About this item
In September 1823, three men met at Rainy Lake House, a Hudson's Bay Company trading post near the Boundary Waters. Dr. John McLoughlin, the proprietor of Rainy Lake House, was in charge of the borderlands west of Lake Superior, where he was tasked with opposing the petty traders who operated out of US territory. Major Stephen H. Long, an officer in the US Army Topographical Engineers, was on an expedition to explore the wooded borderlands west of Lake Superior and the northern prairies from the upper Mississippi to the forty-ninth parallel. John Tanner, a "white Indian" living among the Ojibwa nation, arrived in search of his missing daughters, who, Tanner believed, were at risk of being raped by the white traders holding them captive at a nearby fort.
About the Author
Theodore Catton was born in Seattle and has lived most of his life in Washington and Montana. He is an independent historian who specializes in writing book-length reports for the National Park Service. His first book publication, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos and National Parks in Alaska, received the George Perkins Marsh Prize in 1998. He was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2011 and went to New Zealand as a Fulbright scholar in 2012. His latest book, Rainy Lake House: Twilight of Empire on the Northern Frontier, mingles the early life stories of a white man adopted into the Ojibwa nation, a Hudson's Bay Company fur trader, and a U.S. army explorer.
