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Description: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner's boyhood was spent on the beautiful and remote frontier of the Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where his family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920. In a recollection of his years there, Stegner applies childhood remembrance and adult reflection to the history of the region to create this wise and enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing on the verge of a modern world.

The geologist who surveyed southern Saskatchewan in the 1870s called it one of the most desolate and forbidding regions on earth.

My town used to be as bare as a picked bone, with no tree anywhere around it larger than a ten-foot willow or alder. Now it is a grove.

The axles were unpeeled poplar o cottonwood logs, and the wheels could not be greased because grease would have collected dust and frozen the hubs to the axles. The shriek of a single Red River cart was enough to set tenderfoot visitors writing home: it was an experience of an excruciating kind.

Speed on, speed on, good Master!
The camp lies far away;
We must cross the haunted valley
Before the close of day.

Lots here to like and will appeal to those who know the area in real life, and those who delight in Stegner's prose. Recommended.

4* The Spectator Bird
4* Wolf Willow
4* Angle of Repose