Dark Storm Moving West

Dark Storm offers unique insights into history of fur-trade, exploration

Oct 24 2007, Rocky Mountain Outlook

When Hudson's Bay Company explorer Peter Fidler saw the Rocky Mountains in November, 1792, he remarked that the line of mountains stretching out along the horizon looked like "dark rain Like clouds rising up above the Horizon on a fine Summers evening."

In her newest book, Dark Storm Moving West, Barbara Belyea uses Fidler's words and the image of a storm as a metaphor for exploration of Northwestern North America.

She compares the fur trade to a prairie storm and how it seems to linger on the horizon before bringing its heavy rain. The fur trade, she writes, had a similar delayed effect, at first bringing a benefit in the way of valuable trade goods, before becoming destructive.

She uses this metaphor to explore through the six essays in the 202-page book how westward expansion of the fur trade brought increasing levels of change to Western Canada and to the lives of the region's Native people.

The book traces three phases of exploration in western North America, beginning with the search along the West Coast for the Northwest Passage, the progress of fur traders route finding along lakes and rivers and finally, the Lewis and Clarke expedition, which relied on those early fur-trade route-finding explorations.

Overall, Dark Storm Moving West is not linked by a single unifying theme or thesis. Exploration, the fur trade and Peter Fidler, who wanders in and out of the archival record and each essay as a result, do provide a loose theme, but Belyea, a professor of English at the University of Calgary, approached each one as an opportunity to take risks and ponder problems that she writes may have no answers at all.

Belyea describes the overall shape of the book as a "series of tentative responses that overlap like fish scales, or like shingles on a roof." The essays appear in the order she wrote them, with each one seeking answers for questions raised in the previous piece.

Creating these "tentative responses", Belyea's depth of research and understanding of her subject allows a number of rich and fascinating ideas and details to pop into each essay, such as the spatial difference between European and Native maps and illustrations of how Native cartography influenced the explorer's own maps, the role of women in the trade frontier or how ethnographers are forced to sit outside the circle of Native knowledge.

While that same depth of research allows readers insight into numerous unique aspects of fur trade exploration, that level of detail can also make Dark Storm Moving West a challenge to read.

Even though Belyea's writing is quite readable, each essay demands the reader's careful attention given the academic nature of her work. But once accustomed to the flow of language - much like watching an Irish film and requiring 10 minutes or so to become used to the accents - Dark Storm Moving West offers many unique insights in the history of the fur trade.

This book will appeal to those with a broad interest in the history of Western Canada; but more specifically, those with a love of cartography, historic maps and the interpretation of Native ledger book drawings, will find Dark Storm Moving West a worthwhile read.

The author begins the book with a broader view as she investigates how the myth of the Northwest Passage became scientific hypothesis. From there, Belyea tightens the scope with each essay as she moves through the essays, including the reasons David Thompson left the Hudson's Bay Company and the clues that provide insight into business practices of the time; followed by Decision at the Marias (Lewis and Clark and their confusion over the map they relied on for their journey), Mapping West of the Bay (the change in mapping techniques based on the influence of Native maps), The Silent Past is Made to Speak (using Peter Fidler's journals to paint a picture of life at a HBC fort) and Outside the Circle (how ethnographers, while perhaps included in cultural activities, are not included in the meaning).

At the end of The Silent Past is Made to Speak, Belyea reminds the reader that "the job of historians is to guide us to the bounds of a foreign country, and to let us wonder at its strangeness and variety."

Belyea has done her job well in Dark Storm Moving West. She guides readers into this foreign country and succeeds in finding the threads that allow us to wonder at its strangeness and variety.

Dark Storm Moving West, published by the University of Calgary Press, sells for $44.95.