"It is an excellently written, vivid and exciting story of the conquest of a present-day frontier and maintains the pace and suspense of a good novel." -OLIVER LA FARGE
Eric Collier's extraordinary story may very well become a classic of wilderness writing, for this account of one family's heroic struggle against nature ranks in its way with Peter Freuchen's Vagrant Viking and Louise Dickinson Rich's We Took To The Woods.
Collier, a young Englishman who first came to Canada in 1919, married a quarter-breed Indian girl, then with wife, small child, a wagon, and thirty dollars, took off into the primitive wilderness of British Columbia where he had been granted sole trapping rights to 150,000 acres. There in a frighteningly remote area they built their home and almost single-handedly brought the barren wilderness back to life, in the process, creating a truly remarkable family relationship.
When Collier first came to this land it was parched, exhausted by constant forest fires. Seven hours by wagon from the nearest trading post, their only neighbors were moose, bears, timber wolves, and coyotes. With back-breaking labor Eric and his wife Lillian personally rebuilt beaver dams and farmed the wilderness. The net result was that the whole water table of the area rose, bringing back with it not only beavers, but muskrats, owls, deer, moose, geese, ducks –a full complement of wildlife. The achievement of the Collier's has been recognized by the British Columbia Game Department as a prime example of what a few individuals can do to bring back the natural wealth of an area.
Although the story does concern itself throughout with the struggle of Eric, Lillian, and their son, Veasy, with the land, this is only a part of their great adventure.
At first the Colliers were so poor they had to rely on the desperate expedient of tossing a lighted torch into a bear cave to get a winter's supply of grease. Their whole existence depended on Eric's success as a hunter. There is a wonderful story of Eric hunting a coyote on a saddle horse in the middle of the winter with thirty inches of snow on the ground and 20-degree-below-zero temperatures. There is the dramatic account of a four-year fight against a vicious wolf. There was the time when Lillian was almost killed by a renegade moose – the 1400-pound moose charged Lillian and came within a few feet of her before Eric was able to shoot. One particularly exciting chapter concerns the heroism of Lillian. In midwinter with her husband desperately sick with Flu, she had to rescue her equally ill son in a hair-raising dash across an icebound lake at night.
Through years of high adventure the Collier family fought the wilderness, learned to live with it and in the end achieved an extraordinary victory. THREE AGAINST THE WILDERNESS is an inspiring portrait of a remarkable family, their deep mutual affection, and their triumphant fight.
"Three Against the Wilderness by Eric Collier is an extraordinarily vivid account of a family struggle for survival." —JOHN KIERAN
—from the dust jacket
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