The Mad Trapper of Rat River

Ross Willmot is Executive Director of the Ontario Association for
Continuing Education.

This updating of one of Canada’s most fascinating and publicized frontier mysteries is based on facts obtained from almost 100 “key witnesses” interviewed by the author. It’s a much more accurate account than the so-called “true story” of the 1981 Hollywood movie, Death Hunt. The “mad trapper” portrayed by Charles Bronson is so romanticized that he becomes a hero whose Mountie pursuer believes him to be unjustly accused.

The motivation of trapper Albert Johnson, who killed three men and seriously wounded another following an RCMP investigation of his damage to a neighbour’s trapline, is still not known. Dick North has tentatively established that this “mad trapper” — who fled for 48 days and 150 miles along the Arctic Circle during the bitter winter of 1931-32 — also went under the name of Arthur Nelson in his wanderings around the Yukon. A bibliography of books, periodicals, and government documents, some of which are reprinted, attest to the author’s research. Photographs of the players, and matter-of-fact reporting, bring this Arctic tragedy to life.