The great wide north

Consider David Thompson, the boy taken from a charity home in London in 1784 to work for the Hudson’s Bay Co. in the New World.

He loses the sight in one eye to snowblindness while wintering on the shores of Hudson’s Bay and breaks a leg that heals badly, leaving him with a limp. Yet he walks and paddles across Canada several times, learns numerous First Nations languages and records thousands of pages about everything that met his eye during his travels – from native customs to the habits of polar bears and the way ice crystals form at different temperatures.

Out of these travels, he produces the first accurate maps of 18th-century Canada, which would form the geographical basis for a country not yet dreamed of.

Thompson’s story is the leaping-off point for Kanata, the first novel by Toronto writer Don Gillmor. Gillmor has been a magazine journalist, children’s author and creator of nonfiction (including the family memoir The Desire of Every Living Thing). He came across Thompson’s writings while researching the book Canada: A People’s History, a companion volume to the 2000-2001 CBC-TV series.

"He has these extraordinary explorations throughout the West, but he also had a very profound sense of what would happen to the West, even as it is being discovered for the first time by whites," Gillmor said in a recent interview. "He could see the death of the buffalo, the death of the Indian, ultimately the population of these Prairies into farms and cities and how it's going to change everything. Even the border — which he mapped as well — how that would be an issue, and proximity to the United States would be an issue."

Thompson, probably the greatest explorer of the Canadian West, got just six pages in Canada: A People’s History. But Gillmor couldn’t get him out of his head – Thompson's observational skill, the wide scope of his life, its tragic end.

In his final years, the nearly blind Thompson tried to sell his maps to the political powers of the day, and later to a New York publisher. There were no takers. He died in Montreal in 1857 in extreme poverty.

Thompson’s journals have been collected and published, most recently in The Writings of David Thompson: Travels, 1850 version (edited by Toronto history professor William Moreau). But Gillmor set out to capture the flavour of the man himself and the Métis wife he spent his life with.

"He's so understated in his journals," Gillmor said. "It's unbelievable, because he describes these events where he is almost killed and it is in this matter-of-fact, deadpan, objective manner. Some of those I wanted to flesh out a bit. The other thing is his wife, Charlotte. I think she gets a one-line entry saying, ‘Married Charlotte Small today,’ and she was with him on a lot of these journeys and was clearly integral to his whole life.

"He was madly in love and they went everywhere together. So many people in that era would have what they called a ‘country wife’ — usually Métis —and then they'd retreat to Montreal and go back to find a more acceptable [white] partner, and he didn't."

Through his research, Gillmor discovered a treasure trove of first-person narratives about Canadian history that languish in archives across the country. The journals of early explorers, the records of settlers attempting to carve a living out of unbroken soil and the diaries of foot soldiers and prime ministers drew him in with their mix of the mundane and the visionary.

Kanata starts with the story of Thompson, then evolves into a series of first-person voices based in part on these journals. The 1860s and ’70s are told through the eyes of an assistant to Sir John A. Macdonald and of Louis Riel, while the 1930s are related through the journals of internationally renowned Dr. Norman Bethune and former prime minister Mackenzie King. Gillmor sought out people who had a significant role in the way the country was shaped, but also those who had kept journals and thus left something to posterity.

Kanata alternates these voices with the story of a fictional descendant of Thompson named Michael Mountain Horse. Mountain Horse is the character who carries the narrative through the 20th century – serving as a soldier in both world wars and in Spain. He also rides the rails in the Depression and participates in a parade of First Nations people at the 1908 Calgary Stampede that emphasized the divide between whites and natives. Mountain Horse even makes a diversion to Hollywood in the 1930s.

Carrying that much Canadian history is a lot for a single character, and Mountain Horse races through so many events that he barely has time to cast a shadow. The other voices of the 20th century Gillmor conjures up, however, are powerful – especially prime ministers King and John Diefenbaker, who had distinct concepts of the country.

"King was so successful but so insecure, as well as quite loopy in many ways," says Gillmor. "He would be worried about where he was seated at dinner – was he too far away and does that mean he was out of favour? You can see these kinds of charming insecurities and you realize how, I think, frail a figure he was. He was worried that he didn't have enough grasp of history, because Churchill, of course, was one of those people who remember everything."

Kanata is an ambitious novel that poses big questions, like what is a border and how does a country arise from a handful of unsellable maps? The book barely holds together as a fictional narrative, jumping from one personal story to another too quickly. But it succeeds in plunging the reader into particular moments of Canadian history – Thompson losing his children, Macdonald when he’s deeply in his cups, Mackenzie King grappling with the issue of conscription. Although it is written as a novel, what Gillmor has created is more an alternative history of Canada. 

"The idea was just to look at a personal account – almost an alternative account – of how the country was created, as opposed to this top-down overview of heroic figures and events and how they kind of move in this logical ascendancy, and this is how a country comes out of it. To look at it on a much more personal level," he said. "To some degree, history is a series of accidents."

Kanata is in stores now.

Susan Noakes writes about the arts for CBC News.