For Fidler, the shaman

OUTSIDE THE CIRCLE

129

NOTES

All manuscripts and maps are cited in full; all other sources are cited in abbreviated form. There is no running reference in the notes. Full citations for books, articles, recordings and websites may be found in the list of these sources following the notes. Unless specified in the notes (“my emphasis”), italicized words and phrases in quotations are copied from the source texts. Bibliographical citations of eighteenth-century titles are spelled and punctuated as they found in the documents. Frequently cited archival collections are indicated by the following initials: HBCA

Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Provincial Archives of Manitoba Winnipeg HBCA A correspondence of the HBC London Committee HBCA B/a/ HBC post journals HBCA B/b/ HBC correspondence in North America HBCA E HBC personal journals HBCA G HBC maps

LAC

Library and Archives Canada (formerly National Archives of Canada) Ottawa LAC MG LAC manuscript collection LAC NMC LAC national map collection

TNA

The National Archives (formerly Public Record Office) London (Kew) TNA Admiralty Papers TNA Colonial Office Records TNA Foreign Office Records

A N I N T RODUC T ION 1 2

3

4

5

HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “From Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains,” 20 November 1792. The statement of method that follows is in response to readers who criticized the structure of Dark Storm Moving West in manuscript. The book’s range of topics and shifting disciplinary focus engage and intrigue some readers, while others insist that a monograph should be the statement and proof of a single “overarching thesis.” Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II; Braudel, Coarelli and Aymard, La Méditerranée: l’espace et l’histoire; Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire; Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien: arts de faire; Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire; Foucault, Les Mots et les choses; Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir; Foucault, L’Ordre du discours; Dening, Islands and Beaches; Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language. There are exceptions to every rule: my doctoral dissertation was organized according to the same questioning pattern as Dark Storm Moving West. It passed without any revision. Robinson, Write it on Your Heart, 243.

131

MYTH AS SCIENCE: T H E N O RT H W E S T PA S S AG E 1

2

3

4

132

Meares, “Observations on the Probable Existence of a North West Passage,” Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North-West Coast of America, lxv–lxvi. Dixon, Remarks on the Voyages of John Meares, Esq., in a Letter to that Gentleman, Meares, An Answer to Mr George Dixon, and Dixon, “Further Remarks on the Voyages of John Meares, Esq.,” in The Dixon-Meares Controversy, ed. Howay, 25. The quotation is from Dixon’s first “Remarks.” Academic historians have followed Dixon’s critical lead, beginning with Howay’s edition. See Williams, The British Search for the Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century; Gough, The Northwest Coast; Clayton, Islands of Truth; and Williams, Voyages of Delusion. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole, 3: 294, 335: “I was very desirous of keeping the Coast in order to clear up this point beyond dispute; but it would have been highly imprudent for me to have ingaged with the land in such exceeding tempestuous weather, or to have lost the advantage of a fair wind.” In his biography of Cook, Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole, 4: 592 approves of Cook’s decision: “Cook was ... a realist: ... he would not sacrifice a favourable wind for so romantically improbable a notion.” Cf. Cook’s first biographer Kippis, A Narrative of the Voyages Round the World Performed by Captain James Cook, 350: “Every one who is acquainted with the character of our commander will be sensible, that if he had lived to return again to the north in 1779, he would have endeavoured to explore the parts which had been left unexamined.” NAC NMC 21056. Philippe Buache. Carte des Nouvelles Découvertes au Nord de la Mer du Sud ... Sur les Mémoires de Mr Del’isle Professeur Royal et de l’Académie des Sciences, par Philippe Buache de la même Académie, et Présentée à l’Académie, dans son Assemblée pub-

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5

lique du 8. Avril 1750. 1752. As the title indicates, Jean-Nicolas Delisle, a Fellow of the Académie des Sciences, presented his conception of the northwest coast to the Académie des Sciences on 8 April 1750. He illustrated his paper by displaying this map drawn by Buache, published two years later. Cf. Delisle’s own, very similar map published three months later, reproduced in Williams, Voyages of Delusion, 253. Guillaume Delisle, an older brother of Jean-Nicolas, was the first to draw a “Mer de l’Ouest” on his Carte de la nouvelle France et des Pays voisins (1696); he called this sea his “discovery.” Four years later Jean-Baptiste Nolin, who copied this feature on a map entitled Le Globe terrestre représenté en deux plans hémisphères ... (1700), was condemned in 1706 for plagiarism – see Lagarde, “Le Passage du Nord-Ouest et la Mer de l’Ouest dans la cartographie française du dix-huitième siècle.” Guillaume Delisle’s exclusive right to represent the Mer de l’Ouest affords insight into the way the maps of theoretical geographers should be read: they were frankly hypothetical and were arrived at by considering current theories and by judging the available evidence, which was sparse and unreliable in 1696. Guillaume Delisle followed the current theory of geographical symmetry and suggested a western sea to balance Hudson Bay. See also Hayes, Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest, 24–29, and Hayes, Historical Atlas of the North Pacific Ocean, 58–62, 75. Maps of “the late Russian discoveries” appeared in English translations of Müller, Voyages from Asia to America, and Stählin, An Account of the New Northern Archipelago. Both maps as published in the translations are reproduced in Hayes, Historical Atlas of the North Pacific Ocean, 77–80. Dr Mathew Maty FRS published his translation of a letter from Stählin in the Philosophical Transactions 64 (1774). Apparently Maty drew or supervised the drawing of a map based on Stählin’s – hence King’s reference to Maty in The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole, 3: 342: “We have Dr Matys map of the Noern Archipelago constantly in our hands ... We are kept in a constant suspense ...” Not long

6

before Cook’s third expedition set sail, Jean Nicolas Buache de la Neuville, nephew of Philippe Buache, presented a memoir to the Académie des Sciences comparing the Pacific Northwest coastline laid down by earlier closet geographers with the maps of Müller and Stählin. The published memoir was illustrated by a Carte de Comparaison Des Plans Systématiques de MM. Engel et de Vaugondy, sur le Nord-Est de l’Asie et le Nord-Ouest de l’Amérique, avec le Plan des Cartes Modernes, par J. N. Buache, 1776. Since Maty usually translated from French for the Transactions, he may also have considered Buache de la Neuville’s analysis, though I have found no evidence for this speculation. Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole, 3: 368. Cook gives the same two reasons for his decision to cease exploring this “River” as he had for the coast south of N60º: bad weather, since “the season was advancing apace,” and faint hope of a passage: “the Continent extended farther to the west than from the Modern Charts [Müller and Stählin] we had reason to expect and made a passage into Baffin or Hudson bays far less probable.” But Cook’s officers recorded ambivalence rather than Cook’s repeated disbelief. Gore’s journal expressed repeated hopes, never dashed entirely, that this inlet was the Pacific entrance to a northwest passage. King, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole 3: bk. 2, 1420, noted that Gore and a mate who had been sent to look at the channel differed in their opinion, and that the Captain (who agreed with the mate) “judged it the Wisest way to lose no more time, being certain that if we were amongst Islands, we shoud soon come to more Passages that woud be less equivocal than any we had seen in this Sound.” Cook’s own mind was closed, quite unscientifically, to any possibility of a passage but he indulged his officers – Cook, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole 3: 361: “I was fully persuaided that we should find no passage by this inlet and my persevering in it was more to satisfy other people than to confirm my own opinion.”

7 8

9

10 11

12

13

Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 2: 373. John Vancouver, “Advertisement from the Editor,” in Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1: xxxii. Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World; Documents Relating to Anson’s Voyage Round the World, ed. Williams; An Account of the Voyages undertaken ... for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, ed. Hawkesworth. De Brosses, “Introduction,” Histoire des navigations aux terres australes, 1: i (my translation). Cook, “General Introduction,” A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World, 1: xxxvi. Cf. Richard Parker’s self-defence at his trial for leading the Nore mutiny, PRO Ad 1/5486, Account of Richard Parker’s Trial, 1797: “As I have been at sea from my youth ... I hope nothing can be expected of me but plain facts.” Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate la Boudeuse et la flûte l’Etoile, 126. The Royal Society’s preference for plain speech is noted by Thomas Sprat, A History of the Royal Society, 113: “[The Fellows] have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.” Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole, 4: 462–63, describes Cook’s work of revision for the press: “we have Cook, as the autumn of 1775 moved on, furiously busy over one of his own copies of the journal [of the second voyage] – operating on this creature of his mind with quite merciless determination: deleting, adding, interlining, incorporating footnotes in the text, filling up his margins, drafting sentences or paragraphs on separate slips keyed into his pages.” As for the

NOTES

133

14

15

134

Bishop’s editing, Beaglehole quotes a letter from James Cook to John Douglas, 4 January 1776: “the copying my Journal ... I leave it intirely to you to make such alterations as you see necessary and even to strike out any part, or passage which you may think superfluous.” MacLaren, “Exploration/Travel Literature and the Author,” 45, quotes from Douglas’s “Autobiography” (1796): “The Public never knew, how much they owe to me in this work [Cook’s Third Voyage]. ... I took more Liberties than I had done with his Acct of the second Voyage; and while I faithfully represented the facts, I was less scrupulous in cloathing them with better Stile than fell to the usual Share of the Capt.” [Douglas], “Introduction” to Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean ... undertaken ... for making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere, 1: lxxix–lxxxii: “The charts, particularly the general one, were to be prepared by Mr. Roberts ...; the very numerous and elegant drawings of Mr. Webber were to be reduced by him to the proper size; artists were next to be found out who would undertake to engrave them; ... paper fit for printing them upon was to be procured from abroad; and after all these various and unavoidable difficulties were surmounted, much time was necessarily required for executing a numerous impression of the long list of plates.” Fry, Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808) and the Expansion of British Trade, 190; Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole 4: 691–92: “According to Banks, ... Banks and Webber were to supervise the engraving of the drawings, Dalrymple (‘at Lord Sandwich’s desire’) that of the charts and the coastal views – except the general chart by Henry Roberts, ‘which was not then constructed.’ He [Banks] adds, ‘the Charts & views which were under M r Dalrymples direction were elegantly engraved at Reasonable prices, but the general chart which was under the sole direction of the admiralty cost a large Sum of money.’”

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16 17

18

19

Fry, Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808) and the Expansion of British Trade, 191. Dalrymple was elected to the Royal Society in 1771, Cook in 1776. Each published several papers in the Royal Society’s journal: see Dalrymple, “On the Formation of Islands. Communicated by C. Morton, M. D. F. R. S.”; Dalrymple, “Journal of a Voyage to the East Indies in the Ship Grenville”; Cook, “An Observation of an Eclipse of the Sun at the Island of New-foundland, August 5, 1766, by Mr. James Cook, with the Longitude of the Place of Observation deduced from It. Communicated by J. Bevis, M. D. F. R. S.”; Cook, “Variation of the Compass, as observed on board the Endeavour Bark, in a Voyage round the World. Communicated by Lieut. James Cook, Commander of the said Bark”; Cook, “Transitus Veneris & Mercurii in eorum Exitu è Disco Solis, 4to Mensis Junii & 10mo Novembris, 1769, observatus”; Cook and Green, “Observations made, by appointment of the Royal Society, at King George’s Island in the South Sea”; Cook, “Method taken for preserving the Health of the Crew of His Majesty’s Ship the Resolution during her late Voyage round the World”; Cook, “Of the Tides in the South Seas.” As Astronomer Royal and vice-president of the Royal Society, Halley wrote several papers for the Philosophical Transactions. Halley, “A Proposal of a Method for finding the Longitude at Sea within a Degree, or twenty Leagues,” is one of the most interesting, given the relative exactitude of late eighteenth-century surveying. For example, all but one of Philip Turnor’s observations for longitude in 1790–91 were within one minute of early twentieth-century government surveys completed by the same methods, according to Tyrrell, The Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, ed. Tyrrell, 285–491. Precise and finely calibrated instruments were necessary for accurate surveys. The development of such instruments can be traced in the Philosophical Transactions, from Hadley’s invention of the quadrant to Peter Dollond’s refinement of the sextant.

20 21

22 23

Hadley served a term as vice-president of the Royal Society and read his own papers to the Fellows; John and Peter Dollond were obliged (as Dalrymple and Cook were also, before their election) to inform the Fellows by letter. See Hadley, “The Description of a new Instrument for taking Angles”; Hadley, “A Spirit Level to be fixed to a Quadrant for taking a Meridional Altitude at Sea, when the Horizon is not visible”; John Dollond, “A Letter from Mr. John Dollond to Mr. James Short, F. R. S. concerning an Improvement of refracting Telescopes”; Peter Dollond, “A Letter from Mr. Peter Dollond, to Nevil Maskelyne, F. R. S. and Astronomer Royal; describing some Additions and Alterations made to Hadley’s Quadrant, to render it more serviceable at Sea.” For a clear and succinct overview of eighteenth-century navigation, see Parry, Trade and Dominion, 220–34. See the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions for articles on rainfall in Rutland, 64 (1774), 67 (1777) and 70 (1780); the cuckoo, 78 (1788); the mechanics of birdsong, 63 (1774); deformed foetuses, 57 (1767); curious fishes, (1773); the Lisbon earthquake, 49 (1755–56); musical talent in children, 69 (1779); preserving acorns, 58 (1768); the ink of ancient manuscripts, 77 (1787); Dobbs on bees, 46 (1750), and much much more. Perhaps the most bizarre article published in the eighteenth-century Transactions was a report of the autopsy on Dr. Maty performed, the dying man having consented, by two other Fellows of the Royal Society – this in the era of resurrectionists: details in 67 (1777). “Advertisement,” Philosophical Transactions 63 (1773): iii. See Middleton, “A new and exact Table collected from several Observations taken from the Year 1721 to 1729, in nine Voyages to Hudson’s-Bay in North America, by Captain C. Middleton; shewing the Variation of the Compass according to the Latitudes and Longitudes under-mentioned, accounting the Longitude from the Meridian of London. Communicated by Mr. Benj. Robins, F. R. S.”; Wales, “Astronomical Observations made by Order

24

25

26 27

of the Royal Society, at Prince of Wales’s Fort, on the North-west Coast of Hudson’s Bay”; Wales, “Journal of a Voyage, made by Order of the Royal Society, to Churchill River, on the North-west Coast of Hudson’s-Bay; of Thirteen Months Residence in that Country; and of the Voyage back to England; in the Years 1768 and 1769”; Wales, “Observations on the Solar Eclipse Which Happened June 24, 1778. By Mr. William Wales F. R. S. and Master of the Royal Mathematical School in Christ’s Hospital.” Clarke, “An Account of the very tall Men, seen near the Streights of Magellan, in the Year 1767, by the Equipage of the Dolphin Man of War, under the Command of the Honorable Commodore Byron; in a Letter from Mr. Charles Clarke, Officer on board the said Ship, to M. Maty, M.D. Sec. R. S.” Carteret, “A Letter from Philip Carteret, Esquire, Captain of the Swallow Sloop, to Mathew Maty, M.D. Sec. R.S. on the Inhabitants of the Coast of Patagonia.” Bougainville, who encountered the Patagonians on 8 December 1767, also took care to report on their stature – Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la frégate la Boudeuse et la flûte l’Etoile, 86: “Ces hommes sont d’une belle taille; parmi ceux que nous avons vus, aucun n’était au-dessous de cinq pieds cinq à six pouces, ni au-dessus de cinq pieds cinq à dix pouces; les gens de l’Etoile en avaient vu dans le précédent voyage plusieurs de six pieds. Ce qui m’a paru être gigantesque en eux, c’est leur énorme carrure, la grosseur de leur tête et l’épaisseur de leurs membres. Ils sont robustes et bien nourris ... c’est l’homme qui, livré à la nature et à un aliment plein de sucs, a pris tout l’accroissement dont il est susceptible.” Beaglehole, The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. Beaglehole, 4: 123, 161. [Douglas], “Introduction” to Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean ... undertaken ... for making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere, 1: xlvii–li; Dalrymple, Memoir of a Plan for Promoting the Fur-Trade, 1, 6, 26.

NOTES

135

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38

39

136

Williams, The British Search for a Northwest Passage in the Eighteenth Century, 212–40, and Gough, Distant Dominion, 51–71, give summary accounts of these fur-trade voyages. Dalrymple, Plan for Promoting the Fur-Trade, 20. Dixon, “Introduction” to Beresford, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, xxiii. Dixon, “Introduction” to Beresford, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, xiii–xv. Dixon turns from “so disagreeable a subject” (the Spanish explorer Francisco Maurelle’s rejection of De Fonte’s passage) to write “a few words respecting the Discoveries of our immortal countryman, the late Captain Cook.” But Cook was indeed mortal; what is more, in Dixon’s view he repeated Maurelle’s error. Dalrymple, Plan for Promoting the Fur-Trade, 7–14, 21–24. Dalrymple, Plan for Promoting the Fur-Trade, 4, 8. Dalrymple, Plan for Promoting the Fur-Trade, iv, 6–7. NAC NMC 24315, Peter Pond, [Map presented to LieutenantGovernor the Honourable Henry Hamilton], 1785; cf. Peter Pond, A Map shewing the communication of the Lakes and the Rivers between Lake Superior and Slave Lake in North America, published in Gentleman’s Magazine, 1790. Both maps are reproduced and discussed in Hayes, First Crossing, 51–69. Dalrymple, Map of the Lands Around the North Pole, 1789. Dalrymple, Plan for Promoting the Fur-Trade, 5–6. [Douglas], “Introduction” to Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean ... undertaken ... for making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere, 1: li. HBCA B.9/a/3, Philip Turnor, “Journal of a Journey from Cumberland House towards the Athapiscow Country & back to York Factory,” 1790–92; HBCA E.3/1, Peter Fidler, “A Journal from Isle a la Crosse by way of Swan Lake a new Track to the Athapescow Lake,” 1791, and “A Journal of a Journey with the Chipewyans or Northern Indians to the Slave Lake ...” 1791–92, published in The Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, ed.

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40 41

42

Tyrrell, 197–491, 495–555. The HBC Committee’s aims and expectations for the Athabaska region and north to Great Slave Lake, which they hoped would be realized by Turnor’s expedition, may be judged from a postscript to HBCA A.5/2, HBC Committee to Samuel Hearne, 16 May 1781: “The Ships which went under Capt Cooke to Explore a N.W. and N.E. Passage are Returned and brought with them some Sea Otter Skins ... We send you an Accurate Description of them and desire you will enquire of the Indians that comes to your Factory [at Churchill] if they have seen any of them any where they were found in a River in the N.W. Coast of America in Latitude 64 which being the same as Chesterfield Inlet, they may now hope to be found there.” Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North-West Coast of America, xliv, lxvi. Meares, Voyages Made in the Years 1788 and 1789 from China to the North-West Coast of America, includes three maps: first, A Chart of the Northern Pacific Ocean, Containing the N. Coast of Asia & N.W. Coast of America, Explored 1778 & 1779, by Captain Cook, and further Explored in 1788 & 1789, by John Meares, facing “An Introductory Voyage of the Nootka,” i; second, A Chart of the Interior Part of North America Demonstrating the very great probability of an Inland Navigation from Hudsons Bay to the West Coast, facing “Observations on the Probable Existence of a North West Passage,” xli; and third, Chart of the N.W. Coast of America and N.E. Coast of Asia, explored in the Years 1778 & 1779, by Captn Cook; and further explored, in 1788 & 1789, facing “Voyages to the North West Coast of America,” 1. NAC NMC 25984, Aaron Arrowsmith, A Chart of the World on Mercator’s Projection Exhibiting all the New Discoveries to the Present Time, 1790, reproduced in Hayes, First Crossing, 147; a later state issued in 1794, without Great Slave Lake and the tentative line to Cook Inlet, is reproduced in Hayes, Historical Atlas of the North Pacific Ocean, 110. It is worth noting that Dixon’s Further Remarks

43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

gave advance endorsement of the first state of this map – The Dixon-Meares Controversy, ed. Howay, 131n.: “I am exceedingly glad to find that Mr. Arrowsmith has it in his power to lay before the public a more correct delineation of the interior parts of North America to the westward of Hudson’s Bay, than has been yet given, and that it will shortly appear on his chart of the world.” Dixon, Further Remarks, in The Dixon-Meares Controversy, ed. Howay, 51. For an example of his observational and navigational skills, see Dalrymple, “Journal of a Voyage to the East Indies in the Ship Grenville,” in Philosophical Transactions 68 (1778). Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1: vi. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1: 214. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 3: 125. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1: v–vi. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1: v–vi, xxix. Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1: xx. Vancouver’s instructions include the following directives: “You are therefore hereby required and directed to pay a particular attention to the examination of the supposed straits of Juan de Fuca, said to be situated between 48˚ and 49˚ north latitude ... If you should fail of discovering any such inlet, as is above mentioned, to the southward of Cook’s river, there is the greatest probability that it will be found that the said river rises in some of the lakes already known to the Canadian traders, and to the servants of the Hudson’s bay Company ... but the discovery of any similar communication more to the southward (should any such exist) would be much more

51

advantageous for the purposes of commerce, and should, therefore, be preferably attended to.” Cf. Cook’s instructions, [Douglas], “Introduction” to Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean ... undertaken ... for making Discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere, 1: xxxiii: “you are very carefully to search for, and to explore, such rivers or inlets as may appear to be of a considerable extent, and pointing towards Hudson’s or Baffin’s Bays ... But, nevertheless, if you shall find it more eligible to pursue any other measures than those above pointed out, in order to make a discovery of the before-mentioned passage (if any such there be), you are at liberty, and we leave it to your discretion, to pursue such measures accordingly.” Fry, Alexander Dalrymple (1737–1808) and the Expansion of British Trade, 248–50.

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D AV I D T H O M P S O N , H B C S U RV E Y O R 1

2

3 4

5

6 7 8 9 10

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HBCA B.14/a/1, Bedford House post journal (Malcolm Ross), 21 May 1797; Archives of Ontario F443, David Thompson, journals, 21 May 1797. Thompson, David Thompson’s Narrative of his Explorations in Western America, ed. Tyrrell 168–71; Thompson, David Thompson’s Narrative, ed. Glover, 130–34. NAC MG19 A8, vol. 42, David Thompson. Prospectus [Terrebonne, 1816–19]. Tyrrell, “Introduction,” David Thompson’s Narrative of his Explorations in Western America, ed. Tyrrell, xliii; Rich, The History of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670–1870, 2: 149–55; Glover, “Introduction,” David Thompson’s Narrative, ed. Glover, xxxv–xliv; Jenish, Epic Wanderer, 81. The HBC posts built along the Saskatchewan River between 1778 and 1800 are as follows: upper Hudson House, 1778; lower Hudson House, 1779; South Branch House and Manchester House, 1786; Buckingham House, 1792; Nipawi House, 1794; Edmonton House and Carlton House, 1795; Acton House, 1799; Chesterfield House, 1800. HBCA A.11/116, Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, August 1786. HBCA A.11/116, William Tomison to the HBC Committee, 24 August 1786. HBCA A.11/117, William Tomison and Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, 19 July 1788. HBCA A.11/117, William Tomison to the HBC Committee, 20 July 1788. HBCA A.5/2-4, correspondence of the HBC Committee to Hudson Bay factories and inland posts, 1787–1800. See Johnson, “Introduction,” Saskatchewan Journals and Correspondence, ed. Johnson, xix–xxiv, for identification of the HBC Committee members in the 1790s and the business they discussed. Johnson

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11

researched Committee shareholders during the late eighteenth century and came up with the names of these individuals, their dates of tenure and the amount of stock each held. In the company’s correspondence their enquires, wishes and decisions were collectively represented by the secretary; letters from North America addressed them, again collectively, as “Honoured Sirs.” Cf. Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 2: “The HBC never abandoned its hierarchical organization ... Its workers tend, therefore, to appear to be little more than instruments of policy or problems of strategy as the company overcame the challenges that faced it.” On the contrary: although, in the experience of those engaged in the conduct of company business, members of the Committee were “invisible,” for the Committee the common men who manned the factories, posts and brigades, like the chief factors, post masters and writers, appeared in sharp if brief detail. The “Lists of Servants” recorded each man’s age, parish, type of work, length of service, term of contract, level of performance (“character”) and bargaining position for the next contract. Fairly complete lists were kept from 1787 to 1800, and a later list has gained a certain notoriety as George Simpson’s “Character Book.” Certainly the lists described the men as “instruments of [company] policy”; at the same time, the lists were the means by which employees were defined and recognized as individuals – cf. Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 151, 155: “La tactique disciplinaire se situe sur l’axe qui lie le singulier et le multiple. Elle permet à la fois la caractérisation de l’individu comme individu, et la mise en ordre d’une multiplicité donnée. ... Ce caractère du pouvoir disciplinaire ... a moins une fonction de prélèvement que de synthèse, moins d’extorsion du produit que de lien coercitif avec l’appareil de production.” Apart from post journals and “general letters” sent to England every year, information reaching the London Committee about operations in North America was not systematically produced or relayed until the administrative reforms of 1810. HBCA B.239/

12 13 14 15

b/54, David Thompson to the York Factory Council, 28 July 1793; HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to David Thompson, 29 May 1794: Thompson’s bold decision to enter into direct correspondence with the London Committee while still an apprentice and a writer exemplifies the haphazard way in which the Committee learned of events and conditions in North America. Cf. HBCA A.5/2, HBC Committee to Joseph Colen, May 1788, marked “Secret,” and HBCA A.5/2, HBC Committee to Robert Longmoor, May 1788: “We recommend it to you to write your sentiments to Us in the fullest manner from time to time as they occur upon every subject worthy our particular attention that We may be fully informed of the true state of our affairs.” The Committee appears to be asking certain individuals to snitch on their fellow “servants,” perhaps even on their superiors. This request was addressed to Colen, who was the “Resident” at York Factory, second in command to Tomison, the “Inland Chief,” and to Longmoor, who was the second, not the factor, at Churchill. HBCA A.11/117, Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, 27 August 1788. HBCA B.239/b/57, Joseph Colen to Malcolm Ross and David Thompson, 15 June 1796. HBCA B.239/a/96, York Factory post journal ( Joseph Colen), 12–20 June 1794. HBCA B.239/b/49, Joseph Colen to William Walker, 24 July 1789.The lines of conflict are drawn in the following letters: HBCA A.5/2, HBC Committee to William Tomison, 23 May 1787, and HBCA A.11/117, William Tomison and Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, 19 July 1788. Cf. analysis of this “rivalry” in Rich, The History of the Hudson’s Bay Company, 2: 126– 27, 142–55, and Johnson, “Introduction,” Saskatchewan Journals, ed. Johnson, xiii–lxvi. Rich sees the conflict between Tomison and Colen in regional terms (Tomison favoured the Saskatchewan trade while Colen focussed on the region around York

16 17

18

Factory and rather ineffectually promoted northern exploration); Johnson sees their conflict in technical terms (Tomison is said to have favoured canoes for inland transportation while Colen experimented with boats). Neither Rich nor Johnson considers why this damaging “rivalry” was allowed to persist for over a decade. HBCA B.239/b/55, Joseph Colen to Malcolm Ross, 20 July 1794. HBCA B.239/a/95, York Factory post journal ( Joseph Colen), 4 June 1794. Wishart’s contract is given in HBCA A.11/117, York Factory General Letter, 6 September 1787: “Edward Wishart is engaged to convey the Packet Inland, at £20 Pr Ann & a Gratuity of 5£ on Account of his being a good Canoe Builder & very steady.” HBCA B.239/b/55, Joseph Colen to Edward Wishart, 22 March 1794: “it behoves you to exert yourself to forward this undertaking as it will promote your interest with the Honble Company.” Although the man could not read, Colen’s advice was in writing, for the record. Wishart left this letter at York Factory when he returned up the Nelson River. Nicks, “Orkneymen in the HBC, 1780–1821,” Old Trails and New Directions, ed. Judd and Ray, 122, compiled statistics for Orphir and concluded, “Most of the Orkneymen who became employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company seem to have been drawn from the middle and lower ranks of island society ... sons of small tenant farmers, craftsmen and cottagers.” Rev. Mr Liddell commented on education in Orphir to the Statistical Account of Scotland, ed. Sinclair, 19: 16: “There is a parochial school, where from 30 to 40 boys and girls are taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. ... the inhabitants, poor as they are, make a shift to employ private teachers occasionally at their own expence.” In his report to the Statistical Account of Scotland, ed. Sinclair, 16: 452–53, Rev. William Clouston distinguished between town and parish education, but did not report how many children attended these schools. Stromness had “one grammar school,

NOTES

139

19

20

21

140

where Latin is taught. Four schools, where the schoolmasters teach reading, writing, and arithmetic,” and three more schools where reading, sewing and knitting were taught. Clouston also mentioned a school in Sandwick parish. Fees ranged from sixpence to two shillings a quarter. Cottagers would find these fees onerous – a ploughman earned £3.10. 0 yearly plus board – but tradesmen earned from £20 to £30 a year and could afford them. When Tomison returned to South Ronaldsay in 1797, he found that educational standards had slipped. His response was to endow a school, paying for the master’s salary and the children’s books from his own pocket. See Johnson, “Introduction,” Saskatchewan Journals and Correspondence, ed. Johnson, xliv. HBCA B.205/a/1, South Branch House post journal (David Thompson for Mitchell Oman), 30 May 1787; and HBCA B.205/a/4, South Branch House post journal (Peter Fidler for Mitchell Oman), 5 June 1790. Oman signed the journal with an X when he and Fidler reached Cumberland House; he then continued to York Factory with Thompson, who had kept his journal in 1786. Richard I. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 47, quotes the criticism of Thomas Hutchins, then chief factor at Albany: Sutherland’s journal, Hutchins complained, was “defective very much in Orthography and Grammar and in many places more whimsical than usefull, yet contains several Observations worthy of consideration.” See, for example, HBCA B.239/a/98, York Factory post journal (George Sutherland), 1794–95. HBCA B.239/b/54, Joseph Colen to William Tomison, 29 August 1793: “you place greater credit to the assertions of time serving men than to Officers whom our Employers place confidence to transact this business.” Colen’s distinction is not borne out by the company’s official hiring practice. A glance at the Lists of Servants (HBCA A.30/1-10) shows that all regular HBC employees were on short term contracts of one to five years.

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22

23

The longest term was that of apprentices, who were engaged for seven years. HBCA A.30/1-10, Lists of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1784–97: David Thompson, London (St. John’s), Grey Coat Hospital apprentice, 1784; Joseph Colen, London (St. Botolph’s), writer, 1785; George Charles, London (St. Margaret’s), Grey Coat apprentice, 1785; William Hemmings Cook, London (St. Andrew’s), writer, 1786; Thomas Staynor, London (St. George’s), writer, 1788; James Bird, Mitcham, Middlesex, writer, 1788; James Peter Whitford, London (St. Paul’s), writer, 1788; Thomas Wiegand, London (parish?), writer, 1789; Robert Hudson, London (St. Margaret’s), writer, 1789; John Peter Pruden, London (parish?), apprentice, 1791; James Swain, London (St. Andrew’s), writer, 1791; Henry Hallet, London (parish?), writer, 1793; Thomas Swain, London (St. Andrew’s), writer, 1795; Thomas Colen, Cirencester, writer, 1795; John Ward, London (parish?), writer, 1795; Joseph Howse, Cirencester, writer, 1795. All of the above were English; most were from London, specifically parishes in Westminster, Holborn and the City. The Gray Coat Hospital apprentices are listed in the school’s register. Of the writers, a search in the archives of three City schools (Charterhouse, Merchant Taylors,’ St. Paul’s) turned up only one likely name: Thomas Wiegand, born on 17 August 1773 and a pupil at the Merchant Taylors’ School in 1785–86. Henry Hallet was Philip Turnor’s nephew; Thomas Colen was a relative of Joseph Colen. The exception to this preference for English writers and apprentices was James Sutherland from South Ronaldsay, engaged as a writer in 1797, whom Tomison probably recruited during his year at home. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 45–48, 52–53; and Ruggles, “Hospital Boys of the Bay,” 4–11; Robertson, Elements of Navigation; HBCA A.11/117, Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, 26 September 1791: a list of items ordered from London, ending

24

25 26

with “David Thompson. – Robertson’s Elements of Navigation, the last Edition in two Volumes, – for which a Bill was inclosed in your honours Packet.” The order is in Thompson’s handwriting. David Thompson’s Narrative, ed. Glover, 55. Thompson’s account of his years on the Saskatchewan River in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s service is missing from Tyrrell’s edition. Cf. HBCA B.121/a/3, Manchester House journal (William Tomison), 29 March 1789 (three months after Thompson’s accident): “David Thompson was out of bed to day for the first time but had not set long before his foot and Ancle swelled a good deal so that he was obliged to lie down again God only knows how it may turn out”; and 9 June 1789: “I have left Malchom Ross in charge of Cumberland ... have also left David Thompson it being impossible to carry him down in the Condition he is in.” In June 1790 Thompson was well enough to leave Cumberland House with the brigade travelling to York Factory. HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 9 June 1790: in his letter to London sent down with this brigade, Turnor deplores Thompson’s accident and commends his surveying skill. Cf. notes 47 and 51 below. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 49–52. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 58; HBCA G.2/28, [ John Hodgson], “An Accurate Map of the Territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company in North Ameri-ca,” [1791]. Turnor had a low opinion of Donald’s cartographic skills – HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 9 June 1790: “when George Donald went on the expedition on the east coast of the Bay in the Moose Fort Sloop Commanded by Alex r Brand the only use he ever made of [a sextant] was to let the Indians see he had such a thing and the Chart sent of that Coast by Geo. Donald was not other than an attempt to impose upon Your Honors and doubts have been wether he was in a Condition to have given any

27

28 29 30

account of that Voyage had not M r Brand have lent him his Journal and John Davison second Mate ... have lent him a Chart.” Designation of Stayner and Longmoor as explorers and surveyors north of Churchill is found in HBCA A.5/2, HBC Committee to William Jefferson, 23 May 1787; and HBCA A.5/2, HBC Committee to William Tomison, 23 May 1787: “If our Apprentice George Charles should be with you let him be sent to Churchill directly together with the Books & Instruments for astronomical Observations: We mean to have Churchill River explored. ... We have ... appointed [Robert Longmoor] to be our Second at Churchill ... We intend him to pursue the Plan of Discoveries from Churchill Factory as We at first directed.” Charles, who had assisted Ross in 1787 (a disappointing expedition), was to be kept at Churchill to write and keep accounts. HBCA A.30/4, “List of Servants at Churchill,” 1789; HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to William Jefferson, 27 May 1789. HBCA A.5/2, HBC Committee to William Jefferson, 23 May 1787. HBCA A.11/117, York Factory General Letter to the HBC Committee, August 1788: “M r George Hudson requests to return on account of indisposition; he is accompanied by M r Cha s Thomas Isham (who we particularly recommend to your Honors notice).” In the same General Letter, Colen and his Council noted the arrival of two writers ( J. P. Whitford, James Bird) and four English labourers ( John Smith, Robert Taylor, Peter Fidler, John Ward). John Ward who accompanied Fidler on two trips from Buckingham House (and lost his way on both of them) is this labourer, not John Ward the writer, who arrived at York Factory in 1795. Ward the labourer is mentioned for the last time in HBCA A.30/7, List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1796: “Run away ... wages to be stoped, and Canoe to be valued & paid for by him.” Ward probably deserted to the North West Company.

NOTES

141

31 32 33

34

142

HBCA A.11/117, Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, 27 August 1788. HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to William Tomison Chief (or the Resident at York Fort for the time being), 27 May 1789. HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 3 September 1789; HBCA A.11/117, York Factory General Letter to the HBC Committee, 8 September 1789: “M r Thos Stayner expressed a desire to accompany M r Philip Turner in his Journey of discovery to the Northward from Cumberland House. M r Turnor says an Assistant is requisite; both Wiegan & Hudson Writers are too weak to attempt a Journey at this Season of the year, both will be sent Inland next Season.” This reference is to Thomas Wiegand and Robert Hudson, who arrived at York Factory that year as writers, together with John Thompson, labourer. Robert, George Hudson’s brother, was suffering from scurvy; both Hudson brothers died the following spring. John was David Thompson’s brother, mentioned in HBCA A.30/6, List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1794, as a “Steersman ... very good” with a wage of £6 (the designation “Steersman” may be in error, since the wage is too low and he is subsequently listed as a bowsman). John Thompson is last mentioned in HBCA A.30/6, List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1795: “Bowsmen ... Entered into Contract for 3 years at £14 – Engaged for the Northward” with Ross and David Thompson. HBCA B.49/a/21, Cumberland House post journal (George Hudson and Malcolm Ross), letterbook: George Hudson to William Walker, 8 October 1789; HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 9 June 1790. Cf. HBCA B.121/a/5, Manchester House post journal (Thomas Stayner), 1789–90: Turner’s hopes for Stayner were based on their shipboard acquaintance and the fact that Stayner had already made a trip inland from Churchill. Stayner’s year on the Saskatchewan River made it clear to Turnor as well as to the other Saskatchewan River post

DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

35 36

37

masters and the HBC Committee that the young man was unfit, unskilled and unwilling to participate usefully in the routine of the frontier posts. Stayner repeatedly complained of poor food, hard labour and cold weather, he had to be rescued after losing his way, and he blamed his faulty astronomical observations on the instruments lent to him. Hudson sent Stayner to Walker at South Branch House. An Assiniboin man asked Walker to send an Englishman with his band but was refused; Stayner himself recorded that “It would have been granted him, but there are none fit for such an Expedition” (16 December 1789). Instead Walker left Stayner with Tomison at Manchester House and returned to his own post with Peter Fidler. Stayner could have made himself useful at Manchester House but he disliked the smoky chimneys, found life there “Dull & lonesome” (10 February 1790) and elected to spend several weeks at James Spence’s hunting tent. It is interesting to speculate on Stayner’s reaction to Thompson’s newly honed surveying skills as they travelled in Walker’s brigade to York Factory. While Thompson made a detailed river survey of courses and distances with frequent observations, Stayner took one more erroneous meridian altitude and once again blamed the faulty sight on his watch and sextant (17 June 1790). Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 52. HBCA B.205/a/4, South Branch post journal (Mitchell Oman, kept by Peter Fidler), 5 June 1790; HBCA A.11/117, Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, 27 August 1787. HBCA B.239/b/49, Joseph Colen to William Walker, 24 July 1789; HBCA B.239/b/50, Joseph Colen to Philip Turnor, 20 July 1790: “You will find Peter Fidler a useful assistant – and your skill will improve him in a study his mind seems fixed on.” The second letter suggests that Fidler had already demonstrated an aptitude for surveying at York Factory, probably in drawing up plans for the fort (the “Old Octagon” built on the present site).

38

39

40 41 42

43

44 45

46 47

HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 9 June 1790; and HBCA B.239/b/50, Philip Turnor to Joseph Colen, 10 June 1790. Williams, The British Search for the Northwest Passage, 217–19. Although he severely criticized fanciful “contradictions and misrepresentations” in Meares’s Voyages, Dixon, “Introduction” to Beresford, A Voyage Round the World, in the Years 1785, 1786, 1787, and 1788, xiv, suggested that the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii) marked the western entrance to De Fonte’s legendary passage. HBCA C.7/175, HBC Committee, instructions to Captain Charles Duncan, 18 May 1790. HBCA B.239/b/52, Philip Turnor to Joseph Colen, 22 March 1791. HBCA B.49/a/22, Cumberland House post journal (Philip Turnor), 23 June 1790; HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 9 June 1790. HBCA B.9/a/3, Philip Turnor, “Journal of a Journey from Cumberland House towards the Athapiscow Country & back to York Factory,” 3 March 1791 and 25 July 1791, published in The Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, ed. Tyrrell, 362, 418–19. HBCA B.239/b/50, Joseph Colen to Philip Turnor, 20 July 1790. HBCA B.9/a/3, Philip Turnor, “Journal of a Journey from Cumberland House towards the Athapiscow Country & back to York Factory,” 25 July 1791 and 17 August 1791; HBCA E.3/1, Peter Fidler, “A Journal of a Journey with the Chepawyans,” 17 August 1791, published in The Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, ed. Tyrrell, 418–20, 428. HBCA A.11/117, Joseph Colen to the HBC Committee, 6 September 1790. HBCA B.239/b/50, Philip Turnor to Joseph Colen, 10 June 1790. In contrast to Colen, Turnor recommended Thompson not

48

49 50 51

as a writer but as an instructor of surveying – HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 9 June 1790: “In my Journal which contains my Observations &c I have inserted some Observations made and worked by Your Honors unfortunate Apprentice David Thompson ... should he not be capable of travelling, he may be very useful in giving others instructions by which any of moderate abilities may be made more capable of taking Observations than any have yet proved that Your Honors have sent out from England.” HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to Joseph Colen, May 1791: “David Thompson’s Conduct we are so well pleased with that the Mathematical Instruments which he Desires may be sent to him, shall be complied with at the Expence of the Company”; HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to David Thompson, May 1791: “if you continue to make yourself useful to us you shall not fail of further Encouragement, to convince you of this we send you a Sextant and the other things you desire & mention in your Letter, as a present ... We have received the Copy of your Observations, which, together with M r Turnors, are put into the hands of M r Dalrymple, from whom we doubt not to have a good account of them, shall be glad to receive your Dft of the Lakes and Rivers &c from YF to Cumberland House every Information that can tend to from [form] a good Survey & Map of the country Inland will always be particularly acceptable to us.” The instruments and Robertson’s Elements of Navigation arrived at York Factory the following year. HBCA A.11/117, David Thompson to the HBC Committee, 19 and 20 September 1791. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 54, 59–60. HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to David Thompson, 29 May 1794. Cf. HBCA B.239/b/52, Philip Turnor to Joseph Colen, 22 March 1791: “Peter Fidler and Malcolm Ross are both turned Astronomers and have wrote for Sextants Watches &c.” This letter might be misread as inferring that

NOTES

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Fidler and Ross were not yet trained in surveying when they set out with Turnor on the northern expedition. Both Fidler and Ross had previously demonstrated skill in surveying: Fidler worked on plans for rebuilding York Factory and Ross surveyed part of the northern track to Cumberland House. HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to Malcolm Ross, 30 May 1793; HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to Peter Fidler, 30 May 1793: “From the Representations made to the Honble Committee by M r Philip Turnor of your Abilities & Attention to the Company’s Interest the under mention’d Articles [survey instruments] all chosen by him are sent for you [sic] sole Use, but are to be considered as the property of the Company & should you at any future period return to England you are to deliver them up to the Resident at York Factory.” Ross and Fidler were obliged to wait two years before they received instruments on loan from the Company, in strong contrast to the immediate “Encouragement” given to Thompson. All three were able men; all three had earned Turnor’s praise; yet Thompson was exceptionally favoured. The answer may lie in Thompson’s direct approach: he addressed his letters, observations and maps to the Committee rather than to Colen or Turnor, whereas Fidler communicated his results to Turnor until 1799, when the Committee remarked on this practice – HBCA A.5/4, HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to Philip Turnor, 4 October 1799: “The Governor & Committee ... thank you for the Communication of M r Fidler’s Locn they however think he should have likewise wrote himself to the Board.” Cf. HBCA A.11/52, Peter Fidler to the HBC Com-mittee, 10 July 1802; HBCA A.5/4, Alexander Lean to Joseph Banks, 17 December 1802; HBCA A.5/4. Alexander Lean to Alexander Dalrymple, 17 December 1802: when Fidler sent a composite map (now lost) and Akkomokki’s map (HBCA G.1/25) directly to the London Committee in 1802, his work got the attention formerly paid only to Thompson’s.

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DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

52

53 54 55

56

HBCA B.239/b/52, Joseph Colen to David Thompson, 30 August 1792. Colen added that “in order to Benifit Gehography you are to be as exact as possible in Laying down your track and fixing the Latitude and Longitude of the differant Rivers and Lakes you pass thro.” (The spelling is not to Colen’s usual standard; it is probably a young writer’s.) HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to Joseph Colen, 25 May 1792. HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to William Tomison, 25 May 1790. HBCA A.5/3, HBC Committee to William Tomison and the York Factory Council, 25 May 1792. Cf. Glover, “Introduction,” David Thompson’s Narrative, ed. Glover, xxi: “Had there been a single first-class directing man, a man of George Simpson’s calibre, in North America, the Company might have done what it would seem to have been most wise to do, namely, to make a clear-cut decision ... But the Company had no such man. William Tomison ... was not a first-class man.” Glover’s remark is simplistic; it assumes that Tomison had unlimited power to act and was less than decisive (cf. Glover’s equally absurd psychological assessment of Thompson in the same introduction). The administrative problems affecting the company during the 1790s were caused by ambiguous delegation of power rather than by the absence of strong and able personalities. Colen sailed from York Factory to London in 1798; he appears to have left in some hurry or disarray, because most of his possessions were left behind – HBCA A.5/4, HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to John Ballenden, 31 May 1799: the list of articles includes framed prints, drinking glasses, 1400 books, 6 barrel organs and livestock. Colen may have been ill when he left Hudson Bay; at any rate, six months later he was not well. A letter from Fenchurch Street shows that relations between him and the Committee were cordial – HBCA A.5/4, Alexander Lean to Joseph Colen, 14 January 1799: “I thank you for the Hare which

57

58

59

proved a very fine one – and am joind by all my fellow Labourers in the Vine Yard in my sincere wishes for the reestablishment of your Health.” HBCA B.239/a/96, York Factory post journal ( Joseph Colen), 5 July 1794: “Early this morning M r David Thompson arrived ... [he] tells me he is entirely disheartened as is M r Ross – so many obstacles having purposely been thrown in the way to prevent the Northward expedition being carried forwards from Cumberland House”; HBCA B.239/b/55, Joseph Colen to Malcolm Ross, 20 July 1794: “artifices mean and underhand have been used for several years past to set aside every attempt made to send men and Goods into the Athapascow Country from this place – The same has been pursued this Season. As these underhand schemes have been conducted with much secrecy and the scene of action many hundred Miles from this Factory, it was out of my power to counteract them. ... Do not let the repeated disappointments you have met with depress you – keep up your spirits and let the Athapascow Trade be the object of your pursuit – The Honble Company have a reliance on your persevernce, M r Thompson will join with you heart and hands – in all your fatigues and I have not a doubt but you will soon surmount all difficulties”; HBCA A.11/117, HBC Committee to Joseph Colen and the York Factory Council, 30 May 1795: “Obstacles are again, We perceive, thrown in the way of the Athapascow Expedition but We trust all difficulties which occur and impede the Companys Success will soon be removed.” HBCA B.239/b/57, Joseph Colen to David Thompson, 9 July 1796. Given the probability that Thompson’s opinion of Stayner was very low (cf. note 34 above), Colen’s acquiescence to Stayner’s claim of administrative control over the territory Thompson was exploring must have rankled. Cf. Glover, “Introduction,” David Thompson’s Narrative, ed. Glover, xxxvii: “the reader will have noticed some doubt in the writer’s [Glover’s] mind as to whether Colen’s alleged letter was ever

60

written. Certainly it seems impossible to find that letter now ... Moreover, it is, unfortunately, doubtful how far the Narrative can be trusted in such a context as this. We are not merely confronted with an occasion on which there is reason to fear that Thompson’s conduct was discreditable. There is also the fact that no statement made by any man about events which occurred half a century earlier can command unhesitating confidence.” HBCA A.30/4-10, List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1788–1800. When he was engaged as a labourer in 1788, Fidler’s wage was £10 (the rate for English labourers; Orkney labourers received only £6). It is doubtful that he worked as a simple labourer for any length of time: HBCA B.239/b/49, Joseph Colen to William Walker, 24 July 1789, indicates that Colen had assigned a writer’s duties to Fidler during his first year at York Factory; in December 1789 he was given a writer’s job at South Branch House, and by June 1790 Turnor had taken him on as his surveying assistant. In 1792, although his £10 wage did not change, Fidler was listed as “Mr Turners Assistant,” the following year as “Mr Turnor’s Assist in his late survey.” A note to the 1793 List indicates the expiry of his original contract: “very good late Mr Turnor’s Assistant vide YF Servants List To contract for 3 Yrs at £15.” But the 1794 List indicates a better second contract: Fidler is called “Surveyor Writer &c” and his salary is now £25. The 1795 List calls him “Surveyor &c,” still at £25. The 1796 List notes “Surveyor &c &c,” once again at £25. In 1796, at the age of 27, Fidler is listed simply as “Surveyor,” with a salary of £50; by this time he was also an inland trader. In 1799 his contract was again up for renewal. The note against his name in the 1800 List (the last in the series) reads: “Last Wages £50 out 1799 – Was to Contract for £60 – YF List says £50 out 1801 – vide his Letter to the Compy [not extant] to go to the Athapasco for 3 Yrs at £70,” and the Committee’s response: “to be employ’d as a Trader where most usefull.” Within ten years Thompson’s HBC career promoted him beyond the expected position of writer to that of surveyor.

NOTES

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But Fidler’s professional success was even more remarkable than Thompson’s: when he was named “Surveyor,” Fidler had served the company for only eight years, during which he had risen from the status of “labourer,” the company’s lowest hiring category, to that of “Trader,” its highest.

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DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

DECISION AT TH E M A R I A S 1 2

3

4

Jefferson, instructions to Lewis, 20 June 1803, in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Jackson, 61. Lewis and Clark, entries for 2–8 June 1805, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 4: 242, 246–47, 265–66. Here are the high points of Lewis’s account: “we came too ... opposite to the entrance of a very considerable river ... An interesting question was now to be determined; which of these rivers was the Missouri ... to mistake the stream at this period of the season ... could not only loose us the whole of this season but ... might defeat the expedition altogether. convinced we were that the utmost circumspection and caution was necessary in deciding on the stream to be taken. ... The whole of my party to a man except myself were fully peswaided that this river [flowing from the northwest] was the Missouri ...” In the following discussion a few phrases from these entries are quoted without further acknowledgement. 9. Jefferson, “Annual Message to Congress” (revised draft, 2 December 1806), in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Jackson, 352. De Voto, The Course of Empire, 426, 541, 553, 482, waxes eloquent on uncertainties of the route, the hostility of Indians and the heroism of the Corps of Discovery – “men who by guts and skill had mastered the farthest wilderness, they must have had a way of standing and a look in their eyes.” De Voto also mentions but does not discuss the expedition’s scientific aspect: “A great deal of its fruitfulness stemmed from the scientific objectives set for it ... by Jefferson in consultation with [members] of the American Philosophical Society.” Lewis and Clark have always been seen as heroes; heroism is continuously evoked in even the soberest scholarly studies – see Belyea, “Heroes and Hero-Worship.” The captains’ contributions to science were first emphasized in Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 3–8,

5

6 7

24–29. Goetzmann suggests that “Lewis and Clark might almost be considered a logical extension of the American Philosophical Society,” contending that “the most important fact about the Lewis and Clark expedition ... is the degree to which it was ‘programmed,’ or planned in advance, down to the smallest detail by Jefferson and his scientific associates in Philadelphia.” Moulton, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 2: 5, confirms recent historical emphasis on the captains’ scientific achievement: “[Lewis and Clark] were to observe the whole range of natural history and ethnology of the area, and the possible resources for future settlers. Jefferson expected a great deal of two infantry officers, but they met the challenge. Lewis, a student of plants and animals since boyhood, made significant additions to zoological and botanical knowledge ... Only in recent decades have his contributions been fully appreciated.” In his introduction to the atlas of his edition, Moulton, Journals of Lewis and Clark, ed. Moulton, 1: 4, 13, praises Clark’s mapping skills: “One is ... amazed at his drafting capabilities. ... [His 1810 map] was the beginning of a new generation of maps – maps that would accurately portray the American West because they were based on actual field sightings and acute topographical inference.” Allen, “Lewis and Clark on the Upper Missouri: Decision at the Marias,” 15; Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 261, 241, 210, 89. Cutright, Lewis and Clark, Pioneering Naturalists. Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians; Ronda, “ ‘A Chart in his Way,” in Mapping the North American Plains, ed. Luebke, Kaye and Moulton, 81–91; Ronda, “Exploring the Explorers: Great Plains People and the Lewis and Clark Expedition”; Ronda, “Dreams and Discoveries”; Ronda, “A Knowledge of Distant Parts.” The article on Native cartography is of greatest interest here: Ronda claims that “despite arbitrary symbols not part of their learning and lore, and despite divergent ways of

NOTES

147

8

9 10 11 12

13

148

understanding the physical world, Lewis and Clark did succeed in gaining important information from Indian maps.” See Belyea, “Amerindian Maps,” 267, 275. Moulton, “On Reading Lewis and Clark.” This review of contemporary scholarship reflects the trend of Expedition expertise: among Lewis and Clark specialists, there tends to be more agreement and echoing of each other’s work than discussion of problematic issues. See, for example, Ambrose, Undaunted Courage; Beckham, The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; and Ronda, Beyond Lewis and Clark: the Army Explores the West. Cf. Plamondon, Lewis and Clark’s Trail Maps, for a new analysis of the explorers’ route and the changing course of the Missouri River, and Jenkinson, A Vast and Open Plain, for brief discussion of the wider context of North American exploration. Heckrotte, “Aaron Arrowsmith’s Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” 16. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 180. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 253–54, 225. Moulton, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1: 4; Bedini, “The Scientific Instruments of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” in Mapping the North American Plains, ed. Luebke, Kaye and Moulton, 93–110. Cf. Godlewska, “The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt”; and Jelly, “Early Methods of Topographical Survey,” A History of the Ordnance Survey, ed. Seymour, 1–17. Mackenzie made his transcontinental crossing into a political and social success, but only after eight years of lobbying. Voyages from Montreal was published in 1801. When he read Mackenzie’s book, probably in the original 1801 edition, Jefferson moved quickly to mount a transcontinental expedition of his own. Voyages from Montreal must have been recommended reading for Lewis, whose own journals echo the book’s heavily edited phrases as well as imitating the heroic gloss applied to Mackenzie’s more prosaic journals -- see Montgomery, “Mackenzie’s Literary Assistant,” and Belyea, “Heroes and Hero-Worship.”

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14

15

Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Smith Barton, 27 February 1803; Thomas Jefferson to Caspar Wistar, 28 February 1803; Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 28 February 1803; Meriwither Lewis to the Public, National Intelligencer, 14 March 1807; Conrad Prospectus, 1 April 1807; Biddle Prospectus, May 1810; cf. [David McKeehan] to Meriwether Lewis, Pittsburgh Gazette, 7 April 1807; Conrad & Company to Thomas Jefferson, 13 November 1809; William Clark to F. R. Hassler, 26 January 1810; William Clark to Benjamin Smith Barton, 22 May 1810; Nicholas Biddle’s correspondence, 1810–14 – all reproduced in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Jackson, 16–19, 385–86, 394–97, 546–48, 468–69, 491–92, 548–49, 494–599. Basing his analysis on Cutright, A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals, Moulton, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 2: 35–42, devotes a long section of his introduction to the many problems of publication and preservation of the expedition’s documents and collections. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses, 144–45, claims that observation, the dominance of vision over other senses, has always been characteristic of empirical science. Moreover, Foucault argues, “l’histoire naturelle n’est pas devenue possible parce qu’on a regardé mieux et de plus près. Au sens strict, on peut dire que l’âge classique s’est ingénié sinon à voir le moins possible, du moins à restreindre volontairement le champ de son expérience. L’observation, à partir du XVIIe siècle, est une connaissance assortie de conditions systématiquement négatives. Exclusion, bien sûr, du ouï-dire ... privilège presque exclusif de la vue, qui est le sens de l’évidence et de l’étendu.” In the following century, picturesque art subscribed to the observer’s organization of space by emphasis on the vanishing point, while the sublime subverted this visual control. The captains inherited both these ways of seeing. Lewis was dissatisfied with his own picturesque descriptions but could not see western topography as other than a series of landscapes. See also Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 25–66,

16 17

and Edney, “Cartography Without ‘Progress’”; Belyea, “Captain Franklin in Search of the Picturesque.” Cf. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 244. Library of Congress. Nicholas King, untitled map, 1803; LAC NMC 120813 and University of British Columbia Library, Verner A1802A, Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1802 (the first issue for this year, the fifth state of the map); cf. University of British Columbia Library, Verner A1811A, Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1802 (the second issue for this year, the sixth state of the map). Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 78, vaguely refers to “the group of maps that Gallatin called ‘the three maps of Arrowsmith.’ Aaron Arrowsmith ... had produced many maps of North America that were available in the United States, either as separate sheets or as smaller versions included in many of the published works on North American geography. Although it cannot be known just which of Arrowsmith’s many maps Gallatin was referring to, it is most likely that at least two of them were the widely circulated 1795 and 1802 editions of the British cartographer’s large map of North America.” By 1803, Arrowsmith had published six states of his Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America, and he had engraved a second map to illustrate Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal – a total of two maps, not “many,” as Allen claims. Small derivative maps appeared in atlases; however, maps based on Arrowsmith’s but drawn by other cartographers cannot be counted as maps produced by Arrowsmith. Heckrotte, “Aaron Arrowsmith’s Map,” 20, explains Gallatin’s “three maps of Arrowsmith” as the three sheets of the first issue of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802 (the fifth state of the map). Allen refers to two states of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries: the original issue dated 1795 and “a revision of the 1795 map ... published in 1802.” Unfortunately, his illustration

18

19

of the 1795 map is not of the first state but of its fourth state, dated 1796, watermarked 1798, and published no earlier than 1799. The Arrowsmith maps referred to in Jefferson’s pre-expeditionary correspondence are probably the first issue of the Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1802 and the map illustrating Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal. Lewis, entry for 3 June 1805, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 4: 248, records the captains’ uncertainty as they tried to reconcile Arrowsmith’s Missouri with what Mandans and Hidatsas had told them over the previous winter: “what astonishes us a little is that the Indians who appeared to be so well acquainted with the geography of this country should not have mentioned this river on wright hand if it be not the Missouri; the river that scolds at all others, as they call it if there is in reallity such an one, ought agreeably to their account, to have fallen in a considerable distance below, and on the other hand if this right-hand or N. fork be the Missouri I am equally astonished at their not mentioning the S. fork.” Much quoted, Lewis’s entries for 8–9 June 1805, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 4: 266–67, 269–70, register the explorers’ loss of confidence in Arrowsmith’s depiction of the Missouri: “I now began more than ever to suspect the varacity of Mr Fidler or the correctness of his instruments, for I see that Arrasmith in his late map of N. America has laid down a remarkable mountain in the chain of the Rocky mountains ... said to be from the discoveries of Mr Fidler ... The information of Mr Fidler [is] incorrect ... for if he has been along the Eastern side of the rocky mountains as far as even Latd 47º... and saw only rivulets making down from those mountains the presumption is very strong that those little streams do not penetrate the rocky Mountains.” Library of Congress, William Clark, untitled map drawn at Fort Mandan, 1805, reproduced in Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 1, plate 32 a and b (two copies for the State

NOTES

149

20

21

150

and War departments). Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 234, 243, describes the captains’ process of deduction at Fort Mandan: “Combining the best previous knowledge on the area from both written and oral sources with their own firsthand observations, the American explorers came up with a highly realistic picture of the lower reaches of the rivers that flowed into the Missouri between its mouth and the Great Bend. The accuracy of their view declined toward the interior, however. ... The critical lack, both conceptual and experiential, in the captains’ background was relative familiarity with the basic distinctions between rivers of the plains and those which flowed through the various ranges of the Rockies. Such unfamiliarity was understandable: Lewis and Clark had yet to see a mountain stream, and the Yellowstone was the first river in their image of the trans-Missouri region which was even understood to be a stream which flowed through mountains for great distances before passing out onto the plains.” Allen, “Lewis and Clark on the Upper Missouri,” 5-8; Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 226–51, 283. Heckrotte, “Aaron Arrowsmith’s Map of North America and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” 16–20, identifies the “River which scolds at all others” as the Marias River rather than the Milk River. Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians, 129; Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 211–14, 231–51; Moulton, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 1: 5. Allen’s reference, 211, to “rough maps” suggests that Native cartography was crude and valued only for details that were placed provisionally on the explorers’ own maps. Ronda, “A Chart in his Way,” Mapping the North American Plains, ed. Luebke, Kaye and Moulton, 87–89, recognizes that “beneath those lines, marks, and heaps of sand was a different way of seeing the world.” Ronda suggests that Lewis and Clark not only perceived and respected the difference, but could even imitate this different mapping convention and understand the geographical perception it represented.

DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

22 23 24 25 26

27

28

29

Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 275, 282; Moulton, “On Reading Lewis and Clark,” 35. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 225. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 245. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 245. John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, 350-53. European conventional map signs for rivers and streams can be seen in the French government’s regulations issued to its cartographic departments in 1803–05 – see Godlewska, “The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt,” 24–25, 127, 129. Jefferson, Instructions to Lewis, 20 June 1893, in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Jackson, 61–62. The emendation in angled brackets is Jackson’s. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 214, is right in asserting that the captains incorporated “data” onto the cartographic space and into the geographic understanding that was familiar to them. Lewis and Clark reduced Native maps to information; they deformed the geographic perceptions of which these maps were graphic transcripts. Clark’s report of Lewis’s arrival at the falls, 14 June 1805, Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 4: 295, is a confirmation of Native reports: “Capt Lewis dates his letter from the Great falls of the Missouri ... Capt L. informs the [party?] that those falls; in part answer the discription given of them by the Indians, much higher the Eagles nest which they describe is there; from those Signs he is Convinced of this being the river the Indians call the Missouri.” The interpolation is Moulton’s. Meriwether Lewis, “A Summary view of the Rivers and Creeks which discharge them[selves] into the Missouri,” Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 3: 336–69. Moulton groups Lewis’s “Summary view” and Clark’s corresponding table under the title “Affluents of the Missouri.”

30

31

32

33 34 35

36

Lewis, “A Summary view of the Rivers and Creeks which discharge them [selves] into the Missouri,” Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 363–64. Lewis, “A Summary view of the Rivers and Creeks which discharge them [selves] into the Missouri,” Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 365. LAC NMC 24668, Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1796 (the first issue for this year, the second state of the map): this map includes an overlay of Hearne’s explorations; LAC NMC 17396, Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1796 (third issue for this year, the fourth state of the map, probably published in 1799): this map includes the extension of the Rocky Mountains south to N29˚ past the “Bear’s Tooth,” shown as the southernmost extent of the Missouri River; BL Add 69917.70, Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America ... Additions to 1796, annotated between 1799 and1801, showing the fixes of Mackenzie’s Pacific route and the southward extension of the Rocky Mountains, with streams but no conjectural lines, reproduced in Derek Hayes, Historical Atlas of Canada, 149; TNA Colonial Office Records 700 Canada 59A: Aaron Arrowsmith, A Map of America ... Exhibiting Mackenzie’s Track ... [1801], reproduced in Hayes, Historical Atlas of Canada, 144–45. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 19. Heckrotte, “Aaron Arrowsmith’s Map and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” 18, 20. HBCA G.2/32, Philip Turnor, “... Map of Hudson’s Bay and the Rivers and Lakes Between the Atlantick and Pacifick Oceans ...,” 1794. Small sections of this map are reproduced in Hayes, Historical Atlas of Canada, 148, 151. HBCA B.39/a/2, Akkomokki, copied by Peter Fidler, map of the Missouri River, 1802; HBCA G.1/25, Akkomokki, copied

37 38

39

by Peter Fidler, “An Indian map of the Different Tribes that inhabit on the East & west side of the Rocky Mountains ... 7th Feby 1801 ...,” reproduced in Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 143, plate 19; HBCA E.3/2, Akkomokki, copied by Peter Fidler, “Drawn by the Feathers or ac ko mok ki a Blackfoot Chief,” 1801; HBCA E.3/2, Akkomokki, copied by Peter Fidler, “Drawn by the Feathers or ak ko mok ki a Black foot Chief 1802”; HBCA B.39/a/2, Akkoweeak, copied by Peter Fidler, map of the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers, 1802; HBCA E.3/2, Akkoweeak, copied by Peter Fidler, map of the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers, 1802, reproduced in Hayes, Historical Atlas of Canada, 153; HBCA B.39/a/2, Kioocus, copied by Peter Fidler, map of the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers, 1802; HBCA E.3/2, Kioocus, copied by Peter Fidler, “Drawn by Ki oo cus – or Little Bear a Blackfoot Chief 1802,” reproduced in Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 144, plate 20; and Hayes, Historical Atlas of Canada, 154; HBCA E.3/2, “Fall Indian,” copied by Peter Fidler, map of the Missouri River and west of the Rocky Mountains, 1802. See Judith Hudson Beattie, “Indian Maps in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives” and Binnema, “How Does a Map Mean?” From Rupert’s Land to Canada, ed. Binnema, Ens and Macleod, 201–24. HBCA A.11/52, Peter Fidler to the HBC Committee, 10 July 1802. Heckrotte, “Aaron Arrowsmith’s Map and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” 16–20; Johnson, Saskatchewan Journals and Correspondence, ed. Johnson, 319; HBCA A.5/4, HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to Sir Joseph Banks, 17 December 1802; HBCA A.5/4, HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to Alexander Dalrymple, 17 December 1802. For characteristics of Amerindian cartography, see Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking and Map Use by Native North Americans,” in Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 51–182. A trace of the

NOTES

151

40

41

42 43

152

conception of confluences as meeting points of a river “lattice” rather than the mainstream and tributaries of a watershed system can be found in Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 147, 161: “ ... where the town is now/ and where the river meets together/ where the bridge is now”; “And that’s where the Okanogan River/ gets connected to the Columbia River.” Beinecke Library, Yale University. Lewis and Clark Expedition Maps 10r and 10v. Sheheke, map of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, 1805, reproduced in Ronda, “ ‘A Chart in his Way’: Indian Cartography and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” in Mapping the North American Plains, ed. Luebke, Kaye and Moulton, 83, and Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 1: plates 31a and b. Beinecke Library, Yale University. Lewis and Clark Expedition Maps 55r. “Cut Nose,” “Sketch given us May 8th 1806 by the Cut Nose ...,” reproduced in Ronda, “ ‘A Chart in his Way’: Indian Cartography and the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” Mapping the North American Plains, ed. Luebke, Kaye and Moulton, 88, and in Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 1: plate 98. Allen, Passage Through the Garden, 244 (my emphasis). Beinecke Library, Yale University. Lewis and Clark Expedition Maps. William Clark, “A Map of part of the Continent of North America ...” 1810, reproduced in Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, vol. 1, plate 125; Samuel Lewis, A Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track Across the Western Portion of North America ..., 1814, in [Biddle and] Allen, History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to ... the Pacific Ocean, 1: frontispiece, reproduced in Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 1: plate 126; NAC NMC 48909. Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1814 (eighth state of the map). Cf. Godlewska, “The Napoleonic Survey of Egypt,” 136: “Information from indigenous sources was regarded with suspicion and even hostility by both

DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

44

the compiler [the cartographer in Paris] and his surveyors [in Egypt]. Nevertheless it was extensively used, [though] never directly and openly acknowledged. ... perhaps many of the earliest European maps of newly conquered territories ought to be reexamined for influences from indigenous sources and traditions of mapping.” See Belyea, “Inland Journeys, Native Maps.”

M A P PI NG W E S T OF T H E BAY 1

2

3

HBCA G.1/25, Akkomokki, copied by Peter Fidler. “An Indian Map of the Different Tribes that inhabit on the East & West Side of the Rocky Mountains with all the rivers & other remarkable places, also the number of Tents &c. Drawn by the Feathers or Ak ko mok ki – a Blackfoot chief – 7th Feby 1801”; HBCA A.11/52, Peter Fidler to the HBC Committee (Alexander Lean), 10 July 1802 (the verb “conveys” is an alternative plural form which often appears in eighteenth-century texts). Dalrymple, Memoir of a Map of the Lands around the North Pole, 12, mentions “Indian Maps, in the Collection of The Hudson’s-Bay Company” – probably a reference to a “Drt of the Northern Parts of Hudsons Bay laid dwn on Indn Information” (1760) as well as to “Captain Mea to na bee & I dotly a zees Draught. CR” (1767). Fidler’s comment on the “Blackfoot” maps echoes Dalrymple’s remark: “These Indian Maps [convey] much information of the Northern parts, where European Documents fail ...” Having drawn extensively on Philip Turnor’s surveys, Dalrymple may have given a copy of his Memoir to Turnor, who may have passed it on to Fidler. Buache, Carte Physique des Terreins les plus élevés de la Partie Occidentale du Canada ..., in Considérations géographiques et physiques sur les nouvelles découvertes, appendix map 5. See Lagarde, “Philippe Buache, ou le premier géographe français, 1700-1773,” and Lagarde, “Le Passage du Nord-Ouest et la Mer de l’Ouest dans la cartographie françaises du XVIIIe siècle.” LAC NMC 13814, Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l’Amérique septentrionale, 1743; LAC NMC 21057, Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, Carte de l’Amérique septentrionale, 1755. National Archives of Canada. Cf. Jacob, “Il faut qu’une carte soit ouverte ou fermée,” 39: “Il est certains cas où le tracé se désigne lui-même comme conjectural ... [Dans ces cas, le] tracé est beaucoup plus simple que celui des régions déjà explorées ... un contour prospectif,

4

qui anticipe sur l’exploration à venir. La ligne suffit ainsi à créer l’espace qu’elle ne peut représenter.” Greenhood, Mapping, is a clearly written introduction to European scientific cartography. Greenhood acknowledges “authoritative” advice from the American Coast and Geodetic Survey, the US Army Map Service and the Canada Department of Mines and Technical Surveys. Robinson and Petchenik, The Nature of Maps, 17, 97, quote the definition of map established by the International Cartographic Association in 1973 – “A map is a representation normally to scale and on a flat medium, of a selection of material or abstract features on, or in relation to, the surface of the Earth or of a celestial body” – and claim that it is universally true: “Among the cartographer’s most basic [sic] assumptions is the notion of the universal utility of coordinate systems of reference. It is sobering to note, however, that the ability to think in terms of coordinates appears to be the ultimate in the development of the conception of space.” Jacob, L’Empire des cartes, 143–49, explains how the map support can play a key role in establishing significant cartographic space: “Il y a en premier lieu la délimitation d’un espace de représentation par un cadre ... Toute carte découpe un espace dans un continuum. ... La simple bordure du papier, de la tablette ou du parchemin, suffit à encadrer la carte. ... Le cadre joue ainsi un rôle déterminant dans la définition même de la représentation qu’il délimite comme un espace et un énoncé homogènes.” Cf. a recent, non-Eurocentric definition of map is given by Harley and Woodward, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Harley and Woodward, xvi: “maps are graphic representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes, or events in the human world.” The essential concept of the new definition is “spatial understanding”; if this concept is transferred without question or reflection from European cartography, then the range of the new definition is severely limited.

NOTES

153

5

6

7

8

154

Harry Beck drew the first state of the London Underground map in 1933; his design was suggested by the circuit diagrams that Beck worked with as an engineer. The London Transport website calls the map a “stunningly simple design ... an instantly clear and comprehensible chart that would become an essential guide” – descriptions that apply equally to Amerindian map design. Belyea, “Mapping the Marias.” The Dark Storm essay entitled “Decision at the Marias” is a revised and corrected version of my earlier article. Ronda, “A Chart in his Way,” in Mapping the North American Plains, ed. Luebke, Kaye, and Moulton, 89, suggests that after a mere two years on the road Lewis and Clark were able to draw a map “as Lewis put it, ‘in their way.’ ” Ronda concludes that “the mapping ways of Hidatsas and Nez Perces had become at least partially an expedition way. Maps once formidable in structure and design could now be made and understood by the explorers themselves.” If so, the captains attained this understanding with unparalleled insight and rapidity. My claim is that understanding and adoption of the Native cartographic convention developed over several decades, practised by a number of men who spent all their working lives in the fur trade. Previous surveys of “tracks” inland from York Factory include HBCA B.239/a/69, Matthew Cocking, log, 1772–73; HBCA B.9/a/3, Philip Turnor, journal, 1792; HBCA E.3/1, Peter Fidler, journal, 1792; AO 443, David Thompson, journals, 1793, 1794. Previous maps made from surveys include HBCA G. 1/21–22, Philip Turnor, From York Factory to Cumberland House, 1779; HBCA G. 2/18, [David Thompson], “Nelson River, Hayes River, and Communications through Lake Winnipeg to, and along Saskatchewan River, including part of Churchill River,” 1794; HBCA G.2/32, Philip Turnor, “Map of Hudson’s Bay and the Rivers and Lakes Between the Atlantick

DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

9 10

11

and Pacifick Oceans,” 1794. See Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 49–60. HBCA E.3/4, folio 13v. Chachaypaywayti, copied by Peter Fidler, “From Split Lake to Cumberland House,” 1806. Moulton, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ed. Moulton, 1: 8–13, 3: 269–70, 7: 227–28. The following histories also make much of the materials used to draw Amerindian maps: Bagrow, The History of Cartography, 1–10; Kish, La Carte, 11–13; Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps, 29–36; as well as Jacob, L’Empire des cartes, 53–54, and Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis. 67, 70, 77, 79–94, 143–44, 159. Warhus, Another America, 2–3, 8, 11, 157. Warhus has described in considerable if speculative detail the question-and-answer dialogues that are supposed to have produced Native maps (cf. Jacob, L’Empire des cartes, 53–54 and Belyea, “Inland Journeys, Native Maps”). Although his attitude to Native cultures is respectful, even reverent, Warhus retains the classical binary notions of civilization and savagery. He insists that Amerindian societies were exclusively “oral” and apparently refuses to accept that individuals from these societies were capable of using pencil and paper. Warhus claims that Akkomokki translated an oral tradition into the graphic form that Fidler copied, and that Akkomokki drew his map with a stick on snowy ground. We are left with an improbable scenario: either Fidler and his visitor stood for a very long time outside in a biting winter wind (the original map was drawn on 7 February 1801, and according to Fidler’s journal the weather that day was “sharp”), or Fidler welcomed his visitor to the trading room of the post and then, to draw the map, Akkomokki insisted on going outside again to find a patch of undisturbed snow in the well-trampled yard. It is much more reasonable to suppose that nineteenth-century Natives were capable of drawing on paper when it was supplied. Two of Fidler’s

12 13

14

15

16

17

“Blackfoot” maps as well as a large number of ledger drawings are evidence that they did so. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 63–64, 193–236. Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 51– 182. Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 145, 149. Woodward and Lewis, “Introduction,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 2. The editors further state that “describing spatial representation ... before contact with Westerners is difficult for several reasons. These include the paucity or virtual absence of extant precontact artifacts [and] an unwillingness or inability to recognize as maps certain types of archaeological evidence such as ceramics, textiles, petroglyphs and pictographs, even when datable.” Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 176– 77. Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 57, 61–66, 181, 115–24; Joslyn Art Museum, Honanistto/Howling Wolf, “No. 1” and “No. 2,” May 1878–May 1881, reproduced in Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art, plates 18 and 19; Amos Great Heart Bull, “Map of the Black Hills” and “Map of the Setting of the Black Hills Conference of 26 September 1876,” 1891–1913, photographed in 1927, reproduced in Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and

18

19

20 21

Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 122–23. Szabo, “Chief Killer and a New Reality,” 55, comments that landscapes drawn by some of the Fort Marion prisoners may have been inspired by American maps and views. Szabo suggests, moreover, that “the pictorial concept at work in these drawings ... transcribes those locations in ways that geographers might use. But the kind of mapping or transcription offered in Chief Killer’s drawings differs from the sketchy maps known from the Plains.” Keyser and Klassen, Plains Indian Rock Art, 13–15, 177–89, 224– 78, 256–78; Keyser, “Painted Bison Robes: the Missing Link in the Biographic Art Style Lexicon”; Penney, Art of the American Indian Frontier, fig. 14, plates 77, 79; Peterson and Peers, Sacred Encounters, 74–75; Brownstone, “The Musée de l’Homme’s Foureau Robe”; Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art,10–13, 80–143; Berlo, “Drawing and Being Drawn In,” Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935, ed. Berlo, 12–18. Cf. also McCoy, “Swift Dog, Hunkpapa Warrior, Artist, and Historian,” as well as Miles and Lovatt, “The Pictorial Autobiography of Moses Old Bull.” In King, Green Grass, Running Water, 18–21, one of the characters gives a lecture on the ledger books to a sleepy, apathetic class. The tone is humourous until one of the students asks the burning question: “The ones at Fort Marion. I was wondering ... What happened to them?” Cf. Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art, 23, 31, 74. Cf. Robinson and Petchenik, The Nature of Maps, 15, 86, 11: “The space represented [on a map] ... normally refers to the three-dimensional field of our experience ... A fundamental characteristic of mapping is that the map is actually a diminutive reproduction of the real space to which it refers. ... In the topological concept of space ... one employs characteristics such as connections, enclosure, proximity and so on, involving no reference to a point of view outside the object. ... At the more sophisticated end of the continuum ... we can accomplish the positioning of

NOTES

155

22

23

156

an object in overall Euclidean terms such as might be generated through the use of latitude and longitude or a less sophisticated rectangular grid system” (my emphasis). Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 149–51, quotes geologist Robert Bell’s remark in 1869 that as a result of drawing on sheets of paper, “the shape is distorted Indian fashion.” Lewis suggests instead that a “disproportionately large” feature was drawn in this way to emphasize its importance as a link in a long canoe route; in other words, Lewis rightly points out that “distort[ion]” or “disproportion” may have nothing to do with the size or shape of the paper. Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art, 36; Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art 4526.19.96, American Horse Ledger, unknown Cheyenne artist, “Gunfire from both sides” 1879 – cf. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College 04.1180, Honanistto/Howling Wolf, “Warriors Dance War Dance,” undated, and Joslyn Art Museum 1991.19, Honanistto/Howling Wolf, “Sun Dance,” 1878–81; Smithsonian Institution 4563, unknown Cheyenne artist, “Cheyennes Chased by Crow Indian One wounded” and “Old Whirlwind charging on Shawnees & Sacs & Foxes on the Solomon River,” 1880–90; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College 04.1180, Honanistto/Howling Wolf, “Heap-of-Birds counts coup under Pawnees’ gunfire,” undated, and “Howling Wolf is wounded by gunfire,” undated, all reproduced in Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art, figs. 20–22, 64, 66, plates 23, 29. Smithsonian Institution 4452A, “Rescue of a Comrade under Heavy Fire”; St Louis Mercantile Library 78.038.4, Little Shield, “Pennetaker Comanch Not Killed Run Off ” and “Utes Killed Heap Squaws & Pappoos”; US Military Academy Library, Bourke collection, unknown Cheyenne artist, “Bear Foot is Rescued by Last Bull,” 1871–76; South Dakota State Historical

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24

25

Society, Collins collection, unknown Hunkpapa Lakota artist, “Miwatani Society Officer on Horseback,” reproduced in Plains Indian Drawings 1865-1935, ed. Berlo, 75, 89, 93, 95, 183–85. Smithsonian Institution 39b, Making Medicine, “Inspection of Indian Prisoners, Fort Marion, Fla,” 1876–77; Smithsonian Institution 20/6231, Bear’s Heart, “Bishop Whipple Talking to Prisoners,” 1876; Brown University Library, Anne S. K. Brown collection, Making Medicine, “Indian Prisoners at Fort Marion Being Photographed,”1876–77; New York State Library 672, Honanistto/Howling Wolf, “Classroom at Fort Marion”; Missouri Historical Society, Wohaw, “Kiowa Portraits,” 1877 – all reproduced in Plains Indian Drawings 1865-1935, ed. Berlo, 48, 117, 131, 139, 175. Cf. unknown artist/engraver, “Howling Wolf at Fort Marion,” Harper’s Weekly 22, no. 1115 (11 May 1878), 373, reproduced in Warhus, Another America, 203. Wade and Rand, “The Subtle Art of Resistance: Encounter and Accommodation in the Art of Fort Marion,” in Plains Indian Drawings 1865-1935, ed. Berlo, 45–49. Since Ewers, Plains Indian Painting, appeared in 1939, the study of rock, robe and ledger drawings has been divided between anthropologists and art historians. Petersen, Plains Indian Art from Fort Marion, 53, 56–60, gives valuable profiles of the prisoners who recorded their memories of pre-reservation cultures and their impressions of the American way of life. At the same time, Petersen sees the influence of European artistic norms as a liberation from the Native pictorial convention. Commenting on the work of Making Medicine, for example, she states that “realism rather than conventional stylization has become the keynote. ... Pictographic symbols have vanished. The stiff horses have become more naturalistic. The representation of the man ... is admirable. Animate figures have become three-dimensional.” In other words, the artistic value of the prisoners’ drawings depends on their discovery of perspective, central to the post-medieval phase of European pictorial convention. Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of

26

Ledger Art, 23, 31, 74, sees the prisoners’ art as a bridge between cultures: “The development of ledger art from schematic beginnings to polished individual compositions by recognized artists was one of acceptance of tradition but gradual abandonment of various restrictions. ... Fort Marion drawings are more fully descriptive, detailed presentations of figures that exist in actual environments rather than placed against the void of a blank piece of paper.” Berlo, Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935, 16, differentiates between drawings of past life on the plains and those depicting the prisoners’ present experience in Florida: “Among the most visually powerful drawings are those that show little influence from non-Native sources ... But among the most eloquent – and the most heartwrenching – are those that trace, both in subject matter and style, the gradual ‘drawing-in’ of Native American people to the hegemonic world of the dominant white culture.” Berlo clearly shows that convention and perception are interdependent, and infers that historical judgements favouring the prisoner-artists’ adoption of perspective is one more instance of “drawing in.” When they privilege mathematical positioning and scale, historians of cartography participate in the same hegemonic process. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College 04.1180, Honanistto/Howling Wolf, “Two Self-Portraits,” undated, reproduced in Szabo, Howling Wolf and the History of Ledger Art, plate 21; National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Silberman collection 95.2.647, Squint Eyes, “Hunting Buffalo,” 1876; National Cowboy Hall of Fame, Silberman collection 95.2.674 and 95.2.657, Making Medicine, “Indian Drill” and “Still Hunting Antelope,” 1876– 77; and “Indian Prisoners and Ladies”; Smithsonian Institution 2-/6231, Bear’s Heart, “Cheyenne Among the Buffalo,” 1876– 77; Honanistto (Howling Wolf ), “Cheyenne Village Scene: Women’s Work” and “Archery Practice”; Beinecke Library, Yale University 1174, Etahdleuh Doanmoe, “The Night of the Surrender” and “Indians Moving Heavy Cannons,” 1876–77, all

27

28

reproduced in Plains Indian Drawings 1865–1935, ed. Berlo, 117, 123, 128, 137, 139, 141, 143, 159, 163. Cf. also Field Museum of Natural History 83999, Howling Wolf/Honanistto, “Trains Arriving at Fort Marion,” 1876–77: the trains, rails, buildings and groups of US Army personnel are drawn as straight lines, while the sea coast and group of newly arrived Native prisoners are drawn as curves. The “Blackfoot” maps and another map possibly by a “Fall Indian” (Atsina) copied by Peter Fidler are found in three sources: HBCA B.39/a/2, Peter Fidler, Chesterfield House post journal 1801–2; HBCA E.3/2, Peter Fidler, journals 1791–1800; and HBCA G.1.25, Akkomokki, “An Indian Map ...” HBCA B.39/ a/2, folios 85v–86r: Kioocus, “Map of the Rocky Mountains and Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers”; HBCA B.39/a/2, folio 92v: Akkoweeak, “Map of the Rocky Mountains and Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers”; HBCA B.39/a/2, folio 93r: Akkomokki, “Map of the Rocky Mountains and Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers”; HBCA E.3/2, folio 103v: Akkoweeak, “Drawn by Ak ko wee ak a Black Foot Indian 1802”; HBCA E.3/2, folio 104r: Akkomokki, “Drawn by the Feathers or Ak ko mock ki a Black foot Chief. 1802. Feby”; HBCA E.3/2, folios 104v–105r: Kioocus, “Map of the Saskatchewan and Missouris rivers,” 1802; HBCA E.3/2, folios 105v–106r: [“Fall Indian,”], “Map of the Rocky Mountains and Missouri River,” 1802; HBCA E.3/2, folios 106v–107r: Akkomokki, “Drawn by the Feathers or Ac ko mok ki a Black foot chief 7 Feby 1801”; HBCA B.34/a/1, folio 30r: sketch of the Red Deer, Bow and Millk rivers, 1801. For analysis of these maps, see Binnema, “How Does a Map Mean?” From Rupert’s Land to Canada, ed. Binnema, Ens and Macleod, 201–24. Smithsonian Institution, unknown Assiniboine artist, “Map of the North Side of the Missouri river from Fort Union ... to Fort Benton ... drawn by an Assiniboine warrior at Fort Union Dec. 27, 1853,” reproduced in Warhus, Another America, 180.

NOTES

157

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36 37

158

Joslyn Art Museum, Crazy Mule, map of the upper Missouri River, 1880, reproduced in two articles: Fredlund, Sundstrom and Armstrong, “Crazy Mule’s Maps of the Upper Missouri, 1877–1880,” also Sundstron and Fredlund, “The Crazy Mule Maps.” Smithsonian Institution, Lean Wolf, “Horse Raid along the Missouri River to Fort Buford,” 1881, reproduced in Warhus, Another America, 186. See Klassen, Keyser and Loendorf, “Bird Rattle’s Petroglyphs at Writing-on-Stone,” and Dempsey, “A Warrior’s Robe.” Both Bird Rattle, a contemporary of the Fort Marion prisoners, and Mike Mountain Horse, a Kainai youth who fought in the First World War, contributed to the long tradition of rock, robe and ledger art in the 1920s. Tyrrell, Journals of Samuel Hearne and Philip Turnor, ed. Tyrrell, 485–86, referring to HBCA E.3/1, Peter Fidler, “A Journal of a Journey with the Chepewyans or Northern Indians to the Slave Lake,” 26 June 1792. HBCA G.2/8, Moses Norton, “Moses Nortons Dr t of the Northern Parts of Hudsons Bay laid down on Ind n Information & brot Home by him anno 1760.” HBCA G.2/27, Matonabbee and Idotlyazee, “Captain Mea’to’na’bee & I’dot’ly’a’ zees, Draught. CR,” 1767. Helm, “Matonabbee’s Map,” analyzes this map; cf. Belyea, “Inland Journeys, Native Maps.” HBCA G.2/15, [Andrew Graham], “A Plan of Part of Hudson’sBay & Rivers communicating With the Principal Settlements,” 1772; HBCA G.2/17, [Andrew Graham], “A Plan of Part Of Hudson’s-Bay, & Rivers, Communicating With York Fort & Severn,” 1774. Belyea, A Year Inland, ed. Belyea, 343–68. Birk, “When Rivers were Roads,”The Fur Trade Revisited, ed. Brown, Eccles, and Heldman, 359–76.

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38

39 40

41 42

43

HBCA G. 2/10, Samuel Hearne, “A Map of part of the Inland Country to the N h Wt of Prince of Wales’s Fort,” 1772; HBCA G.2/17, Samuel Hearne, “A Plan of Part of Hudson’s Bay, and Rivers, Communicating with York Fort & Severn,” 1775. Hearne, Narrative of a Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort on Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean, xliii–xlxiv. Lewis, “Maps, Mapmaking, and Map Use by Native North Americans,” Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific Societies, ed. Woodward and Lewis, 149: “features [such as rapids or falls] were common on maps made by Subarctic Indians, always represented by one or more short strokes transverse to the line of the river channel.” Ruggles, “Hospital Boys at the Bay”; Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 49–53. HBCA G. 1/22, Philip Turnor, “A Chart of Rivers and Lakes Falling into Hudson’s Bay,” 1779; HBCA G.2/11, Philip Turnor, “A Chart of Rivers and Lakes Falling into Hudson’s Bay ... And of Rivers and Lakes above Churchill Fort Joining the Same taken from a Journal kept by Malcolm Ross,” 1787–88; HBCA G.2/32: Philip Turnor, “Map of Hudson’s Bay and the Rivers and Lakes Between the Atlantick and Pacifick Oceans,” 1794. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 59–60, observes that Turnor must have revised his 1794 map after it was completed, since the green wash covering the land surface has been scraped and the lines of rivers redrawn. Ruggles suggests that this last-minute revision was in response to the HBC Committee’s reception, in November 1794, of David Thompson’s distances and directions taken along the Saskatchewan and Nelson rivers in 1793–94. HBCA G.2/28, [ John Hodgson], “An Accurate Map of the Territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company in North America,” 1791. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 56–59, presents a careful argument for attribution of the two Albany maps to Hodgson and Edward Jarvis. Most HBC manuscript maps are unsigned.

44

45 46 47

48

49

50

HBCA G.1/13: [Edward Jarvis and Donald McKay], “A Map of Hudsons Bay and interior Westerly particularly above Albany,” 1791. Archives of Ontario F443. Thompson, journals no. 19: 17 September 1809. See Belyea, “Amerindian Maps,” 273–74, 277. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 52–54, 59, 61–63. HBCA E.3/3: Peter Fidler, journal, 18 July 1807; HBCA E.3/4: Peter Fidler, journal, 12 June 1809; see Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 65–66. HBCA G.1/31, Joseph Howse, From York Factory to Split Lake, [1811]; HBCA G.1/35, James Swain, “Map of Severn District laid down from Indian information by Js Swain 1815”; HBCA G.1/27, James Bird, “Sketch of Carlton District by Ja s Bird,” [1815]. HBCA E.3/4, Fidler, journal, 12 June 1809; HBCA E.3/3, Fidler, journal, 18 July 1807; HBCA E.3/3, folio 9r, John Charles, “A Sketch of the Road from the Sandy or Northern Indian Lake, to where M r John Charles built in 1806 – drawn by himself ”; HBCA E.3/4, folios 11v, 12r, 12v, 13r, 17v, 18r: John Charles, Egg Lake “Sketched by M r John Charles 1809”; Towwekishequich, “Drawn by Tow we kish e quih a Nelson River Indian 24th June 1809”; Hugh Sabbeston, Hill River “Drawn by Hugh Sabbeston 1808”; Seeseep, Hill River to Nelson River “Drawn by Seeseep 24th June 1809”; William Cook, “Split & As se an Lakes Drawn by M r Cook 24th June 1809.” John McDonald, “Red River & its communications M r John McDonald AMK & Co,” 1808; HBCA E.3/4, folios 17r, 14r, 15r: Jean Findley, Country west of the continental divide “Drawn by Jean Findley 1806”; Peter Fidler, “James Sutherland’s Track from Edmonton to Acton House 1806”; Chynkyescum, “These two Sketches by Chynky,es,cum a Bungee Chief, 29th May 1809.” See Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 65–66, 280.

51

52 53 54 55

HBCA B.60/a/6, Edmonton House post journal ( James Bird), 1806–7: copied letter, James Bird to John McNab, 23 December 1806. Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 68, 246; Thompson, Columbia Journals, ed. Belyea, 35–53, 209–10. NAC NMC 19686, Aaron Arrowsmith, Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries ... Additions to 1814 (the ninth state of the map). Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 71. HBCA B.51/e/1, folios 1v–2r, Peter Fidler, “A Sketch a la Savage of the Manetoba District 1820,” reproduced in Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 147. “The last map known to have come from Fidler’s pen is dated 1820,” comments Ruggles, A Country So Interesting, 67. “It may have accompanied his first district report. It was his rendition of one or more of the local Indians’ sketches, which he copied or compiled for the use of the company’s officers. In his characteristically honest way he attributed the map as a ‘Sketch a la Savage’ ... Although directions, shapes, sizes, and distances are awry and distorted, relative positions could easily be seen.” But note that the title of this map “a la Savage” is a departure from the usual phrase “laid down from Indian information,” as inscribed on Norton’s and Swain’s maps cited in notes 33 and 48 above. Fidler’s title refers to the style of the map – to its imitation of the Native cartographic convention.

NOTES

159

T H E S I L E N T PA S T I S M A DE T O S P E A K 1 2

3

4 5

160

Cf. Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire, 7–23, and Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, 9–10. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade; Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties; Brown, Strangers in Blood; Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company. Cf. Podruchny’s complementary study, “Unfair Masters and Rascally Servants?”; also Hay and Craven, “Master and Servant in England and the Empire.” Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 36–39, 55–73, 102–3 (the modifer “active” in the phrase “active agents” is redundant, since both words are derived from the same Latin verb; I mention this small etymological point because Van Kirk’s phrase is often quoted); Brown, Strangers in Blood, 66, 73. Cf. Johnson’s earlier comment in her introduction to Saskatchewan Journals and Correspondence, ed. Johnson, c: “Fidler’s wife, who had undoubtedly carried out her share of the women’s duties at Chesterfield House, was to do similar work during trading season 1802–3 and in succeeding years.” Johnson provides no evidence to support this statement. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 39; Brown, Strangers in Blood, 51, 72. According to its title, Van Kirk’s book is a survey from 1670 to 1870; Brown, Strangers in Blood, xx, xiii–xiv, approves a “macrobiographical method” but states that the focus of her study will be on the years after 1780: “The broadest span of time that might define its scope is ...1670 ... [to] 1869–70 ... The uneven amount of evidence within that time span, however, and the salience of certain events after the 1770s in respect to the topics at hand, combine to dictate the focussing of attention on a much narrower period than two hundred years. ... the private letterwriting among traders so valuable to this study is mainly a nineteenth-century phenomenon.” Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 16, states that the period she will study is 1770–1870.

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6 7 8

9

10

Glenbow Archives M8736, Warren Sinclair, “Métis Genealogy Collection,” ed. Jim Bowman, 2002. HBCA A.30/5-10: List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1792–1800. Cf. Brown, Strangers in Blood, 153–54, 158–59: Brown’s references are to the bayside factories (York, Churchill, Moose, etc) and cannot be understood as applying to the inland posts of the Saskatchewan River. HBCA B.24/a/1, Buckingham House post journal (William Tomison), 1792-1793; HBCA B.24/a/2, Buckingham House post journal (William Tomison), 1793- 1794; HBCA B.60/a/1, Edmonton House post journal (William Tomison), 1795–96; HBCA B.49/a/27a, Cumberland House post journal (George Sutherland), 1795–96; HBCA B.24/a/3, Buckingham House post journal ( James Swain), 1795–96; HBCA B.49/a/27b and HBCA B.24/a/4, Buckingham House post journal (Peter Fidler), 1796–97; HBCA B.29/a/2, Carlton House post journal ( James Bird), 1796–97; HBCA B.60/a/2, Edmonton House post journal (George Sutherland), 1796–97; HBCA B.24/a/5, Buckingham House post journal (Henry Hallett and George Sutherland), 1797–98; HBCA B.60/a/3, Edmonton House post journal (William Tomison), 1797–98; HBCA 49/a/28, Cumberland House post journal (Peter Fidler), 1797–98; HBCA B.60/a/4, Edmonton House post journal (William Tomison), 1798–99; HBCA B.49/a/29, Cumberland House post journal (Peter Fidler), 1798–99; HBCA B.60/a/5, Edmonton House post journal ( James Bird), 1799–1800; HBCA B.34/a/1 and B.34/a/2, Chesterfield House post journal (Peter Fidler), 1800–01; HBCA B.39/a/2 and HBCA B.34/a/3, Chesterfield House post journal (Peter Fidler), 1801–02. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 25, 42. Cf. HBCA E.3/1: Peter Fidler, “Journey from Cumberland House to Ile à la Crosse,” 13 September 1790. Fidler comments that Malcolm Ross, who was in charge of the expedition, “had also his woman and 2 children

11 12

13

with him,” and adds parenthetically, “An Indian woman at a House is particularly useful in making shoes, cutting line, netting snow shoes, cleaning and stretching Beaver skins &c, that the Europeans are not acquainted with.” The parenthesis is not a statement of simple fact; it describes a convenient or ideal situation, and use of the singular (“An Indian woman at a House ...”) is interesting counter-evidence for the now-common assumption that several, even many Native women usually lived at interior posts. Brown, Strangers in Blood, 22. HBCA B.24/a/1, Buckingham House post journal (William Tomison), 3 October 1792; HBCA B.60/a/1, Edmonton House post journal letterbook, William Tomison to James Spence, 12 November 1795; HBCA B. 34/a/1 and B.34/a/2: Chesterfield House post journal (Peter Fidler), 26 September and 3 November 1800. Cf. the dimensions of two earlier Saskatchewan River posts: HBCA B.87/a/1, Hudson House post journal (William Tomison), 12 October 1779; HBCA B.205/a/1, South Branch House post journal (Mitchell Oman), 21 December 1786: Hudson House measured 37 by 27 feet, and South Branch House was 36 x 24 feet. Francis and Morantz, Partners in Furs, 24; Trudy Nicks, “The Archaeology of Two Hudson’s Bay Company Posts,” 81: “At Buckingham House there was a two storey trading house and residence complex, [and in addition] an unknown number of men’s cabins”; Francis and Porter, “Archaeological Resource Description and Analysis: Rocky Mountain House,” 80. See Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, for eighteenth-century definitions of “cabin” and “apartment.” Some North West Company posts seem to have had a series of small, separate buildings for the men such as Nicks assumes was the case at Buckingham House. Mackenzie, entry for 23 December 1792, in Journals and Letters of Alexander Mackenzie, ed. Lamb, 247: “set all the men to begin the buildings intended for their habitation. Materials sufficient

14

to erect a range of five houses for them, of about seventeen by twelve feet, were already collected.” Cf. also Archives of Ontario F443: David Thompson, Journals no. 19, plan of Kootanae House, which shows a second building as well as a “Dwelling House”; the second building may have been a trading hall and warehouse, or it may have accommodated his men. However, even the North West Company posts may have accommodated few families in proportion to the number of men. Thompson’s journal entry for 22 July 1807 mentions “13 Men & Women besides 6 Children”; eleven men are named in entries for the winter 1807–8. The total of “13 Men & Women” allows for at most two women. The other woman may have been the wife of Thompson’s clerk, Finan McDonald. In his entry for 21 August 1800, Alexander Henry the Younger named the men and passengers of the brigade travelling to his Pembina post, New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest, ed. Coues, I: 49: the brigade numbered 22 men including Henry, but only four women and four children. The four company personnel with families were Henry himself (“Bourgeois”), a clerk (“commis”), a pilot (“voyageur conducteur”) and an interpreter; none of the common men (“voyageurs”) had a woman with him. Nicks, “The Archaeology of Two Hudson’s Bay Company Posts,” 82; HBCA B.39/a/5b, Nottingham House post journal (Peter Fidler), plan of Nottingham House. On-site interpretation of Buckingham House now includes an image of Fidler’s Nottingham House plan. Later archaeologists probably learned of the plan from Karklins, Nottingham House, published as a Parks Canada monograph in 1983. Cf. HBCA B.205/a/1, South Branch House post journal (Mitchell Oman), 21 December 1786: David Thompson, who wrote the journal for Oman, noted the partitions: “at the East End is the Masters Room 12 Foot long and 24 Broad. the Guard Room is of the same Dimension. at the West End is the mens Cabbins in number 3. each one is 12 foot long and 8 Broad.”

NOTES

161

15

16

17 18

162

Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 113–14, 35, 44. Van Kirk maintains that “native females ... were accustomed to an open expression of their sexuality”; at the same time, she insists that “important factors [such as women’s contributions to post maintenance and trade] ... worked toward stabilizing relationships and promoting long-lasting unions. Marriage à la façon du pays, not prostitution [casual sex?], became the usual relationship within fur-trade society. ... It should be emphasized that the Indians themselves played an important role in ensuring that the usual patterns for sexual relations between their women and the white traders took the form of sanctioned marital unions.” Van Kirk’s arguments are slippery because a time-frame for her statements is so often vague or missing, and because she does not distinguish between relationships of the “traders” and those of the common men. HBCA B.87/a/2, Hudson House post journal (William Tomison, Robert Longmoor), 30 November 1779, 4 and 15 February 1780, HBCA B.121/a/5, Manchester House post journal (Thomas Stayner), 16 February 1790; Brown, Strangers in Blood, 70; Johnson, Saskatchewan Journals and Correspondence, ed. Johnson, 17 note; Thistle, “The Twatt Family, 1780–1840,” 193– 212. Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 203–4; cf. Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 125–26. Brown, “Partial Truths,” From Rupert’s Land to Canada, ed. Binnema, Ens and Macleod, 59–80. Brown borrows her title from James Clifford’s introductory essay in Writing Culture, ed. Clifford and Marcus, 1–26. See also Van Kirk, “Fur Trade Social History,” Old Trails and New Directions, ed. Judd and Ray, 160–173. In 1980 both Brown and Van Kirk considered that their pioneering studies were “only just beginning to unravel the intricacies of the social world of the fur trade”; they expected that their work “would serve to draw other researchers into the field.” Although it has been enthusiastically received and cited in

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

most subsequent fur-trade studies, the work of these historians has not been carefully scrutinized or developed. Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 91, 101, 111, 121–22, 196, 245. Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 2. HBCA A.5/3: HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to David Geddes, 25 April 1794. HBCA A.5/3: HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to David Geddes, 8 March 1796. HBCA A.30/8: “List of the Company’s Servants at York Factory and Inland,” 1798. HBCA A.5/4: HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to David Geddes, 5 February 1799. HBCA A.5/4: HBC Committee (Alexander Lean) to David Geddes, 7 December 1795. Ens, “The Political Economy of the ‘Private Trade’ on Hudson Bay,” Le Castor Fait Tout, ed. Trigger, Morantz and Dechêne, 383–401; Foster, “The Indian Trader in the Hudson Bay Fur Trade Tradition”; Pannekoek, A Snug Little Flock. Brown, Strangers in Blood, 11–13, 20; Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 160. As well as pointing to Laslett’s account of rural English society, Brown has also used the term “military monasticism” to describe the social organization of the bayside posts. Company discipline and sexual abstinence seem ascetic if we think of employees living out their lives in North America rather than working through one or more short-term contracts. If indeed some employees spent their adult lives away from “home,” this choice was not made once and for all. “Monasticism,” suggesting as it does lifelong religious vows, is an inappropriate description of the employees’ commitment to the fur trade. As for The World We Have Lost, Laslett’s view of English history is oddly partial: for instance, he considers the battle of Marston Moor to have been a key event in the transition to modernity, and in discussing this transition he flatly refuses to consider events and

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conditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: “We shall not attempt to deal ... with the course of the secular, overall change which brought about the contrast between our world and the world we have lost. ... all that we shall need to do is to dwell briefly on the England of the early twentieth century in order to point out the contrast as sharply as we can.” The enlightenment that is supposed to result from this sharp contrast remains obscure. So does its relevance to the Hudson’s Bay Company during the focus period of Brown’s and Burley’s studies. Brown, Strangers in Blood, 21. Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 62: “1700–1710 ... is the final decade of the old world for our purposes.” Laslett, 5: “Everyone belonged in a group, a family group. Everyone had his circle of affection: every relationship could be seen as a love relationship.” Brown, Strangers in Blood, 34, defines company organization by a “company man” career profile: “Because his kinship ties in Britain were generally not strong or extensive [an unproven contention], those that became more significant tended to derive from the company and often from his friendship ties with a senior patron within the fur trade.” To counter this view, Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 22, recalls E. P. Thompson’s warning against the “sense of emotional cosiness” that can colour “household” paternalism: it seems to be a “mutually assenting relationship” but is in fact a “concentration of economic and cultural authority.” Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 64–71; Brown, Strangers in Blood, 24–31; see also Nicks, “Orkneymen in the HBC, 1780–1821,” Old Trails and New Directions, ed. Judd and Ray, 102–26. For example, in 1795 Rev. Mr. Liddell of the Parish of Orphir wrote in his contribution to the Statistical Account of Scotland, ed. Sinclair, 19: 406, “Many young men emigrate from hence yearly; some as sailors ... others, and the greatest number, enter into the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company; and instead of ...

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staying at home to cultivate their lands, and protect their wives, their children, and their parents, for the sum of £6 per annum, hire themselves out for slaves in a savage land.” Commenting on Burley’s application of the Laslett model, Stromness historian James Troup points to the poverty of cottar families as well as the lack of a diversified, balanced economy. “Laslett’s household [model is] totally irrelevant to Orkney,” he remarks. “Few of the farms had more than 4 to 8 acres of arable land”; these farms were therefore incapable of supporting a household of farm servants (personal communication, 7 May 2006). Statistical Account of Scotland, ed. Sinclair. Information on land use, economic resources, conditions of labour, social relationships, traditional customs and schooling was requested. Some ministers answered briefly, others at considerable length. Clouston, “Sandwick and Stromness.” Statistical Account of Scotland, ed. Sinclair, 16: 409–468. Clouston made careful enquires of the HBC Committee via their agent in Stromness. HBCA A.5/3: William Clouston to David Geddes 27 May 1794: “I have by this to request the favour of you to hand me Note of the Number of Men from this Country presently in the Service of the Honble the Hudson’s Bay Comy, & for the Capacity in which they serve; ascertaining, as nearly as you can, the Number in each Line, whether Book Keepers, Seamen, Mechanicks, or Labrs with the encouragement given to each class. – As this Acct is to appear in Print, I could wish to have the best information, and not to give it by conjecture.” Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 14–15,19–155, 245, differentiates the “view from the top” and the “view from the bottom”; she indicates “a gap that yawned” between “working men” and “officers” (chief factors and post masters) who commanded them. Certainly in the 1790s and even after reorganization in the early nineteenth century, the management-labour model is too simplistic to account for documentary evidence of administrative decision-making (or lack of it) and the sense

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of “duty” regularly evoked at all levels of operation, from the Fenchurch Street boardroom to the frontier outposts. The Hudson’s Bay Company was an enterprise permeated by what Michel Foucault calls a “discipline.” The striking characteristics of a disciplined organization are a perfusion of power at all levels and the collusion of all participants in furthering its aims, regardless of what may strike us as an unjust distribution of effort, costs and benefits – Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 179: “La surveillance hiérarchisée, continue et fonctionnelle n’est pas, sans doute, une des grandes ‘inventions’ techniques du XVIIIe siècle, mais son insidieuse extension doit son importance aux nouvelles mécaniques de pouvoir qu’elle porte avec soi. ... ce réseau fait ‘tenir’ l’ensemble, et le traverse intégralement d’effets de pouvoir qui prennent appui les uns sur les autres.” HBCA A.30/5-10: Lists of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1792–1800: all company employees, including factors of the Bayside forts, masters of inland posts, ship captains, “writers,” surveyors and surgeons – the “gentlemen” of the service – are listed as “servants” together with steersmen, smiths, carpenters, tailors, sailors, canoemen, and labourers. HBCA A.11/117, Philip Turnor to the HBC Committee, 9 June 1790; Thompson, Narrative, ed. Glover, 55; HBCA B.239/ b/62, William Tomison to John Ballenden, 29 July 1799: Of all the Saskatchewan masters, Tomison most resembles the “patriarchal” model. He demanded decent working conditions for his men inland, insisting that “the Men would not be able to work the Boats to Cumberland House on the allowance served out to them was it not for the Country Provisions they carry Flour, Oatmeal, Barley & Rice are very good in their kind but when Men that labour so hard as they do comes to live upon that only it cannot be called good living.” And Thompson recalled that, while he was recovering from a serious accident, “Mr Tomison behaved with the tenderness of a father to me.” But however grateful he was for Tomison’s care during his long

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convalescence, Thompson rebelled against the “Inland Chief ” and considered him a poor master. Thompson, Narrative, ed. Glover, 52: “He was a truly honest, kind hearted man who would have made a first rate steward, but was not adapted to be at the head of affairs.” HBCA A.30/6-10, List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1795–1800. Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, 21–22, distinguishes between the power of the officer’s commission and the personal authority of his experience and tact. HBCA B.34/a/1-3 and B.39/a/2, Chesterfield House post journals (Peter Fidler), 1800–1802. HBCA B.49/a/27b, Buckingham House post journal (Peter Fidler), 1796–97; HBCA A.30/7, List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1796. Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 223. Rodger, The Wooden World, 16–29. TNA Admiralty Papers. In a petition handed to Lord Spencer, the first Lord of the Admiralty, the Spithead mutineers complained of low wages, short provisions and rotting foodstuffs, inadequate care for the sick, and refusal of shore leave when in port. To these grievances the Nore mutineers added the long delays in paying wages, cruel and unjustified punishments, and unfair distribution of prize money in war. Both groups insisted on pardons for having mutinied. After repeated refusals to accommodate such demands, the Admiralty at last accepted those made at Spithead, but there was no question of further concessions or pardon at the Nore. Burley, Servants of the Honorable Company, 223. Dugan, The Great Mutiny, 90, suggests that the mutineers imitated the new democratic practices of France and America: “the ships’ companies elected ‘speakers’ who were to transform ship democracy to a fleet republic. In a handful of days British naval peasantry traversed political ground that the nation had not yet crossed in

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a millennium. The all-fleet committee ... derived its laws and precedents from the United States Congress and French Assembly, the Irish underground, and the forbidden British reform societies.” Dugan’s Irish-American loyalties blind him; he wants to see the mutinies as forerunners of revolution. But no seditious literature was found on any of the ships, nor did any of the mutineers express disloyalty to the Crown and the political status quo it represented. TNA Admiralty Papers. “The Humble Petition of the seamen on board His Majesty’s Ship [blank] in behalf of themselves and all others serving in His Majesty’s fleets,” sent to Richard, Lord Howe, February 1797. TNA Admiralty Papers. “To the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty,” 18 April 1797. TNA Admiralty Papers. Minutes of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, 19 April 1797. Private collection. Copies of Papers Found in Possession of Mutineers on Board H. M. Fireship Comet, 1797, quoted by Dugan, The Great Mutiny, 251. TNA Admiralty Papers. “The Delegates of the different ships at the Nore assembled in Council, to their fellow-Subjects,” May 1797. TNA Admiralty Papers. George, Lord Spencer to Alexander Hood, Lord Bridport, 4 May 1797. TNA Admiralty Papers. Reports of Courts-Martial on Board H. M. S. Neptune: Trial of Richard Parker, 22–26 June 1797; PRO Ad. 2/133. Evan Nepean to Alexander Hood, Lord Bridport, 24 April 1797. TNA Admiralty Papers. Charles Buckner to the Delegates at the Nore, 27 May 1797. TNA Admiralty Papers. Reports of Courts-Martial on Board H. M. S. Neptune: Trial of Richard Parker, 22–26 June 1797; cf. the last words of one of the Bounty mutineers, quoted by Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language, 41: “Take warning by our example

55 56 57 58 59

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never to desert your officers and, should they behave ill to you, remember it is not their cause, it is the cause of your country that you are bound to support.” Richard Parker’s last letter, 27 June 1797, quoted by Dugan, The Great Mutiny, 350. HBCA A.30/7-10, List of Servants at York Factory and Inland, 1797–1800. HBCA B.239/b/61, Joseph Colen to George Sutherland, 1 July 1797. HBCA B.239/b/60 and B.239/b/61, John Moore to Joseph Colen, 20 June 1798. HBCA B.239/b/61, George Sutherland to Joseph Colen, 31 July 1797. Cf. HBCA B.239/b/57, David Geddes to Joseph Colen, June 1796: “Several [men] wishing to return made Application for more Wages; this the Company decline; referring to the Chiefs & Council for a regular advance according to their Merits while they continue in the Service.” Men could and did negotiate contracts with inland Masters, the Chief at York Factory and Geddes, all of which were subject to approval by the London Committee. This situation often left men uncertain and suspicious that better deals than their own had been made at one or other of these levels. The men’s response was to try for unprecedented wages – Geddes, the HBC agent at Stromness, mentions that “Stout green Hands ask for £10 for 3 Years,” although the going rate for inexperienced, unskilled Orkneymen was £6 a year. HBCA B.239/b/61, Malcolm Ross to George Sutherland, 20 May 1797: in this letter Ross announces Thompson’s desertion to the North West Company. HBCA B.239/a/60 and B.239/ a/61, George Sutherland to William Tomison, 10/11 August 1798; HBCA B.239/a/60, Malcolm Ross to William Tomison, 20 September 1798. Sutherland writes of Tomison’s “sordid disposition”; Ross calls the Inland Chief “malicious” and ends his letter by wishing Tomison “that Blessing you have not enjoyed

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for a long time that is peace and harmony with those around you.” HBCA B.239/b/61, Joseph Colen to Angus Shaw, 20 July 1797. HBCA B.239/b/60, William Tomison to Joseph Colen, 18 July 1798. HBCA B.239/b/63, Joseph Howse to James Bird, 23 October 1799. HBCA B.239/b/63, James Bird to John Ballenden, 4 August 1799. HBCA B.239/b/63, Joseph Howse to John Ballenden, 5 August 1799; HBCA B.239/b/63, James Bird, Peter Fidler and Joseph Howse to the York Factory Council, 12 August 1799. HBCA B.239/b/63, James Bird to Peter Fidler, 30 August 1799.

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OU T SI DE T H E CI RC L E 1

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Smithsonian Institution, Lean Wolf, untitled map, 1881, reproduced in Mark Warhus, Another America, 186. On the imminent disappearance of Amerindian cultures, Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 182, quotes George Catlin’s statement of purpose, in Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of North American Indians, 1: 16, as typical of “white American” attitudes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Catlin declared he would come to the “rescue” of Native peoples – “not of their lives or of their race (for they are doomed and must perish), but to the rescue of their looks and their modes ... [so that] phoenix-like, they may ... live again upon canvass, and stand forth for centuries yet to come, the living monuments of a noble race.” The emphasis is Catlin’s. The work of Cushing, Benedict, Walker, Mandelbaum and many other ethnographers of Amerindian cultures has been fuelled by similar contradictory aims. Deloria, Jr., Spirit and Reason, ed. Deloria, Foehner and Scinta, 48, 55. Alfred, Peace, Power and Righteousness, xi, xxi. Cushing, Zuni, ed. Green, 148. The emphasis is Cushing’s. Geertz, “ ‘From the Native’s Point of View,’ ” Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Basso and Selby, 235–36, remarks on “significance”: “What do we claim when we claim that we understand the semiotic means by which ... persons are defined to one another? That we know words or that we know minds? ... Understanding the form and pressure of ... natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an illusion, seeing a joke ... than it is like achieving communion.” Cushing, Zuni, ed. Green, 67. Hughte, “A Zuni Artist Looks at Frank Hamilton Cushing,” was a travelling exhibition sponsored by the Maxwell Museum, University of New Mexico, 29 January – 15 April 1994. Hughte drew cartoons depicting the ethnographer dressed in “Native” clothes and a feathered

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headband. The caption to the last cartoon reads: “Cushing ... died in 1900 by ... swallowing a fish bone. ... Notice that the feather is falling off. That is the end of Cushing. This was a fun drawing to do.” Walker, “Autobiographical Statement,” in Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, ed. DeMallie and Jahner, 49. James Walker to Clark Wissler, 30 July 1925, in Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, ed. DeMallie and Jahner, 43. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 16. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 5, 10, 15–16. Watson, “Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Culture Concept,” 690, comments that “in sociocultural anthropology over the past forty to fifty years, there has ... been a proliferation in approaches to culture from the earlier essentialist concept to cultures as configurations of a psychological sort, as a series of distinct cognitive maps, as symbolic and/or adaptive systems, as infinitely varying surface phenomena that may reveal deep truth about universal thought processes, as social knowledge networks, and as trait-complexes studied within neo-Darwinian frameworks.” Practitioners can still be found for them all, though Lewis Binford’s 1962 Darwinian definition of culture as “man’s extrasomatic means of adaptation” (quoted by Watson, “Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Culture Concept,” 686), seems to have weathered less successfully than the “semiotic” approaches of Geertz and Clifford. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 19. Ethnohistorians are still mulling over the problems and direction that Geertz set in 1973 – see, for example, Brown and Vibert, “Introduction,” Reading Beyond Words, ed. Brown and Vibert, ix–xxi. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 14. Geertz defines context as “something within which [the culture under study] can be intelligibly – that is, thickly – described”; Clifford, “Partial Truths,” Writing Culture, ed. Clifford and Marcus, 6, defines context as the “meaningful social milieux” which ethnography both describes

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and creates; Fabian, “Ethnographic Misunderstanding and the Perils of Context,” 42, explains that “context is usually invoked to point out shortcomings or misconceptions that arise when analysis falsely reifies items or entities, confuses logic with explanation, or sells generalizations as cultural universals.” Meaning reverberates between the “text” (a cultural sign or group of signs) and the “context” (the significant milieux), so that one is easily – too easily – used to explain, justify and document the other: the result is tautological. The shuttle between text and context leaves the anthropologist, who defines both text and context, in control of “meaning” ... or out of control, as the case may be. Clifford, “Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture, ed. Clifford and Marcus, 2, 6: “Ethnographic writings can properly be called fictions in the sense of ‘something made or fashioned,’ ... it is important to preserve the meaning not merely of making, but of making up.” Jackson, “ ‘I am a fieldnote’: fieldnotes as a symbol of professional identity,” in Fieldnotes, ed. Sanjek, 15, 17, 22, 28. Foster, “Fieldwork in Tzintzuntzan: the First Thirty Years,” Long-Term Field Research in Social Anthropology, ed. Foster, Scudder, Colson and Kemper, quoted as an epigraph in Fieldnotes, ed. Sanjek, 45. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 314–18. Cf. Derrida, De la grammatologie, 171: “La ‘Leçon d’écriture’ ... installe incontestablement une prémisse – la bonté ou l’innocence des Nambikwara – indispensable à la démonstration qui suivra, de l’intrusion conjointe de la violence et de l’écriture.” The Nambikwara are innocent (ignorant) of the “proper” use of writing, which is to disseminate information, yet the chief ’s imitation demonstrates his awareness of the political power of writing as a tool of oppression, which convinces Derrida that the Nambikwara are not innocent at all. The ethnographer’s pose as a worldly intruder into a primitive society is undermined by the chief ’s cunning.

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Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 13. Stocking, Jr, Observers Observed, 108, quotes and paraphrases Bronislaw Malinowski: “The ethnographer not only is capable of sharing [his subjects’] vision of their world, but he knows things about it that they will never know, and brings to light phenomena which ‘had remained hidden even from those in whom they happened..’” Cf. Sontag, “The Anthropologist as Hero,” Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Hayes and Hayes, 184–97. Clifford, “Partial Truths,” Writing Culture, ed. Clifford and Marcus, 14. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 18. For example, Hymes, “Use All There is to Use,” On the Translation of Native American Literatures, ed. Swann, 85, 87, 89: “There remains the general question: how should texts be put on the page? ... There is no single answer to the question, how much to adapt, how much to preserve ... We are concerned to convey the voice of performance in various ways, by indicating loudness, quietness, raspiness, and the like.” Neither Hymes nor Tedlock pauses to ask if transcription – the transformation of performance into text – might be inappropriate, destructive, even fallacious. Hartman, Saving the Text, xx, remarks that “to see writing as silent speech is already to misunderstand it and to reduce its force. ... What complexity have we overlooked or suppressed – perhaps what threat have we warded off – by ‘forgetting’ writing, a forgetting that includes its reduction to the status of a mere technique, to a function of voiced and prior thought?” Hartman insists (following Derrida), that writing is not simply a technique for setting down speech. Nor can it be a transcript of an “essence” of that speech – a code, or message, or “prior thought.” Nevertheless some form of recording is the standard ethnographic response to performance. The archival instinct is deep in European-derived cultures, which are based on the literatures of Antiquity and the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. Cf. Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale, 9, 26: “En vertu

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d’un préjugé déjà ancien dans nos esprits, et qui informe nos goûts, tout produit des arts du langage s’identifie à une écriture, d’où la difficulté que nous éprouvons à reconnaître la validité de ce qui ne l’est pas. ... [d’où,] chez l’ethnologue, le folkloriste ou l’historien de la littérature, la conviction que la poésie orale est pour lui autre, alors que l’écrite lui est propre.” The emphasis is Zumthor’s. Cf. note 15 above. Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales, xiii. Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales, 185–86; cf. James Walker to Clark Wissler, 14 March 1916, Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, ed. DeMallie and Jahner, 39: “The professional story tellers of the Lakota ... tell their stories at the winter camp, usually prolonging the story during the entire occupancy of the camp.” Grinnell, Blackfoot Lodge Tales, 153. Cushing, Zuni Folk Tales, 262–63. Benedict, Zuni Mythology 2: 314. Benedict, Zuni Mythology, 2: xii. Mead, Ruth Benedict, 29–30. Hymes, “Reading Clackamas Texts,” Traditional Literatures of the American Indian, ed. Kroeber, 117–18. Hymes works with texts previously transcribed in Native languages, with the aim of improving the translation into English, although he deplores the fact that “Native American literature” is almost always published in translation. Benedict, Zuni Mythology, 2: 314, lists a variant in which the birds are geese rather than ravens; Hymes, “Use All There is to Use,” Recovering the Word, ed. Swann and Krupat, 87–88, quotes a similar Klamath story starring Coyote and Thunderbird. Ramsey, Coyote Was Going There: Indian Literature of the Oregon Country, 245–47, re-tells a Paiute story told by Bige Archie, collected by Isabel Kelly. Cf. Charles Woodard’s interview with N. Scott Momaday, in Woodard, Ancestral Voice, 57–58:

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Q. There are similarities between the Kiowa and the Lakota accounts [of a boy who turned `into a bear.] ... What of the possibility that [these accounts] originated separately? ... A. There are two levels of truth here. One [is the] storyteller’s creation ... and [the other is] the reality that the rock was a tree, and that the boy turned into a bear ... So both things are true, and you choose the one you want. ... Q. You say that without irony? A. No. I say nothing without irony. [Both laugh.] Tedlock, Finding the Center, 77; Tedlock, “From Voice and Ear to Hand and Eye,” 140; Tedlock, “The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation in American Indian Religion,” Traditional Literatures of the American Indian, ed. Froeber, 45. James Walker to Clark Wissler, 11 February 1910, in Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, ed. DeMallie and Jahner, 23. James Walker to Clark Wissler, 15 July 1910, in Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, ed. DeMallie and Jahner, 23. However, the relationship between orality and textuality is not simple, especially given the variety and pervasiveness of recording media. As Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale, 30, points out, “Les voix ... qui résonneront demain auront traversé toute l’épaisseur de l’écriture.” I can suggest two examples of double transmission, oral and textual, which also involve recorded sound transmission. One example: at the Canmore Folk Music Festival, 2–4 August 2003, Leon Bibb sang “No More Cane on the Brazos”; his son Eric Bibb sings it on a CD (Eric Bibb, Home to Me, cut 8) and writes that he learned the song from Odetta. Similar songs (“variants”) were sung by inmates of Texas prisons in 1964–65 and transcribed in Wake Up Dead Man, ed. Jackson, 73–75, 115–18. A second example: Ramsey, Coyote Was Going There, 100–101, includes Dell Hymes’s reworking of “Seal and her Younger Brother Lived There,” narrated by Victoria Howard in 1929 and published by Jacobs, Clackamas Chinook Texts, 2: 340–41. An English colleague told me this story of Seal ten years

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ago, over lunch in London; his wife had narrated it to him after hearing it on the radio. DeMallie and Jahner, “Preface,” to Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual, ed. DeMallie and Jahner, xxi: “the Colorado Historical Society [the repository of Walker’s papers] ... received requests from the Oglala community at Pine Ridge for copies of the material ... for use in Oglala history classes. Mimeographed notebooks of the myth cycle have been widely circulated among the Lakotas, fulfilling a deeply felt need for materials relating to their traditional religion and culture.” Walker’s papers were published in part to satisfy this demand. In this way, as Walker had promised, the elders he had known were able to pass on something of their knowledge to their descendants, who have revitalized it. In contrast to oral tradition, textualizing has an inhibiting effect; the text is like a snapshot that freezes time, while oral transmission is a flow open to change, whether of loss or elaboration. Mandelbaum, The Plains Cree, xiii–xiv. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” Writing Culture, ed. Clifford and Marcus, 112–13, comments that the “disappearing object” of “salvage ethnography” justifies the practice: “The rationale for focusing one’s attention on vanishing lore, for rescuing in writing the knowledge of old people, may be strong ... I do, however, question the assumption that with rapid change something essential (‘culture’), a coherent differential identity, vanishes. ... It is assumed that the other society is weak and ‘needs’ to be represented by an outsider (and that what matters in its life is its past, not present or future).” This is precisely the reasoning of Hymes’s claim to intervene, as a non-Native linguist, in the “salvaging” of Native narratives: Hymes, “Anthologies and Narrators,” Recovering the Word, ed. Swann and Krupat, 42: “Where continuity in the ancestral language has been broken, for Indian and nonIndian alike, the patterning has to be brought to awareness by the discovery of an appropriate method. ... For the present, most

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work of this kind is done by persons trained in the kind of attention and discovery required by descriptive linguistics. ... it will always be desirable to have both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ share the work.” Mandelbaum, The Plains Cree, 167–68. James Clifford, “Notes on (Field)Notes,” Fieldnotes, ed. Sanjek, 57; Clifford, “Partial Truths,” Writing Culture, ed. Clifford and Marcus, 12. Clifford, “Notes on (Field)Notes,” Fieldnotes, ed. Sanjek, 54. Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale, 32, 35. Alfred, Peace, Power and Righteousness, 10–11, 145. Deloria Jr, Red Earth White Lies, xv. Medicine, Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native,” 3. Medicine quotes Deloria Jr, Custer Died for Your Sins, 275: “This book has been the hardest on those people in whom I place the greatest amount of hope for the future – Congress, the anthropologists, and the churches.” Medicine points out that most readers, including Native readers, respond to Deloria’s criticism of these institutions without registering his faith that they can do better than their practices have so far demonstrated. Deloria comes from a family distinguished for its church leaders (his father and grandfather) and for exceptional contributions to anthropology (his aunt Ella Deloria, who was a researcher for Franz Boas and later published under her own name). Deloria himself holds degrees in theology and political science, and he taught for many years at the University of Colorado-Boulder. As one of the family, Medicine is aware of the complexity of Deloria’s heritage, experience and thoughtful advocacy. Medicine, Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native,” 6–7. Medicine, Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native,” 13. Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 54–58, 62, 64. Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 66.

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Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 68. Cf. Crowshoe and Manneschmidt, Akak’stiman, passim: in meetings on the Peigan reserve in southern Alberta, the pipe ceremony which traditionally confirmed decisions is replaced by signing and sealing a document, while the traditional role of tobacco cutter (the person who prepared the ceremonial pipe) is assumed by a secretary who writes the minutes. Writing has thus been accepted in a negotiation process that is still considered traditional. Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 52, 68. Cruikshank, ed., Life Lived Like a Story, 12, 14–16. Cruikshank, ed., Life Lived Like a Story, 16–17. Cruikshank, ed., Life Lived Like a Story, x–xi, 1, 13–16, 18. Cf. Kehoe, “Transcribing Insima, a Blackfoot ‘Old Lady,’” Reading Beyond Words, ed. Brown and Vibert, 381–402. Cruikshank, ed., Life Lived Like a Story, 2, 16; cf. 17: “Although there is undoubtedly loss in form and style, the narrators are at least able to retain their own rhythm and idiom, their own expressions, the nuances of their unique narrative performances.” Just how much loss of “form and style”? We are to believe that oral qualities are transmitted in the text despite editing that involves conversion of these performances into written form, “distill[ing]]” them (“the accounts are edited for length ...”), rearranging them (“... to bring together materials recorded in many different sessions and over many years as one continuous narrative” ), and imposing foreign literary norms on the textual presentation. Cruikshank, ed., Life Lived Like a Story, x, 1, 3, 15–16. Cruikshank, ed., Life Lived Like a Story, 16. Three pages on, Cruikshank herself calls the notion of legitimacy into question – Life Lived Like a Story, 19: “Does a written version suddenly come to have an authority that makes it the socially ‘correct’ version to the exclusion of others? ... Does writing down oral tradition make it seem less urgent to continue telling stories now that a record exists?” These are reasonable doubts. But

55 56 57 58

59 60

61 62

63 64 65

Cruikshank does not try to answer them, nor are they uppermost in her mind as she selects, abridges and publishes a single written version of each woman’s “life-story.” Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 15. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 68. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 58. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 106, 92, 107–10. In the same story Robinson compares Coyote’s moonwalk with Neil Armstrong’s; later, to explain Coyote’s stop-start return to earth, Robinson mentions a space voyage which encountered similar difficulties. The reference to the lost spaceship grows longer and longer with more and more explanatory details, even a farewell letter which the doomed astronaut ties to a piece of wood (“somehow he must have carry wood or something”) before tossing it earthwards. When the astronaut settles into permanent orbit, Robinson can turn to Coyote again and tell of the landing near Lytton. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 53. N. Scott Momaday, interviewed in “New Perspectives on the West,” produced by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives (Public Broadcasting System), transcription at <www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/ program/producers/momaday.htm> 12 September 2003. Cf. a Native history ( Joseph Medicine Crow, From the Heart of Crow Country) and a non-Native telling of the Native “side” of history (Hoxie, Parading through History). Woodard, Ancestral Voice, 15. King, “Introduction,” All My Relations, ed. King, xii–xiii; see/ hear also King, The Truth About Stories, available in print and CD formats. Thomas King, question-and-answer session with Narcisse Blood at the University of Calgary, 12 November 2003. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 118. Robinson, Write It on Your Heart, ed. Wickwire, 64.

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68 69

70 71 72 73 74

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King, Green Grass, Running Water, 414–16, 350. Following Robinson, King combines biblical stories and Coyote stories, often as jokes. Here is the one about Christ walking on water: “That’s a really good trick,” says Coyote. “Yes,” I says. “No wonder this world is a mess.” “Maybe the – ah – [disciples] would follow me,” says Coyote. “Now that’s a really scary thought,” I says. HBCA E.3/2, Peter Fidler, “Journal of a Journey over Land from Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains, in 1792 & 3.” Murray, “Fur Traders in Conversation,” discusses the usefulness of fur-trade journals as ethnographic documents; her example is Daniel Harmon’s record. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 8 November 1792. HBCA E.3/1, Peter Fidler, “A Journal of a Journey with the Chepawyans or Northern Indians, to the Slave Lake ... in 1791 & 2.” HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 30 January 1793, 29 December 1792. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 16 December 1792. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 12 December 1792. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 6 March 1793. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 31 December 1792. The site is Utsitakaspi, on the south side of the Oldman River. The story is included in the Nitsitapiisinni exhibition at the Glenbow Museum, Calgary: “While travelling along the mountains one day, Napi met the Creator of the Westside People ... They had an argument as to which one of them was more powerful. Napi suggested they settle it by playing the wheel and arrow game while using their power. The Westside Man agreed, so Napi levelled out a mead-

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75 76 77 78 79 80

ow right where they were sitting.” They played for a long time. Napi was losing, so he asked for just one more game, this time for everything. ... His luck turned and in one shot, he beat Westside Man. Right there he turned the river loose, and it started down the mountain toward the plains. That river was the Oldman River, and that is why it is called that today, to remind the people of Napi’s adventure. In his journal Fidler notes the name of the river as “Naw pew ooch e tay cots” and includes a sketch of the gambling place. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 12 December 1792. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 12 December 1792. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 31 December 1792. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 28 January 1793. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 28 January 1793. Cf. David Thompson’s Narrative of his Explorations in Western America, ed. Tyrrell, 91–92; David Thompson’s Narrative, 1784–1812, ed. Glover, 80–81: Thompson witnessed the escape of a Cree conjuror who was similarly bound. Thompson suspected that “the apparent fast knots, were really slip knots ... I became convinced the whole was a neat piece of jugglery.” The Orkneymen with Thompson insisted that “if they had the tying of him, he would never get loose, this I told the Indians, who readily agreed the Scotchmen should tie him ... In about fifteen minutes, to their utter astonishment, all the cords were thrown out in a bundle, the Rattle, and the Song [was heard] in full force, and the conjuring box shaken, as if going to pieces.” Although he refrained from commenting on this second feat, Thompson recorded the responses of the others present: “my men were at a loss what to think, or say. the Natives smiled at their incredulity.”

81 82 83 84

HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 28 January 1793. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 28 January 1793. HBCA E.3/2, Fidler, “Journal of a Journey ... to the Rocky Mountains,” 31 January 1793. Watson, “Archaeology, Anthropology and the Culture Concept,” 690: “In spite of episodic skeptical crises within anthropology, and a chronic agoraphobia about where our center is and where our boundaries are, anthropology is still here – even Geertz gives it another half-century.” While Watson looks forward, Geertz himself looks back to the work of Lévi-Strauss and concludes with a question – Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 345–47: “What, after all, is one to make of savages? Even now, after three centuries of debate on the matter [five, actually: Las Casas and Montaigne began this discussion early in the sixteenth century] – whether they are noble, bestial, or even as you and I ... after all this, we still don’t know. For the anthropologist, whose profession it is to study other cultures, the puzzle is always with him. ... Know what he thinks a savage is and you have the key to his work. ... All ethnography is part philosophy, and a good deal of the rest is confession. ... Every man has a right to create his own savage for his own purposes. Perhaps every man does.” In this savage comment Geertz reveals the key to his own work and the longstanding problématique of the discipline.

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R ECORDINGS Bibb, Eric. Home to Me, produced by Dave Bronze, Dave Williams and Eric Bibb. Redway, California: EarthBeat! Records, 2000. King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: a Native Narrative. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2003.

WEBSITES Beck, Harry. Map of the London Underground. 29 September 2003. Momaday, M. Scott. interviewed on “New Perspectives on the West,” produced by Ken Burns and Stephen Ives. Public Broadcasting System. <www. pbs.org/weta/thewest/program/producers/momaday.htm> 12 September 2003.

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INDEX

A

B

Académie des Sciences 3, 33 Akkomokki 38, 46-48, 51, 64, 67, 68, 75, 86 Akkoweeak 46, 63, 68, 86 Acton House 86, 93, 95 Albany Factory 22, 78, 97 Alfred, Taiaiake 109, 111, 120 Allen, John Logan 32, 33, 36, 39, 45, 48 Allen, Paul 48 American Philosophical Society 33 Arapaho 61 Arrowsmith, Aaron 9, 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 44–49, 73, 84, 86, 87 Assiniboia 90 “Assiniboine Warrior” 68, 73, 75 Athabaska, Lake 15, 22, 25, 27, 81 Athabaska (region) 18, 19, 27, 29, 81, 105 Atsina (Fall Indian, Gros Ventre) 36, 46, 66

Bad Heart Bull, Amos 57 Bagrow, Leo 55 Banks, Joseph 4, 7, 46 Barrington, Daines 7 Barkley, William 7 Basquia 76 Bastien, Betty 121, 122 Bear’s Heart 62 Beartooth Mountain 35, 36 Bellin, Jacques-Nicolas 53, 54, 73, 75 Benedict, Ruth 115, 116, 117 Biddle, Nicholas 48 Bird, James 81, 91, 101, 105, 106 “Blackfoot” maps 41, 46, 51, 63–68, 73 Bougainville, Louis-Antoine 3, 4 Bow River 68 Braudel, Fernand xiii Brosses, Charles de 4 Brown, Jennifer S. H. 90, 96, 97, 99, 100, 106 Bruce, Benjamin 91 Buache, Philippe 2. 52, 53

Buckingham House 28, 36, 91, 93, 95, 101, 106, 126 Buffalo Lake 127 Burley, Edith 97, 98, 99, 101, 102 Byron, John 4, 6

C Carlton House 101 Carteret, Philip 4, 6 Certeau, Michel de xiii Chachaypaywayti 55, 81 Charles, George 22, 24 Charles, John 81 Chesterfield House 49, 68, 86, 91, 95 Chesterfield Inlet 25 Cheyenne 56, 61, 68 Cheyenne River 41 Chief Mountain 35, 36, 39, 45, 46, 47 Christ’s Hospital 22 Churchill 18, 21, 22, 27, 29, 73, 75, 81, 97 Churchill River 18, 28 Chynkyescum 83, 86

Clark, Willliam 31–37, 39, 40, 45, 47–49, 55, 68, 73, 78 Clark Fork River 47 Clifford, James 112, 119 Clouston, William 100 Colen, Joseph 18, 19, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29, 105 Colnett, James 7 Columbia River 12, 17, 31, 36, 41, 45, 86 Comanche 61 Cook, James 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 33 Cook, William Hemmings 81, 86 Coppermine River 9, 74, 75 Coyote 115, 116, 124–26 Crazy Mule 68, 73 Cree 53, 118, 126 Cruickshank, Julie 122 Cumberland House 18, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 77, 78, 81, 91, 97, 106 Cushing, Frank 111, 112, 115–17 Cut Nose 47 Cutright, Paul Russell 32

INDEX

185

D Dalrymple, Alexander 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 25, 27, 46 Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas 2, 3 Deloria, Vine Jr 109, 111, 120 Dene (Chipewyan) 75, 126 Dening, Greg xiii De Voto, Bernard 32 Dixon, George 1, 3, 7, 9, 12, 25 Dobbs, Arthur 6 Dollond, John and Peter 6 Donald, George 22 Douglas, John 4, 7, 12 Dubawnt Lake 24 Duncan, Charles 7, 12, 25

E Edmonton House 86, 93, 101 East India Company 25

F Fidler, Mary 91 Fidler, Peter xi, xii as HBC winterer 36, 126–29 as HBC surveyor 9, 25, 27, 29, 36, 40, 41, 51, 78, 80–87 as HBC trader 91–93, 95, 101, 102, 105, 106 and Amerindian maps 38, 47, 48, 51, 55, 63–67, 73, 78, 80–87 Findley, Jean 82, 86 Flathead Lake 86

186

Flett, William 98 Fond du Lac River 27 Fonte, Admiral de 7, 9 Fort Buford 109, 110 Fort Mandan 35, 36, 39, 40, 49 Fort Marion 58, 61, 62, 68 Foucault, Michel xiii Francis, Peter 95 Fuca, Juan de 7, 12

G Gaddy, James 91, 102 Geddes, David 98, 104 Geertz, Clifford112–14, 129 Glover, Richard 17 Graham, Andrew 72, 75 Gray, Robert 12, 86 Great Falls 35, 39, 48, 86 Great Lakes 53, 78 Great Mutiny 102–4, 106 Great Slave Lake 9, 24, 25, 27, 126 Grey Coat Hospital 21, 22, 78 Grinnell, George Bird 114, 115, 116, 120 Gros Ventre 36, 46

H Hadley, John 6 Hallet, Henry 91 Halley, Edmund 6 Hanna, James 7 Hansom, Joseph 22 Harvey, P. D. A. 55 Hawkesworth, John 4

DA R K S TO R M M OV I N G W E S T

Hayes River 19 Hearne, Samuel 7, 9, 18, 75, 76 Heckrotte, Warren 32, 45, 46 Hidatsa 36, 39, 41, 68, 109 Hodgson, John 22, 23, 78 Honanistto (Howling Wolf ) 57, 60, 68 Howse, Joseph 81, 86, 105, 106 Howse Pass 86 Hudson, George 22, 24, 25, 100 Hudson Bay 9, 17, 21, 27, 73, 75, 77, 101 Hudson’s Bay Company 9, 15, 17–19, 45, 46, 51, 73, 78, 86, 90, 91, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105, 126 Hymes, Dell 115, 116

I Idotlyazee 70–71, 75 Ile à la Crosse 25, 27 Iroquois 86 Isham, Charles Thomas 22, 24

J James Bay 22, 78 Jarvis, Edward 78, 79 Jefferson, Thomas 31–33, 36, 39, 40, 46

K Kainai (Blood) 121, 122, 128 King, James 4 King, Nicholas 35, 36, 39, 40, 45

King, Thomas 124–26 Kioocus 46, 48, 65, 75, 86 Kiowa 59, 61, 62, 125 Kootanae House 94 Kootenay Plains 86 Ktunaxa (Cottona haw, Kootenay) 78, 127

L Lac la Biche 105, 106 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy xiii Lakota (Sioux) 68, 112, 117, 118 La Pérouse, Jean-François de 3 Laslett, Peter 99, 100 Laughton, Gilbert 102 Leach, William 98 Lean, Alexander 46, 98 Lean Wolf 68, 73, 75, 109, 110 Lemhi Pass 48 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 112, 113, 122 Lewis, G. Malcolm 57, 61, 75, 81 Lewis, Meriwether 31–33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 41, 47–49 Lewis, Samuel 48 London Committee (HBC) 18, 19, 21, 25, 27, 28, 45, 46, 87, 91, 98, 99, 101 London Underground 53 Long Knife (George Sword) 117 Longmoor, Robert 24, 100

M Making Medicine 58, 62 Marias River 31, 35, 36, 39, 40, 48, 68 Mackenzie, Alexander 13, 17, 25, 27, 33, 45, 46, 78 Manchester House 24, 25, 96 Mandan 36, 39, 41, 47 Mandan villages 35 Mandelbaum, David 118, 119, 121, 126 Manitoba District 85 Maskelyne, Nevil 6, 22 Matonabbee 70–71, 75 Maty, Mathew 6 McKay, Donald 78, 79 Meares, John 1, 7, 9, 11, 12, 25 Medicine, Bea 121 Middleton, Christopher 6, 9 Milk River 35, 39, 40, 68 Minimic 61 Missouri River 31, 33, 35, 36, 38– 41, 45, 46, 48, 49, 51, 57, 68, 86 Momaday, N. Scott 124, 125 Moore, John 104 Moose Factory 22, 78 Moulton, Gary E. 32, 33, 39, 48, 55

N Nambikwara 113, 114 Napi 114–16, 120, 127, 129 Nelson River 28, 73

Nez Perce 68 Nicks, Gertrude 95 North West Company 15, 18, 19, 25, 27, 73, 78, 81, 90, 97, 105, 106 Northwest Passage 1, 7, 9, 12, 13, 15, 18, 25, 27, 39 Norton, Moses 69–71, 73 Nostishio 96 Nottingham House 92, 95

O Ojibwa (Bungee) 86 Oldman River 127 Ordnance Survey 33 Orkney 21, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104

P Parker, Richard 104 Patagonia 6, 7 Pawnee villages 35 Pikani (Muddy River Indians, Peigan) 45, 68, 96, 114, 126–29 Pine Ridge 112, 119 Playfair, John 40, 41, 47 Pond, Peter 8, 9, 13 Porter, Jack 95 Prince William Sound 1, 3, 9, 12

Q Queen Charlotte Islands 7, 9

R

South Branch House 21, 25 Spence, James 91, 96 Spence, Magnus 102 Stayner, Thomas 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27–29, 96 Swain, James 81, 91, 101 Sutherland, George 21, 91, 105 Sutherland, James 84, 86 Sweetgrass Hills 36, 39, 68

Ray, Arthur J. 89 Reindeer Lake 15, 27, 28, 29 Roberts, Henry 4, 5 Robertson, John 22 Robinson, Harry xiii, 123–26 Rocky Mountains xi, xii, xiii, 17, 24, 39, 41, 45, 46, 57, 68, 86, 97, 120 Ronda, James P. 32, 39, 47, 55, 73 Ross, Malcolm 15, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27–29, 91, 105 Royal Navy 4, 13, 46, 102–4, 106 Royal Society 4, 6, 9, 33 Ruggles, Richard 24, 25, 55, 86

T

S Sabbeston, Hugh 81 St Lawrence River 17 Saskatchewan River exploration 18, 22, 24, 28, 78 maps 35, 39, 42–46, 51, 63–68, 73, 75, 86 posts 81, 90–93, 95, 96, 100, 101, 104–6 Severn Factory 75 Sheheke (Big White) 47 Shewditheda 26, 27 Shoshoni (Snake Indian) 126–29 Siksika (Blackfoot) 121 Sinclair, Sir John 99 Sinclair, Warren 90, 91 Sitting Bull 68 Smet, Pierre-Jean de 61

Tedlock, Dennis 116, 117, 122, 123 Thompson, David15–19, 22, 25, 27–29, 78, 81, 86, 94, 100, 105 Three Stars, Clarence 117 Tomison, William 18, 19, 21, 24, 28, 91, 95, 101, 105 Trans-Mississippi West 35 Turnor, Philip 9, 15, 20, 22, 24–28, 42–43, 45, 77, 78, 81, 100 Twatt, Magnus 91 Tyrrell, J. B. 17, 73

U United States Army 56, 62

V Vancouver, George 3, 12, 13, 33, 45, 78 Vancouver Island 12 Van Kirk, Sylvia 90, 95–97, 106 Veyne, Paul xiii

INDEX

187

W Wales, William 6, 9, 22 Walker, James 111, 112, 117–21, 126 Walker, William 19 Wallis, Samuel 4 Ward, John 126 Warhus, Mark 55, 68 Webber, John 4 Wedderburn, Andrew 18 Wegg, Samuel 9, 24, 25 Wickwire, Wendy 123, 124 Winnipeg, Lake 17, 53, 78 Wishart, Edward 21 Wissler, Clark 112, 118 Wohaw 59, 62, 68 Wounded Knee 112

X XY Company 81, 95

Y Yellowstone River 35, 36, 40, 41, 73 York Factory 15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 28, 73, 75, 77, 90, 91, 97, 101 Yukon 122

Z Zuni 111, 115

188

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B E LY E A

DARK STORM ± MOV ING

DARK STORM

B A R B A R A B E LY E A Barbara Belyea is a faculty professor in the English department at the University of Calgary. Her multidisciplinary interests include literary theory, the history of publishing, fur-trade exploration and the history of cartography.

MOVING WEST

The essays in Dark Storm Moving West trace three phases of exploration in western North America: naval and fur trade ventures on the Pacific coast; traders’ progress along interior rivers and lakes; and the transcontinental Lewis and Clark expedition, which used maps based on fur trade surveys. Author Barbara Belyea poses challenging questions about the fur trade’s rapid expansion as well as Native/non-Native definitions of space and communication of traditions. In this book Belyea introduces Peter Fidler as an important documentary source by frequent reference to Fidler’s journals, maps, and reports, most of which are still unpublished.

MOVING WEST

DARK STORM

WEST±

www.uofcpress.com 978-1-55238-182-3

BA R BA R A BE LY E A