Sleeping Island: A Journey to the Edge of the Barrens

In an age when bush planes and outboard motors were opening up previously inaccessible regions of the Canadian North, Prentice G. Downes, a graduate of Harvard who worked as a schoolteacher just outside Boston, chose to travel alone by canoe to explore the Great Barren Lands. Sleeping Island is the sensitively written and moving account of one of his trips, a journey made in 1939 to remote, and at that time unmapped, Nueltin Lake. Downes records a North that was soon to be no more, a landscape and communities that had experienced little contact with European settlers. Downes describes the excitement of wilderness canoe travel, the delights of discovering the land, and his deep feeling for the people he met along the way. His respect for the First Nations and their ways of life, as well as his love of their land, shine through this richly descriptive work.