Civilising the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Rupert’s Land by A.A. den Otter (review)

Professor A.A. den Otter’s Civilising the Wilderness has been, as he points out, a long time on the “back burner.” Conceived in the 1980s as he wrote his Civilising the West: The Galts and the Development of Western Canada, this sequel has benefited from considerable extended archival research and from a recognition of the potential for a wider audience interested not only in the development of the Canadian West but in environmental history and the history of ideas.

The heart of the book consists of several of the author’s earlier essays on the wider implication of the Sayer Trial at Red River, on the ideology of Bishop David Anderson and the responses of the Hudson’s Bay Company to the 1857 parliamentary inquiry into the affairs of Rupert’s Land. To these has been added an introduction that draws together some of the literary, historical, and religious origins of the Victorian construction of civilization and wilderness: of “civilized” and “savage.”

Like other contemporary writers, the author sees that the wilderness begins not only at the visible edge of the bush but in the imagination of generations of Europeans. Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are assembled here to give us glimpses of the power of that imagination as well as the despair it could induce. The naturalist P.H. Gosse, Father Lescarbot, and Principal Dawson demonstrate the European drive to observe, collect, and classify its produce. The Toronto Globe extolls the opportunities for wealth, and the engineers, those particular heroes of Samuel Smiles, map and build the railroad tracks while colonial politicians negotiate the inevitable rapids. The mid-Victorian vision for the future of the Northwest depicted here is “a heady melange of capitalism, imperialism, technological progress and Evangelical enthusiasm.”

den Otter conveys with much evidence and authority the sense of duty and certainty of purpose that lay behind these imperial views. Individual and collective duty are concepts that are often difficult to convey to contemporary students, who are more accustomed to a secular world view and increasingly conscious of the consequences of colonialism. The essays here on the Reverend William Mason and Reverend Robert Rundle and on the roles of the Indigenous converts, of Reverend Henry Steinhauer and the Reverend Henry Budd, of Bishop Anderson’s writings, and of Governor Simpson’s testimony offer evidence for the most secular of readers.

A final chapter on the historians of Red River presents a case study of the changing ideological perspectives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although den Otter breaks little new ground here, the essay remains a useful introduction to the writings of a diverse group of scholars. With the addition of contemporary studies, such as Emma LaRocque’s When the Other Is Me, this would be a reasonable starting point for a general reader or for a senior seminar in Canadian history.

Perhaps unavoidably for a study that links diverse case studies to a dominant theme, the book at times seems repetitive, although individual chapters can stand alone and the author has effectively linked each chapter to its successor. The writing is broadly accessible and free of the dense jargon of postmodern social science. The bibliography, with the addition of current works such as Tolly Bradford’s study of Reverend Henry Budd in his Prophetic Identities, and Andrew Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison, would offer graduate and undergraduate students a solid introduction to the field.

Some of the broader generalizations, for example, that loss of land might be of greater significance for Indigenous peoples than adoption of a new religion, will bear further study. One might question the argument that the Métis’ search for economic opportunity at mid-century may be considered a rejection of the ideology of their mothers’ people, or perhaps some would challenge what seems to be an underlying assumption that democracy is a...