Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57 (review)

From the late 1820s through the late 1850s, several thousand men left their native towns and villages in Europe and Lower Canada to work in the operations of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) associated with the Northwest Coast - many never to return. In this ambitious volume, editors Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss have set themselves the task of documenting the lives and experiences of these ordinary men and their families through the publication of some two hundred letters that wound up in the company's dead letter office in London. As a historian of the Northwest Coast and a descendant of French Canadian voyageurs who chose to remain in the Oregon Country, I felt not a small amount of anticipation in opening this book. I was not to be disappointed. The editors have delivered on several accounts and, in so doing, offer scholars and interested readers alike a valuable resource linking individual lives to larger historical events.

Beattie, former keeper of the HBC Archives in Winnipeg, and Buss, a literary scholar at the University of Calgary, have carefully edited all but forty of the 250 letters in the HBC's undelivered letters collection now housed in Winnipeg (the others were destined for company posts outside the West Coast). They have divided the collection into four sections corresponding to employee cohorts: men on the ships, voyageurs, men at the posts, and emigrant labourers hired for work on Vancouver Island. Beattie and Buss have included commentaries on the letters, extensive biographical notes on the addressees and their families, and useful appendices covering the company ships and posts. The letters retain the original spelling and punctuation, though the editors have added notations in brackets to assist in reading. Missives to the French Canadian voyageurs are reproduced in French, accompanied by English translations. Running to nearly 500 pages, one-half of the volume contains letters to the men on the ships, while the other sections are much smaller, ranging from 26 to 55 pages.

As the editors explain in a short but informative introduction, the reason for the existence of this collection is due to geography. The vast distances that separated HBC operations on the Northwest Coast from Europe and Lower Canada created significant disruptions in the delivery of mail. Company employees returned home, moved on to other postings, deserted, or died before the letters could reach them. The editors have done an admirable amount of detective work to determine why the letters may not have been delivered and what became of the intended recipients - though the fate of many remains a mystery. This points to the great contribution of the volume. It not only presents excellent biographical data and sources on the HBC workforce but also offers a glimpse into the intimate details of ordinary lives. Wives, sweethearts, friends, siblings, and parents wrote to the men from Lower Canada, Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales. They expressed concerns about financial hardship, illness, and separation, passed along gossip and news on family matters and affairs of the heart, and occasionally offered reflections on larger historical events. The letters also document local dialects and the hybrid semi-literate/oral culture of the labouring classes in Great Britain and Lower Canada. As the editors recommend for postings from the Orkneys, the letters are sometimes best read aloud to capture the richness of the writers' language and culture.

Although the editors demonstrate an attention to detail, the volume contains a few weaknesses. Several of the illustrations depicting the Northwest Coast would have benefited from critical captions noting historical inaccuracies in the artwork. Most notable among these illustrations is the view of Fort George (present-day Astoria, Oregon), featuring birch-bark canoes rather than wooden...