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Sample Books Available

Let Them Be Remembered cover
Let Them Be Remembered

The Story of the Fur Trade Forts
Elizabeth Browne Losey

It might be said that Canada was founded because of a fad of fashion - the insatiable demand for beaver hats that swept through Europe in the late 17th century. When it was discovered that the beaver existed in abundance in North America, the fur trade was born. As trappers in their relentless pursuit of beaver probed every stream and lake moving ever deeper into the wilderness, they pushed back the boundaries and opened the way for the settlers who followed them. Let Them Be Remembered, by Elizabeth Browne Losey is the story of the fur trade and the fur trade forts. Over the course of twenty years, the author and her husband, long interested in the fur trade, not only sought information from a wealth of sources such as fort journals and traders' diaries and letters, but also searched for and traveled to the sites of the forts themselves.

$36
ISBN 0-533-12572-3

Trader Tripper Trapper cover

Trader Tripper Trapper
The Life of a Bay Man
Sydney Augustus Keighley
"I hated the city and I hated the job."

With these words, Sydney Keighly describes leaving a bank teller's cage in Winnipeg and escaping, at age 17, to the silent beauty of the north country and a life of high adventure.

Two years earlier, in October 1915, he had bluffed his way into the Canadian Army and sailed for England on the Empress of Britain and had several months at Bramshott before officials discovered his age.

Back in Canada, with his hopes to see action in France frustrated, young Sydney was restless in a routine job. His mother suggested the Hudson's Bay Company and Sydney went off to 'Beaver House' on Main Street. He joined the 'The Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay' that same afternoon. Within days he was on his way to his first fur trade post in northern Manitoba.

$36 [$30 for members]
ISBN 0920486-36-3

Mission to Little Grand Rapids cover

Mission to Little Grand Rapids
Life with the Anishinabe 1927 - 1938
Reverend Luther L. Schuetze

Brought to death's door by illness while homesteading in Alberta, Luther Schuetze experience a miraculous healing that transformed his life. Years later, when asked to serve his Lord, he willingly gave up a successful trading enterprise to do missionary work in northern Manitoba.

Luther set out by canoe on Lake Winnipeg with his wife and four children, and traveled up the perilous Berens River to Little Grand Rapids. For the next eleven years he served as minister, teacher, doctor and dentist for the Anishinabe people who lived in this harsh and beautiful bush country.

Enlivened by Luther's wry, anecdotal humour, this book will introduce you to the animals he befriended, the shamans he challenged, and the many people whose lives he touched with a caring hand.

$24 [$20 for members]
ISBN 1-894694-02-3

The English River Book cover The English River Book
A North West Company Journal and Account Book of 1786
Edited by Harry W. Duckworth

In 1786 the North West Company traded furs in Athabaska territory as a branch of its English River district, the fur trader's name for the Churchill River. The journal published here, which was probably kept by Cuthbert Grant the elder, later a North West Company partner, provides a day-to-day record of trade in the spring of April 1786 at Fort Athabaska, the under the direction of Peter Pond. The vividly written text describes Pond's peremptory manner with the Indians and the traders' return to civilization in May. Colourful anecdotes describe the events such as the time the Athabaska River, blocked by ice, flooded the fort, leaving its inhabitants scrambling for the rafters.

$36 [$30 for members]
ISBN 0-7735-0714-0