For really, the early 19th century conflicts between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company were in my opinion historically not ever simply a case of one company acting correctly and with honour and the other company behaving with nastiness and dishonour (since both really only seemed to care about the fur trade, about exploiting for financial gain and that both companies callously used both the Métis and the Red River settlers as pawns and played them against each other, not caring about the consequences, the hardships, the animosities caused and created). So yes, right at first I was certainly rather wishing that Carol Matas had made her Footsteps in the Snow: The Red River Diary of Isobel Scott a bit more balanced with assigning blame, that her imagined journal text (telling of the Scott family migrating in the early 19th century from Scotland to what is now the Canadian province of Manitoba) were a bit less one-sided regarding the plight of the Red River colonists, and I was indeed a trifle frustrated with chief protagonist and fictional diarist Isobel Scott generally showing only the North West Company and the Métis as being villains and agitators bent on destroying the family’s settlement dreams (even though the mother’s death due to blood poisoning before the Scotts even set sail from Scotland to what is now Canada had already kind tarnished said dream right from the beginning).

Footsteps in the Snow by Carol Matas