A Nellie McClung Manitoba Mystery

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories
Nellie L. McClung
Toronto: William Briggs, 1912
224 pages

We have here a collection of short stories by a writer best known as a novelist.

Scratch that.

Nellie McClung is remembered today as a campaigner for women's rights. I learned this in 1973 when my mum brought home a sheet of newly issued postage stamps bearing her portait.

My mother was born at a time when women in Canada were not considered persons under the law. Strange but true. She wasn't recognized as a person until the month after her second birthday. Nellie McClung worked to made that possible.

I don't remember my mum mentioning that Nellie McClung wrote fiction and am not certain that she knew, though McClung had once time one of the country's bestselling novelists. Her 1908 debut, Sowing Seeds for Danny, sold over 100,000 copies.

Toronto: William Briggs, 1908

The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories was the author's third book and the first of her two short story collections. It was published fifteen years before my mother's birth, sixty-one years before that stamp was issued, and one-hundred-and-thirteen years before today. 

There are eight stories in all. They are interesting enough, though much of that interest has less to do with prose or clever plot than as snapshots of the time in which they were penned. Nowhere is this more true than with 'The Elusive Vote,' which takes place on the final day of the 1911 Canadian federal election:

The story centres on John Thomas Green, "a gentle soul in ill-fitting armor," and attempts by local Conservative Association to secure his vote – or, failing that, preventing him from casting a ballot. It reminded me of Stephen Leacock, as did 'The Runaway Grandmother,' in which a bachelor farmer hires an tenacious elderly housekeeper, bends to her will, and finds his life much improved. Then I remind myself that Prof Leacock was fairly new on the scene as a humorist.

I'm more confident that 'A Short Story of a Rabbit' was influenced by by Ernest Thompson Seton and Charles G.D. Roberts. A young rabbit disregards the warnings of his mother and so learns a valuable lesson.

'The Return Ticket' is also timestamped. The narrator has a chance encounter with a woman who is accompanying her daughter's body back from Rochester, Minnesota to Manitoba's Rose Valley. The only the only truly dark story, it is also the very best.

But it is the title story that dominates:

'The Black Creek Stopping-House' begins with John Corbett strolling into a Salvation Army meeting at Winnipeg's Victoria Hall. He has for no other reason to be there other than the fact that "he would do anything once, and if he liked it he would do it again." Corbett is very taken with the music, the camaraderie, and more than anything Maggie Murphy, the pretty young thing seated by the door selling War Cry: "When he went in he bought one; when he came out he bought all she had left."

Corbett is a card shark. He loves the life, the challenge, the money, and may be the very best. But he gives it all up, ill-gotten gains included, for pretty Maggie Murphy. The two wed and with the aid of oxen move more than 200 kilometres west to what would become Brandon, Manitoba. There they set up a "stopping house," feeding hungry men traveling east and west. The railway comes the following year, thus securing their future.

 
Early in the story, John and Maggie Corbett cede their positions as protagonists to twin Brydon brothers Reginald and Randolph. Are they remittance men? They don't do much of anything apart from waiting for wealthy, appropriately-named Aunt Patience to die. As they mess about, making money tighter, Randolph comes up with an idea to tide them over. Why not encourage young half-brother Fred to come out West?

“Wot’s the matter with us gettin’ out Fred for our farm pupil? He’s got some money—they say he married a rich man’s daughter—and we’ve got the experience!”

Fred sends money, then follows with his elegant, delicate, doll-like wife Evelyn. The daughter of a wealthy lumber baron, she had defied her father to marry for love. Events after the couple's arrival are not happy, and involve deceit, betrayal, misunderstanding, and a wolf of a man named Rance Belmont. I was all in! But then came an unimaginative climax that for a short story, no matter how long, relies far too much on coincidence. The denouement, happy and breezy, sees the Brydon twins receiving their just desserts.

Those familiar with the story will appreciate the pun.

The first ten chapters of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House' were so engaging that I moved my copy of Sowing Seeds for Danny to my night table. The final two chapters were such a disappointment that I moved it back to the shelves.

I thought no more about it until glancing through Nellie McClung's 1935 biography Clearing in the West. In the nineteenth chapter, the author recounts a thirty-mile trip to Brandon with her mother and brother Jack on a sleigh heavily loaded with wheat. According to McClung she was twelve at the time, meaning that the journey was untaken in the December of 1885: 

Though the stay at this "Black Creek Stopping house" is brief, four pages provide a Clearing in the West provides a description of the stopping house, which is something lacking in McClung's long short story:

Mrs. Cobett's stopping house was one big room, with one end used as a kitchen, in which stood a great high-over black stove where Mrs. Corbett with quick movements filled plates with a cut of roast bef and helpings of turnips, potatoes and gravy. Each man, who was helped took a place at the long table coveref with oil-cloth, where he found everything else he needed.
   "Da," Corbett, traversed the length of the table with a blue enamel tea pot and filled the cups that were stationed at every place. Bread and butter, pickles, biscuits and cheese were set at close intervals, along the long table and it took but little time to serve thirty or forty men.

Mrs Corbett's first name is not shared in Clearing in the West. In 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' Maggie cannot bring herself to address her husband, whom she first knew as "Mr Corbett," by his first name. "Da" is Da is short for "Dad" which is something I'd rather not address, particularly as  they have no offspring .

The Corbetts of 'The Black Creek Stopping-House,' have one employee, a young hireling blessed with the unforgettable name Peter Rocket. The Clearing in the West Corbetts have help in the form of an child  named Peter Rocket about whom twelve-year-old Nellie has a strong opinion:

I could see he was a lout of a boy, who could not even think of two things at once.

   There was an impatient rattling of spoons on cups.
   "Let me do it," I said, and took the smallest pot on the stove and went down the line.
   I could hear Mrs. Cobett's voice above the chatter.
   "Look at that now, there's a girl with a quick turn, and her not more than twelve years old. I'd be a proud woman, if I had a little girl like that comin' along."

Young Nellie's mother is not of similar mind: "When we were in the sleigh again, Mother told told me, I should nt be so forward. It did not look well for a little girl to jump up and pour tea for strange men."

Was there a Peter Rocket? No one by that name is recorded in 1881 and 1891 census records, though the latter does include an English immigrant named John Rocket living in Manitoba. In 1885, that Rocket would've been a fourteen-year-old.  

Similarly, the Corbetts don't match up. The 1881 census features a John Corbett (age 27) and Maggie Corbett (age 21) living in Manitoba, but not close to one another. The sole Margaret Corbett is fifty-nine.

Don't get me started on the Brydon bothers.

Neither the Corbetts nor their Black Creek stopping-house receive mention in 1880 editions of the Brandon Daily Sun. Curiously, the newspaper did not review The Black Creek Stopping-House and Other Stories.

So, I ask, is 'The Black Creek Stopping House' a nouvelle à clef? Did such a place exist? Could it be that the Corbetts are modeled on a couple who had entirely different names? What of Peter Rocket? Is it that the author couldn't remember John Rocket's first name? Did she even know it?

Now, I can't stop thinking about 'The Black Creek Stopping House.'

Dedication:

Trivia (personal): Because I'm working on a book about the Maria Monk hoax, I'm leaving this paragraph from 'The Way of the West' by way of reminder.

Object and Access: A very attractive hardcover, my copy, was purchased eight years ago in Toronto as part of a lot. It once belonged to Florence Adams.

The 1911 census features twenty-six women named Florence Adams, three of whom lived in Toronto. I'm ruling out the three-month-old, but not the twenty-three and twenty-five-year-olds  Of course, it's entirely possible that the woman who once owned the copy never lived in Toronto at all. 

I find no evidence of an edition published after 1919.

First editions begin at $30.00. At $177, the prize is a copy inscribed to one Alice Jordan:

A perfect gift for Xmas 2026.