By Vicki BROOKER Review Staff
One of our area’s first historians is now the subject of a fitting tribute by one of today’s counterparts. Heinsburg history buff Robert Hendriks says he’s “pretty tickled” to see his book, “William Blaisdell Cameron, A Life of Writing and Adventure,” in print after 10 years of research, two years of writing and a year of editing the close to 90,000 words. The biography was launched Nov. 15 by Athabasca University Press. Hendriks said a herd of whitetail deer, peering in the windows of the university president’s house, was among the audience.
Cameron, a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk, was the only white man to survive the Frog Lake uprising on April 2, 1885, and told the story of that tragic time in “The War Trail of Big Bear,” published in the 1920s, which was revised some 20. years later to become “Blood Red the Sun.” Cameron also wrote countless short stories, capturing history as it happened, some of them published in “The Beaver,’ “Scarlet and Gold,’ and “Field and Stream” Magazines. In 1906 he became the publisher of the first weekly newspaper in this area, the short-lived Vermilion Signal.
In later life, Cameron owned drugstores in Lac La Biche, Heinsburg and Athabasca before becoming the curator of the Regina RCMP Museum. He continued to write throughout his life, but died in Meadow Lake, SK in 1951, many of the stories he had pounded out on his battered typewriter still unpublished.
A battered steamer trunk of Cameron’s unpublished work, along with a collection of photographs, documents and letters from such contemporaries as artist Charles Russell and novelist Owen Wister, was bequeathed to Hendriks and his wife, Shirley, by Cameron’s daughter-in-law, when she learned of the strong interest the couple had in preserving Cameron’s memory. The collection has now been gifted to Athabasca University, and is catalogued, along with some of the unpublished stories, on a CD enclosed in the book.
The information contained in the collection gave Hendriks a detailed look at Cameron’s life and formed the basis for the book. “I kept finding (more information) and poking it in,” Hendriks says. “There are a lot of footnotes and it’s a very detailed book. Some of the footnotes are basically a story in themselves.” Facts contained in the volume have been documented up to three times, and Hendriks says, “it’s about as accurate as it can be.”
The biography has “turned out to be a university reference book, and I don’t know where that will lead,” Hendriks says. Information about the biography were sent by the publishers to larger publications across the country, and Hendriks has already heard from Maclean’s magazine and the Western Producer, both indicating they would be publishing information about the book.
Hendriks says that some years ago, Western Producer Prairie Books published an anthology of some of Cameron’s work. “Eyewitness to History: William Blaisdell Cameron, Frontier Journalist,’ was edited by Rusty Macdonald, who actually knew Cameron, and who also had accessed the information in the steamer trunk.
Inquiries regarding “William Blaisdell Cameron, A Life of Writing and Adventure” should be directed to Karen Langley, biography project director and university archivist at the Thomas A. Edge Archives and Special Collections, Athabasca University, phone (780) 675- 6268, or by email at karen] @athabascau.ca.
The Robert and Shirley Hendriks collection of William Blaisdell Cameron, including the biography, is now available free online, through the Archival Network of Alberta database that feeds into Archives Canada.
