With thick smoke in his throat and the roar of flame in his ears, Pete Noël awoke, shaking as if in the grip of a nightmare. He sat straight up in his bunk. Instantly he felt his face scorching. The whole cabin was ablaze. Leaping from his bunk, and dragging the blankets with him, he sprang to the door, tore it open, and rushed out into the snow. But being a woodsman, and alert in every sense like the creatures of the wild themselves, his wits were awake almost before his body was, and his instincts were even quicker than his wits. The desolation and the savage cold of the wilderness had admonished him even in that terrifying moment. As he leaped out in desperate flight, he had snatched with him not only the blankets, but his rifle and cartridge-belt from where they stood by the head of the bunk, and also his larrigans and great blanket coat from where they lay by its foot.

In this lavishly illustrated new book, the author of Early Life in Upper Canada and other famous histories of pioneer days, relates the story of the Canadian farm and farmer from the primitive to the machine age. Farm life and farm processes are pictured in fascinating detail, and Mr. Guillet quotes generously from books, newspapers, letters and hitherto unpublished archives material, using the words of those who actually witnessed the life of other days–the pioneers themselves, or the more observant of the numerous travellers who visited Canada during the period. The 450 illustrations contained in the two volumes of this work include many never before reproduced. A detailed list of contents and a full index enable the reader to find readily any topic of pioneer life to which he wishes to refer.

People allowed livestock to run free to forage for themselves in the river bottoms and pine uplands; there were no fences except those around cultivated fields. By long-established custom, everything outside the fenced fields was "open range", a wooded commons in which hogs, cattle, and backwoodsmen were free to roam. And roam they did - not only stockmen, with their "rooter hogs" and "woods cattle," but also tie cutters, grey-moss gatherers, hunters, trappers,