New Rivers of the North Revisited

Review By Matthew Evenden

February 26, 2026

This attractive, slim volume reproduces the photographs taken by Hulbert Footner and his companion, Auville Eager, as well as a sections of text from Footner’s original book, New Rivers of the North: The Yarn of Two Amateur Explorers of the Head-Waters of the Fraser, The Peace River, The Hay River, Alexandra Falls, published in 1912 by McClelland and Stewart.  Footner was a writer and journalist, born in Hamilton in 1879 and raised in New York City, who worked in Alberta as a journalist in 1906 but spent most of his career in the US writing western and detective dime novels.   Footner’s book recounts his journey with Eager in 1911 from the upper Fraser northeastward to the Peace and Hay Rivers as well as Alexandra Falls.  While Footner and Eager photographed their journey (who took which photo is unclear as is the type of camera used), not all of their images appeared in the book.  A scrapbook of the unpublished photographs survives and is held by the University of Alberta archives.  Part of the purpose of this volume is to share these photographs with a wider audience.

New Rivers of the North Revisited comprises an introduction and commentary by Leonard and Silversides, a selection of text from the original, interspersed with black and white photographs from the scrapbook, as well as eight photographs drawn from other sources.  Brief descriptions accompany the photographs.  Both of the authors/editors, David Leonard and Brock Silversides, bring considerable knowledge of Alberta archives to the project.  Leonard, recently passed, will also be well known to readers of BC Studies as the author of several volumes of regional history on the Peace River country.  In addition, Joanne Gotnar, a director of the Western Cree Tribal Council based in Grand Prairie, Alberta, provides “A Cree Perspective” on the volume and Beverly Whelan, President of the Monkman Homestead Preservation Society, “A Métis Perspective.”  Both offer thanks for the photographs that are preserved as well as the light they shed on the lives of previous generations.  Whelan appreciates that some of the worst racist language in the original book is left out of the new volume.   Several maps, some historical, run through the book providing orientation.

Leonard and Silversides argue that the real value in reproducing this work is in the photographs, many of them published here for the first time.  They suggest that the original volume contains dated language, that Footner described indigenous peoples in derogatory terms, and that some of the historical and geographical description “adds nothing to what is already known” (xxi).  If this is so (and in reviewing the original, it is difficult to argue), then why re-publish the work?  Leonard and Silversides propose that “the images disclose aspects of life in the Northwest that few visitors to the region prior to their visit were able to capture” (xxv).  Photographs in the volume include landscapes of river scenes, portraits (mainly indigenous individuals, families and groups), as well as street and settlement scenes, primarily focused on buildings.  These everyday snapshots offer useful evidence about places, peoples and the period, but additional commentary would have been useful.  Silversides has published previously on the staging of ethnographic photographs, but there is little discussion in this volume on the selectivity of the original photographers.  Why and how did Footner and Eager photograph the people and places they did?  What scenes did they possibly avoid or at least fail to photograph?  A few passages reveal the awkward interactions between Footner, Eager and indigenous subjects.  In addition to Gotnar and Whelan’s comments, it would have been interesting to know whether the editors worked with communities to try to identify any of the unnamed indigenous subjects.  Perhaps this was not feasible, but additional context on the editors’ own decisions in selecting images would have been instructive.

For readers interested in the history and geography of the upper Fraser and the Peace River Country, this book provides important source material.  Leonard and Silversides have shared a little known collection that may well inform other studies of this region as well as provoke community interest and reflection.