Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
McGowan's War a must-read for BC history, February 6, 2005
I agree with Tom Poiker's review that this book is eminently readable, and that the critical movements are staged like a movie, but I strongly disagree that there are only two traditions in Canadian historical writing. The third is the predominantly Central-Canadian-chauvinist view of history, which only treats with "the West", and BC in particular, as being of any importance when it has to do with central Canadian history. (and that BC is "wacky", which is I suppose a way of saying that we're not as boring as the rest of the country). This is one reason why so much of BC's history is misunderstood, or more often blithely ignored - because it does not fit the Canadian mold. The tale of McGowan's War, like so much else of early BC history, is barely known even in BC, and nearly unheard-of in the rest of the country. As observed in passing by Tom Poiker, it is a regular conceit of Canadian history that BC's destiny to become part of Canada was a foregone conclusion, and that none of the troubles in the goldfields described in McGowan's War, or in such matters as the Oregon or San Juan or Alaska Boundary Disputes, could have worked out any other way and that American annexation (or British Columbia remaining a separate unit within the Empire). Even the Akriggs and Ormsby make this assumption in their work, and it is repeated in more recent works such as those by Bowering, McLennan and Barman. And as observed in a recent doctoral thesis by Dan Marhsall of UBC, the vast collection of documents written by frontier-era Americans in BC and assembled by Bancroft was placed in San Francisco. As a result it has been completely unexamined in Canadian historiography, and as a result it has been possible to pander to certain biases, such as the demonization of Ned McGowan, without having to consider the other side of the story. Similarly, as Marshall and Hauka both observe, events in early British Columbia are generally treated as though they happened in isolation, and are not part of the history of the rest of the Pacific Northwest after 1846 (the Oregon Boundary treaty).
Hauka's book is the first to draw on some of the Bancroft materials in depth, particularly in the character profile and personal history of Ned McGowan. He also writes up one of the most trenchant tellings of the sordid Fraser Canyon War that precedes the events of McGowan's War, and also gives a completely novel account of Gov. Douglas' motives and machinations in manipulating the gold rush overall. The role of San Francisco civic politics in the goldfields, in particular that of the infamous Vigilance Committee, is illuminating - and not just because it helps to vilify the generally villainized Ned McGowan. The villainy of British magistrates Whannell and Hicks is also fully exposed (having been glossed over in Akrigg et al). A more complete picture of BC in 1858 does not exist, whether it's the nature of life in Yale and Hill's Bar or the political manoeuvring of Douglas and Nugent (the American consul in Victoria).
It is a truism that the best historical writing in BC has been by journalists rather than by historians. Hauka's book is a case in point, and one of the best examples, joining the works by Huthinson, Glavin, Hume, Morley, St. Pierre and other pressmen and putting to shame the overblown and overhyped histories by Barman and Bowering, which are full of gaffes, out-of-context misjudgements, and downright errors on every other page. It is a pity that this book is out-of-print, but like so many works of BC history this is the case. This book SHOULD be a textbook - but then again, BC history is not really taught anywhere in Canada, not even in BC's own universities....
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A key moment in BC's history, February 6, 2004
For the longest time, Canadian history writing was held down by two historical traditions, the European idea that only events that happened at least five hundred years ago, and in Europe, are of interest, and the American approach of advertised news. Canada, a country that beats them both in the numbers of conflicts and newsworthy scoundrels, had a hard time to establish its own sense of history. But it has arrived, by the hands of a few gifted writers, one of them being Don Hauka. McGowan's War gives us a peek into a very important period in BC's history. It describes the second half of the eighteen-fifties, the time of the early, pre-Barkerville gold rush when hordes of American gold-diggers did everything to unsettle the British sense of law and order and deliver the Province to the powers to the South. To understand a country's history, you don't need to know what happened year after year. There are a few periods that are critical and determine the behavior of a place for many decades and centuries. For BC, the early gold-rush years are likely the single-most important period in the determination of what this fragile region would become. Don describes it through the characters of James Douglas, BC's first Governor, Matthew Baillie Begbie, later known (wrongly) as the "hanging judge", and the American Ned McGowan. In the process, he tries to rectify McGowan's reputation - he has been wrongly described as a political criminal. The book is eminently readable. The critical moments are staged like in a movie, the conflicts between the three groups - the British establishment, the American roughians and the noble Indians - are presented through personalities of likeable dignity, and the flow of the story is driven by individuals of lesser importance but equally likeable humanity. I predict that this book will have a very long shelf life because it describes a very important period in BC's history and it does it very well, indeed.
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