Lightning

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

Award-winning Calgary author Fred Stenson has written an insightful and
entertaining story about the cowboys and herders who, from 1867 to 1882,
drove several thousand cattle through the western American badlands and
Indian territories northward to the ranches and grasslands of
southwestern Alberta, to settle in particular on Quebec Senator Matthew
Cochrane’s sprawling ranch. The story, which features a 37-year-old
believer in Masonry and phrenology named Doc Windham, his three
sidekicks (Lippy Mann, Dog Eye French, and reformed drunk Dwight),
Pearly (the dance-hall darling who leaves him), and a villain variously
known as Overton and Overcross who is out to kill them all, wends its
way through the historic towns and down the cattle trails of the
times—Helena, Great Falls, Fort Benton, Denver, Fort Macleod, Fort
Calgary, and Pincher Creek.

Descriptions of the hazards of the drive, the branding the cattle, the
stampedes, and the inclement weather that spooks drovers and cattle
alike enhance the realism of the story, as do the inclusion of icons of
the era (such as the Marquis of Lorne, Charles Dickens’s RCMP son,
Francis, and the Reverend John McDougall) and anecdotes about everything
from gambling on the bowling games to the meetings and secret handshakes
of the Masons.

Stenson has an admirable ability to marry the facts of history with the
creativity of his imagination. His book moves beyond the typical western
genre shootout into a psychologically perceptive presentation of the
universal motivations for good and evil with sometimes quirky but
believable characters who happen to be cowboys during a hardscrabble
period of adventurous pioneering in Canadian history.