Four “WILLIAM, PREPARE MY BARTH”
This story is the most clearly mocking of gentlemanly big-game hunters, and it happens also to be directed programmatically against Tex’s former countrymen, the English (called “Woodbiners,” in the slang of the day). The prejudice against Englishmen that Tex encountered when he arrived in Canada (cf. John Cow’s recollections in Appendix A) was real; appended to “help wanted” signs in shop windows was often the coda “Englishmen Need not Apply.” As exhibits at the museum in Fort Steele Heritage Town in British Columbia document, prejudice against the English middle- and upper-class settlers was particularly strong in the mountains of western Canada at that time because they were not seen as good settlers. Tex did a great deal to shed that stigma, though he never really shed important parts of his identity, such as his tea at 11:00, or subscribing to what was then still called the Manchester Guardian by air mail. But his desire to distance himself from the stereotype of his fellow countrymen means that Tex often presented himself as a real Canadian, unlike his English clients, who are just tourists.
This story demonstrates Tex’s authentic Canadianness by emphasizing the effete and silly gentlemanliness of his clients. Again, mountain masculinity is at stake here: excessive bathing, attention to the body and clothing, and to comfort are clearly not proper masculine behaviours in the mountains. One has the sense that this is situational, and that Tex he would be perfectly happy for them to be fastidious English gentlemen at home and in private, just as he was a tea-drinker and Guardian-reader—at home and in private. But in his stories and out in the wilderness at least, as Tex he expected conformity to a masculine ideal of ruggedness and insouciance about comportment (washing and comfort) in the mountains—an expectation that he passed down to his children and grandchildren, much to AG’s annoyance as a child. In “Pipestone Letter No. 1,” Tex notes that most guides “generally expect a Pilgrim to be washing, shaving, and cleaning his nails, when he ought to be scrambling up a slide to try and bust a bear.” Perhaps we can speak of situational norms of ethnic national and gender display—but the mocking description of the great hunters sitting in Morris chairs in the shade, waiting for beaters to drive a gazelle past their guns is too funny to be submitted to dry analysis alone—it is high satire and has its own raison d’être. The ending has a nice populist touch.
—AG and JR