2 Quotes & Sayings By George Turnbull
George Turnbull was born in 1843 in County Antrim, Ireland. His parents were an Anglican clergyman and his mother's family were Covenanters, followers of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. He emigrated to Canada in 1861 at the age of seventeen and found work as a clerk with the Hudson's Bay Company. He was eminently qualified for this position since he had taken the preliminary examinations for the ministry while still in his teens
This gave him what he needed to get his first job as minister of the Presbyterian Church at Wawa, Ontario. After eight years, however, he lost this position when he married a Catholic woman against the wishes of her parents. After separating from his wife, Turnbull returned to writing articles about Canada's fur trade for journals around North America.
He also began publishing articles about his experiences in the fur trade in books such as Wanderings in Canada (1892), The Fur Trade of Canada (1893) and The Indian Question (1905). After publishing two books that did not sell well, Mr. Turnbull returned to writing articles about Canada's fur trade again in 1911, when he published Fur Hunters on Red River: The Diary of Jim Bridger Before Lewis and Clark (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons).
He also wrote several historical novels including Orpheus Rode Again (1907), A Daughter of the Wilderness (1908), The Sword of Light (1920) and The Valley of Silent Men, which won him a Governor General's Award for fiction in 1930.