The Call of the North

The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her back crouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her in interminable journey, day after day, league on league into remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different for many years. Once a summer the sailing ship from England felt its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, to drop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer a six-fathom canoe manned by a dozen addles struggled down the waters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a little band of red-sashed voyageurs forced their exhausted sledge-dogs across the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was all.

Stewart Edward White was an American author, dramatist, and spiritualist who was born March 12, 1873, and died September 18, 1946. Known wall painter Gilbert White was his brother. His mother was Mary E. Danielell and his father was a lumberjack named Thomas Stewart White. White was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He graduated from Grand Rapids High School and the University of Michigan with a B.A. in 1895 and an M.A. in 1903. In the years between 1900 and 1922, he wrote both fiction and non-fiction about travel and adventure, with a focus on natural history and life outside. He and his wife Elizabeth "Betty" Grant White wrote many books starting in 1922. They said they got the ideas for the books from talking to ghosts. Besides that, they wrote about their trips in California. It was September 18, 1946, when White died in Hillsborough, California. He was 73 years old. People liked White's books at a time when America was losing its wild places. He was very aware of the beauty in both nature and people, and he could write about them in a simple way. Based on his own life, he wrote funny and clever things about building cabins, canoeing, logging, gold hunting, guns, fishing, hunting, and camping in both his camping diaries and Westerns.