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The Road to Canada: The Grand Communications Route from Saint John to Quebec. By Gary Campbell. New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions and the New Brunswick Military Heritage Project, 2005. ISBN 0-86492-426-7. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Selected bibliography. Index. Pp. 115. $12.95.
"Getting there fustest with the mostest" was General Nathan Bedford Forrest's famous recipe for victory. It also pinpoints a military principle that generals sometimes ignore and their civilian masters and judges seldom learn. Logistics and geography often decide the fate of Empires. Major Gary Campbell, himself an historically minded Canadian logistics officer, argues this case for what contemporaries called the Grand Communications Route from Saint John to Quebec, a road so important that Britain was willing to contemplate war with the United States in the 1840s to protect it.
North America's own history makes the case. Europeans only made headway here because native peoples had long since done the exploring and had developed the means for achieving mobility in all weathers. Long before any European appeared, the Miq'mak and Malecite knew how to reach the river and lake system that penetrated the heart of North America. By canoe or on snowshoes, they travelled up the Saint John...