Peter Fidler: Canada’s Forgotten Surveyor 1769-1822.

Fidler was a rather obscure surveyor and mapmaker of English birth, who served the Hudson’s Bay Company for over thirty years, just beyond the 1820 amalgamation of the HBC with the North West Company. His interest here is that he was instrumental in buying books for the HBC to send from London to their various posts in Canada. This volume is confined to Fidler’s full journals of his travels for his surveying career. They make little of Fidler’s book life, but it does not that he build a personal collection of 500 volumes which he left to the Red River Colony. He had fourteen children by an illiterate Metis woman whom he finally married. He is someone you’d like to meet. Though he suffered through some very hard times he seems to have met them with a stoic resolve, and he died a rather rich man after years of £100 pay per year.