BOOK REVIEWS “Opposition on the Coast”: judges, the best available material from The Hudson’s Bay Company, these kinds of sources. American Coasters, I was not familiar with the work of the Champlain Society before I reviewed the Russian American Company, this book, and I was looking for more and Native Traders on the of a storyline than it aims to provide in Northwest Coast, 1825–1846 its publications. Its goal is to advance knowledge of Canadian history by James R. Gibson, editor publishing primary records of historical value, such of those presented in Gibson’s Toronto: The Champlain Society, “Opposition on the Coast.” I was looking 2019. 295 pp. $99.00 cloth. for a work of historical synthesis, a learned analysis of this transition period Howard Stewart Denman Island in the history of the northeast Pacific shore, a kind of maritime version of Richard White’s The Middle Ground: im Gibson has assembled a collection Indians, Empires, and Republics in the of primary sources: twenty-seven Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Instead, I documentsJ from the Hudson’s Bay found a fascinating collection of primary Company Archives (HBCA), the sources that required me to do most of British Columbia Archives (BCA), the analysis. Even Gibson’s eighty-page and microfilm of Russian-American introduction is mostly a guide to the Company (RAC) records from the US primary material that follows, which I National Archives. A significant part expect is what the Champlain Society of his contribution is the translation wanted from him. of RAC documents from the original What these sources reveal is hardly a Russian. As Gibson points out, the “middle ground” but, rather, a depressing material from all three sources presents chapter in the history of ever-expanding exclusively the views of the white male Euro-American exploitation of the rich managers who prepared the original resources of the continent. Like White’s reports, letters, journals, and memoirs. seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Though skewed in favour of their race, Great Lakes region, the Northwest Coast gender, and class, they are, Gibson in the early nineteenth century is also bc studies no. 206, Summer 2020 121 122 bc studies in transition. But the main players on to ply its trade the way it had in the heart our coast – the Hudson’s Bay Company of the continent during the eighteenth (HBC), RAC, and the American and century. But the HBC’s game plan is Indigenous traders – never reach any increasingly ill adapted to this new kind of enduring accommodation such maritime place and new century. So, as emerged, for a while, in the pays d’en by the time it has prevailed in the haut back east. Against a backdrop of Northwest Coast fur trade, the prize rapidly depleting fur supplies, the HBC is disappointing, with the sea otter in particular schemes and connives to gone and the beaver hat rapidly being achieve the kind of absolute control of replaced by silk. Before long, the HBC trade to which it had become accustomed. would find itself marginalized by new With these sources Gibson offers the actors who played the mid-nineteenth- reader/researcher many glimpses and century game of rapid colonial conquest insights into this time and place that set and industrial-scale exploitation of the scene for the emergence of modern raw materials like fish and wood, and British Columbia. Repeated references whose commerce on the coast the old to the brutality with which certain company had pioneered earlier in the HBC managers carried on their business century, even as it struggled to make remind one of Dan Clayton’s account the fur trade work (see Mackie 1997). of the way control was exercised within and beyond the HBC’s rudimentary References establishments and of the central role of violence therein. The importance of Clayton, Daniel. 2000. Islands of Truth: The the slave trade is also highlighted, as Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island. is the degree to which external traders Vancouver: UBC Press. Mackie, Richard. 1997. Trading beyond the stimulated and participated in this large Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the and lucrative commerce, where slaves Pacific. Vancouver: UBC Press. were acquired mostly around the Salish White, Richard. 1991. The Middle Ground: Sea region and then sold or traded Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great farther north. We are also reminded Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge: Cam- of the highly vulnerable nature of the bridge University Press. British, Russian, and American trading ventures on this coast at a time when a few hundred Canadians, Americans, Brits, Hawaiians, and Asians far from Nothing to Write Home About: home mingled with many thousands British Family Correspondence of Indigenous inhabitants who only tolerated them as long as they were and the Settler Everyday in useful. The seeds of coming change British Columbia are visible when outbreaks of smallpox, for example, diminish the ability of Laura Ishiguro Indigenous suppliers to meet the visitors’ Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019. requirements. The future can be seen at 308 pp. $34.95 paper. Fort Langley, too, so poorly located for the fur trade but so richly appointed in Kristine Alexander fish and timber and agricultural soil. The University of Lethbridge overall picture is one of an increasingly dominant player, the HBC, determined Book Reviews 123 he history of colonial British noticed what settler letters didn’t say, Columbia is, in many respects, Ishiguro decided to look closely at what well-troddenT ground. Over the past they did. She finds that, in their letters, few decades, scholars like Jean Barman, settler correspondents focused especially Cole Harris, and Adele Perry have made on two things: their trans-imperial family multiple transformative contributions ties and various unremarkable aspects of to our understanding of how settler their everyday lives – all of which worked colonialism and Indigenous survivance together to frame the settler presence in have shaped the past and present of British Columbia, and British imperial Canada’s westernmost province. As a power more broadly, as natural and historian of Canada and colonialism “normal.” whose work doesn’t focus on British Ishiguro’s innovative and careful Columbia, I continue to be impressed reading of family letters is enriched by by the volume and quality of research her discussion of the postal system as that exists about this place. I might networked infrastructure that was crucial also have wondered to myself, in a to the construction and maintenance less-than-generous moment, if the most of Britain’s global empire. The ease important arguments about this “edge and affordability of maintaining long- of empire” and its history had already distance relationships in writing, she been made. notes, was also what “made … migration I am happy to report that Laura and [family] separation thinkable, even Ishiguro’s Nothing to Write Home About: attractive, for many Britons” (54). After British Family Correspondence and the discussing the imperial postal system Settler Everyday in British Columbia has and demonstrating that separation across proven me wrong. Focusing on the years vast distances was “not an aberration” between the 1858 discovery of gold in the for British families in this period Fraser Valley and the start of the First (62), she then devotes two chapters to World War in 1914, Nothing to Write Home settler boredom and food. Focusing on About is a beautifully written and original these issues, Ishiguro tells us, allowed contribution to the historiography of correspondents to ignore other aspects settler colonialism, British imperialism, of life in late nineteenth- and early and family ties in British Columbia twentieth-century British Columbia, and beyond. Family letters, a rich and including Indigenous life and settler surprisingly underexamined body of violence and vulnerability. The book’s archival evidence, comprise the book’s third and final section turns to what subject and primary source base. It was Ishiguro calls “faultlines,” or instances of while reading several thousand letters “epistolary rupture, conflict, or secrecy” exchanged by members of fifty families (27). This part of the book includes a (mostly middle-class British settlers in chapter about death and an especially rich British Columbia and their kin in the case study focused on correspondence by United Kingdom), Ishiguro writes, that and about Michael Phillips, a British she came to a surprising realization: settler who chose not to tell his English the topics that dominate the extant relatives that he had married a Ktunaxa scholarship on this time and place – woman named Rowena and had twelve including violence, the creation of racial children with her. Epistolary silence and hierarchies, and Indigenous resistance gossip, Ishiguro writes, could be effective – were not what settler correspondents “strategies for maintaining relationships chose to write home about. Having in circumstances when colonial and 124 bc studies metropolitan lives, and families of the same surveyors over the next seven origin and marriage, seemed otherwise years, focusing on BC commissioner irreconcilable” (27). A.O. Wheeler’s struggles to survey Reflections on silences and the partial the height of land northwest of Howse nature of the colonial epistolary archive Pass and Alberta commissioner punctuate the book, as do welcome R.W. Cautley’s efforts to demarcate the reminders that letters are material boundary line along the 120th meridian, objects as well as textual evidence.