Curwood traveled to Hudson's Bay on his honeymoon and found he was creatively inspired by nature, the mountains, the wilderness, and the unknown. Over the course of his writing career, he completed many novels in the Canadian northern wilderness in cabins he often built with his own hands. Curwood lived many of the stories about which he wrote. He and Ethel Greenwood Curwood would for months bury themselves in the wilderness hundreds of miles from civilization. With wilderness as the background, his novels were infused with adventure and romance. A flavoring of the novels can be sensed, in part, by the titles, for example, Philip Steel of the Royal Mounted (Bobbs-Merrill, 1911), The Honor of the Big Snows (Bobbs-Merrill, 1911), Isobel: A Romance of the Northern Trail (Harper and Brothers, 1913) and The Valley of Silent Men (Cosmopolitan Book Corp., 1920).
Ethel Curwood setting up camp and gathering firewood on her honeymoon in the Canadian wilderness with James Oliver Curwood.
“ Tonight I am in a little cabin in the heart of a great wilderness. Outside it is dark. I can hear the wind sighing in the thick spruce tops. I hear the laughter of a stream out of which I took my supper of trout. The People of the Night are awake, for a little while ago I heard a wolf howl, and, not far away, in an old stub, lives an owl that hoots at the light in my window. I think it’s going to storm. There is heaviness in the air, and, in the drowse of it, the sweetness of distant rain….I am strangely contented as I start writing….My secret to happiness”
Ethel Curwood at their honeymoon cabin which they built and lived in for a year.