At its height in the nineteenth century, the Hudson's Bay Company's trading territory covered three million square miles and spanned the continent. And no one person was more responsible for its success than its larger-than-life governor, the remarkable George Simpson. The illegitimate son of a ne'er-do-well Scottish lawyer, Simpson was a master planner who laid the foundations for the greatest business enterprise of its day, a pompous dandy who was most at home in a canoe, and a man who, while ashamed of his out-of-wedlock birth, sired at least thirteen children with eight different women.

A wide cast of characters strides through the pages of this gripping story--frontier entrepreneurs, hardy voyageurs, skilled native trappers, intrepid explorers, impoverished settlers, and lords and ladies of the realm--and George Simpson was at home with all of them. The history of the Bay is that of a country in the making, but it is also a history of the clash between different ways of life in a vast, sparsely populated land far from the crowded cities, counting-houses and imperial ambitions of the British Empire.

Resonant, reflective, a legacy of the Canadian canoeing experience Canexus: The Canoe in Canadian Culture is a first. "This book is cause for celebration," says Kanawa Canoe Museum founder Kirk Wipper, "because of the canoe, and because it is created by writers who are, themselves, enthusiastic paddlers."

From "Canoe Sport" to "Canoe Irony" and finding "Motives for Mr. Canoehead," Canexus opens doors to the primitive and explores the canoeing experience from an exciting variety of perspectives.

Travel with some of Canada's best known canoeists to the mysterious Northwest Coast of BC, across constitutional waves on Meech Lake and into a landscape of the Canadian imagination. Hear great canoe stories, bake bannock, weather storms, ponder canoeing and gender roles. For all kinds of paddlers, and lovers of adventure and wilderness, Canexus gives the canoe its rightful place of prominence in Canadian culture.

With contributions by E.Y. Arima, Philip Chester, C.E.S. Franks, Shelagh Grant, Bob Henderson, Bruce Hodgins, Gwyneth Hoyle, William C. James, C. Fred Johnston, George Luste, Roderick A. Macdonald, Kenneth G. Roberts and Kirk Wipper.

"The writers in Canexus bring different perspectives & abilities to these essays, but all of them reinforce the idea of the canoe as an ancient, echoing symbol; one that can illuminate our place in the north like no other." M.T. Kelly, Winner of the Governor General's Award for Literature

"An intelligent person's guide to the place of the canoe in the Canadian culture and psyche...exciting, like fast white water and spray in your face..." Fred Bodsworth"