The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #68888   Message #2803010
Posted By: Jim Dixon
04-Jan-10 - 11:06 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Req: Capture of Albert Johnson (Wilf Carter)
Subject: Lyr Add: RAT RIVER TRAPPER (Doug Hutton)
From Figures in a Ground: Canadian Essays on Modern Literature Collected in Honor of Sheila Watson by Sheila Watson, Diane Bessai, David Jackel (Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1978), page 244f:

Item 11: a song written to celebrate the RCMP Centennial in 1974. It was first recorded on a memorial album called Scarlet and Gold.

RAT RIVER TRAPPER
Doug Hutton (Bulrush Music, BMIC, 1974.)

CHORUS: Rat River trapper, Rat River man,
Chased through the northland, catch him if you can.
Rat River trapper, Rat River man,
Crazy Albert Johnson, hard to understand.

1. Built himself a cabin a long way from home.
All he ever wanted was to be left alone.
Pay him a visit in the shivering cold.
Check out the story the Indians told.

2. Smoke from a woodstove. Someone's inside,
But a man won't answer when he's trying to hide.
Back to Aklavik. What shall we do
With a man in the cabin? But nobody knew.

3. Four men with dog team, driving through the snow,
Eighty miles from nowhere at forty below.
A 30-30 rifle makes a terrible sound,
And a Mountie lying on the frozen ground.

4. Back with the posse and a band of Loucheux,
The weather was bad as the cold wind blew.
Then one day along a creek bed,
He jumped up from nowhere and shot a Mountie dead.

5. Over the mountain, by the Barrie [sic] River Pass,
Walking on his snowshoes he kept moving fast.
Covered his tracks by a herd of caribou.
You could see this man wasn't anybody's fool.

6. On February seventeen nineteen thirty-two,
Lying on the ice, someone nobody knew.
In the cold of the land of the midnight sun,
He died from the bullets of the posse's guns.