Mackey introduces the entrepreneurs who forged this important link between Montreal and the nation's interior and chronicles the course of their industry, correcting previous misinterpretations. He sheds light not only on steamboats but also on the social, commercial, and geographical development that they made possible. He shows that the history of this country, a land with vast expanses and a harsh climate, cannot be fully appreciated without looking at the different modes of transportation that made it possible.

Presents a narrative account of the first twenty-five years of steam navigation along the St Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. This title focuses on the development of steamer traffic from 1816 - when the foundations were laid for the first stage-and-steamboat line between Montreal and Upper Canada - to the early 1840s.

A sixteen-year-old slave boy who finds freedom in a most unusual way, a teenage prostitute who does not, a business manager of the 1790s, a four-year-old boy placed as a servant, a respected activist of the 1830s, a fugitive Kentucky slave who makes a name for himself as a jockey and horse trainer - these are some of the people we meet in these thirty stories about black life in and around Montreal between the last days of slavery and the early years of Confederation. The black experience in Montreal during these eighty-odd years, a time in which the city grew from a colonial backwater into...

A study of the black experience in Montreal.

In the stories of thirty people who lived there and then, author Mackey explores the various fates of people of African descent in Montreal between the 1780s and 1880s. Some were born slaves in a slave culture and stayed there; others were born in freedom, found it, or lost it after struggling with local conventions as well as the law. Mackey makes