18-year-old Moshe Levy will be sent to the wilds of Western Canada, to work on his pioneering uncle’s ranch. This is not the Old West of John Wayne, Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott. The Canadian West of the turn of the century was peopled by Yiddish-speaking cowboys who learned Blackfoot, and Blackfoot Indians who learned Yiddish. By Chinese coolies and Scots, Poles and Eastern European immigrants of every description. Moshe will have little patience mucking out horse stalls, but he will revel in being taught to shoot by a Yiddish-speaking Blackfoot Indian horse whisperer with the unlikely name of Kipling. He will leave the ranch in Pincher Creek, Alberta and migrate to Edmonton, to become a professional bare-knuckle brawler, pickpocket and thief. It is there that he will befriend a Chinese restaurant owner, who is being beaten and robbed by a group of white rednecks, who Moshe, now calling himself Morris, will beat half to death with all the rage he felt for those who slaughtered his family back in the Old Country.

The Beiyang government (Chinese: 北洋政府; pinyin: Běiyáng Zhèngfǔ; Wade–Giles: Pei-yang Chêng-fu), also sometimes spelled Peiyang Government or the First Republic of China[1], refers to the government of the Republic of China which was in place in the capital city Beijing from 1912 to 1928. It was internationally recognized as the legitimate Chinese government. The name derives from the Beiyang Army, which dominated its politics with the rise of Yuan Shikai, who was a general of the previous imperial Qing government. After his death the army fractured into competing factions. Although the government and the state were nominally under civilian control under a constitution, the Beiyang generals were effectively in charge of it; with various factions vying for power, contributing to internal instability. Nevertheless, the government enjoyed legitimacy abroad along with diplomatic recognition, had access to tax and customs revenue, and could apply for foreign financial loans.

The Warlord Era is the time period of China beginning from 1916 to the mid-1930s, when the country was divided by various military cliques, following the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916. Communist revolution broke out in the later part of the warlord period, beginning the Chinese Civil War. The era nominally ended in 1928 at the conclusion of the Northern Expedition with the Northeast Flag Replacement, beginning the "Nanjing decade". However, "residual warlords" continued to exist into the 1930s under de jure Kuomintang rule, and remained until the end of the Communist victory in 1949.[1]

Zhang Zuolin (simplified Chinese: 张作霖; traditional Chinese: 張作霖; pinyin: Zhāng Zuòlín; Wade–Giles: Chang Tso-lin) (19 March 1875[1] – 4 June 1928) was the warlord of Manchuria from 1916–28, during the Warlord Era in China. He successfully invaded China proper in October 1924 in the Second Zhili-Fengtian War. He gained control of Peking (Beijing), including China's internationally recognized government, in April 1926. The economy of Manchuria, the basis of Zhang's power, was overtaxed by his adventurism and collapsed in the winter of 1927–28. He was defeated by the National Revolutionary Army of the Nationalist Party of China under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in May 1928. He was killed by a bomb planted by a Japanese Kwantung Army officer on 4 June 1928.[2] Although Zhang had been Japan's proxy in China, Japanese militarists were infuriated by his failure to stop the advance of the Nationalists.