Marysville Settlement

I had one project that I had to finish in the middle of winter. It was ten miles up the mountain

from Marysville, an unincorporated area just outside the City of Kimberley, where a mining

company had discovered a mineral needed to fabricate the heat shield for the nose cone of

rockets. The nose needed a material that would not belt or burst. This is going back to when they

were sending rockets all over the place, including to the moon.

We got a rush job to survey out a mine where the mineral had been discovered. It was a very

difficult, strenuous job. We almost got killed. My associates and I were chopping out the

boundary lines of this mining property when the branch of a large tree fell within a few feet of

us. Had it hit us, we would have been killed. You think of your lucky stars on such occasions.

That we didn’t get hurt was one of my lucky stars.

To get a precise bearing, I used to take what was called a star shot to see Polaris. Otherwise, we

would use a compass, but relying on a compass was not considered to be professional surveying,

as it only gave you approximate measurements. Although a compass was not good enough for a

survey, it was for mining claims.

So, we marked out the boundary lines and finished the job as best we could in a couple of weeks.

We worked so hard. One of the workers insisted on having steak for breakfast, saying he could

not work that hard on only bacon and eggs. There was probably half a dozen of us working on

the survey map, but this one fellow insisted. We got him a steak for breakfast!

When we were working in the bush, we wore what they called caulk boots, which have sharp

spikes on the soles. They are something like the shoes that golfers wear these days. These boots

took a lot of work to lace up. We would go for breakfast with our boots on. But on occasion, we

would get heck because we punched holes in the linoleum in the restaurant. The owner made us

take off our boots or she would not feed us. We had to unlace our boots and do them up again

afterwards.