Wau-Bun: The Early Day in the Northwest

The author recounts personal and collected memories of early settler life across the upper Midwest, tracing river and lake travel, frontier outposts, and seasonal encampments. She records interactions with Indigenous communities, fur traders, and missionaries, describing customs, ceremonies, language fragments, and gift exchanges. Travel episodes include difficult canoe passages, winter encampments, and mining and trading settlements. Several chapters narrate wartime sufferings, captivity, and a violent attack on a frontier fort, while others focus on everyday household management, social gatherings, and local characters. Interspersed are retold Indigenous tales and reflections on cultural change during the region's opening to settlement.