The Three Sisters Bar & Hotel by Katherine Govier: Review By Robin L Harvey

The Three Sisters Bar & Hotel seems like a labour of love and a passion project for Katherine Govier, one of Canadian literature’s most enduring, endearing and gifted authors. Govier became a literary treasure almost 40 years ago with her first short-story collection, Fables of Brunswick Avenue, 16 tales, thematically linked by the popular but once-modest Toronto street where the book’s protagonists reside. 

Since then, she’s used fiction to bring history alive, both in her factually-based novel Creation about artist and naturalist birder John James Audubon and her fictional narrative, The Printmaker’s Daughter, a story about a young woman living in 19th century Edo Japan.

The Three Sisters is a meticulously researched work of historical fiction, set near her part-time childhood haunt in the front range of The Rockies and the Three Sisters mountain peaks, originally called Three Nuns. In the book, the fictional town of Gateway stands in for real-life Canmore, 20 miles away from the three rugged peaks.

The book spans a century across three generations of the family. It begins in the summer of 2011, when the three middled-aged Mariner sisters, Lynn, Nancy, and Ana, are summoned to their hometown by their mother, Iona (granddaughter of another lead protagonist, Herbie Wishart– the clan’s first immigrant to Canada, a British family’s black sheep sent overseas) and their father. 

Father Walter has purchased the run-down Three Sisters Bar and Hotel as a gift for his daughters to restore. The town and hotel have languished since the Canadian west transformed from an idiosyncratic and dangerous frontier into a modern business/energy hub. The sisters reluctantly accept the project, unaware of the property’s familial significance.

Govier launches plot threads of intrigue beginning in June 1911, in chapters that leap-frog back and forth across a century. However, the story is anchored to one event: the mysterious disappearance of a famous American archeologist who came to retrieve fossils he’d seen on expedition the summer before.

Under the care of trail guide, Herbie Wishart, now turned rough and rowdy frontiersman, Charles Hodgson is driven by his obsession to find the fossils somewhere beyond the Bow Valley. They can be accessed across dangerous mountains, through treacherous trails and dangerous terrain.

Soon Hodgson sets off with son, Humphrey, daughter, Isabel, and Maxwell, a dapper African-American who is the family’s servant and caretaker. Wishart runs the trail crew, its packhorses, supplies and gear. He also brings along his Chinese cook named How Long.

Finally, the expedition edges to the dig spot, high above the tree line near Mystic Lake and digging begins in earnest through deep snow, on cliffs and at a quarry. Near-disaster erupts when a dynamite stick is prepared to blast to the fossils and Wishart lights his pipe. A crosswind set the dynamite off early, sparking an explosion.

Worse for wear and injured, the diggers continue until Hodgson uncovers his treasure. He sends Wishart off to seek more supplies (to avoid his guide’s cautious eye) so the expedition can pack as many fossils as possible for the trip back. Wishart obliges and sets a rendezvous for two days later. But the archeologist, his family, the crew and cook disappear. The mystery turns out to be more complex than believed.

Search parties comb the trails and officials bring in the Mounties without luck. The fossil hunters and crew have vanished. Wishart heads to the American capital to comfort the lost archeologist’s youngest daughter. In time they marry, cementing the link from past to present to come. 

The missing scientist makes national and international news and strains relations between the United States and the Dominion of Canada, hoping to whitewash the tragedy, because it wants to turn the western frontier into a lucrative tourist destination.

Enter Helen Walsh, a bureaucrat, nature lover, and key player in the Dominion’s nascent Parks department. Walsh, an early feminist, is in love with her work and then her boss, in that order, until she meets Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, a real historical figure and former journalist who pretended to be a Blackfoot chief. 

Govier creates a fictionalize romance between the two on Walsh’s trip west to write tourism guidebooks. The expedition’s fate unfolds across decades, encompassing world wars, the roaring twenties, and The Great Depression to Alberta’s boom times. By the book’s end, the mystery is solved by clues discovered across decades.

Govier is a master at creating quirky but believable characters who reflect their era. Her considerable talent is displayed in the descriptions of life in the mountains and the majestic wilderness. Readers are immersed in the biting wind, icy snow, as well as the seasons on the rugged landscape with their glorious vistas.

“…trees below the surface, white skeleton tress standing upside down, as if they had dropped into it from every side. They hung like sticks in a game of Chinese pickup … straight trunks … branches reduced to silver spears floating on clouds of miraculous green that blossomed deep in the water,” Govier writes of the Mystic River waters.

Themes of the rights of frontier women, the fight to save wilderness, and the exploitation of indigenous peoples and immigrants are stitched throughout the plot. The book’s main flaws come in an avalanche of overwhelming historic detail, its ambitious timeline and its confusing profusion of sub characters and subplots. 

Add the way the plot jumps around in time and it can be hard to follow. Perhaps Govier was blinded by her enthusiasm for historic detail and struggled with what to keep and what to discard causing the book’s readers to suffer. Even so, for many, especially those enthralled by Alberta’s history, the flaws can be forgiven in the tale that bursts to life within the book’s pages.

The Three Sisters Bar & Hotel by Katherine Govier HarperCollins Canada $22.95 – 480 pages