Chapter 6 Misao Dean A “Most Enthusiastic Sportsman Explorer” Warburton Pike in The Barren Ground

Warburton Pike was a sportsman. But he did not think of sports the way that the other contributions to this volume would define the word. He did not play team sports or field sports (which he might have called “athletics”); he was not a fan or a coach or a swimmer. Warburton Pike was a hunter, a man who travelled in search of unique hunting opportunities, and who sought trophy heads, animal skins, and specimens for the taxidermist. His two published books, The Barren Ground of Northern Canada (1892) and Through the Sub-Arctic Forest (1896), considered classics of Canadian travel writing, describe his trips through northern British Columbia, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and southern Alaska in search of nothing more serious than “sport,” the leisure pastime of killing caribou, deer, moose, and musk-ox, with a side order of geese, ducks, grouse, and other “game.”

Described this way, Pike’s idea of “sport” perhaps does not seem very sporting to a twenty-first century reader, evocative perhaps of Donald Trump Jr.’s controversial hunting expeditions, or the practice of “canned hunting,” in which specially raised animals are provided to hunters for a guaranteed kill. But Pike’s idea of “sport” resists simple identification with the trophy hunting of today. Instead, the practices of hunting in northern Canada during Pike’s lifetime required intense physical fitness, strength, and endurance, knowledge of guns and of camping equipment, multilingualism, and willingness to risk discomfort, or even starvation. Unlike the hunters who followed him, who travelled with luxuries like whiskey and sleeping cots, Pike frequently ventured into territory that was little known to Europeans and carried little more than his blankets, his guns, some tobacco, and tea.

Pike did resemble contemporary “sport” hunters in that an essential part of his experience was telling the story afterwards. For Pike, the equivalent of the hunter’s selfie was the hunting story, with the necessary evocation of an audience for his achievement through “the remembrance of the chase, its recollection, and its retelling” (Jones 2015, 12). In The Barren Ground of Northern Canada Pike creates a hunting and travel narrative that, like many similar books of its time, includes natural history, commentary on Indigenous hunting practices and a one-on-one confrontation with a male trophy animal. But The Barren Ground stands out among its contemporaries for its elegant and concise Neo-Romantic descriptions of landscape and its modest, reticent, good humoured, and open-minded narrator. While he sometimes defies the advice of his Indigenous guides and debunks the more romantic notions many Europeans had about “Indians,” the narrator more often acknowledges their superior knowledge of animal habits, ranges, and breeding cycles. As Peter Murray writes in Home from the Hill: Three Gentlemen Adventurers, Pike’s books seem “remarkably free of the patronizing racism toward Indians that most of his countrymen in Canada exhibited at that time” (1994, 13).1

Pike seems to have considered his trips to be personal adventures rather than the expression of a national destiny for Canada or for the “Anglo-Saxon race,” as many of his contemporaries did (see Loo 2006; Rico 2013; Harraway 1989). In his writings, while he occasionally offers opinions on proposals for local or national game regulation, he never offers visions of future development or “civilization” of the Indigenous spaces he visits; instead he writes that the land should be “entirely given up to what it was evidently intended for, a hunting-ground for the Indian” (Barren Ground, 1). However, the paratexts that accompany the book reveal a more nationalist vision for the North: The Barren Ground contains as an appendix George M. Dawson’s article “On Some of the Larger Unexplored Regions of Canada,” which Dawson wrote as a member of the Geological Survey of Canada. Pike writes that this appendix “shows more plainly than any words of mine could tell how much more yet remains to be done before this great portion of the British Empire is known as it ought to be” (303). In this way The Barren Ground demonstrates the contradiction at the heart of Pike’s book, which advocates for leaving Indigenous Peoples and their lifeways intact, while taking for granted Crown sovereignty and his own right, as a citizen of the empire, to make use of both people and resources.

In pursuing the “sport” of hunting, Pike was to a certain extent behaving as a typical white Englishman of his class. Pike was born in 1861 in Dorset, one of four sons in a wealthy family who made a fortune mining the clay that was used to make Wedgewood china. His parents died when he was young, and he was raised by servants, attending Rugby School and Brasenose College at Oxford before dropping out when he came into his inheritance at age twenty-one. Like other upper-middle-class young men of his time, Pike would have hunted as a matter of course; weekends spent shooting grouse were a popular way for wealthy people who had recently bought country estates to show off for their friends and claim a faux aristocratic status (see Squires 2017, 294–96). Monica Rico (2013) and Tina Loo (2006) have analyzed the way that hunting was a reinscription of the moment of imperial conquest, as well as a recursive practice of gendered masculinity in self-conscious opposition to the perceived limitations of urban life at the turn of the century. As a well-to-do young man just come into his inheritance, Pike would have considered big game hunting both an appropriate and a challenging way to spend his time.

After Pike left school in 1882, the opportunities for both hunting and investing became an excuse for knocking around “America” for a couple of years with his elder brother Marmaduke. As Rico points out, “During the 1880s the American West drew British younger sons, family black sheep and miscellaneous wellborn young men at loose ends. . . . These men dreamed of making fortunes as ranchers and returning to Britain to resume their lives of privilege” (2013, 48). Pike and his brother were persuaded to invest in timber leases in British Columbia in 1883, and made their way to Victoria, at the time the only urban community in British Columbia, to investigate. Like others of his time and class, Pike “linked the pleasures of the big game hunter and the rewards of the entrepreneurial investor” (Rico 2013, 55), and expected to find both in the congenial society of Victoria, whose upper crust was dominated by English expats and “remittance men.” Pike purchased most of the available land on Saturna and Mayne, islands located in the Gulf waters between Victoria and Vancouver, and built a substantial home in Oak Bay, then a rural suburb of Victoria.

Colonial Victoria had originally been settled by Hudson’s Bay Company officers and their mixed-race Scottish and Indigenous families, who had formed the elite of the colony in the mid-nineteenth century. The original governor on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company, James Douglas, was himself a mixed-race man born in Guyana; his wife Amelia Connolly Douglas was Métis. But by the 1880s, many of these men had retired; the colony had become a province, and their place was taken by recent immigrants from Britain and the United States who, like Pike, came to the province to take advantage of more modern economic opportunities. These men made substantial livings through becoming “first on the ground” in shipping, mining, logging, and land speculation in the developing province, and benefited from the inside knowledge that their political connections provided. Hunting was one of their most common leisure pastimes. Pike set up a bachelor household with English friend Charles Salusbury Payne, and almost immediately commenced the series of wilderness adventures that would form the basis of his books. In 1885 he travelled by canoe to the headwaters of the Athabasca River on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains (the current location of Jasper National Park), and explored the area at the east end of Tête Jaune Pass near Mount Robson. On the basis of this positive experience, he undertook the two much longer journeys, one to the Barren Ground in 1889 and another up the Stikine River to Dease Lake and back to the coast via the Yukon River in 1892, trips he would later recount in his books.

As Karen R. Jones argues in Epiphany in the Wilderness, an intrinsic part of the sport of hunting was its narrativization, whether in the form of oral stories for fellow hunters or published narratives for general readers. Jones points out that big game hunting in North America is a performance of class, national, and gender identity specifically for an audience, and “the act of storytelling—of ritually performing the hunt as a way of creating, consolidating, and evoking a frontier identity—was shared by all” (2015, 11). Within these narrative tropes of “self-discovery, proving and renewal, conquering ‘virgin land,’ and competing with faunal ‘monarchs’” (36) were common characteristics, as well as “referents of scientific and explorer acumen, natural history appreciation, self-awareness of the gravitas of the moment, and a performative bent: a full roster of passionate manhood” (41). Pike is characteristically modest in his self-presentation as the narrator of The Barren Ground, asking the reader’s indulgence for “faulty style, and the various errors into which a man who has spent much time among the big game is sure to fall when he is rash enough to lay down his rifle and take up the pen” (Barren Ground, viii). But he nonetheless provides a model of many of Jones’s conventions, including natural history information and Neo-Romantic landscape description.

Pike’s trip to the place he calls “the Barren Ground” was prompted, he writes in the preface to the book, by the rumours he heard about the musk-ox, “a strange animal, a relic of an earlier age, that was still to be found roaming the Barren Ground, the vast desert that lies between Hudson’s Bay, the eastern ends of the three great lakes of the North, and the Arctic Sea” (v). He recounts that few Europeans had seen the musk-ox, and no big game hunters had managed to find them. “This, then, was the sole object of my journey; to try and penetrate this unknown land, to see the Musk-ox, and find out as much as I could about their habits, and the habits of the Indians who go in pursuit of them every year” (vi). Pike was at pains to clarify that his trip to the Barren Ground was only “an ordinary shooting expedition, such as one might make to the Rocky Mountains or the interior of Africa” (v), and not a scientific or geographic expedition. But he was being modest: on his trip he travelled deeply into Indigenous territories by way of a portage that was later named after him, and he became one of few Europeans who had seen the Barren Ground musk-ox. Since he considered Samuel Hearne the only European before him who had made a successful trip to the Barren Ground, he decided “to follow Hearne’s example, and trust to the local knowledge of Indians to help me,” since “they are possessed of a thorough knowledge of the movements of the various animals at different seasons, and thus run less danger of starvation than strangers, however proficient the latter may be in driving dogs and handling canoes” (vii). He travelled by train to Calgary, then by buggy to Edmonton and Athabasca Landing, and by steamer down the Mackenzie to Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake. There he contracted with Joseph “King” Beaulieu (1836–1916), a well-known Métis guide and sometime employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, to take him on the seasonal trip to the Barren Ground to hunt caribou and musk-ox. “In following out this plan” Pike says, he “naturally passed through a great deal of new country, and discovered, as we white men say when we are pointed out some geographical feature by an Indian who has been familiar with it since childhood, many lakes and small streams never before visited except by the red man” (vii). Pike’s hand-drawn maps became a touchstone for European explorers, naturalists, geographers, and hunters who followed him up Pike’s Portage at the eastern end of Great Slave Lake, from Harry Lake to French Lake, Acres Lake, Kipling Lake, Burr Lake, and finally to Artillery Lake and the beginnings of the tundra.

Pike’s guide, King Beaulieu, was a Métis man from a prominent family whose grandfather Francois “Old Man” Beaulieu (Francois Beaulieu I) had travelled with Alexander Mackenzie to both the Arctic Ocean (in 1789) and the Pacific Coast (in 1793), and whose father (Francois Beaulieu II) had guided Sir John Franklin.2 Well-known as a guide and successful hunter, King Beaulieu had founded a Hudson’s Bay trading fort in 1868 at Fond Du Lac on the eastern arm of Great Slave Lake, near the present-day Dënesųłıné community of Łutsël K’é, though by the time he met Pike the post had been closed. Beaulieu was literate and spoke French with Pike, though Pike reports learning a few words of Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) from Beaulieu family members over the course of the months they travelled together.

Pike’s representation of Indigenous people in The Barren Ground is a complex one that combines common racist stereotypes with astute judgement of individuals and defense of Indigenous hunting practices and lifeways. At the beginning of The Barren Ground, he describes King Beaulieu:

Nobody could give him a very good character, but as he was known as a pushing fellow and first-rate traveller, besides having made a successful musk-ox hunt in the previous year, I concluded that my best chance lay in going with him. Certainly, with all his faults, I must say that he was thoroughly expert in all the arts of travel with canoes or dog-sleighs, quick in emergencies, and far more courageous than most of the half-breeds of the Great Slave Lake. (18)

He continues: “When I was alone with him I found him easy enough to manage; but his three sons, who accompanied us, are the biggest scoundrels I ever had to travel with, and as they seem to demoralize the old man when they are together, the united family is a bad combination” (18). Here Pike is magnifying his authority over his guides: like Hearne, Pike was travelling with an established Indigenous family group and completely reliant upon them. He would have had little power to “manage” his travelling companions, other than King Beaulieu’s sworn word and his promise “to do everything in his power to ensure the success of the expedition” (18). Pike’s condemnation of Beaulieu’s sons is explained by their helping themselves liberally to his supplies, beyond what Pike felt he had agreed, while he and King Beaulieu were absent from the winter camp near Great Slave Lake in the Barren Ground. The Indigenous ethic of sharing may explain their actions, or they may indeed have felt they deserved payment in addition to what was agreed; in any case, Pike has little complementary to say about Beaulieu’s sons throughout the book.

Another common cause of conflict between European hunters and Indigenous guides was their refusal to abide by the ethics that hunters use to construct their sport as “fair” to animals. “Sport,” as Pike understood it, was governed by a code of conduct—“rules,” as it were—for hunting specific animals such as deer, moose, and bear, designated as “game.” As Monica Rico recounts in Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West, “big game hunters created a whole ideology designed to make the process as arduous as possible” (2013, 174). Big game hunters were to focus on mature male animals in the prime of health and leave female and young animals alone; they were supposed to kill specific identified animals quickly and cleanly, and have sufficient knowledge of the animal’s habits and anatomy to enable them to kill with one well-placed shot: “Trapping, baiting, and in any way increasing the pain and suffering of the hunted animal were all considered ungentlemanly” (174). William Hornaday, a pioneer of US wildlife conservation and the first director of the Bronx Zoo, articulated a similar “Sportsman’s Creed” for US hunters, which stated that “ethical hunters did not engage in ‘wanton slaughter,’ going into the woods or mountains with guns ablazing and mowing everything on four legs: they exercised restraint and avoided ‘waste’” (Loo 2001, 307). Instead, an ethical hunt required the hunter to approach the animal on foot and give it a fair chance to escape; hunting carried out over difficult terrain was more admirable, and trophies that required extensive travel or mountaineering, such as mountain sheep or goats, were prized. “The greater the difficulty, the greater the achievement, and the greater the man who was successful” (Loo 2001, 307; see also Altherr and Reiger 1995).

Unlike many subsequent hunters (see Dean 2007; Jones 2015), Pike seems to have felt no responsibility to impose this code on his travelling companions, or to condemn either their hunting practices or their way of life. He notes the ways that Indigenous hunters violate the “Sportsman’s Creed” by shooting indiscriminately into herds of caribou, shooting animals while they are swimming and unable to get away, and shooting many more animals than can be practically consumed. Yet his experience of starvation while travelling with the Beaulieus seemed to convince him of the necessity of these practices. He even participates in a summer hunt of breeding females and calves. “Cruel work, this shooting in the summer-time,” he comments, “but it was necessary to keep the camp in meat” (Barren Ground, 174). Pike notes the “improvidence” of the Beaulieu family as they gorge whenever they have access to fresh meat, repeating the common complaint of Europeans that Indigenous families refuse to plan for future periods of famine: “Starvation will always be one of the features of a Northern Indian’s life, owing to his own improvidence; his instinct is to camp close on the tracks of the caribou and move as they move; a permanent house and a winter’s supply of meat are an abomination to him” (50). Yet Pike himself takes part in this “improvidence” when, after travelling for many days without food, he gorges on the delicacies of caribou tongues and loins and acknowledges the impossibility of preserving and carrying the leftover food.

The Barren Ground of Northern Canada does occasionally indulge in what Mary Louise Pratt (1985) calls “othering discourse,” a

very familiar, widespread, and stable form of “othering.” The people to be othered are homogenized into a collective “they,” which is distilled even further into an iconic “he” (the standardized adult male specimen). This abstracted “he”/“they” is the subject of verbs in a timeless present tense, which characterizes anything “he” is or does not as a particular historical event but as an instance of a pregiven custom or trait. . . . Through this discourse, encounters with an Other can be textualized or processed as enumerations of such traits. (1985, 120)

Pike applies these grammatical strategies abundantly, describing both Indigenous Peoples, as well as animals, in the “timeless present” of traditional anthropology, or what Anne McClintock might describe as its “anachronistic space” (1995, 30). For example, he describes the Yellowknife people he has met with distancing generalizations and the tropes of anachronistic space: “They are rather a fine race of men, above the average of the Canadian Indian, and, as they have had little chance of mixing with the Whites, have maintained their characteristic manners till this day; they are probably little changed since the time when the Hudson’s Bay Company first established a trading-post on the Big Lake a hundred years ago” (Barren Ground, 120). The section from pages 119 to 122, with its sweeping judgements of Yellowknife women (“The women are, as a rule, not quite so hideous as the squaws of the Black-feet and Crees; they are lax in morals, and accustomed to being treated more as slaves than wives” [121]) and its complaints of “Indian” temperament (“a curious mixture of good and bad, simplicity and cunning; with no very great knowledge of common honesty, thoroughly untrustworthy, and possessed with an insatiable greed for anything that takes their fancy” [120]), have a racist flavour reminiscent of Hearne’s Journey. Yet elsewhere in the book, particularly when he writes of individuals, Pike writes differently. Recounting a stay in a Yellowknife camp, he speaks well of his hosts and the sense of comfort he feels. While he complains that the “lodges” (skin tents) of his hosts are “infested with the vermin from which these people are never free” he also finds “an air of warmth and plenty about it” (71) and declares “there is no better camp than a well-set-up lodge (skin tent) with a good fire crackling in the middle” (37). He praises King Beaulieu and counts the Yellowknife man Saltatha, another man in the hunting party, among his friends. Yet he admits that, despite his many months of travelling with them and with the Beaulieu family, he does not understand Indigenous people as a whole. Unlike many of his European contemporaries, who claim to know Indigenous cultures and motives with no evidence of either, he suggests that the Indigenous “mind runs on different principles from that of a white man, and till the science of thought-reading is much more fully developed, the working of his brain will always be a mystery to the fur-trader and traveller” (122).

The Barren Ground is often praised for its spare, matter of fact style, and indeed the book focuses on conveying information that would be of interest, or of use, to the sportsman. Like many travel books, it begins with a list of necessary gear he carries from Edmonton: field glasses, “ammunition for a 12-bore Paradox and a 50–95 Winchester Express, besides a pair of large blankets and a little necessary clothing” (1). The Paradox was a classic hunting rifle whose ability to shoot both bullets and shotgun shells made it highly flexible in the bush; later in the book, David, an orphan boy who attaches himself to the hunting party, uses the Paradox to bag his first musk-ox, first expending all his bullets in the chase, then shooting stones, and finally killing the animal by firing the ramrod. The 50–95 Winchester was an up-to-date hunting rifle designed for big game hunting in Africa, India, and the western United States and was popular in England and North America. In addition, at Fort Resolution Pike purchased “a couple of sacks of flour and fifty pounds of bacon,” and by the time he left for the Barren Ground he had equipped the party with

a good supply of tea and tobacco, though it proved after all insufficient, plenty of ammunition for the three Winchester rifles, and powder, shot, and ball for the muzzle-loading weapons of the party; we had also nets and a few hooks and lines, matches, needles, and awls to be used in the manufacture of moccasins and the deer-skin clothes so essential for winter travel; knives of various shapes and sizes, scrapers for dressing skins, and a small stock of the duffel imported by the Company for lining mittens and wrapping up the feet during the intense cold. (23)

The group left in three canoes “crowded with men, women and children, amounting in all to over twenty souls” (23) and including fifteen dogs.

Pike’s party began by heading toward the “Inconnu Fishery” (located near Thaltheilei Narrows). They moved slowly to accommodate the wind on Great Slave Lake as well as the necessity of hunting and fishing along the way. Pike provides an impromptu natural history of the “game” fish in the lake and various methods of catching them. This section inaugurates his method, used throughout the book, of interspersing descriptions of the progress of the group toward the Barren Ground with accounts of the local fauna, their habits, ranges, abundance, and suitability for hunting. For example, he describes a successful day’s hunting for geese in the forest south of the Barrens:

Along the foot of the sandy ridge . . . were many small lakes partially thawed, and here the snow geese, or white “wavies,” were resting in thousands, waiting till the warm weather should have melted the snow from their feeding-ground along the sea-coast. We could have made enormous bags of them, as they were tame and disinclined to leave the open water; but we were sparing with our ammunition, as we might want it badly later on. Great numbers were killed, however, and their prime condition told of the good feeding-ground they had left far southward. There were also plenty of large Canada geese, but the grey wavy, or laughing goose, the best of all for eating, is much scarcer. (161)

As he moves into the forest north of the Lake, he encounters caribou, and chapter four consists wholly of information about the caribou, its scientific names, ranges, breeding habits, best time of year for hunting (end of summer into September), usual predators (wolves, humans), and useful ways to tell young from old, and male from female specimens. After securing enough meat for present wants, the family group camps on Camsell Lake, and Pike, accompanied by King Beaulieu and several other men, continue north to look for musk-ox.

Pike encounters his first musk-ox on September 27, a “red letter day” (64). The book demonstrates “self-awareness of the gravitas of the moment” (Jones 2015, 41) by extending the description of Pike’s first kill over numerous pages. As Jones argues, hunting narratives commonly frame the moment of the kill according to an established convention that Pike follows precisely. The animal is identified as a male with desirable characteristics such as large size, good condition, large head, prominent or even record horns, and healthy coat; the animal must be stalked, his demeanor studied with the goal of determining the perfect approach; and the moment of the kill is constructed as a direct confrontation with a knowing adversary, whose appearance represents a romantic concept of wilderness freedom and agency. Pike records that he encounters “a single old bull walking directly towards us.” He continues, “We lay down in the snow, and I had a capital chance of watching him through the glasses as he picked his way quietly over the slippery rocks.” The climax of the encounter occurs when the bull raises his head and looks directly at them, “with his neck slightly arched and a gleam of sunshine lighting up the huge white boss formed by the junction of the horns.” This extended description figures the musk-ox adversary as desirable due to his prominent horns and “formidable appearance,” and also fully aware of the enemy that will cause his death. Finally, the animal appears as if crowned “with his neck slightly arched and a gleam of sunshine lighting up” his horns—backlit, as it were, by the sunshine. Pike draws attention to the way that this scene functions as a climax and a justification for the whole narrative by stating that the animal was “a sight which went far to repay all the trouble we had taken in penetrating this land of desolation.” The moment of the animal’s death is almost anticlimactic: “His fate was not long in doubt, as my first shot settled him, and the main object of my trip was accomplished; whatever might happen after this, I could always congratulate myself on having killed a musk-ox, and this made up for a great deal of the misery that we afterwards had to undergo” (64–65).

Pike held that one of the frustrations of big game hunting in North America was the absence of established standards for trophy animals. In England, Rowland Ward and Co. taxidermists began in 1882 to write and distribute Records of Big Game, a serial publication that certified the specific measurements of a “record” animal, including length from nose to tail, height at the shoulder, depth of base of horn, width of horns, and so on. But there was no similar authority in North America, and when Pike later wrote about musk-ox hunting he resorted to the Records of Big Game measurements of a “fair average specimen” that had been transported to England for mounting (Barren Ground, 429). In later years the Boone and Crocket Club, the famous US men’s club founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1887, kept records of trophy animals in the western United States (as indeed they still do); Pike became an associate member in 1907. But in 1910 he pointed out that there was still no authority for specifically Canadian animals, which he considered an impediment to the promotion of hunting tourism in British Columbia (Pike 1910).

Throughout his accounts of travel in the North in Barren Ground, Pike sprinkles nuggets of information of use to hunters and other travellers who would follow him. “English is little spoken in any part of the North that I visited,” advises Pike, and he describes guides translating from Indigenous languages into French for him (10). Pike declares his Paradox “the most useful gun yet invented for purposes of exploration” because it “shoots very true” with either ball or shot, though he thinks that a 20-bore with its lighter ammunition would be more practical if it were available (126). He advises against trying to carry provisions onto the Barren Ground in summer, because the “difficulty of transport is so great, and after the caribou are once found there is no danger of starvation” (160). He describes their outfit for the winter hunt and how they were fixed for provisions and ammunition; points out that they had to wrap their guns in fur, because if they touched the cold iron their fingers would stick; details the effects of having a frozen beard and eyebrows; describes what they ate and how they slept; and bemoans the inconvenience of the dogs, who not only slept on top of them but peed on packs and ate their gear.

Having declared that one of the goals of his trip was to learn about the “habits of the Indians who go in pursuit of them [the musk-ox] every year” (v), Pike also provides information about Indigenous hunting practices. He participated in a group hunt of musk-ox in which the animals were herded toward a river and shot while on the edges of the stream. He was surprised to discover after the hunt was over that the drivers were shouting directions to the musk-ox—“These animals are said to understand every word of the Yellow Knife language” (169–70)—and presumably were being offered the opportunity to give themselves to the hunters (on this point, see Houston 2004; Cruikshank 2005). When hunting caribou with a group, Pike explains that by custom the meat is shared equally, but the tongue and back fat belong to the man who made the kill; when hunting musk-ox, “it was a custom among the Yellow Knives to consider a band of musk-ox as the property of the discoverer, and only his personal friends were granted the privilege of killing them without payment of some kind” (102). Pike conforms to these practices without question despite his skepticism about their value, and somewhat ironically thanks his companions once he understands the significance of being offered a share of a musk-ox herd that he had not discovered himself (103).

Aside from the exoticizing effect of these details, they imply some of Pike’s unstated attitudes toward Indigenous peoples and their futures. While he acknowledges the difficulty faced by European hunters in reaching the tundra, he nevertheless assumes that increased incursion of sport hunters into Indigenous territories is, if not desirable, at least inevitable, and so provides information to make these trips possible. While Pike elsewhere argues that Indigenous people have their own very effective ways of regulating hunting and suggests that attempts to assimilate them are wrong-headed, he does not doubt the claims of Canadian (imperial) sovereignty. Like many British hunters, he regrets the restrictive game laws that hamper “sport” in England, where regulation reserves game animals for wealthy landowners, and he is happy to be hunting in a jurisdiction that considers game animals a public resource, available to all. Yet he seems oblivious to the consequences of development and settlement in Canada, which will in their turn result in Canadian game laws that will criminalize Indigenous hunting practices in the North within a generation.

Pike’s pursuit of “sport” in Barren Ground is contextualized throughout the book with lavish landscape description that conforms broadly to the conventions of Neo-Romantic nature, describing prospects or “views” to mimic the composition of a Romantic landscape painting and emphasizing the ways that landscape views evoke emotions in the viewer. Pike’s description of the “chutes” on the Peace River near Fort Vermillion begins with the foreground, where “the white broken water of the cascade showed in strong contrast to the broad blue stretches above and below”; the scene is framed by “several rocky, pine-covered islands” that “stand on the brink of the overfall” and in the background “the gloomy forest of black pines, relieved by a glimpse of the open side-hills of the Caribou Mountains.” Pike comments: “I think the scene from the south bank is one of the most beautiful in the whole course of the loveliest of rivers” (220). In contrast, when he climbs “to the top of a high butte to have a look at the surrounding country” on the Barren Ground he describes “a good view of probably the most complete desolation that exists upon the face of the earth.” He evokes the uncanny when he considers this winter range of the musk-ox: “[H]ere this strange animal finds abundance of its favourite lichens, and defies the cold that has driven every other living thing to the woods for shelter.” From Pike’s perspective, this Indigenous homeland deserved its characterization as “barren”: “There is nothing striking or grand in the scenery, no big mountains or waterfalls, but a monotonous snow-covered waste, without tree or scrub, rarely trodden by the foot of the wandering Indian. A deathly stillness hangs over all, and the oppressive loneliness weighs upon the spectator till he is glad to shout aloud to break the awful spell of solitude” (107). These descriptions are examples of Pike’s admirable style: direct, concise, well ordered, and expressive. Yet both of these descriptions, while representing “real life” experience, work to materialize Romantic theories about nature (see especially Glickman 1998; MacLaren 1984), judging the varied landscapes featuring jagged rocks, powerful water flows, and graceful trees to be picturesque, and representing the tundra, lacking these landscape features as well as signs of European inhabitation, as sublimely desolate and inhuman.

Pike’s Neo-Romantic description of landscape is one component of the ideology of anti-modernism that justified trophy hunting for many in the late Victorian and early twentieth-century era. The Romantics of Wordsworth’s era saw the natural world as a retreat from the sophistication and falsity of urban life; as industrialization grew and transportation and communication improvements seemed to speed up the pace of life, the Romantic view of nature was revived by the hunters and conservationists of Pike’s era, who claimed “primitive” adventures in the natural world were a necessary antidote to the physical and mental effects of urban life. In the Neo-Romantic view, urban life also seemed incompatible with the traditional characteristics of the masculine self, such as independence, aggressiveness, and dominance—characteristics whose suppression supposedly resulted in ill-health and the feminization of men. Pike argues,

[S]urely we carry this civilization too far, and are in danger of warping our natural instincts by too close observance of the rules that some mysterious force obliges us to follow when we herd together in big cities. Very emblematical of this warping process are the shiny black boots into which we squeeze our feet when we throw away the moccasin of freedom; as they gall and pinch the unaccustomed foot, so does the dread of our friends’ opinion gall and pinch our minds till they become narrow, out of shape, and unable to discriminate between reality and semblance. (274)

Pike nods to this ideology throughout his book, claiming that outdoor life even under the harshest conditions promotes health (128), and commenting on the beauty of his surroundings.

In fact, Pike’s book consistently declares how comfortable he is in the woods. These sections are some of the most striking in the book. While naturalists like Seton and hunters like Roosevelt claimed to love the natural world, accounts of their travels in the bush are filled with complaints about bugs, health, companions, diet, temperature, and equipment. In contrast, Pike seems almost ascetic, rolled in his blankets by the fire at all times of year, and matter-of-factly tackling any obstacles. Commenting on a December hunting trip with Hudson Bay–area commissioner James Mackinlay, “master” of Fort Resolution at the time, and Pierre Beaulieu, he states: “We had everything we could want to make life pleasant in the woods, abundance of tea and tobacco, meat if we killed it, and no hardships; the cold was severe of course, but there was plenty of firewood, and it was our own fault if we could not keep ourselves warm” (136; given that the average temperatures in December in Łutsël K’é, a hundred and fifty miles south of Pike’s trip, range from a high of minus sixteen to a low of minus twenty-four degrees Celsius, Pike’s “of course the cold was severe” seems like an understatement). Pike gives the impression of a self-sufficient outdoorsman, whose consistent good humour in the face of rough travel and privation seems genuinely admirable. Clive Phillipps-Wooley, a British Columbian novelist who knew Pike well, described him as “the Boss” in The Chicamon Stone, a man of “seasoned strength” who could “cover his thirty-five or forty miles in a day, and as likely as not, if all were well, turn around at daylight next morning and ‘lope’ back” (1900, 98, 34).

After his initial success in killing his first musk-ox, Pike returned to the Camsell Lake camp to await the onset of winter weather. He made another successful trip to the Barren Ground with a Yellowknife family group by dog team and snowshoe. Returning (by way of the portage that was to bear his name) to Fort Resolution for Christmas, he lived happily in Mackinlay’s household and in the summer participated in another hunt for caribou for the Fort. Leaving Fort Resolution late in the summer accompanied by Hudson’s Bay Company officer Murdo Mackay, he attempted to reach Quesnel and transportation to the lower mainland, famously getting lost, along with his “Indian guides,” between Hudson’s Hope and Lake MacLeod. The Barren Ground tells the harrowing story of their eventual return to John Barrow’s cabin at the east end of the portage:

I pushed open the door, and shall never forget the expression of horror that came over the faces of the occupants when they recognised us. We had become used to the hungry eyes and wasted forms, as our misery had come on us gradually, but to a man who had seen us starting out thirty-two days before in full health the change in our appearance must have been terrible. There was no doubt that we were very near the point of death. (265)

Happily, he recovered, and returned to Victoria in the spring.

In an article published two years after The Barren Ground, Pike summed up what he had learned about the sport of shooting musk-ox: “In expeditions of this kind there is really no sport in the ordinary acceptance of the term,” he wrote, because “the musk ox is so easily approached that one soon tires of the slaughter.” The habit of musk-ox to defend themselves by standing and facing their enemies, no matter how useful against wolves and other predators, made them easy pickings for hunters equipped with rifles, “[b]ut it is never a certainty that the game will be forthcoming when most required for meat, and the knowledge that starvation, even to the last extremes, may come upon you at any time, goes far to counterbalance the tameness of the sport when once you have reached the land of plenty.” The challenge of hunting musk-ox, Pike writes, is in their remoteness and difficulty of access, rather than in the experience of stalking, but this does not mean that musk-ox hunting is tame: “Sufficient excitement and danger will always be found in penetrating the little known desert of the north to satisfy the most enthusiastic sportsman explorer” (Pike 1894, 435).

Pike recounts his subsequent trip from Wrangell, Alaska, up the Stikine River into Northern British Columbia in his later book Through the Sub-Arctic Forest (1896). The book similarly includes numerous bits of information about hunting, the habits and prevalence of game animals, and the details of travel by canoe and on foot through Indigenous lands. His interest was piqued by the area, which was experiencing a prospecting boom; Pike staked a claim on the Thibault River, and subsequently ran a placer mine with money invested by many of his friends in Victoria. He set up a successful freight business and purchased a steamboat to run from Wrangell up the Stikine to Telegraph Creek, where he would meet the freight with a mule train and make the strenuous trip once again over the pass to Dease Lake. But the placer mine never more than broke even, and despite Pike’s numerous attempts to open up the area by promoting a railroad from Telegraph Creek into the interior, his investments dwindled and by the time he died in 1915, he was broke. He had given up trophy hunting for photography, and become a fixture at Victoria’s British-style men’s club, the Union Club.

Pike’s career as a “sportsman” was in many ways typical of his class and his era: like many well-to-do young men at the end of the nineteenth century, he drifted to North America in search of opportunities for hunting and investment. While he succeeded at the former, he was defeated by the latter. Nonetheless his books are an important achievement: The Barren Ground in particular constructs a persona who is modest, courageous, and physically indomitable, and a style of narration that foregrounds concrete detail, useful information, and carefully rendered landscape description, while also conforming to many of the tropes identified by scholars. The book concludes by quoting Saltatha’s evocative comparison of the Barren Ground to heaven: “Is it more beautiful than the country of the musk-ox in summer, when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes, and sometimes the water is blue, and the loons cry very often? That is beautiful; and if Heaven is still more beautiful, my heart will be glad, and I shall be content to rest there till I am very old” (276). By ending with this memorable quotation, Pike evokes the wilderness sublime in the voice of his Yellowknife friend, restating the view that for those that are willing to brave its physical challenges, the Barrens are a rewarding experience for the sportsman.