H.A. Cody, one of New Brunswick's first literary sensations

CBC

3 days ago

In 2025, Codys is known as a quiet rural community about 30 kilometres northwest of Sussex in southern New Brunswick.
It's named for the Cody family, United Empire Loyalists who opened several businesses in what became for a while a booming community with its own railway station.
Most of the family's accomplishments have been lost over time, but one Cody stands out above the rest.
Hiram Alfred Cody, known as H.A. Cody, wrote 25 novels, some of the most popular Canadian fiction at the time.
Cody was born in Codys in 1872, some 90 years after his ancestors fled the American Revolution for New Brunswick.
While he would eventually become a man of letters, his early years at school were unsettled.
He did not like school and preferred the great outdoors to more indoor scholarly pursuits.
"Cody did not really have an interest in school as a younger person," said James Upham, a popular historian and contributor to CBC's Roadside History.
"[He] tried to leave school. His family just kind of railroaded him back into it."
Long gone to the Yukon
After his formal education, Cody was ordained as an Anglican minister.
According to the Anglican Church of Canada archives, his career as a minister would take him through New Brunswick, from small churches in Doaktown and Ludlow, to Fredericton's Christ Church Cathedral and the former St. James Church in Saint John.
But it was Cody's posting in 1904 that probably piqued the interest of the adventurous young minister. He was sent to Dawson City to preach in the middle of the Klondike Gold Rush.
The departing minister told Cody he would be expected to spread the gospel, not just within city limits but throughout the Yukon territory.
"You're going to be canoeing and you're going to be dog sledding and you're going to be snowshoeing," Upham said.
"You just kind of imagine Cody sitting there pinching himself, going like, 'Have I died and gone to heaven?"
So Cody, along with his pregnant wife, Jess, moved north.
"Not totally sure that she was enjoying it quite as much as he was, but he seems to have really enjoyed himself up there," Upham said.
While he was in the territory, he hobnobbed with a giant of early Canadian literature, Robert Service, eventually establishing a friendly rivalry.
"He and Robert Service were actually pretty good buddies in the Yukon," Upham said.
"Cody seems to have had it in mind that he was going to like, civilize this youngster and sort of show him what's what. To the degree that Cody's book of poetry is … called Songs of a Blue Nose as a direct response to [Service's] Songs of a Sourdough."
'God, king and country'
Upham said Cody's work was in keeping with the times, featuring many archetypal characters popular in early English Canadian literature.
"They're the kind of stories that your grandma would buy if she was a member of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and wanted you to grow up in a particular God, king and country kind of a way," Upham said.
Examples include the RCMP constable Norman Grey in The Long Patrol d escribed as a man who "fears neither man nor devil."
In a similar vein, Cody created Keith Steadman, a "hardy northman and trailsman" in The Frontiersman, who befriends a dog by giving it scraps from his supper of "bacon, a few beans, a taste of sourdough bread, with some black tea for a relish."
While Cody did write stories about the Yukon, he also wrote plenty of stories about his home province.
"There's one particular book called the The Unknown Wrestler, which takes place in a mythological community called Rookston, which is definitely not Rexton, even though it is obviously Rexton," Upham said.
Cody returned to New Brunswick after a coupe of years and lived much of his life in Saint John. He continued to write until the end of his adventurous life in 1948.
"Kid grew up on a farm, didn't really want to go to school, liked being in the woods," Upham said.