James Oliver Curwood was born in Owosso, Michigan on June 12, 1878, the son of James Moran Curwood and Abigail (Griffen) Curwood. His father was a cobbler and operated a shop in Westtown until Curwood was six years old.

When his business failed, the family moved to a farm in Erie County, Ohio. James' job on the farm was to pick up stones. Later he remembered this time as helping to build character. It was also here that he began to write stories at the age of nine. When James was thirteen the family returned to Owosso.

Some of Curwood's first short stories were published while he was a teen, but he was not paid for these works. His first story to be sold was "Across the Range" for $5 to Gray Goose. He was to have may more stories and more than 30 books published during his lifetime. River's End was the first book to sell more than 100,000 copies in its first edition.

In 1909, Curwood took his first trip into the Canadian Northwest. For the next 18 years he would spend up to six months of each year in the wilderness, exploring, writing, and building log cabins. He wrote in the woods, under a tree in Owosso's Harmon-Partridge Park, in his log cabins (including one built along the Ausable River near Roscommon which was eventually built into a lodge), at home, and at his studio which resembles a small castle.

Curwood was an avid hunter until about ten years before his death. While on a hunting trip in the Rockies, he saw a large bear he called Thor. He tried to shoot him three times in three weeks. One day as Thor approached him, he slipped and fell, breaking his gun. The bear reared up before walking away. Curwood turned from hunting for trophies to championing the cause of wild things.

His philosophy was to lead to his active campaigning for the preservation of Michigan's natural resources. He wanted to limit or even close hunting seasons, including the season for spikehorn deer. He was interested in stocking streams and game preserves, as well as reforestation.

On January 1, 1927 he was appointed to the Michigan Conservation Commission. He was also instrumental in planning and building the Shiawassee Conservation Club.

Baree, Son of Kazan

Preface by James Oliver Curwood

Since the publication of my two animal books, "Kazan, the Wolf Dog" and "The Grizzly King," I have received so many hundreds of letters from friends of wild animal life, all of which were more or less of an inquiring nature, that I have been encouraged to incorporate in this preface of the third of my series--"Baree, Son of Kazan"--something more of my desire and hope in writing of wild life, and something of the foundation of fact whereupon this and its companion books have been written.

I have always disliked the preaching of sermons in the pages of romance. It is like placing a halter about an unsuspecting reader's neck and dragging him into paths for which he may have no liking. But if fact and truth produce in the reader's mind a message for himself, then a work has been done. That is what I hope for in my nature books.

The American people are not and never have been lovers of wild life. As a nation we have gone after Nature with a gun.

And what right, you may ask, has a confessed slaughterer of wild life such as I have been to complain?

None at all, I assure you. I have twenty-seven guns--and I have used them all. I stand condemned as having done more than my share toward extermination.

But that does not lessen the fact that I have learned; and in learning I have come to believe that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into the homes and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made and their lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever a heart beats it is very much like our own in the final analysis of things.

To see a bird singing on a twig means but little; but to live a season with that bird, to be with it in courting days, in matehood and motherhood, to understand its griefs as well as its gladness means a great deal.

And in my books it is my desire to tell of the lives of the wild things which I know as they are actually lived. It is not my desire to humanize them. If we are to love wild animals so much that we do not want to kill them we MUST KNOW THEM AS THEY ACTUALLY LIVE. And in their lives, in the facts of their lives, there is so much of real and honest romance and tragedy, so much that makes them akin to ourselves that the animal biographer need not step aside from the paths of actuality to hold one's interest.

Perhaps rather tediously I have come to the few words I want to say about Baree, the hero of this book. Baree, after all, is only another Kazan. For it was Kazan I found in the way I have described--a bad dog, a killer about to be shot to death by his master when chance, and my own faith in him, gave him to me.

We traveled together for many thousands of miles through the northland--on trails to the Barren Lands, to Hudson's Bay and to the Arctic. Kazan--the bad dog, the half-wolf, the killer--was the best four-legged friend I ever had. He died near Fort MacPherson, on the Peel River, and is buried there. And Kazan was the father of Baree; Gray Wolf, the full-blooded wolf, was his mother. Nepeese, the Willow, still lives near God's Lake; and it was in the country of Nepeese and her father that for three lazy months I watched the doings at Beaver Town, and went on fishing trips with Wakayoo, the bear.

Sometimes I have wondered if old Beaver Tooth himself did not in some way understand that I had made his colony safe for his people. It was Pierrot's trapping ground; and to Pierrot--father of Nepeese--I gave my best rifle on his word that he would not harm my beaver friends for two years. And the people of Pierrot's breed keep their word. Wakayoo, Baree's big bear friend, is dead. He was killed as I have described, in that "pocket" among the ridges, while I was on a jaunt to Beaver Town.

We were becoming good friends and I missed him a great deal. The story of Pierrot and of his princess wife, Wyola, is true; they are buried side by side under the tall spruce that stood near their cabin.

Pierrot's murderer, instead of dying as I have told it, was killed in his attempt to escape the Royal Mounted farther west.

When I last saw Baree he was at Lac Seul House, where I was the guest of Mr. William Patterson, the factor; and the last word I heard from him was through my good friend Frank Aldous, factor at White Dog Post, who wrote me only a few weeks ago that he had recently seen Nepeese and Baree and the husband of Nepeese, and that the happiness he found in their far wilderness home made him regret that he was a bachelor.

I feel sorry for Aldous. He is a splendid young Englishman, unattached, and some day I am going to try and marry him off. I have in mind someone at the present moment--a fox-trapper's daughter up near the Barren, very pretty, and educated at a missioner's school; and as Aldous is going with me on my next trip I may have something to say about them in the book that is to follow "Baree, Son of Kazan."

James Oliver Curwood

Owosso, Michigan

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