Alexander Henry's Travels and Adventures in the years 1760-1776

By: Alexander Henry

Narrated by: Nick Adams

Alexander Henry is one of the giants of the 18th century fur trade in the Great Lakes region, and his journal has been reprinted many times since it was first published in 1809. With the defeat of the French in Canada in 1760, the interior of the continent was suddenly accessible to English traders. Henry set out for the west with goods for the Indian trade, into a land where the First Nations were deeply hostile to the English. These two volumes, Adventures in Michigan 1760-1764 and Lake Superior and the Canadian Northwest 1765-1776 were compiled by Henry towards the end of his life and together have become an adventure classic.

The Great Lakes region was in turmoil in the 1760's when Henry embarked upon his trading mission. The great First Nations leader Pontiac had engineered an uprising against the British Forts and Posts in the region with the intention of driving the British out. It was a time of violence and danger - and Alexander Henry was caught right in the middle of it, frequently experiencing hardship, hunger and abuse - while managing to retain his optimism and courage.

The accounts of his experiences are at times harrowing, while at the same time providing an almost unparalleled description of First Nations life in the lands surrounding the Great Lakes and in the Canadian Northwest.

Public Domain (P)2020 Author's Republic

Nick Adams Nails Yet Another Classic

I came to Alexander Henry’s Travels and Adventures after finishing two other 18th-century fur-trade classics—Wacousta (Vol. 1) and John Long’s Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter and Trader. Together, they’ve become an unexpected trilogy for me, all brought forward into the modern world by Nick Adams’s remarkable narration. In Nick’s catalog, dominated by outstanding motorcycle travel writing and his excellent Friends of the Dead series of captivating novels, these historic works sit almost like quiet lanterns—lit, tended, and offered purely out of his love of history, language, and story. And I’m grateful for it. Had he not taken the trouble to record them, I never would have found my way here.

If John Long gives us the human and cultural texture of the fur-trade frontier, Alexander Henry gives us the danger and the sweep. His journals stretch from 1760 to 1776—a period of upheaval, violence, travel, starvation, shifting alliances, and rapid change following the fall of New France. Henry walks straight into a world that is, frankly, inhospitable to anything fragile or unprepared. And he endures it with an optimism and courage that seem almost superhuman.

Of all the impressions I took from these three books, this one brought something sharply into focus:
In that time and place, there were **three things you absolutely did not want to be—**a woman, a dog, or English.
Henry makes no political speeches about it; he simply records the reality around him. And viewed from a 21st-century seat, that reality is astonishing. Women had almost no protection or agency. Dogs lived at the mercy of hunger, travel, and utility. And the English—newly arrived, deeply distrusted—moved through a world where alliances could turn on a dime and survival was never guaranteed. Henry survived all three conditions, sometimes by inches.

The passages describing First Nations life—particularly in the Great Lakes region and northward toward Lake Superior—are some of the most vivid, detailed, and matter-of-fact I’ve read. The moments of danger are genuinely harrowing, the cultural encounters fascinating, and the descriptions of hardship almost unbelievable. Yet Henry somehow retains a kind of grounded, undramatic resilience. He doesn’t posture. He doesn’t embellish. He simply tells the truth about what happened.

And that’s exactly where Nick Adams’s narration shines. The consistency of his delivery across all of these historical works is its own kind of gift: he pulls you through the landscapes, the conflicts, the hunger, the storms, and the negotiations as if he’s guiding you by the elbow.

By the time I finished this volume, I found myself grateful—not just for the history, but for the chain of events that led me to it. Following the trail of a narrator I admire led me to stories I never knew existed, and that’s one of the quiet joys of this kind of reading: you never know where a good storyteller is going to take you.