Cabbages Not Kings: Towards an Ecological Interpretation of Early Canadian History

Cabbages Not Kings: Towards an Ecological Interpretation ofEarly Canadian History RAMSAY COOK Thefollowing paper was delivered as the W.L. Morton Lecture at Trent University in October 1990. Since ancient and mediaeval times the plough has often been a metaphor for the pen, the parchment an untilled field. So it was appropriate that W.L. Morton should open his autobiographical essay, "Seeing an Unliterary Landscape," this way: "The walking plough tipped with its point set to slip into the sod, its mouldboard gleaming a lambent silver polished by miles of turning soil, jerks as the horses lean into their collars, and the furrows roll." Those lines, he said, summed up "his clearest images" of a boyhood on his father's farm at Third Crossing, near Gladstone, Manitoba. And the essay went on to explain how the farmboy became a writer, the plough exchanged for a pen. It is not, however, the echo ofancient poetry that interests me. Rather it is that this formative experience seems to explain why W.L. Morton, no matter how diversified his historical interests became - Red River, Manitoba, Confederation, the Canadian identity - never completely departed from a conviction expressed in one ofhis earliest published essays. "History is concerned with more than ecology," he contended in 1946, "but it is concerned with ecology too." Much of the history that Morton wrote, and certainly that classic of Canadian historiography , Manitoba A History (1957), was informed by an understanding gained while walking behind a plough: the history of the Canadian west was the story-of the struggle ofEuropeans with the often hostile environment ofAmerica. Red River was a microcosm where "on the one hand was the sedentary agricultural economy ofthe colony, on the other the nomadic hunting economy of the plains." 1 Though the mouldboard walking plough, as Morton realized, was an "archaism" in his time, it was nevertheless a revolutionary instrument, "one of the greatest of history's transforming tools.""Grassland and forest," he wrote, "oakgrove and prairie steppe, each has eroded before its trenchant and rendering coulter, the wilderness become field and lawn.... The new landscape was that standard in North America, the homestead with shelter bluff, square white house, and long red barn... . Around the homestead the fields and pastures spread out to the fenced limits ofthe farm, usually the road allowances."2 In these few sentences Morton captured the central elements ofan ecological interpretation ofthe history notjustofThird Crossing, but of much of the New World. "Wilderness," as Europeans called the lands occupied Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 25, No. 4 (Hiver 1990-91 Wimer) 5 by America's aboriginal peoples, became "field and lawn," occupied by European peoples. Both the natural and the human worlds - in other words, the ecology were transformed by the plough. That was one - but only one - ofW.L. Morton's insights into the history of his society, one learned neither at the University of Manitoba nor at Oxford, but on the rolling fields of southern Manitoba. It is an insight which I would like to try to build upon. But in doing so I wanted to begin by reminding myselfand others that this generation ofhistorians has no more claim to the discovery ofecological history than Columbus had to the discovery ofAmerica. Others, including W.L. Morton, have long since known that place. Perhaps T.S. Eliot had historians in mind when he wrote that We shall not cease from exploration And the end of our exploring Will be to arrive where we started AEd know the place for the first time.3 In a broad sense the writing ofCanadian history has always been concerned with the environment. The story of opening up and developing a new country had, in significant measure, to be an account of the reshaping of the environment by fur traders, mining companies, the assault on the forest, as well as the furrowing and fencing ofthe land. Though it is not the fault of Carl Berger's The Writing ofCanadian History, one ofthe regrettable results ofthat brilliant book has been a tendency, on the part ofsome, to dismiss earlier generations ofCanadian historians as little more than a group of frenzied nationalists interested in little beyond a limited vision...