Nine PIPESTONE LETTERS NO. 1
This is the first of a series of “Pipestone Letters” running through May of 1937. The Pipestone Creek comes down from Pipestone Canyon high in the Rockies, and is now in Banff National Park. In Tex’s day, it was outside Park boundaries and one of his primary hunting grounds, where he had a cabin. The main fun in this piece is directed against a prospective customer, McPhee, who wastes Tex’s time and his own with frivolous correspondence. But as in “William, Prepare my Barth,” expectations of correct masculine behaviour while in the mountains shape the tone and content of the rest of this piece. The client arrives in “what the well-dressed club man is wearing” (by “club man,” he meant the aristocratic and wanna-be aristocratic drones who frequented—and in a few places, still do frequent—gentleman’s clubs). He needs some rough handling to make him shape up to expectations. Tex has to taunt him when he flags as they approach some game. Tex’s slender physique has already been mentioned, even questioned, by the client, and now, in response to Tex’s gender-loaded question why he didn’t just come in summertime instead, to “pick posies and hunt butterflies,” the client responds to both Tex’s less-than-perfectly-masculine body and to his gendered insult: “By the red eyed old Jeehosophat, you slabsided long drink of pump water, if you can make it, I can.” The client ends up “the dirtiest man between the Crow’s Nest [Pass] and the Saskatchewan [River].” This dirt and his success in hunting signal his successful attainment of “mountain masculinity.”
—AG