Peter Fidler : Canada’s Forgotten Surveyor 1769-1822

Hardcover with dust jacket, 265 pages, 6x9 in - 15x23 cm, B&W maps and plates.

Covers lightly rubbed at corners. Brodart-wrapped jacket taped to boards at flaps by previous owner. Jacket back lightly soiled, creased and rubbed at top and bottom. Jacket spine bumped at head and heel. Gutters tender in several places. Ffep., title page, and p.5 stamped by previous owner; pp.106-107 discolored from content formerly laid in.

James G. MacGregor (1905-1989) rose from engineer to general manager at Canadian Utilities Limited before becoming Chairman of the Alberta Power Commission in 1952. Although MacGregor’s professional pedigree was electrical engineering, his authorial passion lay in western Canada’s history. In this volume, MacGregor traces the life of Hudson's Bay Company surveyor Peter Fidler using Fidler’s journals. The book documents Fidler's start as a York Factory labourer in 1788, his explorations of waterways like the Columbia, North Saskatchewan, and South Saskatchewan rivers, his establishment of posts across the North-West, and his 1822 death at Dauphin House. Throughout, MacGregor comments on competition between the HBC and other trading companies as well as interactions and tensions between traders and Indigenous populations (including the Battle at Seven Oaks).