The author and historian Nancy Marguerite Anderson discusses her recent book The HBC Brigades: Culture, Conflict and Perilous Journeys of the Fur Trade (Ronsdale Press, 2024), with Joseph Planta.

The HBC Brigades: Culture, Conflict and Perilous Journeys of the Fur Trade by Nancy Marguerite Anderson (Ronsdale Press, 2024). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: The HBC Brigades

Text of the introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.

One of the more interesting books of last year was The HBC Brigades: Culture, Conflict and Perilous Journeys of the Fur Trade. It’s author Nancy Marguerite Anderson joins me now to talk about the book which is a lively recounting of the thousand-mile trails encountered by the brigades of the Hudson’s Bay Company. They would travel over mountains and through river crossings to reach isolated fur-trading posts. Ms. Anderson writes of the size of these brigades, and the challenges they would encounter amongst themselves and naturally, along the way. And Nancy’s book illustrates how formative these trails are to the shaping of the British Columbia we know today; as a lot of the highways or roads we know now follow a lot of these paths. Nancy Anderson is Métis and an accepted member of Métis Nation British Columbia. She is, as we’ll hear in the interview, descended from a North West Company voyageur. Visit her website at www.nancymargueriteanderson.com for more. This book is published by Ronsdale Press. We spoke in late December 2024. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, Nancy Marguerite Anderson; Ms. Anderson, good morning.

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