Journeys to the Far West: Accounts of the Adventurers in Western Canada 1858 to 1885

The Canadian West in the second half of the nineteenth century offered something for everybody--land for settlers, profits for big corporations like the CPR--but for many young Englishmen, it also promised exotic adventures in an unknown land.Nobody told them about the mosquitoes. Or the muskeg. Or the cold. Or the difficulties of making plum pudding out of dried pemmican. They soon found out, however, and recorded in fascinating detail their encounters with these problems and others for the moral edification of their countrymen in books which were very popular in their time but have since been largely forgotten.In Journeys to the Far West Edward Cavell has excerpted many of the most exciting moments from these texts and matched them with some of the finest photographs of the time. The result is a fascinating glimpse of the Canadian West in a time of transition.