The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney Brian Titley Long

9$ BC STUDIES The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney Brian Titley Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999.171 pp. Illus. $75 cloth. Long Day's Journey: The Steamboat and Stagecoach Era in the Northern West Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999. 408 pp. Illus., maps. US$60 cloth. BY PATRICK DUNAE Malaspina University College RIAN TITLEY, a historian and Territories (1880-88), and Conservative professor of education at the MP for Yale (1872-80). He also rep B University of Lethbridge, has resented the District of Kootenay in written an authoritative and revealing the colonial Legislature of British biography of a figure that is not well Columbia (1868-70). known in British Columbia. This is a Dewdney was a qualified surveyor stylish, edgy study: it crackles with and engineer when, in 1859, he came energy, twinkles with wry humour. to British Columbia from England at "Biography is akin to necromancy," the age of twenty-four. He assisted Titley writes, "We exhume the bodies Moody and the Royal Engineers in of the dead - skulldiggery, if you like laying out the townsite of New - and breathe life into them. But we Westminster; he helped with the cannot question them, and our recon construction of the Cariboo Road; and struction hinges largely on the frag he blazed and built a strategic trail to ments they leave behind, whether delib the goldfields at Wild Horse Creek. erately or accidentally" (viii).The author Having surveyed and constructed of several major studies on colonialism, many other key routes, he has been racism, and Aboriginal administration called the father of road making in in western Canada, Titley knew where British Columbia. to look in the National Archives of The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney Canada, the British Columbia Archives, is an important book, one that makes the Glenbow, and other repositories a significant contribution to our for the documentary fragments of understanding of British Columbia Edgar Dewdney. and the prairie west. It is notable not Edgar Dewdney was lieutenant- only for its snappy style and im governor of British Columbia from pressive scholarship, but also for the 1892 to 1897. Before that he was federal author's stance with respect to his minister of the interior (1888-92), subject. "I do not consider Dewdney lieutenant-governor and commissioner a great man or a nation builder. Rather, of Indian affairs for the North-West I see him as a type - a representative Book Reviews çç of that class of adventurer who saw in minister of the interior ("no statesman the western frontier an unprecedented like vision, no spark of originality, no opportunity for self-aggrandizement" independent thought" [142]). Most of (ix). all, he dislikes Dewdney because he Titley doesn't like this type of subscribed to, and apparently benefited character and he certainly doesn't like from, the "loose moral code of frontier Edgar Dewdney. Indeed, he is con capitalism" (85). temptuous of Dewdney and nearly The author's disdain for Dewdney everything Dewdney did or rep is evident in assessments of seemingly resented. Consider, for example, his innocuous traits, such as Dewdney's remarks on Dewdney's decision to abiding love of the wilderness in stand as member of Parliament for British Columbia. "Grand, savage, Yale in 1872: "Neither ranching nor untamable old nature!" Dewdney mining had made him rich, and he rhapsodized during a vice-regal faced an uncertain future of successive excursion up the Coast in 1893: "Man surveying contracts. What he really with all his inventions and scientific wanted was a sinecure - a well-placed means of overcoming obstacles would government appointment with a have a poor chance of asserting him steady income that would allow him self in these parts." Titley comments: to speculate in business ventures as he "A fine tribute from one whose early saw fit. He believed that politics might career had been spent carving trails lead to such arrangements"(26). As it through the wilderness" (124). The turned out, Dewdney did fairly well very last sentences of this scarifying for himself financially by speculating biography also resonate with derision in land around Regina and mines near and disdain: "It is no small irony that Rossland. And he succeeded in be the main thoroughfare in Regina is coming "viceroy" of British Columbia, called Dewdney Avenue. Could it be "a position with a good salary, social a deliberate tribute to the shady moral prestige and not too much work" (102). code of frontier capitalism with which But Dewdney was never as blatantly the West was won?" (143). venal or as cynically corrupt as were In British Columbia, Dewdney is many of his contemporaries. John H. commemorated by several place names, Turner, who was premier during including a community, a mountain, Dewdney's stint in Cary Castle, and two peaks, a couple of flats, a creek, Edward G. Prior (premier, 1902-03; and an island. His name is also as lieutenant-governor, 1919-20) spring sociated with the Dewdney Trunk to mind. (They must be quaking in Road, an old highway that extends their graves, praying that Titley doesn't east from Pitt Meadows into the turn his "skulldiggery" searchlights on Fraser Valley. The road runs parallel them!) to the Fraser River and close to the Titley dislikes Dewdney not simply American border. South of the line, because he was a political opportunist. as Carlos Schwantes explains in Long He dislikes Dewdney's patronizing Day's Journey, frontier capitalists attitudes towards Native peoples on developed an extensive transportation the Pacific slope, the coercive policies network using steamboats and stage he administered as Indian com coaches. missioner on the prairies, and the Schwantes is professor of history insipid way he conducted himself as and director of the Institute for Pacific IOO BC STUDIES Northwest Studies at the University workers, Schwantes says relatively of Idaho. This book is a companion little about attempts by the state to volume to his Railroad Signatures of the exert political or cultural hegemony in Pacific Northwest (1993). In Signatures, the northern west. Schwantes demonstrated how railways Schwantes is also more sanguine affected regional development in the than is Titley in his overall assessment late nineteenth century. In Long Day s of this historical period. In the con Journey, he looks at an earlier era and cluding sentences of his book he says shows how a sparse population, scanty simply that the "steamboat and stage capital investments, and a difficult coach era was a distinctive age, with terrain determined the success or its peculiar definition of time and failure of regional steamboat and distance and the odd juxtaposition of stagecoach enterprises in the "northern frontier travel with the travail of a long West" (i.e., Washington, Oregon, day's journey" (370). This is not to say Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming). that Schwantes's book is cursory or Schwantes is less critical than Titley facile. Indeed, this is an instance in in describing the frontier world of the which good looks may be deceiving. northern west and the non-Native This looks like a coffee-table book; entrepreneurs who sought to dominate nearly every one of its 400 glossy pages it. Moreover, he takes a rather benign is adorned with a beautifully reproduced view of the transportation networks colour or black-and-white illustration. maintained by the steamboat pilots And it feels like a coffee-table book; the and the Concorde stagecoach drivers dust jacket, cover boards, and paper (who revelled in such titles as "kings stock are heavy, and it is presented in a of the river" and "knights of the rein"). modified folio format. But make no For example, Titley argues that mistake; this is a formidable piece of Dewdneys trail from New Westminster scholarship. It includes eight pages of was "more than a conduit of trad^ ... endnotes and fourteen pages of "Sug it was also a line of contact to a remote gestions for Further Reading." The corner of the colony so that the state bibliography is authoritative and com could assert its control" (18). While prehensive, and includes many works acknowledging how roads and rivers relating to the history of transportation facilitated the activities of American in this province. Long Day s Journey is a troops, census officials, and postal tour de force. .

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