“The Yellowknife Journal is a slim, unusual book and a revealing document. Reproduced, page by page, it is an amazing find: a 200-year-old diary written by a fur trader in an elegant hand on fragile birchbark. Risk, riches and intrigue were one side of the traders? lives; sheer physical physical misery through the long winters was another. Losing fishing hooks or breaking an ax could be catastrophic. Other shortages were merely intensely frustrating. Wrote a colleague of Steinbruck?s in his own journal: ?for the future (if the company) expect a Journal will they Please give me Paper to Keep one.? Steinbruck resorted to birchbark when paper ran out just before the winter of 1802 set in. He must have first weighed the danger of using up birchbark strips that were stockpiled for canoe-patching, since there was no more of it for hundreds of miles. That Steinbruck was no Susanna Moodie but a beleaguered trading clerk makes for some plain, sparse reading, but the surprising fact of the diary’s survival in the hands of a private collector and that readers can actually see it, and read it in its original French or its English translation is fuel for the imagination.” The Hamilton Spectator “Fur traders were required to keep journals of their daily lives, their encounters with nature, their trafficking with natives. Jean Steinbruck, at a North West Company post in the Great Slave Lake area, wrote his 1802-1803 notes on birchbark after he ran out of paper. Nuage has published them as a fascinating facsimile copy, in colour no less, complete with French transcriptions and English translations of the daily entries. The Yellowknife Journalis an extraordinary volume, of interest both as an artifact and as a record of the particulars of one man’s winter. Harry Duckworth’s informative introduction provides a larger perspective.”?The Beaver