Book Reviews
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BOOK REVIEWS The Elusive Mr. Pond: greater paper record. Sir Alexander The Soldier, Fur Trader and Mackenzie, the most notable example, Explorer Who Opened the wrote a definitive narrative and crafted maps of greater use to empire builders. Northwest Historians writing about Pond, then, Barry Gough have had to accept what contemporaries said of him, often disparagingly, or Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, to contain Pond’s story within the 2014. 256 pp. $34.95 cloth. larger history of the North West Company and, with it, a Canadian George Colpitts University of Calgary transcontinental narrative. Gough works within the extant record and draws on his talents both n The Elusive Mr. Pond: The Soldier, as a superb writer and as an established Fur Trader and Explorer Who historian of empire to lay out what is IOpened the Northwest, Barry Gough and what is not known about Pond. masterfully grapples with the challenge He effectively describes Pond’s of interpreting an important figure in birthplace and youth in Milford, the Canadian fur trade. Peter Pond has Connecticut, and the likely formative raised many obstacles to generations influences of colonial Congregationalist of biographers. Famous for having values, entrepreneurship, geographic expanded the Canadian fur trade from expansionism, and militia service. Montreal into the Athabasca district Pond’s engagement in the fur trade in 1778, Pond unfortunately left few after the Seven Years’ War, following written documents, a fragment of a in the steps of his father who traded fur, memoir, and unscientific maps of his provided him backwoods experience in discoveries. North West Company Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. and Hudson’s Bay Company journals His Plains Sioux trade further joined his make only brief mention of him. strong personality with the individual Pond’s own marginal literacy and his autonomy offered by bourgeois trading. cartographic unorthodoxy, in turn, left Pond entered the British Northwest him overshadowed in his time by his trade from Montreal in 1775; in 1778, by more politically engaged peers and their then in partnership with the recently bc studies, no. 189, Spring 2016 151 152 bc studies formed North West Company, he used The Laird of Fort William: the Methye Portage to become the first William McGillivray and the trader in the Arctic drainage, an event North West Company of not only commercial but also imperial significance. Gough then returns with Irene Termier Gordon Pond to Montreal in 1784, examining Victoria: Heritage House, 2013. how the trader’s geographic discoveries 208 $19 95 reached Quebec and metropolitan pp. paper. audiences keenly interested in unlocking an overland connection to the Pacific coast. Still aloof from the close social Forging a Fur Empire: and commercial networks of Montreal, Expeditions in the Snake River even though still partnered with the Country, 1809-1824 Nor’Westers, Pond’s next inland foray implicated him in a murder – the second John Phillip Reid in his career – making his place in Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clarke Montreal increasingly untenable while 2011 208 $29 95 his own discoveries and maps were being Company, . pp. paper. eclipsed by Alexander Mackenzie’s. Pond retired from trading and, in 1790, returned to his former Connecticut birthplace to Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary live out the rest of his life. Mountain Man Gough does a good job of establishing Pond as “an outlier, an extraordinary Barton H. Barbour person standing apart from others” Norman, OK: University of (6); indeed, throughout his life, Oklahoma Press, 2011. 304 pp. Pond’s personal inclinations, fierce $19 95 independence, and strong temperament . paper. seem to have made him, at best, “respected, but unloved” among his peers (119). His outlier status is key in Obstinate Hope: The Western understanding Pond’s place both within Expeditions of Nathaniel J. Wyeth and beyond Montreal society. Gough superbly situates this Connecticut Jim Hardee Yankee’s enterprising personality in Pinedale, WY: Sublette County the distant Athabasca district, while Historical Society and Museum of explaining how his discoveries, in turn, the Mountain Man, 2013. 500 pp. were critically appraised and sifted by $24.95 cloth. British and American geographers and strategists who were in the business of Robert Foxcurran and building empires. Gough’s biographical John Jackson treatment of Pond, then, offers valuable Bellevue and Olympia insights into an individual who, through his “Athabasca odyssey,” changed n The Laird of Fort William: William fur trade and imperial history in the McGillivray and the North West northwestern portions of the North Company, American continent. I Irene Gordon, a true daughter of the Saskatchewan prairies, provides Book Reviews 153 an informative outline of the western insufficient to support its faulty business operations of the North West Company plan. (nwc) as historical background to this The first one hundred pages of Reid’s long overdue biography of William book contain seventy-eight citations McGillivray, a major figure in the of Alexander Ross’s Fur Hunters of the nwc’s long battle with the Hudson’s Far West as a source. This brands him Bay Company (hbc) for the “Indian” as an admiring and uncritical admirer trade of Rupert’s Land. A casual reader of Ross’s data. Reid fails to grasp that or interested scholar will not find a Ross’s descriptions of Donald McKenzie, better description of the demands of or even of Ross’s own adventures, are the trade upon McGillivray and his an untrustworthy source upon which to brothers, Duncan and Simon, who build an accurate version of the oft-told acted as downstream agents defending tale of the early Snake River fur trade. the nwc’s business in Rupert’s Land Reid, like other fur trade historians and extending the fur trade to the lacking collaborative data, takes Ross’s largely unexplored and undeveloped opinions, written thirty years after the Pacific Northwest. Hampered by what events described, as unchallenged fact. turned out to be a faulty business plan After Ross served as a clerk for the for shipping Columbia River and Snake Astorians, the Nor’westers, and the River beaver skins to the China market, newly amalgamated hbc, the London the Montreal agents of the nwc could directorate sent a new overseas governor not stem an inevitable downward (George Simpson) west in 1824/25. The profit spiral. Unfortunately, the author astute Simpson saw through Ross without devotes a scant seven and a half pages actually meeting him. The self-inflated to a major factor – the nwc’s ill-fated former clerk was then sent east to return China trade – in the company’s decline to the relatively unchallenging role of and its 1821 amalgamation with the hbc. schoolmaster. Ross tried to salvage his Modestly documented with a reasonable reputation through the publication, bibliography and a few samples of new decades later, of two memoirs based on writing, the “Laird of Fort William” his experiences in the fur trade, but he has found his amanuensis in Gordon’s was not the man he portrayed himself lively and homely treatment. to be. Reid’s uncritical reliance on a Thenwc ’s expansion to the Pacific questionable source diminishes his book, slope is also the subject of John Phillip which is published by a respectable and Reid’s Forging a Fur Empire: Expeditions long-established press. in the Snake River Country, 1809- With these two books filling in some 1824. Reid has published other books gaps in our understanding of the nwc and dealing with this period of the early hbc eras and operations, we can turn to Pacific Northwest, includingPatterns slightly later – and American – characters of Vengeance: Crosscultural Homicide in in western history. Readers may have to the North American Fur Trade (1999) and decide whether Barton H. Barbour in Contested Empire: Peter Skene Ogden and Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain the Snake River Expeditions (2002). Reid’s Man has succeeded in producing a fascination with empires has now led to balanced new treatment of this far from another study of the only two expeditions neglected western hero. Smith was the nwc managed to put into the field indeed an overlooked mountain man before it realized that the price paid of the 1820s until a few documents were for beaver on the Chinese market was rediscovered in 1902, which, together with 154 bc studies some uncritically examined data, inflated British Columbia, Wyeth had already him into the popular symbol of the iconic (1834) established his experimental Fort mountaineer. It is curious that Barbour Hall in the declining garden of the starts this book with Smith’s fatal western beaver hunt. But the hbc’s John encounter with a band of opportunistic McLoughlin refused to cut a cooperative young Comanche on the Santa Fe Trail deal with Wyeth, who sold Fort Hall to in May 1831, before retracing his steps the hbc in 1837. Canadian readers who through a generally unfortunate fur trade are firmly convinced that the sun rose career – a career that cost the lives of and set on the semi-imperial ambitions many of his followers. In the electronic of the hbc may be enlightened by this world of hand-held gadgets and limited engrossing volume. twitters, it is disappointing that the author of a book intended to refresh the facts chose to provide neither citations The Bastard of Fort Stikine: of documentary evidence nor even a The Hudson’s Bay Company bibliography of the published studies consulted. In our opinion, Smith’s and the Murder of admirers, rather like the self-serving John McLoughlin, Jr. Alexander Ross, tend to rewrite the record on the sly. Debra Komar Of a morning Jim Hardee sits on the Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane porch of his excellent library at Tetonia, Editions, 2015.