Journal and newspaper accounts of a minor HBC fur trader, who eventually became disaffected with the Company (and vice versa).
p. 77, note on importing of books on HBC ships.
p. 109: The library [at York Factory] held many valuable old books of travel, with special reference to those on the Bay and North-West. It was kept up by subscription, ten shillings a year being contributed by each clerk, and a smaller sum by such of the men as patronized it.*[Footnote]
* I am informed that although many books have been spoilt or lost, this library still contains many rare and valuable volumes. Could not the survivors of the old subscribers ask for its removal to the custody of the Provincial Library at Winnipeg?
p. 223, welcome by chief clerk Alexander Macdonald to Fort Qu’Appelle, where Cowie was assigned: Letters from his relatives and from his patron, Mr. Edward Ellice, M.P., still kept him in touch with his native glen, and subscriptions to those fine old newspapers, the Inverness Courierand the Scottish American Journal, afforded him full intelligence of public affairs. Nor did the periodicals, to which he freely gave me the benefit, end with those newspapers, for he subscribed also to the Leonard Scott American re-publications of Blackwood’s Magazine and ‘the three Reviews.’ Besides all this good reading he had the, also familiar, red leather-bound thick volume of Oliver and Boyd’s Edinburgh Almanac sent out to him yearly, and, as he either knew personally or through friends of a number of celebrities and others mentioned in it, he searched that almanac as one devout might search the Scriptures, and with such effect that he could quote the pedigrees of all those given in it as quickly from memory as he could do that of any horse in the band of hundreds attached to the fort.
p. 231: …once I had settled down off a voyage, I fell at once into my old habit at home of reading, or working to all hours of the night.
p. 235: Charles Pratt, Catechist of the Church of England Missionary Society, was a pure Indian of Assiniboine and Cree blood: In searching the Scriptures of the Old Testament he had recognized so many traits and customs of the Israelites to be so entirely like those of the Indians of the prairie, as to have become convinced that these Indians were the Lost Tribes.