News of the disaster at Little Bighorn reached the Eastern Seaboard shortly after July 4, and not just any ordinary July 4 but the grand celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A country feeling its oats, flexing its muscles, vigorous and rich, cocksure and confident, has seen the impossible happen, the unthinkable become fact. Sitting Bull has spoiled their glorious Centennial, pissed on Custer's golden head, the head of a genuine Civil War hero, the head of someone who has recently been touted as a future President of the United States. Somehow a wedding and a funeral got booked for the same hour in the same church.
This is the atmosphere in which A Good Man begins: Sitting Bull and his band of Sioux have humiliated the American military and disappeared. At Fort Walsh on the Canadian side of the western border, Wesley Case is waiting for his term with the Northwest Mounted Police to be up (a fact made possible by his estranged and wealthy lumber baron father having bought out his contract with the Mounties) when his commander and old friend, Major Walsh, enlists Case to become his envoy to his American counterpart, Major Ilges of Fort Benton, a hundred and fifty miles to the south in Montana. As Case had decided to become a rancher in the vicinity of Fort Benton, and since he can recognise the importance of smoothing the correspondence between Walsh and the American that he despises, he accepts the challenge. In this way, A Good Man ( and The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing before it) does for Canada and the U.S. what Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy did for Mexico and the U.S. -- setting a work of epic sweep on the fluid border between two different countries, two different cultures, at a time when that border doesn't seem written in stone and the Americans can't be trusted to not attempt to move the border as it suits them.
When Sitting Bull finally appears on the Canadian side of the "Medicine Line" seeking sanctuary, Major Walsh is sympathetic and shows great respect for the Sioux leader who proves himself to be more holy man than warrior. Walsh finds himself under pressure from the Americans to treat Sitting Bull as a dangerous terrorist who is probably hiding out just long enough to rally other tribes to his cause and plan a renewed attack against the States. Despite wanting to help the Sioux, Walsh is under orders from Ottawa to give them nothing, to let them starve (and hopefully go away before the Canadian government is forced to come to a decision about what to do with them). I found the entire thread about Sitting Bull and the other Natives to be compelling and, ultimately, sad -- if the American solution to hunt down the Indians and take their land and move the survivors to Reservations sounds brutal, the Canadian stance of ignoring the problem, refusing to put money into setting up Reservations, had much the same effect (and has led to where we are today, a hundred and fifty years after the treaty process began, and a staggering number of agreements yet to be reached).
Wesley Case, through diary entries and the eventual revelation of a written confession of sorts, describes his upbringing and young adulthood in what were then Canada's power centers, Ottawa and Toronto. This civilised and privileged life makes for a nice contrast to the wild frontier existence he encounters later. Especially fascinating is his recounting of the Battle of Ridgeway during the Fenian Raids -- the notion of a bunch of kids being led into battle by pompous brats whose Daddies bought their commissions in the Militia, going up against Civil War veterans who are fighting passionately for the cause of an Irish homeland, makes for tense and exciting reading (and also is an interesting contrast to the sympathetic view of the Fenians held by some of the characters in Jane Urquhart's Away). A misjudgement during the battle will haunt Case throughout the book and taint his budding romance with the very strong-minded, very married, Ada Tarr.
Another instance of cross border shenanigans is described by the mysterious Michael Dunne; a character who thinks himself more clever than everyone around him but whose low station in life causes him to be used and discarded repeatedly by men of wealth and power. As a young man, Dunne was hired to help the "crimpers and substitute brokers" who came up from the States to Toronto -- those looking for volunteers (or at any rate those who could be tricked into volunteering) to take the place of rich Yankees in the Union army during the Civil War. From there, Dunne infiltrated the Fenians, working both sides for his own profit, and after he, too, falls in love with the alluring Mrs. Tarr, a sequence of events is initiated that would make a worthy plot for a Coen Brothers movie a la Fargo.
The writing in A Good Man is muscular and masculine, but not in a way that I found off-putting; it is intelligent and literary, but not given to fancy prose. There is also much humour, especially in the character of Joe McMullen -- I laughed out loud at his story of Fancy Charles and the lovely Lurleen. The fact that McMullen made for Fort Whoop-Up when he was injured -- a place I know well from my years of living in Lethbridge, Alberta -- placed the main events of this story firmly within the limits of my own experience, making it feel even more like the story of me and my people. I loved this book -- it made Canadian history come alive, and as anyone who has been half asleep during Canadian History in high school would tell you, that's no small feat.
