This Wild Spirit: Women in the Rocky Mountains of Canada (review)

At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans Mary Schäffer and Mollie Adams decided to no longer ‘listen calmly to [men’s] stories of the hills we so longed to see’ (72), and planned an exploratory trip to Canada’s Rocky Mountains. Schäffer later moved to Banff, where she came to epitomize the growing numbers of white women who redefined themselves through the mountain landscape and its people. This Wild Spirit is a valuable and captivating anthology about women in the Canadian Rockies, from the opening of the CPR until the mid-twentieth century.

This collection of primary sources – seemingly all by white, relatively affluent Britons and North Americans – is divided into six sections, each contextualized with critical introductory essays by Skidmore. The first section, on Aboriginal women, deals primarily with white women’s perspectives of Métis homesteader Suzette Chalifoux Swift, but Skidmore’s introduction provides a wider overview of Aboriginal women’s presence in and dispossession from the parks in the area. The second section reproduces works by female travel writers, and the third section takes up with women who lived in the mountains for extended periods, most notably Mary Schäffer and Mary Vaux. Section four contains sources related to Schäffer’s exploratory journeys, and the fifth section is dedicated to female mountaineers; here Skidmore chooses to include fewer ascent narratives in favour of more artistic responses to climbing, the most remarkable being Georgia Engelhard’s 1943 portrait of Mount Assiniboine and its moving companion piece about a summer spent photographing the mountain. The final section focuses on representations of women in the Rocky Mountain parks, and contains full-colour reproductions of many early CPR posters.

The richness and variety of the sources are compelling. This Wild Spirit incorporates letters, diaries, maps, promotional articles and images, book and movie reviews, poetry, photographs, paintings, portions of novels and plays, and reproductions of dried flowers. The inclusion of the influential botanist and adventurer Mary Schäffer ties together this web of loosely interconnected sources: she is the author of nine of the excerpts, and is mentioned in many others. Where This Wild Spirit is most valuable, however, is in its recovery of obscure archival records. These include Glacier House scrapbook entries, Catharine Robb Whyte’s private letters, and the unpublished diaries of Schäffer’s travelling companions. The book effectively conveys the depth of white women’s emotional responses to the Canadian Rockies across more than half a century. Also evident are the internal and external conflicts these women confronted as they tried to carve out a space for themselves in an already inhabited place, while doing activities already claimed by white men.

This Wild Spirit’s only major flaw lies in its organization. Each source appears simply with a title, year, author, and bibliographic citation. Skidmore’s adept introductory essays weave together much additional background and analysis, but the reader must constantly flip between the index, these essays, and the records themselves, even to determine whether an excerpt is from a novel, an autobiography, or a promotional tract. It is far too easy to read a selection or look at an image without having any idea why it was created or what purpose it served; basic contextual information should have been placed in specific introductory paragraphs alongside each source.

Nevertheless, this book certainly deserves to find a wide and varied audience. It is recommended for visitors to Canada’s Rocky Mountain parks who are interested in the region’s history, and for whom the early descriptions of tourist destinations such as Banff and Maligne Lake should hold particular appeal. Most of the primary sources in this collection would be equally appropriate for post-secondary classrooms. Since its contributors continually brushed up against gendered, racial, and physical boundaries, This Wild Spirit brings issues of colonialism, feminism, and space to the forefront in a deeply personal way, while tracing the history of a changing landscape...