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Reviewed by:
  • Dark Storm Moving West
  • Gerhard Ens
Dark Storm Moving West. Barbara Belyea. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007. Pp. 200, $49.95

In the introduction to Dark Storm Moving West Barbara Belyea informs the reader that the title to her collection of essays is intended both as an image and metaphor to signify the economic, political, and social conditions attributable to the fur trade that initially brought benefits to Native people, ‘but before long the trade proved destructive to those that had welcomed it’ (xi). This is surely false advertising. Nothing in this collection substantiates these statements, nor indeed does any of the analysis directly focus on these issues. If these essays have any unifying theme it is their unflinching critique of Western science and ways of knowing, and of historians who have covered this terrain before. The book is attractively laid out with beautifully reproduced maps (both Western and Native), but this handsome presentation belies a contradictory and somewhat ill-tempered argumentation.

The first few essays in this volume introduce the main concerns of the author, but do not much advance our understanding of the topics covered. In ‘Myth as Science: The Northwest Passage,’ Belyea wanders over the vast geographic and intellectual terrain that was the search for the Northwest Passage and the mapping of the Northwest Coast to conclude that the claim for a scientific method by George Vancouver was more scientific prejudice than scientific practice (13). The essay, however, is almost impossible to follow without a detailed knowledge of this exploration literature, and even then the returns are slim. In ‘David Thompson, hbc Surveyor,’ Belyea is more informative, explaining Thompson’s reasons for leaving the Hudson’s Bay Company to join the North West Company in 1797. In the process she also provides a useful account of the nature of fur-trade exploration and surveying, and the progress of Thompson’s career. This essay also introduces a second tendency of these essays – the creation of historiographic ‘strawmen’ to be demolished by Belyea’s revisionism.

The third and fourth essays more directly engage the exploration and mapping of the western Interior by both Europeans and Natives. In ‘Decision at the Marais,’ Belyea examines the dilemma of Lewis and Clark in June 1805 on arriving at the junction of the Missouri and [End Page 589] Marais rivers and having to decide which the mainstream was, as they were on a mission to follow the Missouri to its source. After nine days they made the correct decision, but Belyea gives them little credit, arguing that the decision was based largely on Native informants who Lewis and Clark had been slow to believe, and whose spatial and topographic concepts they remained blind to.

The topic of Native topographical concepts and mapping is further explored in ‘Mapping West of the Bay.’ Fur traders, whose acculturation to indigenous societies made them more open to Native mapping conventions, often used these conventions in producing sketch maps as route finding aids. Even fur traders, according to Belyea, never fully understood that Native maps were not simply route-finding equivalents, but represented a radically different conception of space inherited from an ancient graphic tradition. While Belyea has a good number of interesting things to say about Native mapping conventions, her argument for connecting these conventions to ‘pre-historic art’ by way of nineteenth-century ledger art is speculative at best.

The most contentious and problematic essays in the book are the last two, both of which deal with Peter Fidler in some way. In ‘The Silent Past Is Made to Speak,’ Belyea takes aim at those social and labour historians who have portrayed fur-trade posts as ‘mixed-blood’ communities, and hbc labourers as members of a working class. Based on a limited number of eighteenth-century Saskatchewan River post journals, Belyea notes that few make mention of women and children. From this lack of evidence, Belyea then concludes that ‘either we can assume that the Saskatchewan River journals of the 1790s reflect an incredible degree of censorship and repression of daily facts of life, or we can suspect that relatively few “lower-ranked employees” had families living at the post’ (92–3). While...

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