Voyageur Classics is a series of special versions of Canadian classics, with added material and new introductory notes. In this bundle we find five biographical and autobiographical titles that shed light on some of Canada’s most important figures at crucial times in the country’s development. William Kilbourn brings to life the rebel Canadian hero William Lyon Mackenzie: able political editor, first mayor of Toronto, and the gadfly of the House of Assembly. The Scalpel, the Sword...

Elizabeth Simcoe's diary, describing Canada from 1791 to 1796, is history written as it was being made. Created largely while she was seated in canoes and bateaux, the diary documents great events in a familiar way and opens our eyes to a side of Canadian history that is too little shown.During her time in Upper Canada (now Ontario), Mrs. Simcoe encountered fascinating figures, such a explorer, Alexander Mackenzie, and Mohawk Chief, Joseph Brant. She took particular interest in the...

Voyageur Classics is a series that issues special new versions of Canadian classics, with added material and special introductions. In this bundle we find two classic works of Canadian historical writing. During three extraordinary years, 1805-1808, Simon Fraser undertook the third major expedition across North America, culminating in his famous journey down the river in British Columbia that now bears his name. Fraser’s exploratory efforts helped lead to Canada’s boundary later being decl...

Long considered one of the best of the captive narratives from the 19th century, Abbie Gardner's thrilling and graphic tale of her abduction by a band of Santee Sioux in 1857 will captivate you from beginning to end. Barely 14 years old, her family was butchered before her eyes and she witnessed the deaths of two other women captives before her release by Chief Inkpaduta.Gardner suffered years of illness after her return to white culture but eventually made a successful and prosper...

This is the remarkable story of the trail that became the longest street in the world, as officially recognized by The Guinness Book of Records. Begun in 1794, Yonge Street was planned by the ambitious Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe as a military route between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. Anxious to bolster Upper Canada’s defences against the new republic to the south, which he heartily loathed, Simcoe had his Queen’s Rangers survey and develop the route from Toronto to pr...

In the four years between 1881 and 1885, Canada was forged into one nation by the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Last Spike reconstructs the incredible story of how some 2,000 miles of steel crossed the continent in just five years — exactly half the time stipulated in the contract. Pierre Berton recreates the adventures that were part of this vast undertaking: the railway on the brink of bankruptcy, with one hour between it and ruin; the extraordinary land boom of ...

David Wingfield joined the Royal Navy in 1806, at the age of fourteen. His service took him to the Great Lakes during the War of 1812. Captured, he was a POW in the United States for nine months. Following his release, Wingfield had some intriguing adventures on the Upper Great Lakes before returning to England. Once home, he used his handwritten notes, kept during his time in North America, as the basis for an account of his experiences thereThis unique account of the history of C...

Hoping for the Best, Preparing for the Worst explores the web of human relationships that developed in Upper Canada following the American Revolution, in the years leading up to the War of 1812, and during the conflict that raged for two years between the young United States and Britain, its former master. The book focuses on the families, homes, gardens, farms, roads, villages, towns, shops, and fabric of everyday life in this frontier society.Upper Canada was a land in t...

This book-collection file includes books of Mark Twain's speeches and letters, plus 3 book-length collections of essays: What is Man? Sketches New and Old, and Christian Science. It also includes the following short collections and individual essays: Editorial Wild Oats, Essays on Paul Bourget, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences, and In Defence of Harriet Shelley. According to Wikipedia: "Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 1910), better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humori...

At age 75, David Thompson began to write about his life of exploration and surveying in western North America from 1784 to 1812. At this point, how-ever, the odds of ?nishing were slim; his eyesight was failing, his body was worn out after years of strain on portages and mountain passes. For ?ve years he toiled with rewrites and revisions, never able to set the ?nal account in order. On 16 January 1851 he put his papers to right in one last attempt to ?nish his work. By 28 February 1851, n...

This file includes: Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV, The Discovery of the Great West, Half-Century of Conflict, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, Montcalm and Wolfe, The Oregon Trail, Pioneers of France in the New World, and The Conspiracy of Pontiac. According to Wikipedia: "Francis Parkman (September 16, 1823 November 8, 1893) was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monu...