The Ward of 1812: Major John Richardson—Child Soldier, War Historian, and the Father of Canadian Literature

Abstract

Now that the dust is settling after the anniversary of one of the key game-changers in Canada's history, the legendary War of 1812, it has become even clearer that this conflict has been best chronicled perhaps by an actual Canadian combatant in a historical text published in 1842, which is certainly one of the first such publications, and first memorialized in fiction in Canada's first national epic completed two years earlier at the beginning of our literary tradition—both written by the same person, Major John Richardson. Dubbed the “father of Canadian literature,” Richardson, a favourite of both General Brock and Tecumseh, is both a remarkable early war historian and one of the ancestral voices of the Canadian imagination.