Overview of Canadian history

Canadian History

Precis: W.J. Eccles, "Society and the Frontier."

While elementary exposure to history cloisters many in an idealistic interpretation of the past, it is the job of the academic historian to push past the nebulous tales of heroes and villains and evince a clearer illumination of actualities. While Canadian history, like many others, is filled with the protagonists and antagonists and stories of great fortune that build a nation, W.J. Eccles has pursued a career in dissuading the myths of historical reticence and injecting the old with true scholarship in pursuit of a greater base of knowledge. In The Canadian Frontier, this has never been truer. In "Society and the Frontier," W.J. Eccles provides a sound disclosure of fact and theory that knit together the nuanced truths and assumptions of Canadian history to create an accurate reflection of the development of northern frontier society.

In the entirety of his works, Eccles seeks to dismantle hackneyed approaches to viewing Canadian history that are frequently based in a Davey Crocker-esque approach to history; far more said than done. In his first book, Frontenac: the Courtier Governor and later Canada Under Louis XIV, he expertly riffles through superficial statements about the Canadian past repeated through both textbooks and lectures at all levels of historical knowledge. It is from this perspective that "Society and the Frontier" was cast; in Frontier, he approaches these facts as "flabby evidence" and even suggests that others are "fantasies or dramatic lies." His approach to Canadian history, particularly that of the Society as embodied in this article and throughout the rest of his works, is one that summarily disregards assumptions for the brass-ring of research: fact.

He begins his work with a description of the Canadian frontier, pastoral land of the idyll that has enraptured the hearts of Canadians for centuries. He continues his discussion by addressing the problems of New France as being used as a commercial outpost for Europe. This commercial structure was devastating for Canada; cod fishing villages in the East were made solely for export, with very little raw local investment. The fishing villages were inevitably small and lacked the inherent foundational ties integral to the creation of a society; there was no need for a common source of consumer experience, since both boat and sail were imported from Europe. As such, the size and nature of the villages was immediately truncated and monochromatic, and the ability to grow a society from such nascent forms was impossible as allows for by the governing system in early Canada.

While the fur trade pushed out into parts unknown, as the Cod industry did in the seas of the North Atlantic, it did so with family and future in mind, settling the "wilderness" of the Canadian north. The peculiar market, an oddity in the international economy, mirrored its industrial role in the affects it left on Canada. The land into which the hunters ventured, in search of the beaver that would make the hats so desired by the fashionable gentleman of Europe, demanded of its settler labor and skills that the native people had mastered. Fur traders and courageous merchants moved Westward throughout the Canadian hinterland, unsupported by the structures foundational to any society; here, they were on their own, but it is there ingenuity and strength recognized by Eccles that yields these agents invaluable in the construction of the Canadian society. Not merely people who ventured into the great unknown, Eccles heralded them for their biggest contribution: taking Canada inward and building a new society.

The new settlers were forced to acknowledge, even in contrast with racial-ethnic social norms, the prowess of these indigenous groups in mounting a useful menagerie of economic endeavors with great success in a climate where toil and tribulation did not always coordinate directly to success; this knowledge base and the resulting exchange in ideas had lasting impressions on the relationship between the two demographics for years to come. With the fur trade and "Fur Trade Frontier" and the "Imperial Frontier," Eccles elaborates on this with greater focus, but the nascent beginnings of the forces behind the societal structure were all addressed with equal concern in "Society and the Frontier," in which he described with incredible shrewdness and skill, the history and significance of New France as a commercial outpost whose institutions and environments precisely structured the type of society that slowly emerged.

Defining the dawn of the early Canadian society in this light, Eccles challenges many of the earlier versions and interpretation so of the birth of a new economy and the struggle between the French and the English in America. He carefully rejects assumption for fact, and describes Count Frontenac, the familiar figure, as a man whose greed was only matched by inept. He further disputes the assumptions about the other heroes and villains of the Canadian tale, including the Marquis de Montcalm, Father Jacques Marquette, Louis Jolliet, Rene-Robert Cavalier, and Sieur de La Salle.