Rigged Poetics

In 1913, a thirty-five-year-old engineer from Nova Scotia, Sidney Clarke Ells, travelled to Alberta’s Athabasca River valley as part of an exploratory team sent to report to the federal government on the springs of bitumen that had been seen seeping freely from the ground. It would have been a journey of some mystery and adventure, and Ells seemed particularly suited for the task. An eager-minded man of both arts and sciences — he had undergraduate degrees in each from McGill University, as well as experience in the oil fields of New Brunswick and Trinidad — he produced, besides a detailed account of Athabasca bitumen, photographs, sketches, stories, and poems of his time in the hinterland. He included some of this work in Northland Trails, from 1938, his attempt “to convey something more vital than mere statistics — the atmosphere of the great North land and the spirit of its people.”

Although he is now barely a footnote in Canadian history...