Remittance men get their due in stories of the Canadian West
For a few decades at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, British aristocrats and well-to-do businessmen lumbered with prodigal sons who were unacceptable to their Victorian sensibilities because they were, even more than usual among their class, wasters, gamblers, and sexual eccentrics, would often pack the boys off to the colonies, promising some family support so long as they kept their scandals at a safe distance.
Many of them came to Canada in those decades, and Victoria writer Mark Zuehlke’s book Scoundrels, Dreamers and Second Sons, reissued this spring by Harbour Publishing after some years out of print, tells their stories.
Zuehlke grew up in the Okanagan, one of the centres of remit- tance man settlement in Canada, and he remembers hearing a local legend (possibly apocryphal but compelling nonetheless) about how these subsidized reprobates left the valley at the beginning of the First World War. According to the story, the nearly 1,000 remittance men in the valley made a pact among themselves when news of the outbreak of war reached them by short wave radio.
On a single day they saddled up, left the modest cabins that studded the valley and rode, each to his neighbour’s cabin. At the next cabin, they shot their neighbour’s old hunting dogs and horses that would be of no use to their Canadian neighbours and burnt down the cabin. While the authenticity of this account remains uncertain, it does provide a powerful image of the young aristocrats beginning their return home under a haze of wood smoke, off to the battle smoke of the Western Front where many of them died as junior officers in the trenches.
At any rate, by the end of the Great War, most of the remittance men who had made Western Canada home for a few decades were gone, either joining their generation’s vast burnt offering in the war or inheriting the estates of older brothers whose death cleared the way for their return. But before they disappeared into the smokes of legend, battle and ironically acquired respectability, this odd band of unusual British settlers left behind a treasure trove of fascinating stories.
The colourful figures he has rescued from forgotten archives make up a little known chapter in Canadian history. They include the hapless remittance men who arrived in Calgary only to be persuaded by amused locals that they would only be accepted as real western cowboys if they bought a grotesque costume made up of sheepskin chaps with the wool on, huge spurs and a ten gallon hat.
The sight of newly arrived Brits teetering down the street in high heeled cowboy boots in this comic outfit brightened the day of many a 19th century Calgarian. Perhaps even more amusing for Canadians, who tended to see the remittance men as richly comic figures, were the steamer trunks and crates the typical new arrival unloaded from the train at journey’s end, luggage stuffed with tweed suits, dinner jackets, tennis rackets, polo mallets, Norfolk jackets, straw boaters and full china and silver tea sets.
And right across the Canadian West, the remittance men were a steady support to bar tenders and whiskey dealers. Many of the stories Zuehlke has gathered feature the heroic binges and open house parties conducted by remittance men when their checks arrived from home. From Duncan, known then as the most English town in Canada to Vernon, Windermere and Calgary, the family exiles did their best to support Canada’s alcohol industries.
The reissue of this charming book is timely. It will make an entertaining summer read, especially for readers who live in some of the communities across the West where the remittance men had their brief turn on the Canadian stage. The prose is consistently competent and amusing, and occasionally moving.