The thread about choosing a gun to put over the fireplace in Alaska caused me to look into the story about a crime spree that occurred in the Canadian Northwest, and I came upon a good book.
The Law and the Lawless: Frontier Justice on the Canadian Prairies 1896-1935 (Amazing Stories) is an extremely readable non-fiction book edited by Art Downs. It covers a number of sensational incidents involving the Northwest Mounted Police, who became the Royal Northwest Mounted Police by a proclamation of King Edward VII, and who subsequently merged with other departments to form the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
There are train robberies, bank robberies, shoot-outs in cafes and on streets, and pursuits of fugitives in the mountains in a huge expanse of rough country in the west and north of Canada, where the nearest policeman may have been more than a day's travel away.
One of the stories was made into a movie starring Charles Bronson--Death Hunt (1981), which was loosely based on the story of a man variously known as Arthur Nelson and Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River. That's among the most brutal shoot-'em-up movies ever, gruesome even for Bronson--but according to a non-fiction book I bought in Alberta in 1987, it wasn't really very much of an exaggeration. The perp had a Savage Model 99 carbine chambered in .30-30 and a 16 ga. single shot Iver Johnson shotgun.
The other stories would have made exciting movies, too, without enhancement. The book opens with a blow-by-blow account of a gunfight following the robbery of a post office in a small town, with the Mounties joined by the armed citizenry, and aided in particular by the marksmanship of a very highly regarded local veterinarian and preacher who used his .303 British Lee Enfield hunting rifle very effectively to help the Mounties in Maintiens le droit (defending the law--the motto of the Mounties).
A number of the evil-doers in the stories were Russians, some of whom who had escaped from Siberian prisons when the Japanese gave the Russian Empire a shellacking during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.
Some of the Russians had come into Canada through the US--wearing sombreros! What an image! Russian train robbers in the Canadian wild, wearing sombreros .......
There's a story of an attempted jewelry store robbery in Vancouver, which ended in car chases and the largest manhunt in local history.
The backwoods accounts are something like modern-day versions of the stories in the Sergeant Preston of the Yukon TV episodes (do you remember them?), except for the much meaner bad guys, more mayhem, and Mounties who shot to kill....
...and except for the number of Mounties who met violent ends in the line of duty,
...and except for the planes, trains, automobiles, and telephones.
There is a story involving pursuit by dog-sled, but it's a whole lot rougher than any we ever saw on TV with Sergeant Preston and Yukon King, the Wonder Dog. An Arctic Inuit who wanted a wife in a tribe where women were outnumbered by men shot another man with a Winchester rifle during a caribou hunt, and took possession of his wife and igloo. He then had his uncle kill the man's crying little daughter. Word reached the Mounties. A sternwheeler up Hudson's Bay and a motor launch sailing in strong winds and waves took two Mounties to within a two week sled journey of the location of the perps. They then embarked by dog sled into the Arctic night of winter, in blizzards that lasted for weeks, without firewood, with lows of minus 46 C.
That one could be made into a movie, too.
There's a discussion of the death by hanging of a murderer, carried out under court order by a man whose father and grandfather, and prior ancestors, had been the most highly regarded hangmen in London for years, the kind that even Dickens' Bill Sykes would have feared. There's nothing like taking pride in one's work.
On, King! On, you huskies!
By the way, in the TV series, Preston carried some kind of top-break revolver. Starting around 1900, real Mounties carried big Colt New Service revolvers.
Well King, this case is closed!
www.goodreads.com/book/show/30531183-the-law-and-the-lawless
The Law and the Lawless: Frontier Justice on the Canadian Prairies 1896-1935 (Amazing Stories) is an extremely readable non-fiction book edited by Art Downs. It covers a number of sensational incidents involving the Northwest Mounted Police, who became the Royal Northwest Mounted Police by a proclamation of King Edward VII, and who subsequently merged with other departments to form the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
There are train robberies, bank robberies, shoot-outs in cafes and on streets, and pursuits of fugitives in the mountains in a huge expanse of rough country in the west and north of Canada, where the nearest policeman may have been more than a day's travel away.
One of the stories was made into a movie starring Charles Bronson--Death Hunt (1981), which was loosely based on the story of a man variously known as Arthur Nelson and Albert Johnson, the Mad Trapper of Rat River. That's among the most brutal shoot-'em-up movies ever, gruesome even for Bronson--but according to a non-fiction book I bought in Alberta in 1987, it wasn't really very much of an exaggeration. The perp had a Savage Model 99 carbine chambered in .30-30 and a 16 ga. single shot Iver Johnson shotgun.
The other stories would have made exciting movies, too, without enhancement. The book opens with a blow-by-blow account of a gunfight following the robbery of a post office in a small town, with the Mounties joined by the armed citizenry, and aided in particular by the marksmanship of a very highly regarded local veterinarian and preacher who used his .303 British Lee Enfield hunting rifle very effectively to help the Mounties in Maintiens le droit (defending the law--the motto of the Mounties).
A number of the evil-doers in the stories were Russians, some of whom who had escaped from Siberian prisons when the Japanese gave the Russian Empire a shellacking during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.
Some of the Russians had come into Canada through the US--wearing sombreros! What an image! Russian train robbers in the Canadian wild, wearing sombreros .......
There's a story of an attempted jewelry store robbery in Vancouver, which ended in car chases and the largest manhunt in local history.
The backwoods accounts are something like modern-day versions of the stories in the Sergeant Preston of the Yukon TV episodes (do you remember them?), except for the much meaner bad guys, more mayhem, and Mounties who shot to kill....
...and except for the number of Mounties who met violent ends in the line of duty,
...and except for the planes, trains, automobiles, and telephones.
There is a story involving pursuit by dog-sled, but it's a whole lot rougher than any we ever saw on TV with Sergeant Preston and Yukon King, the Wonder Dog. An Arctic Inuit who wanted a wife in a tribe where women were outnumbered by men shot another man with a Winchester rifle during a caribou hunt, and took possession of his wife and igloo. He then had his uncle kill the man's crying little daughter. Word reached the Mounties. A sternwheeler up Hudson's Bay and a motor launch sailing in strong winds and waves took two Mounties to within a two week sled journey of the location of the perps. They then embarked by dog sled into the Arctic night of winter, in blizzards that lasted for weeks, without firewood, with lows of minus 46 C.
That one could be made into a movie, too.
There's a discussion of the death by hanging of a murderer, carried out under court order by a man whose father and grandfather, and prior ancestors, had been the most highly regarded hangmen in London for years, the kind that even Dickens' Bill Sykes would have feared. There's nothing like taking pride in one's work.
On, King! On, you huskies!
By the way, in the TV series, Preston carried some kind of top-break revolver. Starting around 1900, real Mounties carried big Colt New Service revolvers.
Well King, this case is closed!
www.goodreads.com/book/show/30531183-the-law-and-the-lawless
