Private Letters from the Founding Decades of Manitoba and Canada
by Gerald Friesen
This is a remarkable collection of primary source testimony about the history of the Red River settlement, Manitoba, the prairie provinces, and Canada.
John Norquay, Bungee/English-speaking premier of Manitoba 1878–1887, was a central figure in the era when Canadian and immigrant arrivals took over the lands of prairie Canada. When he died suddenly in 1889, he left in his office copies of hundreds of letters written by him and thousands of letters to him that were bundled into a trunk and given to his family. The trunk and its contents arrived in the Archives of Manitoba a century later. These documents contain a multitude of stories about Manitoba and Canada in the 1870s and 1880s.
The collection of letters has been made accessible thanks to a catalogue prepared by historian Lee Gibson and Archives of Manitoba staff. This list of documents records word-searchable information on author, date, place, document type, recipient, and subject. Gerald Friesen transcribed large portions of the letters and has added some notes here that he gathered while preparing his biography of Norquay.
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