This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of thefile for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making anentire meal of them. D.W.]
By Gilbert Parker
This book, Northern Lights, belongs to an epoch which is a generationlater than that in which Pierre and His People moved. The conditionsunder which Pierre and Shon McGann lived practically ended with theadvent of the railway. From that time forwards, with the rise of townsand cities accompanied by an amazing growth of emigration, the whole lifelost much of that character of isolation and pathetic loneliness whichmarked the days of Pierre. When, in 1905, I visited the Far West againafter many years, and saw the strange new life with its modern episode,energy, and push, and realised that even the characteristics which markedthe period just before the advent, and just after the advent, of therailway were disappearing, I determined to write a series of storieswhich would catch the fleeting characteristics and hold something of theold life, so adventurous, vigorous, and individual, before it passedentirely and was forgotten. Therefore, from 1905 to 1909, I kept drawingupon all those experiences of others, from the true tales that had beentold me, upon the reminiscences of Hudson's Bay trappers and hunters, forthose incidents natural to the West which imagination could make true.Something of the old atmosphere had gone, and there was a stir and amurmur in all the West which broke that grim yet fascinating lonelinessof the time of Pierre.
Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different stylefrom that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as forinstance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man's River, TheStroke of the Hour, Qu'appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, andsomething of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incidentof the earlier stories appears. I believe I did well—at any rate formyself and my purposes—in writing this book, and thus making the humannarrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of thesixties onwards. So have I assured myself of the rightness of myintention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry onthis human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of thepresent, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills andfactories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, andwhen hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across theplains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in theirmillions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.
The tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of theFar West. The first five are reminiscent of "border days and deeds"—of days before the great railway was built which changed a waste into afertile fie