Way Out West: On the Trail of an Errant Ancestor
By Michael Shaw Bond McClelland & Stewart, 247 pages, $32.95
Not all the early explorers of Canada's vast territory west of Winnipeg were hard-bitten fur-traders. A famous journey across the Prairies and over the Rocky Mountains was made in 1862-63 by a young English lord and his personal physician, who by any measure were the greenest of greenhorns.
The lord was Viscount Milton, 22-year-old heir to Earl Fitzwilliam, one of the grandest Whig magnates of his day, a tremendous swell with extensive lands in Yorkshire and 66,000 acres at Coolattin in Ireland. Among the glories of Georgian Dublin are Fitzwilliam Square and Fitzwilliam Place. The physician was a friend from Cambridge days, Dr. Walter Butler Cheadle, a powerfully built former oarsman.
Lord Milton was an odd-looking person, with a long neck and sloping shoulders. He was also epileptic, bad-tempered and spoiled, the most unlikely figure of an explorer. Despite his disability, Milton had been a passionate rider to hounds and had made a hunting trip to Canada in 1860. This was hardly enough to make him an experienced traveller. Nevertheless, these two greenhorn toffs rode their horses all the way from Fort Garry over the Yellowhead to the Pacific, enduring appalling hardships and privations (they had to eat their horses), all with the aim of discovering a Northwest Passage overland.
The route followed was far from the U.S. border, near the gold- fields and with moderate gradients, fordable rivers and friendly Indians. In the event, the CPR chose a route via the Kicking Horse Pass. Still, there's a major highway along Milton's route today. In his book, The North West Passage by Land,a bestseller in its day, Milton put the argument for a Yellowhead route strongly while celebrating his own achievement. Years later, Cheadle published his own journals, in which his noble friend does not always seem quite so heroic. No man is a hero to his valet -- or to his physician.
Now a sprout of the Fitzwilliam family tree, Michael Bond, an old Etonian and Durham University science graduate, has made his own journey along his ancestor's route, some of it by hitchhiking across the winter Prairie and through the mountains on horseback. He has made a lively and interesting book of the adventure, with many humorous glances at Milton's version. Beginning with the tall tales of his grandmother, and ending with his no less colourful Aunt Chris in British Columbia, Bond is able to give full credit to the courage of his epileptic ancestor, whose virtues included empathy with the Indians he met or travelled with.
In Milton's day, epilepsy was considered a disgrace both to patient and family. (One thinks of the great suffering of Edward Lear, convinced that his disease was caused by masturbation, a habit he could not give up.) The young viscount had an Indian paramour, despite Cheadle's disapproval, but her kindness must have been a source of strength as he triumphed over his illness. And no doubt -- as "a sleeping dictionary" -- she helped him to learn Cree, one of his most useful accomplishments. Bond's own journey was fraught with hardship, at least in the Rockies, yet mollified by his easy relations with Indians and other company along the way. With the light, allusive finger of a good examinee, he sketches the history of the fur trade and the Selkirk Settlement at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Lord Milton was all for settlement and against the Hudson's Bay Company's monopoly.
Bond responds enthusiastically to the beauty of the plains, the vast sky with its towering clouds, the limitless horizons. And in the mountains, despite the hazards of dizzying precipices and deadfalls in the forests, he becomes so intoxicated with the sublime vistas before him that language goes into a spin: "There went bear and deer, there the coyote, there they lightly trod. They have gone before us. Now the only movement is ours. Where are they hid?. . . . They have crossed the portal and beckon us follow. There in utter desolation does great beauty lie"
Bond is eager to shake off what he sees as the stuffiness of the Fitzwilliam connection. He admires Lord Milton as a maverick. He seems proud that, for his own part, every day is a bad hair day. (His mother rebukes him for his unkempt head.) He mentions his shaggy locks more than once -- perhaps it is important to him. After all, he's a likable author, especially to this reviewer. The reason? Well, his bibliography doesn't mention Pierre Berton or Peter Newman, but does list The Great Fur Opera by Dobbs and Searle, and even quotes from it in his text. Kildare Dobbs is the author, with cartoonist Ronald Searle, of The Great Fur Opera , a travesty of the Hudson's Bay Company's history. In childhood, he lived at 43 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin, later attending the Coolattin Point-to-Point race meetings.