The Book of the West

The Canadian West was forged in fire and ice, a vast landscape where mountains rose like ancient cathedrals and plains stretched beyond the horizon into forever. This is the story of how that raw, magnificent territory became home to settlers who crossed oceans to build new lives, and of the Indigenous nations who had tended this land for millennia before any European ship appeared on the horizon. Kennedy traces the arc from the birth of the landscape itself through the coming of the fur traders, the explorers who mapped the impossible terrain, and the settlers who arrived by the thousands on the newly laid railways. He writes of the collisions and collaborations between Indigenous peoples and European newcomers, of the transformations in society and industry that remade the frontier in a single generation. The book captures a world in rapid disappearance, written with the conviction of someone who understood that he was recording the last testimonies of an era closing forever. Those drawn to frontier history, to the epic sagas of nation-building, and to understanding how the modern West emerged from older, more ancient ways of living will find in these pages a vivid, sometimes troubling, always human account of a landscape and its peoples in profound transition.