If the raconteurs of the Ottawa Valley could tell but one story it would be the story of Sagganosh, the brash young Scot, Angus Dunkeld, who came in 1857 bereft of his Scottish inheritance to make a new beginning in the Valley. He faces a white hot inferno on the steamboat Montreal. He attempts to carve from the pathless Upper Ottawa Valley wilderness a homestead where the only crop must be rocks. He plunges into the arduous life of the lumberman’s shanty, where he will be hated for his uppity ways and his very name.

Expecting help from his relatives, he faces indifference, hostility. He will accept the kindness of strangers such as James Dunlop and James Carmichael despite attempts made to kill him.

Will he marry the languorous Maurie despite the fact that she is both Irish and Catholic and he a Scots Presbyterian? What will the people in Pembroke say? Will he escape the malice of the French shantyman, Rene Perrault? And what of Rene’s dusky Algonkin wife, Agwacone, who knows that the Valley belongs to her people and that Angus is only a brash interloper?

The new Dunkeld Dynasty will be carved from the wilderness. But at what cost? A must read for all who love the Ottawa Valley.