{"id":4212,"date":"2014-10-24T16:50:11","date_gmt":"2014-10-24T22:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=4212"},"modified":"2014-10-26T20:51:36","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T02:51:36","slug":"high-plains-bookfest-opens-with-talk-of-the-other-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2014\/10\/high-plains-bookfest-opens-with-talk-of-the-other-border\/","title":{"rendered":"High Plains BookFest opens with talk of the ‘other’ border"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Safarik\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

During a High Plains BookFest discussion Friday, historian Tim Lehman, left, listens as Canadian novelist Allan Safarik talks about his book, “Swede’s Ferry.”<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course it was planned and was not a lucky accident, but still, you couldn\u2019t have found a better way to officially open this year\u2019s High Plains BookFest<\/a> on Friday.<\/p>\n

The theme of this year\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

And the guest speaker at the first event\u2014a poetry slam Wednesday was affiliated with but not officially a part of the festival\u2014was Allan Safarik, the author of \u201cSwedes’ Ferry,\u201d a novel that opens with the words: \u201cHe came into the country on a stolen horse.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Lehman is a history professor at Rocky Mountain College and the author of \u201cBloodshed at Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, Custer and the Destinies of Nations,\u201d winner of the nonfiction award at the 2011 High Plains BookFest.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>So the government, he said, \u201cgot a brilliant idea.\u201d It would create an army, but to avoid alarming its neighbor to the south, it would call it the North-West Mounted Police. The name also fooled a lot of recruits, Safarik said. A young man who pictured the rather easy life of a policeman discovered himself to be, essentially, \u201ca grunt for the British Army.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s book, and his main character, the man on a stolen horse, is a former Mountie.<\/p>\n

Besides worrying about the Americans, Safarik said, the Mounted Police were also charged with \u201ctaking attendance\u201d 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 \u201cand really freaked out the Canadian government.\u201d<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWell, the other border is pretty interesting, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the time and place in hand, he had only to create a plot, or as he put it, \u201can international incident.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

\"Safarik-book<\/a>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.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time the American elephant farts, we get knocked on our ass,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Safarik said the neglect of Canada, and Americans\u2019 ignorance of it, is something one learns to take for granted. He also described Canadians as he imagines Americans see them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re bumpkins,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have cow shit on our boots. We\u2019re not sophisticated.\u201d<\/p>\n

He paused a moment after saying that and then went on, \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

A stereotype that is true, Safarik said, is that Canada\u2019s Western history lacked the romance and drama of the American West, mainly because Canadians had far fewer guns, and when Prohibition wasn\u2019t in force, people were not allowed to bring their guns into saloons.<\/p>\n

And because they were a colony of Great Britain for so long, he said, Canadians have \u201cthat staid, British attitude. \u2026 It\u2019s very dull compared to you guys.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s books. He seemed pleasantly surprised to learn that yes, Welch is quite well regarded in his native state.<\/p>\n

It had occurred to your Last Best News correspondent earlier that Safarik\u2019s 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 \u201cSwede\u2019s Ferry,\u201d your correspondent hopes to report back soon on that.<\/p>\n

Lehman ended things by urging his listeners to read the book. It is a brisk, thrilling read, he said, \u201cand you might learn some history without even realizing it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Of course it was planned and was not a lucky accident, but still, you couldn\u2019t have found a better way to officially open this year\u2019s High Plains BookFest on Friday. The theme of this year\u2019s festival is Border Crossing, meant to celebrate the literary kinship of the people of the High Plains, whether they live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4213,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1534,1499,1536,329,1537,1535,215],"class_list":["post-4212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture","tag-allan-safarik","tag-high-plains-bookfest","tag-james-j-hill","tag-james-welch","tag-pinkerton","tag-tim-lehman","tag-western-heritage-center","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}