Fascinating Canada. John Robert Colombo
kidnaps Dudley’s girlfriend, Nell (the Inspector’s daughter), and ties her to railroad tracks. If that weren’t proof enough of his villainy, Snidley also has green skin. According to Michael Dawson in The Mountie: From Dime Novel to Disney (1998), Ward has described Dudley as “stalwart, clean-living, chaste, dense — and a crashing bore.”
054. Who was the strongest man in the world?
Weight-lifting records are made and broken every year. Yet, in downtown Montreal there is a statue raised to “the strongest man in the world.” He is the French-Canadian strongman Louis Cyr (1863–1912), whose strength became a legend. Before the sport of weightlifting was developed, he won every challenge match in North America in 1885 and even claimed the world championship in 1892. Three years later, in Boston, he lifted 1,967 kg, believed to be the heaviest weight ever hoisted by a human being.
Harry Houdini, writing in Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920), had this to say about Cyr: “It is generally conceded that Louis Cyr was, in his best days, the strongest man in the known world at all-round straight lifting. Cyr did not give the impression of being an athlete, nor of a man in training, for he appeared to be over-fat and not particularly muscular; but he made records in lifting which, to the best of my knowledge, no other man has been able to duplicate.”
055. Did Jesse James hide in Ontario?
The American outlaw Jesse James was shot by a fellow gang member, Bob Ford, in April 1882. As John Macdonald wrote in “The Traveller,” CARP News, May 1998, “The story made the headlines around the world, including Princeton, Ont., a small Oxford County village 50 km southwest of Kitchener. Villagers saw the pictures of James and recognized him as a former local resident, a Mr. Richardson. To this day, over a century later, stories persist around Princeton that Jesse James lived there while on the run from U.S. authorities.”
It is said that he arrived in the early 1880s and moved into the local hotel. He bought a horse and buggy and was noted for his marksmanship. He courted a local young lady and after their engagement was announced, he made known his plan to buy a farm on Governor’s Road, now Highway 2. Thereupon, he vanished, leaving behind his broken-hearted fiancée.
The legend of James’s days in Princeton is one of many stories included by Anna Williamson in History of Princeton (1967).
056. Where is there a replica of Lester B. Pearson’s study?
Upon the death of former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson in 1972, a replica of his study from his Ottawa home, complete with books, furnishings, and memorabilia, was fitted into Laurier House in Ottawa, as incongruous as it might seem. The result is that Laurier House could be called Liberal House, for it is associated with three prominent Liberal prime ministers of Canada: Sir Wilfrid Laurier, W.L. Mackenzie King, and Lester B. Pearson.
057. Who was the so-called Lone Cowboy?
Aficionados of the art and fiction of the Wild West know the “Lone Cowboy” as Will James — cowboy, bronco-buster, rodeo performer, cattle-rustler, ex-onvict, Hollywood stuntman, illustrator, and storyteller about Western subjects. Curiously, James was not the adventurer’s real name, and contrary to the impression he gave, he was not born in the United States, though he did live in the West and his last decades were spent on his ranch at Pryor Creek, Montana.
A French Canadian by birth and background, he was born Ernest Dufault (1892–1942) at Saint-Nazaire, Eastern Townships, Quebec. At the age of seventeen, he headed out to Alberta, where he ran afoul of the RCMP and then crossed the border, eventually spending time in a U.S. prison. Between 1924 and 1942, he wrote and illustrated twenty-four popular Westerns. Two of them, Smoky (1933) and Lone Cowboy (1934), were made by Hollywood into movies. His rambunctious life became the subject of a NFB documentary titled Alias Will James (1988), directed by Jacques Godbout with music supplied by Ian Tyson.
058. Who was Mary Helena Fortune?
Mary Helena Fortune has an imposing name, but one that is appropriate for an unusual woman and an impressive writer. Born Mary Wilson (1833–1910) of Scottish ancestry, in Belfast, Ireland, she was brought to Canada as a child. In 1851 she married Joseph Fortune, a surveyor, and in 1855 they travelled to Australia to join her father, George Wilson, who was working the goldfields.
In colonial Australia she began to write crime fiction under various pseudonyms for a popular Australian Journal, contributing over five hundred detective stories between 1865 and 1908. Her one-book publication was The Detectives’ Album (1871), possibly the first collection of detective stories published by a woman. She died under mysterious circumstances.
She wrote one of the longest-running series in crime fiction and pioneered the “police procedural.” She was probably the first woman to write stories narrated by a police detective, and certainly the first woman to make a literary specialty of crime fiction. These details come from George Vanderburgh, publisher of the reprint edition of The Detectives’ Album: Stories of Crime and Mystery from Colonial Australia (2002).
059. Did Biggles ever fly North?
Biggles did, although his flight is pretty well forgotten these days.
Biggles is short for Flying Officer James Bigglesworth, the action hero of a series of boys’ adventure novels that were published in England between 1932 and 1998 and were read throughout the Empire and the Commonwealth. Biggles’s big decade was the 1950s.
In the novels, the intrepid aviator was a dauntless adventure hero born of English stock in India and raised at a school in England. He flew a Sopwith Camel during the Great War, worked with British Intelligence, flew a Spitfire with the RAF during the Second World War, and then sought out adventure in South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, Canada, and behind the Iron Curtain.
Ninety-eight of these thrilling, well-loved novels were published. They were written by Captain William Early Johns (1893–1968), an English writer and former Flying Officer who promoted himself to “Captain” following the success of the early Biggles books. The last in the series is Biggles Sees Too Much (1970). In all, Johns wrote close to two hundred works of fiction for young readers, including a series for girls about Joan Worrals, a determined, eighteen-year-old flier for the WAAF during Second World War.
Of specific Canadian interest is the fact that Canadian editions of a number of these novels were published by the Musson Book Company of Toronto. Curiously, one novel that Musson failed to release in Canada is Biggles Flies North (1938), in which the flier heads for the Great Northwest in pursuit of villains who lack common decency and are intent upon the subversion of good old British values in the Dominion upon the eve of the Second World War.
060. Who was Canada’s “King of the Pulps”?
King of the Pulps, published in 2003, is about H. (for Henry) Bedford-Jones (1887–1949). The three authors of the book (Peter Ruber, Darrell C. Richardson, and Victor A. Berch) explain that, between 1909 and the year of his death, Bedford-Jones wrote 231 novels and 1,141 short stories — some 25 million words published in the American and British pulp magazines, which were then very popular, under his own name and a host of pseudonyms,
The phenomenally prolific “pulpster” was born in Napanee, Ontario, attended one year at Trinity College in Toronto, worked as a newspaperman in the United States, came into his own as a freelancer contributor to the pulps, and spent his last years in Palm Springs, California, where he died.
He wrote fast-moving tales in most of the genres: adventure, fantasy, epic heroism, science fiction, horror, crime, true-crime, westerns, etc. In the 1920s he was described as the highest paid pulp writer in the United States. Today, his tales seem simple-minded, yet there is the thrill of the chase to them.
As Allan Hawkwood, he wrote the “Famous John Solomon Adventure Series” in the 1930s, which was set in the Middle East of the same period. His earliest fiction dealt with New France’s Ancien Régime and the Northwest fur trade, but he soon found that imaginative adventure tales set in exotic climes sold best. The Depression dealt a death blow to most of the pulps; those that survived were polished off by television and then paperback originals. These originals were a throwback to the earlier penny dreadful and dime novels.
In