Travel on the Gravel

A long lapse in writing here, and so much I could write about, but I'll begin with a few notes about recent reading. Here are a couple of works picked up in a McNally Robinson store in Winnipeg.

Palsson, Gisli. Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005. Originally published in the Icelandic language by a firm in Reykjavik; translated into English by Keneva Kunz.

Raffan, James. Emperor of the North: Sir George Simpson and the Remarkable Story of the Hudson's Bay Company. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007.

The Palsson biography of Stefansson caught my interest especially because of the North Dakota connection. The future Arctic explorer and anthropologist spent years of his boyhood near Mountain, North Dakota, where the family resided in a log cabin. The cabin may still stand; I can't tell for sure from the caption in the book. Stefansson attended the University of North Dakota--not for long, but long enough to establish a legendary reputation as a prankster. His landmark explorations and studies in the Canadian Arctic took place in the early 1900s; subsequently he took up residence in New York and enjoyed the lively intellectual and social scene of Grenwich Village, until marrying and settling into a teaching job.

The Raffan biography of Simpson, with its magnificent canot de maitre on the jacket, drew my attention because of Simpson's importance in the development of the Canadian West under the Hudson's Bay Company.

The two books have much in common. Both treat larger-than-life figures famous for their travels in the Canadian wilds. Both Stefansson and Simpson were hardy, ambitious, and self-promoting. The greatest commonality between the two biographies, though, is that both dwell upon the personal lives of their subjects, specifically their relationships with women.

In the case of Stefansson, Palsson draws heavily on a recently discovered trove of personal letters between Stefansson and his fiance-but-never-bride, Orpha Cecil Smith, and also other correspondents. The biographer details Stefansson's relationships with several women, but most particularly his liaison with the Inupiat woman, Pannigbluk, with whom he had a son. The tone of the book is neither scandalous nor condemnatory, but the situation offers the opportunity for searching considerations about colonial relationships.

In the case of Simpson, Raffan delves into the multiple liasons of the indomitable Scot with native and mixed-blood women, in addition to his eventual marriage to his 18-year-old cousin. Simpson is known to have fathered children with at least eight women.

These are both strong biographies with lots of human interest; I'll put them into the bib for my Canadian history course. Poring through them this summer, though, reminds me of the pleasure of deliberate reading for no good reason. It seems that so much of my reading is on command, with a task at hand; on my desk right now are a book to be reviewed for a historical journal, two book manuscripts to be reviewed for university presses, and a lengthy proposal to be reviewed for a Canadian granting agency. And still, my thoughts keep drifting to the new Richard Gwynn biography of John A. Macdonald that I'm reading for no particular or pressing reason. . . .