Review
HOPE’S LAST HOME
by Tony Rees
Brindle & Glass, 256 pp.
If you drive through southeastern Alberta or the northern stretches of Montana, well east of the mountains, it’s easy to tune out the landscape.
That’s especially true in a typical cruise-control summer when your air-conditioned comfort is enclosed by tinted glass. This landscape doesn’t naturally seize you like the Rockies’ majesty or the Drumheller Valley’s layered mystery.
But anyone who reads Hope’s Last Home will never again be able to dismiss a region so rich in history and pre-history, from its ancient geology and glacial reconfigurations to the culture of its aboriginal inhabitants and the cross-border shopping mania of the 1990s.
Author Tony Rees engagingly describes how the great plains of North America took shape, with the Milk River settling into an odd path that would influence the travels of American explorers Lewis and Clark, who named the waterway in 1805. Over time, the Milk flowed under the flags of five nations – France, Spain, Britain, the United States and Canada.
Despite early warnings that this region was too dry for sustained farming, homesteaders were seduced by a succession of unusually wet years and bumper crops before reality crushed them in the 1910s and ’20s. Only massive farms, it eventually turned out, had a chance of surviving.
"Today," writes Rees, "there is little evidence of the tens of thousands of dryland homesteaders who flooded into the country in the second decade of the century only to be blown away by the end of the third.
"A few of their small shacks and outbuildings still stand along the highway and up the gravel side roads. But most were cleared away long ago, their yards and shelterbelts plowed under by the huge machines of the big wheat producers…."
This book is filled with stories worth telling, and Rees tells them beautifully. His many years as an archivist – in Toronto and Calgary, most recently with the Glenbow Museum – sharpened his eye for humanity among the data. And clearly his research skills are superb.
Hope’s Last Home was originally published in 1995 by Johnson Gorman, then vanished from the bookstores without a trace. Anecdotal evidence suggests the few hundred people who bought it consider it one of the best books ever written about the West. Brindle & Glass recently purchased the rights, and now intends "to remove the ‘cult’ from its status as a cult classic," says publisher Lee Shedden.
We should be thankful for that.
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