"There were all kinds of head gear in the country,"; says 'Hank' James in D.M. McGowan's The Great Liquor War (Daison $9.95), "but most had been beaten and smashed about and generally made into part of the landscape. Most of the underground miners would take a beat up hat, maybe a derby, and shellac it until it was almost as hard as the rocks that might fall on their even harder heads. I always wore a Stetson and the one I was wearing then had held water for my horses more than once."; The Transcontinental Railroad is nearing completion in McGowan's account of the Northwest during the late eighteen hundreds. The British Columbia Police and the North West Mounted Police find themselves embroiled in a disagreement over jurisdiction -- who has control over liquor sales? "Any suggestion that these characters represent real people,"; says McGowan, "would be highly flattering.";

[BCBW SUMMER 1999] "Alcohol" "Fiction"