Brisebois Drive

The little outpost had been temporarily called Bow River Fort, but Brisebois seemed to think there was a precedent for naming the rough palisade Fort Brisebois, and proposed a Christmas toast to that effect. The men’s subterranean rumbles grew more vocal, and Mountie command, aware that Brisebois was hardly a model of decency or decorum, began to view him with overt disfavour. Colonel James Macleod (the golden Mountie who embodied all the traits of exceptional Mountie-ness) decreed that the fort would be called Fort Calgary, with reference to a Scottish ancestral connection of his own. Although the men’s complaints were not entirely assuaged, their combined ill regard coupled with his demonstrable lack of leadership finally persuaded Brisebois to decamp. In the summer of 1876, another man assumed command.

Calgary stayed Calgary, branded by Macleod not only in name but in spirit, the main artery into the city from the south still called Macleod Trail, Macleod’s extended family still part of its gentry, Macleod’s legendary sense of fairness and camaraderie with his men a continuing myth, one that Calgary celebrates to this day. Brisebois is virtually forgotten. Incompetent and erasable, he’s been wiped off the map of time. His men rebelled but did not shoot him. He stumbled off into a forgettable future, not even ignominious.

So why do I harbour this fleeting affection for Brisebois? I imagine him out here, far from his French-Canadian home, expected to perform as leader to a group of men who were probably a combination of idealists and roughnecks, intransigent, intent on making him look bad. I imagine him acutely homesick. I imagine that none of his men spoke French, and that they mimicked his way of talking behind his back. I imagine that he always had a cold, that his nose ran from October to March, and that his moustache trapped the moisture in an endearingly repulsive track. I imagine that he suffered fierce headaches when the occa¬sional chinook unfurled its thick flannel arch across the sky. I imagine his dark eyes in contrast to his pale skin, and the frustrated bulge of his receding forehead. I imagine that he yearned for heat and comfort, and so stumbled into misguided behaviour, hoarding buffalo robes and annexing a stove and sleeping in the arms of a woman. Some days I imagine him a dextrous and tender lover, some days half hearted and perfunctory. Why did the Metis woman stay? What did he offer her in the early economy of a Mountie outpost in sight of the shining mountains? His real story, bare and unvarnished, can be readily displaced by what I imagine.

In her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson’s narrator observes the extent to which the past can become inconvenient: “People have never had a problem disposing of the past when its gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget. And if we can’t dispose of it we can alter it. The dead don’t shout. There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it.” And erase it completely. If it does not suit the story of the moment, if it does not entertain or play into the accepted mythology, the past’s characters can be rearranged, relegated to the midden heap of scrap.

We expect the past to sing for its supper, provide entertainment and enlightenment in equal measure. We look for piquant details, the button on Napoleon’s sleeve, the ribald uses of parsley, riveting moments of choice. Brisebois’s pragmatic alignment with a Metis woman interests us more than the fact that F Troop actually fomented serious labour unrest.

In a brash new West, reinventing itself with every economic corkscrew, Brisebois ghosts our restless relationship to history. The very absence of absence delineates our uneasy recall of the past, our utter oblivion to the shadow of the past. Familiarity breeds our contempt. Is that why cities like Calgary appear to be stripped bare, buildings springing out of tomorrow’s forehead, all glass and steel, wireless, and climate controlled? The reconstructed Fort Calgary (not at all resembling the rough palisade that F Troop constructed) is now the site of Stampede tent parties, huge sexual mosh pits with hardly a cowboy or Mountie in sight. No one at those 5,000-person-strong events could even pronounce Brisebois’s name, let alone identify him.

But why does this disappoint me? Why do I expect the denizens of a booming city to dip into a reservoir of vanished time? Why do I hope that they will nourish a little curiosity about the paved-over secrets of the concrete grid they drive through every day? Will it contribute to civic spirit, give Calgary more character? Will it make a difference to our wilful pursuit of immediate gratification, slaked desires, quick mercantile exchanges, surface attraction? Hardly.

And yet this naked and needy city produces a constant archive of arrivals and accommodations. In this respect, we are no different from any other metropolis, ancient or recent. We take for granted our over-documented and over-documenting age. Trivial emails are kept and archived, security camera tapes hold images in an endless loop of coming and going, cellphone records inscribe the time and length of quotidian conversations. Every moment is confined, numbered, and dated, photographed and Facebooked. This amassment of detail is destined to overwhelm itself — on what virtual garbage dump will so much unselective data end up? The technology that gathers it becomes obsolete as quickly as the minutes roll by, and even retrieving these details will pose a challenge, not in 100 years but in ten. How will the future make a narrative out of our narcissistic noise? And in such an obsessive hyperbolizing of experience, where will cheerless Brisebois and his extra buffalo robes end up? Forgotten, of course.

Our contemporary story is overwhelmed by brutally tangential detail. Even while we obsessively document and hoard, we cannot remember what happened five minutes ago, let alone 100 years ago. Contexts change so swiftly that even a shared vocabulary cannot be assumed. My twenty-something fitness trainer, overhearing a discussion about South Africa, asked curiously, “What’s apartheid?” Her question was not so much ignorant as a marker of an age so saturated with information that even political urgencies are replaced more quickly than paper can be recycled. Is it this culture of rabid immediacy that makes us so strenuously avoid the past, cultivate a selective amnesia? Or does it make us yearn for a romantic past? In that past, Brisebois would be an existential hero, writing poetry by the light of a dripping candle, exquisitely miserable but determined to forge a legacy. So far as we know, he wrote no poetry at all, although he was well educated and had unusual experiences. Before the Great March West, he had fought with the Union Army in the American Civil War. And most distinctively and romantically, he had served for almost three years in the Devils of the Good Lord unit of the Papal Zouaves in Italy. That one is worth searching out in a history textbook.

The cultural critic Raymond Williams described history as a tale of “accidents, unforeseen events . . . often the frustration of conscious purpose.” How would he describe history now, I wonder, when we seem to have immersed it in a bath of some strange solvent meant to dissolve the verdigris of age but retain the patina of marketability? Of course, history is a shaped story, where inarguable facts and dates might serve any number of masters and persuasions. But like the disliked, ineffective, and seemingly arrogant Brisebois, it is the shadow stories haunting history that argue for its cornucopia of possibilities, multiple versions of the past always on the verge of being rediscovered or reordered or rewritten, scrutinized from a new angle or in a different light. Where once history was institutional, owned by priests and scholars, it is now ours, to shake and bake, to imagine, and to dream. We can crave and renovate history, worry it for answers and for apparitions, insist that it dance attendance on our pharmacological forecasts. And history obliges, willingly putting itself in the predicament of contrast and comparison, justification and footnote.