An intriguing forensic review of the unrevenged murder of John McLaughlin Jr. of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Aficionados of Canadian history will again meet up with the Little Emperor, George Simpson, and be able to view with distaste his machinations to keep the killer from justice. ( )

I grew up in western Canada and so my imagination was full of stories of the voyageurs, the Métis and the freedom of a canoe and the wilderness. Fort Edmonton was a favorite weekend outing, and I vastly preferred the actual fort to the turn of the century town set up nearby. Now that I'm an adult, I'm pretty sure that the romance of guiding a canoe down the North Saskatchewan river was in reality a smelly, dangerous and mosquito-ridden endeavor, so The Bastard of Fort Stikine was the perfect book to remind my inner child that those times were not so great.

The Bastard of Fort Stikine concerns the murder of John McLoughlin, Jr., the manager of a Hudson's Bay Company fort near the Pacific coast on land then owned by Russia (now Wrangell, Alaska), in 1842. Kumar, a forensic anthropologist, looks at the history of "the honorable Company," under the control of the despotic George Simpson, as well as the background of McLoughlin, the son of a doctor and HBC bigwig and a First Nations mother. Simpson disliked McLoughlin, and essentially blamed the victim for his own murder. Despite his father's increasingly desperate efforts, this became the narrative. Komar reveals the actual events through examining the eyewitness statements, some of which were clearly fictitious, or self-serving, but many not only agreed, but remained constant over the years. ( )

John McLoughlin, Jr., is the titular bastard, and his murder gives us a window into one of the most lawless of the trading posts run by the Hudson's Bay Company in the 1800s. This particular trading post was near the site of modern-day Wrangell, Alaska, and at the time of the incident the land was being leased from Russia, so you can imagine the tangled jurisdictions for investigating John McLoughlin Jr's death. In the end the governor of the HBC, the "museum-quality bastard" Sir George Simpson, conducted a perfunctory investigation, leading McLoughlin's father to wage a war of letters in an attempt to reopen the inquiry. Debra Komer's book goes over the facts of the case, provides a history of the HBC as relevant to the situation, and uses modern crime-solving techniques to attempt to figure out what actually happened.

By necessity, there's a lot more about the HBC in here than there is about the murder: crime scene records were not what they are now, and given the cursory nature of the investigation, there was no motivation to be especially diligent in keeping records. Not much to work with when reconstructing the crime, but one can certainly try reconciling the eyewitness testimony and comparing it with what we know about anatomy, ballistics and the layout of the fort. This was the most interesting part of the book and also the briefest. However, I did find the diagram of the fort slightly confusing; each of the four bastions (one at each corner) were labelled with compass directions -- NE, NW, SE, SW -- but there seemed to be something wrong with the labels because I couldn't reconcile the labelled bastions with normal compass directions. East was on the west, or south was on the north. Fortunately, the location of other rooms or areas in the fort were more relevant to the incident, so I could just disregard the directions (knowing that there was a bastion at each corner was sufficient).

Other than the potential labelling issue, this was a very good look at a lesser-known item in the history of the HBC. ( )