Reader’s Diary

Ben Arnold, Lewis F. Crawford
(Originally published in 1926 as “Rekindling Campfires”.)

Ben Connor deserted from his second Civil War enlistment and later joined the cavalry as Ben Arnold. He went west in 1863 and was stationed at Fort Laramie and its western outposts. He turned in some soldiers, former Confederate “galvanized Yankees”, who were plotting a mutiny. When his role in their arrest was discovered he found it expedient to desert again. Arnold took care of stock for wagon freighters, mined for gold, hunted, and saw action at the Battle of the Rosebud as a messenger in Crook’s 1876 campaign against the Sioux. He took an Indian wife, chopped wood, ran ferries, and opened a store. He survived battles, grizzly bears, and floods. He knew notable whites and Indians. He lived in Deadwood, Virginia City, Fort Union, and dozens of other now-famous localities. He was a real life Jack Crabb.

Though the book’s official author is Lewis F. Crawford, Paul L. Hedron’s forward tells us that, though Crawford helped prepare the book for publication in 1926, “any publisher today would credit [Crawford] with having been an editor, not the author.” Arnold tells his tale in a matter-of-fact way, never making himself out to be a hero. He was an ordinary man doing the things that ordinary men in that time and place did to make their way in the world. Thanks to the passage of years, it has become an extraordinary story.

Ken McGoogan

John Rae was a Victorian Superman. As Ken McGoogan writes in this fine biography:

Endowed with almost superhuman physicality, rightly hailed as “a genius of Arctic travel,” Rae had remained extraordinarily open to learning form the native peoples of North America — a postcolonial figure in a colonial age even before he became embroiled in controversy. Between 1846 and 1854 he led four major Arctic expeditions, traveling more than 23,000 miles. The chief hunter of every one, Rae surveyed 1,751 miles of unexplored territory, including 1,538 miles of northern coastline. A cost-effective marvel of stamina, resilience, and resourcefulness, he trekked 6,504 miles in the Arctic alone, mostly on snowshoes, an traveled 6,634 miles in canoes and small boats.

Rae, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, discovered the missing link of the Northwest Passage and determined the fate of the Franklin Expedition. His conclusion that Franklin’s men had resorted to cannibalism (later proven by 20th century forensics) earned him a unique distinction: he was the only major British Arctic explorer who was not knighted. Proper Victorians like Franklin’s widow and Charles Dickens could not accept the civilized men would eat each other, especially since the story was based on the word of “savages”. Rae, unlike other British explorers of his time, learned from the natives, adopted their technologies, and was uniquely qualified to deduce Franklin’s fate from native accounts.

“Fatal Passage” covers Rae’s entire life: his youth in the Orkney Islands, his Edinburgh medical education, his years with the Hudson’s Bay Company, his explorations, the controversy over his discoveries, and his “retirement”, during which he mapped out telegraph routes in the Canadian West. McCoogan’s book is great narrative history and inspiring biography.

This is a really great book and deserves a place on the shelf with Pierre Berton’s “Arctic Grail” and Peter C. Newman’s series on the Hudson’s Bay Company.