Ripples, About the Author

About the Author

 

Jerry England is a family historian, canoeist and writer who lives in Chatsworth, California.

Since 2011, he has written a blog titled, "A Drifting Cowboy Blogspot."  The stated goal for writing his blog is, "to leave to my grandsons the answers to the questions I wished I had asked my granddad."

Jerry is also a cowboy activist, a Western movie historian, and a folk artist. His cowboy and fur trade legacy can be back-trailed for more than twelve generations across the forests and prairies of North America.

Jerry explains,

"I've always known I had some distant relatives that were French-Canadian, but until recently I didn't know anything about them.

Yet, somehow deep within my DNA, I've always carried a burning desire to learn about North America's fur trade, and her mystical forest dwellers.

More than that, I've had a love affair with canoes and canoeing for 60 years. When I was a teenager, in the late 1950s, I rented canoes at Bass Lake, near Yosemite.

In 1974, I bought my first canoe, and promptly made two float trips down the Owens River in California's Eastern Sierras. Since then I have paddled hundreds of lakes and rivers across North America.

Some of my most cherished memories are of canoe trips to the Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Ontario's Algonquin Park, Wyoming's Snake River, and the upper Missouri River in Montana.

In the Boundary Waters, 1986

In a 2011 breakthrough, I discovered my French-Canadian roots, and learned that I share the DNA with more than a hundred French-Canadians that were involved in the fur trade between 1620 and 1820.

I guess it explains my love of canoeing, and those magical silent places that can only be reached by paddle and portage."

Jerry with his vintage Old Town Canoe at Wishon Reservoir, California, 2011

NEXT: Bibliography... http://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2017/03/bibliography-introduction-contents-and.html


Return to beginning of book… http://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2017/03/ripples-introduction-contents-and.html

Index - Ripples from La Prairie Voyageur Canoes

http://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2017/03/index-ripples-from-la-prairie-voyageur.html