Book Notes: David Thompson at the Champlain Society

Members of the Champlain Society have been receiving their annual members' book for 2024 recently. Or at least I did. (Actually, I thought my membership had lapsed, but evidently there has been a lapse in record-keeping at one end or the other, presumably at mine.) 

The essence of the Champlain Society for over a century has been that by having a membership you assist in the publication of edited volumes of essential documentary collections from Canadian history. In exchange you get a copy of the new volume each year. Nowadays they do various other things too, as documented on their website. Notable: the Witness to Yesterday podcast, which must do more interviews on historians of Canada and their new books than everybody else combined.

Anyway, this year's members' book is a big one. Even physically big: two big hardcovers in a boxed set. But significance-big as well. In 19th century Canadian literature as well as in exploration history, David Thompson's Travels and other writings have been reckoned as essential reading. And since I've never done much more than dip into them for an anecdote or two, I may actually read widely in this year's volume (not always the case, I confess). Here are the blurbs for Volume One, edited and introduced by John Warkentin (geographer and longtime pillar of the society) and William Moreau, and for Volume Two (by Moreau).

Sometimes Society books are published commercially as well.  Not this one I think, but from the links non-members can order individual copies through University of Toronto Press, the publishing partner for all the Society books.

Book notes here on recent and interesting works on Canadian history have been a bit scarce lately.  Got some catching up to, mebbe.

Making history at the Champlain Society

Went out to the Champlain Society AGM on the weekend, where James Gibson's publication of the annual volume was launched and Jonathan Vance was honoured for A Township at War, Chalmers Award Winner for best work in Ontario history 2019.

The AGM was told the society has nicely avoided the collapse and bankruptcy it was spiralling toward a few years ago, having restored stable membership, secured new revenues, and above all found relevant new services to provide to Canadian history, from its immense digital archive based on 120 years of publication, its various outreach projects to libraries and groups, its lively website, and its remarkable podcast "Witness to Yesterday," which not only produces an unmatched amount of original high-quality content but continues to grow its audience multiple times over ever year.

And to that end, it was gratifying to hear Patrice Dutil, co-impresario of the podcast with Greg Marchildon, announce that the all-time most-downloaded of their podcasts is... the one he and I recorded last spring.

Prize watch: Chalmers Prize for Jonathan Vance

The Champlain Society has announced the 2019 winner of its Chalmers Award for the past year's best book on Ontario history is Jonathan Vance of Western University for his book A Township At War, his microhistory of one Ontario community's experience of the First World War.

The award will be presented at the Society's AGM in Toronto Saturday, November 2, at which the society will also be launching its own 2019 publication, “Opposition on the Coast”: The Hudson’s Bay Company, American Coasters, the Russian-American Company, and Native Traders on the Northwest Coast, 1825-1846 by Barry Gough.

In Which I Briefly Return to the History of New France

Jumonville Glen in autumn

The Champlain Society runs both an online document publishing forum, Findings/Trouvailles, and a podcast, Witness to Yesterday, and and today I have a little corner of the history of New France in both of them. The document here is the casualty list of the 1754 skirmish at Jumonville, the first skirmish of the Seven Years War, and the podcast here is my discussion with Patrice Dutil of why it is of interest.

Champlain Society

John Warkentin

Went down to the annual meeting of the Champlain Society the other day, always a gathering of the tribe for Torontonians interested in published Canadiana.

The Society  discovered in recent decades that its century-old model -- members pay a hundred bucks a year, get a handsomely published book of carefully edited Canadian documents on a chosen subject, and thereby subsidize the dissemination of accessible documentary knowledge  -- just was not working anymore.  Library building among Canadians is not such a big thing anymore, 'tseems.  Proof: plunging membership, plunging revenue, looming collapse.

That was a decade ago. This AGM demonstrated that the Society has successfully been re-orienting itself away from dependency on membership dues and into other sources of revenue, along with other vehicles for disseminating historical knowledge.

One of those new vehicles is the Society's very active and ambitious podcast Witness to Yesterday.  Listeners in its founding year, 2017: 686. Listeners in 2018 (first nine months only): 6452.  Listeners in 2019: another ten-fold increase?

The Society's more than a hundred year backlist of published volumes is already available digitally, but the annual published volume in the red jacket continues to appear. This year's volume, published in conjunction with the Hudson's Bay Records Society, is Life and Death by the Frozen Sea, the 1714-17 York Factory journals of James Knight, edited by Arthur J. "Skip" Ray.

The Society also honoured some of the volunteers who keep the society running, including noted historical geographer John Warkentin, who has been serving the Champlain Society, for fifty years, and also literary scholar Germaine Warkentin, active for 20.

Society President Michel Beaulieu took me by surprise by making time to mention another recently launched partnership: cross-publication on the CS website of blog posts from (he said, not me) Canada's leading historical blogger, Christopher Moore, who occasionally takes note of Society achievements.  Thanks! -- it seems to be working.

If you were a member, you could have known this already.

Update, October 31:  Allan Williams comments:

Thanks for the tip in your “leading” blog on the Champlain Society podcasts – I listened to the one on Donald Creighton and the one with Peter Russell last night and will explore further when I have some more time.

 
    

Cross-posting at the Champlain Society website

My friends at The Champlain Society run a website crammed with findings, sources, readings, and podcasts about Canadian history. They have just done me the honour of inviting me to cross-post now and then from here to there. So every ten days or so, a post from this blog will go up on the Champlain Society site at well. And the first one selected from here is now there.  Go take a look, and browse around.

Podcasts from the Champlain Society

The Champlain Society, a member-supported organization that for more than a century has been publishing scrupulously edited Canadian historical documents in handsome editions, has also been expanding into new ventures, not least of which is "Witness to Yesterday," a podcast series that has been running for some months on the society website, and on iTunes and other podcast sources.

It's hosted by Patrice Dutil, Greg Marchildon, and Kenna Turcotte, and while the focus of each episode is a particular historical document, they tend to talk about just about any CanHist topic that takes their fancy: the Canadian Irish, the diary of Lucy Morrison, the birth of the NHL, the religious use of peyote in Canada.  And more.

If you need something new in your earbuds....

Champlain Society and William Ord Mackenzie

Dropped by the Champlain Society AGM yesterday at the Toronto Archives. Heartening to know that the membership rolls of the Society have been rising nicely in the past year.  Probably not just because this blog has been telling you you ought to be a member  (You ought to be a member.) but good to see anyway.

This year the Society published Another World, Sandra Alston's edition of the mid-19th century Canadian diary of the Scottish military doctor William Ord Mackenzie. All members receive a copy.

Mackenzie turns out to have had an eye (and more) for the ladies of Toronto and to be hotly anti-Reform (Robert Baldwin he considered a dangerous radical).  He also described a long drunken evening at Fort York with "the Macnab" and how they struggled to get him home:

Lt  Gordon & I, with Ens. D.  Seton (from Aberdeen) went out with him. The air was keen & frosty, & soon had such an effect on Macnab, so that it was quite evident he never could walk home alone 1¼ mile, so we accompanied him without appearing to do so for the real reason. – It was with great difficulty, that Gordon & I could manage on each side to steady such an immense, & for the time unsteady body. – When we had got about half way, he stopped short, & insisted that we should turn back. “Ye’re fine braw chiels, & I’m a puir auld man (I should think his age is about 60), & ye think I canna gae hame without ye”.

So saying, we wished him good night, & pretended to leave him: fortunately I recommended that we should follow at a distance, for I knew that close to his path, was a tolerably deep ditch at that time being made. We watched him from a corner, when after staggering a few paces, he disappeared, & sure enough, we soon found him with his face downwards in the ditch, from which he never could have raised himself; with great difficulty we got him up, & unheeding his further remonstrances, took him to the Hotel, where he allowed no one but myself & “boots” to put him to bed.

This work, one of considerable difficulty being satisfactorily accomplished, I offered my hand & said goodnight – With a good humoured but Drunken smile he raised his huge hand, & gave me a smart slap on the cheek, “Guid nicht, ye rascal!”. –

On Going home, we all agreed, to say nothing of his Drunkenness to our Brother–officers, for the Credit of the Highlands, nor was the Circumstance ever mentioned up to the period of my leaving the 93rd.

This post is gonna cost you a hundred bucks

... because if you share the interests of this blog, you really want to be a member of The Champlain Society, annual dues $100.  Here's where you send the money.

The Champlain Society, flourishing since 1905, publishes one book a year, each one a handsomely produced, edited, annotated collection of documents from Canadian history. Its first publications, more than a century ago, were the complete works of Champlain himself. But the society has gone far afield since. The 106th volume, just gone out to members, is Norman Hillmer's edition of the papers, letters, and diary entries of the early 20th century Ottawa Man par excellence O.D. Skelton  (Hillmer: "These days I explain he was Mackenzie King's Nigel Wright, and everyone understands.")

The society was once the preserve of gents and knights, and one was invited to join (or not). Those days are long gone. The society now relies almost entirely on the support of those who choose to join it. And in recent years it has been burning through its accumulated reserves at an impressive rate as membership has gently declined.

Dutil wants you.

The directors have stopped the hemorrhaging lately. These days they are led by Patrice Dutil, who somehow manages to be an historian in two languages, a scholar of public administration, and someone with most unhistorian-like gift for actually running things. The society has been cutting costs (not on the books) and they have been making some very promising investments. In a couple of months every book in the Champlain Society will be available as an ebook, freely downloadable (freely as in no charge) to Kindle, Kobo, laptop, iPhone, whatever ... but only if you are a member.

Surely anyone who takes a large and culturally enlightened view of Canadian history ought to be a member. But the current membership of the Society is under 300. It's an impressive list, but the list of those who should be members, but are not, seems vast.

I drank some of the Society's wine at their AGM yesterday  (comp'ed -- for the first time. They found a winery sponsor.) As I left, I congratulated Dutil and he thanked me for coming, and he said, "Hey, maybe you will say something about this on that blog."

Said.