Blue Pete and Canadian Nationalism:
Vision and Experience in the Western Novels of William Lacey Amy
KEITH
WALDEN
Journal
of Canadian Studies 1989 24(2)
Popular
novelist William Lacey Amy (Luke Allan) began writing his series of Blue Pete
novels trying to say something serious about western development. His
perceptions derived from a common English-Canadian expectation of Edenic
transformation as well as firsthand knowledge of life in southern Alberta . Vision and
experience did not mesh. Unwilling to question his nationalist assumptions. Amy
abandoned any hope of commenting on real western society and moved Blue Pete
much closer to the realm of myth.
For over three
decades after the First World War, William Lacey Amy published a score of
novels about the Mounted Police in the Canadian West, most of them centering on
a half-breed named Blue Pete who worked with the scarlet riders. These
‘‘interminable” works, written under the pseudonym Luke Allan, are so bad in
Professor Dick Harrison’s view that he refused to inflict on readers even a
small sample in his recent anthology of Mountie stories.[1]
Though Amy had some talent at building suspense, it would be absurd to claim he
was a good novelist. His books, for the most part, were contrived, convoluted
and conventional. Few readers took them seriously. Librarians did not make a
point of collecting them. Critics have given them short shrift.
As Harrison astutely pointed out in his analysis of the
evolution of prairie fiction, English-speaking settlers often drew on a culture
that was ill-adapted to the life and landscape of the West. Imported
expectations and applied values isolated and confined them, making it difficult
to adjust to prairie realities.[2]
This was certainly true of Amy, a classic illustration of the argument. Yet, it
may be that just as inappropriate structures and assumptions were imposed on
the land, inappropriate critical judgments have been imposed on literature,
making its reality difficult to appreciate. What seems to bother Harrison most
is his assessment that Amy simply imported the American frontier formula to Canada . Blue
Pete, like the typical American western hero, worked outside the law using
violence as a surgical tool to impose order. Canadian heroes, by contrast,
supposedly resolved conflict by denying violence. Their authority came not from
themselves but from an “ideal of civilized order” perceived to be much more
important than any individual’s existence.3
Clearly, Amy
was influenced by the American view of the West. The first Blue Pete novel
contains not one, but two explicit allusions to the Virginian’s famous line,
“When you call me that, smile."* It was hard not to be affected by
materials which had tremendous international appeal and circulation. An
insistence on sharp distinctions between popular Canadian and American frontier
fiction is highly problematic. Amy was no different from thousands of other
Canadians. He was, in fact, a typical central Canadian Protestant, and the
values of that society, including nationalism, permeate his writing. It was not
a slavish adherence to American forms that made his work boringly repetitive
but a refusal to reconsider nationalist assumptions about the West that did not
hold up under first-hand scrutiny.
When Amy began
writing the Blue Pete stories, he wanted to say something serious about the
development of the West. Like innumerable authors before and after who dealt
with frontier areas, he was interested in the difficulty of reconciling an
existing order with the imperatives of encroaching civilization. He brought to
this question two sets of perceptions. The first, and most important, was the
English-Canadian Protestant vision of western development. The second was his
own experience of living in the West. The two were not quite compatible. After
his simplistic expectations of Edenic transformation corroded, Amy backed away
from romance toward myth, abandoning any possibility of commenting seriously on
western society. That retreat is worth a closer look.
One reason why
Amy’s work seems American at first glance is that unlike most Canadian prairie
novelists, who wrote about the agricultural frontier, he wrote about the
ranching frontier. This was logical: it was the West he had encountered, though
for how long is hard to say. Despite his prolificness, not much is known about
Amy’s life. Born to a Methodist minister and his wife in Sydenham, north of Kingston , probably in the mid-1870s, he emerged two
decades later as a freshman at Victoria
University in Toronto . According to class lists he spent
three, possibly four years there studying arts, though he seems to have
completed only the equivalent of about two academic sessions. Shortly after the
turn of the century, he began publishing a newspaper in Medicine Hat , Alberta
The initial
novel in the series, Blue Pete: Half-breed, published in 1921, may have been
written much earlier since one segment appeared well before the war as a short
story in Canadian Magazine.1 It is the most ambitious and most interesting of
the works. The story has two intertwined threads. The first is a conventional
romance. Constable, eventually Sergeant, Mahon, product of a respectable
English middle-class family, must choose between prairie- bred Mira Stanton,
physically beautiful but “a wild creature of untamed instincts and untrained
mind,” and her equally attractive cousin, Helen Parsons, unaffected but
possessed of a culture and intellect “incongruous with the untamed life in
which they lived.”8 The decision is never really in doubt; Mahon selects the girl appropriate to his
class, background and station.
The other
thread, much more twisted, involves Blue Pete’s relationship with the police. Mahon discovers the half-breed just as Pete has crossed
into Canada
to break loose from his old associates in the rustling business. “I’m too
gor-swizzled chicken-hearted fer Montany,” he tells Mahon , “an’ dead- sick o' th' everlastin’
game.”1’ Impressed by the young constable’s generosity and determination to
prevent disorder, Pete goes along on a mission to recapture an escaped
horse-thief, one of the gang he has just left behind. Dutch Henry, cornered in
a shack, shoots Sergeant Denton who in true Mountie fashion had approached with
gun holstered to make the arrest. Pete refuses to intervene at this point but
swears that if the Sergeant dies he will come after Dutchy.
While Denton ’s life hangs in
the balance, Pete becomes an undercover police agent, drifting from job to job
at surrounding ranches, disrupting the rustlers. It is work he enjoys,
especially since he has become very attached to Mahon , whom he calls Boy. With this help
police are able to stop much of the movement of stolen stock, though the
culprits themselves remain at large. The situation is disrupted by four events.
Pete’s connection with the force is discovered, making him persona non grata
among both ranchers and rustlers. Sergeant Denton finally dies, obliging Pete
to act on his promise to get Dutchy. Mira Stanton’s brothers, owners of the
3-bar-Y ranch, commit suicide when they are caught with pilfered cattle.
Finally, Pete is discredited at a trial by an incompetent judge and the police
are forced to relinquish his services. The effect of all this is to isolate the
half-breed, and Mira as well, from the rest of society. Mira, who had been
infatuated with Mahon ,
now realizes they are not suited. To free him emotionally, she allows herself
to be caught with some stolen horses and is sent to prison for six months. As
Pete waits for her release Dutchy’s gang returns. Mahon goes after them, and so does the
half-breed who finally kills Henry to protect his friend and fulfill his oath.
Badly wounded, he disappears into the bush. A police search turns up only a
note from Mira, just liberated, who says they will never find his body.
For all its
complications, Amy’s message was not hard to decipher. Mahon and Helen represented the future of the
West. Boy, prevented from going to university by his father’s untimely death,
had come to make his fortune in Canada .
Opportunities proved scarce so he joined the Mounted Police, a force which, Amy
made clear, was bringing more than law enforcement to the plains. “Men of
birth, many of them, and all of them overflowing with the tastes that grow from
education, their clean souled sense of duty and the ease with which they
retained their wider interest in life and learning” were an inspiration to
people like Helen Parsons. She in turn, educated in the East, was “no product
of the prairie.” Her father, a prominent Calgary
lawyer, came to Medicine Hat
for his health. When he died she stayed on with her aunt; the ranges offered
“more of the relief of outside interest.” Once committed to the West she began
to master its arts, like shooting and riding. If this muted the impression that
alien values were being imposed, it was clear nonetheless that she and her
husband-to-be embodied the culture, refinement, civilization, and order that
would transform the empty flatlands into a prosperous garden. This was made
explicit by wise Inspector Parker who congratulated Mahon for making the right decision about a
mate. “The West isn’t going to be always the wild thing it is even today - and
you’ll want to grow up with it.” Mira, a picture “you couldn’t hang in the
parlour and wouldn’t insult by putting in the kitchen, 10 would have
marginalized him in western society. It is interesting that Amy reversed the
usual convention by requiring a male to choose between two female suitors. This
reinforced the impression that on this frontier order and domesticity would be
established mainly through the actions of the Mounted Police.
Helen and Mahon indicated the
future. Blue Pete confirmed the rightness of this inevitability and pronounced
the superiority of Canadian over American values. He was the outsider who
substantiated the traditional view that our society is more peaceful, more
ordered, more just than that to the south. To some extent Amy used Blue Pete
the way Thomas Chandler Haliburton used Sam Slick, as an embodiment of the
excesses of the neighbouring Republic. Some of the half-breed’s actions - when
he plugged a hole through Mahon ’s
hat to avoid being taken into custody, for example" - illustrated typical
American behaviour, at once impressive and objectionable. Slick is a more
compelling character, of course, because Haliburton was a more talented writer.
His creation remained ambivalent about Nova Scotian society; Sam’s bombast
pilloried Yankees and Bluenoses simultaneously. For the most part, Pete
accepted Canadian values so completely that he had little power to prod us with
our shortcomings.
His judgment
of the Dominion’s superiority was demonstrated in his decision to stay and work
with the agents of order and in a willingness to curtail his violent habits. He
continued to use a gun but did so sparingly and usually to protect the Mounties
or affirm their purposes. When he killed Dutchy he acted primarily to save Mahon , not to exercise
vengeance. In later novels, Amy stressed repeatedly how Pete tried to evaluate
his conduct according to police codes of behaviour. Unlike the supposedly
typical American frontier hero, he was very much controlled by the law. Though
often he acted beyond its reach, society defined his goals, not himself.
Blue Pete was
more than a vehicle for national self-congratulation. He was also a natural
man, unencumbered by artificial social constraints, totally in tune with his
environment. More than just at home with the land, he was almost a part of it,
a fact underlined when he virtually disappeared into the prairie before Mahon ’s very eyes.12 In
many respects Pete was clearly superior to the police. His understanding of the
cattle business, his ability with a gun, his mastery of horses, as well as his
extraordinary knowledge of the land far exceeded their capabilities. He was not
alone here; the other rustlers, especially Dutchy, shared these abilities
though not to the same extent. Pete’s co-operation with the police symbolized
the assent given by the more intelligent elements of the old order to the
process of development. He could not block the goals of the force; it would
triumph in the end. He got an inkling of this when he tried to free Mira on her
way to prison: pursuit was organized so quickly after she escaped that he
accepted the futility of trying to keep her at large. Still, he could have made
things exceptionally difficult for the police had he opposed them. That he did
not was an instinctive recognition of the value of true civilization.
As a natural
man Pete was concerned with justice, not law. He was offended by the shooting
of Sergeant Denton, not because a policeman was wounded but because the
violence was unnecessary. Dutchy could have escaped without hurting anyone.
When Pete went to work for the Mounties he made no effort to put the criminals
behind bars; he simply tried to right the wrongs they committed. His
willingness to be a police agent, therefore, demonstrated that in the Canadian
West law and justice were essentially the same. If Amy sometimes emphasized in
later novels that Pete’s methods were frowned on by the police, it was not
because he sanctioned rootin’, tootin’ American cowboy behaviour. Rather, he
wanted to remind readers that the half-breed was still a natural, instinctive
man and that the equation between law and justice still held. This
correspondence was confirmed by his readiness to teach the Mounties some of his
tricks so they could do a better job. He trusted them to use the knowledge
wisely. This was not a melding of values, though, only a transfer of skills.
While it hinted that some valuable things from the old existence might be
perpetuated, it mostly suggested that the new order would become stronger and
more adept at getting its way.
As her
ultimate match with Blue Pete indicated, Mira was another symbol of the wild,
untamed spirit of the West. Her relationship with Mahon cast more light on the linkage between
old and new forces. In disillusioning the Corporal by getting arrested, she
indicated her acceptance of an inferior social role. “I ain’t in your class,”
she acknowledged. There would be no fruitful union between them with offspring
combining the strengths of both.13 Her success in the new environment would
depend on how well she imbibed the lessons in literacy, dress and conduct which
Mahon and Helen
taught. Since Helen remarked on Mira’s facility in learning to read and
write,14 there was some indication that the original spirits of place could
adapt but they were likely to have a much diminished stature. Again, there was
no blending of values here, just an exchange of skills which facilitated the
grip of ordered society.
The turbulence
of the old West would disappear; any regrettable loss would be compensated by
the advantages of civilization. The prairie would become a prosperous, well
regulated, attractive habitation. This was an optimistic projection Amy shared
with thousands of other Canadians and many Britons too.15 He had likely grown
up with this vision and brought it with him to the West. There was another
dimension to his view of the area, however, one which came from his own
experience. An undertone to the major key, it introduced nevertheless a curious
chord of aesthetic and moral ambivalence which jarred with the imperialist
dream of progress.
There are many
indications in the novel that Amy was describing an environment he knew. For
one thing, there are touches of modernity, like the telephone used to warn of
Dutch Henry’s escape and the car used to transport wounded Sergeant Denton,
which seem out of place in an ordinary cowboy novel but not in
twentieth-century Medicine Hat .
For another, there are characters which closely resemble well-known Alberta personalities of
the time. Paddy Norton, the lawyer from Calgary who helped discredit Pete as a
police agent is clearly based on Patty Nolan, the real Calgary frontier lawyer
who actually was counsel for the Western Stock Growers’ Association in the
period when the novel is set.16 Inspector Parker is almost certainly drawn from
the real Inspector William Parker who commanded the “Hat’s” police detachment
since explicit reference is made to one of his actual cases.17 Not
surprisingly, by the second novel the name had been changed to Barker.
More
impressively, Blue Pete: Half-breed contains brief flashes of almost
sociological discernment which punctuate the adventure narrative. Consider, for
example, the description of Medicine
Hat “in the early throes of industrial ambition”:
Its natural
gas was spreading its fame throughout America
and England ,
and pioneers looking for factory sites were the town’s guests from the moment
of their arrival. Its unearned reputation across the border as “the breeder of
weather” was being fought by a systematic propaganda that was justifying its
cost. The moving spirits of the city decided to go in for sports. Professional
baseball was discussed, the result being the formation of the Western Canada
Baseball League, more commonly known as “The Twilight League,” because in the
long evenings of the prairie the games were started at seven-thirty. Medicine Hat was out for
anything that promised publicity.18 There is a ring of authenticity here, as
well as traces of insight that invite speculation about what Amy might have
produced had he stayed in one place.
Perhaps it was
not writing skill that he lacked but frontier fortitude, for embedded in these
realistic touches are clues that Amy was less than enthralled with prairie existence.
Formulaic praise for the beauty and freedom of the plains was contradicted by
references to “shrubless waste” and “mile after mile of the dead grass of
years” on the flat landscape. The Parson’s house in town was “rather gaudily
painted as an offset to the drabness of the prairie.” Moreover, the land's
“bare ugliness,” as he put it in a later novel, was matched by something
monotonous and stifling in prairie society.19 Mahon, he emphasized, craved “a
little of the variety of [the] outside world”:
Day after day
of his duties threw him among men who thought in cattle and horses, whose
conversation was round-up and brands and the prospect of encroaching homesteaders,
whose sports were bronco-busting and wild riding and an occasional visit to
town, whose sleep was mental vacuum and whose work entailed little more. He had
never been able to satisfy himself with that....20
It was a
feeling Amy probably shared. Whatever the future of the West, its present was
less than completely satisfying, and the novel reflected an undercurrent of
tension between booster expectations and constrictive realities.
Among the
things Amy seemed to be genuinely knowledgeable about was the cattle business,
including its shady aspects. Beneath the routine antics of the rustlers was a
firm sense of how they operated—taking large herds into the hills, breaking
them up into smaller groups, building semi-permanent corrals at regular
intervals to speed up the drives. Blue Pete, in his courtroom testimony, listed
a dozen-and-a-half ways to change the look of a horse. Such expertise might
have come from other cowboy books, but it may be that newspaper work brought
Amy face to face with these practices.
The most striking
aspect of his depiction of rustling was the assertion that everyone involved in
the cattle business, respectable and otherwise, participated. The point was
frequently reaffirmed in the story. Blue Pete was abruptly tired from
Grantham’s ranch after being exposed as a police agent. He explained in court
how brands routinely were overlayed to confuse ownership. Mira’s locally
esteemed brothers committed suicide when their involvement in the game was
discovered. All this was something more than a plot device. Amy was insistent
that rustling was part and parcel of raising cows, and he reiterated the point
at length in some of his later novels. In a representative example from The
Vengeance of Blue Pete, the Inspector lashed out at local worthies who
complained about police inefficiency:
You come
blatting to me, you the biggest ranchers in the country, about justice and the
prevention of crime, and the duty of the Mounted Police, when you know that if
we did our duty, if we considered nothing but justice and strict law
enforcement, every one of you would be in Lethbridge jail right now... I don't
say you rustle in person, but you know your cowboys do. And you accept what
they help themselves to in the way of unidentified stock, and often in
identifiable that can safely be taken.21
The ranchers
were not the only characters in the novel with suspect morals. It also featured
a railway contractor who knowingly bought stolen horses, and a newly appointed
judge “whose previous record in criminal cases had frequently brought him into
conflict with the police.”22 Together they highlighted the honesty of the
Mounties, who were not corrupt, but, as with Amy’s view of prairie life and
landscape, they introduced a note of ambivalence that conflicted with the
expectation of Edenic transformation. The effect of the whole book, then, was a
typically Canadian evocation of an emerging pastoral utopia,23 undercut by an
ongoing contest between good and evil, likely to be permanent because ordinary
people lacked moral consistency. The evolution to perfection of his romantic
vision was challenged by a pessimistic interpretation of human nature. His
dream of the future did not mesh with the real situation of prairie life.
Insights into
western society in Blue Pete: Half-breed were scattered and brief, submerged in
the adventure narrative. But if only to a limited extent, Amy was drawing on
his experience of the area, trying to translate what he had known into
imaginative literature. The fact is, especially if the novel was written before
the First World War, this work contains some interesting seeds of prairie
realism. The dichotomy between sentimental romances and realistic depictions of
prairie life may not be quite as rigid as some critics have thought.24
At the end of
the first novel it was not clear if Blue Pete was alive or dead, but all the
important questions had been answered. Mahon
and Helen, harbingers of the future, were about to be married. The spirits of
place had been defeated or had aligned themselves with the forces of the new.
Some disorder existed but it could be controlled by the police. There was
perhaps a little regret at the passing of old ways, but no conflict over
values. The choices of western society had been decided. This made for a
satisfying conclusion but it did not leave much to explore.
Amy was not
ready to give up trying to say something serious about the region’s fate. He
had one powerful arrow left in his quiver — racism. In The Return of Blue Pete
he addressed the “problem” of the alien worker. The book is chiefly remarkable
for being one of the most vitriolic attacks on Canadian immigrants and radical
labour ever to reach print. The plot revolved around efforts to prevent the
sinister International Workers of the World from blowing up a newly built
railway trestle out of spite for not being allowed to boss themselves. Its adventure
was a thin coating for hate.
The navvies,
“wild Continental scum” according to Amy, were “a filthy, low-down gang of
[creatures] dressed up like men and walking on their hind legs.” They were
violent, duplicitous, cowardly, and completely expendable. Torrance , the contractor, chided his
assistant for failing to kill any in the course of construction. One aide, he
noted approvingly, “did for five in his last season.”25 Blue Pete, as natural
man, confirmed the judgment that foreigners were disgusting and radical labour
a dangerous fount of anarchy.
Amy made a
concerted effort to explain what made the “Dago Bohunk” so objectionable.
Speaking through Ignace Koppowski, leader of the International Workers, he
outlined the anguish that resulted from “over-sudden civilization.” “From the
crude half-lights of my own country,” wailed Koppy, “I leaped at one bound into
the brilliance of civilization’s beam.... And I couldn’t stand it — few of us
can”:
... not
finding the milk and honey flow out to lave our ships, we start depressed and
resentful. We land in a strange country with only a word of its language. No
one greets us, no one holds our fumbling hands. By dirty ways we slink to dirty
tenement houses to hide ourselves—where disloyalty is the air we breathe, discomfort
our bed, and robbery our experience—robbed by the friends who preceded us.
Half-cowed, lonely, cursing in silence the drudgery that faces us, we learn to
live for ourselves alone. Helpless, we drift into the hands of our own kind,
who wax rich on the sale of us in herds to work no one else would undertake.
Sullen, keen to the injustice of things, but ignorant of the simplicity of
redress, we fall victims to our own morbid hatreds, to anything that promises
to feed our fury....26
This kind of
sympathy merely diverted venom to those who had successfully adjusted.
Regardless of how they fared, Amy found reasons to damn the newcomers. He
offered no solution other than complete exclusion.
This was the
dark side of the Protestant vision—the fear that Anglo-Saxon superiority would
be polluted by the off-scourings of Europe .
The depth of Amy’s prejudice was unusual, but not its premise. Just as the
ranchers’ moral lapses undermined assurances about the coming elysium, so too
did the immigrants. While the trestle’s completion symbolized the West’s
evolutionary advance, the continued presence of the workers at the end of the
novel represented a source of evil that would not soon go away. Again, Amy’s
optimistic expectations ran up against the sordid facts of western life.
Having
unleashed this invective, he did not have much more to say about the evolving
reality of the prairie. He was in a rather tight conceptual bind. Either he
could admit that the simplistic Canadian dream of the future was wrong, and
explore the ramifications of this, or he could go on repeating his old message
and his established pattern of action with good defeating evil in the
progressive establishment of Eden ,
knowing the chances of this happening were ever more remote. He chose the latter.
However, when he returned to Blue Pete after writing several conventional
police novels without the halfbreed, the essence of his creation had shifted.
According to
Northrop Frye, the extremes of literary design are bounded by realism and myth,
with romance in between. The characters of romance, though clearly superior to
ordinary mortals, retain some resemblance to human reality. The world they
inhabit, though missing many of the frustrations, ambiguities and
embarrassments of everyday life, is still recognizable as the world of normal
people. The more fabulous the depiction of romantic characters, the more
dissociated they are from regular society, geographically and emotionally, the
more they begin to show a mythic colouring.27 Even if not formally invested
with divine qualities, they may become so distant and unbelievable that the
connection with familiar existence becomes exceedingly tenuous. What Amy did
when he returned to his creation was to move Blue Pete significantly closer to
myth. There were still occasional flashes of insight into prairie sociology,
still occasional warnings about vile immigrants, but now Pete worked alone,
performing implausible feats at the fringes of society with little to say about
what transpired within.
One indication
of the change is the disappearance of any love interest in the plots. Mira, as
Pete’s wife, continued to drift in and out of the action, especially to rescue
her husband from danger, but she became part of the adventure machinery. Helen
put in a brief appearance in The Return of Blue Pete, then vanished. With her
went much of Amy’s opportunity to discuss domestic and community developments.
To compensate for the elimination of romantic involvements, he increased the
suspense in his plots. Once embarked on a case, Pete would lose his gun or his
horse, get captured by Indians or become lost in a blizzard. Each of these
circumstances complicated and delayed the completion of his mission. With this
improbable mastering of trial after trial, Pete began to assume mythic
proportions while the novels took on the episodic structure common to quest
adventures.
As love and
domesticity faded, so did the Mounted Police. By no means were they banished
completely. Pete’s actions remained firmly tied to Mountie causes but almost
always now he worked alone while members of the force became additional
obstacles to overcome. Sometimes police had to be avoided because they
suspected him of a crime; sometimes they had to be protected. Either way, they
were used not so much to comment on what the West was or would become, but just
to build tension.
When Pete left
the police behind, action increasingly occurred in a world clearly divorced
from the normal realm. Whether the Cypress Hills, the Rockies or Montana , normal rules of
civilization did not apply. The danger in these places changed somewhat as
well. Now the threat was more likely to be an Indian rather than a rustler or a
foreigner. Amy was no more charitable toward native peoples than he was toward
immigrants. His analysis of their situation was identical. Both groups were
composed of backward misfits, resentful of those who should control them. He
drew a few favourable portraits of individual Indians, but made clear these
were exceptions.28 Whatever the reasons for the advent of these new villains —
it may have had a lot to do with reader expectations—the effect was to direct
attention to a group that was perceived to be at the margin of real society.
Changes in the
setting were accompanied by changes in the treatment of Blue Pete. For one
thing, a much greater emphasis was put on the specialness of his gun and horse.
The pistol, unremarkable in the first novels, became almost an extension of the
half-breed—so important that it alone enabled him to complete his tasks. If
lost or stolen, before anything else it had to be found; no other weapon would
do. Whiskers, his horse, a remarkable beast from the start, became even more
unusual. She seldom required direction and appeared to know every thought in
her rider’s mind. Though exceptionally small, she had greater strength and
speed than any other mount. Inanimate objects that had special powers, strange
and wonderful little animals capable of amazing feats—these belonged to a
fairy-tale universe, not a real one.
In addition,
Pete became ever more deformed and grotesque. When first introduced he was a
bit cross-eyed, unkempt, had a bluish tinge to his skin, and wore outlandish
clothing. As a character he was exaggerated but not unbelievable. To Mahon he resembled a London
stage cowboy.29 By the late 1920s, after a succession of broken limbs and
gunshot wounds, his appearance was distinctly peculiar: “His head hung forward,
as if clearing the way, and one of his great rounded shoulders slouched
perceptibly lower than the other. He covered the ground with amazing speed,
with a noiselessness even more amazing. His crossed eyes darted from side to
side, his blue-black face was still expressionless.” Later, his nose got badly
smashed; later still, he was attacked by a cougar and told he would carry the
scars in his head for the rest of his life.30 Despite the injuries, none of his
skill or speed was diminished. From a colourful, unusual cowboy Pete became a
shambling, misshapen, good-natured giant. Perhaps his progressive deformities
were meant to parallel changes in the landscape as the work of civilization
unfolded, but symbol or not he left the edge of reality and became a mythic
archetype. The West itself, plagued by an unceasing supply of villains,
remained stuck in the process of becoming a pastoral garden. The tension
between the expectation of evolution and the permanent struggle between good
and evil remained, though the triumph of progress seemed ever more remote.
Why did Amy
move toward myth? Why did he give up trying to say anything substantial about
the prairie situation? Dissatisfaction with western existence must have been a
factor. After all, he left. Once gone, his perceptions, frozen in an era long
since passed, became increasingly anachronistic. To compensate for the absence
of authentic insight he drifted more completely into fantasy. Indeed, the later
Blue Pete books should not be thought of as regional novels. The decision to
leave, in turn, may have been conditioned by concurrent realizations of his
limitations as a serious writer and of the ease of earning a living by grinding
out pulp fiction. His British publishers and international audience were
largely indifferent to the real character and future of the Canadian West. They
did not care if situations were improbable as long as they got adventure.
Still, this
does not fully explain why Amy abandoned a more realistic romance formula. Even
with an unwillingness to probe the distance between inherited vision and actual
experience, he could have maintained his original vision. Other authors managed
to produce adventure without moving so fundamentally into make-believe.31 Like
many of them, Amy could have centered on the Mounted Police, keeping more of an
attachment to real society. Instead, his imagination gravitated to myth.
Why? Was there
something in Amy’s outlook that made even romance unsatisfying? Since little
about him is known, the question is impossible to answer, yet his contradictory
view of the West — evolving towards pastoral harmony but infected at its very
core with seemingly permanent imperfections is intriguing. Amy was writing at a
time when cosmological thinking was profoundly unsettled. In the aftermath of Darwin , the paradigm of
evolutionary advance was inordinately compelling, yet the anticipation of progress
which it reinforced was undercut by deeply rooted conceptions of nature,
including human nature, as a fixed commodity. Many people may have been
troubled, for example, by an inability to mesh notions of inevitable progress
with traditional understandings of evil as an inescapable presence in the
world. Coming, presumably, from a rigorous Methodist background, this may have
been Amy’s dilemma.
Since it is
situated close to the world but not mixed in it completely, romance allowed him
to bridge the difference between what he wanted life to be and what he knew it
was. He could say something about the actual situation of the West without
having to square completely dream and reality. It is possible that as Amy began
to realize how difficult it would be to transform the prairie into the garden
he expected, how difficult to produce order, justice and freedom in an unstable
world, the assurances of romance seemed more fragile. To sustain his optimism
he gravitated toward myth, looking for comfort in something well beyond
ordinary humanity.32
When romance
would not hold Amy retreated toward myth. It was an appealing destination,
arrived at by many others travelling a variety of paths. The resurgence of myth
has been a distinguishing characteristic of the present century. Ironically, by
withdrawing into timeless, archetypic formulas, Amy demonstrated his
fundamental modernity. It did not make him a good novelist, to be sure, but it
may suggest he should not be dismissed out of hand as an uninspired hack who
merely grafted American motifs onto a Canadian setting. Though Blue Pete
ossified into a predictable adventure hero, he began as something more: a
conscious affirmation of the inevitable, necessary and beneficial
transformation of the West. Canadian nationalism was the force that conceived
him and an unwillingness to disturb nationalist assumptions trapped him in an
archetypal netherworld.
NOTES
[1] Dick
Harrison, ed.. Best Mounted Police Stories (Edmonton: University of Alberta
Press, 1978), 16.
2 Dick Harrison,
Unnamed Country: The Struggle for a Canadian Prairie Fiction (Edmonton:
University of Alberta Press, 1977), X and passim.
3. Harrison , Unnamed Country, 160, 161.
4. William Lacey
Amy [Luke Allan], Blue Pete: Half-breed (New York: McCann, 1921), 91, 140.
5. University of Toronto
6. Sec David H.
Breen, The Canadian Prairie West and the Ranching Frontier, 1874-1924 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1983).
7. William Lacey Amy, “Blue Pete: The Sentimental
Half-breed,” Canadian Magazine, Jan. 1911, 269-74.
8. Amy, Blue
Pete: Half-breed, 152, 50.
9. Ibid., 16.
10. Ibid.,
52, 51, 213, 210.
11. Ibid.,
68.
12. Ibid.,
21.
13. Ibid.
, 204. Though she remains a character in later novels as Pete's wife, there is
no mention of children. The older spirits of place are ultimately sterile.
14. Ibid.,
127.
15. See
Doug Owram, Promise of Eden
16. See
Henry J. Morgan, The Canadian Men and Women of the Time (Toronto: Briggs,
1912), 854-55. Amy's portrait of Nolan may have come from a 1903 trial in
Medicine Hat involving a round-up captain for the Stock Growers' Association
who was charged with theft as part of a prolonged dispute between large and
small ranchers. See D.H. Breen, “The Mounted Police and the Ranching Frontier,”
in Hugh A. Dempsey, ed.. Men in Scarlet (Calgary
17. See
Hugh A. Dempsey, ed., William Parker, Mounted Policeman (Calgary:
Glenbow-Alberta Institute. 1973); and Amy, Blue Pete: Half-breed, 211.
18. Amy,
Blue Pete: Half-breed, 85-86.
19. Ibid.,
22, 11, 54; William Lacey Amy [Luke Allan], The Tenderfoot (London: Jenkins,
1939), 126.
20. Amy,
Blue Pete: Half-breed, 178.
21. William
Lacey Amy [Luke Allan), The Vengeance of Blue Pete (London: Jenkins. 1939), 65.
22. Amy,
Blue Pete: Half-breed, 178.
23. See
Northrop Frye, The Bush
Garden
24. See,
for example, Harrison , Unnamed Country, 100.
25. William
Lacey Amy [Luke Allan], The Return of Blue Pete (New York: Doran 1922) 108 64,
39-40.
26. Amy,
Return of Blue Pete, 360, 362.
27. Northrop
Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University
1973), 136-51.
28. See,
for example, William Lacey Amy [Luke Allan], Blue Pete’s Dilemma (London:
Jenkins, 1945), 9; and Amy. Blue Pete: Indian Scout (London: Jenkins, 1950),
140.
29. Amy,
Blue Pete: Half-breed, 14.
30. William
Lacey Amy |Luke Allan], Blue Pete: Detective (London: Jenkins, 1928), 14: Amy,
Blue Pete: Rebel (London: Jenkins, 1940), 68-69; Amy, Blue Pete’s Dilemma, 140.
31. See
Keith Walden, Visions of Order: The Canadian Moimties in Symbol and Myth
(Toronto: Butterworths, 1982).
32. William
Lyon Mackenzie King also had difficulty reconciling a belief in the possibility
of spiritual and material evolution with traditional religious conceptions of
sin. He, too, had a highly romantic outlook, evident in such things as his
idealization of women and predilection for chivalric heroes like Sir Galahad.
When King's responsibilities increased, romantic optimism no longer seemed
enough to sustain his confidence. He turned to spiritualism, asking the forces
controlling destiny, or at least aware of its direction, to help make sound
decisions in matters where lines between good or evil were not easily drawn.
Like Amy, he sought comfort in something beyond ordinary humanity. This tension
between evolutionary and dualistic cosmological conceptions as a key to
understanding the progressive mentality may be worth more thought. On King, see
Joy Esberey, Knight of the Holy Spirit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1980), 43-58, 161-62; Ramsay Cook, The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late
Victorian English Canada (Toronto- University of Toronto Press, 1985), 198-200:
Reginald Whitaker, “Liberal Corporalist Ideas of Mackenzie King,” Labourite
Travail 2 (1977), 137-69; and Whitaker. “Political Thought and Action in
Mackenzie King," Journal of Canadian Studies 13 (Winter 1978-79), 40-60.
Keith Walden is a member of the History Department at Trent University
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