Author: E.C. (Ted) Meyers

Published: 2006

Mood: If you’re tired of never having anything interesting to talk about at social gatherings and want to quickly read a whole bunch of trivia about Canada’s frontier days.

In just its six-page introduction, Wild Canadian West made one thing abundantly clear to me: It’s seriously shameful how little I know about 1800s Canada compared to the 1800s United States.

It would be easy to put all of the blame on Hollywood, because there are thousands of movies and novels glorifying the American West, compared to hardly any that take place in Canada. It would also be easy to blame the Canadian public school system.

But the truth is, I always found Canadian history to be MASSIVELY boring. I hated social studies classes with every fibre of my being, and there was nothing any teacher could have done to change my mind. Except maybe rolling in the AV cart and showing The Grey Fox – I would have sat up and paid attention to a history lesson from Richard Farnsworth and his glorious moustache.

There’s a point to all of this, I swear.

You see, I didn’t really expect to find Wild Canadian West interesting either. I especially didn’t expect to burn through it in just a couple of days! I only picked this book off my shelf out of a sense of duty; I thought I should try a little harder to balance the amount of American content on my site with something about Canada, and the guy on the cover looked pretty cool.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants a relatively light read that will pad their Old West knowledge with fascinating Canadian trivia.

The theme of Wild Canadian West is that most people have no idea how many notorious Wild West characters either came from Canada, or wound up in Canada. The book sets out to right that wrong, setting the stage in the introduction with such titillating facts as:

• Bat Masterson and his brothers were from Quebec
• Butch Cassidy’s gang was amalgamated with “Flat Nose George” Curry’s gang (Curry hailing from Prince Edward Island), giving the ‘Wild Bunch’ a huge influx of skilled rustlers and horse thieves
• Pearl Hart, who robbed stagecoaches and rode in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, was from Ontario
• Henry Wagner, aka the Flying Dutchman, wanted in multiple states, spent the last few years of his life robbing settlements up and down the BC coast until finally being caught, tried, and hung

Each chapter is a short recap of someone’s life, including lawmen, gamblers, gunfighters, whiskey runners, outlaws, and even one ‘angel’ of the goldfields.

The stories that fascinated me the most were those of Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, aka BC’s legendary Hanging Judge, and trapper, guide, warrior, and all-around badass Jerry Potts, aka Kyi-yo-kosi (the guy on the book’s cover). The information presented here was enticing enough to make me want to hunt down whole books about each of them.

The way Wild Canadian West is written is matter-of-fact, and highly digestible for even the most ADHD brain (like mine) because the longest story is only 11 pages long. It’s easy to knock off one or two chapters at a time, and come away feeling smarter about Canadian history.

If you’re a grammar nerd (also like me), being able to put it down after short chapters also makes it easier to get past the repetitive language and the many, MANY run-on sentences. Author E.C. Meyers avoids commas like the people he writes about avoided the law.

And although this book is almost 20 years old, it’s got a surprisingly modern perspective when it comes to the First Nations outlaws featured in its pages. There’s acknowledgement of how shitty things were for Indigenous people, how external factors of colonization contributed to certain choices, and how the legal system mistreated them.

All in all, Wild Canadian West is worth reading. Could it have been improved with a better editor? Absolutely. But better punctuation and a few variations on descriptive phrasing would only really make a noticeable difference for picky readers. As-is, this book is a solid way to learn about the cool stuff from Canada’s own Wild West without feeling like you’re back in school.