Reluctant Pioneer: How I Survived Five Years in the Canadian Bush

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 endure...