If you are a descendant of any of these men, it's well worth the read.  Check out your local library, and if they don't have it -- or if after reading it your decide you just have to have a copy of your own -- it can be ordered through the link to Amazon.com.  (And yes, if you order thorough the link on the right, Lisa does receive a small percentage of each sale.)

by Denys Nelson
issued by the Art, Historical and Scientific Association of Vancouver BC, 1927.

This is a small pamphlet rather than a book and will be tough to find as it is out of print.  The Vancouver Public Library in Vancouver, British Columbia has a single copy up on the seventh floor in Special Collections.  Like Morag MacLachlan's book, it gives some good information about the fort and its people.

Check out the Special Collections at the Vancouver Public Library, visit the library's website at http://www.vpl.vancouver.bc.ca, or order it from Amazon.com

It's a history of the Hudson's Bay Company, from its founding three centuries ago to the present day.  It gives a good feel for the type of men attracted to the Hudson's Bay company.

Emblazoned on the front and back cover are the words "Now a CTV, History TV, PBS documentary series."

The URL on the back of the book comes back "404 site not found", but after a bit of diligent searching, I finally found it at  http://www.pbs.org/empireofthebay/.

From the back of the book:

John Jackson's Children of the Fur Trade is a distinctive look at a forgotten people.  At a time when all Americas are concerned about issues of cultural complexity and diversity, Jackson's book reminds us that those questions have been part of our history for a very long time.  Children of the Fur Trade takes readers into a lost world, a place where Native American and European lives crossed to form a new people and a new culture.  Jackson helps us recover a vital part of Northwest history, and American history for that matter.  Using many kinds of sources, Jackson gives readers a vivid and memorable portrait of Métis life at the western edge of North America.  Graced with many maps and illustrations, this is a book sure to interest and inform both the scholar and the general reader.

---James P. Ronda
H.G. Barnard Professor of
Western American History
The University of Tulsa

The Voyageur
by Grace Lee Nute Illustrations by Carl W. Bertsch
ISBN: 0-87351-213-8

Originally published in 1931, The Voyageur is the authorative account of this unique and colorful class of men whose exploits, speech, terminology, songs, customs, and dress comprise an enduring and romantic legacy.

"This is the definitive work . . . on the French-Canadians who manned the great canoes of the fur trade from Montreal to the Pacific and the far northwest."
--The Beaver

" . . . a fascinating and important contribution to the . . . field of frontier history."
--Ethnohistory

Grace Lee Nute, formerly a member of the Minnesota Historical Society's staff and of the history faculty of Hamline University in St. Paul, is perhaps best known for her many publications on various aspects of the fur trade, exploration, and the northern Minnesota land of voyageurs.  Among them are the companion volumes The Voyaguer's Highway and Rainy River Country, also published by the MHS Press.

Cover: Frances A. Hopkins, "Canoe Shooting the Rapids," detail (oil, c. 1879--collections of the Picture Division, Public Archives Canada, Ottawa, C-2774)

This book gives you a good feel for why men became Voyageurs, through their deeds as recorded in person anecdotes and through the writings of those who traveled with them.

Reference to Basil Brousseau: Simon Pierre's (son of Peter Pierre) oldest sister married HBC employee Basil Brousseau who settled as a farmer at Langley Prairie. Later 2 of their daughters married whites, Victor Twist and George Moody. Simon's father spent part of his boyhood on is brother-in-law's farm. - included a reference to Simon or Pierre's (which?) youngest daughter having the second site (is this Sarah or?)