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Ernest Thompson Seton loved animals, so he paddled a canoe two thousand miles into the far north of Canada, where almost no maps existed. He was looking for the great herds of caribou, the deer of the north, and he travelled with guides from lake to lake and river to river. He watched wolves, beavers, and birds, and wrote it all down. It is a true adventure in a land of forests, ice, and animals that had never seen people.
The book is a journey told in fifty short sections, following Seton’s 1907 expedition from Athabaska Landing down the river and across the great lakes to Great Slave Lake and east into the Barren Lands and back. Each stretch of water gets its observations: caribou crossings, wolf sign, beaver works, weather, and the daily arithmetic of miles paddled and food remaining. His own sketches and photographs season the log throughout.
Its themes are abundance and loss. Seton found the north still stocked with game beyond counting, caribou in herds that took days to pass, and he wrote knowing the slaughter farther south would repeat itself if no one spoke. The book argues, gently and by accumulation, that wild country is wealth and that Canada should keep hers.
It lasts as one of the last firsthand reports of the untouched north, made by a man who could draw what he described. Seton helped invent wildlife conservation for ordinary readers, and this expedition was his proof. Later travellers used his maps and his example; readers still use his eyes.
In 1907 Ernest Thompson Seton, naturalist and Boy Scouts founder, canoed two thousand miles through the far Canadian north, hunting the last caribou herds in country still unmapped and unfenced. The Arctic Prairies, published in 1911, is his account: part expedition log, part field guide, part love letter to a vanishing wilderness. His preface asks who would not trade a year of life to see the old wild West, then answers that the miracle was possible, just farther north.
By 1907 Ernest Thompson Seton was famous on two continents as a writer, artist, and student of wild animals, and he had a question: did the old West of endless game still exist anywhere? His answer was to go north. The Arctic Prairies, published in 1911, records his expedition of that year: two thousand miles by canoe from Athabaska Landing through the lakes and rivers of northern Canada into the Barren Lands, travelling with Indigenous guides, hunting caribou and musk ox sign, and mapping country no chart yet covered. Expect a naturalist’s log rather than a hero’s saga: daily miles, weather, camps, and an unending census of life, beaver, wolf, moose, and caribou in herds of a size the settled world had already destroyed. Seton’s drawings and photographs come from the same hand that writes, which gives the book its double authority. Starvard shelves it among the great exploration narratives for its witness value: this is what the northern wilderness contained, counted by a man who knew animals the way sailors know weather, at nearly the last moment it could still be counted whole.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 6818.
The first chapter
TO
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR WILFRID LAURIER, G. C. M. G. PREMIER OF CANADA
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1911. US public domain (author died 1946). Share this book: WhatsApp
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