Battling the Bay: The Turn of the Century Adventures of Fur Trader Ed Nagle

John Kendle is a history professor at St. John’s College, University
of Manitoba.

Ed Nagle (1853–1929) was an adventurer, explorer, pioneer, trapper,
and trader on Canada’s northwestern frontier from the early 1870s to
the 1920s. He worked as a millwright in Winnipeg, homesteaded in the
Dauphin area, learned to work a trapline in the same region, and finally
for more than 20 years was instrumental in establishing a free-trading
network in the Great Slave Lake region in opposition to the Hudson’s
Bay Company. Zinovich has drawn heavily on Nagle’s letters and
journals to trace in considerable detail a life that was demanding,
exhilarating, and ofttimes lonely. Nagle made a significant contribution
to the opening of the Great Slave Lake region to systematic trapping and
trading, and the company he founded with Jim Hislop endures today as the
Inuit-controlled Northern Transportation Company.

This book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the
Canadian West, for it provides a texture often missing from academic
studies. It is, nonetheless, firmly grounded in wide reading and
extensive use of manuscript sources, particularly those of the
Hudson’s Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg and the Nagle family papers
in Calgary’s Glenbow Archives. Endnotes have been kept to a minimum
but a fully annotated version can be consulted at the Alberta Historical
Resources Foundation Library in Calgary.