Novel
Wacousta
John Richardson · 1832
Synopsis
September 1763. Pontiac and the nations gathered around him besiege Fort Detroit. A white giant dressed as an Indian warrior, known as Wacousta, advises the attackers: he is a European gentleman who pursues vengeance for a fiancée whom his friend de Haldimar, now colonel and master of the fort, once took from him in Scotland. A young Indian woman, Oucanasta, in love with the colonel's eldest son, who had saved her from drowning, leads him to the council where the ruse is being prepared: a game of lacrosse played beneath the walls of the fort.
Context
The accounts of the siege of 1763 and of the surprise of Michilimackinac come from the author's childhood on the frontier; he turns them into a novel in England. The character owes some of his traits to John Norton, son of a Cherokee father and a Scottish mother, raised in Scotland and become a Mohawk chief, whom the author had met as a child. The book appeared in three volumes in London and Edinburgh in 1832; the American editions that followed, from 1833, pillaged and abridged it, to the point that a university thesis by Douglas Cronk, in 1977, spoke of the editorial destruction of Canadian literature. The full text was not restored until 1987.
Who it is for
A Gothic novel published in three volumes; the standard editions long followed the abridged text of the American editions: one must look for the complete text, restored in 1987.
Prizes and reception
Its author was the first Canadian-born novelist to find an international audience; the book gave its title to the “Wacousta syndrome” of the essayist Gaile McGregor (1985).
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