Arctic Exodus: The Last Great Trail Drive

Arctic Exodus: The Last Great Trail Drive by North, Dick. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9781592286683.

Arctic Exodus is the dramatic story of one of the greatest trail drives in the history of North America. In 1929, Andrew Bahr, “The Arctic Moses,” and his small band of herders started out from Alaska with three thousand reindeer, intending to cover the fifteen hundred miles to the Mackenzie Delta in eighteen months. Bahr was seventy at the time, and the reindeer were needed as domestic animals for tribes living above the Arctic Circle. While the rest of the world was reeling from the Depression, Bahr and his men would face the challenges of seventy-below temperatures, blizzards, prowling wolves, twenty-four-hour days in summer, boggy tundra, mosquitoes, and ornery reindeer. In the end, their perilous journey would take more than five years to complete--one mountain range took an entire year to cross--and he ended the trip with roughly the same number of reindeer, having raised as many as he lost. With riveting detail, Dick North brings the characters, the setting, and the spirit of the trail drive to life in this classic Arctic adventure tale. There will never be another like it.