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WINNER OF THE 2020 RBC TAYLOR PRIZE • "Readers might well wonder if Jonathan Swift at his edgiest has been at work."—RBC Taylor Prize Jury Citation • "A remarkable biography of an even more remarkable 17th-century individual ... Beautifully written and endlessly thought-provoking."—Maclean’s Murderer. Salesman. Pirate. Adventurer. Cannibal. Co-founder of the Hudson's Bay Company. Known to some as the first European to explore the upper Mississippi, and widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark Bourrie, as “an eager hustler with no known scruples.” Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions. A guest among First Nations communities, French fur traders, and royal courts; witness to London’s Great Plague and Great Fire; and unwitting agent of the Jesuits’ corporate espionage, Radisson double-crossed the English, French, Dutch, and his adoptive Mohawk family alike, found himself marooned by pirates in Spain, and lived through shipwreck on the reefs of Venezuela. His most lasting venture as an Artic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America’s oldest corporation. Sourced from Radisson’s journals, which are the best first-hand accounts of 17th century Canada, Bush Runner tells the extraordinary true story of this protean 17th-century figure, a man more trading partner than colonizer, a peddler of goods and not worldview—and with it offers a fresh perspective on the world in which he lived.
Pierre-Esprit Radisson (1636?-1710) was many men. He was a teenager captured, tortured, and adopted by the Mohawk, and a youth relishing the freedom of the wilderness. He was the French-born servant of an ambitious English trading company and a hapless petitioner at the court of Louis XIV. He was a central figure in the tug-of-war between France and England over Hudson Bay and a pretender to aristocratic status who had to defend his actions before James II. Finally, he was a retired "sea captain" trying to provide for his children, and despite the pension he had fought for, the "decay'd Gentleman" described in his burial record. Radisson's writings, characterized by hubris and contradiction, provoke many questions. Was he a semi-literate woodsman? Are his accounts of Native life ethnographically reliable? Can he be trusted to tell the truth about himself? How important were his explorations? In this first volume of Radisson's complete writings, Germaine Warkentin introduces the life, travels, motivations, and work of this compelling and complicated figure while providing a comprehensive and authoritative edition of his masterpiece - The Voyages. In the four accounts of his travels to the far interior of the Great Lakes and James Bay, Radisson vibrantly depicts his life among the Mohawk, his encounters and relationships with Native peoples, Jesuits, English, French, and Dutch colonists and traders, as well as the hazards of the capricious politics of the New World and the thrilling surprise of discoveries. Striking a superb balance between accessible writing and comprehensive scholarship, this new edition of Radisson's Voyages is indispensable, definitive, and reasserts the important roles that Radisson played in seventeenth-century North American rivalries.
A reader-friendly anthology of influence—the geologic, historical, and personal history to supplement Lorine Niedecker’s poem.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER A thrilling new telling of the story of modern Canada's origins. The story of the Hudson's Bay Company, dramatic and adventurous and complex, is the story of modern Canada's creation. And yet it hasn't been told in a book for over thirty years, and never in such depth and vivid detail as in Stephen R. Bown's exciting new telling. The Company started out small in 1670, trading practical manufactured goods for furs with the Indigenous inhabitants of inland subarctic Canada. Controlled by a handful of English aristocrats, it expanded into a powerful political force that ruled the lives of many thousands of people--from the lowlands south and west of Hudson Bay, to the tundra, the great plains, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific northwest. It transformed the culture and economy of many Indigenous groups and ended up as the most important political and economic force in northern and western North America. When the Company was faced with competition from French traders in the 1780s, the result was a bloody corporate battle, the coming of Governor George Simpson--one of the greatest villains in Canadian history--and the Company assuming political control and ruthless dominance. By the time its monopoly was rescinded after two hundred years, the Hudson's Bay Company had reworked the entire northern North American world. Stephen R. Bown has a scholar's profound knowledge and understanding of the Company's history, but wears his learning lightly in a narrative as compelling, and rich in well-drawn characters, as a page-turning novel.
Accounts of the explorations of Radisson, La Verendrye, Samuel Hearne, and Lewis and Clark.
"An African tightrope walker who cannot die gets involved with a mysterious society that's convinced the world is ending and is drafted into the fight-to-the-death Tournament of Freaks, where she learns the terrible truth of who and what she really is"--
Pierre-Esprit Radisson, a French adventurer, came to New France in 1651 in search of opportunity. Captured by the Iroquois at sixteen, he survived torture, was adopted by the Mohawks, and lived among the natives for over a year learning their customs and languages. Once back in New France he led the adventurous life of a coureur de bois, becoming the partner of his brother-in-law, Mdard Chouart Des Groseilliers. When French authorities rejected their plan to reach the rich fur territories of the Hudson's Bay area, they found ready backers and expertise for the expedition in England. Their first successful expedition of 1668-69 resulted in the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company. Historians have been critical of Radisson and Des Groseilliers' changes of allegiance but Martin Fournier shows that they loyally served their English business partners until the political turmoil of the Exclusion Crisis against the succession of the Catholic Duke of York, Radisson's patron, forced the two Frenchmen to leave England. Radisson then worked briefly for French interests before permanently establishing the Nelson River trading post for the Hudson's Bay Company in 1684. From 1687 until his death in 1710 he lived as a gentleman in London. In this accessible biography Martin Fournier makes use of Radisson's six travel narratives to provide an intimate portrait of this intriguing and complex figure. These narratives, too often neglected by historians, provide rich insight into Radisson's character as well as vivid accounts of his periods of captivity, guerilla expeditions, and trading ventures among the natives. Pierre-Esprit Radisson casts a new light on a remarkable figure who was as much at home in the North American wilderness as in the grandest salons of Europe.
Winner, Manitoba Day Award, Association of Manitoba Archives (2008)
A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists. Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from Montreal to Toronto in 1913, he became a key figure in a landscape movement that was determined to depict Canada in a bold new way, only to have a war dash the group's collective ambitions. Alone among his close associates, Jackson enlisted to fight with the 60th Infantry Battalion. Wounded at Sanctuary Wood in 1916, he returned to the field of combat as an official war artist – the first Canadian artist appointed, the only infantryman in the program – and militated for other Canadian appointments to what is now a storied moment of creation for such artists as F.H. Varley and Arthur Lismer. Jackson produced some of Canada’s most memorable depictions of the world’s first industrial-scale conflict, even as he reckoned with the anguish caused by the mysterious death of his close friend Tom Thomson. A life-changing event for soldiers, families, and nations alike, the First World War has been understood as a moment of stasis in the visual arts in Canada – the dead ground from which the Group of Seven emerged in the early 1920s. Douglas Hunter shows how Jackson’s war was a moment of intense transformation and artistic development on the canvas as well as an experience that tempered a young man into a constructive elder statesman for Canadian art. On his return home he was not only instrumental in the formation of the Group of Seven in Toronto, but a key figure for the Beaver Hall Group in Montreal. Jackson’s Wars is a story of brotherhoods of painters and soldiers, shot through with inspiration, ambition, trauma, and loss, on the home front as well as on the battlefield. Hunter widens and deepens A.Y. Jackson’s world of friends, family, and colleagues to capture the life of a complex man and the crucial events and relationships behind the creation of Canada’s best-known art collective.
It was at the trading post of Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence River, the year 1662, and the time, early in the morning, when the wood thrush had just begun his call. Strange things happened then, but these were frontier days when strange things used to happen, so do not be surprised when you learn what befell Pierre Radisson, son of a French emigrant to Canada, and then a youth of about seventeen years of age.