Notes from the Century Before by Edward Hoagland

First published: 1969

Type of work: Travel writing/diary

Time of work: June 2 to August 3, 1966

Locale: British Columbia

Principal Personage:

• Edward Hoagland, a writer who searches out aged explorers in the British Columbian wilderness

Form and Content

In the summer of 1960, Edward Hoagland and his wife lived in Hazelton, British Columbia, a remote village on the Skeena River, where Hoagland heard stories of an even more isolated town named Telegraph Creek. Telegraph Creek originated one hundred years earlier, when a plan to string telegraph wire from New York to London the long way required outposts along the route. The line was hung as far as Telegraph Creek when the transatlantic cable connected New York and London the short way; thus, spools of unused wire were left to rust, and the population of Telegraph Creek shrunk to native Indians and the various gold hunters and white explorers who fancied living on game and produce. The century-old Telegraph Creek Hoagland pondered in Hazelton promised a wealth of lore and glimpses of mountain men (“stories which hadn’t worn threadbare with handling”) were it only possible to arrive there. No one in Hazelton could accommodate the journalist, however, as the passage overland was more demanding than even the local blusterers could manage, and Hoagland returned to New York unsatisfied.

Despite correspondence from guides familiar with Telegraph Creek which discouraged the avid writer from visiting, Hoagland returned to British Columbia in 1966, divorced and lonely but eager to confirm his intuition that going into the area around Telegraph Creek would be tantamount to stepping into the previous century. Notes from the Century Before, a travel journal of more than three hundred pages, is the book he wrested from the inhabitants, human and animal, and the magnificent landscape. Although Hoagland labels himself a rhapsodist, and although he devotes sections of the journal to the visual wonders, the book concentrates on describing the men who live in the wilderness and the stories they had to tell: “I would be talking to the doers themselves, the men whom no one pays any attention to until they are dead, who give the mountains their names and who pick the passes that become the freeways.”

The journal begins with an entry for June 2, 1966, the day Hoagland left New York, and concludes with an entry for August 3. After two weeks in Telegraph Creek, he traveled to other remote corners of British Columbia. Entries characteristically feature physical impressions of the men and women Hoagland meets. Dan McPhee, who settled in the West in 1904, “looks like a canny grandpa from Tobacco Road—long nose, floppy hat, black shirt . . . and when he tells a joke, he seems to swallow it, like a shot of whiskey.” Another Telegraph Creek citizen, Mr. Wriglesworth, “looks like the prophet who walks in front of a migrating people carrying a staff, and as though his face were younger underneath the skin than outside.” Entries also focus on the means these pioneers have found to thrive in this land without supermarkets. Wriglesworth’s staples include grouse, salmon (slimed “with brine strong enough to blacken a potato”), black bear, mountain goat, moose, snowshoe rabbits, beaver, and a wealth of vegetables from cabbage to squash. Methods of trapping animals are discussed at length, and story after story is recorded of self-sufficient inventiveness by the mountain men. Typical of dozens is a method used by Jim Morgan, an aging explorer, who as a young man enticed wolves to approach him by flopping around on a frozen lake as if wounded.

Since the book is a journal, meditation on the place he is visiting occurs at random. Hoagland often remarks on the Indians’ condition, and how their way of living contrasts with the whites. Hoagland finds the Indians of Eddontenajon, a village to the east of Telegraph Creek, susceptible to the white man’s gift of liquor and their community a mess as a result. In a town such as Caribou Hide, however, the Indian’s traditional life-style survives. Left to themselves, without the welfare checks distributed to the alcoholic Indians of Eddontenajon, the Indians remain Indians. Yet they also suffer periodically from starvation, a condition the white explorers find inexcusable given the wealth of game available to any hunter.

Hoagland also records descriptions of the animals. Game, he contends, is more essential than stunning scenery. Watching a caribou swim across a lake, he writes, “She was a pretty bleached tan with two-pronged antlers in velvet, and she splashed in the shallows like a filly, muzzling the bugs off her rear.” A sighting of a wolf takes up two pages of diary space, as if his view might be the last:

And their heads are large to contain their mouths, which are both hands and mouths. Their eyes are fixed in a Mongol slant to avoid being bitten. Nobody born nowadays will see a wild wolf. They are an epitome; one keeps count because they are so exceptional a glimpse.

Along with the eighty-year-old pioneers, their anecdotes, the Indians, the vast landscape, and the game, Hoagland writes of introspective moments. He feels guilty about the scavenging methods of professional journalism, and though most interlocutors speak freely and surrender their lore, some ask to be paid. His inability to stay married to a woman he loved exasperates him. He frankly admits the differences between himself and the pioneers. While admiring their stamina and indifference to the harshness of isolation, he is not tempted by their life-style. Though he has found sustained intimacy with women in civilization hard to manage, he is not inclined to withdraw. When he is concussed and bedridden after an automobile wreck in the woods, and flown to a hospital in Hazelton, he surrenders gratefully to the blandishments of the nurses: “Back to the world of women! Suddenly it was all women. It’s not that there aren’t any women in the bush; it’s that they’re so muffled up.”

After recovering, Hoagland explores the region north of Telegraph Creek, including another town he wanted to visit for its possible historic significance—a “gold town” called Atlin. During the Gold Rush, Atlin had thrived. When Hoagland arrives he finds 160 old souls living just below the Yukon on a mixture of memories and alcohol: “Needless to say, I love this town. Atlin has the blue lake, the Swiss view and the swish-swash historical hurrah of the Rush, but it isn’t niched into a worn river bluff like Telegraph Creek.”

Hoagland’s journal concludes with his departure from Atlin. The book’s final chapter describes his few days in Victoria, before leaving for New York, where he hunts down and interviews one last aged adventurer, E.C. Lamarque, who led mapping expeditions during the 1930’s in northern British Columbia. To Hoagland’s astonishment, Lamarque gives him a ten-foot sheet of paper containing his original sketches for a map of a passage Lamarque loved the most of any place he had explored. Hoagland flies east the next day mumbling again and again to the wilderness, “I love thee. Love to thee. I love thee.”

Critical Context

Notes from the Century Before is written in a distinctly American literary context deriving from the nature writing of Henry David Thoreau. The writer in this context is typically an isolated figure developing in great detail the sense of an actual place. As Thoreau became synonymous with Walden Pond, Hoagland’s two months of observation on the Stikine River by Telegraph Creek established a similar identity: “This is my Mississippi. I love it as I have never loved any piece of land or any other scene.” The literary tradition from which this work springs includes the travel books of Herman Melville, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883), Ernest Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935), and the work of writers contemporaneous with Hoagland, such as John McPhee (Coming into the Country, 1977), Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, 1968), and Peter Matthiessen (Men’s Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork, 1986). While Thoreau could imagine a vastness of unexplored country to the west, recent nature writers are concerned with the end of the American frontier.

Placing Hoagland firmly in such a milieu is a generalization which familiarity with his work will both confirm and blur. He is an oddball, an original, a unique voice, and his searching out of other one-of-a-kinds shows that his subject is life itself, in whatever vital manifestations he finds it. Restlessness is the condition from which he writes, a restlessness which, after the book on British Columbia, carried him to the Sudan “because of its almost unequaled variety, and because it has seldom been written about.” The book which resulted from that trip, African Calliope (1979), is filled with the same sort of voracious seeing found in Notes from the Century Before.

Though Hoagland writes frequently of unknown people and places, he has also written at length about New York, which he loves as much as the natural wilderness. His essay “Home Is Two Places” elucidates his contrary affections. Hoagland frequently mentions his stuttering as a painful handicap clearly relevant to his need to live in isolated places. As a teenager, he sought the company of animals, both in the woods and working as an animal tamer for a circus. His ability to describe animals is evident in The Edward Hoagland Reader (1979), which contains essays on turtles (several species roam the floor of his New York apartment), mountain lions, dogs, and bears.

The originality of Edward Hoagland is felt even more in his style than in his choice of offbeat subjects. Surprise is a regular experience for Hoagland readers. Horses can be described in human terms in one sentence, and as butterflies in the next. Occasionally his honesty seems excessive. A reader can be shocked by the frankness of his appraisals, such as some in Notes from the Century Before, which he puts down without seeming to realize that the person so described may read the description and be devastated. Yet Hoagland’s honesty is what makes his writing so appealing, since his aesthetic seems to be based on the belief that something new will be found with each new person or place he sees. Vital signs—whether ferocity, mindlessness, or mediocrity—are what claim his attention and what his writing brings to readers curious enough to be attracted by the same things.

Bibliography

Gardner, Harvey. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXIV (January 8, 1969), p. 16.

Grant, Annette. Review in Newsweek. LXXIII (January 2, 1969), p. 94.

Hoagland, Edward. “Slouching Toward Wadi Dhar: Edward Hoagland Motors Through the Mountains of Yemen and Lives to Tell About It,” in Interview Magazine. XVIII (May, 1988), p. 96.

Updike, John. “Journeyers,” in Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism, 1983.

Wolff, Geoffrey. Introduction to The Edward Hoagland Reader, 1979.