Canoeing With The Cree

I reread this book for the first time in about 25 years. If anyone is looking for a good read I’d highly recommend it. I assume alot of the folks on this site know the story but it’s worth another read.

For those that don’t know the story, it’s about 2 young men from Minneapolis that graduate high school in 1930 and canoe from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay. They had little to no experience but took on the adventure anyways. Its pretty remarkable what they accomplished.

That is a great book and it was part of my inspiration to paddle the 200 mile BWCA border route a few years ago

Matt Moen wrote:

I reread this book for the first time in about 25 years. If anyone is looking for a good read I’d highly recommend it. I assume alot of the folks on this site know the story but it’s worth another read.

Absolutely a terrific book. It is difficult to imagine the mindset of boys of that era, the confidence (and sometimes overconfidence) they had, and of just how little was known about the far north in 1930.

This book gives a vivid picture of Minnesota in the 1930s, the description the headwaters of the Minnesota river at Brown’s Valley were especially interesting to me having grown up in this area.

BTW, the author of Canoeing with the Cree was Eric Sevareid. He went on to a fascinating career in journalism. Only 10 years after the canoeing adventure, Sevareid was the last American journalist broadcasting from Paris as the Nazis stormed the city. He had a harrowing escape from Paris to England with his wife and newborn twin sons. In London he joined Edward R. Murrow and many of the movie newsreel clips you see of England during the war have Sevareid’s voice.

My favorite book – I’ve read it 2 or 3 times. It’s a great deer stand read, you can get through it in a day if the action is slow. But it’s an first-hand story of two boys becoming men and beating the odds. And Yes, Sevareid went on to have a LOT of adventures in his later career. I borrowed my copy to another hockey dad about 5 years ago, and then he and his wife got divorced and I’m not even sure where he’s at these days, but I never got it back. I’ll have to buy a new copy.