My First Years in the Fur Trade: The Journals of 1802-1804, and: From Barrow to Boothia: The Arctic Journal of Chief Factor Peter Warren Dease, 1836-1839 (review)

The fur trade is back - well, fur-trade documentary publishing is making a comeback at any rate. In the 'golden age' of writing about the fur trade (prior to the 1950s), when fur traders like La Vérendrye, Samuel Hearne, Alexander MacKenzie, and David Thompson were deemed to be critical figures in the mythology of Canadian nation-building, fur-trade documentary volumes were published yearly by the Champlain Society and the Hudson Bay Record Society. Since the late 1960s and the 1970s, however, as fur-trade scholars moved away from imperial themes and a preoccupation with Euro-American dimensions of that history to focus on Aboriginal roles and the socio-cultural aspects of the trade, fur-trade documentary publishing declined precipitously. In part, this was due to a growing scepticism about the uncritical use of published primary documents as a window on objective truth, but also because most published fur-trade documents contained little about Native history. By the 1980s the Hudson Bay Record Society was defunct.

The pendulum of scholarly interest has begun to swing back. The current fascination with colonialism/post-colonialism and the deconstruction of colonial systems of representation has produced a renewed attention to fur-trade texts. In order to 'read beyond the words' we still need texts to analyse and read beyond. In the last half-dozen years there has been a plethora of fur-trade texts rolling off the presses with more in the planning and editing stages. The two books under review here are part of these trends and are published by the Rupert's Land Record Society and McGill-Queen's University Press, a more than welcome successor to the Hudson's Bay Record Society.

My First Years in the Fur Trade, the fur-trade journals of George Nelson between 1802 and 1804, is an excellent addition to the fur-trade library. Nelson was not only an astute observer of the fur trade and Native life, but he left behind two separate accounts of this period in his life. The original 1802-4 journals of Nelson's first years in the fur trade in the Folle Avoine District (south of Lake Superior) have not survived, but Nelson rewrote these journals in 1811 while he was stationed on Lake Winnipeg and sent them to his father in Lower Canada. Twenty-five years later, following a chance meeting with a former fur-trade colleague, Nelson went over the same events again when he wrote a series of lengthy memoirs. What the editors have done here is reproduce the 1802-4 journal written in 1811, including excerpts of the later 1836 memoir where it comments on and supplements the description of events in the journal. These documents offer the reader a rare stereoscopic view of not only Nelson's apprenticeship in the fur trade as a fifteen-year-old, but of the ways in which self-censorship and the play of memory could affect the depiction of events in fur-trade documents. The journal written for his father in 1811 varies in significant ways from his later memoir, particularly his account of his first marriage to an Ojibwa woman.

On the whole, Laura Peers and Theresa Schenck have done an excellent job in editing and annotating these writings. The introduction both contextualizes Nelson's life and writings, and provides just enough background to the fur trade at the turn of the nineteenth century to allow the uninitiated to make sense of these documents. The brief...