The Wild Northland, Being the Story of a Winter Journey: With Dogs, Across Northern North America (1922)

Lieutenant-General Sir William Francis Butler (1838 1910) was an Irish 19th-century British Army officer, writer, and adventurer. Butler's account of his ride and tramp through the ice-bound regime of the North has been placed high among the many masterly books of travel. Taking his route as a whole it stands for one of the great journeys on this Continent, and the freshness of the country traversed and the interest of his descriptions have given his book a permanent value. The reader follows Butler and his dog, Cerf-vola, with sympathetic interest from first to last. The vivid descriptions of the strange unknown country to the border of the Barren Lands, his graphic story of the Indians who lived there are unsurpassed if not unsurpassable. This is one of the more interesting studies in the Wild Northland Series. The author set out from Manitoba in the fall with a very small party to traverse British America. As his trip was made in the 1870s he found more primitive conditions than now prevail among them, even buffaloes. The love of adventure breathes through every page of his book, and gives it a pleasant flavour of originality. It Is not always that the restless wanderer, whose love of adventure leads him into the wildest recesses of distant mountains, can reproduce his impressions with the skill and power that are shown by the author. In the ensuing pages the story of that long tramp for it was mostly performed on foot will be duly set forth. Written by camp fire, or in canon, or in the little log-house of a northern fur fort, when dogs and men rested for a day or two in the long icy run, that narrative will be found, I fear, to bear many indications of the rough scenes 'mid which it has been penned.

This book originally published by AMS Press in 1922 has been reformatted for the Kindle and may contain an occasional defect from the original publication or from the reformatting.