Biography & Autobiography Historical
Reluctant Pioneer
How I Survived Five Years in the Canadian Bush
- Publisher
- Dundurn Press
- Initial publish date
- May 2013
- Category
- Historical, Personal Memoirs, Cultural Heritage
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781926577166
- Publish Date
- May 2013
- List Price
- $26.99
-
eBook
- ISBN
- 9781459702387
- Publish Date
- May 2013
- List Price
- $11.99
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
Thomas Osborne delivers a gripping account of 1870s Ontario pioneer life.
The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.
For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."
Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.
About the authors
Thomas Osborne came as a teen in the 1870s from the United States to homestead with his family in Ontario’s Muskoka. Eventually, as an adult, he returned to the United States to live and work in Pennsylvania and New York. In 1938 he was killed by an automobile in San Diego, California, four years after penning Accidental Pioneer.
In the fall of 2006, Roy MacGregor, veteran newspaperman, magazine writer, and author of books, came to campus. Since 2002, MacGregor had been writing columns for the Globe and Mail, but he had a long and distinguished career in hand before he came to the national newspaper. He has won National Newspaper Awards and in 2005 was named an officer in the Order of Canada. He is the author of more than 40 books — 28 of them in the internationally successful Screech Owls mystery series for young readers — on subjects ranging from Canada, to the James Bay Cree, to hockey. That fall, he spoke to a packed room in the St. Thomas chapel. After the lecture, Herménégilde Chiasson, the Acadian poet, artist, and New Brunswick's Lieutenant Governor of the day, hosted a reception at the majestic Old Government House on the banks of the St. John River. MacGregor spent the evening surrounded by young journalists and the conversation continued late into the night. After all, there were more than three decades of stories to tell.
Editorial Reviews
[Osborne’s] adventures make for an exciting story full of escapades, back -breaking work, isolation and ingenuity. . . Readers will also enjoy the accounts of all the people they met during their time in the North Portage.
The Bracebridge Examiner
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