Beneath My Feet: The Memoirs of George Mercer Dawson (review)

What constitutes a person’s memoirs? According to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the plural form denotes ‘an autobiography or a written account of one’s memory of certain events or people.’ In this interesting volume on the life of the pioneering Canadian geologist and ethnologist George Mercer Dawson (1849–1901), the award-winning popular writer Phil Jenkins explains that what began as a biography eventually (d)evolved instead into what he also describes as Dawson’s ‘ghost-written’ autobiography. Jenkins means that, after encountering the truly massive collection of Dawson’s personal and family papers in the McGill University archives, he simply ‘laid out’ Dawson’s many letters ‘in a narrative line forty-five years long.’ ‘In creating a coherent narrative,’ however, ‘parts of some letters were moved to the times they described,’ with others rearranged ‘to ensure a narrative flow.’ ‘Every fact in this memoir is Dawson’s fact,’ Jenkins assures us, ‘as is every description of his travels.’ While Jenkins estimates that ‘close to ninety-five percent of the book is written in his [Dawson’s] own words,’ he [Jenkins] ‘tidied up’ the overall work ‘to best tell the story of a man who led a heroic life, and who deserves to have his story on as many bookshelves as possible.’

Jenkins is certainly right in his appraisal of Dawson’s importance in Canadian history as well as the spellbinding nature of his influential professional career. The son of the Nova Scotian geologist Sir John William Dawson (1820–99), principal of Montreal’s McGill College through most of the latter half of the nineteenth century, George was born into Canada’s scientific elite, educated at London’s prestigious Royal School of Mines, and then appointed to undertake the Geological Survey of Canada’s first forays after Confederation westward into British Columbia and northward into the Yukon during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. His accomplishments appear all the more remarkable in light of severe physical challenges that resulted from a childhood bout with tuberculosis of the spine. As a leader among the second generation of professional Canadian geologists, Dawson contributed not only to the geological and mineralogical mapping of enormous territories, but also to major theoretical issues confronting the science of the day, including the roles of both evolution and glaciation in shaping the country’s landforms and their denizens. His own interest in ethnology and anthropology also helped to shape government policy toward British Columbia’s Native peoples, as well as initiating the museum collections of native artifacts that, for better or worse, sought to preserve these items for posterity.

For all these reasons, Jenkins’s timely book makes fascinating reading, and it is no surprise that he found himself captivated by Dawson’s vivid scientific, literary, and artistic legacy. But there is no attempt in Jenkins’s approach to set any of Dawson’s many achievements into any kind of larger context. How, for example, are uninitiated readers to understand his unofficial observations about his Native guides? More poignantly, while we learn in an entire chapter about the devastating impact of the unrequited love of Dawson’s life, the lack of context does little to explicate what exactly happened, and what we might be able to learn about Victorian society from the ways in which both his family and others responded to his tragic disability. In the end, it is even unclear whether this animated reprinting of Dawson’s own letters is at all sufficient to convey the enormous significance of Dawson’s professional accomplishments.

For historians, who ought long ago to have risen to the considerable challenge of providing a definitive biography of Dawson, this work raises still more fundamental questions. Without a single citation or even a single quotation mark throughout this book, how can we tell which 5% of the words do not belong to Dawson or, for that matter, when (and where, and for whom) he wrote the remaining 95%? In an irony that Jenkins himself recognizes, Dawson...