The Emigrant and Sportsman in Canada. Some Experiences of an Old Country Settler. With Sketches of Canadian Life, Sporting Adventures, and Observations on the Forests and Fauna by Rowan, John J

London: Edward Stanford, 1876. First edition thus (viii, 440, adverts) with coloured fold-out map of the northeast of NA, from the Sault to Nova Scotia and from Cape May to the sub arctic, showing growing regions and where to hunt, trap, and fish, and for what. 8vo, in decorative green publisher’s cloth, gilt titles to spine. Under the nom de plume ‘Cariboo’, Rowan wrote a column for the periodical Field featuring ‘useful hints for emigrants and sportsmen’. These columns are gathered here, together with ‘fresh matter’. Rowan wrote, as he said, for ‘people of small fortune’ who if they remained in Britain would find only a pinched and impecunious life and a ‘shabby gentility’, but who if they emigrated to Canada might manage to live in a fashion more in keeping with their pretensions. Rowan was no eager promoter nor a wide-eyed fantasist and wrote from personal experience, whether about raising cattle or fishing salmon. He knew how to stay alive in the bush and how to tie a fly, as his directions for each suggest. Rowan is often portrayed as a sports writer, and he certainly knew his way around fly fishing and goose shooting, but this book is as much about how to get along and how to manage in this raw, new country and is all the more interesting for that. Minor loss at top edge of spine (.5 cm), bottom edge lightly abraded, a worn corner. A clean, tight, bright copy. Very nice indeed.