“Thundering mustangs!” exclaimed Wes, pointing judicially with his leathery whip butt at the creamy bronco with the girl of super whiteness atop. “Who’s your blinding lady friend, Bob? Talk about sun worshippers! Yon girl must be the center of the solar system!”
—Samuel Alexander White, NORTHWEST PATROL
“Northerns”—tales set in the rough-and-tumble frontier days of Alaska, the Yukon, the Canadian Barrens, the Hudson’s Bay region—were a popular adjunct of the Western story during the first half of this century. The widespread publicity given to the Yukon Gold Rush of 1897–98 and the Alaska Gold Rush a few years later focused attention on that part of the world and stirred the imaginations of armchair as well as actual adventurers. Among the thousands who flocked to the Northland were Jack London and Rex Beach, who went in search of story material as well as precious metal; other writers, such as Robert W. Service and James B. Hendryx, also visited Alaska and the Yukon in the years following the stampedes. Such novels as London’s CALL OF THE WILD, Beach’s THE SPOILERS, and Service’s THE TRAIL OF ’98—and Service’s stirring collection of poems, THE CALL OF THE YUKON—became bestsellers. These in turn spawned thousands of adventure stories and novels and numerous films featuring Far North prospectors, fur trappers, wilderness pilots and explorers, dog-sledders, traders, gamblers, saloonkeepers, outlaws, and officers of the Northwest Mounted Police.
So popular were Northerns in the period between the two World Wars that entire pulp magazines such as North-West Stories (later Northwest Romances), Real Northwest Stories, and Complete Northwest Novel were devoted entirely or in large part to what were billed variously as “Big Outdoor Stories of the West and North,” “Stories of the Wilderness Frontier,” and “Vigorous, Tingling Epics of the Great Snow Frontier.” North-West Stories acquired such a loyal following that it lasted considerably longer than most pulps, nearly 30 years (1925-1952). Northerns could also be found in many issues of such adventure pulps as Short Stories, Adventure, Argosy, Blue Book, and Action Stories; in several of the Western titles, notably Street & Smith’s Western Story; in such slick-paper periodicals as Collier’s, Liberty, and The Saturday Evening Post; and even now and then, surprisingly, in such publications as Coronet, which seldom used fiction.
Substantial literary careers were built by men specializing in the Northern-adventure yarn. James Oliver Curwood, author of such novels as THE ALASKAN and the story collection BACK TO GOD’S COUNTRY, was the most prominent. Another of note was James B. Hendryx, who published 36 novels and collections with Alaska and Yukon settings; his long-running series featuring Black John Smith, leader of an outlaw community on Halfaday Creek who dispenses his own brand of swift justice to those less scrupulous than he, had a large following in such pulps as Adventure and Short Stories and in book form (the 13 Black John collections published between 1935 and 1953 are highly prized by modern collectors). Other practitioners include George Marsh, who wrote acclaimed stories of the Hudson’s Bay country; Robert Ormond Case, creator of an excellent series of novels about a pilot, remittance man, and adventurer named Ravenhill; and William Byron Mowery, who concocted stories about Mounties, wilderness treks, and Northland mystery with equal aplomb.
Prominent writers of traditional Westerns occasionally took a flyer at a Northern, some with satisfactory results: William MacLeod Raine’s THE YUKON TRAIL, Charles Alden Seltzer’s GONE NORTH, Max Brand’s TORTURE TRAIL, Luke Short’s THE BARREN LAND MURDERS, and Harry Sinclair Drago’s THE SNOW PATROL. A handful of others alternated between Westerns and Northern adventure, among them Courtney Riley Cooper, whose END OF STEEL is an eye-opening account of early railroad-building in Alaska, and Frank Richardson Pierce, primarily a pulp fictioneer who produced more than a hundred tales of bush piloting, dog-sledding, and other Far North pursuits, the best of which are contained in his 1950 small-press collection, RUGGED ALASKA STORIES.
Among all the glittering sagas of the North, naturally, were works of an alternative nature. Even such magazines as North-West Stories, as well-edited as any pulp, were not above publishing a clunker now and then. The lending-library houses occasionally included Northerns as part of their Western lists, and in fact two LLP regulars furnished several titles each. One was Charles S. Strong, whose Charles Stoddard byline appears on more than a dozen Arcadia House, Dodge, Gateway, and Phoenix Press Northerns (most of which, despite melodramatic prose, have an authentic and entertaining flavor); the other was Samuel Alexander White, a Phoenix mainstay in the ’30s and early ’40s, whose work has a distinctively alternative flavor. The redoubtable Archie Jos-celyn tried his hand at a Northern at least once. And in England, there were a number of homegrown scriveners of varying degrees of alternative merit.
The percentage of quality-challenged Northerns, however, is much lower than that among traditional Westerns, perhaps because the specialized knowledge required to write one convincingly enough for publication deterred those who not only preferred conventional tales of hoofbeats and blazing sixguns but could write them with no more research than could be found in a jug of coffin varnish. Still, the dedicated prospector can find enough gold to justify a short chapter such as this one.
We’ll commence with THE FROZEN TRAIL, a rousing 1924 saga of “the wild Klondike, the rough Northern adventurers, the Northwest Mounted Police, the snow and mountain peaks...all combined into a book of action, written with all the untamed vigor of the country which it depicts,” according to the dust-jacket blurb. The author was British thriller and adventure writer Austin J. Small, who is best known for such lurid mystery/horror tales— published under his own name and the pseudonym Seamark—as THE MAN THEY COULDN’T ARREST, THE DEATH MAKER, and THE AVENGING RAY. THE FROZEN TRAIL appears to have been his only novel of the snowy wastes, though he did perpetrate a number of Northern shorts, some of which can be found in posthumous Seamark collections published in the ’30s.
What makes this novel alternative, aside from the highly improbable adventures it chronicles, is the rather strange and hot-blooded dialogue that issues from heroes and villains alike. No noose-dodger in any other Northern sounds quite like Bully Magain, leader of a gang of vicious river rats who terrorize the good citizens of Cedar Falls, Yukon Territory:
“Gentlemen, I’m the lord of creation! Did you know that? Well, I’m telling you. I’m the lord high Boss of the Universe and I’m coming round in a minute to pull all your noses. You ought to be proud of it. Tain’t often I find time to call around on Cedar Falls, but when I do, I guess I do the honours proper. And in acknowledgment of same, Cedar Falls is going to lick my boots!”
“Hey! you babes and suckers, I’m Bully Magain, I am! I’m first cousin to a bull buffalo. I’m the toughest, roughest, cussedest cuss on the whole blamed line River! I’m the li’l’ feller that keeps the Canadian Mounted on the jump! I eat bear meat raw! Hear that, you swabs? I take my meat warm off the bone. I’m a fighter, I am— and...I’ll learn you half-suckled no-goods what it means to wear man clothes in a man country!”
One of Bully’s henchmen, Coldwater Griff, is no less gnarly, even when he’s talking to the Boss of the Universe himself:
“Aw! you make me tired!” he growled. “You’re one of them unbe-lievin’ Jews who won’t believe your own darn death till yeh spook crawls out’n yeh body and shins down the tree to get a ground-floor view of its corpsy [sic] danglin’ on a branch!”
Nor has any Northern hero ever slung words in quite the same way as Robert Endersley, gold hunter, lover, and all-around skook-um he-wolf. Here he is, speaking first to Bull Magain in a barroom showdown—
“You’re the ugliest, nastiest, least-useful swab that ever hit Creation. The Devil himself got up with a liver the day you were born. If sin was coloured, you’d look pickled. The earth will heave a sigh of relief the day you go back into it. Wherever you die, your grave will be a standing insult to the country you are buried in. For three pins I’d push the nose clean off you.”
—and later to his lady love, June Royal, who is engaged in beating the crap out of Coldwater Griff with a whip after Endersley, weak and wounded, had “shot his bolt” by hurling some flower pots at Griff, “the shock and sudden demonical exertion” of which “had set up a chaotic twitching of muscles and tendons long since fallen into the coma of desuetude”:
“Soak him, lassie! Take the hide off him! Give him what he’s given Nell, whoever she is; give him what he was going to give you! Sock into him, lassie; cut him up; pickle him! Gee! You’re the greatest he-girl that ever breathed!”
As hard-boiled as are Bull Magain and Coldwater Griff, they can’t hold a hogleg to the villain who lopes through the pages of THE BULL MOOSE, a 1931 masterpiece by Ridgwell Cullum. Another Brit who penned several Far North tales—HOUND OF THE NORTH, CHILD OF THE NORTH, THE WOLF PACK, THE MYSTERY OF THE BARREN LANDS are some of the others—Cullum is probably best known for THE VAMPIRE OF N’GOBI, a well-regarded fantasy/horror tale set in the African jungle. He seems to have actually visited the Canadian wilderness, since his settings not only are elaborately described but have the ring of authenticity; but when it came to devising a believable story, he often fell short of the mark. In THE BULL MOOSE he fell so far short he couldn’t have found the mark with a company of Cree Indian trackers.
The featured players in this Northland epic are a tough prospector, Jim McBarr; his “granite-hard Scottish dame,” one Marthe, who is reputed to be “as soulless as a bank without its honesty”; their illegitimate son, 20-year-old Sandy; Wanita, a beautiful half-breed (who is “charmingly naked” when we first meet her); Inspector Jack Danvers of the Northwest Mounted Police; Scut Barber, a shrewd drunk who one night “surprised his blankets with a wholly sober body”; and Faro Neale, a “hard-shell gunman” and gambler, whose “manhood was rather magnificent” and whose philosophy of life is, “It’s no sort o’ use blinkin’ things. If you’re huntin’ dollars it’s a full-time game that don’t leave you play time fer sweatin’ around.”
The setting is the Kaska Indian country and the Valley of the Moose, through which runs the gold-rich Alikine River and in which is Reliance, a “derelict old fur post hundreds of miles from any living soul with a spot of civilization in them.” Rebuilt by Marthe into a great store, the old post is surrounded by “a dump of shacks and dugouts they call a town.”
Sandy and Wanita are in love, but Jim McBarr doesn’t want them to get hitched. As he counsels Sandy in his warm, fatherly fashion:
“If you marry Wanita you can forget Marthe and me ever bred you and raised you. You can’t mix color in the human body without producing the sort of stuff that belongs to a red hot hell. It’s against nature; it’s against life. A bitch wolf and a dog father can’t sport better than a cur malemute.”
It’s not that old Jim is prejudiced against Indians or half-breeds or any other nonwhite; no, it’s just that he’s a Scot and Marthe’s a Scot, and, well, “I’d still have to be me if you were a black from Africa and Marthe was a yellow Chink.”
Sandy, however, is determined to have Wanita. Jim and Marthe are determined to stop him from having her. Faro Neale is determined to have Wanita, too, one way or another. Scut Barber is determined to get rich so he can stay drunk and disappoint his blankets. Sandy is determined to avenge the brutal murder of Wanita’s parents by the Bull Moose, scourge of the Kaska Indian country and the Valley of the Moose. Inspector Danvers of the NWMP is determined to bring the Bull Moose to justice. And the Bull Moose is determined to keep on being an at-large scourge. All of which determination makes for plenty of exciting conflict, as you can well imagine.
Just who is the Bull Moose? Why, he’s a killer, a rogue supreme, a scourge among scourges. As Danvers explains to a superior officer from Ottawa:
“If you went up to Reliance and asked them you’d hear of a bogey they regard as something almost super-human. You’d hear of a queer figure looking something like the whole forequarters of a real bull moose. They’d tell you of a big man whose garments are a parka of moose fur reaching to his thighs. And of a pair of fur chaps reaching to his heels. Then they’d tell you of a headpiece that’s joined to the neck of the parka, and which is no less than the great drooping tines of a fine bull moose, with the original fur mask entirely concealing the human face beneath it....
“The Bull Moose! They talk of him as if he’d got clean out of the pages of a fairy story and come to life.”
The Bull Moose’s “methods are theatrical,” Danvers admits in a brilliant piece of understatement, but pretty effective just the same. Up there in the Valley of the Moose, he “has got the whole four thousand murdering Kaska Indians right in the palms of his two hands. He’s got them hypnotized to do his bidding in just the way he’s hypnotized the folk of Reliance into a sort of superstitious fear of him.” What he and his murdering Kaska Indians do is to run around robbing prospectors along the gold-rich Alikine River of all their hard-earned dust, though it is the murdering Kaskas who do most of the work. Just before the getaway, in Danvers’ words,
“The Bull Moose suddenly appears out of—nowhere. He’s in full view of the claim, but at a point that’s safe from gunplay. He just stands there and looks through his mask with its crazy drooping horns. When his victim’s seen him there comes a deep imitation of a moose’s bellow at the rutting season, or a laugh. Then he goes .. .or just fades away.”
Some Moose.
Can’t you just see him, running like the wind through the forests of the Valley of the Moose, his great drooping horns flopping, his wicked eyes gleaming through holes in his moose mask? Can’t you just hear his maniacal laugh, the old moose-on-the-rut laugh, “the same as if he was calling you a crazy, helpless darn fool who don’t matter anyway”?
Of course, despite what the murdering Kaska Indians and the superstitious white folk up at Reliance believe, the Bull Moose isn’t really a superhuman bogey. No, he’s human—a greedy gent whose manhood is rather magnificent, in fact, and who has a philosophy of life remarkably similar to that of a certain hard-shell gunman and gambler. Surprise? No more so to the jaded reader than the fact that Sandy and Wanita turn out to be star-crossed lovers: Wanita fails to survive to the final chapter, which makes Jim and Marthe very happy, even if they aren’t really prejudiced, because now she and Sandy won’t be sporting up any malemutes.
Here’s to the Bull Moose. Long may he lope and flop and rut in the forefront of legendary alternative villains.
The writer of Northerns who contributed the most chunks of alternative “yaller stuff” was Samuel Alexander White. Born in a Canadian pioneer village called Buffy, he was the son of naturalist James White. “I spent several years in teaching,” he wrote in a 1935 letter to Adventure, “but the lure of the mining camps and fur posts proved too strong and I abandoned the schoolroom” to join a Northern Ontario silver rush and “take up the pen.” His “literary” career spanned some 40 years; his first novel, STAMPEDER, was published in 1910 and was followed sporadically by 18 others, 10 of which bore the Phoenix Press imprint (1938-45). He was also a frequent supplier of pulp fiction to such magazines as Adventure, North-West Stories, and Complete Northwest Novel.
In some Phoenix and pulp blurbs he is referred to as the “Jack London of Canada,” an appellation which may have been self-inflicted and which not only insults the real Jack London but may well have provoked London’s shade into an ectoplasmic rage. There is no question that White had first-hand knowledge of his Canadian-bush backgrounds, and that his long suit was an effective portrayal of these backgrounds, in particular Northern Ontario and the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the vicinity of James Bay. There is also no question that, as one Canadian critic has been quoted as saying, “White’s books were so disorganized, badly written and inconsistent that it is hard to understand why they were published.”
White could write an effective short story now and then, but the plots of his longer works are indeed mishmashes of disconnected scenes peopled by fictional characters who could not possibly have existed anywhere except in his turgid imagination. His novels bulge with cowboys and Canadian frontiersmen named Whipstalk Wes, Bucking Bart, Rider Imp, Diamond-Thumb Jerome, Colonel Butt, Hang-Fire Hallett, Kootenay Kilgour, and Chris the Mex; with Indians named Blowing Soup, Silver Bit Dug, Never Sick Once, Old Blind, and Chief North Axe; and with magnificent steeds known as Plains Burner, Gray Ghost, and Blueballs. He even managed to make such real historical figures as Louis Riel, leader of the Metis separatists, colorless and silly; and to render such dramatic incidents as train robberies, buffalo hunts, the Second Northwest Rebellion, and the French and Indian Uprising in Saskatchewan about as exciting as an in-depth study of navel lint.
The main reason for this was his prose style, which makes a Beadle & Adams dime novel of the 1880s seem positively terse. His descriptive passages, for one thing, are arch and as lavender as Aunt Fanny’s lilacs.
Her hair, wind-rippled, looked like molten sunlight; her blue eyes outflashed the Kansas spring sky; her full, curved cheeks and dainty chin were as bright as the bronze face of a mountain goddess streaking prairieward from the Rockies in the distance. Her slim arms, agile as darting javelins, alternately waved and reined, fluttering the open collared, gray, pearl-buttoned waist that she wore with her chamois-colored riding costume and striking tan boots and copper hued chaps encasing her mobile thighs with whipping jacket tails. (CALLED NORTHWEST)
Her voice was like the wind of dawn, too, rising from far away, vibrant, vigorous, but at the same time sweet and undoubtedly fragrant, with the rhythm of new things strumming through it, chords in a faint echo from beyond the rose horizon. Her laugh was in harmony, softly voluminous, thrilling and winning, revealing a world of hope and delight in prospect for her in her lustrous youth. (NORTHWEST PATROL)
Ruby Fleury shoved the porch shutters open in her earnest perturbation, the yellow light of the lantern she had picked up painting her there with a magical brush of ocher and umber. She was tall, massive, as deep-bosomed as she was deep-voiced. More elderly-looking than a cousin she loomed, rather like the figure of an aunt. Had she been black-skinned, she would have been well suited to the appellation of Auntie Ruby or Mammy Fleury, but she was white, and her training as a nurse in Civil War days made her scrupulously white, hygienic, with a refreshing personal perfume that suggested the wild fragrance of mountain flowers and the watery plunge of prairie streams. (CALLED NORTHWEST)
Remarkably stilted dialogue was another of White’s alternative attributes. None of which was actually said, you understand, since he had an aversion to that particular word; his people preferred to rasp, trill, gurgle, whoop, exclaim, chatter, splutter, grit, chirrup, chafe, titter, propound, flatter, belittle, blare, squeak, fume, cackle, elucidate, and coo their words. They are constantly cackling and cooing such dubious phrases as “By all the gum-shoed ginks of detectives” and “Let’s call a spade a son-of-a-shovel,” and gurgling such remarkable passages as:
“Gosh golly, Aunt Flo,” he burst out, “they sure have made it somehow. Those shots and Peter the Greek’s yowl in the middle of that Metropolitan Opera rendition of his, quaked me for one dizzy minute. But don’t worry, I’ll pull out of it. I’ve had those spells before now—hold-ups and ambushing Injun war parties and such trifling trail incidents.” (NORTHWEST LAW)
“Told you I’d duck you in the Marsh Mallow if you stuck your nose in here once more...and that’s where you’re sliding so greasily now, Major Wade. Isn’t far across the valley bottleneck. Smell the swamp water? Sniffs better than Kentucky whiskey in the spring, eh, Colonel Butt?”
“Condemn you, Kansas cuss,” gritted the Major. (CALLED NORTHWEST)
“You see, we’re not standing on ceremony here,” she told him. “We’re in camp, on the prairie, in the open, away from everything. Politeness, manner of address, the way we meet—well, it just comes naturally, and our words may as well be the same. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Charmed with a charm deeper than snake charm,” joked Bob. (NORTHWEST PATROL)
“Look out,” she exclaimed, “look out! You’re upsetting the table. You’re spilling the coffee, too. There it goes!”
The lunch table crashed down to Court’s swift, secret knee push.
The coffee cups crashed off the tray as he slanted the tray into Constable Slade’s lap where he sat so hungrily....
The Constable exploded into crisp speech.
“Heavens! hold hard, waiter. You’ve handed me out a scalding.” (NORTHWEST LAW)
Heavens! Hold hard, reader. I have handed you out another alternative classic. Yes, and more to charm you with a charm deeper than snake charm are yet to come.