The Englishman's Boy

Canadian author Guy Vanderhaeghe’s 1996 novel, The Englishman's Boy, won that year’s Governor General's Award for English-language fiction for recounting a slightly fictionalized account of the real-life Cypress Hills Massacre that took place in Canada’s North-West Territories in 1873. The novel offers several versions of this violent encounter between American and Canadian frontiersmen and a camp of people from the Assiniboine nation: a third-person narrative follows the involvement of the titular “boy” in the event as it is happening; a first-person account from the event’s last survivor as told to a screenwriter fifty years later; and a revelation of how the story was depicted in the movie made from the screenwriter’s script as he mulls over his experiences at the end of his life. Through comparing and contrasting these versions, the novel considers concepts of civilization and savagery, and the power of stories to create and shape culture.

In the novel, the three periods are intertwined, but this summary will follow the events chronologically instead.

The novel opens as two Assiniboine warriors steal horses from a group of American white men in the northern Montana Territory. The white men are “wolfers,” or wolf hunters, a tough and hardened crew who have been ranging over the wilderness. After the horse theft, the wolfers decide to organize a posse to follow the thieves all the way north into modern-day Saskatchewan.



As the white men progress, they are joined by some American bison hunters and Canadian whiskey traders, and by a mysterious teenager who is only known as the Englishman’s Boy. The Englishman’s Boy got this nickname because he began his experiences in the West as a gun bearer to an Englishman—an employer who died just before the Boy joined up with the wolfer posse. On the way, the young man earns his guns, his horse, and cowboy status.

The journey to Canada is fraught with typical prairie dangers—bad weather, treacherous roads, afflicted horses. Nevertheless, the men do finally make it to Battle Creek, a town in the Cypress Hills, near which is an encampment of Assiniboine people. There is no evidence that the men who stole the horses have anything to do with this village, and the white keeper of a trading post urges the wolfers to give the horses up for lost and leave the place in peace.

However, the posse, led by the vicious Hardwick, refuses. Instead, they attack the men, women, and children of the Assiniboine camp, killing more than twenty-five people. One of these is a native girl whom the men rape, beat, tie up inside the trading post, and burn to death by setting the post on fire. The Englishman’s Boy relives the horror of standing by while this happens for the rest of his life.



In 1923, the Englishman’s Boy is a retired Western actor who goes by the name Shorty McAdoo. Shorty is contacted by Harry Vincent, a disabled screenwriter who works for a movie company owned by Damon Ira Chance. Chance, deciding to make a huge epic about the reality of life in the American West towards the end of the nineteenth century, has hired Harry to write the script. Harry, who is a hack, decides to take this project seriously; he plans to interview Shorty, basing the movie on Shorty’s biography. For Harry, this opportunity is a big break, but what he doesn’t realize is that Shorty is still haunted by his participation in the massacre, and his knowledge that he isn’t the “civilized man” he thought himself to be.

Harry gets the reticent Shorty to tell him the real story of the massacre, revealing even the horrible details of the rape and murder of the young woman. Harry is thrilled—he believes that the screenplay he writes will be exactly the visionary work that Chance seems to want. Chance waxes at length about his belief that “the spirit of the age would express itself in an endless train of images”—that movies will show people a true reflection of themselves and their world.

However, when Harry produces the script, Chance reveals that all along his plan has been to fundamentally undermine the truth of the story, betraying both Harry and Shorty in the process. He doesn’t want to show the truth, so much as to invent it wholesale—his agenda is to demonstrate that the American conquest of the West was inevitable and correct. To this end, Chance forces Harry to rewrite the ending of the movie. Now, instead of showing the “destruction, hopelessness, and loss of a culture” through violence, the movie ends with a scene that proves that Native people had it coming because “the downtrodden always lose because they are weak, the strong always win.” Practically, what this means is replacing the image of the wolfer posse setting fire to the trading post with a scene where the girl starts the fire herself. The idea is that she is giving up the fight and the land so that white people can take it with impunity.



Harry is horrified by what Chance is doing, but he has no ability to do anything about it. Chance’s studio owns the movie and Harry’s script; Chance himself threatens Harry—he could be denounced as a communist, or his Jewish girlfriend be blackballed from work in the film industry altogether. The novel ends as Harry, who has completely capitulated, visits his dying mother in the hospital. The two have never gotten along, but this time, Harry brings his girlfriend, Rachel, with him, and with her as a kind of mediator, Harry and his mother are able to forge an end-of-life connection.