Charles Mair

Charles Mair (September 21, 1838 – July 7, 1927) was a Canadian poet and journalist. He was a fervent Canadian nationalist noted for his participation in the Canada First movement and his opposition to Louis Riel during the two Riel Rebellions in western Canada.

Early life and education

Mair was born at Lanark, Upper Canada, to Margaret Holmes and James Mair. He attended Queen's University but left it after one year to help with the family’s troubled businesses in Lanark.

Career On leaving college, Mair became a journalist. He wrote extensively in opposition to Riel's cause, and his columns incensed the citizenry of Red River. At a dinner given by Alexander Begg; Annie McDermot Bannatyne, the Métis daughter of Andrew McDermot and wife of Andrew Graham Ballenden Bannatyne, reacted to Mair's account of tensions between Métis and white wives with a public slap and horse-whipping, which inspired the first western roman-à-clef, Begg's 1871 Dot it Down: A Story of Life in the Northwest, presenting "a caricature of Mair as a self-important Upper Canadian flirt who dots down his sneering observations about the west", according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. and about the native and Métis people and places of the time. However, "Mair’s prose, and the reaction to it, obscured his road work, which drew more resentment."

He died in Victoria, British Columbia.

Writing

Mair published the first book of poetry in post-Confederation Canada, 1868's Dreamland and Other Poems. Although the poetry was not particularly notable, it became popular after Mair was captured by Louis Riel and managed to escape.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) states that Dreamland "demonstrates a conventional colonial approach to poetry. Such poems as 'August' succeed in their attention to natural detail: descriptions of the blueflies, the milkmaids, and the 'ribby-lean' cattle in parched fields anticipate the mature nature poetry of Archibald Lampman. But too often he wrote not of the timberlands he knew but of a dreamland weakly modelled upon the romantic flights of Keats." However, the book was praised by "the established poet Charles Sangster, who referred to Canada's sophisticated literary tradition as one that was habitually overlooked in the popular press."

Mair published Tecumseh, a historical drama mainly in blank verse dealing with the War of 1812, in 1886. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography calls Tecumseh "a major contribution to our 19th-century literary heritage, wherein the War of 1812 is the central event of Canadian history. Among the many literary treatments of this war...Tecumseh stands as the most accomplished." Similarly, Dennis Duffy, writing in The Canadian Encyclopedia, calls Mair's writing "pedestrian and untheatrical", but it stresses the importance of Mair's vision of Canada as "a co-operative enterprise in contrast with the self-seeking individualism of the United States."

Recognition

Mair was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1889.

Publications Dreamland and Other Poems. London: S. Low, 1868. Montreal: Dawson, 1868, Through the Mackenzie Basin: A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 . London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1903.