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Books : Biographies & Memoirs : Regional Canada : Western Provinces
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WINNER, 2004 NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD! (Outdoor Literature) Who hasnt wanted to get away from cell phones, e-mail, roads, and traffic? And what better place to escape our wired world than the far northwestern corner of Canadas Northwest Territories and a river that flows through uninhabited country, 400 miles to the Arctic Ocean. But what if your canoeing partner brings along a satellite phone to use in case of an emergency? And, struck by the novelty of anywhere-on-earth communication, he proceeds to use the phone to check in with his law office, his wife, kids, sisters, father, and friends? Noted wilderness traveler and author Ted Kerasote deals with just such a situation as he journeys along the Horton River through the largest ice-free, roadless area left on Earth, a stunning wilderness of grizzly bears, caribou, and migrating birds. Between navigating rapids, slipping around musk ox and grizzlies, and being pinned down by Arctic storms, the two friends prod each other into a finer understanding of love, marriage, parenting, and the meaning of solitude in an increasingly wired world. Contrasting his own experiences with those of the regions earliest explorers--Sir John Franklin and Vilhjalmur Stefansson--Kerasote provides a compelling and humorous take on how travelers from any age adjust to being away from their civilizations and how getting "out there" has inevitably changed but has also remained the same--especially if you shut off the phone.
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They called it The Arctic Circle War. It was a manhunt the likes of which we will never see again. The quarry, Albert Johnson, was a loner working a string of traps in the far reaches of Canada's Northwest Territories, where winter temperatures average forty degrees below zero.
The chase began when a Mountie came to ask Johnson about allegations that he had interfered with a neighbor's trap. No questions were asked. Johnson shot Officer Millen dead through a hole in the wall of his log cabin. A vicious firefight ensued. When the Mounties returned with reinforcements, Johnson was gone, and The Arctic Circle War had begun.
It was a forty-eight-day odyssey across the harshest terrain in the world. On Johnson's heels were a corps of Mounties and an irregular posse on dogsled, supplied by airplanes dropping food. Johnson, on snowshoes, seemed superhuman in his ability to evade capture. The chase stretched for hundreds of miles, and during a blizzard crossed the Richardson Mountains, the northernmost extension of the Rockies. It culminated in the historic shootout at Eagle River.
There will never be another chase like it.
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"This is a great book about life at remote bases in Canada's far north as seen by a young English boy who went there by himself to see the world and got more than he could have bargained for. Beautifully written." --Sir Ranulph Fiennes
"As spare, gleaming, and exhilarating as the Arctic wastes and the gentle, stoic Eskimos who had mastery of this realm . . . The book evokes the frozen seas, whale hunts, snow plains and storms that intimidated those rash enough to brave this world, and the traditions, myths, and hunting skills that contoured a bygone way of life . . . His translucent prose is a sparkling and moving record." -- Times (London)
At sixteen, Edward Beauclerk Maurice impulsively signed up with the Hudson's Bay Company -- the Company of Gentleman Adventurers -- and was sent to an isolated trading post in the Canadian Arctic, where there was no telephone or radio and only one ship arrived each year. But the Inuit people who traded there taught him how to track polar bears, build igloos, and survive expeditions in ferocious winter storms. He learned their language and became so immersed in their culture and way of life that children thought he was Inuit himself. When an epidemic struck, Maurice treated the sick using a simple first aid kit, and after a number of the hunters died, he had to start hunting himself, often with women, who soon began to compete for his affections. The young man who in England had never been alone with a woman other than his mother and sisters had come of age in the Arctic.
In The Last Gentleman Adventurer Edward Beauclerk Maurice transports the reader to a time and a way of life now lost forever.
After serving in the New Zealand navy during World War II, Edward Beauclerk Maurice became a bookseller in an English village and rarely traveled again. He died in 2003 as this, his only book, was being readied for publication.
"If you like reality, The Last Gentleman Adventurer will be your cup of tea: a delicious quaff of it. Savor it!" -- Edward Hoagland
"Maurice's memoir supplies a fascinating elegy to a vanishing world." -- Telegraph
"One of those rare writers who will be remembered for turning out one great memoir/travel book . . . He relates these events in a beautiful prose that is quaintly elegant in tone but never archly so . . . Not only a gentleman but a wonderful writer who limited his output to one book, and perhaps that is why it reads so beautifully." -- Sunday Tribune (Dublin)
"Maybe he was exceptional, but the charm of his book lies in its modesty; he makes no claims for himself. His concern was to make a record of some amazing adventures and a vanishing way of life; these are woven into an eye-opening narrative that is suffused with kindliness and an attitude to growing up more restrained but more humane than that prevailing today. A gentleman adventurer indeed." -- Times Educational Supplement
"A deceptively simple account of how he grew to manhood, shaped on one hand by the brutal elements of the Arctic, on the other by the compassionate communities of Inuit who understood them . . . This is a beautifully unadorned, homespun tale with a lack of self-consciousness rare in travel literature . . . I was charmed." -- Benedict Allen, Independent on Sunday
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Morgan offers an authentic and deliciously humorous account of the prostitutes and other "disreputable" women who were the earliest female pioneers of the Far North.
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Meet Frank Barr, who flew every early plane from the Jenny to the Super Cub, carrying passengers and freight to remote villages in Alaska and the Yukon.
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Of Athapaskan and Tlingit ancestry, Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie Ned lived in the southern Yukon Territory for nearly a century. They collaborated with Julie Cruikshank, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, to produce this unique kind of autobiography.
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In the tradition of Sebastian' Junger's The Perfect Storm and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, Barren Lands is the extraordinary tale of two small-time prospectors who risked their lives to discover $17 billion worth of diamonds in the desolate tundra of the far north.
In the late 1970's, two men set out on a twenty-year search for a North American gem mine, along a fabled path that had defied 16th-century explorers, Wild West prospectors, and modern geologists. They are an unlikely pair: Chuck Fipke, a ragged, stuttering fellow with a singular talent for finding sand-size mineral grains, and Stew Blusson, an ultra-tough geologist and helicopter pilot. Inventive, eccentric and ruthless, they follow a trail of geologic clues left by predecessors all the way from backwoods Arkansas up the glaciated high Rockies into the vast and haunted "barren lands" of northern Canada. With a South African geochemist's "secret weapon," Fipke and Blusson outwit rivals, including the immense De Beers carte, and make one of the world's greatest diamond discoveries- setting off a stampede unseen since the Klondike gold rush.
A story of obsession and scientific intrigue, Barren Lands is also an elegy to one of earth's last great wild places, a starkly beautiful and mysterious land strewn with pure lakes and alive with wolves and caribou. An endless variety of primeval glacial rock formations hide copper, zinc, and gold, in addition to diamonds. Now that the barrens are "open for business," what will happen to this great wilderness region?
Barren Lands is an unforgettable journey for those who, in the words of a nineteenth-century trapper, "want to see that country before it is all gone."
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Betty Lowman was 22 years old in June 1937 when she climbed into her beloved red dugout canoe Bijaboji and set out on a journey from Puget Sound to Alaska. Traversing some of the most treacherous waters on earth, the journey would have been a risky act for an extreme adventurer in any era; for a young woman in the conservative 1930s, it was a venture of almost unimaginable daring. Betty pulled it off, and now, 67 years later, she accomplishes an equal feat--a book of pure adventure. Bijaboji is a classic of boating literature worthy of a place beside < i> The Curve of Time< /i> by Muriel Wylie Blanchet, whose coastal narrative dates from the same period.< br> < br> Betty slips through quiet water by moonlight, her oars dripping with phosphorescence. She goes deer hunting with a young Native man near Sechelt. She travels with a boat full of exuberant Boy Scouts for a few days and she visits lightkeepers, loggers, fishermen, doctors, missionaries and other coast dwellers who live in beautiful, isolated places and who speak openly about their lives, loves and politics. She also braves storms, rapids and blistering heat. In Douglas Channel Bijaboji capsizes and Betty loses her oars< br> and everything she owns, except her boat and her sleeping bag. She is trapped on a precarious rock ledge for three harrowing days until rescued by Native fishermen.< br> < br> Through it all, she copes with her growing celebrity as people all along the coast watch for her, at the same time as they wait for news on the abdication of Edward VIII and on the disappearance of another female adventurer, Amelia Earhart. This is an amazing account written by a smart, strong, funny, independent woman with a glad heart and an abiding love of the BC coast.
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In the mid-1920s Raymond M. Patterson left a comfortable position with the Bank of England for a life in with wilds of Canada. Here, he hunted, trapped, fished and prospected his way along the rivers he would later write about. This spellbinding book, his most famous account, chronicles his two journeys down the treacherous Nahanni River between the Yukon and the Mackenzie River, spurred on by his irrepressible lust for adventure and his quest for gold. The New Yorker called this "a truly enchanting book."
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“One July day four hundred years ago, Samuel de Champlain stepped out of a small boat at Quebec and began a great adventure.” So begins Christopher Moore’s riveting account of the life of the extraordinary, daring “father of New France.”
Samuel de Champlain helped found the first permanent French settlement in the New World; he established the village that eventually became the great city of Quebec; he was a skilled cartographer who gave us many of our first accurate maps of North America; he forged alliances with Native nations that laid the foundations for vast trading networks; and as governor, he set New France on the road to becoming a productive, self-sufficient, thriving colony.
But Champlain was also a man who suffered his share of defeats and disappointments. That first permanent settlement was abandoned after a disastrous winter claimed the lives of half the colonists. His marriage to a child bride was unhappy and marked by long separations. Eventually Quebec had to be surrendered temporarily to the English in 1629.
In this remarkable book, illustrated entirely with paintings, archival maps, and original artifacts, Christopher Moore brings to life this complex man and, through him, creates a portrait of Canada in its earliest days.
Champlain is illustrated with archival maps and paintings. Additional artwork has been provided by Francis Back.
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"Traces the lives of some two dozen women who participated in the gold rush as wives, single women, or even as children .... What emerges is no common portrait". -- Choice
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When the great cities of North America were being developed, there was little thought to creating “green spaces.” Frederick Law Olmsted combined his childhood love for nature with the structured beauty of the great parks of London and Paris to turn a neglected, swampy area into one of the most acclaimed parks in North America: Central Park in New York City.
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When you cross an Oxford graduate with a young man seeking gold and adventure in the remote wilderness, the result is Nahanni Journals. In this fascinating account of Raymond Patterson, a Londoner who finds his destiny in the Nahanni and Flat Rivers region of the Northwest Territories, Richard C. Davis reveals to us an extraordinary life. Patterson’s adventures are as swift and unpredictable as the river he canoes. Outdoor enthusiasts, historians, lovers of travel, and anyone interested in captivating stories will enjoy accompanying Patterson for the ride.
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Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who has been a landscape architect for more than sixty years, considers her profession “the art of the possible.” The description also applies to the very way this remarkable 86-year-old has lived her life. Playing in her grandmother’s garden as a child, Cornelia absorbed the beauty and importance of the natural world and by the age of eleven had decided that she would become a landscape architect.
Leaving her native Germany in the wake of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, the teenaged Cornelia was transplanted in America, where she could pursue her dream in safety, although not without having to struggle to carve out a place for herself in the male-dominated world of her chosen profession. This 96-page biography tells her remarkable life’s story, complete with photographs and plans for the imaginative playgrounds and the innovative museum and embassy grounds she has created around the world, and for green rooftops, her latest passion. Young readers will not only learn about the profession, but also will find inspiration in Cornelia Hahn Oberlander’s love for the natural world and the respect and concern she shows for our increasingly fragile environment.
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When William Kurelek was young, he went into the bush to work as a lumberjack twice. Realizing that the traditional life of a lumberjack was disappearing, he decided to record in pictures and text a job that helped to make Canada the country it is. Kurelek takes readers through a day in the bush, from the first wake-up to breakfast, to the different phases of cutting wood, to how the men spent their free time. Hardship and pleasures were shared in the creation of these unforgettable paintings.
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Service went from bank clerk to cowboy to become the first million-selling poet. The early forerunner of Kerouac's beat generation, Service wrote for those who wouldn't be caught dead reading poetry.
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Crash landings were part of the job in the early 1930s, when Rex Terpening started out in arctic aviation. As an air engineer for Canadian Airways in the Northwest Territories, Terpening took the right-hand seat in the cockpit and flew "on operations" daily, warming the oil and the engine on winter mornings, refuelling, and inevitably mending both engine and aircraft when things went wrong.
Terpening's beat stretched from Fort McMurray to the Arctic Ocean, and his remarkable bush-flying stories tell of planes wandering lost over unmapped muskeg, perilous rescue missions to retrieve stranded missionaries, dogged searches for downed flyers lost on the Barrens and emergency landings in blizzards on nameless pothole lakes. But there is humour, too, in tales of a drunken wolverine, a planeload of rambunctious sled dogs and a trip in a tiny Fairchild with a Catholic priest and the wife of an Anglican minister. And there are vivid evocations of the sheer joy of flying over the Arctic's raw beauty.
Rex Terpening not only kept a meticulous journal from which these stories are derived, he carried his camera everywhere, snapping pictures of downed machines, their step-by-step resurrections, the men who flew them and those who fixed them. Most of those men and machines are gone now, but they live on in "Bent Props and Blow Pots,"
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Dressed in cowboy garb acquired in a Scottish auction room, a naive but committed young Robert Service stepped off the CPR train in Vancouver, sustained only by his sense of adventure. Sixteen years later, he would leave Canada as the author of the most commercially successful poems written in the 20th century. Service's time in the Yukon, at first as a transplanted bank clerk and later living off the royalties of poems like "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", is the core of a fascinating life. Starving in Mexico, residing in a California bordello, farming on Vancouver Island and pursuing unrequited love in Vancouver were only preludes to his Yukon years and his first poems. Words were Robert Service's lifelong passion, and he set them on many stages. But it was his McGrew, McGee and other players of the Great White North who glittered with a golden glow and forever made him the 'Bard of the Yukon' and the de facto poet laureate of Alaska. This book sheds light on aspects of Service's life that have been sketchily covered by other biographers, focusing on his years in Canada and the western U.S. 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Songs of a Sourdough", which sold over three million copies and was the most successful poetry book of the 20th century.