This book, Northern Lights, belongs to an epoch which is a generationlater than that in which Pierre and His People moved. The conditionsunder which Pierre and Shon McGann lived practically ended with theadvent of the railway. From that time forwards, with the rise of townsand cities accompanied by an amazing growth of emigration, the wholelife lost much of that character of isolation and pathetic lonelinesswhich marked the days of Pierre. When, in 1905, I visited the Far Westagain after many years, and saw the strange new life with its modernepisode, energy, and push, and realised that even the characteristicswhich marked the period just before the advent, and just after theadvent, of the railway were disappearing, I determined to write a seriesof stories which would catch the fleeting characteristics and holdsomething of the old life, so adventurous, vigorous, and individual,before it passed entirely and was forgotten. Therefore, from 1905 to1909, I kept drawing upon all those experiences of others, from thetrue tales that had been told me, upon the reminiscences of Hudson'sBay trappers and hunters, for those incidents natural to the West whichimagination 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 grimyet fascinating loneliness of the time of Pierre.Thus it is that Northern Lights is written in a wholly different stylefrom that of Pierre and His People, though here and there, as forinstance in A Lodge in the Wilderness, Once at Red Man's River, TheStroke of the Hour, Qu'appelle, and Marcile, the old note sounds, andsomething of the poignant mystery, solitude, and big primitive incidentof the earlier stories appears. I believe I did well--at any rate formyself and my purposes--in writing this book, and thus making the humannarrative of the Far West and North continuous from the time of thesixties onwards. So have I assured myself of the rightness of myintention, that I shall publish a novel presently which will carry onthis human narrative of the West into still another stage-that of thepresent, when railways are intersecting each other, when mills andfactories are being added to the great grain elevators in the West, andwhen hundreds and thousands of people every year are moving across theplains where, within my own living time, the buffalo ranged in theirmillions, and the red men, uncontrolled, set up their tepees.NOTEThe tales in this book belong to two different epochs in the life of theFar West. The first five are reminiscent of "border days and deeds"--ofdays before the great railway was built which changed a waste into afertile field of civilisation. The remaining stories cover the periodpassed since the Royal North-West Mounted Police and the Pullman carfirst startled the early pioneer, and sent him into the land of thefarther North, or drew him into the quiet circle of civic routine andhumdrum occupation. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.