BOOK REVIEW: FIVE STARS
Beaver Coats and Guns: The Adventures of Radisson and Des Groseilliers by Richard Lapointe
This book is real history of the North American wild frontier when it still remained pristine over four hundred years ago as told by Radisson who lived with the Indigenous, learned their languages and survival techniques. This gripping true story reveals an in depth look into this now long gone world. I loved the book’s presentation of American history.
EXCERPTS:
Each of us carried a pack with supplies and ammunition as well as a gun, a hatchet, and a knife. Snowshoes strapped to our feet kept us from sinking into the snow which was still knee deep. I first used them in the winter after my arrival in Canada, when I was on my way to Trois Rivières from Québec. Almost as long as a man is tall, they were made of rawhide mesh stretched across an oval frame of birch. Snowshoes and toboggans were among the many marvels of the New World that fascinated me.
Along with the other prisoners, they dragged him to an open space where fires burned. There, as I later heard, they beat him and plucked out his nails and poked him with hot sticks – his screams mingling with the agony of other victims. Before letting him expire from his wounds, the mob burned him alive at the stake.
I adapted too easily to Mohawk ways which included the killing and torturing of our enemies.” The French soldier interrupted. “Remember, dear lady, it wasn’t long ago that good Catholics gathered to witness the persecution and burning of their own neighbors, accused not of murder but merely suspected of being heretics or witches. I’m afraid we are not as far from being like the Iroquois as we like to think.”
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