Agnes C. Laut was a Canadian historian, journalist and novelist.
Background
Agnes Christina Laut was born on February 11, 1871, in Ontario, Canada. She was the daughter of John Laut, a merchant from Glasgow, and Eliza George Laut. Laut’s exposure to frontier life began when she was two, when her family moved to Winnipeg, in the Manitoba province of Canada.
Education
Laut finished school at the age of fifteen. Then, she enrolled in the University of Manitoba.
Career
Laut began to substitute teaching at a prairie school, where she taught for several years. After only two years of courses, she withdrew from the university due to poor health and began writing articles that she submitted to the New York Evening Post and the Manitoba Free Press. Impressed by her writing skills, editors at the Manitoba Free Press offered her a position. Laut accepted and worked there as an editorial writer from 1895 to 1897. She traveled for the following two years, during which time she wrote about her experiences and published articles in several American, English, and Canadian periodicals.
Laut’s first novel, Lords of the North: A Romance of the Northwest, was published in 1900. After exhaustive research, she wove fiction and historical fact together to dramatize the struggle for control of the northwest fur trade between the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company. Laut’s second fictionalized study of Canada’s history, again pulled from her research, appeared two years later under the title Heralds of Empire: Being the Story of One Ramsey Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade. This novel bears evidence of its author’s careful research and her desire to enliven Canadian history. Both books were well-received, and the first became a huge success as it was embraced by Canadians who were eager for national literature. In 1912, she wrote an investigative report on racial issues in British Colombia for Saturday Night magazine, that was republished in 1913 as a pamphlet titled, Am I My Brother's Keeper?, and later published in Canadian Commonwealth (1915), a summary of and discussion about Canadian issues at the time.
Laut’s research was time well spent as she continued to draw upon the information she gathered about the Hudson Bay Company and wrote dozens of magazine articles, many of which she turned into books, including three books for children: “The Adventurers of England” on Hudson Bay: A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (1914), Pioneers of the Pacific Coast: A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters (1915), and The Cariboo Trail: A Chronicle of the Gold-Fields of British Columbia (1916). In 1919, she traveled to Mexico where she worked as secretary to the Childhood Conservation League.
Having earned a considerable amount of money from her first two books, Laut purchased Wildwood, a country estate in Wassaic, in upstate New York, but continued writing about Canada. Her popularity grew as a novelist and historian. Though she was known primarily as a historian and nature conservationist, Laut wrote three additional fiction titles in the latter part of her career. In Freebooters of the Wilderness (1911), Laut incorporated her wilderness conservation concerns in relation to corporate and political corruption.
Views
Agnes' work centered around lifelong interests in nature and history and appealed to a wide audience.