Hope's Last Home

A book review.

Hope's Last Home

'Travels in Milk River Country'

by Tony Rees

published: 1995

ISBN: 0921835329

genre: History

reviewed:2005.03.18

To the best of my recollection, I picked up this slim book while in Calgary a couple of years ago. My interest in the Milk River area of southern Alberta came about during my extensive travel around the rest of that end of the province, and came to a head during a flight from Vancouver to Toronto.

During that flight, I was looking out the window to watch the terrain slide by. Some day, when we run out of oil, I suspect that we'll all be back on the trains, and won't have this opportunity. So I like to make the most of it. Especially when I get to see sights as odd as the one I saw one day while flying over the Milk River territory, and spotting what looked like a dimented irrigation channel.

The channel, you see, departed from a small river, and crept along the side of the river's valley for some time. Then the 'irrigation channel' pours into a long culvert and... crosses the river valley. From their, it follows a cut through a rough, hilly area, and dumped into another river.

Seeing this from the air, I was struck by two thoughts. The first was, "Tsk! Americans and their water projects!" The second was, "wait, are they diverting water from a river that flows into Canada? And why - there's no agriculture here...."

When I found the book, I remembered what I'd seen, and was surprised to find a map outlining that very water diversion project I'd spotted. I bought it immediately, then continued to move around like a nomad for two years while my books languished in boxes. I finally got around to completing the book this Spring, and now I know why the diversion was built, and that it took an international showdown to get its parameters defined.

This book covers quite a lot of detail about the geography, history, and peoples of the district. It is in this detail of course that the book becomes tied down from time to time, and loses its flow in a few spots. But this is probably inevitable in a book that manages to convey the author's love of the place in addition to astounding detail in everything from its bird life to its geology in 250 pages.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in that part of the country.

That said, I do have one quibble with this work. While there is a map at the beginning of the book, the author covers a lot of geography, and many of the places and features mentioned aren't depicted on the one map. It's long been a beef of mine that historians make poor use of maps when a map can save a thousand words. This is one such case.