Rainy Lake House
My book about the fur trade is being published by Johns Hopkins University Press this fall 2017.
RAINY
LAKE HOUSE weaves together the
biographies of three men involved in the fur trade in the first quarter of the
nineteenth century. John Tanner was a
“white Indian” who was taken captive and raised by Ottawa, and lived among the
western Ottawa-Ojibwa for thirty years, hunting across the northern forests and
plains of present-day Ontario, Manitoba, and northern Minnesota. Dr. John McLoughlin fled Quebec at the age of
eighteen to work in the fur trade in the Lake Superior region during two
decades of escalating strife between the North West and Hudson’s Bay
companies. Major Stephen H. Long
explored the northern borderlands in a time when the United States aimed to
take over British-Indian trade in its new western territories. The three men met at Rainy Lake House in 1823
after Tanner was attacked and badly wounded while taking his daughters out of
Indian country. Foregrounding those
incidents in 1823 and telling the story of the three men’s experiences in the
fur trade leading up to them, the book presents a nonfiction Rashomon tale
about the British-American-Indian frontier.
By interweaving and juxtaposing the three biographies, the book
describes the world of the fur
trade from its various colliding vantage points: American, British, and Indian; imperial,
capital, and labor; explorer, trader, and hunter. RAINY
LAKE HOUSE is original in its narrative conception: it is a work of
historical nonfiction that is character-driven and inspired by the
multiple-person narrative mode sometimes used in works of fiction (and in
cinema, most famously in Akira Kirosawa’s Rashomon) while true to the
canons of history. (Picture: Shooting the Rapids, 1879, by Frances Anne Hopkins.)
