[Hey everyone. I’ve been away from my blog for a long time (for good reasons, I do promise). But I have a lot of bite-sized pieces that I’ve published in various places, sitting on my computer. I’m going to start bringing them in here.]
*** NOTE: this piece was originally published in Rural Roots August 21st 2014 ****
John Beames is a western Canadian author “who does not deserve to be as completely forgotten as he has been,” wrote Dick Harrison in 1977, commenting on prairie writers.
But, even in Prince Albert, the town he worked so hard to make famous, Beames is all but forgotten.
Born in India in 1889, John Beames was the son of a British army officer, well-used to traveling and adventure. Taken to Britain, Beames entered public school until the family relocated to Canada, taking up a homestead farm north of Prince Albert when the land was opened for settlement, about 1906.
As was the case with most homesteaders, local jobs brought extra cash. Beames worked as a lumberjack, a millhand, and did some trapping. He also hauled freight on the winter trails north from Prince Albert, taking goods up the old Montreal Lake trail. Eventually, he became a bookkeeper and started writing stories for pulp magazines. By 1926, stories such as “Cuff Her, Riverhog” and “The Price of a Pelt” found their way into Short Stories and Ace-High Magazine.
The Ace-High Magazine had a tagline of “Western Adventure and Sport Stories,” and sold for 20 cents a copy. Its covers showed cowboys, in hats and chaps and guns and handkerchiefs, glorying in action. Beames published forty-four short stories in Ace-High, eighteen in West, as well as other pulp publications.
His work brought a distinctly northern flavour to the magazines. Lumberjacks, freighters, trappers and bears, gold mining and prospecting, trees and muskegs seasoned his stories.
Beames moved to Toronto in 1928, persuaded by his editor to write full-time. The Great Depression curbed his writing, as so many pulp magazines suffered in the economic crisis. But Beames, with the weight of practice, wrote three novels that put Prince Albert on the fictional map.
Army Without Banners was published in 1930. The main characters, Billy and Maggie Clovelly, are cast as pioneers homesteaders in the northern bush. “Real, wild, new country – that’s what I like. Fences give me a pain in the neck.” The nearest town is Riverton, a mask for Prince Albert, but the town features little in the story. Instead, Beames recreates what it was like to build a homestead, then a neighborhood, then a community, with each quarter slowly filling and the land changing from bush to farmland.
The characters face typical homestead stories, from digging a well to building a homestead shack, getting rooked by an implement dealer and taking freighting contracts in winter to make a little money. Church services and community parties, with a mix of cultures, brings the homestead world to life.
In the end, all that civilization was too much for Billy Clovelly, and he sells his farm to move even further north, to the Peace River country of Alberta, to start all over again in a place with no fences. “He was not made for civilization, but appointed by fate a scout, a spyer-out of the land.”
Two more novels followed in close succession, both with a clear focus on the city of Prince Albert: Gateway in 1932, and Duke in 1933. In both these novels, the city is renamed Gateway – a play on Prince Albert’s tagline, “Gateway to the North.” River Street is Water Street, “three miles long, with a sawmill at either end, and followed the wide windings of the Sweetwater River,” a fictional version of the Saskatchewan. Central Avenue became Maple Avenue, and the “train went no further, and from the banks of the Sweetwater to the Arctic there stretched the Northern wilderness.” Both were published in Britain by Ernest Benn Limited, no doubt to an audience still eager for rough-and-tumble stories from the far-flung colonies.
Gateway tells the story of Richard Black, a handsome ne’er-do-well bachelor who inherits a store on Water Street and struggles to both turn a profit and escort the prettiest girl in town, Molly McLay, in style. The rival for Molly’s fickle affection is Conquest Gates, owner of the local flour mill. Side characters abound, and Beames has a deft touch when it comes to writing local language. A rival store owner, Mr. Isenberg, described a customer: “I don’t give him no credit, it’s cash or trade mit dot deadbeat. He bring in some botter an’ some Seneca root just now an’ trade, I don’t give him no credit.”
In some ways, Duke, his final novel, is Beames’ best portrayal of Prince Albert. In it, he takes the theme of town boosterism, real estate booms and how they can be created. The central character, Marmaduke Ming, becomes the “Duke,” a real estate man complete with a vapish wife who strips him of money and pride.
But the heart of the story is the rush to build a power dam at Thunder Falls – which Prince Albert residents would recognize as La Colle Falls. “The river came foaming down a littered stairway of granite rock and leaped out in a bold and beautiful curve, to fall into a boiling basin forty feet below.” The novel follows the power-dam idea through politics, engineering, raising money, and ultimately the bust that stopped the project and sent Gateway/Prince Albert into a tailspin of debt. Duke Ming, in the end, goes off to fight in the Great War in 1914.
While the old Western Producer book publishing series re-issued Army Without Banners in 1988, both Duke and Gateway are rare finds. Only the lucky will find one of the few copies. I bought mine through rare book hunts and treasure them. But I suspect, with Beames’ connection to Prince Albert and its fictionalization into Gateway, that there are still a few copies of these books hiding in P.A. family bookshelves.
Thanks for posting this blog. Great story about this little known Saskatchewan author. I was fortunate to find a copy of Army Without Banners and it was a very good read. Keep your blogs coming!
This John Beames is my grandfather. Copies of the novels are in the Scott Library, Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University. They have been digitized and are available
That is superb news. Perhaps one day we can chat?
Here is the link to the York eBooks
https://www.library.yorku.ca/find/Search/Results?mylang=en&lookfor=Beames+John&type=AllFields&filter%5B%5D=location_str_mv%3A%22Clara+Thomas+Archives+and+Special+Collections%20
Reprints are available online through Amazon