The Rangeland Derby: 110 Years of Chuckwagon Racing at the Calgary Stampede by Glen Mikkelsen, Folklore, 2023
As a boy Glen Mikkelsen was so captivated by chuckwagon races at the Calgary Stampede that he counted the number of steps inside the Stampede grandstand to the racecourse, a setting that, even today, he finds “as exhilarating as any I can conceive.” That enthusiasm permeates this lively book celebrating chuckwagon racing at the Stampede. It’s a brisk read; best on the early days, when the wagons were cook tents for cattle drives. Then, in 1892, a cowboy bet “a case of whiskey that the Hog Eye chuckwagon team was the [fastest],” and when the starting gun fired, “20 other guns blazed forth just to make no mistake about the start [and] off they went, neck-and-neck.”
Spoiled Heritage: The Manitobans by Jeannette Lebeau Richter, Friesen Press, 2022
At the heart of Beiseker author Janette Lebeau Richter’s compelling first novel is a lament for the erosion and loss of language and cultural rights for French Catholics on the prairies, specifically Manitoba. Set in the years just prior to the hanging of Louis Riel in 1885, the plot centres on a 16-year-old woman in a French settler community who falls in love with her cousin—a young man who first sets out to join the priesthood but whose ambitions draw him to the Protestant business community in Winnipeg. Minority rights were (at times violently) suppressed and the road of survival led through the shady part of town. It’s a history not widely known, an era of injustice that shaped a century of life on the prairies.
