SOURCE: "Present at the Creation: John Richardson and Souwesto," in Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, Autumn, 1993, pp. 75-91.

[In the following essay, Duffy focuses his discussion on Richardson's last novel, Westbrook the Outlaw, contending that the novelist led the way in establishing the imaginative tradition of Southwestern Ontario in Canadian literature.]

"Souwesto" designates one of English Canada's most thickly populated countries of the mind. On the map where Thoreau's true countries never are, Southwestern Ontario covers the peninsula created by Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. The painterly imagination has dotted it with the views caught in the paintings of Jack Chambers and Greg Curnoe. Hamlets as storied as Hanratty (Munro's Who Do You Think You Are?), Biddulph Township (Reaney's The Donnellys), and Deptford (Davies's trilogy of that name) flourish there. Though James Reaney is the genius of Souwesto's shore, he credits Curnoe with inventing its name.

In a remarkable paper, Reaney places John Richardson (1796-1852) at the heart of his own Laurentian model of the Canadian literary imagination. No surprise that the poet who dramatized Richardson's two Prophecy novels—Wacousta and The Canadian Brothers—pays such close attention to an earlier writer. Following Reaney's imaginative mapping, my survey here encompasses nothing beyond a regional outcropping. Lost for better than a century, Westbrook the Outlaw can hardly be said to influence the work of Richardson's successors. Yet viewed properly, the wildly plotted, pulp-y fiction in fact foretells many of the preoccupations of the more "serious" literature that will follow. Richardson's last, lost (and perhaps his least) novel seizes instinctively upon material that more closely resembles folklore than fiction. Through his presence at the creation of Souwesto, Richardson helps to establish a tradition of the transformation of history into legend—with all its attendant implications—in the representation of the region.

Native Others had told their stories earlier, before white settlers came to the territory. Those aboriginal works are not my subject here. With John Richardson begins the imaginative history produced by the Euro-Canadians and their heirs, which concerns me. Almost certainly of mixed blood, Richardson leads the way in the imaginative appropriation of the territory that his immediate, white ancestors grasped in material fact.

The writer's most telling early experiences as a man were set in Souwesto. His military-doctor father belonged to the multinational enclave of the garrison, the Niagara region where John Richardson was born and the Maiden (Amherstburg) where he was raised. His mother sprang from the world of the fur trade and the family of John Askin. One of the more prominent traders and land speculators in that vast wilderness region whose capital was Detroit, Askin and his family left their mark upon it. His Askin grandmother told the boy the stories of Pontiac's 1763 uprising that gave the writer the historical framework for Wacousta, his best-known fiction. Askin had first married an aboriginal woman according to the custom of the country, and had children by her before marrying Marie Arcange Barth. Her daughter Madeleine was the novelist's mother. Unlike the majority of whites who entered into such local arrangements, Askin acknowledged his mixed-blood offspring. They in turn did well by him in seeking to preserve his trading frontier against the encroachment of white, American settlement. John Askin's offspring had fought alongside the confederated Indians at Fallen Timbers in 1794 in their final attempt to hold onto what the victorious Americans called the Old Northwest. An Askin led the Indians who, alongside their British allies, recaptured Michilimackinac from the Americans in 1812. The future novelist, his father, and his brother fought in that Northwest campaign whose conclusion at Moraviantown in 1813 destroyed forever the Indian and trader cause.

John Richardson had been one of the last whites to see the great Tecumseh alive. The gallant, stylish leader wore at his last battle an ostrich plume given to him by one of the novelist's kin. Wacousta may have originated at Grandma's knee, but its sequel, The Canadian Brothers, sprang from the novelist's own abruptly ended boyhood that included time spent as a prisoner of the Americans. Westbrook originated in another kind of American imprisonment, this one voluntary on Richardson's part, one that I will examine later. Souwesto remained with Richardson; toward the end of his life he wrote feelingly of his return to the region and to the towns of his early years. Those times had marked him enough to make Souwesto and its ways the battle-ground that he chose for his last, desperate struggle to earn his livelihood through writing fiction.

The frontier world that he knew from the inside and whose genetic make-up he bore in his physiognomy determined the shape Richardson's writing took. This is true even of so formulaic a work as Westbrook. Two minor details indicate the story's debt to actual experience. In the early 1840s, Richardson passed the night at a squalid inn near Brockville, Ontario. A memorable feature of his accommodation was a rickety partition wall enabling him to peer into the adjoining room. The title character in Westbrook takes advantage of a similar arrangement in an inn near Kingston, gazing with perverse delight upon the heroine as she undresses. The second detail is also visual, but perspectival rather than voyeuristic. Andrew Westbrook's log house on the bluffs of the Thames offers its occupant a compelling prospect over a "highly romantic aspect" of the landscape. Richardson's own house in Brockville was set upon a "picturesque and elevated" site. If every congruence between his actual and his imaginary worlds were that specific and simple, then my discussion here would be shorter. His experience—in its rigour a kind of emotional beating of the boundaries—created a mapping more complex than simple one-to-one parallelisms. Exploring one of those sectors—the historical Andrew Westbrook and Richardson's version of him—opens our investigation into the particular contours of his cartography.

Begin by considering the literary market in which Westbrook appeared. The politics of culture and publishing explain one arresting, incongruous element in Richardson's choice of characters for a novel set in Upper Canada during 1812. Any census of the colony at that time would have noted as many woolly mammoths as lay members of Roman Catholic monastic orders. Yet this story of a border monster, who outdoes any earlier creature in Richardson's wax museum of frontier horror, also features Anselmo, the Abelard half of the loving couple that includes the voluptuous Emily. She is raped and murdered, and Anselmo killed by Westbrook, though not before the young couple fall in love in a convent and add the ferment of forbidden, runaway passion to the story. Still, what are they doing in Upper Canada?

Imaginative and commercial forces alike generated the doomed affair of near-cleric and quasi-nun. The imaginative drives centred around the 1836 runaway success, Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery. Widely known as The Confessions of Maria Monk, or simply as "Maria Monk," the work appeared to confirm generations of anti-Catholic suspicions about the sexual practices of Roman Catholic clergy and religious. Protestantism's Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the volume offered the titillation that only the highly moral perusal of obscenity can deliver.

Among the lurid disclosures of "Maria Monk" was the news that the monstrous events that it chronicles—the infant corpses buried in the basement, the secret tunnels connecting convents with monasteries, all the paraphernalia of grand guignol Gothic—were happening here, on this continent, in Montreal. American readers, disturbed at the continuing British presence on their continent, now found themselves especially threatened. At the root of that alien, royalist, but thankfully Protestant, political melanoma to the north lay the French-speaking, Gothic citadel of Romanism. Even the North was not wholly fortified against Papal aggression.

Richardson's fictional perspective peers beyond the remote outpost of empire that was Upper Canada. His tale of the Great Lakes border discovers the farthest reaches of that Popish power poised like a dagger at the heart of Protestant civilization. Thus Richardson's Paolo and Francesca take as their escape route the lakeshore road leading from Lower to Upper Canada. The voluptuously endowed heroine (Richardson knew of no other kind, whether in literature or life) rivets Westbrook's attention. Westbrook's creator replays a situation that he may well have encountered in actuality. A reader who could swallow the appearance of a loving, upper-class Catholic couple along the Kingston Road would have no difficulty digesting Anselmo's means of earning a livelihood. He is a mathematics tutor. The couple has every reason to flee toward Protestant enlightenment in Upper Canada. There the sciences were honoured, esteemed, and used to build a more progressive world.

In providing these distant, imaginative echoes of Maria Monk, the novelist could well have been writing to order, as may have been the case with other late fiction by him. The commercial roots of the lay brother originate with the New York publishers that the author found—at a price—after his retreat from Canada. His homeland had witnessed his failure as a journalist, novelist, and even as the commander of a detachment of security guards on the Welland Canal. His introduction to his American publishers' new 1851 edition of Wacousta spoke of Canada's indifference to his work. As the price of his new allegiance, he had taken his nationalist The Canadian Brothers and either gelded it himself or consented to his publisher's excision of its Upper Canadian loyalties. Its new audience was spared what it would never have tolerated: the anti-American remarks that dot the original text. Then he had given his creation a sex change, retitling it Matilda Montgomerie.

His accommodation to his publishers' political ideology may well have been followed by a bow to their religious one. New York's Dewitt and Davenport were a well-known dime-novel and reprint house. Its senior partner also enjoyed a certain prominence in nativist (or "Know-Nothing") affairs. Robert Dewitt belonged to the Order of United Americans. In the manner of Tammany Hall, they employed cigar-store Indian designations in their fraternal, anti-Roman gatherings. Richardson worked for a time on the order's journal, The Sachem. Dewitt and Davenport had become his bread and butter. He literally starved on the pittance that his writing fetched, but not before he had produced a near-pornographic treatment of medieval Catholicism.

Written a year earlier than Westbrook, set far away from the Great Lakes in both space and time, The Monk Knight of St. John deals with the Crusades, and the monastic-military order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. It seems rooted in the anti-Catholic crusade of its publishers, seething as it does with sado-masochism. Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) showed that Templars made good villains. Yet even Richardson felt uneasy enough about his pandering to anti-Catholic bigotry (did he remember the story-telling grandmother who had recounted to him the material of his best work?) to insert a disclaimer into Westbrook: "What occurred in a Catholic convent might as well have taken place in a Protestant, had there been any such establishments attached to them." Though the logic of the statement is elusive, it does indicate some misgivings over the cultural politics of his story-telling.

Much of Westbrook, then, is driven by the currents in the metropolitan centres where Richardson worked and where his readers found their fashions. Yet when we consider the details of the historical figure of Andrew Westbrook and the novelist's treatment of him, this truism requires examination.

The subtitle ("An American Border Tale") alerts us to the setting's equivocality. Richardson's character deflates the self-esteem of audiences on either side of the line. Westbrook at first would seem to be the classically democratic, therefore anti-British figure—the fighting blacksmith—that a novelist could present as a token of his new allegiance. He battles the Upper Canadian authorities even as his historical progenitor did. He takes pot shots at retreating British commanders and cheerfully kills a loyal militiaman. He also allies himself with Captain Lee, an American marauder. The historical Westbrook made life unendurable to many in the so-called Talbot Settlement stretching north from Lake Erie. His special hatred for the squirearchical pretensions of Colonel Talbot (whose power cramped Westbrook's own land speculations) led him to bedevil that figure. He came close to wrecking Talbot's life and burning out what is now an entire county. He was also prominent in a sizeable band (250 men) of expatriate Upper Canadians who passed the war in raiding Souwesto from the American side. Call him either a bandit or a freedom fighter, depending upon your political allegiance. As the latter, Westbrook appealed to the author's new national audience. Yet Richardson satisfied their longings for the bread of heroism by giving them a stone in the person of this monster.

He gives little more to his former Upper-Canadian compatriots. His process of fictionalization (demonizing) involves plucking Westbrook out of context, disregarding the collective, dissenting forces whose existence had so troubled Isaac Brock. A jagged edge of the early years of Upper Canada is smoothed through the lone, fairy-tale villain's monopolizing of the reader's attention. What is going on?

A rapist, murderer, and incestuous father, Richardson's Westbrook commits a series of crimes outdoing those of the author's earlier creation, Wacousta. Only the cannibalism of Wacousta's son Desborough (The Canadian Brothers) can out-Herod Westbrook. An early white settler in Souwesto, the Reverend Edmund Burke wrote in 1795 to a colonial official that an enemy as "terrible" as the Indian "prowls like a wolf in the dark." Richardson got beyond the conventions of racism when he thrust his white monster beyond civility. He is finally slain by a she-wolf who has nurtured the grandson that Westbrook threatens.

Richardson attempts to pacify his United States audience when a bystander thanks God for the fact that Westbrook was not an American. In fact he was. His few years of residence in Upper Canada gave him a factitious Canadian identity, but he settled quite happily in Michigan after the war, enjoying public approbation and emoluments. His military service on behalf of the United States earned him two land grants from a grateful congress.

A novelist more intent on flattering his new readers would have worked this national, collective material into his story, emphasizing Westbrook's communal ties and achievements. A writer more intent on thumbing his nose at his former audience would have emphasized context as well, though of another, pro-American sort. Of course, this would have entailed denaturing his creation. A Westbrook metamorphosed into an American patriot could not have flaunted the monstrous nature that made him imaginatively compelling. Richardson seems intent enough on creating a larger-than-life protagonist to make him risk the alienation of his new-found American audience. His Westbrook may not be an American, yet he is their strongest friend and ally. In order to keep his monster, Richardson has to forgo waving the flag.

Richardson's handling of Westbrook resembles other moments in the legends of Souwesto. A late-Victorian compilation of local lore helps to illuminate a cultural process that I would call the folklorizing of a region: that is, the ascription to it of the power to provide a setting for folk tales and romantic narratives. Literature may come out of this process. But those literary landmarks that I mentioned at the beginning do not engage me here; I am concerned with a less finished literary product.

The narratives that convey my point about folklorization can be found in Marie Caroline Hamlin's Legends of Le Détroit (1884). The Detroit compiler's citizenship presents no obstacle to her dealing with borderland Souwesto material. Where the tales display imaginative strength and vitality, they are retellings of the folk tales and legends of the earliest white settlers in the region, who were of course canadien. Thus, the reader is regaled with the typical collection of loups garoux, yearning village maids, enchanted canoes, and priests in avid pursuit of traces of the devil, that one can encounter in any compilation of Quebec legends. Hamlin's tales may be set in the Detroit region, but they are stories told long ago in Rivière du Loup and Chicoutimi, and before that in Rouen and Quimper. So much for the familiar tales in the volume.

When we reach the new material, however, we find romantic fantasies based on such historical happenings in the War of 1812 as the massacre at River Raisin (Frenchtown) and Hull's surrender of Detroit. Stories like "The Sibyl's Prophecy" and "The Ghost of Montgaugon" are not folklore or legend. They are instead feeble versions of nineteenth-century historical fiction, their distant begetter Sir Walter Scott rather than some oral source. What the collection itself does show is that by the 1880s (and probably well before), the Detroit-Souwesto region had been processed into the material for pseudo legend-making. This was a continent-wide activity, and various regional literary enterprises were well under way by then. William Kirby's Canadian Idylls (1894) and Annals of Niagara (1896) show a similar process happening at the other end of Lake Erie from Souwesto. In fact, such imaginatively geographical regions as the American south, or the midwest of Willa Cather, indicate that many North American regions acquired a mythic history long before anyone compiled a scientific one. Much of this process we can attribute to such cultural forces as the prevalence of antiquarianism and the invention of tradition, complex undertakings that need not concern us here.

What needs emphasis is that Richardson's creature is an early version of the making of legend out of Souwesto historical material, a process reaching its zenith in Reaney's The Donnellys (1975-77). But not all legendary material ends up as legend. Study of a process that failed to happen brings home the cultural politics played out in the work of Richardson.

Consider an incident in the life of the Long Point trader David Ramsay (1740-1810?). We find out about Ramsay largely through depositions against him. Our earliest narrative that is not part of a legal document occurs in Patrick Campbell's Travels in North America (1793). Fairness compels me to begin with a version favourable to Ramsay. Campbell considered him "a man of strict veracity, honesty, and integrity," while Joseph Brant thought the trader nothing more than an "unworthy rascal." Perhaps the Mohawk chief knew the story that follows here.

By Feb. 15, 1772 Ramsay had found himself vexed enough at his Indian trading partners to kill and then scalp two of them who had tried—he swore—to murder him. This did not end the Lake Erie businessman's difficulties with his clientele. By the approach of spring he felt forced to kill some more, these from a "wandering" (hunting?) band who continued to threaten him. By that time, he had lost his customary forbearance: "After killing the first Indians, I cut lead, and chewed above thirty balls, and above three pound of Goose shot, for I thought it a pity to shoot an Indian with a smooth ball." His opponents had grown peevish as well. Capturing and binding him, they taunted him with their confidence in the British alliance. They believed with reason that while Sir William Johnson, the crown's great superintendent of Indian affairs, might forgive them for killing Ramsay, he would never forgive Ramsay for killing them. The trader's dexterity—and the aid of a ten-year-old nephew whom he had introduced to the exigencies of commercial travelling—enabled him to unloose himself from his bonds while his captors slept. He then killed a few more. Detained at Niagara and sent to Montreal, he pleaded self-defense eloquently enough to be released eventually. Years later, this case's most surprising feature occurred when the Indians conveyed to Ramsay a four-mile-square tract of land in Upper Canada. "[H]e now lives," Campbell notes with astonishment, "in intimacy and friendship with that very tribe, and the sons and daughters of the very people he had killed."

According to a later historian, everyone in the surrounding countryside knew of these events. Sir William Johnson considered them of sufficient import to write to his London superiors that he considered a fair trial impossible: "the interest which his creditors will make with those who are his Jurors, and the prejudices of the Commonality [sic] against Indians, will probably prove the means of his being acquitted . . ." Johnson also raised an even more significant matter. How was trade to continue in light of such consumer dissatisfaction? "I leave Your Lordship to judge how difficult a task it is to calm the passions of incensed Savages and to keep them faithfull [sic] to engagements whilst they find themselves exposed to the licentious outrages of our own people against which no remedy is as yet provided." Sir William's account adds that among Ramsay's victims in his escape from captivity were a woman and an infant, both of whom he had scalped. It was his conveyance of those trophies to Niagara that aroused the suspicions of the commandant there.

Upper Canada's very own Indian-hater! The pathological killer in Melville's The Confidence-Man alive and well in Souwesto! Yet when legend is made of Ramsay, it begins when Patrick Campbell credits the man's account of an incident that could have leapt out of any adventure narrative. Ramsay had called out to his unbound nephew in broad Scots, a dialect his captors had not mastered, to fetch him a knife. With this he severed his material ties, and then went on to sever any commercial ones by killing his former customers. The linguistic detail seems legendary, and not from internal evidence alone. Ramsay's relatives retell the incident without any mention of his use of a foreign tongue. All accounts do agree that Ramsay's captors had drunk themselves into insensibility, making them less of a danger to the man who would slay them.

Ramsay's minor incursion into the stuff of legend is offset by his subsequent, ghostly presence in the stories collecting around the life of Souwesto's most celebrated spiritualist, Dr. John Troyer. The white magician of Long Point has been the subject of a play and a children's book. We need not rehearse the Baldoon material here. Ramsay and Troyer link up when the doctor makes his first public entrance as a celebrated diviner. According to the memories of one Simpson McCall, Troyer in 1817 undertook a search for a treasure that Ramsay supposedly buried at Long Point in order to hide it from yet another group of aggrieved clients. Troyer and his son located the iron chest; the doctor's radical Protestant beliefs (he belonged to the Tunker sect) led him to hold an open Bible and a lighted candle in order to ward off evil. Imagine the treasure seekers' surprise when the apparition of a gigantic black dog "rose up beside the chest—grew right up bigger and bigger, until the light went out, and then they took to their boat and went home." McCall was 85 when he told this legend to a travelling scholar interested in these old fireside tales.

What does the Ramsay matter tell us about the legend-making in a region where Richardson's writing fills so early and originating a role? When an Indian-hater with an addiction to murder becomes the stuff of legend, he is transmuted into a character who could have stepped from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, with his command of violence and broad Scots, his youthful sidekick, and his reincarnation as a fearsome black dog. He becomes a bogeyman, rather than an extreme exemplar of a social process that in one way or another involved many inhabitants of the territory that the newcomers named Upper Canada. He was a pioneer, a land developer, an entrepreneur, a player in the process of making the country safe for white settlement.

Our own legends—about ourselves as dwellers within a peaceable kingdom—fare better when the Ramsays of our past are linked with the adventures of the benevolent Dr. Troyer. Planter of the first orchard in Norfolk County, a figure willing to work in conjunction with the Ojibway medicine man Bauzi-Geezhig-Waeshikum in his attempts to relieve a family from the attentions of a poltergeist, Troyer is the patriarch transformed into Daddy, whose benign nature makes him a fitting forbear for the likes of us. Figures like Ramsay and Westbrook become Grendels, stalking the marshes as monsters rather than as social misfits whose evil originates in a system that we both inherit and endorse. Such a linkage camouflages any resemblance between our ancestry and the lonesome monsters lurking in the forests to the south. It comfortably defines our own writers in opposition to the American writers who represented those sorts of killers with such aplomb.

Richardson of course remains the master of the Great Lakes monster. When he invented him in the person of Reginald Morton/Wacousta, he forced the reader to endure the bulk of the novel in the company of an ogre before turning Wacousta into a fool for love. Until the narrative-within-a-narrative that forms chapter seven of Volume III, he has been the bloodthirsty military and sexual predator who seemed to have sprung from the dark forest perpetually threatening the fort. Then our author unfolds his story in a way that helps us to know better than that. We absorb the lesson of Wacousta's self-justification: only the skills honed within a high civilization can produce him. The obsessive concentration, the methodical subordination of every aspect of existence to a single goal: these skills of a sophisticated society (especially as evidenced in its military machine), rather than some power-bundle, supply Wacousta with his strength.

That adventurer straddles a pre-settlement border. The son that Richardson gives Wacousta in the sequel, The Canadian Brothers, straddles a political one. Desborough shifts back and forth between the lakeside countries, sworn enemy to the Grantham brothers of the novel's title, but restive under the legal restrictions marking life in Upper Canada. His sworn foe is a magistrate, the brothers' father whom he shoots in the back. Like his daughter who corrupts one of the brothers, Desborough too represents a series of abiding Canadian misgivings about the nature of life below the border. Yet no sooner do we rejoice that Richardson has displayed (albeit in hyperbolic fashion) our abiding Canadian righteousness, than he switches countries on us. Now we are faced with Andrew Westbrook. We write him off simply: hackwork churned out by a writer at the end of his tether. A dying man's last attempt to resurrect his old métier, marred by the mindless sensationalism of his attempt to recapture a lost public.

Yet if we place the monster Westbrook within his Souwesto context, we discover a greater complexity. When Richardson seeks to conjure up an evil spirit, a black dog of a man, he can turn him only into an example of the Other. He fabricates a bogey-man out of Andrew Westbrook, an historical figure who was nothing more than another traitorous bandit during a time of war. Because Richardson's desperation in the face of his total failure in Upper Canada had driven him elsewhere, he turned Westbrook into someone non-American (un-American he is not!) in order to soothe that new public. Had he produced his novel here, his character would have been clad in the Stars and Stripes. Rather than create a terror like Ramsay writ large, Richardson gives us a creature who wars only on whites. Westbrook brings home the hard times that we, and ours, have endured at the hands of rapacious men beyond the control of law. In this villainizing of our foes, Richardson becomes the father of us all.

A curiosity in this novel's use of setting alerts us to the nature of the symbolic transformation that I have been describing. One of Richardson's weaknesses as a writer was his inability to describe landscape in any detail or with any sense of drama. He could allude to the romantic grandeur evoked by the placing of figures within a landscape, striving for the kind of figuration Keats admired in Milton when he wrote of that poet's gifts at "stationing." He could never, however, really deliver us that landscape in the manner of a Cooper or Scott. So timid was he about his ability to shape a landscape into whatever image he required that his 1851 introduction to Wacousta apologizes for his narrowing of the Detroit River. Whenever the task of describing combat forces him to consider topography, he does so in distant fashion. He narrates, for example, the work of the corps he served in as a soldier of fortune without exhibiting any particular flair in conveying the physical feel of the battlefield. Fond as he was of remarking that certain scenes in his writing were fit subjects for visual reproduction, he went no further than that in presenting detail. So too with his brief combat topographies. Richardson possessed a very strong visual memory, even a discerning eye, but he simply could not exert any descriptive literary power over landscape.

It comes as a pleasant surprise, therefore, when the reader encounters a description, however brief, of the lakeshore marshlands in which so much of the story of Westbrook takes place. Yet the author describes these areas that in his time abounded in game and wildlife as wastelands, mephitic swamps: "one continuous low and foetid extent of unwholesome-looking marsh." Very well, we can applaud his willingness to indulge his powers and create an appropriate setting for a horror story. We can even link this with a personal aside two pages earlier on the dismal prospects that Upper Canada presents to writers. No acute critical insight is necessary to sense some personal symbolism at work in the transformation of marshland into wasteland. In light of our present concern, however, can we sense some other forces at work?

The landscape had to become mythicized in the same hyperbolic manner as his characterization. Nothing less than a monster would do for the figure of Andrew Westbrook, that Grendel who finds no Beowulf, but a real wolf instead. The landscape would in turn become what another Souwesto character—Dunstan Ramsay—terms one of Hell's "visible branch establishments throughout the earth . . ." On the one hand, this turn of the screw seems what we would expect of any popular writer. On the other, does it not create horror shows as a distraction from the actual monstrosities that walk the earth in everyday garb? Far more than Andrew Westbrook, David Ramsay told of something rotten in the history of the region. Ramsay was a very ordinary, disquieting villain whose culture backed him to the hilt, so to speak. He needed no gruesome makeup in order to star in a melodrama. Yet he does not. He becomes instead an off-stage presence, a wicked old dragon of a treasure leaver whose spirit hovers about as a black dog.

We cannot blame Richardson for choosing to fictionalize one figure rather than another, or for choosing to fictionalize the history of his region in the first place. We can observe only that this procedure leaps directly into the folkloric, the legendary, the larger-than-life as an evasion of the stark realities of day-to-day monstrosity governing a region's settlement. The facts of the founding of this new polity lay not in the mists of antiquity, in legends of Romulus and Remus, in the fall of Troy and the dispersion of the Trojans. The fireside stories—as in the case of Richardson's grandmother—concerned historical events. The mists parted to reveal few gods and heroes. They displayed instead folk rather like oneself, involved in activities perfectly comprehensible, understandable even, but disturbing in what they revealed about one's heritage.

Two incidents—one involving a whole community, the other a lone individual—bring home the nature of the world that was passing into legend. Both involve material that no regional romancer thought worthy of "working up" into the stuff of fictional narrative. Both incidents involved on their fringes John Askin, the novelist's grandfather, and show him in a favourable light.

The first we enter through the history of a place name. Tecumseh's confederacy and Richardson's early world ended at Moraviantown. The settlement was also known as Fairfield. It stood at no great distance from the Thamesville, Ontario that Robertson Davies turned into Deptford. It took its name from the "praying Indians" that the Protestant missionaries of the United Brethren (Moravian) sect had made out of the tribes that they had converted to Christianity and agricultural settlement. These converts had not always been in Upper Canada. Their conversion to full-time agriculturalists and non-violent Christians had first landed them in what was known as Gnadenhütten in Ohio. There they and their German-speaking missionaries established a new community, "Safe Havens." It was to be a hideous misnomer, for in March 1782, 90 of those disarmed Delawares were slaughtered by a western Pennsylvanian militia out to destroy any settlements that they could find. After this notable incident in frontier history, a "trail of tears" followed, in which at least one white person showed himself to be humane. In 1786, John Askin lent his trading vessels Mackinac and Beaver to the transportation of the Moravian congregation from the Detroit region to the mouth of the Cuyahoga (Cleveland, Ohio). For this and other kindnesses, the Moravian John Heckewelder, the missionary whose accounts gave James Fenimore Cooper his ideas of Indian life and character, called Askin a "good friend" to the praying Indians.

Like Richardson's failure to give a name to the Indian youth who twice saves the romantic lead's life in Wacousta, this aspect of Indian-white affairs catches our attention by its absence from his writings. The Pontiac era witnessed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in December, 1763 a massacre of peaceful and sequestered Indians by a mob calling itself "the Paxton Boys." Who can blame Richardson for failing to include matter of little interest to his audience, material connected only peripherally to his focused narrative set also in the time of Pontiac? We can but notice a void, and speculate about its implications. Only one side in Richardson's fiction seems capable of atrocity. Nowhere does there surface even a hint of the possibility for humanity and reciprocality between the two races, except for (forbidden) erotic yearning or temporary sexual alliance. Not even evil is a matter for exchange between races. Rather, evil stays boundaried within one side. Yet evidence of fellow feeling and human kinship lay all around the author in the history of his region and in the life of his bountiful grandfather who acknowledged his mixed-blood offspring and befriended the dispersed.

The other incident outlining the nature of the new world that was coming to be seems, compared to the fact of massacre and dispersion, minor indeed. It was but one of those potholes on the path of progressive development. Sally Ainse (1728-1823?) had been the second wife of the trader Andrew Montour. Among the sons of this Indian woman was Nicolas Montour, who would play a prominent role in the western fur trade, end up in a Quebec seigneury, and serve as the basis for a character in a significant Quebec historical novel of 1938, Les engagés du grand portage. A colourful figure known under a number of names, eventually Sally Ainse became an Upper Canadian trader. John Askin knew her as a friendly business associate, in one instance forbearing to charge her for a bottle of whisky she had ordered. She is probably the "Sally Hans" mentioned by the Moravian missionary David Zeisberger as a willing donor of land to his charitable enterprise. In 1789, however, she began a search for justice that she never found. A parable of Jesus presents the example of an importunate widow whose unending complaints finally secure a proper verdict from an unjust judge (Luke 18: 1-6). That story came only half true along the Detroit. In a land dispute involving so powerful a local figure as Matthew Elliott, Ainse had the support of such influential people as Joseph Brant. Elliott, however, had something even better: a position on the land-claims board that favoured his suit over hers. No less a figure than Governor John Graves Simcoe saw the justice of her case. He ordered the land restored to her. Nothing happened. Again he ordered it. And nothing happened. Nothing ever did. For years the claim simmered, but nothing ever came of it.

Nothing will come of nothing, cried another old person who was to find himself done in by those whom he knew, but not nearly well enough. Sally Ainse might have been a well-known trader and matriarch, but she was still an Indian, and a "squaw" at that. Governor Simcoe himself could not enforce the law in her favour. When we speak of the monstrous, surely here is an instance of it. But can we really expect a writer to create a character out of a system? Yet in Wacousta, Richardson can personify a repressive system in the person of Colonel de Haldimar. Through this, he convinces the reader that something beyond personal pique lies behind the trying behaviour of the Colonel's opponent. No need to seek out the inflated demonizing of Andrew Westbrook in order to find evidence of the monstrous. Richardson and his culture instead chose to seek their monsters amid the haunted fens rather than among the ironfaced potentates of the settlements. This tradition continues throughout the fantasy life we have erected of the early years of Upper Canada, the heritage theme park that gives us our imagery of pioneering. Even when the genius of James Reaney surrounds his Donnellys with the stuff of history—songs, agricultural instruments, judges, schoolhouses, sticks and stones—it cannot resist the flight into apotheosis. The Donnellys live because they come back to haunt a bunch of necking teenagers or furnish the material for a strolling medicine show. The culture will not leave them to history, the author implies, but metamorphoses them into the legendary. Some bit of their richly evoked humanity has been frittered away. This the dramatist seeks to restore, but he will not forgo in the process the spiciness that the legends provide.

Go to the bookshelf and take down the paperback of Alice Munro's The Progress of Love (1987). The collection has for its cover illustration a work of Souwesto's finest painter, the late Jack Chambers. Diego Asleep #2 presents the transformation of the banal into the mysterious and the threatening. The overstuffed, overpriced, blue velvet couch in the centre bears its precious burden of the curled, sleeping child. The meticulously rendered folds of the covering blanket reveal that he has drawn up his legs in a protective, near-fetal position. An unplumped cushion rests at another end of the couch, and an ochre velour garment (a bathrobe?) is strewn carelessly along the top centre of the back of the couch. On the wall behind, centred again, is a print of a masculine version of Michael Snow's iconic Woman Walking. In the right foreground stands a dark gray King Kong whose fierceness is modelled in plastic. Slightly behind him rests an open Lego kit. At the opposite diagonal to the Lego, in the manner of Velasquez's Las Meniñas, appears the open door to another room. Its vertical off-setting of the couch's horizontality is caught in distant perspective, with a carpeted entrance hallway standing between the room where the boy is sleeping and the alcove where his mother stands, gazing deeply out a barely visible window at something beyond the painting's border.

In the manner of modern life, in the style of Alice Munro's "Fits" (a story that appears in this volume), the scene's banality is simultaneously reassuring and unsettling. The broadloom, the "solid" furniture, the tasteful, trendy painting, and the "educational" Lego kit all bespeak the House Beautiful of Enduring Family Values, of Quality Time redeemed. Yet we dream of monsters, figured forth in the same material in which the rectilinear uniformity of the Lego blocks is cast. Those monsters, as one of the greatest of Spanish painters reminds us, are produced by the "sleep of reason." The doorway to the room where the mother stands is a distance away. She does not look toward the child, but into some vast, unknowable distance, lost in her own dreams. What can she know of those nightmares that could be the psychic force causing the sleeping boy to curl up his legs? We may not have reached the legendary in this painting, but we see here how close to us is the world of terror. The slightest fissure in the surface we inhabit allows that terror to bubble over into our laps. This is not the world of Goya's Caprichos and their monstrous dreams. It seems too fragile for that.

In filling Souwesto with monsters and the larger-than-life, Richardson showed himself not only his world's reflector, but one of its shapers as well. His proved a leading role during a period that Reaney describes as "that strange moment when a civilization, having somehow survived its birth pangs and begun to have commercial and physical continuity, decides to put all this into words." Always John Richardson provided the imaginative figuration, deliberate or involuntary, of the world he both inherited and inscribed as his own. He put it into his own words, and in his own write. Yet neither writer nor audience, as we have seen, always gets it quite right.