Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains ed. by Barbara Belyea

Abstract

Reviewed by: Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains ed. by Barbara Belyea Robert M. Briwa Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains. Barbara Belyea, ed. Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2020. Pp. vii+359, sketches, maps, notes, index. $52.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-64642-015-5. Hudson Bay Company (hereafter HBC) surveyor Peter Fidler (1769–1822) is one of the more obscure figures of the Canadian fur trade. In Peter Fidler: From York Factory to the Rocky Mountains, Barbara Belyea ensures his greater prominence through masterfully editing two of Fidler's journals ("From York Factory to Buckingham House" and "From Buckingham House to the Rocky Mountains"), which he wrote over a nine-month period traveling the Canadian interior between 1792 and 1793. This volume is an admirable addition to any North American [End Page 138] historical geographer's bookshelf, for the text is a useful primer in understanding not only Peter Fidler's journeys but also the Hudson Bay Company's historical development, its literary practices, and its contributions to Canadian geographical knowledge. Belyea demonstrates how editors play essential roles in making primary sources legible to lay audiences. Her original contributions include an introductory chapter titled "Peter Fidler in Context" and extensive endnotes. I recommend that readers who are unfamiliar with the Hudson Bay Company (or those encountering Fidler for the first time) read these sections prior to diving into the journals, as Belyea provides essential contextual information. These sections outline Fidler's life, explain his obscurity among HBC historians, and provide necessary historical and geographical contexts to his journals. Moreover, Belyea demonstrates how HBC documents like Fidler's journals reflect a conservative literary culture that was developed to efficiently conduct business transactions across a geographically far-flung social network that had both North American and European participants. To modern eyes more accustomed to reading explorers' accounts published for general audiences, Fidler's journals are a challenging read—yet Belyea serves as an exemplary guide to the unfamiliar world of an eighteenth-century surveyor navigating vast tracts of the Canadian interior. Peter Fidler was a meticulous chronicler. His journals exhibit all the qualities required of an HBC surveyor. Fidler's daily entries are written in a form of shorthand akin to a captain's log. The journals' terse narrative structure—employing dashes instead of punctuation to indicate distinct ideas or temporal breaks—reflect wider writing practices adopted by literate HBC employees, who were required to produce standardized manuscript forms. Standardized lists, letters, journals, and maps were common HBC business documents. They often lost their utilitarian structure, however, when folded into memoirs by those who sought to profit off their HBC experiences by selling them to armchair geographers. In contrast, the two journals reproduced in this volume are the unedited entries of a skilled HBC employee in the field, designed for field navigation and use. Devoid of literary flourishes or sentiment, they document key events as perceived by someone accustomed to surveying, hard travel, and interacting with unfamiliar cultures for extended periods. Belyea's choice to reproduce Fidler's field notes in their original [End Page 139] structure is a key strength of the volume. Fidler seamlessly transitions between prose narrative, survey measurements, and sketched maps. Belyea chose to reproduce the latter as photocopies, inserting them wherever they appeared in the journals in their relative positions. Often these sketch maps leave Fidler's script legible, though others' small size—sometimes less than a sixteenth of a page—leave readers squinting at Fidler's annotations in vain. I found that the maps' positions on the page visually broke up Fidler's prose and sometimes left me disoriented, at least until I identified the correct narrative thread to pick up reading again (53). At other times, I wished for editorial annotations or captions for the more obscure sketches. Occasional disorientations aside, I applaud Belyea's decision to leave these elements of Fidler's journals untouched, because she rightly notes that to do so retains a sense of "how Fidler and other fur-trade writers perceived and mentally organized events and situations" (28). An important contribution of this volume is its ability to reflect how Euro-American geographical...