In Quest of Fur: The Travel Journal of William O.K. Ross, 1909 (review)

This book is an edition of a diary in the possession of Montreal's McCord Museum. The editor was able to identify its author, William Oliver Kennedy Ross, through research in the daily journals of the Hudson's Bay Company post at Mingan. Ross (1864-1942) was a native of Quebec City of Irish descent. In the spring of 1909 as a fur buyer for Holt Renfrew he travelled along the North Shore of the St Lawrence from Quebec City to Labrador and then by boat across the Strait of Belle Isle to Newfoundland.

Why Ross kept the diary (and whether he kept other diaries, now lost) is a matter of speculation. Perhaps, as he was away from his family from mid-March to mid-June, able to communicate only by the occasional telegram, he wanted to use the diary as a help in talking about his trip. He may also have been aware that travelling with dogs and kometik 'down the Labrador coast' was likely to be an adventurous experience and one that might give him pleasure to look back on later in life.

Almost a century later, Ross's diary is certainly worth reading by those interested in the fur trade and/or the region of Canada he visited. Travelling fur buyers are not well documented. In fact, the main source of documentation on them is the records of the Hudson's Bay Company, in which the comments are never lengthy and rarely sympathetic. The edition of Ross's diary thus fills a gap. His detailed accounts of his dogs and the vicissitudes of travelling with them are of special interest. The hair-raising descriptions of getting down steep hills are particularly fine. While Ross's descriptions of people are often brief, he was sometimes moved to write more. He was evidently touched by the fortitude of a five-year-old boy who had to walk over twelve miles in the soft snow of spring to bring aid to his brother, only two years older, who had been caught in a fox trap. Ross describes the child as 'poorly clad, short pants all torn, socks fell down over boots leaving the legs bare, and no mitts, no scarf, and little coat flying open.'

Reading a diary can bring to life the world it describes and in which it was created. We need the editor's help, however, to set the diary in context. Philip E.L. Smith has been very diligent in amassing facts; the introduction and the endnotes occupy almost four times as many pages as the diary itself. Ross apparently never encountered a telegraph operator or Anglican lay reader on whom Smith was not able to dig up at least some biographical information. Yet we do not need to know everything Smith was able to find. His research runs the risk of smothering the diary rather than illuminating it. To some extent this is because so much is crammed into the back of the book. It might have been more helpful to intersperse the text of the diary with introductions to each community Ross visited or to each portion of his journey.

The introduction contains a great deal of information on Ross himself. As most readers will be more interested in what the diary is about than they will in its author, these biographical details could have been presented in a more streamlined fashion. More background on the fur trade at the beginning of the last century, and on disease among sled dogs (a major source of anxiety to Ross), would have been useful, as would material on the practice of diary keeping.

Though this book, like Ross's journey, could have been easier going, it is still a valuable source on life and the fur trade in a remote part of Canada more than a century ago. We owe thanks to Smith and to his publishers for making...