Safarik Saddles up and Rides the Range

Swede’s Ferry

by Allan Safarik
Coteau Books
$19.95/272 pp.

What we got here is a duster wherein the good guy is the bad guy, or mayhap t’other way around; the bad guy is a pretty good guy, who, that’s “Tall Bob” Simpson, whilst on leave from his day job as a North-West Mounted Policeman, holds up the First National Bank in Bismarck, North Dakota, in May 1894, accidentally leaving an angry bullet hole the Bank Manager’s forehead, gallops north to cross the Souris River on Swede’s Ferry, hightails her back across the line to Canada as fast as his fleet  chestnut horse with three white stockings and a bullet grazed rump will carry him, stops by to visit his ailing Mom in Brandon, and then dekes back to Regina to hunker down and lay low in Mountie headquarters.

I don’t reckon it makes no never mind that I know Allan Safarik but I thought I’d get “full disclosure” out of the way right off the bat. He’s a friend. He published my first book. I like him. There. And I’ve known him for forty some years and always savoured his poetry but I didn’t know he knew a diddley squat about which end of a horse the fodder goes in. Reckon he does.

James J. Hill, President of the newly empty First National Bank in Bismarck, also owned the Great Northern Railway, whose payroll turns up missing from said bare bank.  Hill was pissed off. He calls in head honcho of the Pinkerton (“We Never Sleep”) National Detective Agency, William Pinkerton, and charges him with getting his damn money back, in the near soon if not before. Pinkerton unleashes his sleazy henchman Jiggs Dubois to recover the money and bring in the head of the varmint what took it.

And another thing. I didn’t know Safarik knew beans about guns neither. Well he does. The gun that started it all was Tall Bob’s police issue Enfield Mark II .476 revolver.  The rifle that coulda’  ended it all the same day it started was an old nine pound Civil War muzzle-loading .58 caliber Springfield musket wielded by a kid who could barely lift the sucker. The gun that fired the last shot and ended it all for certain sure was Bud Quigley’s Remington Double Derringer, Model 95, .41 caliber rim fire.

James Hill, now, he didn’t pack a gun at all. He used a hired gun if he felt the need. William Pinkerton relied on his personal body-guard, Edgar Haines, who used a Volcanic leaver-action .41 caliber repeater. Dirty Dubois packed a brace of Merwin Hulbert .30s in shoulder rigs in each armpit. Pinkerton Detective Balfour Smith favoured a snub-nosed Webley Bulldog, a powerful  .455 caliber hand cannon.

But just because there were all those guns in this drama doesn’t mean it’s a shoot’m up bloodbath kinda book. Au contraire. Some folks do get plugged but there are far more horses ventilated than people. But back to the story.

The law dogs in this tale are sure nothing to write home about. Bismarck Sheriff John Humphrey was a nice enough old fart but he had the gout, a bad back and a case of the screaming hemorrhoids so severe he was loathe to lower his ravaged rear end onto the hurricane deck of even the gentlest old plug.

A little farther north, Gerry Whatshisname, head law enforcement officer of the generally peaceful burg of Bottineau, N.D., was a good old boy who didn`t even bother to carry a gun at all. He shuffled about town in his bedroom slippers with a cherub smile on his face; his occupation, or preoccupation, being to spend as much quality time as possible between the Widow Murphy’s comforting sheets.

And meanwhile, over to Regina, NWMP Commissioner Lawrence W. Herchmer wasn`t about to tell the American rent-a-cops nuthin.  Just damn “Yankee riffraff“ he allowed.

Dubois and his sidekick, Balfour Smith, were dispatched to Mountie headquarters in Regina to get their man. They have an ace in the hole in Regina in the form of two Pinkerton retained spies right in the heart of Mountie headquarters. Two working ladies, Lilly Flett and Bonnie Blondon, ply their ancient trade above a Chinese restaurant in Regina’s warehouse district where, as Bonnie opined – “There`s no place information flows like in bed.”

Caught in the middle of the cross-border cops and robber intrigue is humble horse-trader Bud Quigley, whose spread is only a few miles north of the boundary in Manitoba. Quigley favours a 12 gauge side-by-side, 18“ barrel, Parker shotgun; generally has a .44 caliber Model 3 Smith & Wesson pistol handy, and  a back-up over-and-under .41 caliber derringer in his shirt pocket.

This rollicking romp across the prairies is not just a cool chase book, it’s great historical fiction as well; chock full of detail about life in them days, the folks that lived it, the horses they rode, the guns they used or didn’t use as well as their usually closet confined skeletons.

Hot damn. I enjoyed this book. Thanks Allan. But don’t take my word for it folks. Get the book and find out for your own self. As for me, I can’t hardly wait for the movie.

Jim Green is a celebrated storyteller, poet, writer, broadcaster, and entertainer who’s been hiding out in the Northwest Territories for more than forty years.

LIFE IN THE OLD NORTH

“I never wanted to be a cop. Christ, I didn’t want to spend my life handing out traffic tickets. I joined the RCMP so I could get up north. There was nothing more to it.”

So opens this illuminating book about fours years in the life of Bill White, one of the most unlikely of cops ever to build an igloo.

Written entirely in the first person by Patrick White (no relation to Bill), this tale will captivate arctic buffs, RCMP enthusiasts, historians and everybody else interested in a first hand glimpse of  “the best years of my life;” how it was in the central arctic in the early 1930s. Life in the old north.

“I decided to join up with an eye on getting to the Arctic as soon as possible.” After basic training in Regina: “…really nothing more than a modified Boy Scouts program,” Bill began his career herding naked Doukhobours and chasing bootleggers along the US border in Saskatchewan. He applied for arctic service and was transferred to Vancouver, there to await transport north.

Bill shipped out of Vancouver aboard the St. Roch under the command of the legendary Henry Larsen in June 1930, bound for the arctic.

The book dishes up a smorgasbord of written and visual delicacies (there are 80 some black and white photographs throughout); snapshots of the old police posts at Herschel Island, Baillie Island, Bernard Harbour, Coppermine and Cambridge Bay as the St. Roch flounders in frigid swells, scrapes through pack ice, bounces off reefs, dodges bergs and slams across sand bars.

Bill meets arctic veterans like trader Charlie Klengenberg and his son Patsy, Ikey Bolt who married Charlie’s daughter Etna, Gjoa Haven Canalaska trader George Washington Porter, Tree River Hudson’s Bay trader Otto Binder and Mrs. Pannigabluk Stefansson. He befriends Sam Carter, Mahik and L. A. Learmouth. In fact, he and Learmouth once liberated three quarts of alcohol from the compass of the good ship Maud, by then a half submerged derelict in Cambridge Bay, and the two’m ended up having a fine old time.

Learning to live in the country, Bill was taught how to build an igloo, hunt caribou and seals. He spent the better part of each summer in a fish camp at Wellington Bay. And he got to go trapping too, albeit illegally, bringing in $3,500.00 in white foxes one year; quite a boost to his $700.00 annual salary.
A census took him over 700 miles by dog team to count 750 northern folk widely scattered over a wide chunk of real estate. Another trip took him a thousand miles by dogs to retrieve a body and witnesses in an alleged murder case.

Returning south to another land and another life, Bill finally revisited Cambridge Bay in June of 1974, went fishing with Bill Lyall and had tea again with Angulalik and his old friend Mahik.

“On a windy autumn day, snow crunching underfoot, two active Mounties, a priest and two Inuit elders stood on Mount Pelly, the hill overlooking Cambridge Bay, with Bill’s ashes.” It was the fall of 2001. Constable Dean Larkin let the wind scatter Bill’s mortal remains in the one place in the world where he had always felt he belonged. Bill White was home.

This may Patrick’s White’s first book but he’s sure enough learned how to use his tools. Patrick has done a bang up job of rendering Bill’s adventures imminently readable, historically sound and immensely enjoyable. Feet up beside the wood stove, Mountie in Mukluks was a fine trip for me.

Here’s a note of explanation about this review.
I have a whole passel of personal connections with this book. Not only did I once live on the arctic coast for several years, I’ve fished the mouth of the river that almost took Bill’s life.  I was still living in Toloyoak in 1974 when Bill White made his return trip to Cam. Bay after 40 years, though I didn’t know it at the time. I’ve walked and crawled all over the St. Roch in its permanent berth at the Vancouver Maritime Museum and visited Pasley Bay on the Boothia Peninsula where it once overwintered in the ice. Thanks to James Eetoolook and Pat Lyall I’ve visited almost every landfall along the ice coast the St. Roch stopped into the summer of 1930.
Then, while living on the Sunshine Coast in 1975, the author’s father, Howard White (they aren’t related to Bill), loaned me a copy of Bill’s original 175 page manuscript. I thought it a dry read, historically questionable in places and grossly over opinionated. In fact, when Bill asked me what I thought of it, I told him I figured his opinions were as valid as anybody else’s’. Holy poop! “Opinions,” he bellowed, and that was the end of that politically incorrect conversation.
Jim