A Life on the LinePierre tienne Fortin led a life and plied a career at the heart of Canada's early history. He was an adventurer, an amateur scientist, an early (if ambiguous) conservationist and a Conservative politician from 1867 to 1888. He was a doctor on Grosse le amid the horrors of the 1847 typhus epidemic, led a mounted police troop during the infamous Montreal riots of 1849 and, as commander of the armed schooner La Canadienne, policed the Gulf of St.