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When Gavrilo Princip, the Serb student, sent a bullet crashing into Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian Empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, that peaceful summer day of June 28, 1914, he not only “fired the shot heard round the world” but loosed the fingers of Fate which were to set the feet of men upon strange paths, and tear asunder forever the barriers of distance that had been the bulwark of the peace the universe had enjoyed. As with all world-shattering events, few realized to the full the impact this “European incident” was to have upon the lives of all and sundry—even people unborn. On August 4, 1914, the law of self-preservation, linked with desperation and necessity, set in motion forces that were to carry science and invention to new and undreamed of heights and send mankind, literally and figuratively, flying into strange new worlds.

For nearly half a century the Western world had lived under the inertia of tranquillity and peace, enjoying the diffused plenty of cheapness and freedom no living being was ever to see again. Though newspapers spoke of a world catastrophe their message conveyed little, or nothing, to those for whom the world had always seemed safe and secure. In homes all across the land there was much talk and excited conjecture but it was the talk and conjecture of spectators who had no true sense or realization of the part they were to play in the catastrophic upheaval which was to involve and engulf them all. The world was about to be set on fire, yet the conflagration was a nebulous thing—a distant miasma which couldn’t possibly affect the little individual worlds of the populace at large. But, as event piled upon event, and the German Army prepared to spread its evil despite all treaties and decencies, the picture began to assume a different colour. Soon the youth of the land, caught up in the fever and excitement of the moment, were rushing to the recruiting stations to sign up for the “Big Adventure,” and Wilfred Reid May of Carberry, Manitoba, was no exception, though he little realized when he took the King’s Shilling that his part in this adventure was ultimately to place his name, along with those of other fellow Canadians and trail-blazers of the war, high on the roster of North American aviation.

Known as “Wop” as far back as his school days, nobody could accuse him of having Latin blood in his veins. A tall, pronounced blond, slim and active as a panther, he was as demonstrative as the Sphinx and about as communicative as the proverbial oyster. Actually, the nickname, which clung to him throughout his life, was acquired when the little daughter of Judge Swanson of Kamloops, lisped the name Wilfred into something that resembled “Wop.”

The moving fingers of Fate dealt the first cards in “Wop’s” ultimate destiny and that of Northern bush flying when, in 1902, the family decided to move west to Edmonton, Northwest Territories, which, three years later, was to become the Province of Alberta. The future capital of the Northwest was just emerging from its chrysalis and throwing off the primitive rule of the Fur Lords. The end of the ox-cart era was still not far behind. In fact, a cavalcade of squeaking Red River carts, drawn by oxen, still hauled the Hudson’s Bay Company’s freight and fur-packs across Smith Portage to the northward, while a regular brigade of horse-drawn Bain wagons, with their swarthy half-breed drivers, was in constant motion over the Athabasca Trail, hauling supplies for the northern trading posts from Edmonton to Athabasca Landing and returning with the baled wealth of the Silent Places.

On the banks of the swift-flowing Saskatchewan, where the old Hudson’s Bay Company’s post—Fort Edmonton—still reared its squat trading stores and grey stockades, bronzed Crees continued to barter their peltries with the factors, while, only a few years before, a hunting party had sought sanctuary within its palisades when predatory Blackfeet had pursued them to the very gates. A straggling street, fronted with ugly, square-faced stores, harness shops, livery stables and the inevitable Chinese cafés—all smelling of newly-sawn lumber—lined the heights above, rubbing shoulders with the Queen’s Hotel and its more aristocratic competitor, the Alberta Hotel, across the way. Aloof and dignified stood the whitewashed buildings which housed the red-coated members of “N” Division of the Royal North West Mounted Police^[1] under the command of the veteran Inspector Wroughton.

Edmonton was still a frontier town. The steel tentacles of the Canadian Pacific Railway had reached a halt at Strathcona, on the south side, though the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk were uncoiling twin ribbons of steel slowly across the prairies to the eastward.

High hopes stalked the muddy streets of this city of contrasts where the ox-cart was to dodge the automobile, French heels sink in moccasin tracks, and the high silk hat salute the stiff-brimmed Stetson. It was, as it still is, the gateway to that vast, picturesque and, then, untamed two million square miles of rugged mountains, pathless forests, rushing rivers and tranquil lakes enjoying the comprehensive title “The North.” From its muddy streets, log buildings and frame shacks fur traders, half-breed freighters, grizzled trappers, priests and black-cowled nuns from the seminaries of Montreal and Quebec trekked north by canoe, pack-train and sternwheeler to the rolling prairies of the Peace, the forested wilds of the Athabasca, and the far-distant Mackenzie region wherein the Hudson’s Bay Company, undisturbed by the surrender of their Royal Charter thirty-odd years before, still held feudal sway under the despotic regime of Chief Factor William Thomas Livock who ruled with an iron hand encased in velvet from his palisaded stronghold on the riverbank.

A slim, reserved and, at times, somewhat moody youngster, the North was soon putting its ineradicable mark upon “Wop” May as, annually, the giants of the Pays d’en Haut and the voyageurs of the Three Rivers converged on the fast-growing frontier town. There was Angus Brabant, eagle-eyed potentate of the Mackenzie; Colin Fraser, free trader from Fort Chipewyan on the shores of beautiful, island-dotted Athabasca Lake, who had defied the might of the “Gentlemen Adventurers” to trade furs on his own from coppery Slavies and Chipewyans, a man whose great-grandfather had been piper to Governor Simpson, the Little Emperor of Rupert’s Land, as he travelled from the Atlantic to the Pacific in his gaily-painted canot-de-maitre. There was Captain Haight, “Admiral” of the Hudson’s Bay scow transport, with his brass-buttoned uniform, foghorn voice and colourful vocabulary; “Peace River Jim” Cornwall, who had participated in the march of Coxey’s Army on Washington then headed west to establish the firm of Bredin and Cornwall and compete with the Hudson’s Bay Company for the Indian trade of the Peace River country, and that roguish Highland chieftain, Campbell Young, of Hislop and Nagle, whose picketed fur forts stood cheek by jowl with those of the Company the length of the far-off Mackenzie. There was Jack Hornby, too, the bearded Hermit of the Barrens who had once trained for the British Diplomatic Service and who was destined to die of starvation with his two young companions in the heart of the Barrens he loved—and others hated. And, no one could forget granite-featured Sergeant Anderson of the Royal North West Mounted Police. Around hotel lobbies the story was told of how this giant Icelander with the pock-pitted face and ice-blue eyes once dogged a criminal for months only to find him buried in the fastnesses of the, then, almost inaccessible Pouce Coupe country. To prove to Headquarters that he had caught up with his quarry, “Andy” calmly dug up the body, cut off the head and brought the grisly object back in a gunny-sack to a very unappreciative Officer Commanding. When he boarded the train at the end-of-steel there was something about the sinister bundle that aroused the coloured porter’s curiosity. As the Sergeant snored blissfully he hooked the gunny-sack from beneath the bunk and lifted it. The repulsive head rolled down the aisle, evoking screams that echoed throughout the train. Old-timers still insist that porter is running yet!

As these husky Northerners swept into town, in company with their Indian or half-breed retainers, by dog-drawn carriole or stage, the columns of the local press recorded stories of hair-raising adventure on trail and trapline. Each summer, too, The Journal and The Bulletin displayed pictures depicting the annual treaty party en route to the Far North to carry King Edward’s treaty money to nomad Slavey, Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib Indians, while Jim Cornwall made the welkin ring with his praises of the “New North,” and his attempt to slash a frontier railroad from Edmonton to Fort McMurray to open up the Athabasca, the Slave and the Mackenzie rivers.

To any impressionable lad with the spirit of adventure in his soul these things could scarcely help but prove an inspiration and the youthful May, along with others like him, proved no exception to the rule. By the time he was sixteen, settlers from as far south as Iowa and Texas were battling the muskegs along the widely-advertised and much misrepresented Edson Trail to carve out a new empire in the North. Every day saw a further incursion, and exodus, of this seemingly endless covered-wagon caravan as the last mass movement of whites into the unoccupied lands of the Northwest continued.

While the Mounted Police were kept busy in their eternal search for illicit booze the unorganized caravan continued to trickle in and out of town, some heading for the Edson Trail while wiser ones branched off along the Athabasca Trail to Lesser Slave Lake and the rolling highlands beyond Peace River Crossing. Every day one heard new tales of hope or hardship, of tragedy and humour, while the evanescent hope of the new pioneer settlers was reflected in the slogans scrawled on their wagon-covers or the rickety sides of their cabooses: “Grande Prairie or Bust!” “Peace River or Bust!” “Grand Falls to Grande Prairie!”

Enthralled by this passing pageant of pioneering humanity, “Wop” never missed an opportunity to know what was going on. Eagerly he talked to nasal-toned Easterners and soft-spoken Yankees, and read with avidity McKitterick’s stories—hot from Dunvegan, The Waterhole, Peace River and Grande Prairie—of this stampede into the new “Promised Land.”

That tragedy stalked these Northern trails was forcibly brought home to him when word reached a shocked Edmonton of the death by starvation of Inspector Francis J. Fitzgerald of the Royal North West Mounted Police, and the lost Dawson Patrol, comprising Constables Carter, Kinney and Taylor, in the snow-filled passes of the Arctic Rockies east of Fort McPherson—an area with which “Wop,” himself, was to become only too familiar in the years ahead.

That same summer, along the streets of Edmonton, “Wop” and other future bush fliers gazed with fascinated eyes as the stuffed wood buffalo, slain by the ill-fated explorers, Radford and Street, was paraded along First Street. As though to top off the day’s excitement, the evening Bulletin carried the story, in banner headlines, of Vihljalmur Stefansson’s new biological discovery amongst the Arctic snows to the northward—of the so-called “blue-eyed, blonde” Eskimos.

“Some day,” “Wop” told his brother, Court, after hearing from the lips of bronzed Northerners how Radford and Street had fallen victims to the copper snow-knives of these same Eskimos on the icy shore of Bathurst Inlet, “I’m going into that country and you’ll hear of me down there!”

Court grinned with good-natured tolerance, little realizing how truly prophetic these words were going to prove.

At Victoria High School in Edmonton, May formed a firm friendship with Roy Brown of Carleton Place, Ontario. A slim, dark-haired chap with square jaw and shrewd grey eyes, Roy exuded an expansive friendliness. Both shared a love of sports—sailing, lacrosse and the track—and Roy had gained the reputation of being one of the outstanding baseball and hockey players in the city. Added to all this, they also shared a common interest in the then undeveloped science of aviation and would spend hours together discussing the significance of the Wright brothers’ first flight in a heavier-than-air machine. How, on December 17, 1903, Orville had succeeded in covering 120-feet at a height of 50-feet in twelve seconds in a twenty-one-mile-an-hour wind from a base near the village of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on historic Roanoke Island where Raleigh’s Lost Colony predated the settlements of Plymouth and Jamestown, while, that same day, Wilbur soared 852-feet in fifty seconds. The fact that Louis Bleriot had been successful in flying the English Channel from Calais to Dover in only thirty-seven minutes six years later appealed to each of them as an assurance that, despite the much-advertised and abortive attempt at a flight put on at the Edmonton Exhibition grounds not long afterwards, the aeroplane had come into its own.

Yet, nobody in Edmonton, least of all young Brown and May, could have foreseen the time when this frontier city, only just emerging from the ox-cart and dog-team era, was to become the cradle of aerial pioneering and development for the vast hinterland lying to the northward. Neither could they, in their wildest dreams, have foreseen that in this same forested wilderness the old-time voyageur with his canoe and dog-team was to yield pride of place to the bush-pilot with his winged aeroplane, or that the small but rapidly-growing city on the banks of the Saskatchewan was to give birth to a new but equally indomitable type of pioneer—his “canoe” an aeroplane and his “paddle” a propeller—the khaki-clad bush-pilot who was to blaze new sky trails from the end-of-steel to the Polar Sea. For the days when Edmonton, with its two splendidly-equipped modern airports, was to proudly proclaim itself “the cross-roads of the world,” and send Russian-bound, lend-lease bombers winging their way over the Northwest Staging Route for delivery to Soviet girl-pilots at Fairbanks, Alaska, to be used in blasting Hitler’s Nazi hordes from Russian soil, still lay deep in the future. Yet the dark clouds which were already threatening in distant Europe were to nurture many of these embryonic bush-fliers who would be moulded to their future destiny in the fiery crucible of war.

[1]	Founded in 1873, the Force was known as the North West Mounted Police until 1902 when the name became Royal North West Mounted Police. Later, in 1920, the name was changed once more to—Royal Canadian Mounted Police.—p.h.g.