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Overview
The long rivalry between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company for control of the fur trade in Canada's northwest came to an explosive climax on June 19th, 1816, at the so-called Battle of Seven Oaks. Armed buffalo huntersIndigenous allies of the Nor-Westersconfronted armed colonists of the HBC's Selkirk settlement near the forks of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers in today's Winnipeg. This "battle" would prove to be a formative event for Métis self-determination as well as laying down a legacy for settlers to come.
The Seven Oaks Reader offers a comprehensive retelling of one of Canada's most interesting historical periods, the Fur Trade Wars. As in the companion volume, The Frog Lake Reader, Kostash incorporates period accounts and journals, histories, memoirs, songs and fictional retellings, from a wide range of sources, offering readers an engaging and exciting way back into still-controversial historical events.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781926455532 |
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Publisher: | NeWest Publishers, Limited |
Publication date: | 04/01/2016 |
Pages: | 232 |
Product dimensions: | 6.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d) |
About the Author
A founder of the Creative Nonfiction Collective, Kostash has taught creative writing workshops across Canada and in the US. She has served on several award juries, including those of the Governor General's Awards, the CBC Creative Nonfiction competition, and the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize. In 2008 the Writers Guild of Alberta presented her with the Golden Pen Award for lifetime achievement, and in 2009 she was inducted into the City of Edmonton's Arts and Culture Hall of Fame. In 2010 she received the Writers Trust of Canada Matt Cohen Award for A Writing Life. Myrna Kostash's newest book, The Seven Oaks Reader, is a spiritual sequel to 2009's The Frog Lake Reader.
Read an Excerpt
One: In the Beginning
MK:In Spring of 1816, rumours swirl through Assiniboiain today's southern Manitobathat the Nor'Westers, men of the North West Company of fur traders, Métis hunters, Canadian engagés [contract employees], and clerks, are preparing for war against their commercial rivals, the Hudson's Bay Company. They face each other from their respective posts, Fort Gibraltar and Fort Douglas, near the juncture of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers known as the Forks. There are settlers a kilometre north in a loop of the Red, named Point Douglas.1.
June 19, 1816: a group of Métis and Nor'Westers disembark from a canoe at the mouth of Catfish Creek, where it empties, swift and muddy, into the Assiniboine. They have with them large bundles of pemmican that they transfer to oxcarts for transport overland north-east across the plain. At this point, the horsemen are still well away from the Selkirk settlers on the Red, and from Fort Douglas, downstream on the Red. In fact, they are deliberately avoiding fort and settlers. Or so they will claim.
But that evening of June 19, a watchman in Fort Douglas spots a group of the horsemen, some thirty-five of them, armed and riding in the direction of La Grenouillière or Frog Plain. They seem to be riding toward the settlement itself. The alarm is raised, Governor Robert Semple calls for volunteers, hands them muskets and ammunition, and marches out with them, some twenty-five-strong, to intercept and confront the horsemen. They meet at a bend in the river, in a grove of trees known as Seven Oaks.
What happened next has been called a battle, a skirmish, a massacre. It was over in fifteen minutes but it was long in the making, starting as early as the charter of the Hudson's Bay Company.
1. Point Douglas AKA 1813, Colony Gardens; 1817, 1826, Red River; 1858, Fort Garryor Garry for short; 1873, Winnipeg.