"Tiger" Dunlop's Statistical Sketches of Upper Canada, for the Use of Emigrants: By a Backwoodsman (1832) will not provide statistics on the Canadian settlements in the years before the 1837 rebellion. Nor will his Recollections of the American War, 1812-14 (1905) give insight into the causes and implications of the 1812 War between the British Canadas and the United States. They will give a sense of the huge, energetic, eccentric author, glorying in his own oddities as well as in the raw, envigorating life of the frontier. They give also the pleasure of seeing the writer wrestle his experiences in battle and in the backwoods into vivid, sophisticated style.

William Dunlop was born in Greenock, Scotland, and received a medical education at the University of Glasgow in a time when Scotland was bursting with creativity and achievement in science, political thought, architecture, and engineering, as well as literature. Self-confidence and self-discipline were...