Lure of the Labrador Wild

The Labrador interior has long held the well-deserved reputation of being one of the most inhospitable places on earth. It is a patchwork of Canadian shield granites and sphagnum moss, labyrinthine caribou trails and desolate subarctic barrens, all set against glacier-scoured hills stretching to an apparently limitless horizon.
In the late spring of 1903, Leonidas Hubbard, a young writer, and Dillon Wallace, a forty-year-old New York attorney, set off with George Elson, a native guide with no firsthand knowledge of their destination, to explore the incompletely mapped Lake Michikamau region of interior Labrador. Beset by delays, the men paddled past their intended route, the Naskaupi River, and headed up the treacherous Susan River instead. When in early September they finally glimpsed the vast waters of Michikamau from the top of an unknown mountain, Labrador’s cold winds had begun. With scant scraps of food remaining, the three began a desperate struggle against starvation and the rapidly approaching and unforgiving winter as they raced home for their lives.

DILLON WALLACE was born in 1863, in Craigsville, New York. In 1888 he moved to New York City and later entered New York Law School, graduating in 1896. LURE OF THE LABRADOR WILD, was released in 1905 and became an instant best-seller in the United States and Canada. He died in 1939.

LAWRENCE MILLMAN has written for Smithsonian, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Islands, Summit, and many other magazines. His books include Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Hero Jesse, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Wolverine Creates the World, The Wrong Handed Man, and Last Places. He has made twelve trips to Arctic Canada, nine trips to Greenland, six to Labrador, and six to Iceland. When not on the road, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.