A Guide to Proper Noticing - A Novel of Fort Vancouver

This novel is a companion to A Guide to Proper Noticing: A Novel of the Oregon Trail, sharing its conviction that history is best understood through the eyes of the children who lived closest to the ground it was made on.

As with that earlier book, this one was written in full collaboration with Claude, an AI system created by Anthropic. The author believes strongly in transparency about how a book like this comes to exist: the historical research, structural planning, and prose across these pages were developed jointly, in conversation, between author and AI. Every choice of what to include and how to shape it was made in partnership. That collaboration is credited here, and on the title page, as a matter of principle rather than obligation.

The history underlying this saga — the Hudson's Bay Company's long tenure at Fort Vancouver, the 1846 Oregon Treaty and the boundary it drew, the 1850 Donation Land Claim Act and its treatment of mixed-heritage families, and the fort's eventual abandonment in 1860 — is real. The people who lived through it, and the particular shape of the story told here, are not.