In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Youngsters "in the Great Lone Land":Early Canadian Adventure Stories
  • Patricia Demers (bio)

In early Canadian adventure stories for children, there are no pirate maps marking secret island treasures, no cannibal raids on exotic South Sea paradises, no epic ascents of African mountains in search of long buried gold and diamonds. The challenge is closer to home. In fact, it is the home itself—grim, austere, rigorous, and untracked, as well as haunting, beautiful, rich and expansive. Not only does the land provide the spectacular canvas for these tales, it also assumes the role of a character, sometimes to be explored, tramped over, and fondly recalled, sometimes to be tamed, conquered and cut down to size. These books contain meticulously observed details of the various land forms, stretching from Newfoundland outports to the Hudson Bay posts in the north of Manitoba. The lost children, plucky schoolboys and young soldiers, hunters, fishermen and naturalists whose stories take place in these locales are resourceful and self-reliant, and have close-to-incredible endurance. They are fit matches for the land.

In fact, praising the tenacity of youngsters exposed to obstacles like inclement weather, unmarked terrain, rapacious animals, and enemy attack is the unifying motive behind all nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Canadian adventure stories. The six I have chosen to discuss are a representative selection. Catharine Parr Traill's The Canadian Crusoes (1851) relates the survival adventures of three children, a Scottish brother and sister and their French cousin, who lose their way during a berry-picking expedition in the woods surrounding Rice Lake, Canada West (close to present-day Peterborough, Ontario); Hector and Catharine Maxwell and Louis Perron spend a remarkably productive three years roughing it in the bush. James De Mille's The "B.O.W.C." (1869) tells of the holiday adventures of a highspirited fraternity of vacationing Acadian schoolboys, the Brethren of the Order of the White Cross; Bart Damer and his Brethren embark on a week's cruise around the Minas Basin aboard a leaky washtub called, in "delightful jest," The Antelope. G. A. Henty's hero in With Wolfe in Canada (1887), is almost beyond schoolboy pranks and innocent camaraderie; although only a teenager at the start of his adventures in the Colonial Wars, James Walsham rises to become a Major by the age of twenty-three. Dutiful and patriotic, James not only engages in the campaigns of Washington and Johnson, but functions as the crucial scout at the Battle of Quebec (1759), thus mapping the strategy for Wolfe's victory over Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. Another kind of Anglophilia informs Egerton Ryerson Young's stories of the summer and winter experiences of a trio of British lads spending a year in northern Manitoba, in Three Boys in the Wild North Land Summer (1896) and Winter Adventures of Three Boys in the Great Lone Land (1899). The Hudson Bay post and its environs become the classroom as, under the tutelage of a retired factor, Sam, Alec and Frank learn to hunt and trap, skin and skate, ride and picnic. Naturalist lore on a smaller and less rugged scale is the heart of the matter in Ernest Thompson Seton's Two Little Savages; Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They learned (1906); Sam and Yan are the would-be Indians who, thanks to the care they lavish on their sketches and notes about the terrain and animals, experience a certain communion with the land near Lindsay, Ontario. Finally, Norman Duncan celebrates the fortitude and geniality of the outport dwellers of Newfoundland, still a half-century away from Confederation, in The Adventures of Billy Topsail (1906), a series of episodic tales about a young Ruddy Cove native. Sealer and fisherman, errand boy and neighbor, Billy typifies the indomitable Newfoundland spirit.

While it is true that the overall aim of these books is the praise of Canadian—in some cases, British—resourcefulness, the authors each bring to their stories a particular knowledge of the land that colors and largely determines the narrative style. Catharine Parr Traill (1802-1899) had established a reputation as a writer of factual accounts about Canada—in...

pdf

Share