cover image REDISCOVERING THE GREAT PLAINS: Journeys by Dog, Canoe, and Horse

REDISCOVERING THE GREAT PLAINS: Journeys by Dog, Canoe, and Horse

Norman Henderson, . . Johns Hopkins Univ., $29.95 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-8018-6688-3

At first blush, a contemporary crossing of the plains of Western Canada on foot, by boat and on horseback seems a grand and epic adventure. In real life, environmental theorist Henderson's quixotic excursions over the course of three summers are relatively modest. His travels take but a couple of weeks and a couple of hundred miles, and his first outing—on foot with a dog hauling a few pounds of supplies on a travois—is cut short at mid-point by a plague of mosquitoes. Barbed wire across waterways, a handful of scary cows and nervous horses, spates of high wind and hard rain and loud teens at a campsite are the author's most significant hazards. Luckily for the reader, Henderson's travels and travails through Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle River valley are not the only story he's telling. His account, though geographically and chronologically limited, is buoyantly far-reaching in its passion for the prairies of Canada (his native land), the pampas of Argentina and the steppes of Eurasia, places whose human and ecological histories he weaves into his narrative with a scholar's delight in making connections. His writing style, occasionally overly formal and even florid, evokes (intentionally or not) the 18th- and 19th-century accounts of the trappers and explorers who blazed their ways westward across the great plains; Henderson quotes these accounts liberally, contrasting them cleverly with his own journey. The result is a captivating "biography... of a landscape," its good humor blended with impressive scholarship, including snappy thumbnail histories of canoes, horses, dogs, barbed wire and those pesky blood-sucking mosquitoes. (Dec.)