The Lonely Land

Mr. Olson has illuminated his own cruise with quotations from journals and diaries of such men as George Simpson, David Thompson, Alexander Henry, and Alexander Mackenzie-as well as a host of other explorers-traders whose voices speak from the old Moose Fort Journals of the Hudson's Bay Company. Mr. Olson serves as the Bourgeois of the party of six-the boss who ran the trip, chose the routes, picked the camp sites. His companions and he relived for all readers of this book what life was then in the wilds of the Canadian Northwest. Mr. Olson combines his inimitable ability to evoke the beauties and wonders of the wilderness-its animals, birds, and its very spirit-with a dramatic talent for taking the reader along the route of the men who pioneered that wilderness. Francis Lee Jacques, whose genius to evoke the wilderness in pen and ink is unchallenged, has illuminated this book by his drawings, as he did The Singing Wilderness and Listening Point.