North of Athabasca: Slave Lake and Mackenzie River Documents of the North West Company, 1800–1821 ed. by Lloyd Keith (review)

430 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 relaxed its claim on >Grove= and lost some interest, although other critics are staking claims >in the name of other nations and causes.= One such critic is Martens, the European editor of Pioneering North America, whose introductory synopsis of Hjartarson=s essay misrepresents it slightly. According to Martens, Hjartarson suggests >Grove= lent some >European sophistication= to the Canadian literature he helped create; rather, Hjartarson argues that >Grove= was created by the nation and its need for a national literature. No mention is made of >European sophistication.= (DENISE ADELE HEAPS) Lloyd Keith, editor. North of Athabasca: Slave Lake and Mackenzie River Documents of the North West Company, 1800B1821 McGill-Queen=s University Press. xviii, 504. $65.00 Keith=s annotated edition of fur-trade documents is an exceptionally fine volume. Eleven journals written by men who served in the Slave Lake or Mackenzie River districts before 1821 constitute the book=s core, although the editor=s contextualization and explanation of those documents are what distinguish the project. Taken collectively, these writings convey important details about the trade not only as a commercial undertaking, but as an essential social factor in the relations between European and aboriginal peoples. To have made these documents accessible is a significant achievement. The section entitled >North West Company Documents= offers journals kept by James Porter and John Thomson in 1800 and 1801; journals kept between 1802 and 1807 by W.F. Wentzel, Alexander McKenzie, Alexander Henry, Jr, and George Keith; and W.F. Wentzel=s journals and >Account of Mackenzies River,= covering the period 1805 to 1821. Each journal entry is preceded by a biography of its keeper, usually several pages in length, that focuses on his role in the trade. But North of Athabasca is far more than a collection of previously unpublished documents. The section in which the documents appear is preceded by an eighty-page >Historical Background= that is simultaneously detailed enough to inform the specialist, but clear enough to provide a solid foundation for readers from other disciplines. This >Historical Background= section weaves together an introduction to the region and its Aboriginal inhabitants, a brief history of the North West Company and of the trade in the Slave Lake and Mackenzie districts up to 1800, a discussion of the arrival of opposition in the Athabasca, subsequent declining returns, and the years immediately preceding amalgamation in 1821. Woven within this historical overview are subsections that address, as each becomes chronologically appropriate, the journals collected in the documents section. These subsections, which constitute introductory summaries of the eleven humanities 431 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 documents, enable the reader to understand the importance each plays in constructing a history of the period. Thus, through shifting back and forth between his own historical narrative and these summaries of what the individual journals contain, Keith provides a context in which to value the journals. While a small confusion arises from separating the introductory discussion of the journals from the journals themselves, this minor difficulty is more than compensated for by the extremely thorough and helpful information North of Athabasca contains. The reader simply needs to flip back and forth between the two sections in order to reap the full benefit of Keith=s work on any specific journal. Access to these seminal documents is especially important in today=s multidisciplinary academy, where boundaries between history, life writing, anthropology, and the like become increasingly blurred. Yet because readers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds often know little about this highly specialized subject, even published documents remain relatively inaccessible unless a great deal of editorial assistance is provided. This is where North of Athabasca excels. In addition to Keith=s >Historical Background ,= the pages of the journals themselves are carefully annotated with explanatory information essential to understanding the frequent abbreviations and specialized terms used by the traders. There are probably more than seven hundred notes to the eleven journal entries alone, supplemented by several hundred more for the >Historical Background= section. Readers will find both helpful explanations and specialized information in the notes, which offer the editor=s...