Inhabited by a diverse population of First Nations peoples, Métis, Scots, Upper and Lower Canadians, and Americans, and dominated by the commercial and governmental activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Red River – now Winnipeg – was a challenging settlement to oversee. This illuminating account presents the story of the unique legal and governmental system that attempted to do so and the mixed success it encountered, culminating in the 1869–70 Red River Rebellion and confederation with Canada in 1870. In Law, Life, and Government at Red River, Dale Gibson provides rich, revealing glimpses into the community, and its complex relations with the Hudson’s Bay: the colony’s owner, and primary employer. Volume 2 provides a complete annotated, and never-before-published transcription of testimony from Red River’s courts, presenting hundreds of vignettes of frontier life, the cases that were brought before the courts, and the ways in which the courts resolved conflicts. A vivid look into early settler life, Law, Life, and Government at Red River offers insights into the political, commercial, and legal circumstances that unfolded during western expansion.

Dale Gibson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of law at the University of Manitoba.

Dale Gibson's profile page

Jim Phillips is Professor of Law, History and Criminology at the University of Toronto, and editor-in-chief of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History. He has co-edited four volumes of the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History’s Essays in the History of Canadian Law and, with Philip Girard, a volume on the history of Canada’s oldest surviving superior common law court, The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia 1754-2004: From Imperial Bastion to Provincial Oracle (Osgoode Society, 2004). He has published over fifty articles and book chapters on British imperial history and 18th-century India, on property and charities law, US legal history, and, principally, Canadian legal history. He is also the author, with Rosemary Gartner, of Murdering Holiness: The Trials of Franz Creffield and George Mitchell (University of British Columbia Press, 2003).

Jim Phillips' profile page

“Overall, through his fine research and writing on how the people of Red River understood and made use of frontier law, government and the courts, Dale Gibson makes an essential, and what will no doubt be an enduring, contribution to the broader fields of

"The legal perspective offers a fresh approach to a subject that historians have covered extensively." Recommended –Choice

"In [Gibson’s work] there appear to be no prejudices or presumptions, the absence of which is a sign of both scholarship and academic discipline. Gibson's lengthy tome is sound social observance. The first volume is a retelling of Red River's history especially as it relates to law and government, including key cases. The second volume is something that has never been done: the publication of the complete official court records of the General Quarterly Court of Assiniboia from 1844 to 1872, with commentary. This volume is a catalogue of human experiences in frontier life, from the tragic to the comical." Winnipeg Free Press