Review of <i>The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney</i> By Brian\nTitley
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a bureaucrat and politician, Edgar Dewdney figures prominently in the history of the Canadian West during the late nineteenth century. He was by turns Indian Commissioner (1879-1888), Lieutenant Governor of the North West Territories (1881-1888), a Member of Parliament (representing Assiniboia East), and Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (1888- 1892). This slim volume sheds new light on Dewdney and his legacy.\nDewdney's success in public life was, his biographer argues, the result of good luck, timing, and ability in various degrees. His appointment as Indian Commissioner was a case in point. Dewdney did have some relevant experience that qualified him for the job: before embarking on a political career in British Columbia this English-trained civil engineer had built roads there and had employed Native people as guides and packers. But luck was a factor as well: Titley notes that several other candidates had turned down the appointment by the time Dewdney was approached. Then in 1888 the sudden death of Minister of the Interior Thomas White opened the door for Dewdney's entrance into the federal cabinet. It also helped that Dewdney was well connected. His lifelong friendship with Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald was clearly important in advancing Dewdney's career.\nIn assessing his role as Indian Commissioner, historians have not been kind to Edgar Dewdney, portraying him as the author of a series of coercive policies directed against Native people, and the Cree especially, with disastrous consequences in 1884 and 1885. Titley, however, argues that the real villain was Lawrence Vankoughnet, Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs (and Dewdney's immediate superior in Ottawa). Dewdney in fact "challenged the more mean-spirited details of policy emanating from Ottawa while supporting its general contours." And when the North-West Rebellion began in March 1885, Dewdney pursued a policy of "generosity and appeasement" to ensure that the Cree and the Blackfoot remained peaceful.\nBrian Titley's assessment of Dewdney's accomplishments as a politician is harsher: he had no major impact on the national political stage. As Minister of the Interior Dewdney continued the policies of his predecessor: "there was no statesman-like vision, no spark of originality, no independent thought."\nUnflattering though this "biography is in places, The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney is a welcome addition to the literature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".