Book excerpts: 'We are still part of those frontiers'

Book excerpts on Minnesota and Canada's boundary lakes:

"There were no reliable maps of the area in the nineteenth century, and no way through. Except the route that voyageurs had been paddling for a hundred years."

Porter Fox, "Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border"

"No secluded backwaters were the boundary lakes, but part of a busy thoroughfare to empire, teeming with life and incident as long as the fur trade flourished."

Grace Lee Nute, "The Voyageur's Highway"

"It is good for us to recall the hardihood and simplicities that period represents, for we are still part of those frontiers and will survive because of what they gave us."

Sigurd Olson, "Reflections from the North Country"

"We were eager to reach our favorite canoe country, the Quetico-Superior, and glad to leave this monotonous sequence of lakes and portages. The long expanses of water in the eastern lakes, interrupted neither by islands or deceptive bays, and the absence of challenging rivers, made this route the one favored by the voyageurs, whose only concern was easy travel."

J. Arnold Bolz, "Portage into the Past"

"The canoe is perfectly designed for two seemingly contrary functions — floating upon the surface of things and getting beneath the surface of things. There is no craft more at home in the world of reflections — rocks, trees, birds, clouds, stars — or better suited for exploring the hidden shorelines of reflections within reflections. What does it mean that there are stars, more than the mind can comprehend? That there is a universe at all?"

Douglas Wood, "Fawn Island"