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Canada’s most prolific but least known authors
KIMBERLEY--One of Canada's most prolific but least known authors lives in a caboose and works by the glow of kerosene lanterns. He's Adolph Hungry Wolf, a Swiss-born, California schooled, adopted-Blackfoot Canadian.
On his family's Skookumchuck Prairie homestead, 30 miles north of Kimberley, Hungry Wolf's only concession to the modern world is a 12 volt battery to power a radio. Without the distractions of electricity or running water he has nonetheless produced 40 titles for prestigious international publishers such as William Morrow and Harper & Row, and for his own company, Good Medicine Books (Box 844, Skookumchuck, B.C. VOB 2EO). "Good Medicine is the theme of my life," he says.
His first Good Medicine imprint in 1969 was Life in Harmony with Nature, a booklet set by typewriter, with hand lettered captions, which sold out three printings. "It was the Roaring Sixties and I went to my first Pow Wow. Since then I've mostly offered native examples of how people lived with nature in the past."
Hungry Wolf has been immersed in a profound spiritual growth for 20 years, spending thousands of hours with native elders, learning and recording their ways. Blackfoot culture is very complex but Hungry Wolf has become the keeper of one of the twelve major medicine bundles of the tribe. These bundles symbolize everything important in traditional life.
He has also acquired some 20,000 photographs and archival images, including 4,000 from the 1880's the present "showing virtually everybody and everything about the Blackfoot culture over the last 100 years." His archival material and research are locked in a fire-proof vault and will eventually be published in an exhaustive pictorial history of all four divisions of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Adolph, with wife Beverly and children Wolf, Okan, Iniskim and Star, live on a grassy meadow overlooking the Kootenay River. Beverly teaches the children the required school curriculum at home in their cabin, while Adolph writes and sleeps in a restored caboose.
The compound on their acreage includes four cabooses and three boxcars of the 1890's to 1930 vintage. These, with an assortment of rails, running stock and railway artifacts comprise the private Rocky Mountain Freight Train Museum, not generally open to the public. The assets in the collection are held by the Good Medicine Cultural Foundation and Historical Society, controlled by the family and members.
Hungry Wolf's first of many books on railways, Rails in the Mother Lode (Darwin) was published in California and remains a classic among rail buffs. Selling out three hardcover printings, Darwin published a paperback reprint last fall. His next railway title, Off On a Wild Caboose Chase, a farewell tribute to the last of the cabooses in Canada, is expected in the fall of 1988.
Although his interest in railways might seem to be antithetical to his abiding native way of life, Hungry Wolf has researched and written about railways with an almost equal consistency. After high school and during his university training for teaching in California, Hungry Wolf first worked as a locomotive fireman on trains.
By the mid-seventies Hungry Wolf had issued his first Canadian Railway imprint, Rails in the Canadian Rockies. The hardbound edition is still in demand by railway enthusiasts who will pay $65 to $100 per copy at antiquarian or secondhand bookstores.
Hungry Wolf is articulate and confident, but shies away from the limelight. He does not actively promote any of his titles. Once stung by a reporter at the Frankfurt Book Fair, who labelled him a "Teutonic Grey Owl," for many years he refused all media interviews. More recently he has enjoyed thoughtful interviews on Morningside and other CBC variety programs.
Hungry Wolf and his family lead a relatively uncompromising life. Friends have suggested that the acquisition of a word processor would considerably ease the physical tediousness of scribing new works, but Hungry Wolf has rejected all such suggestions. His attitude is not the frantic intensity of a Luddite condemning machines, but rather he seems mostly unconcerned with what goes on about him in the name of so-called progress.
The family homestead is a peaceful place, graced by mountain backdrops on all sides,
and filled with expanses of grasslands. Large herds of elk grace the property. In the morning, when the family first stirs, a trip to the outhouse is not permitted until the animals have moved back into the trees or the alpine.
Hungry Wolf is also a dancer and singer, and a member of various Blackfoot societies with attendant ceremonial obligations. Prayers are said at mealtimes, and each passing season is heralded with special private or tribal events, many of which are not shared with the public or the uninitiated.
Although dependent to an extent on mail order book sales from a caboose warehouse, the family lives beyond a locked gate on the highway and several miles down a winding road. They only come to town once every week or two, and during stormy winter months their road can be impassable for two weeks at a time.
"The major distraction in my family," says Hungry Wolf, "is the business aspect of publishing."
Hungry Wolf deals with a New York editor on his Morrow imprints, while the U.S. publisher leaves promotion to Macmillan. Macmillan features the Morrow imprints in Canada as agency titles from the New York office. These works are poorly promoted. Hungry Wolf's house imprint, Good Medicine Books, is now available from Lone Pine Publishers in Edmonton.
Sales in the early years were largely via word-of-mouth and from reviews in publications like the Whole Earth Catalogue and Mother Earth News, although the scope of his work soon out grew its roots in the back-to-the-land movement.
In recent years Hungry Wolf and his son Okan have developed a series of one hour railway videos, and lately Adolph has produced a series of railway cards. Son Okan is now working on illustrations and line drawings to accompany future book projects such as Hungry Wolf's forthcoming Indian Tribes of the Northern Rockies. Hungry Wolf's Good Medicine Books has published nearly 20 titles, including a series of Canadian Railway Scenes, Canadian Railway Stories, a yearly railway scene calender (Raincoast distributors), and Indian titles such as the Blackfoot Craftworkers Book and Good Medicine Traditional Dress Issue.
His own backlist titles in and out of print include Tipi Life, My Cree People and The Good Medicine Collection, an anthology culled from the first eight volumes in his series. A second Good Medicine anthology will encompass the best of volumes nine to 16.
William Morrow (Macmillan in Canada) has three titles in print; Ways of My Grandmother, written by Beverly Hungry Wolf, Shadows of the Buffalo -A Family Odyssey Among the Indians, co-written with his wife, and Children of the Sun, stories by and about Indian children.
Warner Books has issued the Good Medicine Collection. In 1983 Verlag Sauerlander of Switzerland issued a children's book which won a German book prize, and also Father Sun, Mother Earth. Hernov in Copenhagen has issued The Raven Knows Where the Sun Lives, while Scherz of Munich has issued two imprints from the Good Medicine stable. Harper & Row issued The Blood People An Illustrated Interpretation of Old Ways, in 1977.-by Bev Hills
[BCBW Summer 1988]
On his family's Skookumchuck Prairie homestead, 30 miles north of Kimberley, Hungry Wolf's only concession to the modern world is a 12 volt battery to power a radio. Without the distractions of electricity or running water he has nonetheless produced 40 titles for prestigious international publishers such as William Morrow and Harper & Row, and for his own company, Good Medicine Books (Box 844, Skookumchuck, B.C. VOB 2EO). "Good Medicine is the theme of my life," he says.
His first Good Medicine imprint in 1969 was Life in Harmony with Nature, a booklet set by typewriter, with hand lettered captions, which sold out three printings. "It was the Roaring Sixties and I went to my first Pow Wow. Since then I've mostly offered native examples of how people lived with nature in the past."
Hungry Wolf has been immersed in a profound spiritual growth for 20 years, spending thousands of hours with native elders, learning and recording their ways. Blackfoot culture is very complex but Hungry Wolf has become the keeper of one of the twelve major medicine bundles of the tribe. These bundles symbolize everything important in traditional life.
He has also acquired some 20,000 photographs and archival images, including 4,000 from the 1880's the present "showing virtually everybody and everything about the Blackfoot culture over the last 100 years." His archival material and research are locked in a fire-proof vault and will eventually be published in an exhaustive pictorial history of all four divisions of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Adolph, with wife Beverly and children Wolf, Okan, Iniskim and Star, live on a grassy meadow overlooking the Kootenay River. Beverly teaches the children the required school curriculum at home in their cabin, while Adolph writes and sleeps in a restored caboose.
The compound on their acreage includes four cabooses and three boxcars of the 1890's to 1930 vintage. These, with an assortment of rails, running stock and railway artifacts comprise the private Rocky Mountain Freight Train Museum, not generally open to the public. The assets in the collection are held by the Good Medicine Cultural Foundation and Historical Society, controlled by the family and members.
Hungry Wolf's first of many books on railways, Rails in the Mother Lode (Darwin) was published in California and remains a classic among rail buffs. Selling out three hardcover printings, Darwin published a paperback reprint last fall. His next railway title, Off On a Wild Caboose Chase, a farewell tribute to the last of the cabooses in Canada, is expected in the fall of 1988.
Although his interest in railways might seem to be antithetical to his abiding native way of life, Hungry Wolf has researched and written about railways with an almost equal consistency. After high school and during his university training for teaching in California, Hungry Wolf first worked as a locomotive fireman on trains.
By the mid-seventies Hungry Wolf had issued his first Canadian Railway imprint, Rails in the Canadian Rockies. The hardbound edition is still in demand by railway enthusiasts who will pay $65 to $100 per copy at antiquarian or secondhand bookstores.
Hungry Wolf is articulate and confident, but shies away from the limelight. He does not actively promote any of his titles. Once stung by a reporter at the Frankfurt Book Fair, who labelled him a "Teutonic Grey Owl," for many years he refused all media interviews. More recently he has enjoyed thoughtful interviews on Morningside and other CBC variety programs.
Hungry Wolf and his family lead a relatively uncompromising life. Friends have suggested that the acquisition of a word processor would considerably ease the physical tediousness of scribing new works, but Hungry Wolf has rejected all such suggestions. His attitude is not the frantic intensity of a Luddite condemning machines, but rather he seems mostly unconcerned with what goes on about him in the name of so-called progress.
The family homestead is a peaceful place, graced by mountain backdrops on all sides,
and filled with expanses of grasslands. Large herds of elk grace the property. In the morning, when the family first stirs, a trip to the outhouse is not permitted until the animals have moved back into the trees or the alpine.
Hungry Wolf is also a dancer and singer, and a member of various Blackfoot societies with attendant ceremonial obligations. Prayers are said at mealtimes, and each passing season is heralded with special private or tribal events, many of which are not shared with the public or the uninitiated.
Although dependent to an extent on mail order book sales from a caboose warehouse, the family lives beyond a locked gate on the highway and several miles down a winding road. They only come to town once every week or two, and during stormy winter months their road can be impassable for two weeks at a time.
"The major distraction in my family," says Hungry Wolf, "is the business aspect of publishing."
Hungry Wolf deals with a New York editor on his Morrow imprints, while the U.S. publisher leaves promotion to Macmillan. Macmillan features the Morrow imprints in Canada as agency titles from the New York office. These works are poorly promoted. Hungry Wolf's house imprint, Good Medicine Books, is now available from Lone Pine Publishers in Edmonton.
Sales in the early years were largely via word-of-mouth and from reviews in publications like the Whole Earth Catalogue and Mother Earth News, although the scope of his work soon out grew its roots in the back-to-the-land movement.
In recent years Hungry Wolf and his son Okan have developed a series of one hour railway videos, and lately Adolph has produced a series of railway cards. Son Okan is now working on illustrations and line drawings to accompany future book projects such as Hungry Wolf's forthcoming Indian Tribes of the Northern Rockies. Hungry Wolf's Good Medicine Books has published nearly 20 titles, including a series of Canadian Railway Scenes, Canadian Railway Stories, a yearly railway scene calender (Raincoast distributors), and Indian titles such as the Blackfoot Craftworkers Book and Good Medicine Traditional Dress Issue.
His own backlist titles in and out of print include Tipi Life, My Cree People and The Good Medicine Collection, an anthology culled from the first eight volumes in his series. A second Good Medicine anthology will encompass the best of volumes nine to 16.
William Morrow (Macmillan in Canada) has three titles in print; Ways of My Grandmother, written by Beverly Hungry Wolf, Shadows of the Buffalo -A Family Odyssey Among the Indians, co-written with his wife, and Children of the Sun, stories by and about Indian children.
Warner Books has issued the Good Medicine Collection. In 1983 Verlag Sauerlander of Switzerland issued a children's book which won a German book prize, and also Father Sun, Mother Earth. Hernov in Copenhagen has issued The Raven Knows Where the Sun Lives, while Scherz of Munich has issued two imprints from the Good Medicine stable. Harper & Row issued The Blood People An Illustrated Interpretation of Old Ways, in 1977.-by Bev Hills
[BCBW Summer 1988]
Submitted on December 9, 2003 in By David.
