The Trade

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

“We know only two powers—God and the Company.” So wrote John
Rowand, the favorite fur trader of George Simpson, the tyrannical
governor for many years of the Hudson’s Bay Company. These two men,
and another trader of whom it was said that he “never tried to do evil
one day in his life, but no matter where he went, evil found him,” are
the three principal protagonists in this fictionalized account of the
last five decades of the fur trade in the Canadian West.

It is a gripping saga, bloody and brutal and beautifully written. One
character refers to “the bosses and bullies” who “were doing
everything to smash us on the Company anvil.” If there is a villain in
this tale, it is indeed the Company, whose edicts were law and whose men
were driven mercilessly under conditions all but unimaginable to us. It
is but one of the rewards of this fine book, a nominee for the Giller
Prize, that this era and the larger-than-life personalities who often
cruelly dominated it are brought to vivid life in its pages.

“I guess in this book of yours,” says an aged Company employee
whose journals were among the many documents and accounts Stenson used,
“we’re talking about how a place goes from wild to tame.” Indeed,
the final years of the trade bring the first nontraders; one section of
the book is made up entirely of (fictional) letters from the frontier
artist Paul Kane, and another is devoted to an ineffectual missionary.
But old ways died hard. When a Company officer suggests that “men
seldom do perform well under the lash,” John Rowand dismisses this
view as “preposterous nonsense.” “I tried to write between the
lines of known fur trade history,” says its author, an Alberta
novelist. There are no jolly, singing voyageurs in this important epic
story of our west; it is, says Stenson, “a novel that argues with some
of history’s assessments.”