Yankees in Canada: A Collection of Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives ed. by James Doyle (review)

444 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 james Doyle, editor. Yankees in Canada: A Collection of Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives ECW Press 1980. 231. $7.95 paper 'When you come into Canadafrom Britain,' a traveller once remarked, 'the people seem very Yankeefied; when you come in from the States, they seem very British: The American travellers whose views are presented in James Doyle's Yankees in Canada vary in response to the 'Britishness' of Canada: pity for this North American neighbour resisting its manifest destiny; amusement at the ox-cart quaintness contrasted to the get-along modernity of the States; delight that the garrison gentry had preserved one last frontier where Americans could enjoy the wilderness sport. An image of our country emerges, important to political and social historians, and of general interest as a study in preconception and perception. Thoreau, for instance, ashe travelled beyond Montmorency in 1850, responded with surprising tension to the myriad small waterfalls not even on his map - and to the myriad crutches hanging in the miraculous chapel at Ste Anne de Beaupre - equally not on the mental map of a New Englander. We deepen our understanding of Thoreau's responses by following Doyle's selections from earlier travel books, some of which Thoreau had consulted before setting out for Canada. In 1798 Benjamin Mortimer, a Moravian missionary from Pennsylvania, had described the astonishing Canadian prospect of Niagara Falls. In 1799 a post-revolutionaryTory named Ogden had gloried in Canadian order, 'an happy harmony' lost in the home republic. In 1820 Joseph Samson, veteran of the War of 1812, had sneered at the sleepy, unimproved countryside on the road to Quebec. Indirectly, by his choice of these readings, and directly, in his excellent introductory notes, Doyle clarifies the kind of tension built up in Thoreau between his expectations and the Canadian facts, 'until finally, with the frustrated yet relieved air of a man who has abandoned a conundrum without solving it, Thoreau turns back to the relative simplicity and freedom of New England: The sequence of readings is always provocative: HenryJames's delicate tracing of the European qualities of Quebec follows a comic piece on the Plains of Abraham, 'where the French was slew'd'; Whitman's exuberance as he reports halcyon days among hay-makers near Lake Huron follows Charles Haight Farnham's dark description of forest-bound loneliness hundreds of miles north 'as the loon flies ... over unbroken spruce forests: Hamlin Garland concludes the series with a vigorous report on the Klondike trail, and once again the image of a last untouched post-Turnerfrontier is tempered by two precedingselectionsemphasi2ing tourist comforts on the new transcontinental trains - amenities showing 'English regard for comfort and safety and order: HUMANITIES 445 Grouping all these disparate writers as 'Yankees: Doyle emphasizes subtly our own tendency to stereotype. Canadians, and their British visitors, have always used this generic term for Americans. In fact, as Doyle's brisk headnotes show, these 'Yankees' came from south and west, as well as from New England. Doyle's useful bibliography reminds us that he has chosen eighteen from a list of seventy American visitors. In the same period over four hundred British travel books on Canada were published. The American travellers are not on the whole as lively or as articulate as the English, Scots, and Irish in the Weld-Dickens-TrollopeButler line. But in the end the 'Yankees' may be more important. 'It is of good profit to us: HenryJames said to his American readers, 'to have near us, and of easy access, an ample something which is not our expansive selves.' James Doyle's book offers to Canadian readers an easy access to American perceptions of our 'otherness: (ELIZABETH WATERSTON) Leslie Monkman, ANative Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature University of Toronto Press. xiv, 193. $25.00 Images of savage antagonism or admirable reconciliation, of nostalgic primitivism or lamentable degeneration, frame the discussion by Leslie Monkman in his interesting account of the ways in which EnglishCanadian literature has incorporated its indigenous subjects, 'eagerly sucking at the symbols' of Indian life in James Reaney's phrase. Monkman's book is a useful addition to an understanding of the relationships between...