The Slocan: Portrait of a Valley (review)

The Slocan, a narrow, beautiful valley in the West Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, is hardly, as Katherine Gordon avers, a microcosm of western Canadian and western American history, but a great deal has gone on there. Following the decimation of the Native population by a succession of smallpox epidemics, there have been influxes of hardrock prospectors and miners, orchardists, Doukhobors, Japanese evacuated from the coast during the Second World War, and hippies. There have been thoroughly industrial economies, and economies of multiple occupation dependent on family labour. There have been those who sought a livelihood in the valley and those who sought an escape from the world. The valley is fascinating, and considerably written about. Now Katherine Gordon, a freelance writer who grew up in New Zealand, has written a comprehensive popular history, which, measured by sales, is an unqualified success.

An easy academic condescension could be brought to bear on a book like this. On the main events in the valley, such as the coming of the miners, the Doukhobors, or the Japanese, it is almost entirely derivative and not always correct. Nor is it connected to larger literatures or to larger bodies of ideas. It is amateur local history. And yet, this book is a success, and in various, largely unintentional, ways it speaks to the broad academic project of interpreting early Canada. Let me explain.

Gordon is at her best when telling stories about ordinary people. She has done a lot of listening, and has got into attics and collections of family letters and photographs. In the stories she draws from such sources is a vivid picture of, essentially, strategies of survival in a setting where the agricultural opportunity was limited and people put together bare livelihoods by scrounging such local work as could be found. It is the recurrent pattern along the northern edge of the North American ecumene. The stories Gordon unearths in the Slocan Valley have long precedents. They were told almost anywhere in the Maritimes, or, for that matter, as Gerard Bouchard has reported, in the Saguenay. Pluriactivité he called it. The ingredients in different locations were much the same: an increasingly industrialized staple trade, patches of land with limited agricultural potential, irregular seasonal employments, and little opportunity for the next generation, many of whom would leave. There is much here to think about and work with.

Gordon deals with a variety of different peoples who, by and large, succeeded each other in the same place. In most of eastern Canada different peoples established themselves in different places, quickly filled them, and deflected newcomers. In this respect, the pattern in the Slocan Valley – and perhaps in many other parts of western Canada – does not replicate eastern experience. This too bears thinking about.

But the most important aspect of Katherine Gordon's book is that it is widely read. Why is this so? She writes well enough, but with no particular flair. I think it is because people recognize themselves in this book, and do so partly because they connect with the stories but also because the stories are situated in a comprehensive picture of a place moving through time. Some excellent regional academic histories are being written in Canada these days – one on the Eastern Townships by Jean-Pierre Kesteman, et al., is probably the best I know – but the strong tendency is in the other direction. Historians work on specialized topics and connect them, if they can, to international literatures. It is the prevailing model of academic success, but it omits a scale in which people can situate themselves and hardly does what good history has always had a responsibility to do: that is, acquaint people with themselves by explaining whence they have come. If historians don't do this, others less professionally qualified will. Katherine Gordon is one such, and she has written an attractive and useful book.