It is still Iskwatam - the "door" which opens to the lower reaches of the Athabasca, the Slave, and the Mackenzie. It is somewhat difficult to find on the map, yet it is there, because its history is written in more than a hundred and forty years of romance and tragedy and adventure in the lives of men, and is not easily forgotten. Over the old trail it was about a hundred and fifty miles north of Edmonton. The railroad has brought it nearer to that base of civilization, but beyond it the wilderness still howls as it has howled for a thousand years, and the waters of a continent flow north and into the Arctic Ocean. It is possible that the beautiful dream of the real-estate dealers may come true, for the most avid of all the sportsmen of the earth, the money-hunters, have come up on the bumpy railroad that sometimes lights its sleeping cars with lanterns, and with them have come typewriters, and stenographers, and the art of printing advertisements, and the Golden Rule of those who sell handfuls of earth to hopeful purchasers thousands of miles away - "Do others as they would do you." And with it, too, has come the legitimate business of barter and trade, with eyes on all that treasure of the North which lies between the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca and the edge of the polar sea.

    It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction - at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful - and completely unforgettable.

    I seem to hear swift passing feet -- The Christ Child in the snow." Reba, the minister's new wife, was spirited, vigorous, courageous, and clever. She was also invincibly, incurably happy -- so that the minister seemed to grow younger every year. Reba doubled his joys and halved his burdens, tossing them from one of her fine shoulders to the other like feathers. She swept into the quiet village life of Beulah like a salt sea breeze. Now she has a plan -- one involving a few small verses she has penned. For there are rebellious youths and some contention in the church that threatens to split it . . .

    Rucker Blakeslee, elopes with Miss Love Simpson. He is barely three weeks a widower, and she is only half his age and a Yankee to boot. As their marriage inspires a whirlwind of local gossip, fourteen-year-old Will Tweedy suddenly finds himself eyewitness to a family scandal, and that’s where his adventures begin.Cold Sassy Tree is the undeniably entertaining and extraordinarily moving account of small-town Southern life in a bygone era. Brimming with characters who are wise and loony, unimpeachably pious and deliciously irreverent, Olive Ann Burns’s classic bestseller is a timeless, funny, and resplendent treasure.

    It was first published in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine in October, 1912. The character was so popular that Burroughs continued the series into the 1940s with two dozen sequels.