Jaxon Whole

Today, Honoré Jaxon would be labelled a “pretendian.” In his own lifetime, he was variously described as a loyal secretary, a dangerous rebel, a blue-collar rabble-rouser, a gifted orator, and a lunatic. Always, he has been on the margins of history. But as Donald B. Smith, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Calgary, writes in this intriguing and readable biography, “Occasionally those on the fringe may see things more clearly than those in the mainstream.”

The resurrection of this volume, first published nearly twenty years ago, is almost as interesting as its resurrected subject. But first, the facts of Jaxon’s life: the reliable facts that Smith has truffled out of archives, interviews, registers, memoirs, yellowing newspapers, learned journals, censuses, unpublished manuscripts, and family letters. This historian is certainly a hound for documentary proof. Honoré Jaxon has 220 pages of text, followed by almost 100 pages of...