The Hunted Woman

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Annotated and Expanded Edition

THE HUNTED WOMAN

BY

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

1915

TO MY WIFE

AND

OUR COMRADES OF THE TRAIL

Annotations by Terry Irving and Barbara Flanagan

Annotated edition ©2015 by Ronin Robot Press

Terry Irving, Publisher

Ronin Robot Press

9715 Holmhurst Rd

Bethesda, MD 20817

Forward

CHAPTER I: AMIDST THE HORDE

CHAPTER II: TO THE RESCUE

CHAPTER III: A STRONG MAN VANQUISHED

CHAPTER IV: DEFENDER OF THE WEAK

CHAPTER V: THE GREAT ADVENTURE

CHAPTER VI: THE CONFESSION

CHAPTER VII: DEVIL FISH

CHAPTER VIII: TALE OF A BEAR AND RUMOUR OF A GRAVE

CHAPTER IX: TWENTY-EIGHT HORSES

CHAPTER X: TÊTE JUANE CAMP

CHAPTER XI: NORTH TO LOON LAKE

CHAPTER XII: THE NIGHT CARNIVAL

CHAPTER XIII: IMPRUDENCE, NIGH ON TO ARROGANCE

CHAPTER XIV: THE STORY OF OLD MACDONALD

CHAPTER XV: A NEW JOANNE

CHAPTER XVI: JOANNE’S SECRETS CONFIDED

CHAPTER XVII: HER GLORIOUS HAIR AND A LITTLE WHITE BUTTON

CHAPTER XVIII: INTO THE MOUTH OF THE COYOTE HOLE

CHAPTER XIX: THE ACCEPTANCE OF LOVE AND DEATH

CHAPTER XX: THE RESCUE AND A WEDDING

CHAPTER XXI: RISEN FROM THE GRAVE

CHAPTER XXII: A KIDNAPPING THWARTED

CHAPTER XXIII: SHE WAS HIS WIFE

CHAPTER XXIV: SHOOT IF IT AIN’T A BEAR

CHAPTER XXV: THE DREAM WAS REALITY

CHAPTER XXVI: THE TREASURE

CHAPTER XXVII: THE THING WORSE THAN DEATH

CHAPTER XXVIII: HIS TRUE TREASURE

CHAPTER XXIX: THE FIGHT

CHAPTER XXX: THE TWO MARYS

Annotations

FOREWORD TO THE RONIN ROBOT PRESS EDITION

2015

Settle in for a ripping, wild-west melodrama of lust, greed, gold, madmen, dynamite, prostitution--and the love of a good woman with a complicated past. The Ronin Robot Press is pleased to offer this annotated edition to speed you—like a tender-foot on a fast-moving, westward-bound locomotive—smoothly through the story and past the potential obstructions of historical references and peculiar jargon encountered along the way.

Exactly one century ago this year, U.S. journalist-author James Oliver Curwood crafted this tightly woven tale of British Columbian railroad camps whose characters are driven by motives arising from complex, competing social and economic issues of the first decades of the 20th Century: the greed of those afflicted with gold fever; the dangerous, break-neck competition to build the railroads; the nature of good people, bad people, and mad people; woman’s evolving place in the world and consequent strains on male-female relations; the redemptive nature of love; and prostitution and sexual slavery as a response to the exigencies of supply and demand in a woman-hungry country.

The Expansion of the Railroad. By 1868, the Gold Rush boom was bust in British Columbia. Partly to compensate for the lost revenues, in 1906 British Columbia began building a branch of the railroad. The focal point for The Hunted Woman is the dangerous, explosive building of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway whose railroad camps continued where the gold camps left off: we encounter wily shopkeepers, saloons, drunks, criminals of every stripe, and, of course, prostitution. The GTPR (which eventually ran from Winnepeg to Prince Rupert, British Columbia) completed its connection to the main Grand Trunk Railway in 1914. The Hunted Woman was written in 1915, depicting events set around 1912 in the rail-end camp called Tête Juane Cache.

The Evolution of Women’s Rights and Sexual Relations. In 1912, married women were still legally chattel. In the U.S., the 19th Amendment would not be ratified for another eight years, but by 1910, some states in the West had begun to extend the vote to women for the first time in almost 20 years. (Idaho and Utah had given women the right to vote at the end of the 19th century.). In Canada, the Act to Confer the Electoral Franchise upon Women was passed a year earlier—1919. (Quebec did not give women he vote until 1940.)

Combined with the struggle for universal suffrage, women were beginning to rebel against the Cult of True Womanhood: the idea that the only true woman was a pious, submissive wife and mother concerned exclusively with home and family. http://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/the-fight-for-womens-suffrage.

During the author’s lifetime, the writings of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, and Bloch were beginning to have an impact on cultural views of women’s sexuality. Indeed, the mere notion that women possessed a sexual nature (and that it could be discussed) was a major cultural change. The confusion of sexual mores in the 1970s pales in comparison to the conflicting messages and thoughts that must have run rampant leading up to The Roaring Twenties.

Our lovely and serene heroine, Joanne, possesses a streak of independent thought and daring unlike most good young women encountered in books of the time. She is entranced by John Aldous’s world-wide travels and wishes she were a man so she could travel, as she did with her father, rejecting the notion of a woman’s place; yet she believes that a wife must obey her husband. She fearlessly enters the dangerous camps unarmed. She is proficient with guns and is confident that she can defend herself, needing no man to intercede; yet, when danger strikes, she reverts to the stereotypical screamer of penny dreadfuls, never reaching for one of those guns. There is a lot of screaming!

For his part, John (I’ll save you, Nell!) Aldous, the handsome novelist and wooer of the lovely Joanne holds contradictory views of women. One glance at her and he is convinced she is a good woman. Twice in the novel, John blatantly refers to Joanne as like the Madonna and articulates his expectation that he possesses her totally (after two days’ acquaintance) and that in the future she will obey him. However, he thinks it is swell that she has an independent streak and wants to partner in his great adventures. And he leaves her in danger with her assurances that she can take care of herself.

Freud’s views of women were much discussed between 1912 and 1915; he labelled feelings such as John’s toward women the Madonna-Whore Complex: a condition in which a man feels anxiety when it comes to women, and to reduce this anxiety, he places them in either the Madonna category—made up of women he admires and loves—or the whore category—women he despises because he finds them sexually attractive (Freud, 1912). John Aldous admits to Joanne that he despises women, considering them bad, and that this feeling has driven his treatment of women in his books—until, that is, he meets Joanne whom he identifies at first sight as good. The reader will note that John’s love for his Madonna remains pure, untainted by the lust that would force him to perceive her as bad.

Nowhere was the delineation between good and bad women as evident as in the camps of the west. Most of the few women available to men were prostitutes, many imported from Europe. Good women were rare and highly valued; an historical event that demonstrated just how they were prized was the arrival of the first good woman in the mining town of Columbia which was celebrated by a parade. Class distinction between prostitutes (in this book variously referred to as Straying Angels, Dizzy Dollies, and the Little Sisters) and good women was typical of the gold rush camps and the railroad camps that took their place. Consider the true case of Big Annie, a well-known madame during the gold rush, who pushed the town schoolmarm into the street. In retaliation, the town’s firemen, dragged their watercart to Annie’s place and washed her out of the building. http://www.sierrafoothillmagazine.com/women.html

Those who were not prostitutes, were good; however, even good women (and young girls) were routinely captured, used and tortured by their captors, then returned to the camps as prostitutes and revenue-earners for the men who had ruined them. It is this danger of sexual slavery that our heroine faces in The Hunted Woman. Displaying an enlightened viewpoint, however, the author allows for the salvation of these captured women: through the power of true love they might be redeemed.

With all this going on, the only thing that could make for a perfect climax is a high-speed chase or a treasure hunt. Well, of course there is a treasure hunt! Who will find the gold? Who will keep the gold? Who will keep the girl? I’m honor-bound not to spill the beans.

Barbara Flanagan

July 8, 2015

About the Author

James Oliver Curwood was born in Michigan in 1878. He never finished high school and his work history was erratic, but he was devoted to writing, beginning at age nine. He spend two years enrolled at the University of Michigan. He was briefly a journalist (twice). The first six-month job was for the Detroit News-Tribune where he covered funerals (he was fired for incorrectly reporting the name of a peeping tom). Oops. The second time he was rehired as an assistant editor; he left after five years to devote more time to writing.

Curwood first went to the Pacific Northwest in 1909 when the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway in British Columbia was undergoing construction. He spent up to six months of each of the next 18 years in the wilderness. He published more than 30 books; some were translated to foreign languages and made into movies.

Source: the Shiawassee District Library. http://www.sdl.lib.mi.us/history/curwood.html

CHAPTER I:

AMIDST THE HORDE

It was all new--most of it singularly dramatic and even appalling to the woman who sat with the pearl-gray veil drawn closely about her face. For eighteen hours she had been a keenly attentive, wide-eyed, and partly frightened bit of humanity in this onrush of the horde. She had heard a voice behind her speak of it as the horde--a deep, thick, gruff voice which she knew without looking had filtered its way through a beard. She agreed with the voice. It was the Horde--that horde which has always beaten the trails ahead for civilization and made of its own flesh and blood the foundation of nations. For months it had been pouring steadily into the mountains--always in and never out, a laughing, shouting, singing, blaspheming Horde, every ounce of it toughened sinew and red brawn, except the Straying Angels.1 One of these sat opposite her, a dark-eyed girl with over-red lips and hollowed cheeks, and she heard the bearded man say something to his companions about dizzy dolls and the little angel in the other seat. This same voice, gruffened2 in its beard, had told her that ten thousand of the Horde had gone up ahead of them. Then it whispered something that made her hands suddenly tighten and a hot flush sweep through her. She lifted her veil and rose slowly from her seat, as if to rearrange her dress. Casually she looked straight into the faces of the bearded man and his companion in the seat behind. They stared. After that she heard nothing more of the Straying Angels, but only a wildly mysterious confabulation about rock hogs,3 and coyotes4 that blew up whole mountains, and a hundred and one things about the rail end. She learned that it was taking five hundred steers a week to feed the Horde that lay along the Grand Trunk Pacific5 between Hogan's Camp6 and the sea, and that there were two thousand souls at Tête Jaune Cache,7 which until a few months before had slumbered in a century-old quiet broken only by the Indian and his trade. Then the train stopped in its twisting trail, and the bearded man and his companion left the car. As they passed her they glanced down. Again the veil was drawn close. A shimmering tress of hair had escaped its bondage; that was all they saw.

The veiled woman drew a deeper breath when they were gone. She saw that most of the others were getting off. In her end of the car the hollow-cheeked girl and she were alone. Even in their aloneness these two women had not dared to speak until now. The one raised her veil again, and their eyes met across the aisle. For a moment the big, dark, sick-looking eyes of the angel stared. Like the bearded man and his companion, she, too, understood, and an embarrassed flush added to the colour of the rouge on her cheeks. The eyes that looked across at her were blue--deep, quiet, beautiful. The lifted veil had disclosed to her a face that she could not associate with the Horde. The lips smiled at her--the wonderful eyes softened with a look of understanding, and then the veil was lowered again. The flush in the girl's cheek died out, and she smiled back.

You are going to Tête Jaune? she asked.

Yes. May I sit with you for a few minutes? I want to ask questions--so many!

The hollow-cheeked girl made room for her at her side.

You are new?

Quite new--to this.

The words, and the manner in which they were spoken, made the other glance quickly at her companion.

It is a strange place to go--Tête Jaune, she said. It is a terrible place for a woman.

And yet you are going?

I have friends there. Have you?

No.

The girl stared at her in amazement. Her voice and her eyes were bolder now.

And without friends you are going--there? she cried. You have no husband--no brother----

What place is this? interrupted the other, raising her veil so that she could look steadily into the other's face. Would you mind telling me?

It is Miette,8 replied the girl, the flush reddening her cheeks again. There's one of the big camps of the railroad builders down on the Flats. You can see it through the window. That river is the Athabasca.9