Yukon who is who

Hiram Alfred Cody (1872 – 1948)

H. A. Cody was born in Codys, New Brunswick, a town named after his family. He was the only son of Loretts and George Redmond Cody.¹⁾ He studied at King’s College in Nova Scotia, was ordained an Anglican minister in 1896, and became the rector of the Greenwich parish in New Brunswick.²⁾ He was mandated to work beyond the parish boundaries up and down the Saint John River. He then responded to a call for a missionary in the Yukon and, shortly after his marriage to Jessie M. Flewelling, the couple landed in Whitehorse in the fall of 1905.³⁾

Rev. Cody was assistant to Rev. Isaac Stringer in Whitehorse. He taught letter and numbers to a group of young and old students in a classroom at the rear of the rectory. Cody, in turn, learned 150 words in a local language. By 1906, Cody was fully in charge of the parish and the school classes lapsed either because he was too busy, or there were no pupils. In 1910, Cody’s successor, W.G. Blackwell, reopened the rectory schoolroom.⁴⁾ In 1927, Cody was Archdeacon of Saint John, a position he kept until his retirement in 1943. Cody kept extensive journals of his experiences, compiling forty-three journals in forty-three years. He became one of Canada’s most widely read authors and his novels were among the first in North America to be mass-produced. They were easy reading with Christian themes. Two of his more famous novels were The Frontiersman: A Tale of the Yukon (1910) and The Long Patrol: A Tale of the Mounted Police (1912).⁵⁾

Cody retired from the ministry in 1942 and started to write his autobiography but he suffered a stroke before the work was finished. The Anglican Church of Canada H.A. Cody fonds in the General Synod Archives contains correspondence, principally from 1907 to 1909, with Bishop Stringer, Bishop Bompas, John Hawksley and other missionaries.⁶⁾

Cody’s hagiography An Apostle of the North: memoirs of the Right Reverend William Carpenter Bompas, originally published in 1908, is an often-referenced biography.