Rainy Lake House

Book excerpt: "Exiles in Indian Country weaves together the biographies of three men who cast their fortunes with the Western fur trade in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. John Tanner was a 'white Indian' who was taken captive and raised by Ottawa, and lived among the Ottawa and Ojibwa for thirty years, hunting across the northern forests and plains of present-day Ontario, Manitoba, and northern Minnesota. Dr. John McLoughlin fled the law in Quebec at the age of eighteen to work for the Hudson's Bay Company in the Lake Superior region during its two decades of war with the North West Company. Major Stephen H. Long explored the northern borderlands in a time when the United States aimed to take over British-Indian trade in its new western territories. The three men met at the HBC's Rainy Lake House near the Boundary Waters in 1823 after Tanner was badly wounded while trying to take his daughters out of Indian country, to save them from being raped by the white traders. Foregrounding this incident, Theodore Catton examines the events leading up to this fateful encounter through a Rashomon-like tale about the British-American-Indian frontier. Through these three colliding vantage points, the book describes the world of the fur trade: American, British, and Indian; imperial, capital, and labor; explorer, trader, and hunter. In its competing viewpoints, Exiles in Indian Country deftly crafts one grand narrative out of three and reveals the perilous lives of the white adventurers and their Indian families who lived on the fringe--truly the hands of empire"--Provided by publisher.