Northern Trader

There is an authenticity and an excitement about this book on the Canadian North which makes it outstanding. At sixteen, the author, son of an Anglican "sky pilot," wearied, as did Robert Service, of bank clerking and, fired by Fenimore Cooper, Ballantyne, and Stewart Edward White, joined the Hudson's Bay Company at Prince Albert. Before he was seventeen, he was appointed clerk at the fur-trading post of Lac La Ronge.The author possesses an unusual amount of sympathetic understanding. He, and later, his wife and children enter into the lives of the Crees and Chipeweyans and speak the Cree language. Hw writes extremely well and gives us a most convincing picture, not only of the Indians but also of the "personalities" of his five dogs, the wildlife around him, and the desperate dangers through which they pass. Kemp's North was the vital Canadian North of 1908. That it is rapidly passing, he regretfully pictures in his closing chapter.