James Oliver Curwood - Writer of Canadian Mounties

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD    When James Oliver Curwood (born in 1879) was expelled from school in his birthplace of Owosso, Michigan at age 16, it was a blessing in disguise. It began a wandering life that took him to the wilds of northern Canada.

He traveled by canoe, by snow shoe and by dog sled, throughout the Peace River country, the Hudson Bay wilderness and the Arctic tundra.

He spent as much as six months out of a year in the Canadian wilderness, even building log cabins to live in.  He enjoyed hunting for meat and for sport, until an encounter with an enraged grizzly bear that could have killed him — but didn’t.

First as a reporter, then as a short story writer and novelist, he would spend the rest of his life telling of his wilderness travels.

His translation of the Cree meaning of Manitoba — “God’s Country” — would become a world renowned phrase.

While best remembered for his masterwork KAZAN THE WOLF DOG, his many other Northwesterns were best sellers in the 1910’s and 20’s.

His popular BACK TO GOD’S COUNTRY was a collection of many of his best short stories.  Six of them were Mountie stories, including “The Fiddling Man,” “The Case of Beauvais,” “The Match,” “The Mouse” and “Wapi The Walrus.”  The last was made into the 1919 box office smash hit Back To God’s Country, a silent movie starring Canadian Nell Shipman.

Among his best selling Mountie novels were

PHILIP STEELE OF THE ROYAL NORTHWEST MOUNTED POLICE (later retitled STEELE OF THE ROYAL MOUNTED)

THE HONOR OF THE BIG SNOWS

THE GOLDEN SNARE

ISOBEL: A Romance of the Northern Trail

THE COUNTRY BEYOND

THE RIVER’S END: A New Story of God’s Country

THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN: A Story of the Three River Country

and THE FLAMING FOREST: A Novel of the Canadian Northwest.

By 1922, Curwood’s writings had made him a very wealthy man.  He lived out a youthful fantasy by building the “Curwood Castle” in Ossasso.  Built in the style of an 18th Century French chateau, his castle overlooked the Shiawassee River.  In one of the home’s two large turrets, Curwood built his library and office, where he would do the rest of his writing.

His fiction, Curwood once explained, “is eighty per cent fact so far as country, environment, geography, customs and manners go.”

After an adventurous and sometimes arduous life, James Oliver Curwood died in 1927, at the age of 49.  His autobiography is SON OF THE FORESTS.

==>> To learn more about the Most Popular Writers of Mountie Fiction, go to The GREATEST AUTHORS OF NORTH-WEST MOUNTED POLICE FICTION 

- Brian Alan Burhoe