Liza Piper captures with detail and insight an essential episode in northern environmental history … in telling this story Piper provides an immensely valuable perspective not just on northern history, but on the practice of environmental history itself … she also exhibits an impressive sensitivity for the meanings embedded in both action and language. But where she especially excels is in situating this history in a specific place, and in invoking its material basis in living organisms: lakes and rivers, water and ice, earth and fire. This history has dirt under its fingernails. - Stephen Bocking (Northern Review, Fall 2009)
