Pierre and His People is the short-story collection that launched the remarkable career of Sir Gilbert Parker. Born in Ontario, Canada, Parker drew on his childhood memories for some of the characters he describes, and he writes in a style as crisp as the cold in the glacial Northwest. Pretty Pierre is the recurrent figure who links these eighteen stories of Indians, gold- and adventure-seekers and red-coated Mounties in the nineteenth century. Pierre is a young gambler called "pretty" for the red tinge on his cheeks, but Parker adds to the figure: "small and beautiful, silent and deadly." Stories range from the hard realities of "The Patrol of the Cypress Hills," to the ghostly horseman in "The Scarlet Hunter," to the tall-tale bluster of "Shon McGann"s Toboggan Ride." (Shon slides down a glacier in a gold-miner"s pan.) Thanks to the success of this 1892 collection, Parker became a novelist, a newspaperman in Australia, a traveler through the South Pacific, and a member of the English Parliament. Or as Pierre says, "The higher we go, the faster we live."