Smith and Other Events: Tales of the Chilcotin

Smith and Other Events: Tales of the Chilcotin by Paul St. Pierre. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. 318 pages. $11.95 paper.

Smith is one of several recurrent characters who appear in the 12 stories in this book and who have appeared in other St. Pierre stories and in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation national television series Cariboo Country. They are a group of men, wives and children trying to make a living raising cattle in the Fraser river country of British Columbia.

Each person is indeed an "event." Smith is continually puzzled by the ways of his wife Nora and by the fact that others--especially Nora--do not see the world as he sees it. Larsen is a reluctant school-board chairman and contrary party candidate, whose wife, Margaret, understands politics better than he does. Frenchie Bernard's wife intermittently leaves him for long periods. Arch MacGregor is the owner of the Namko Beer Parlor and the Namko General Store, the acting Treasurer of the local Cattlemen's Association, and the entire executive and membership of the Namko Chamber of Commerce. From the nearby reservation there are the Chilcotins: Old Antoine, Young Alexander and 12-year-old Phyllistine, who teaches everyone the meaning of dignity.

Cariboo Country is "what passed for a frontier in the 1940's and 50's." The town Namko has no sewer; few of the ranches have electricity. Larsen has to "adopt" an Indian girl to have enough pupils for a Namko public school. Namko citizens go to Williams Lake for medical services (roads permitting) and to Vancouver for anything beyond the basics. Ranches are "so far apart everyman has got to keep his own tomcat." It is a cold country and half the land needs to be drained and the other half irrigated. This would require more capital and organization than the people of Cariboo Country could, or would, muster and they are distrustful of government. As Arch MacGregor says, the Namko people are "an orchestra that plays all the time" and "every musician plays his own separate tune."

What brings them together as a community, and what forms the plot of several stories, is a sort of perverse desire to stick it out on their own terms and a belief that things could be worse. Some are veterans of World War I or II; some are refugees from industry and the city. They have survived the hard times of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s; they have a special feeling for the Chilcotins because the reservation is "Eighty Acres of Hen." And they have learned to laugh at themselves.

What makes these stories fun to read is their verbal quality. They resemble the Maverick and Frontier television shows in their antiheroic tone and understated drama, and in the humor of their narrative and dialogue: opening sentences such as "Ken Larsen learned that he was expected to run the country while he was on his back under the old Dodge truck, calling loudly upon his maker to destroy Detroit utterly"; or Phyllistine's recitation of "Horatio at the Bridge" in Chilcotin English; or frontier philosophy, such as "Everybody's fences get wide in this country"; or euphonious blasphemy ("Jesus Cast-Iron Christ"); or variants of familiar comic lines, such as "The first prize was one week in Toronto; the second prize was two weeks in Toronto."

There are still people like the Cariboo Country people, both red and white, in the potato and sugar-beet country and high cattle land of the Northwest, who are the despair of both preservationists and promoters. Anyone who likes authentic Western literature that is both humorous and sympathetic will appreciate St. Pierre's stories.

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