From the Publisher
Carl Dunrud's posthumously published memoir gives us a vivid feel for the textures of times and places which have mostly been irretrievably lost or altered. Dunrud candidly chronicles the tough and wild times of a young Western man buffeted by the events of his time: homestead experiments on the northern Montana prairie; the Army's horse units of World War One, and employment as a Yellowstone National Park poaching guard and predator-shooting ranger. His faithful recollection of details and the generous photos in "Let's Go" are valuable for their glimpses of the early 20th Century West, a time of upheaval, experimentation and transition from frontier opportunities and excesses, hardships and adventures, to more crowded times of fences, technology and ease of travel. His Arctic observations have a refreshing innocence in these days of pretentious "adventure travel" writings. (Patrick Dawson reports on the Northern Rockies for TIME and is the author of "Mr. Rodeo: The Big Bronc Years of Leo Cremer" (1986) and "The Montana Cowboy," with photography by David Stoecklein (1998)
From the Inside Flap
Carl Dunrud, a full-blooded Norwegian, was born in Minnesota in 1891. He was mostly self-educated, having left school in the fourth grade to help on the family farm. Among the adventures of his eighty-five year life were: his wholesome and sometimes mischievous boyhood in a family of many children, homesteading in Montana during repeated ravages of hail, working as a ranger in the early days of Yellowstone Park, going on an expedition to Greenland to rope polar bear and other animals in the ocean for the American Museum of Natural History, being shipwrecked north of the Arctic Circle, establishing a dude ranch in northwestern Wyoming, where his most famous guest was Amelia Earhart, and outfitting and cooking for oil companies in the wilds of Alaska. This is the self-told story of a man who didn't know what it meant to give up, who was both courageous and modest, and who had the consistent optimistic attitude of "Let's Go!"
