Hardscrabble; or, the Fall of Chicago — John Richardson

John Richardson (1796-1852) was a British Army officer and the first Canadian-born novelist to achieve international recognition. At the age of 16 he enlisted as a gentleman volunteer with the British 41st Foot. This is when he met Tecumseh and General Isaac Brock, whose personalities marked his imagination and whom he would later immortalize in his novel The Canadian Brothers (1840) and in other writings. During the War of 1812, he was imprisoned for a year in the United States after his capture during the battle of Moraviantown. He began his fiction-writing career with novels about the British and French societies of his time. In his third and most successful novel, Wacousta (1832), he turned to the North American frontier for his setting and to its recent history for its historical framework.