The Beaver, the Buffalo, the Border: A Century of Small Town Pioneering

This book is about the first hundred years in the life of Pembina, a fur trading post, then a small town near the center of North America, first inhabited in 1797. During its first 50 years, the town served as a rendezvous point for buffalo hunt brigades, a highly organized effort to provide dried and processed buffalo meat for fur traders in the far north. At mid-century the town's attention turned to official management of traffic across the international boundary between the United States and British North America. Along the way, Pembina witnessed and played its own role in: the arrival of the Selkirk settlers in the area that would become Winnipeg, giving them shelter and sustenance during the first decade of their struggle for survival; the final 60 years of the conflict that was the North American fur trade, a battle between the Hudson's Bay Company, the North West Company, the X Y Company, the American Fur Company, and the independent hunter/traders; the beginning of the settlement that would become St. Paul, the southern terminus of the Pembina ox cart trail; the fixing of and the surveying of the 49th parallel of north latitude, the boundary between the United States and British North America; the formation of the Dominion of Canada and the Province of Manitoba, including the "Riel Rebellion" and the surrender of Hudson's Bay Company's sovereign rights granted under its Royal Charter of 1670; the development of the Territories, then States, of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Frontier characters populating this story include: Enos Stutsman, a frontier lawyer who had been born without legs; Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk, founder of the settlement that would become Winnipeg; Father Joseph Goiffon, the frozen priest of Pembina; Sir Alexander McKenzie and David Thompson, North West Company explorers of Canada; Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Pembina's suffragette; Mr. Belymire, a prisoner, his hands in shackles, who leaped from a Red River steamboat to save a three-year-old girl who had fallen overboard; "Jolly Joe" Rolette, larger-than-life fur trader and legislator; a broad assortment of bishops, rogues, fur traders, politicians, soldiers and financiers.

About the Author :
Gerald M. Sande was born in 1934 and grew up in Pembina, a small town in the extreme northeast corner of North Dakota, where his father was a U. S. Customs Inspector at the international boundary with Canada. A pleasant childhood filled with good friends and adult role models led to his love of learning in the service of others, and brought him to St. John's Prep School and St. John's University in central Minnesota. Graduate work in theology in Europe prepared him for ordination as a Catholic priest and eight years of service in the Diocese of Fargo in eastern North Dakota. In 1968 Gerry and Lorraine were married, a relationship that has only grown stronger over the past half-century. Two daughters and two grandchildren are now making professional contributions to society--testimony, perhaps, to a successful family. Also in 1968, Gerry joined the growing staff of what would become Target Corporation and spent eleven years assisting its legal staff in data collection and systems management. He then moved to a small specialty printing company, where he served as general manager and part owner until his retirement in 1999. Somewhere along the way, a birthday gift from his daughter was a copy of History of the Red River Valley, a book Gerry had heard about years earlier but had never seen. This awakened old childhood memories about the log cabins and stories about the small town of his youth, the oldest settlement, he remembered, in this part of the world. If one book was good, ten would be better and a small library would be best, the yield of many days spent searching the wonderful world of used book stores for anything that spoke of the fur trade and Pembina's role in that era. Information began to accumulate and needed a place to go, finally settling in a story called The Beaver, The Buffalo, The Border.