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    Fort Desolation: Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land
    Fort Desolation: Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land
    Fort Desolation: Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land
    Ebook76 pages1 hour

    Fort Desolation: Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land

    By Robert Michael Ballantyne

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    About this ebook

    First published in 1873, "Fort Desolation: Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land" is a fantastic example of classic Western fiction written for children. Complete with fast-paced action, selfless heroism, and historical insights, this book will appeal to children with an interest in the American Old West. Robert Michael Ballantyne (1825 - 1894) was a Scottish author of children's fiction. He was a prolific writer and produced over 100 books in his lifetime. As well as being an author, Ballantyne was also an accomplished artist, having exhibited his work at the Royal Scottish Academy. Other notable works by this author include: "The Coral Island" (1858), "The Gorilla Hunters" (1861), and "The Eagle Cliff" (1889). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction and biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherClassic Western Fiction Library
    Release dateJul 19, 2017
    ISBN9781473346000
    Fort Desolation: Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land
    Author

    Robert Michael Ballantyne

    Robert Michael Ballantyne was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction, who wrote more than a hundred books. He was also an accomplished artist: he exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy.

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      Book preview

      Fort Desolation - Robert Michael Ballantyne

      Fort Desolation

      Red Indians and Fur Traders

      of Rupert’s Land

      R.M. Ballantyne

      Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from

      the British Library

      Contents

      R. M. Ballantyne

      The History of Western Fiction

      Chapter One.

      Chapter Two.

      Chapter Three.

      Chapter Four.

      Chapter Five.

      Chapter Six.

      Chapter Seven.

      Chapter Eight.

      Chapter Nine.

      Chapter Ten.

      R. M. Ballantyne

      R.M. Ballantyne (born Robert Michael Ballantyne) was a Scottish author of popular children’s fiction and wrote more than 100 books. He was also a popular artist with his water-colours exhibited at the Royal Scottish academy.

      Ballantyne was born on 24 April 1825 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was the ninth of ten children. His father, Alexander Thomson Ballantyne, was a newspaper editor and printer for family firm, Ballantyne and Co. His uncle, James Ballantyne, was also very literary and worked as the printer for Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish playwright, novelist and poet. In 1825 a banking crisis led to the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business with debts of approximately £130,000, leading to the decline of the family fortune.

      At age sixteen, Ballantyne left the family home and migrated to Canada where he spent five years working for Hudson’s Bay Company. He traded with the Native Americans for furs and frequently sleighed or canoed to the territories that are now known as Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. These journeys influenced his later novel Snowflakes and Sunbeams (1856). During this time he missed home and frequently wrote to his mother. He later stated that this letter writing helped developed his literary skills.

      In 1847, Ballantyne returned home to discover that his father had died. He published his first book, Hudson’s Bay: or, Life in the Wilds of North America, in 1848. During this time he was employed by the publishing company, Messrs Constable, but gave this up in 1856 to focus on his own literary career. During his lifetime he wrote over a hundred books in regular and rapid succession. His titles include: The Young Fur Traders (1856), The Dog Crusoe (1860), Fighting the Whales (1866), The Pirate City (1874) and The Settler and the Savage (1877). His writing drew on his personal knowledge of all the scenes he described and his heroes were moral and resilient. His most popular novel was The Coral Island (1857). However, in this novel he made one small mistake when he incorrectly described the thickness of coconut shells. This small mistake led Ballantyne to gain first-hand knowledge of all the subject matters he wrote about from then onwards. He spent time living with lighthouse keepers at Bell Rock whilst writing The Lighthouse (1865) and spent time in Cornwall with tin miners when he was writing Deep Down (1868).

      During this period of his life, Ballantyne met Jane Grant, whom he married in 1866. Together they had three sons and three daughters. Ballantyne spent much of his later years living in Harrow, England. He later moved to Italy for the sake of his health. He was possibly suffaering from undiagnosed Mélière’s disease, which affects the inner ear which and can result in feelings of vertigo, tinnitus, hearing loss and a fullness in the ear. He died in Rome on 8 February 1894.

      Ballantyne is a remembered and cherished author. A Greater London Council plaque commemorates him at Duneaves on Mount Park Road in Harrow, England. Ballantyne was also a favourite of the author Robert Louis Stevenson, who was so impressed by The Coral Island that he based portions of his own adventure novel, Treasure Island (1881), on Ballantyne’s themes. Stevenson honoured Ballantyne in the introduction to Treasure Island with the poem To the Hesitating Purchaser.

      The History of Western Fiction

      Western fiction is a genre which focuses on life in the American Old West. It was popularised through novels, films, magazines, radio, and television and included many staple characters, such as the cowboy, the gunslinger, the outlaw, the lawman and the damsel in distress. The genre’s popularity peaked in the early twentieth century due to dime novels and Hollywood adaptations of Western tales, such as The Virginian, The Great Moon Rider and The Great K.A. Train Robbery. Western novels remained popular through the 1960s, however readership began to dwindle during the 1970s.

      The term the American Old West (the Wild West) usually refers to the land west of the Mississippi River and the Frontier between the settled and civilised and the open, lawless lands that resulted as the United States expanded to the Pacific Ocean. This area was largely unknown and little populated until the period between the 1860s and the 1890s when, after the American Civil War, settlement and the frontier moved west.

      The Western novel was a relatively new genre which developed from the adventure and exploration novels that had appeared before it. Two predecessors of popular Western fiction writers were Meriweather Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clarke (1770-1838). Both men were explorers and were the first to make travel and the frontier a central theme of their work. Perhaps the most popular predecessor of Western fiction was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). His west was idealised and romantic and his popular Leatherstockings series depicted the fight between the citizens of the frontier and the harsh wilderness that surrounded them. His titles included: The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). His tales were often set on the American frontier, then in the Appalachian Mountains and in

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