Chivalric romance in the French and Indian WarsJames Oliver Curwood (1878–1927) was a Michigan-born writer who built a successful career writing popular wilderness adventure novels along the lines of Jack London. Many of Curwood’s books are set in Alaska or the Yukon, and some feature canine protagonists, much like London’s The Call of the Wild, White Fang, or Jerry of the Islands, among others. Curwood’s 1926 novel The Black Hunter, however, is a dog of a different color. This is a historical novel set in Quebec during the French and Indian Wars of the 18th century.
The story takes place in 1754 and 1755. David Rock is a young man who lives in the Valley of the Richelieu, a rural area in Southwestern Quebec. Though of English extraction, David lives in New France and is loyal to the French crown. He comes from a poor family and spends much of his time hunting in the nearby forests. His girlfriend, however, is loaded. Anne St. Denis, the daughter of a seigneur, lives in the local chateau. She and David have known each other since childhood and intend to marry. When some bigwigs from Quebec City come to visit Anne’s father, they insult the rustic David, and he responds by throwing two of them into a fountain. Since one of his victims is a high government official—François Bigot, the Intendant of New France—David is sentenced to a flogging. Bigot, however, at the advice of his cronies, pardons David of the sentence. What Bigot really wants is to hook up with the lovely Anne, and he figures he has a better chance of working his way into her heart (or rather her dress) if he is nice to her boyfriend rather than torturing him. The wily Bigot then takes the suspicious David under his wing, offering him a promising career in Quebec, much to the joy of Anne.
When I saw that this novel is set in “Old Quebec,” I expected a lot of backwoods Canada adventure typical of Curwood. Instead, Curwood’s depiction of Canada (New France) feels more like medieval Europe. This is mostly a courtly drama of romance and honor, somewhat along the lines of a Sir Walter Scott novel such as Ivanhoe, except that the good-versus-evil, damsel-in-distress triangle in this storyline is about as formulaic as the cartoon adventures of Dudley Do-Right, Nell Fenwick, and Snidely Whiplash. The book defies believability in the lengths that the villains go to pretend they are David’s friends and benefactors. In reality, if a powerful man of the 18th century wanted a helpless woman, he would probably use more barbaric methods rather than go to such sly lengths, but this is fiction not history, and that wouldn’t make much of a novel.
Most of the characters in the book, including Bigot, are real figures from Canadian history. Even the Black Hunter is a figure of local legend. He is a White man with black hair and black clothes, a nomadic backwoodsman with mythical skills as a hunter and warrior, like a cross between the Outlaw Josey Wales and James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty “Hawkeye” Bumppo. While David is the star of the book, the Black Hunter is a supporting character who barely appears in the book.
Only in the last quarter of the book does Curwood really dive into the French and Indian Wars, but that is the best part of the book. He has clearly done his research, and the brutality and gore of the final chapters belies the genteel chivalric tone of what came before. The treatment of Native Americans in the book is complicated. They are depicted largely as savage killing machines, but it is acknowledged that they have been made so by the English and French, with bounties and booze, who use the Indians for their own selfish ends. If Curwood had concentrated more on the wars and the Whites relations with the First Nations, it would have been a better book. Instead, you have to wade through an awful lot of wholesome romance and courtly intrigue to get to the good stuff. Nevertheless, the novel is fine overall and one of Curwood’s better efforts.
A romance of the Northern forests, heavy on the sapJames Oliver Curwood is Michigan’s answer to Jack London. Both authors were famous for their wilderness adventures, which frequently take place in the colder regions of the North. Curwood’s novels are often set in the Canadian wilds north of Michigan, while London focused on Canada north of his native California. Both authors were also dog lovers and featured canine protagonists in their fiction. Curwood’s novel The Country Beyond, published in 1922, stars Peter, a pooch who’s half Airedale terrier, half Mackenzie hound. About half the book is narrated in the third person through the eyes of the dog, while the other half is related from the perspective of the human characters.
North of Lake Superior lies an idyllic patch of wilderness called Cragg’s Ridge. Life is not paradise for all who live there, however. There an orphaned 16-year-old girl named Nada lives with her two reluctant guardians who treat her as if she were an indentured servant. Jed Hawkins, her alcoholic foster dad, is particularly abusive and frequently strikes Nada and his wife. He has plans to soon sell Nada to a local laborer, presumably (it’s implied) as a sex slave. Nada has two bright lights in her life. One is her dog Peter. The other is her acquaintance with Jolly Roger McKay, a stranger who recently wandered into the vicinity of Cragg’s Ridge to occupy a neighboring cabin. Young Nada is in love with Jolly Roger, and the feeling seems to be mutual, though as yet unconfirmed. Hawkins injures Peter in a fit of rage, and Nada rushes the dog to Jolly Roger’s cabin. When Roger finds out how Nada’s been treated by Jed Hawkins, he vows to free her from her foster father’s clutches. Jolly Roger would love to make Nada his wife, but he is an outlaw, hiding from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Soon he will once again be on the run from the law, and the hard life of a fugitive is no life for a delicate young lady.
There’s a lot wrong with this book. Jolly Roger’s age is never specified, but he’s clearly a grown man romancing a teenager. He also seems to have the hots for an Indian maiden, but Curwood seems to imply that that’s OK because she’s an Indian and therefore no competition for the white bride. The plot hinges on a fair amount of Native American mysticism that just feels like a lot of unnecessary mumbo-jumbo. There are long stretches of the book where nothing much happens. A lot of words are wasted on Jolly Roger’s (and thus Curwood’s) thoughts on love and womanhood. Nada is depicted as so simple and innocent that she almost seems mentally ill, and her whole purpose in life and in the story is to just be totally submissive to Jolly Roger. There’s never any disagreement between the two lovers that might have made the story more interesting.
Even more annoying is the fact that there’s no good reason for these two lovers to be separated for most of the book other than sheer prudery. If the two went on the lam together, they’d have to sleep in close proximity to one another without a chaperone. God forbid. The whole book feels as if it is constricted by Victorian-era mores. Jack London would have simply disregarded such puritanical conventions, but Curwood’s writing is much more genteel. The reader can tell early on that law and order must prevail in Curwood’s world, which makes the ending a predictable foregone conclusion. A wilderness adventure should have an edge to it, a sense of danger, of which this novel has very little. The scariest scene in the book is the dog’s fight with an owl.
Having read a handful of Curwood’s books, I find his writing hit and miss. I preferred his novels The Alaskan and The Gold Hunters, but neither was great. For another Michiganian writer of wilderness adventures, check out the works of Stewart Edward White. The Blazed Trail is one of his better efforts.
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Moronic mystery in Manitoba
Michigan author James Oliver Curwood specialized in the writing of Northwesterns, a genre comprised of wilderness adventures set in Canada and Alaska. In this genre, Curwood was second only to Jack London in terms of popularity and financial success. His 1910 novel The Danger Trail, however, gives no indication that such success was deserved. This mystery adventure novel set in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba is an irksomely tedious and witless affair.
After years of hard work, engineer John Howland finally gets his big break when he is hired to manage the completion of the Hudson Bay Railroad. Construction on this railway across Manitoba from Le Pas to Churchill began in 1910, but you won’t learn that from Curwood’s book because it has very little to do with the actual railroad. The novel opens with Howland, a Chicago native, reporting for duty in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. There he meets a beautiful and mysterious woman named Meleese, a damsel in distress who asks for his assistance. She lures him into the woods, where he is jumped, knocked unconscious, and tied up by a gang of thugs led by a shifty Frenchman named Jean Croisset.
This sort of thing happens to Howland not once but four or five times over the course of the novel. Through chapter after chapter of capture and escape, he occasionally encounters Meleese, who tells him he must return southward, or he will be killed. He repeatedly asks her what she means. Who wants to kill him and why? She refuses to answer, and Howland seems OK with that, as he never presses her enough to get a satisfying response. It is not OK for the reader, however, who has to sit through these monotonous and unproductive exchanges. Howland refuses to run from his persecutors and instead decides to pursue them into northern Manitoba. From there, most of the story consists of altercations between Howland and Croisset in which the two relentlessly threaten each other with “I will kill you,” yet neither manages to make good on his promise.
Howland may be a macho he-man outdoorsman and pugilist, but when it comes to love he is as virginal and ingenuous as any heroine of a Harlequin Romance novel. He falls in love with Meleese at first sight, even though she keeps luring him into deadly traps. There is no conflict between the two characters, no snappy banter or sexual tension. Like a stray lamb, he simply devotes himself to her from the start, blindly and blandly.
Curwood doesn’t seem to realize that there is more to building suspense than simply keeping the reader in the dark. He doesn’t parcel out any clues, so the reader simply has no idea what is going on until all is explained in the second to last chapter. Even that explanation turns out to be a bust when the motivation for all this abduction and violence proves totally pointless. Other than maybe one or two well-written fight scenes, The Danger Trail really has nothing going for it. I have read Hardy Boys mysteries with more complex and intelligent plots.
Curwood has written better books than this, among them The Gold Hunters and The Alaskan. His work is nowhere in the same league with London’s, however, and this book is far inferior to the Northwesterns of Stewart Edward White (The Blazed Trail) or Harold Bindloss (The Lure of the North).
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Hyperromantic Northwestern shoot-’em-up
I recently traveled to Alaska and wanted to read some classic literature related to the region. Having read everything by Jack London, I turned to the next best thing, Michigan author James Oliver Curwood. Like London, Curwood wrote many novels of the Klondike Gold Rush, several of them with canine protagonists, and other “Northwesterns”—essentially Westerns set in Alaska and the Yukon. His novel The Alaskan was published in 1923.
As the novel opens, a steamer is heading north from Seattle through the Inside Passage on its way to Nome. On board is Alan Holt, a laconic, rather reclusive reindeer rancher who is returning home to his grazing lands after a long sojourn in the lower 48. Though a white man, Holt is a native Alaskan, meaning he was born in the territory. Also on board is Mary Standish, a beautiful young woman, obviously new to the region, who is traveling alone. The reason for her journey to Alaska is unknown to Holt and to the reader. When the two meet, Mary asks Alan to act as her escort and educate her about Alaska. Neither has any intention of romantic involvement with the other, but how long do you think that’s going to last? Shortly after meeting Mary, Alan notices another passenger on the ship, a shifty character of bad reputation named Rossland. From their behavior, it appears that Mary and Rossland have met before, and Alan wonders what connection these two have shared in the past.
To Curwood, Holt qualifies as a hero because he’s an independent self-made man who has wrestled a fortune from the land through resource extraction. (How does a white man come to own a herd of 10,000 reindeer?) On the other hand, the novel’s villain, John Graham, represents corporate interests who take resource extraction too far, raping the land of its bounty and beauty. Alan respects the Natives and they love him like a father figure. As Curwood depicts it, however, Alan’s role in this relationship comes across suspiciously like that of a benevolent slave holder. Curwood argues that Alaska requires American capital so that more men like Alan can develop its resources, while he naively ignores the rights of the Natives and fails to foresee the inevitability of more John Grahams.
Though chronologically later than London’s tales of the North, Curwood’s novel reads as more old-fashioned, more genteel, more romantic—a sort of “London lite,” if you will. Curwood’s writing more closely resembles British-Canadian author Harold Bindloss’s novels of manners set in British Columbia and Alberta. The Alaskan positively drips with Victorian-era chivalry. If the book were written a couple decades later, Alan and Mary would bicker for a while before they found love, but here there’s nothing to argue about because they are both flawless specimens of their type: he the knight in shining armor and she the damsel in distress. The romance between the two is expressed in the most idealistic of terms, and the slow-moving narrative is really too concerned with each and every interior emotion at the expense of action.
It takes about 20 chapters just to figure out Mary’s back story, but once the plot gets down to business it turns into a surprisingly gritty shoot-’em-up. Curwood may be prudish about sexuality, but he’s not prudish about brutality. Rape is a threat constantly hinted at throughout the book, and when the good guys and bad guys clash it makes for a no-holds-barred battle. While much of the novel is predictable, it does not end the way one would expect, which is to its credit. If the whole book were as good as its last four or five chapters, it might have been a great adventure classic. As it stands, however, it’s just pretty good.
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Mystery in the Canadian North
The Gold Hunters, published in 1909, is an adventure novel by American author James Oliver Curwood. As I was reading the book, I got the feeling it might be a sequel because the characters kept referring to events in the past. Upon investigation, I found that, sure enough, it follows Curwood’s 1908 novel The Wolf Hunters, which was made into a John Wayne movie (1934’s The Trail Beyond). Despite the recurring characters, even though I hadn’t read the earlier book, I had no trouble getting into The Gold Hunters.
Roderick Drew is an American enjoying an extended visit at a trading post in the wild country near Hudson Bay, somewhere north of Montreal. His closest companions are two indigenous Canadians, one a young man Rod’s age named Wabigoon, the other an elder gentleman named Mukoki. Apparently, The Wolf Hunters ended with the three adventurers prying a treasure map to a fortune in gold from the fingers of a skeleton. Now they’ve decided to follow that map where it will lead, in hopes of finding untold riches hidden in the remote wilderness. Before they can begin their treasure hunt, however, they must first rescue Rod’s sweetheart, the Indian maiden Minnetaki, from the clutches of the evil tribe known as the Woongas.
Reading this novel today, it’s hard to tell whether it was intended for an audience of teenage boys or grown adults. I would tend to assume the latter, since there are some beautiful passages of nature writing that clearly demonstrate lofty literary aspirations. The Gold Hunters is obviously influenced by the works of James Fenimore Cooper. The trio of heroes bears a suspicious resemblance to the triumvirate of Natty, Chingachgook, and Uncas from The Last of the Mohicans, while the Woongas are blatant stand-ins for the Mingoes. Curwood even repeatedly refers to Mukoki as “pathfinder.” As far as the adventure narrative goes, the action here is too squeaky clean to be mistaken for Jack London’s dark and violent tales of the North, yet wilder than the more genteel boreal romances of Canadian author Harold Bindloss. Curwood’s vision of wilderness strikes a healthy balance between danger and wonder.
What makes the book fun is that it’s really a mystery story that just happens to be set in the wilderness. You never know where the trail will lead, and there are surprises around every bend. Curwood doesn’t haul out the usual lazy adventure-novel clichés. The story is more imaginative than a run-of-the-mill treasure hunt yarn. At times Curwood’s prose lacks clarity, and it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on. How’d they escape that whirlpool again? What did they use to get down into the chasm? Overall I liked the novel, but I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t have to decipher Curwood’s murky action sequences. There's also one odd scene that’s so unintentionally(?) homoerotic it reads like a Saturday Night Live parody.
The ending of The Gold Hunters clearly sets up the characters for another sequel, one that hints at something akin to an Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure. Whether that sequel was ever produced, and what its title could be, I do not know. Nevertheless, as a stand-alone novel, The Gold Hunters is a pretty good read for those who like classic adventure stories.
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