Finlay's River

Mostly unknown to American readers, Raymond Patterson is recognized throughout the British Commonwealth as one of the finest writers on the Canadian wilderness. Reviewing his contribution to Canadian wilderness literature, Arctic Magazine in March 1991 said that, "While his writing skills earned him a wide and appreciative audience, he was more than a skilled wordsmith. He was also careful and sympathetic observer, and intrepid explorer and a meticulous historian." Many of Patterson's works are autobiographical accounts of his explorations in Canada's British Columbia and the Northwest Territories set in a fabric of historical, geological, anthropoligical, and botanical insights. I discovered this works by accident: planning for an expedition to the Thutade Lake region of central British Columbia, my Internet searches led me to Patterson. it was a wonderful discovery. Patterson was born in 1898 in Darlington, England. His father served in the Boer War and spent most of his life in Africa. His interaction with Raymond was episodic, though influential. In April 1917, straight out of secondary school, Patterson went into England's wartime army as an artillery cadet. Early in his military career, on March 21, 1918, Patterson was captured. He spent the next eight months as a prisoner of war until armistice in November 1918. Returning to England, he entered St. John's College at Oxford as a modern history major. There was plenty of time for extracirricular adventure, which he pursued vigorously. With the aid of an exceptional short-term memory, he passed his final exams in a heroic, last-minute effort. From university, he went to the Bank of England, a likely course for a promising young professional. Yet the cosmopolitan life was an ill fit. Among the Bank's austere columns, he learned of his father's death in Africa. Patterson wrote in another of his books, Buffalo Head, "With the going of that man I came up to the surface again and took a look at the workaday world of London. And by God, my father was right! It was grey and it was a desert of stone! [London] was a swarming city like a nightmare by H.G. Wells. It was a vast human ant heap through which the inmates scurried with set, expressionless faces, tied to some fixed routine." He siezed the reins and set course for North America where there was still wildness. At the age of 26, he pounded his tent pegs into Western Canada, where he remained for the rest of his life, making his way variously as a rancher, explorer, and writer. He was a peripatetic explorer whose meanderings served up fodder for several books. Patterson twice canoed down the treacherous Nahanni River and wrote the best-known of his five books, The Dangerous River. In 1949, eager to understand the early history of exploration up the Rocky Mountain Trench, Patterson explored the Parsnip, Finlay and Peace Rivers in a 17-foot canoe. This trip served as the basis for Finlay's River, published in 1968. T