Fugitive ‘bushman’ an enticing enigma

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/06/2021 (1732 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

From 1999-2001, escaped convict John Bjornstrom, a.k.a. “The Bushman of the Shuswap,” lived in (and pillaged from) an excavated cave in the wilderness near Shuswap Lake, B.C.

Besides being a con on the lam, he had a real, though murky, connection to the Bre-X gold-mining scandal.

That scandal culminated in the death of the Canadian mining company’s chief geologist — by either jumping from, or being pushed out of, a helicopter flight in Indonesia, depending on whose version you believed.

Bre-X was a Calgary-based mining company that in 1996 announced it had found a massive gold deposit in Indonesia. It quickly became a market darling and its share price skyrocketed.

But it was all a lie. The rich gold assay results it touted were fraudulent. Its ore samples were “salted” — laced with gold bought from small Indonesian shops that sold panned gold.

This is Canmore, Alta.-resident Paul McKendrick’s first book, by his own admission born of his connection to the Shuswap. His family had a cabin on Salmon Arm, on the southeast arm of the lake, and he first heard tales of the bushman as a teenager.

Bjornstrom, while working as a private investigator in Calgary, was hired by Bre-X president David Walsh to investigate his company’s chief geologist’s death and the “integrity of the Bre-X operation.” He travelled to Indonesia at least once on behalf of Bre-X, according to McKendrick.

What happened subsequently is unclear, but Bjornstrom alleged his Bre-X inquiries resulted in him being put on a “hit list.” When he became aware he was being targeted while a prisoner at the Rayleigh Correctional Centre near Kamloops, he bolted, and let out for the wilds of the Shuswap.

After a couple of years of breaking into cabins and eluding the RCMP, the Bushman became a media cause célèbre.

McKendrick’s writing is lucid and workmanlike, and the narrative pulls you along nicely. But this is a disquieting read; while it focuses on the Bushman’s multiple guises and claims, it never gets a firm fix on him.

Though undoubtedly a thief and burglar who victimized dozens of families in the Shuswap area, McKendrick allows as to a certain moral ambiguity in his take on the Bushman.

Even the RCMP and judicial system didn’t quite know what to make of this forest-dwelling oddball, and both ultimately cut him some slack after he was captured. (The Mounties only caught him after they posed as a documentary film crew and lured the publicity-hound con man to a bogus on-camera interview.)

Seems they were justified in doing so. Bjornstrom ultimately became a solid citizen. He even ran for mayor of the B.C. central interior city of Williams Lake. (He lost.)

Bjornstrom died of a heart attack in Williams Lake in February 2018, by then a mainstay of the community and a perennial volunteer at the local Salvation Army.

Whatever else Bjornstrom was, he was a multilayered, multifaceted — not to mention often charming, and oft-paranoid — personality.

McKendrick doggedly struggles to make sense of a life that, at base, didn’t make much sense. That he fails, ironically, only adds to the Bushman’s allure.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.