Resource

History from the Horse's Mouth

When you want to understand a historical personality, their own words – in letters, diaries-- written in the very times they describe, are considered the true gold of historical sources. When it comes to Edmonton’s first newspaper publisher, Frank Oliver, there is a treasure trove that approaches the wildest dreams of Ali Baba.

 

In 1880 Oliver started the Edmonton Bulletin as a round-up of local events and world news off the telegraph. The paper became a priceless chronicle for local readers, eastern Canadians looking for an accurate report of conditions in the west, and later, historians seeking Edmonton’s roots. For staff at Fort Edmonton Park, the Bulletin is one of the best resources we have for our city’s settlement period.

 

Of course, Oliver was usually offering a second-hand account at best. It is in his editorializing where we learn firsthand what he thought of the events he reported.

 

The Bulletin for 18 July 1885 (a reprint of which we sell at the Park), contains a priceless untitled story that could easily be called No Thanks For The Rescue! The story concerns an incident at Fort Pitt, the Hudson’s Bay Company post turned Northwest Mounted Police fort that was attacked and burned during the Riel Rebellion. Some local Aboriginals had joined Riel’s cause, and a party of young radicals kidnapped “the young girls of the McLean family.” It had all the elements, as Oliver puts it, “of a first class Indian novel of the olden class.”

 

Indeed, eager young volunteers of the Canadian militia rescued the McLean girls, but here “the similarity of the cold facts with the ordinary novel ended.” It seems the McLean girls and their captors were not very enthusiastic enemies. In fact, they got along extremely well. The girls were decidedly cool to the rescue, and only consented due to hunger, or a “vulgar scarcity of grub.” The story was recounted to Oliver by some of the jilted “rescuers.”

 

You can sense Oliver’s glee in pointing out that the McLean girls and their captors were, before anything else, young women and men with a predictable interest in each other. Oliver’s characterization of Aboriginals in the Bulletin, in many stories and editorials, goes against what you would expect from a boondocks newsman in Victoria’s empire. Popular thinking in Oliver’s time portrayed the first nations as pitiable souls needing government benevolence, or as stubborn enemies of “civilization.” 

 

Oliver insisted they were people like any other, who took up arms when they felt they had no option. He put the responsibility for the rebellion squarely at John A. Macdonald’s feet. It was not Ottawa’s munificence that contained these unfortunates, he argued, but Ottawa’s betrayal of treaty promises and shameful neglect that rightly enraged a desperate but proud community.

 

And yet, just a few years later, Oliver campaigned actively for the relocation of the Papaschase Indian Reserve, which included much of present-day south Edmonton, away from the settlement so the community could expand without hindrance. He and others pushed hard for the surrender of the reserve in November 1888. The legality of the process is still being argued before the courts today. 

 

Thanks to a treasure trove called the Edmonton Bulletin, Frank Oliver can defend his own contradictions in such matters, in his own words, to this very day.

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