Columbia Journals. By David Thompson. Edited by Barbara Belyea. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998. Pp. xxiv, 336. Maps. $22.50.) Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807-1846. By Elizabeth Vibert. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 366. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $19.95.) For the better part of a century, travel narratives were among the most popular literary forms in the English language. During the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, readers on both sides of the Atlantic eagerly consumed these published accounts. Many of these narratives recounted European travel, but readers also showed a particular interest in excursions through the North American interior. Although travel narratives have not enjoyed much staying power in literary circles, they have proven essential for historians of early America. They remain among the few sources for places and times that left only scant written records. They chronicle intercultural contact with Indians and settlers. They provide physical details of landscapes transformed by subsequent patterns of migration or by the chroniclers themselves. In addition to their role as sources, narratives also generated one of the definitive motifs of the North American experience. The notion of the western journey-and the telling of that journey-became a powerful fixture in American culture. Two recent books provide important insights into that process of narration. Columbia Journals and Traders' Tales offer fascinating glimpses into the world these travelers inhabited. These titles also serve as an important reminder to Americanists and western historians that Canada was home to forms of exploration and encounter no less dynamic than what occurred in the United States. They suggest the abundant possibilities of research from these sources, but they also provide cautionary tales of the profound limitations presented by travel narratives and the fundamentally limited way that scholars have approached them. Most travel narratives were disjointed texts bereft of the sort of cohesion that makes an individual letter, an act of legislation, or a novel so easy to fix in chronological and literary context. Travel narratives underwent a tortured path that usually began with scattered accounts of individual events. The demands of the reading public and the publishing industry only complicated the process, since the story that appeared on printed pages was often quite different from the story in handwritten journals. Barbara Belyea reveals a welcome concern for these complexities. Her subject is the written record of David Thompson, a clerk, trader, and occasional explorer who worked for the Hudson's Bay Company before defecting to North West Company. The two companies merged in 1821, but only after decades of fierce competition for control of the Canadian trade economy. For men like Thompson, the geographic information that both companies sought provided ideal opportunities for advancement. Thompson conducted a series of ventures through western North America in the first decade of the nineteenth century for his two employers, providing information on land and water routes connecting the continental interior to the Pacific. Combining material from a variety of sources, Belyea has reconstructed Thompson's activities and observations from 1800 through 1811. Though the editorial method for this collection is traditional and sound, the published form is unusual. Instead of using footnotes, Columbia Journals begins with the full text of ten ventures followed by a separate section of notes with detailed material for each entry. This approach has both strengths and weaknesses. This organization requires a lot of shuffling back and forth between pages, especially for sections with cryptic details that Belyea subsequently explains. At the same time, letting Thompson's words stand on their own is a welcome change from other editorial projects where editorial notation overwhelms historical text. …