Lady Lumberjack: Dorothea Mitchell at Silver Mountain is a story of pioneering adventure, early days of Northwestern Ontario mining and forestry, wilderness homesteading southwest of today's Thunder Bay, colourful characters, frontier railroading about a British-born trailblazer breaking into a tough business world long before the doors were open to women.
In the early 1900s, after the Silver Mountain Mines closed, besides running a general store and railway station, she owned/operated a sawmill and became known as "Lady Lumberjack". Lady Lumberjack tells of old-time bush logging and milling, contests for business and the struggle to be paid, the discouragements of intensely cold weather and a disastrous fire, the fun of a mixed mining and forest industry region, where Dorothea Mitchell was one of the "boys" - but still very much a lady.
Dorothea Mitchell was also the first unmarried woman in Ontario to be granted a homestead, later scripted and acted in Canada's first feature film, A Race for Ties, and was 90-years-old when her first book, the best-selling Lady Lumberjack, was published.
Lady Lumberjack: Dorothea Mitchell at Silver Mountain is her original book published in 1967. Out-of-print for many years, it is now reissued as part of the renaissance of the historic Silver Mountain and area.
Lady Lumberjack by Dorothea Mitchel