The Valley of Silent Men - Curwood, James Oliver

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Résumé :
Before the railroad's thin lines of steel bit their way up through the wilderness, Athabasca Landing was the picturesque threshold over which one must step who would enter into the mystery and adventure of the great white North. It is still Iskwatam - the door which opens to the lower reaches of the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie. It is somewhat difficult to find on the map, yet it is there, because its history is written in more than a hundred and forty years of romance and tragedy and adventure in the lives of men, and is not easily forgotten. Over the old trail it was about a hundred and fifty miles north of Edmonton. The railroad has brought it nearer to that base of civilization, but beyond it the wilderness still howls as it has howled for a thousand years, and the waters of a continent flow north and into the Arctic Ocean. It is possible that the beautiful dream of the real-estate dealers may come true, for the most avid of all the sportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the bumpy railroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with lanterns, and with them have come typewriters, and stenographers, and the art of printing advertisements, and the Golden Rule of those who sell handfuls of earth to hopeful purchasers thousands of miles away - Do others as they would do you. And with it, too, has come the legitimate business of barter and trade, with eyes on all that treasure of the North which lies between the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca and the edge of the polar sea....

Sommaire:
James Oliver Curwood was an American author of action-adventure books and an environmentalist. He was born on June 12, 1878, and died on August 13, 1927. Publishers Weekly says that in the early and mid-1920s, his books were among the ten best-selling in the United States. Many of them were about experiences that took place in the Hudson Bay area, the Yukon, or Alaska. One movie was made in three different versions from 1919 to 1953, and at least 180 movies have been based on or directly influenced by his books and short stories. He was the best-paid author in the world (per word) at the time of his death. Curwood was born in Owosso, Michigan. He was the fourth child and youngest of five. Curwood went to neighborhood schools and dropped out of high school before graduating. He did well on the test to get into the University of Michigan and was able to start studying writing in the English department. I quit college after two years to become a writer, and I moved to Detroit to do that. He sold his first story while he was at the University of Michigan in 1898. In 1907, the Canadian government hired him to go to the farthest northern parts of the country and write and print accounts of his travels to promote tourism. It was these trips that gave him ideas for his wilderness adventure stories....