[Cadien, Baptiste]:

$6,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

CASE OF BAPTISTE CADIEN, FOR MURDER; TRIED AT THREE RIVERS, IN THE MARCH SESSION 1838. A rare account of a grisly incident in the fur trade in Northwestern Canada, in which Baptiste Cadien, a half Indian serving as an interpreter for the Hudson's Bay Company at Fort Norman, murdered half a dozen Hare Indians, and wounded several others in 1835. The crime took place in what is now Alberta province, somewhere north of modern-day Edmonton, not far from the Lesser Slave Lake. Cadien was accompanied by two other men, Creole Lagrisse, who participated in the murders once they began, and Baptiste Jourdain, upon whose testimony Cadien was convicted. Several sensationalized contemporary account of the killings asserted a romantic motivation for the killings, by which Cadien sought revenge for losing a paramour back to her husband of another tribe. Jourdain's testimony printed here suggests animosity between tribes as the motivation. The pamphlet also contains a series of letters pertaining to the later commutation of Cadien's death sentence. A remarkable printed work about the western fur trade, published in the rather obscure town of Three Rivers, outside of Montreal. Only six copies located by OCLC.

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