This book, Northern Lights, belongs to an epoch which is a generation
later than that in which Pierre and His People moved. The conditions
under which Pierre and Shon McGann lived practically ended with the
advent of the railway. From that time forwards, with the rise of towns
and cities accompanied by an amazing growth of emigration, the whole
life lost much of that character of isolation and pathetic loneliness
which marked the days of Pierre. When, in 1905, I visited the Far West
again after many years, and saw the strange new life with its modern
episode, energy, and push, and realised that even the characteristics
which marked the period just before the advent, and just after the
advent, of the railway were disappearing, I determined to write a series
of stories which would catch the fleeting characteristics and hold
something of the old life, so adventurous, vigorous, and individual,
before it passed entirely and was forgotten. Therefore, from 1905 to
1909, I kept drawing upon all those experiences of others, from the
true tales that had been told me, upon the reminiscences of Hudson’s
Bay trappers and hunters, for those incidents natural to the West which
imagination could make true. Something of the old atmosphere had gone,
and there was a stir and a murmur in all the West which broke that grim
yet fascinating loneliness of the time of Pierre.
Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different style
from that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as for
instance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man’s River, The
Stroke of the Hour, Qu’appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, and
something of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incident
of the earlier stories appears. I believe I did well--at any rate for
myself and my purposes--in writing this book, and thus making the human
narrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of the
sixties onwards. So have I assured myself of the rightness of my
intention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry on
this human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of the
present, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills and
factories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, and
when hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across the
plains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in their
millions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.