Christopher Moore's Canadian History

Some Cow History for Stampede Week

2009-07-14T09:06:00.004-04:00

Cow history sounds like a caption from The Far Side. As Friedrich Neitzsche memorably put it in the opening line of On the Use and Abuse of History ( (full text here), "Observe the herd which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today is."

But in recent years some western historians and the University of Calgary Press has been making a nice mix of economic, political, environmental, and cultural history out of the yesterdays and todays of cattle. There's been Simon Evans's handsome book on the Bar U Ranch, a collection of essays by Evans with Sarah Carter and Bill Yeo called Cowboys, Ranchers, and the Cattle Business and, just out, Warren Elofson's Somebody Else's Money: The Walrond Ranch 1883-1907. Maybe it's just the pictures of those great foothills landscapes, but I'm a sucker for this stuff.

Calgary Herald 1884: "The rough and festive cowboy of Texas and Oregon has no counterpart here... the genuine Alberta cowboy is a gentleman." (picked up actually from David Breen's earlier work on The Canadian Prairie West and the RAnching Frontier)

Winners

2009-07-14T08:46:00.003-04:00

The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History has been handing out prizes. Janet Ajzenstat, whose Idea File blog has more than once been among "This Week's Links" at right, is receiving the inaugural John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History for her book The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament. Ajzenstat, you might say, admires Lockean liberal principles; recently on her blog she has been looking sceptically at Ian MacKay's much less approving (also prize-winning) take on 19th century liberal traditions in Canada.

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #11

2009-07-13T11:47:00.002-04:00

On the night of July 12-13, volunteers from Quebec launch their raid against the enemy batteries now pounding the city from the south shore. During the night, the force crosses the river well to the west of the British position on Point Levy. The raid quickly collapse in confusion. As men of the raiding party lose their way in the dark, they begin firing on each other and giving way to panic. “Three times M. Dumas contrived to rally his people, and three times his soldiers, mutually mistaking one another for enemies, fired at their own men and went tumbling over each other down the hill to get back to the canoes” Before dawn, the raiders have retreated back across the river, leaving the British unaware they had even been under threat.

This will be the last offensive the forces inside Quebec will launch against their besiegers.

On July 13,, the French military office Captain Malartic notes in his diary that “M. de Montcalm went into the city to reassure the townspeople, who are dismayed by the effect of the enemy fire. It was necessary to send twenty men per battalion to reinforce and encourage the town garrison, which will be relieved every two days.”

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #10

2009-07-11T12:36:00.002-04:00

July 12: While the Quebec townspeople's raiding party gets organized, the siege guns they want to destroy finally go to work about nine in the evening. Here's the Journal du Siège again:

The enemy continued the bombardment all night. We replied from the town … but the batteries hit us at least 120 times, and several houses were smashed down. One shot fell on the cathedral, others on the Jesuit church and on several other buildings. The longest shot that landed inside the town fell fifty steps inside the Saint-Jean Gate.

This will be the experience of the townspeople for the rest of the siege and, though they don't know it, the siege has two months to run.

RIP Keith Ralston 1922-2009

2009-07-11T12:25:00.003-04:00

Keith Ralston, historian of British Columbia and mentor to scores of students in that field, died recently at 87. There is a memorial service in Vancouver today.

When I was an undergraduate at UBC, students called him "Mr." Ralston, aware by osmosis he was somehow a little outside the normal tenure-track academic career. Now, seeing more of his career, that seems a badge of honour. Ralston was a journalist, an labour activist, a school teacher, and the founding curator of Vancouver's standout Maritime Museum before joining the history department (about the time I became a student there).

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #9

2009-07-11T12:09:00.003-04:00

July 11. By now the powerful concern of the townspeople is with the siege batteries being built just across the river narrows, and almost ready to commence firing upon the town. Today the principal merchants and tradesmen of the town present a petition to Governor Vaudreuil, volunteering to serve in a raiding party that would cross the river to seize and destroy the enemy batteries before they begin firing.

By nightfall the force is ready. Jean-Baptiste Dumas, a veteran officer of the colonial regular troops who has been given responsibility for the town militia, takes the lead. "This detachment must have twelve hundred to fifteen hundred men, both regular troops and Canadians and Indians, who are all volunteers…," writes the anonymous author of the Journal du Siège. "We are counting heavily on this detachment. God will that they succeed; we definitely need them to.

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #8

2009-07-10T09:57:00.003-04:00

July 10: More than a week after the British have established themselves on the south shore, the Ile d'Orleans, and the north shore north-east of Montmorency, the siege of Quebec is still a long-distance confrontation for most citizens and even for the troops. The anonymous Journal du Siège reports:

At seven in the morning, an English deserter crossed the river toward the town in a leaky canoe. As soon as he was seen, our people went to get him. His report: they have 6000 men landed at Ange-Gardien and at least 2000 at Pointe à Lévy; that is all their troops. They had stationed at Pointe de Lévy a regiment made up of all nations that never wanted to serve. They had to re-embark them and put Royal Marines ashore to replace them….

At 7.30 in the evening, a seaman was killed at the Dauphine battery by a mortar bomb that exploded as it came out of the mortar. This was the first casualty in the city.

***
A note on histories of the siege of Quebec: Three books stand out.

The first is C.P. Stacey's Quebec 1759: The Siege and the Battle, first published fifty years ago in 1959. Stacey wrote this more or less in his spare time while shepherding to publication the official history of the Canadian Army in the Second World War. What a good historian he was -- I once heard him called the best of his generation in his technical skills. He seems to have been superbly organized, judicious, plain-spoken, and surely a prodigious worker. Donald Graves edited a new edition of Stacey's Quebec 1759 a couple of years ago.

Second is Fred Anderson's Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-66, published in 2000. I first found this a bit Americano-centric, and he is looking for the roots of the American Revolution. But Anderson is very good at carrying readers away from thinking it is just Amherst/Wolfe versus Montcalm/Vaudreuil; this is the best book on the big sweep of the conflict, interested in frontier alliances and British politics as well as the armies on the St. Lawrence. He's actually quite succinct on the siege of Quebec, but this is the one for the bigger context.

The principal new work for the 250th anniversary is Peter MacLeod's Northern Armageddon, published last year. Not easy to go up against Stacey's classic, but MacLeod has new material and a social-history sense that is fresh.

Finally, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, back in 1974, included essays on "The French Forces in North America during the Seven Years' War " by W.J. Eccles and "The British Forces in North America during the Seven Years' War" by Stacey, that remain terrifically useful. The online DBC has biographies of all the principal figures, but does not include the background essays, like these two, that appeared in its early print volumes.

Charles Roland 1933-2009, medical historian

2009-07-10T09:27:00.001-04:00

Belated notice of the life (and death last month) of Dr. Charles Roland, who pretty much created medical history in Canada as the Hannah professor of medical history at McMaster University School of Medicine. The Globe had a good obituary.

Speaking of niche blogging....

2009-07-09T17:15:00.004-04:00

Mark Reynolds is blogging the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Strasbourg, all photographed too. And I want to go there.

LIve-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #7

2009-07-09T09:54:00.005-04:00

[Due to a technical error -- someone can't read a calendar, more or less -- July 9's events time-travelled into July 8's report. I've now put some new material in yesterday's post, and I've moved the events reported yesterday to today, where they should have been in the first place, and expanded them a bit.]

July 9: Montcalm, reviewing his options in a letter to Lévis, his second-in-command, emphasizes the benefits of the defensive strategy: shore up the lines and let the British try to get at them.

Action: The diarist Foligné describes heavy firing from the batteries at Quebec across the river to Pointe de Levy, "where the enemy has been building for some days a battery to fire on the city." Wolfe is not yet able to pour fire in upon the city, its defenders, and its citizens. But the townspeople know what's coming. As Lévis's journal reports: "The people of Quebec, seeing with concern the gun batteries the enemy is building at Pointe de Levy, which will be able to burn and destroy their homes, urgently demand that they be allowed to go attack those works."

Meanwhile, the Journal du Siège notes the results of yesterday's moves at Montmorency:

We learn of firing at the [Montmorency Falls, and of the ships firing on M. de Lévy’s camp, just to entertain them, no doubt.

The result: the Ottawas defeated about forty English who advanced in a squad. And they attacked another column of 300 or 400 men who recoiled and than, as a second group flanked them, were hard hit. In this skirmish we had 4 Canadiens and three natives killed and one Canadien and four natives wounded. The English had at least a hundred men killed, but they have held their place. They encamped above the falls and they have a two-gun battery. They know their trade well. I hope we know ours – in truth we are going to need it.

(Casualty estimates for the other side, it should be said, tend to be unreliable and generally exaggerated)

Abolishing the Senate... in Japan

2009-07-08T15:08:00.003-04:00

Japan's dominant Liberal Democratic Party is thinking of abolishing the upper house of the Japanese parliament, going forward with a unicameral legislature and 30% fewer legislators.

Japan is a fascinating example of how flexible the parliamentary system is. In Canada we lament the autocratic power of prime ministers and the feebleness of backbenchers, and we diagnose this as the inevitable consequence of a parliamentary system. But in Japan, with a broadly similar parliamentary structure, prime ministers are vulnerable creatures who cannot impose their policies and who rarely last more than a year. Factions within the party caucus jockey fiercely for their own policies and candidates at all times.

(h/t: Fruits and Votes)

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #6

2009-07-08T09:41:00.005-04:00

[As explained in the italicized note for July 9, this entry has been redone.]

July 8: Wolfe, habitually restless, eager for action, always preferring contact to the slow preliminaries of siege, makes a move at the only point where contact seems possible: at the far left of Montcalm's lines (which means north-east of the city where the Montmorency river runs south, drops over its falls, and joins the St. Lawrence. His initial instinct (it will also be his final one) had been to land upriver of Quebec, but the fleet does not yet control the river sufficiently, so for the time being he goes with what's feasible.

Today he lands troops at Ange-Gardien, on the north shore between Quebec and Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré on the north shore, and threatens to cross the Montmorency. The anonymous Journal du Siège observes and frets: "We estimate that the English have landed at least 1600 men at Ange-Gardien; I really fear that we will have a lot of trouble pushing them out, although a thousand Canadiens and natives led by M. de Courtemanche will be moved there during the night."

Just noticing: the Hesjedal file

2009-07-08T09:38:00.002-04:00

Ryder Hesjedal currently stands 21st overall out of 180 who started the Tour de France. Bring on the mountains! Getting some coverage from CBC Sports, not much in the Globe, and of course largely anonymous on the American TV coverage picked up by Outdoor Life Network (which I love anyway).

History of blogging

2009-07-08T09:27:00.004-04:00

I'm willing to consider the "blog" as a phenomenon of recent history worthy of historical analysis, and here's someone who's trying. But most of the reflections seem entirely unrelated to what interests me about the potential of weblogs. This blog, I hope, stands among those that are not much influenced by how "A-listers," the MSM, and Huffington Post are changing blogging, and the declaration that "most bloggers spend three to five hours a day blogging" leaves me slack-jawed. The only observation that echoes here is #2, about the future being with "niche" blogging, and most of the other points seem to ignore that rule.

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #5

2009-07-07T09:10:00.006-04:00

July 7: The British cannot besiege Quebec effectively until they have secure control of the St. Lawrence. Early in July, they are still far short of that, even downriver from the city and the narrows.

Foligné, a merchant marine officer detached to command a gun battery on the quay of Quebec, takes a professional interest in the naval skirmishing today, describing how British vessels move into the strait between the Ile d'Orléans and the north shore near Montmorency Falls, how gunboats and floating batteries engage them, and how the British fall back to the main body of their fleet. "That is how this engagement ended, without loss or damage on our part,," he writes; "we do not know what damage the enemy may have received from the shots which we saw hitting home." Captain Bell, a British diarist, notes "the passage from Montmorency to Levy for boats still dangerous, the floating batteries still reigning triumphant." Wolfe had been grousing earlier about "the amazing backwardness in these matters on the part of the fleet." (As C. P. Stacey observes, he is accusing the navy of being gun-shy.)

When the past is less like a foreign country, more like a distant planet

2009-07-07T09:04:00.003-04:00

When Robert McNamara, who died the other day at 93, left the services at the end of the Second World War, he wanted to take up a position as a Harvard professor. But he joined the Ford Motor Company instead. His wife was ill and he feared he would not be able to support her on a Harvard professor's salary.

Potter on parliament in the LRC

2009-07-06T15:29:00.005-04:00

Those of you who took up my offer some months ago and are now luxuriating in the munificence of my benevolence (that is, you are receiving the complimentary Literary Review of Canada subscription for which I had the pleasant opportunity of making nominations) can now read in the crisp new pages of the July-August issue Andrew Potter's lively review of Peter Russell and Lorne Sossin's collection Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis, an academic instabook about the coalition, the prorogation and all that from last winter. The review is not online as yet, so for the moment it's dead-tree or can't-see.

Potter is hard on the collection for including only those he calls "parliamentarians" -- that is, those who saw the coalition as a normal and legitimate part of the parliamentary process, and now see their task as explaining to benighted and ill-informed Canadians why this is so. Potter notes several prominent scholars and intellectuals who took the contrary "democrat" position last winter: that is, they asserted that the coalition challenge may have been conformed to parliamentary rules but offended against the requirements of popular legitimization and consent. Not that they are necessarily right, says Potter, it's their exclusion from the volume that is unacceptable. The contributors, he fears, are permitted to lecture when they should debate.

Regular readers may guess I'm a "parliamentarian" myself. But I see Potter's point. Well done, LRC (again).

Update, July 9: Potter expands on this at his Maclean's blog, and a flood of commentators vent.

Update, July 13. The July LRC is now online, but not including Potter's article.

History of California

2009-07-06T10:38:00.004-04:00

Arts and Letters Daily (link now corrected!) highlights The Atlantic's review of the eighth volume of Kevin Starr’s Americans and the California Dream, which must be one of the most extraordinary single-author historical projects currently in progress.

The news these days has California collapsing under the follies of plebiscitary democracy, where a simple majority can amend the constitution to abrogate minority rights but the legislature needs a 2/3rd majority to pass a budget and endless plebiscites bind the state ever more firmly in tax cuts and bankruptcy. Starr's new volume on the years 1950-63, ironically, is all about the glory days of California, when it had the best schools and universities (all publicly funded), the best infrastructure (ditto), the best parks and recreational facilities (ditto), and limitless job possibilities (much of it from federal investment).

Poor California -- suicide by referendum.

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec +250 #4

2009-07-06T09:45:00.005-04:00

July 6. The British navy and army, still arriving at Quebec, is preoccupied with setting out the groundwork for the siege of the city. Today the crucial action is to the west, at Fort Niagara.

Niagara, an old and substantial fortification (in the territory of the Seneca, westernmost of the Six Nations), enables New France to move men and supplies in bulk along Lakes Ontario and Erie. Niagara's commander, Captain Pierre Pouchot, a French regular officer with skills in both engineering and native diplomacy, returned from Montreal in the spring. Pouchot then dispatched 2500 (of his force of 3000 men) onward, across Lake Erie to attack Fort Pitt (the modern Pittsburgh) on the Ohio. The plan is to regain control of the Ohio-Mississippi communications route, shore up the confidence of the allied First Nations in the west, and by renewing forays into Pennsylvania and Virginia, force the British to retain substantial forces in the west, thus weakening their drive toward the heartland of New France.

French power in all this territory depends on alliances with the First Nations and on the delicate entente with the Six Nations, who have remained largely neutral in French-English quarrels since the Great Peace of 1701 ended a century of warfare between the Iroquois coalition south of the Great Lakes and the French-native coalition based north of the Lakes. Pouchot knows a British thrust to Fort Niagara could come via Oswego, at the southeastern end of Lake Ontario -- but he concludes that if such a thrust is developing, the Six Nations will keep him informed.

Montcalm, commander of the French army in New France, has never been keen on the disposition of thousands of soldiers into the west. Montcalm and Levis, his second-in-command of the army, want to concentrate on defending the approaches to Montreal and Quebec. It is Governor Vaudreuil who continues the fighting on all fronts, and Montcalm fears that Pouchot, "caressed in the study of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, has not gained caution by it."

On July 6 Captain Pouchot learns New France's entente with the Six Nations is coming to pieces. As the British power waxes, the Six Nations are accomodating to what they conclude must be the new reality. They have allowed Lt-Colonel Prideaux to move a British attack force in small boats from Oswego to Niagara without even a hint reaching Pouchot. Mohawks led by William Johnston, New York's influential envoy to the eastern Six Nations, are part of the force. On July 6, Mohawks, scouting just ahead of Prideaux's force, ambush some of Pouchot's men as they work outside the fort. This attack launches the unexpected siege of Fort Niagara -- and threatens the collapse of all New France's efforts in the west. Most of Pouchot's forces are away on the Ohio mission.

Update, July 8: "The History Blog" has news here on what Fort Niagara did to commemorate these events on July 4, 2009

(Photo: Old Fort Niagara)

A day for Ryder Hesjedal to make history

2009-07-03T21:52:00.004-04:00

I know it's also a big day for our friends down south, but across the pond it is the first day of the Tour de France (in Monaco, actually, today), and broadcast on the OLN channel. Again this year, this guy, Ryder Hesjedal of Victoria, is the lone Canadian on the tour. He had a terrific tour last year, not that Canadian sports journalists pay any heed. This is his website.

Update, July 6: Both CB sports and The Globe and Mail have begun incorporating Canadian Press coverage of Hesjedal into the stories they reprint from Associated Press.

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec 3

2009-07-03T21:47:00.003-04:00

July 5, 1759: Two military couriers come in to Montcalm from the north shore beyond the Ile d'Orléans. Both report that the British navy is having little trouble navigating the river. Large numbers of British warships are now moving safely through the narrows and channels of the river, bringing the main body of the British army and supplies and most of the naval firepower, the forces thatwill prosecute the siege of the city together.

Live-blogging the Siege of Quebec 2

2009-07-03T21:41:00.003-04:00

July 4, 1759: With the British siege forces moving into place facing the city, Foligné, a diarist within the city of Québec, reports that Montcalm this day issued a declaration that all within the city who could not serve the armed forces or were fearful should leave for Trois-Rivières or Montreal immediately

Live-blogging the siege of Quebec 1

2009-07-03T10:12:00.002-04:00

[In July 1759 the siege of Quebec was just getting started. I'm thinking of live-blogging the whole thing, 250 years late. If any readers are deep into the sources on this, particularly the French sources inside Quebec, please get in touch - my library is not so extensive, and I would be glad to have co-authors on this]

July 3: General Wolfe, just getting his troops established on the Ile d'Orléans and the south shore, writes in his journal of his consultations with Admiral Saunders:

Our notions agreeing to get ashore if possible above the Town we determined to attempt it. Troops and ships prepared accordingly. Admiral was of the opinion that none of the ships could be of the least use on the Beauport side [i.e., downriver, NE of the city].

The same day, General Montcalm, reading the situation the same way, concludes he could withdraw his forces from the Beauport to shorten his stretched-out defence line.

More DCB Search

2009-07-03T10:03:00.002-04:00

Following on yesterday's post below, friends of this blog assure me (in the nicest way) that when it comes to searching in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, the problem is that I'm a techno-peasant. Don't search just because it invites you to -- you have to use the Advanced Search to get anywhere. Aaah, that's better.

Would tearing down 24 Sussex Drive be a heritage disaster?

2009-07-02T10:47:00.003-04:00

Paul Wells thinks we should tear down the prime minister's residence and hold an architectural competition for an up-to-snuff replacement building.

Y'know, I hope all the various heritage societies I support won't excommunicate me at once, but I kinda like the idea.