Lure of the Labrador Wild

"How would you like to go to Labrador, Wallace?" It was a snowy night in late November, 1901, that my friend, Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., asked me this question. All day he and I had been tramping through the snow among the Shawangunk Mountains in southern New York, and when the shades of evening fell we had built a lean-to of boughs to shelter us from the storm. Now that we had eaten our supper of bread and bacon, washed down with tea, we lay before our roaring campfire, luxuriating in its glow and warmth.

The Labrador interior has long held the well-deserved reputation of being one of the most inhospitable places on earth. It is a patchwork of Canadian shield granites and sphagnum moss, labyrinthine caribou trails and desolate subarctic barrens, all set against glacier-scoured hills stretching to an apparently limitless horizon.
In the late spring of 1903, Leonidas Hubbard, a young writer, and Dillon Wallace, a forty-year-old New York attorney, set off with George Elson, a native guide with no firsthand knowledge of their destination, to explore the incompletely mapped Lake Michikamau region of interior Labrador. Beset by delays, the men paddled past their intended route, the Naskaupi River, and headed up the treacherous Susan River instead. When in early September they finally glimpsed the vast waters of Michikamau from the top of an unknown mountain, Labrador’s cold winds had begun. With scant scraps of food remaining, the three began a desperate struggle against starvation and the rapidly approaching and unforgiving winter as they raced home for their lives.