Books 15 and 16 of 2014 Volumes 3 & 4 of the Canadian Civil War Series

OK I actually finished these a while ago (like a month and 2 weeks) but so be it.

I read the first two book in this series last Spring (and posted about them here).   Since then I have been checking periodically if the next one is ready--and both showed up as free e-books fairly close to each other.

In Volume 3 our narrator/protagonist decides that to continue his work he needs to "go west young man" and explore why the French never crossed the Rockies.  His fiance is going to do a government make friends tour of the South and so he heads out to the Dakota territory in the depths of winter.

In this world Wresch has created the Great Plains are still sparsely populated.  And the Sioux Nation still controls much of the Dakota province.  So we have descriptions of long stretches of flat empty space marked by bitter cold and deep snow.  I would hazard a guess and say that the winter weather described would fit very well in the Northwest Territories.

HOwever the plot point here is that while in De Smet Dr. Murphy gets involved in an invasion (for lack of a better word by (rather incompetent) malcontents who appear to be somehow linked, even if only through the American funder we met in Volume 2, to the Louisiana folk threatening to secede.  THis time there are gunfights and multiple deaths.  And in the end the former president comes West and formalizes a Peace Treaty with the Sioux--which includes some mutual sharing of mistakes made centuries previously that still cause friction between the peoples.

Then we move to Volume 4.  Things are heating up.

First there is a mutiny at a military base in Arkansas.  But we don't really hear much about that.  Then there is a killing at a lacrosse game between a Northern team and a Southern team.  Then there are attacks on the main characters.  So our narrator and his fiance decide to get outta town.  To a major port on the Mississippi.

While they are there there is a major flood.  And dealing with the flood is really the major part of this book.  There is relatively little about the growing tensions (though there is an appearance by the Louisiana separatist group) and more about how to keep the country functioning when the Mississippi cuts it in half.

From the teaser at the end it looks like Volume 5 (which is going to be the last) will take us back to that mutinous base in Arkansas.  And maybe finally to the Civil War of the title???  I mean the first sentence of Volume 1 was about the Canadian Civil Wat.  A couple years and 4 books later we still have only some hints of tensions and stressors in the country....

What I miss now is that we have less and less of the history.  I mean the narrator is a historian weaving the story of current events in with his work on Canadian history (I do note that he started the project to embarrass the leading family of the French/Canadians but we do not hear much about that anymore--he has become a fan of the family).  Mind you he is still a bit of a bigot when it comes to his opinions about French efficiency and industry.  But the story is intriguing still.  And I do look forward to Volume 5.