Donald MacKay
Список книг автора Donald MacKayThe Lumberjacks
The 19th century spawned a unique breed of men who took pride in their woodsmen skills and rough codes of conduct. They called themselves lumberers, shantymen, timber beasts, les bucherron – and, more recently, lumberjacks, working in the vast forests of eastern Canada and British Columbia. Across the country, farm boys would go to the woods, lumbering being the only winter work available. Immigrants – Swedes and Finns more often than not – resumed the trades they had learned so well in the forests of northern Europe. They broke the cold, hard monotony of camp life with songs, tall tales and card games. Within these pages, author Donald MacKay allows us a glimpse into that moment in our heritage when men entered the virgin forest to carve out an industry from the seemingly endless array of pine, spruce, maple and balsam fir found there. «[Donald] MacKay's book has many virtues. His prose is clean. He lets the surviving pioneers talk for themselves when they have something to say, but never allows them to get too windy. He separates legends and half-truths from facts …» – The Montreal Star «… a superb marriage of text and pictures, a nostalgic but not sentimental discussion of one of Canada's primary industries, logging.» – The Globe and Mail «It's marvellous material of a type often ignored by historians … Such books may do more to help us understand ourselves than all the academic tomes together.» – Atlantic Insight
Scotland Farewell
This is the story of the Highland Scots who sailed to Pictou, Nova Scotia, in 1773 aboard the brig Hector . These intrepid emigrants came for many reasons: the famine of the previous spring, pressures of population growth, intolerable rent increases, trouble with the law, the hunger of landless men to own land of their own. Upon arrival at Pictou, after an appalling storm-tossed crossing, they found they had been deceived. The promised prime farming land turned out to be virgin forest. Only the kindness of the Mi’kmaq and the few New Englanders already settled there enabled them to survive until they learned how to exploit the forests and clear land. But survive they did, and their prosperity encouraged shiploads of emigrants, many fellow clansmen, to join them, making northeastern Nova Scotia a true New Scotland.
Flight from Famine
Winner of the 1991 QSPELL Prize for Non-fiction One of Canada’s founding peoples, the Irish arrived in the Newfoundland fishing stations as early as the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century they were establishing farms and settlements from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes. Then, in the 1840s, came the failures of Ireland’s potato crop, which people in the west of Ireland had depended on for survival. «And that,» wrote a Sligo countryman, «was the beginning of the great trouble and famine that destroyed Ireland.» Flight from Famine is the moving account of a Victorian-era tragedy that has echoes in our own time but seems hardly credible in the light of Ireland’s modern prosperity. The famine survivors who helped build Canada in the years that followed Black ’47 provide a testament to courage, resilience, and perseverance. By the time of Confederation, the Irish population of Canada was second only to the French, and four million Canadians can claim proud Irish descent.