| 6ixStringJack: Though I'm not writing a a book, there is a fair deal of writing involved in just a portion of what I'm doing. More like mini-articles, than anything else. Mostly information written by others, but sometimes needing edits because what they have is far too verbose for the setting. I do go out of my way to clean as much of that up as I can as I find it, and I find it while adding and testing other aspects and tying it all in together and doing more testing. Eventually I end up weeding everything bad out or finding how and why I missed something in the process. |
6ixStringJack:  Glad to help if you got anything useful out of it. I had a good feeling that you weren't interested in writing non-fiction historical accounts yourself. |
| Brenda: No, I'm not really down with the idea of writing a historical book. Not at this point anyways. I do in a way want to dig into my question a little more and see what I can come up with. And of course I could pass on my notes and ideas to someone who is a historian. Pretty good ideas you got there SIX. |
| Brenda: That's why I started this first book I am working on in ink. Pen and paper for everything I've done, then type written and now the computer. And that as you said let's you work out minor details or add more details to what you are working on. |
| 6ixStringJack: If you're not down with writing non-fiction, I don't think you necessarily have to be the one writing the historical book. Maybe through your research you can come up with a new story to tell that you haven't thought up yet, and you'll have a lot of notes and ideas that you didn't have before about events you didn't know took place. |
| 6ixStringJack: It's a good exercise. Just writing things down and bouncing ideas out there even when you don't really expect somebody to reply necessarily. I find that quite a lot of times when I do it I end up coming at a problem with a different perspective, which usually results in making something impossible possible or making a monumental task at least a bit less monumental if I'm lucky. |
| Brenda: No worries and you have a point. Sometimes it just takes a person to ask a question to get answers or come up with a new idea. A book about this subject would have to historical. Oh, I did go to that website which lists universities in the US. But the home page wasn't helpful, so I googled Montana to find the university there. I accessed their library and while everything is available on PDF for reading there is nothing helpful there. The books are on his life in Canada and his hanging by Sir John A's government on a charge of treason. |
| 6ixStringJack: Though I can't/won't go into any real details with my own project(s) right now, that's what I'm doing in a way even though it has nothing to do with literature. Something doesn't exist that I feel should exist. Ain't nobody else going to make it for me, so I'm going to make it myself. All that data and all that text that Google scrapes when we ask it a question came from somewhere. Somebody asking questions just like you're doing right now. |
6ixStringJack: Sounds to me like maybe you should be writing another book.  |
| Brenda: I have when I was in high school or going to college where I did read a book on Riel. I mean heck, my teacher at time had to leaned me a book about my own people! Because there was nothing in the college library in the books he talked about. Also misspelt "Nez Perce" there should be no "a" there. |
| Brenda: My curiosity leads me on these tracks and also maybe no one has ever asked the question of why. Why didn't a figure like Riel who was Metis rise in the US? |
| Brenda: Course as for the US, it was war leaders that arose. Men like Geronimo and Sitting Bull, though I would include Chief Joseph of the Nez Pearce from Washington state as well in that group. This people hardly fired a shot. He just led the US army on a grand chase through the mountains of Washington state. They got as far as the border but something stopped them from crossing. I think he and his people were too tired and hungry as well as sick. So he had no choice but turn his people over to the army. Though there was also the rise of the Ghost Dance on the plains too in the US. |
| Brenda: I don't know about anything like that in my area for historical books and materials. I know from my library you can download digital books as long as you have a library card. But I think I would have to look outside BC for more information, like in Manitoba. |
| 6ixStringJack: I'm pretty sure that you can do something through archive.org too, and you can "rent" digital books from there with an account. Not sure if you need to sign up with any credit cards at any point to use it. I have an account there for other reasons and I've never tried renting a book through them before. |
| 6ixStringJack: This could open up the amount of books available to you by quite a bit if you've got access to a system like that. |
| 6ixStringJack: Man... I hope you can figure some of that out. I have a hard time finding out information from the 1980's and 1990's. I think you might have to be doing research offline to know more about this. Nothing at your library? Does Canada have any system in place where you can temporarily download "rental" books like they do here in America? I don't know exactly how it works, but they have a collective digital book exchange program thing out there where you can "rent" an online licensed copy. I would think you could be able to get something like that done without a credit card. |
| Brenda: I mean in the US, you had railroads being built going across First Nations' lands, farms too. You had trappers and fur traders as well. Forts were being built, the Pony Express was pushing in as well. Course the gold rush, but too my knowledge there are no gold mines in Manitoba. Here the gold was in BC and the Yukon.
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| Brenda: The most unifying or common thread I find with the Metis or just half breeds from the Prairies , seems to be the Cree. The gentleman, I meet at the Seniors' Centre and the lady who could have been my cousin, Cree. But that's not enough to my mind why Riel became such a galvanizing figure. I don't think even the railroad was the complete cause because the railroad was going through other parts of Canada. Tribal lands and farm lands.
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| Brenda: I'm sure we will too but it is going to be rough for a while and 150 year old relationship is nothing to toss out. Oh, I know about the saber rattling, it is just a wee bit unsettling. |
| Brenda: No that bit of Canadian history wouldn't make it down there even though Riel spent a year or more in Montana, I think. That is if I am remembering my history right. Then he was brought home to Canada by some of his people, looking for someone to deal with the Canadian government at the time. It has helped me to get a clearer picture but not enough to draw any real conclusions. I would really have to delve more I think into American history to figure out where the divergence was. As I said that has always left me puzzled. |