Lost Land of Moses: The Age of Discovery on New Brunswick's Salmon Rivers (review)

Peter Thomas is an enthusiast of angling and of writing on angling. His Lost Land of Moses is clearly a labour of love, written to resurrect a series of 1840-80 travel accounts that introduced New Brunswick salmon fishing to British, American, and Canadian readers. 'These narratives ... form the basis of this book, and since several are held in special library collections, difficult to access to most readers, my first purpose is to bring them to more general attention.' Almost apologetically, he adds that the accounts are as historically relevant as they are engaging: by selling New Brunswick to potential travellers, they contributed to the opening up of the colony, and in so doing affected such matters as property rights, concepts of wilderness, and environmental conditions on the rivers themselves. The most notable result was that, with the adoption of a leasing system in the 1860s, the salmon rivers were priced out of the range of most New Brunswickers. The book's title does not refer, as one might suppose, to sportsmen wandering for forty years in the wilds of New Brunswick seeking a promised land (the perfect casting pool); it speaks instead to how the work of Moses Perley - Indian commissioner, angler, and booster - to promote the colony as a sportsmen's destination ultimately resulted in considerable disruption to its social fabric.

The opening chapter, on Perley's 1839-42 series of articles for the London Sporting Review, is representative of the book's format. After introducing the writer, the chapter shifts largely to the articles themselves. Long quotations are woven together, joined by commentary as needed. An even longer sample of Perley's prose serves as a sidebar. There are expressive and amusing illustrations from the period's sporting literature. The reader sees how Perley sold adventurous young Brits on a land of unspoiled Indians, raw wilderness, and, almost as an afterthought, some fish. A chapter on Charles Lanman's 1848 Adventures of an Angler in Canada, Nova Scotia, and the United States illustrates that Perley's dream was soon taken up by American writers ever seeking a new virgin land. As early as 1855, Campbell Hardy's Sporting Adventures in the New World documents that improved steamship, rail, and coach travel were making New Brunswick and everywhere else more accessible to the ordinary traveller. Other chapters are dedicated to works by James Alexander, Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, Richard Lewes Dashwood, Charles Hallock, and others.

Fidelity to these original sources creates some problems. The sidebar quotations do not fit smoothly with the surrounding text. It is not clear why a four-page chapter on Perley's friendship with Lanman and Lanman's with Daniel Webster exists, except to introduce a three-page quote. Thomas himself seems to have found the sidebars bothersome, for he includes only one in the final one-hundred pages. Relying so heavily on the original accounts also means that Thomas does not talk about what his writers do not talk about. Though considerable attention is paid to the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet, there is almost no discussion on fishing tourism's effects on rural New Brunswickers generally, presumably because the accounts did not think the local whites exotic enough to merit attention. Thomas also depends heavily on the travel writers for information better found elsewhere. When in 1864 Arthur Gordon notes that the census says the Native population is rising, we can only presume he is right: he, not the census, is cited. When an 1862 Fisheries Act allowed leasing of fishing rights on Crown waters, and when an 1882 House of Lords decision effectively extended the scope to all privately owned waters, there is no discussion of the events or of Canadian reactions - let alone the analysis of later historians such as Bill Parenteau. Only the travel...