6. Canada: The Land and the People

LEITERS IN CANADA: 19,0 31J 6. Canada: The Land and the People J. M. S. CARELESS The books of the past year that fall within this category include reference works, regional histories, university memorial volumes, and books on ski-ing, fishing, mountain-climbing, and folk songs. Under the circumstances, generalizations do not come easily. Two might still be hazarded : first, that although there is greater variety this year in the books on the land and the people there are not as many good regional studies as in the year preceding; second, that in the period at present under review much of the most interesting regional writing deals with the Canadian West. Two new volumes in the "Rivers of America" series examine the greatest waterways of the plains and the mountain West, The Saskatchewan and The Fraser. The Saskatchewan, by Mary Wilkins Campbell, has a sweep as wide as the prairies in treating the river that "drains the Rocky Mountains into the Atlantic Ocean," and the people that have lived beside it. The first half of the book, on the fur-trade era, deals more directly with the Saskatchewan, since it was then the main highway through the empty plains. The river itself declines in significance as the age of settlement begins and as the railway takes over its task of transportation. Yet still it plays a major part in prairie growth, whether to frustrate or to encourage. The spring floods and summer shoals of the Saskatchewan defeat the steamboat; its waters in a trough cut deep into the plains mock drought-stricken farms above. But in these waters lies the hope of irrigation, while along the river's banks in its two-thousand-mile course a varied and distinctive life has developed. Such is the theme of The Saskatchewan. One might wish that, given this theme, the author had expressed it more forcefully. This is not really a powerful book. Yet it is obviously written with devoted care for the subject, and lucid as it is, remains a useful and handsome addition to Mrs. Campbell's previous writing on the prairies. The Fraser, by Bruce Hutchison, is a more powerful effort. Here the skill of a first-ranking journalist has been combined with a novelist's imagination and an ardent British Columbian's knowledge of his ·river. As a result the significance of the Fraser, which has meant for Canada in the West something of what the St. Lawrence has meant in the East, has never been better portrayed. The course of the Fraser, piercing the western mountain walls, provides the chief avenue of communication between eastern Canada and the Pacific 316 THE UNIVERSITY' OF TORONTO QUARTERLY coast. Yet the river finds that course through the massive barrier only after a tortuous and furious struggle. In his pictures of the black Fraser canyons Mr. Hutchison vividly shows the violence of the struggle. He develops his narrative around it, from the dangerous river passage of the first explorers to the tragic ventures of the Over· landers of 1862 and after. The Cariboo gold rush, "Hanging Judge Begbie," the railways, the salmon, the fishing: all the colourful variety of the river's past and present is deftly paraded. But the final im· pression is the timeless violence of the Fraser, beside which man is "the fragment of a passing dream." A forceful book, indeed. It is to be regretted, however, that the rather flat illustrations do not convey the same sense of the river's turbulent strength. In contrast to The Fraser, Measure of the Year by Roderick Haig. Brown deals with country life on Vancouver Island in a mood of quiet reflection. It chronicles the changing seasons as they affect the author and his family in the seemingly idyllic woodland surroundings of Campbell River. Its sensitive and precise observations on the natural setting, its birds, animals, trees, and flowers, are interspersed with informal little essays on a host of subjects: forest conservation, hunting and fishing, individual liberty, the amateur spirit, the making of a library. There are personal reminiscences as well, including a thoughtful and gently humorous account of the author's role as a country magistrate. This is but...