Ed Kemmick/Last Best News
During a High Plains BookFest discussion Friday, historian Tim Lehman, left, listens as Canadian novelist Allan Safarik talks about his book, “Swede’s Ferry.”
Of course it was planned and was not a lucky accident, but still, you couldn’t have found a better way to officially open this year’s High Plains BookFest on Friday.
The theme of this year’s festival is Border Crossing, meant to celebrate the literary kinship of the people of the High Plains, whether they live in the United States or Canada.
And the guest speaker at the first event—a poetry slam Wednesday was affiliated with but not officially a part of the festival—was Allan Safarik, the author of “Swedes’ Ferry,” a novel that opens with the words: “He came into the country on a stolen horse.”
The border the horseman crossed was that between Manitoba and North Dakota, in 1894, having robbed the First National Bank in Bismarck. And so begins a rip-roaring yarn involving the North-West Mounted Police, railway magnate James J. Hill, the Pinkerton detective agency and other characters real and imagined.
Safarik, who lives in Dundurn, Saskatchewan, about 35 miles from Saskatoon and 400 miles due north of Glasgow, Mont., appeared at noon Friday at the Western Heritage Center. He talked about his book for a while and then explored the border region under the questioning of Tim Lehman.
Lehman is a history professor at Rocky Mountain College and the author of “Bloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer and the Destinies of Nations,” winner of the nonfiction award at the 2011 High Plains BookFest.
Safarik, who has published numerous books of poetry and history, said he had never written a novel until, under the goading of his late wife, he penned that opening line. On that strength of it, he wrote the first chapter and then another and another, imagining his way through an era and a place.
He explained the significance of the Mounted Police. For decades after the Civil War, the West was flooded with guns taken home from that war, he said, and the Canadian government fretted about what a large group of armed men on its long, unprotected border might do.
In the early years of the Mounted Police, Safarik said, 500 men took their weapons and fled across the border, making that volatile region even more explosive. That is the setting for Safarik’s book, and his main character, the man on a stolen horse, is a former Mountie.
Besides worrying about the Americans, Safarik said, the Mounted Police were also charged with “taking attendance” on their own Indians, as well as those Indians who crossed the border from the United States. Sitting Bull, he said, crossed over with 6,000 followers “and really freaked out the Canadian government.”
On top of all that, the western provinces of Canada were in the midst of their own Prohibition in 1894, so the Mounted Police were also busy trying to catch the whiskey traders. Americans, if they think of the border at all, picture only their border with Mexico, Safarik said, adding, “Well, the other border is pretty interesting, too.”
With the time and place in hand, he had only to create a plot, or as he put it, “an international incident.” That incident was the killing the bank manager in Bismarck, which brings in the Pinkertons and the Mounties. James J. Hill gets involved because he is the owner of the bank, a man used to having everything his heart desires.
In this case, Hill not only wants his money bank, he wants the actual stolen dollars back, as well as the head of the man who took them. Did we mention that Hill travels back and forth across the prairie on his recently built railroad, accompanied by an opera singer and a dominatrix?
In the more general segment of his conversation with Lehman, Safarik talked about the Canadian inferiority complex. Though Canada is vast, he said, it has a population of only 34 million, and 80 percent of them live within 100 miles of the United States.
“Every time the American elephant farts, we get knocked on our ass,” he said.
Lehman said he has noticed, as a history teacher, that textbook maps of the United States, or of Montana for that matter, often go blank at the Canadian border, as if nothing existed above the 49th parallel.
Safarik said the neglect of Canada, and Americans’ ignorance of it, is something one learns to take for granted. He also described Canadians as he imagines Americans see them.
“We’re bumpkins,” he said. “We have cow shit on our boots. We’re not sophisticated.”
He paused a moment after saying that and then went on, “The High Plains BookFest. Fantastic! You regard people in Canada as the same as you. And we are. I have more in common with you than I do with people in Toronto. You have more in common with us than you do with people in New York City.”
A stereotype that is true, Safarik said, is that Canada’s Western history lacked the romance and drama of the American West, mainly because Canadians had far fewer guns, and when Prohibition wasn’t in force, people were not allowed to bring their guns into saloons.
And because they were a colony of Great Britain for so long, he said, Canadians have “that staid, British attitude. … It’s very dull compared to you guys.”
In a discussion of some Western authors at the end of the presentation, Safarik innocently asked whether any of the 15 or 20 people in the audience had read any of James Welch’s books. He seemed pleasantly surprised to learn that yes, Welch is quite well regarded in his native state.
It had occurred to your Last Best News correspondent earlier that Safarik’s book was likely to be a good read, given the great success Welch had when he made the transition from poetry to fiction. Having purchased a copy of “Swede’s Ferry,” your correspondent hopes to report back soon on that.
Lehman ended things by urging his listeners to read the book. It is a brisk, thrilling read, he said, “and you might learn some history without even realizing it.”
