In 1907, the fifteen-year-old French-Canadian Ernest Dufault left his
home in Quebec for Montana, where he was promptly arrested as a cattle
thief. As a prisoner of the state of Nevada, he passed himself off as an
American cowboy named Will James. Over the next few decades, Dufault,
a.k.a. James, would flourish as a cowboy and horsebreaker and go on to
become an artist, a soldier, a Hollywood stuntman, and a bestselling
author of award-winning westerns -- and his own false memoir. The
Quebecer was so successful a pretender that he was later inducted into
the Hall of Great Westerners, and his estranged wife, Alice Conradt,
would only learn his true identity when, at the age of fifty, Will James
died and left his estate to a man she had never heard of: one Ernest
Dufault.
In Benediction, Olivier Dufault recreates the true story of his
distant relative Ernest's incarceration in a Nevada prison and his
subsequent reinvention as "Will James." Relying on authentic historical
materials, including letters, telegrams, and court documents, as much as
his own imagination, Olivier Dufault's magnificent novel is a posthumous
benediction of an exceptional American life in which truth and lies walk
side by side.
