Author Paul McKendrick never found a dark side to the Bushman of the Shuswap

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      You may have heard the story of the so-called Bushman of the Shuswap. And if you haven’t, Paul McKendrick has a new book for you.

      The first-time author tells the bizarre tale in The Bushman’s Lair: On the Trail of the Fugitive of the Shuswap, which details the intriguing crimes and exploits of John Bjornstrom, who managed to evade police for two years while living in the wilderness around Shuswap Lake in B.C.’s southern interior. He survived by raiding summer cottages, pilfering them of food and clothing and whatever else he wanted to take back to the book’s titular hideout, which he’d built into a rocky outcrop above a remote beach.

      McKendrick had the seed of the book planted in his mind when he became one of the few people to gain access to Bjornstrom’s handcrafted abode shortly after a group of Shuswap Lake houseboat renters happened upon the lair in the summer of 2002, the year after Bjornstrom’s capture.

      “I was fairly unique in terms of seeing the cave,” McKendrick says on the line from his Canmore, Alberta, home, “because it was only a short period of time between the houseboaters finding it and when it was blown up [by the Ministry of Forests]. So there weren’t that many people that ventured inside. I didn’t get to see it when it was fully furnished—[the RCMP] had already cleared out quite a bit of stuff when I went through it—but even when I went through it, it was pretty comfortable, with the kitchen built out of plywood, and the bedroom chamber being quite large, the custom-built furniture in there.”

      Bjornstrom had outfitted the rustic bachelor pad with an electrical system powered by a bank of car batteries. He claimed to have carved the living quarters out with a hammer and chisel.

      “What drives someone to do that?” McKendrick asks. “That was always in the back of my mind. A serious undertaking, not really consistent with wanting to steal from and live off other people. He wasn’t scared of hard work.”

      Although McKendrick uses the surprising complexity of the Bushman’s 900-square-foot cave home as a starting point, it isn’t long before he’s layering on other engrossing aspects of the man’s story. A significant part of the book involves examination of Bjornstrom’s claim that he was hired as a private investigator to uncover sinister details of the notorious 1990s Bre-X mining scandal—which, he maintained, resulted in death threats and being put on a hit list for knowing too much.

      So how much of Bjornstrom’s Bre-X story does McKendrick think is true?

      McKendrick signs copies of The Bushman's Lair at Café Books in Canmore, Alberta.
      Facebook/Café Books

      “That’s certainly one of the lingering questions,” he says. “Other people who knew him well talked of him being an honest person, and I didn’t come across any falsehoods from him. It seemed like [the Bre-X investigation] was a one-off arrangement between him and [Bre-X CEO] David Walsh, so it’s not like other people in the company would know about him, necessarily. I can’t come up with an explanation of why he would make that up.”

      As well as the startling Bre-X claims, The Bushman’s Lair studies Bjornstrom’s assertion that he had psychic abilities and that they led to him being recruited for a secret U.S. military program in 1982. He also said that he was first drawn to the Shuswap by a desire to help children being used by pornographers there.

      “For me, the most intriguing thing is when you put the whole story together,” McKendrick says. “It seems crazy enough to be true when you put it all together, because who’s gonna invent all that? That why I felt compelled to tell the story, because so many things in isolation just didn’t make sense. Like talk of Bre-X, and the child pornography and stuff. There hadn’t even been any talk of Stargate, the secret CIA project, at that time.”

      Although he was never as notorious a fugitive as someone like El Chapo, Bjornstrom’s capture was similar to the Mexican drug lord’s in that it was brought on by a love of the limelight. The Bushman was only taken into custody after RCMP officers set up a sting where they masqueraded as documentary filmmakers interested in telling his story. One wonders if he could have avoided arrest for a lot longer if he’d been less hungry for attention.

      “He was certainly pretty good at avoiding [the police],” McKendrick says. “I don’t know if he was getting bored or he just thought that he needed to tell his story to try to get people on board with what he was doing and accept him. I mean, there was a fair bit of pressure on the police, and they were pretty motivated to catch him. So I’m not sure how long he could have lasted. Obviously, his weakness that they exploited was that he was keen to talk to the media.”

      For his B & E crimes in the Shuswap, Bjornstrom was sentenced to 23 months house arrest and three years probation in 2004. Before his death in 2018 at the age of 58, his will to connect with others saw him campaigning to become mayor of Williams Lake. He didn’t come close to winning, but TV footage of his political exploits made him out to be a likable, harmless guy.

      “The more you get to know him, the more you think he’s an honest man who was trying to help other people,” McKendrick says. “It was my conversation with his lawyer that really cemented my interest in telling his story, because his lawyer did think so highly of him and really came to believe everything that he said. So that was kind of a pivotal moment for me in deciding to write the book. When I set out, I was half expecting him to turn out to have a dark side to him, but I never found that.”

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