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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Jim Mochoruk, Formidable Heritage: Manitoba's North and the Cost of Development 1870 to 1930 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press 2004)

THE "PROVINCIAL NORTHS," or the parts of the provinces lying north of the zone of agriculture, have not received a great deal of attention from professional historians. The reasons for this are obvious: although they contain a great deal of Canada's landmass, and in Québec, for example, make up four-fifths of the province, they do not have a large population, and therefore have proportionately little political power. Their economic importance to Canada has been as producers of natural resource products, chiefly minerals, forest products, and hydro-electricity. They have a large First Nations population, and their non-native population has, historically, been quite transient. They tend to be dominated by outside forces, located in provincial or national capitals, and although they have much in common with each other, there is very little cooperation or coordinated effort among them; northern Saskatchewan and northern Ontario, for instance, do not form a common front against what some would call the forces of internal colonialism that oppress them.

Formidable Heritage is an attempt to rectify this omission of interest in the case of northern Manitoba, a region which can be defined in several ways, but is most usefully thought of as the region north and east of the agricultural belt of the southern part of the province. The central argument of the book is revisionist, an attempt to counter the triumphalism of the traditional accounts of the province's history. W.L. Morton's statement, in The Canadian Identity, that the main task of Canadians was to "make something" of the "formidable heritage" of the Canadian Shield, is the metropolitan, out-side-directed and arguably exploitative interpretation against which Mochoruk directs this book. "The central argument of this study," he says, "is simple. When all of Manitoba was given in 1670, sight unseen, to a group of entrepreneurs whose primary goal was to exploit the natural resources of the region, a precedent was set that would be replicated all too many times in Manitoba's history, for this grant was both careless and callous in regard to the region's resources and to the rights of its inhabitants." (xiii) And, he says, the history of the region over the following 260 years consisted of variations on this theme. In fairness to Morton, though, it must be said that, given the chance for rebuttal, he would likely claim that this book is ahistorical in its approach, and that Mochoruk is approaching the 17th to early 20th centuries with the sensibilities of the 21st: given the spirit and customs of the times, how else were England and the Hudson's Bay Company supposed to deal with northern Manitoba in 1660, or with the other periods the book covers?

The bulk of the book is an account of the development of northern Manitoba in the interests of outsiders — first the Hudson's Bay Company, then the federal government, and then the provincial government, the latter two working in concert with private developers. Such development, prior to quite recent times, was usually carried out with complete disregard for the wishes of the region's inhabitants and for any environmental considerations. On the other hand, when no developmental prospects were on the horizon, the region was simply neglected. When smallpox broke out among the Icelandic immigrants in the Interlake region, which is on the periphery of the province's north, the government first ignored them, then quarantined them, and a violent confrontation with the authorities was only narrowly averted; treaties were offered to the First Nations only when some developer became interested in their traditional lands.

One of the best parts of the book is Chapter Three, "The Entrepreneurs' North: The Land of Opportunity to 1900," in which the author takes aim at the Horatio Alger myth that lauds the process whereby active young men wrest a fortune out of the north. The chapter contains some of the book's most lively prose:

Told and retold by fawning journalists, hagiographers posing as historians, and uncritical local history committees, the careers of many entrepreneurs with interests in the north took on an almost mythic quality ... tales of rags to riches by deserving young men ... or David and Goliath parables of small companies taking on the northwest's economic giants .. Theo Burrows, who left the Ottawa home of his widowed mother at eighteen years of age to take a job on a survey crew in the wilds of the Lake Dauphin region and rose from this humble beginning to become the west's leading lumberman and the lieutenant-governor of his adopted province. (63–4)

Of course, as with the Alger stories, there was always a trick involved, and character and pluck turned out not to be the most important requirements for success:

all these "great men" and companies had feet of clay. More often than not, their business careers had been advanced by political favouritism, by successful attempts to limit competition, by the use of inside information, or any other advantage that would allow them to survive and prosper ... studying these "success stories" ... help[s] to document the general pattern of capital accumulation, concentration, and outflow from the north as well as trace[s] the evolving nature of the relationship between capitalists and the state. (64)

Chapter Six, "New Manitoba and the Fight For Equality, 1912 to 1922," is a hard look at among other things, the employment practices of companies in northern Manitoba in this era that should disabuse anyone of romantic notions of life in lumber and mining camps. Employers at The Pas who fired workers who lacked the money to leave the community, and bush camps where workers were almost slaves were common features of life in the region. Mochoruk cites the case of two workers in 1913 who borrowed $25 worth of clothing and food from the McMillan company to enable them to walk the 100 kilometres back from camp to the The Pas:

No sooner had they arrived at The Pas than they were arrested. On the basis of information provided by the employer, it was established that they owed the McMillans $25 for the goods taken out of the company store, plus ... various other charges ... As the local newspaper put it, "satisfied of their delinquency, the magistrate sentenced each to a prison term of six months, which should serve as a warning to others having similar inclinations. (206)

The rest of the chapters are equally informative about the realities of northern development and exploitation, and indeed, what makes this book particularly valuable is the enormous amount of research that evidently went into writing it. The 396 pages of introduction and text are supported by 90 pages of footnotes, some of them fairly substantive. Despite its size, weight, and rather relentlessly revisionist approach, however, the book is quite readable, and is likely to serve as the definitive work on the subject for a good many years.


William R. Morrison University of Northern British Columbia

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