Canoeing the Churchill: A Practical Guide to the Historic Voyageur Highway (review)

Greg Marchildon and Sid Robinson's Canoeing the Churchill is the third title in the Discover Saskatchewan series published since 1998. Obviously an effort by series editor Ralph Nilson to focus attention on the natural and cultural history of Saskatchewan, the authors and editor have succeeded with this voluminous inventory of the Churchill River: its physical environment and its people.

Within the opening pages the authors allude to their passion for their subject, and perhaps their personal motivation for publishing this work. They suggest that the Churchill River 'offers some of the best wilderness paddling to be found anywhere in North America.' Unfortunately, this majestic waterway, nominated as a Canadian Heritage River, has benefited from few comprehensive guidebooks for canoeists or references for academics interested in its broad history. Canoeing the Churchill largely fills this void, albeit in an unusual format that will likely appeal more to the canoeist/historian than to either alone.

Within the well-organized thirteen chapters of this volume, there are seventy-six contemporary route maps, twenty-one historical maps, and copious photographs (thirty-one in colour) peppered throughout nearly five hundred pages of extensively researched and comfortably written text. Of exceptional note is the authors' treatment of place names, which include those used by Aboriginals (Dene and Cree), fur traders, cartographers, and today's local population. But this book is much more than a guide to the names of the rapids, lakes, portages, and campsites that comprise the physical environment of the Churchill River. The real value of this publication is in the telling of the human story of the region. Each chapter guides the reader through pre-European contact, the fur trade era, inward migration, and settlement well into the twentieth century. Many of the details, especially those of the more recent periods, were gathered as oral histories during their exploration of the Churchill River in 1986, so Marchildon and Robinson deserve applause for adding to the written historical record of the fur traders they quote so extensively throughout their book.

Unfortunately, this ambition to chronicle so much of the history of the Churchill River within one volume is a practical shortcoming of Canoeing the Churchill. The preface acknowledges that the authors' work ended up being 'thicker' than originally intended and therefore 'may be heavy to portage,' although they optimistically 'hope that it finds its way into many canoe packs.' While it is certainly a valuable planning resource for canoeists, one imagines that most paddlers will leave such a hefty (and handsome) book on their shelf rather than hauling it over the route's numerous carrying places. Even in the comfort of an office or library, historians may find the density of present-day route information a bit heavy when using this book as a reference, although the well-appointed index may alleviate this problem.

The length of the book could have been reduced with a more strategic editorial approach, especially toward the use of maps and illustrations. Throughout, strong cartographic images are duplicated with textual descriptions that are not only superfluous, but occasionally contradictory. Nowhere is this more frustrating than in the descriptions of pictographs, which are well illustrated. Additionally, details (often within maps, but occasionally within the text) provide too much information for a modern-day explorer of the Churchill River. Canoeists with the skills to navigate this relatively remote wilderness river may find the meticulous descriptions of every bend in the river (including the placement of beaver dams) exhausting, and perhaps offset their own sense of exploration. And again, historians may be overwhelmed by the copious details that would be of interest only to a canoeist travelling to the area.

Regardless of these minor critiques, Canoeing the Churchill is an impressive collection of human stories and the most comprehensive inventory of on-river route information available for this historic watercourse. While either aspect makes it a...