Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands

In the winter of 1913| high in the Canadian Arctic| two Catholic priests set out on a dangerous mission to do what no white men had ever attempted: reach a group of utterly isolated Eskimos and convert them. Farther and farther north the priests trudged| through a frigid and bleak country known as the Barren Lands| until they reached the place where the Coppermine River dumps into the Arctic Ocean.
Their fate| and the fate of the people they hoped to teach about God| was about to take a tragic turn. Three days after reaching their destination| the two priests were murdered| their livers removed and eaten. Suddenly| after having survived some ten thousand years with virtually no contact with people outside their remote and forbidding land| the last hunter-gatherers in North America were about to feel the full force of Western justice.
As events unfolded| one of the Arctic’s most tragic stories became one of North America’s strangest and most memorable police investigations and trials. Given the extreme remoteness of the murder site| it took nearly two years for word of the crime to reach civilization. When it did| a remarkable Canadian Mountie named Denny LaNauze led a trio of constables from the Royal Northwest Mounted Police on a three-thousand-mile journey in search of the bodies and the murderers. Simply surviving so long in the Arctic would have given the team a place in history; when they returned to Edmonton with two Eskimos named Sinnisiak and Uluksuk| their work became the stuff of legend.
Newspapers trumpeted the arrival of the Eskimos| touting them as two relics of the Stone Age. During the astonishing trial that followed| the Eskimos were acquitted| despite theseating of an all-white jury. So outraged was the judge that he demanded both a retrial and a change of venue| with himself again presiding. The second time around| predictably| the Eskimos were convicted.
A near perfect parable of late colonialism| as well as a rich exploration of the differences between European Christianity and Eskimo mysticism| Jenkins’s Bloody Falls of the Coppermine possesses the intensity of true crime and the romance of wilderness adventure. Here is a clear-eyed look at what happens when two utterly alien cultures come into violent conflict.

“From the Hardcover edition.