In addition to founding the journal “Canadian Literature,” Canadian scholar and thinker George Woodcock's corpus spanned five decades and included works of criticism, biography, political philosophy (particularly anarchism), poetry, and history. In “Gabriel Dumont” Woodcock combined his interest in political dissidence with his talent for biography to recount the Métis leader’s life and struggles against the Canadian government. Woodcock depicts Dumont as a folk hero at home in a disappearing world of unsettled plains, casting his guerrilla tactics as a foil to Louis Riel’s willingness to employ political and diplomatic means of resistance. While much of the volume details Dumont’s role in the chain of decisions and events that culminated in the 1885 North-West Resistance, Woodcock also traces his life amongst the Métis as a hunter and trader, as well as his final years following the Resistance’s end.
