Western Fraser, W. A: Owners Up. v1. 17 Feb 2013

[crutledge]

W. A. Fraser: (1859–1933) married (1889) Jessie Maud Barber. A Canadian novelist and inventor, he was born in Nova Scotia of Scots parents and educated at Westchester. He worked as a mining engineer in India, Burma, and Canada, before taking to writing and broadcasting animal stories. Thoroughbreds: A Sporting Novel (1903) is concerned with horse-racing in America. The plot hinges on a sinister banker trying to ruin the honest trainer by drugging horses with cocaine; the climax is when the trainer's lovely daughter disguises herself as a jockey in order to win the crucial race. Mooswa and Others of the Boundaries (1900) is a series of derivative animal stories (after Kipling) about Mooswa the Moose, protector of the Boy who is the son of the Hudson's Bay Company's factor in a remote area of Canada.

Excerpt
CLATAWA had put racing in Walla Walla in cold storage.
You can't have any kind of sport with one individual, horse or man, and Clatawa had beaten everything so decisively that the gamblers sat down with blank faces and asked, "What's the use?"
Horse racing had been a civic institution, a daily round of joyous thrills—a commendable medium for the circulation of gold. The Nez Perces Indians, who owned that garden of Eden, the Palouse country, and were rich, would troop into Walla Walla long rolls of twenty-dollar gold pieces plugged into a snake-like skin till the thing resembled a black sausage, and bet the coins as though they were nickels.

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