The first lines of his new book, Unsettled: Lord Selkirk's Scottish Colonists and the Battle for Canada's West, 1813-1816, declare that the book "is not a history." He goes on to report that as a child in Winnipeg he naturally had no interest in the history of the place he grew up and he still dismisses everything written about it as "dry historical accounts."
In retirement, however, he has discovered an interest in his ancestors, some of whom participated in the migration of Highland Scottish farmers to Red River in 1813-16 under the auspices of the Earl of Selkirk and the Hudson's Bay Company. Indeed, the Selkirk settlers fascinate him enough to have inspired this history of them.
But instead of realizing he should blame the self-absorption of youth for his long neglect of their struggles and adventures, he insists that all previous work on the topic has been "just facts, a series of incidents that had no power to fire the imagination." The previous works, in other words, were histories. Since he dismisses "history," he has to present his own as something entirely new, a different thing.
Is anyone else really tired of this trope that historical writing is by definition merely a pedantic recitation of dates and facts -- a history, that is -- but THIS ONE ISN'T?
Unsettled, of course, is a history, despite Lower's protests, and not a bad one at all. It is written exclusively from the correspondence the leaders of the settler group sent to their backer, Lord Selkirk, home in Britain, so it abounds in small personal details of the settlers, including the experiences of Lower's own ancestor, the millwright Samuel Lamont. For the larger sweep of that time and place -- the Indigenous civilizations, the contesting fur trade companies, and the proto-Metis whom Lower calls the Bois-Brules -- a historian with a wider lens would be required. But if your interest is the few score Scots who made the agonizing trek from the Highlands to Hudson's Bay, up the long rivers, down Lake Winnipeg, to set up as farmers thousands of kilometres from any other such European settlement, he's your man.
Lower presents them in a lively close-up narrative, much of it told in the historical present. It should get a good reaction from readers not only in Winnipeg but in Scots-Canadian communities anywhere. And maybe such a response will encourage Lower to start his next book with the thought that he has come to appreciate history a little, maybe to admit he is even becoming a historian himself.
Lower is alert to contemporary matters. He includes in his preface a recognition of and apology for the suffering and injustices his ancestors helped inflict on Sauteaux, Cree, Dakota, and other original inhabitants of the Assiniboine and Red River valley. But having recently read Myrna Kostash's Ghosts in a Photograph, an account of her ancestors' later settlement in a different part of the prairies, I can't help thinking how much and how thoughtfully she has internalized and historicized in detail how settlement actually engaged with indigeneity. That's where the leading edge of historical writing should be taking us today.
