The Canadian West in the second half of the nineteenth century offered something for everybody--land for settlers, profits for big corporations like the CPR--but for many young Englishmen, it also promised exotic adventures in an unknown land.
Nobody told them about the mosquitoes. Or the muskeg. Or the cold. Or the difficulties of making plum pudding out of dried pemmican. They soon found out, however, and recorded in fascinating detail their encounters with these problems and others for the moral edification of their countrymen in books which were very popular in their time but have since been largely forgotten.
In Journeys to the Far West Edward Cavell has excerpted many of the most exciting moments from these texts and matched them with some of the finest photographs of the time. The result is a fascinating glimpse of the Canadian West in a time of transition.

Edward Cavell has worked with historical photography in Canada for more than 30 years. Once the curator at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta, and author of seven illustrated histories, Edward has pored through many hundreds of thousands of photographs in archives, museums and private collections across Canada and abroad. Since 1992, he and his wife, Donna Livingstone, have operated Livingstone & Cavell Extraordinary Toys, a shop dedicated to nostalgic collector toys and quirky novelty items, in Calgary, Alberta.

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