They came north like a storm surge of humanity, those wartime workers driven by the forces of World War II. Men and women, black and white, civilian and military, they outnumbered and effectively overwhelmed the largely Native population of Canada's northwest. Under harsh and unfamiliar conditions, they built what the war effort needed - airfields, roads, pipelines. Then, like a storm tide when the winds have passed, they receded from the North, leaving both the terrain and themselves forever changed.

To use their own description, in these pages Canadian historians Ken Coates and Bill Morrison "explore the realities of the experience of northern workers" of the time. They aim to record the uncommon efforts of the common people so often left out of history texts, and they incorporate the workers' own recollections and documents as well as the official records scattered throughout archives in the North and in the national capitals of Canada and the United States.

Thus Working the North captures an intimacy and level of anecdotal experience rarely found in scholarly studies of the period.