Setting out to visit his friends in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and with all intentions to return to the United States to attend Columbia University in the fall, Tappan Adney, at the age of 18, embarked on a trip that would ultimately set the course of his life. Tappan Adney's writings, illustrations, and photographs were published in Harper's Magazine.

This follow-up journal to 2010's first volume, takes us back to a time when wildness was still something easily accessible and wildlife abundant. These experiences, seen through the eyes of a young man from the city and illustrated with his own sketches, photographs, and remarkably accurate maps, bring readers into this world, allowing them to walk and canoe the roads and rivers with him.

The first volume showed us a remarkable young man who fell under the spell of the 19th century New Brunswick wilderness and the Maliseet people. Now, in this second volume of Adney's journals, we meet a man still passionate but wiser, transformed from enthusiastic hunter to reflective woodsman and decades ahead of his time in foreseeing the need for environmental protection. Recounted in the dialect of the day with the added flair of Adney's inimitable humour, and augmented by maps, sketches, and photographs, these journals provide an authentic glimpse into the world before the turn of the 20th century.

Tappan Adney, born in 1868 in Athens, Ohio, was an artist, a writer, and a photographer. He was credited with saving the art of birchbark canoe construction and built more than 100 models of different types. During World War I, he was an engineering officer for the Royal Military College. His book about the Klondike Gold Rush has become a well-loved standard. He worked in Montreal, where he worked as a consultant on aboriginal lore, then retired to Woodstock, New Brunswick, where his wife, Minnie Bell Sharp, had been born. He died in 1950.

Tappan Adney's profile page

C. Ted Behne’s interest in Tappan Adney began when he attended a birchbark canoe-building class. After 30 years of working as a writer and editor, he agreed to take on the task of completing Wheaton’s book on Tappan Adney. His articles on the birchbark canoe and Tappan Adney appeared in Native Peoples Magazine, Prairies North, and Wooden Boat Magazine, and he edited The Travel Journals of Tappan Adney Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

C. Ted Behne's profile page

Andrea Bear Nicholas is the Chair of Studies of Aboriginal Cultures of Atlantic Canada at St. Thomas University in Fredericton. She has published extensively on colonialism, Native women, education, Maliseet history, traditions, linguicide, and immersion education.

Andrea Bear Nicholas' profile page