Squaring the Round

A collection of prose and poetry about the early days of Fort St. James, a Hudson’s Bay Company fur post established in 1806 by Simon Fraser and for many years, the administrative centre of the fur trade in New Caledonia. It is now a National Historic Site, a jewel in the crown of Parks Canada.

This collection of narrative, poetry and quotation from contemporary documents makes no attempt at scholarly analysis of the Fort’s history. It is rather an attempt to recreate the “feel” of life in a remote fur post in the first decades of the nineteenth century, to suggest the endurance needed for what HBC officers themselves referred to as the Siberia of the fur trade.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the staff at Fort St. James National Historic Site for allowing me a free run of their library and archival material. I spent many hours wandering the wooden buildings by Stuart Lake, and poring over ledgers and diaries, scholarly dissertations, notes on architectural restoration and period costume, details of First Nation life and customs, and album after album of photographs in the museum and the basement of the administrative building.

Though the reason for all this was a simple book that could be sold to tourists at the newly-opened gift store at the Fort, I ended up with a vast store of information about a vanished way of life, one that was central to the development of BC as a province. In addition, I found dramatic stories that were hardly ever told which later gave me a framework for my YA novel, Eyewitness.

The cover picture shows a closeup of the logs at the corner of the Tradestore at Fort St. James. The buildings were all made of logs, but they were not left round, like the familiar log cabins. The buildings were constructed by the post and sill method, so the logs were squared and dovetailed at the corners. I liked the picture because it showed the natural growth rings of the trees within the artificial shape of the logs, and for me, that parallelled the way strangers imposed their ways on an ancient land and bent it to their purposes.

ISBN: 0-9697036-0-0

Available from the author.

$4.00

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