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The Mad Trapper
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lberta's national reputation for political eccentricity and extremism was cemented in the late 1930s following the election of a Social Credit provincial government under Premier William Aberhart. It was bad enough, in the minds of Canada's political and corporate elites, that the province was now led by an overtly religious radio evangelist; even worse was the fact that Aberhart and his government subscribed to the revolutionary economic theories of the British founder of the worldwide Social Credit movement, Major Clifford Douglas.
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"A fortunate thing it is for Canada as a whole that this fanatical flame has thus far been kept within the bounds of a single province."
--- --Prime Minister Mackenzie King, writing in his diary after Social Credit took power in Alberta.
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The drama of this extraordinary period in Alberta history makes Volume 7 cannot be overstated. At the center of it all is the tempestuous personality of Aberhart and his mission to rescue his province from Depression. He would battle the banks, the courts, the media and even his own party in his relentless quest for Alberta's economic salvation. Many of his initiatives were manifestly misguided, but some were merely ahead of their time and others, like the creation of the Alberta Treasury Branches, would serve the province well for many years.
But Aberhart and the Alberta Insurrection is not just about politics. A chapter on the arts includes several pages of early Alberta landscape paintings, while a chapter dedicated to crime recounts the hunt for the Mad Trapper of Rat River and recalls an era when capital and corporal punishments were routinely meted out by Alberta courts. It also tells the tale of Arthur English, Canada's last official hangman, who was compelled to retire after the execution of a female murderess went gruesomely awry and the noose pulled her head off her shoulders.
