The Man from the Creeks

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“Why are poets such bluffers and prevaricators, such dotards in the
face of the bald truth? Why do poets fail, ever, to look at the facts
themselves? I was there. I was playing the piano. From where I sat on
the piano stool I could see the front door. My back was to the rear of
the room, where Dan McGrew, as usual, was playing cards.”

Thus speaks Peek, the main character of this colorful tale about a trio
of unlikely stampeders in the 1898 Klondike gold rush. Peek, barely 14
years old at the turn of the century, is the narrator. To get to the
Yukon, he and his single-parent mother stow away on an Alaska-bound
steamer. They are caught and nearly cast overboard by the irate crew,
but their lives are saved by Benjamin Redd, a virgin bachelor who has
abandoned his sedate life as a cooper in Iowa to join a mysterious
friend called Dan McGrew. Together the three make their way north by
steamer, war canoe, packhorse, dog sled, shank’s mare, and river barge
to the boomtown of Dawson City, Yukon.

This novel signals a stylistic change for Governor General’s
Award–winner Robert Kroetsch. Much of the author’s previous work has
involved intense interweaving of realism and surrealism. The Man from
the Creeks could be described as “Kroetsch-lite,” with its more
popular style aimed at a wider audience. This time we are given a
straightforward adventure tale that explores the nature of truth.
Kroetsch, an accomplished poet, even mocks himself when Peek condemns
all poets as self-serving liars. But to Peek’s disgust, the liars win
in the end; the harder he tries to tell the real story of the shooting
of Dan McGrew, the more he discovers that people would rather hear a
good lie well told.