Those Earlier Hills: Reminiscences 1928 to 1961.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

R.M. Patterson knew better than most of us how to combine the necessity of earning a living with the need to embark upon adventures that feed the soul. He was born in England in 1898, educated at Oxford, fought in the Great War, and emigrated to western Canada in 1924. Homesteading in the Peace River country of Alberta (the subject of a luminous series of stories published collectively as Far Pastures) was punctuated by an expedition on the South Nahanni River (The Dangerous River). That was followed by some sixteen years of ranching cattle, entertaining dudes, and exploring the mountains adjacent to his ranch in the Alberta foothills (The Buffalo Head). Then in the late 1940s he and his family moved to Vancouver Island, where the necessary routine of reconstructing and maintaining an island house and farm were relieved by reading, writing, and planning and executing expeditions to explore the island archipelago, the Finlay River (described in Finlay’s River), and the seaward approaches to the mountainous interior of western Canada. Trail to the Interior took him up the Stikine River from Wrangle, Alaska (by riverboat), over the long, arduous portage to Dease Lake (by truck), and down the Dease River (by canoe) to its junction with the Laird.

The present volume contains ten articles published in The Beaver between 1947 and 1961. They are vintage Patterson, focused on the northern interior of British Columbia, the Yukon, and Northwest Territories, rooted in assiduous research of the documentary record, illuminated by his latter-day tracings, and spiced by conversations with old friends met and many years later re-encountered on river, portage, and trail. Readers who have enjoyed the works described above will recognize much of the terrain covered here: the Nahani country (and Albert Faille) as he found it (and him) in 1927–1928 and again in 1951; fur traders and gold seekers at the Big Bend of the Columbia River; travels on the Laird, the Peace, and the Omineca (with memories of his childhood hero, Sir William Butler). The photographs are simply superb.