Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson (Untold Lives Series)

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He weaves a compelling, sometimes lurid, but always enlightening narrative of the legendary adventurer, scoundrel, Pierre-Esprit Radisson. The book reads like an adventure story of one resourceful fur trader dealing with the various indigenous peoples of North America and the European courts. This book is a must read for every Canadian; it provides insight into the formation of European society in Canada which was, essentially, established on the back of the fur trade. His academic paper “The Myth of the 'Gagged Clam': William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Press Relations,” published in Global Media Journal in 2010, is considered the authoritative analysis of the media strategies of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister.

In today’s world, where one can travel great distances with not much effort, it’s only when one reads about travel during the 17th century, for example, that one realizes how fortunate we truly are. Bush runners are bipedal, using a muscular pair of hind legs for locomotion and a smaller pair of forearms for food acquisition. Among the Iroquois, where social mobility was based on a kind of merit, he became, for a time, a young aristocrat. a Life with the Mohawks (1639-1654) -- Back to the Iroquois (1654-1658) -- Pierre and Médard go west (1658-1660) -- Radisson in London and Moosonee (1600-1675) -- Radisson in the Caribbean (1675-1677) -- True and absolute lords and proprietors (1681-1685) -- Decayed gentleman (1688-1710). I started Mark Bourrie’s book at the end of February just before it won the RBC Taylor Prize for the best book of Canadian non-fiction published in 2019.Radisson made his way to Manhattan and talked his way onto a ship bound for Holland, where he scrounged passage back to New France. This in turn led to countless skirmishes, if not outright wars, between the French and the British, as each tried to establish a more or less permanent presence in Hudson’s Bay. Pierre-Esprit Radisson, namesake of a worldwide hotel chain and indomitable founder of the Hudson Bay Company, was one of North America’s dominant figures in the fir-trapping frenzy of the 17th century.

G. Wells Kurt Vonnegut Lee Child Loren Eiseley Louise Erdrich Louise Penny Lovecraft and Howard Malcolm X Margaret Atwood Marianne Moore and Her World Mo Willems Neil Gaiman Norman Mailer Octavia Butler Pat LaMarche and the Charles Bruce Foundation P. A remarkable biography of an even more remarkable 17th-century individual … Beautifully written and endlessly thought-provoking. Pierre-Esprit arrives in Trois-Rivières, Quebec, in 1651, as a fifteen-year-old, only to be kidnapped and adopted by a powerful Mohawk family in upstate New York. Radisson’s human experience on the frontlines and in the forests breathes life into this period, but it also intersects with the confrontations and cultures of the era like few others. WINNER OF THE 2020 RBC TAYLOR PRIZE * "Readers might well wonder if Jonathan Swift at his edgiest has been at work.In many ways, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is a better and a worse man than you would expect from the few facts that I encountered in grade school. He holds a master’s in Journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in History from the University of Ottawa. Radisson appears to be a phenomenon himself, handsome and personable with a great facility for languages. His traveling companion and brother-in-law, Médard Chouart des Groseillers is never far behind, seeming to reap the benefits of tagging along such a crafty friend.

Born in France, Radisson came to New France with his family and managed to be kidnapped as a youngster, and then adopted by a Huron family. His most lasting venture as an Artic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America’s oldest corporation. Improbably, the blacksmith’s boy rose to become Lord Cromwell, the sumptuously-rich bureaucrat who ran the country under King Henry VIII. In his new book Bush Runner, Ottawa author Mark Bourrie portrays the European arrival much differently through an unvarnished account of the life of Pierre Radisson.

Europeans brought guns to North America to use and to trade, expanding their settlements while scheming to turn one Indigenous nation against another. I wish I could say the same for Hilary Mantel’s novel, since I loved the two earlier books in the Cromwell trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. In 2011, Bourrie was invited to contribute to a collection of papers written by Canada’s top military historians. The writing is lively, the descriptions of 17th century Indigenous life are cinematic and, despite Radisson’s many personal flaws, it is easy to admire his chutzpah. It is quite remarkable that someone of such humble origins could have had several audiences with the King of England, much taken with tales of derring-do in the backwoods of North America.