Unsettled

The Selkirk Settlers, like their predecessors at Jamestown, Virginia, Quebec City, and Plymouth, Massachusetts, are one of those numerically small but historically imposing groups associated with the European colonizing project. And, like their seventeenth-century antecedents, Selkirk’s colonists experienced high hopes, internal conflict, tragedy, and a complex relationship with the Indigenous peoples among whom they settled. Their familiar story has now been freshly told by Robert Lower in his moving, personal, and often idiosyncratic book Unsettled.

Although Lower avers that his work is “not a history in any formal or academic sense,” he draws deeply on the Selkirk Papers at Library and Archives Canada, a collection that includes some twenty thousand numbered pages occupying eighty volumes. Lower has taken this collection of documents — letters, reports, inventories, petitions — and distilled them into a lively and readable narrative of thirty-one short, punchy chapters.

Lower fixes his tale on the axis of one day — June 19, 1816 — when twenty-two people were killed during the Battle of Seven Oaks, a violent altercation between fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its rival North West Company. Yet, when that fatal encounter is finally described, it is almost anticlimactic.

The true value of this work lies in the many details of life at Red River, the story of the establishment, dispersal, revival, and demise of the colony, and the account of the intricate and fraught relationships between the settlers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the North West Company, and the Métis — and particularly within the Selkirk group itself. Lower writes that previous writers have missed “the pulsing life” in the Selkirk documents, and his work is enlivened by events such as a Christmas hurley game at Pembina, the Saulteaux leader Peguis’s visits to Fort Douglas, and Jean-Baptiste Lagimodière’s epic journey to Montreal with letters for Lord Selkirk.