Book Description

In 1926, a young, one-armed goaltender named Jimmie Peever, won the prestigious Coy Cup symbolic of the hockey supremacy in the British Columbia, as a member of the Kimberley Intermediates. Later that same year, he also triggered the largest elephant escape in North American circus history, when 13 elephants bolted from the Sells Floto circus train while visiting Cranbrook, B.C. – all because of his dog’s shrill bark which spooked the massive elephants and set them on a wild rampage into the Canadian wilderness. The escape created an international sensation with local reporters penning some 30,000 words for newspapers from as far away as Toronto, Los Angeles and even Cuba, as the world clambered for news of the ‘great elephant escape.” Calls for the most famous elephant handler of the day were issued and Frank “Cheerful” Gardner finally arrived in the Kootenays to head up the search for the escaped elephant, valued at $10,000 apiece. Powell blends the history of BC’s Kootenay region with the life of the central character Jimmy Peever and tells a story where fact and fiction are juxtaposed and interwoven to include some of the region’s most significant historical touchstones from the Eugene Residential School of the 1920’s, and the rise of the Consolidated Mining Company, to the Japanese and Ukranian internment camps among others. A host of characters from Peter Verigin to Babe Ruth to circus personalities and an assortment of future hockey stars all cross Jimmy Peevers path.