THE HARGRAVE CORRESPONDENCE, 1821-1843 Edited by G. P. de T.
Glazebrook
This new volume of the publications of the Champlain Society of Toronto, as usual printed and edited with exceptional care, lacks the adventurous element so noteworthy in most previous issues. It consists wholly of the private correspondence received from colleagues and friends - by James Hargrave, who a century ago was the agent for the Hudson's Bay Company at York Factory, now Port Nelson, and the terminus of the Hudson's Bay railway. At this remote sub-Arctic post Hargrave, a Hawick man, lived for years with his Scottish wife and brought up a family. ' The letters addressed to him from all parts of the vast territory controlled by the company reflect for the most part the humdrum life that the company's factors led in other posts scattered up and down Western and Northern Canada. References to Canadian politics are few and far between. A letter from Fort Vancouver in 1833 describing a voyage to Hawaii is exceptional. A friend writing in 1840 to congratulate Hargrave on his marriage notes that " there is a strange revolution in the manners of the country : Indian wives were at one time the vogue, the half-breed sup- planted these, and now we have the lovely tender exotic torn from its parent bed to pine and languish in the desert:" For such unconscious revelations, no less than for many incidental notes on the, _progress of settlement, stud_ ents of Canadian history will find the book worth leading:
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