Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder, and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913
A really intriguing Book
https://w3.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/bloodyfalls_kh.html
Bloody Falls of the Coppermine:
Madness, Murder, and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913
By McKay Jenkins
NY: Random House 2005
Reviewed by Kenn Harper
McKay Jenkins has written a compelling book about the murder of two Catholic priests by two Inuit (Eskimos) in the Central Arctic in 1913, and the subsequent police investigation and the trials of the accused.
This is not virgin territory. In 1979, R. G. Moyles published “British Law and Arctic Men: The Celebrated 1917 Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, First Inuit Tried Under White Man's Law.” But Jenkins has written a more detailed book than Moyles' spare account – he has put meat on Moyles' skeletal narrative, which dealt mostly with the trials. In particular Jenkins provides detailed background on the lives of the two priests, the context of life in the lower Mackenzie River area and the largely unknown land to its west, and the police investigation.
The facts of the case are simple enough, the interpretation of those facts more difficult as, indeed, is shown by two different verdicts brought against the accused by two juries in neighbouring cities a week apart.
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In the western Canadian Arctic, regular Royal Northwest Mounted Police patrols began early in the twentieth century after American whalers had established at Herschel Island, west of the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Eventually a detachment was opened there.
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