The Memoirs of AE Picard - the Kootenay Shoemaker Adventures

The Memoirs of Edward Alexander Picard 1868 - 1956

The Little Dalles on the Columbia River

THE MEMOIRS OF ALEXANDER EDWARD PICARD 1868 - 1956

ALEXANDER EDWARD PICARD "Grampa" as he was commonly called celebrated his eighty- second birthday on July 30th 1950, and his Diamond Wedding anniversary on October 13th of the same year. Born about a mile outside of Quebec City, he was one of a large French family. He has very little recollection of his father, and his mother passed away when he was quite young, forcing him to be put into an orphanage at the age of 10. He spent his early teens working in a shoe factory before coming west to Revelstoke (then named Farwell) in 1886 to work on the C.P.R. snow sheds. He had a hard time to become acclimatized having to learn to speak English. Life in those days was hard and tough for young fellows making a living.

Having resided there for twenty-seven years he and his family moved to Nakusp in 1912.

Grampa's cobble shop was no different from many others without a thing to distinguish it, but the boot-shaped sign "Shoe Repairs� which overlooked that main street. As he worked he reminisced with the many people who called daily to pay a visit or to talk over old times; others asked him for data concerning this and that. His memory was keen and sharp and with a twinkle in his dark eyes, he captivated his listeners with the happenings of the bygone days. His dates were correct, and there was none better informed on the geology of the district with its wonderful potentialities and opportunities.

He kept abreast of the times and in no uncertain terms would speak of the conditions in the world.

The Arrow Lakes and the Columbia River were as an open book to him.. In 1887, at the age of nineteen, he travelled from Revelstoke to Nelson in a row boat with two other men.

Did I say there was nothing to distinguish his shop from others. In this I erred - there was. Inside, if your let eyes wander, your notice pinned to the walls verses, poems, and wise saying, also writing of men of renown.

Some were inclined to think Gramp's quite odd in his opinions. His church life ended when he left Quebec, his ideas in that quarter being quite definite. His advice for longevity was this : "Try to keep your life at an even keel." He said "You cannot get through life without meeting people who injure you.

There are those who snub you, those who betray you, those who cheat you, those who envy you, along with the swarm of spiteful, malicious and venomous things others will try to do to you." To each of them Gramp said, "Forget it! If your allow yourself to think of them you will poison your own mind. It matters little whether or not you forgive an offense, for there is too much to do to stop and fight bees. Life is much too rich to pauperize it by hate; let it pass. When a man does dirt, he gets dirt by and by; let him alone - why bother?" Quoting Frank Crane, Grampa repeated: "An injury can grieve us only when remembered. The noblest revenge, therefore is to forget.

Of other deeper things of life he said: "We have not dread, no fear to pass beyond the veil that hides the dead. And yet we question, dream and guess. But knowledge we do not possess."

Although Ed Picard is the man who lived these very interesting stories his son Clarence is the man responsible for recording the stories for future generations. During the 1930's Clarence typed out all of his dad's handwritten recollections and it got so he "could read the old boy's handwriting better than the old boy himself.� He spoke of asking his dad to teach him French and his dad's reply was "who are you going to speak it to besides me.� This book is dedicated to Grampa Clarence Picard.

Grandson Kenneth Johnson, 1985

After spending forty-two years in British Columbia in the West Kootenay District, always close to the Columbia River, I sit at night smoking my pipe, watching the smoke racing toward the ceiling, shooting this way and that, twisting and curling, perhaps making a ring or two now and then, often my memory wanders back to the old days gone by.

The smoke from my pipe working its way up through the air reminds me of the currents in the river, as we passed through Canyon Rapids above Revelstoke, and the Little Dalles in Washington to be left like a chip by the force of the boiling current. The smoke rising compels me to think of the whirlpools, some of them strong enough to upend a tree two feet in diameter and one hundred feet long and pull it down out of sight while it is spinning like a top. But as my pipe dies out the smoke has disappeared and my eyes wander over to the radio, cozily set up in a corner, ready to give one the world's news, almost free of charge.

In the next room stands a good Edison gramophone, discarded, quite out of date. In 1888 I paid twenty-five cents to hear two records with rubber tubes to my ears, attached on a machine not half as good as this one now discarded. One surely wonders at the change that has taken place in that forty years. Thinking that the coming generation may be interested in some of the things the past generation did in opening up this part of the country and the wonderful change that men have gone through in a short forty-two years of time, which after all, is like a dream to the man who has gone through it with his mind occupied, a short story on the subject may be helpful.

Time and again I have been asked to write a book about the old-timers, the pioneers in the Kootenay District, and, 1

as much as one would like to comply with that request, I do not feel able to make my writing attractive enough to make it profitable for the renders, nor to make a dollar for myself, nevertheless I have decided to tell you all that my memory can serve me with, at this time hoping you will not be too severe in judging names and dates, as memory is not always to be relied on and much more so, after some forty years; but as far as I can remember, this is the way I found myself in British Columbia in 1886.

I landed at Farwell, which is now called Revelstoke, late in the fall of 1886. A small two by four railway station stood perhaps three quarters of a mile west of where it is now. The town was on the Columbia Riverbank, just below the railway bridge. It consisted of five hotels, four saloons, two general stores, one barber shop, a blacksmith shop, six red light houses, and a post office which was also a fruit, candy and drug store. The only bus from the station to the town, which was a mile away, consisted of one horse and a two-wheeled cart operated by Angus McIntyre, who also owned a water cart and supplied the town with water. The first hotel on the left side of the street was the Central, owned by Abraham Brothers. It was a good-sized place built partly of lumber, slabs, and canvas. Right across the street was a big, two storey lot house, "Hanson's Hotel".

Two blocks further down the street on the same side was the C.P.R. Hotel, owned and operated by Magilvery Brothers. Again, on the other side of the street was the Victoria Hotel, owned by W. Cowan. The Columbia House operated by W.M. Brown, and the Stockholm House, by John Stone and Sen. F.J. Hume also had a good-sized general store. This town had been very busy during the railway construction, but now the work was finished. The rails of the great Transcontinental Railway had been connected the fall of 1885, and the summer of 1886 and had been spent building snow sheds through the 2

mountains. Hundreds of men worked on these sheds, and every payday they had come into town and "blew in", and when the sheds were finished the workers would go elsewhere to find some other job, leaving only a few men in town, mostly miners from the Big Bend District.

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BIG BEND COUNTRY The Big Bend country is about seventy-five miles north of Revelstoke. We are told that the Big Bend was discovered in 1865 by miners who came all the way from Vancouver, about four hundred miles, with packhorses, or without them, and located very coarse gold on the MacCaulay and French Creeks. It is claimed that flour packed into that country in 1865 cost one dollar a pound.

There is no doubt that there was a lot of gold taken out of that district at the time. There was a steamer built in the United States called the Forty-Nine, which operated for some time, taking supplies from the U.S. to the Big Bend on the Columbia River. This steamer came from Markus Washington, up by what is now Northport, and Trail, the greatest smelter town in America, next Robson, and through the Arrow Lakes. Let us stop at Pingston Creek on the Upper Arrow Lake. Because the Forty-Nine's Captain's name was Pingston. The Indians took Pingston up this creek to show him where they got their warpaint from, right at the foot of the Big Lodge Mountains; the creek hereafter was named Pingston. Then this steamer went up to Arrowhead and Revelstoke and forty-seven miles further north to a place called La Port. From here these supplies were packed up to Ground Hog's Basin at the head of McCullow (McCullough) Creek, where the miners had left their trademark. If my memory is correct the Ground Hog's Basin is over a quarter of a mile across and shaped like a gold pan. Here they started from the center and made a straight pile of boulders up to the outer edge, taking the gold off the bedrock, and so on all the way round. When I saw this spot in 1888 it looked like a big wheel with the rock piles as spokes. The old miners had worked this creek off and on for the past twenty-three years. At this time there was a gang of men working for the McCullow Hydraulic Mining Company, they were 4

washing down a forty-five-foot face of gravel on the bedrock. James Gray was foreman, George Laforme and Joe Talmier are the only names I can remember of the crew. This plant was operating at the foot of the mountain.

About halfway up the creek another company was putting in a drift to the rimrock. This company was composed of Arthur Dick, Andy Freen, and W. De Trase. Besides these two companies there were quite a number of other claims on the creek that were worked now and then. A few miles from there was Frenchtown, located on French Creek.

Here the oldtimers set up a number of log buildings in 1865, and did a lot of work digging for gold; and this creek, like McCullow Creek, nearly always had someone working on it from the day of its discovery to the present day. Then there was Camp Creek too, carried gold. These three creeks are not far apart and they empty into Goldstream, and Goldstream empties into the Columbia River. On the other side, or the west side of the river there was Smith Creek. It also carried gold. While we are at Smith Creek let me introduce you to five of the best scouts the country produced at that time. They were John Sand, Angus McKay, Andy Wallis, Charles Norleans, and Pete --- I cannot remember his last name. These five formed a partnership.

They all had a little money which was turned into a grubstake for the winter. They built a boat and took their grub up the Columbia River to Smith Creek; after building a log cabin for their winter home, set to work building a two mile flume from Smith Creek to the banks of the Columbia River where they had found some good gold prospects.

They started to work on this flume early in the fall, some time before the snow fell, and worked all winter until the snow was well gone in the spring, working like the deuce from daylight till dark in the long days of spring in order to get finished before high water.

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Have you ever had the gold fever? If not, you have missed something in your life, a something cannot be substituted by anything else.

This fever creates imagination, it sure makes one built castles in the air, and from day to day you expect to find more gold. When washing gold on the bedrock you are looking for holes in the rock where the yellow gold has been hidden for years, a crack of crevice in the rock where you see those dull yellow specks.

You take out your jackknife and dig feverishly for all you are worth; you get a number of small nuggets, 25 cents, 50 cents, or one dollar each, then you dig all the harder expecting to find a five or ten dollar nugget.

When washing gold in a sluice box, you shovel dirt into the sluice all day; there is no way of knowing how much gold there is in the dirt you shoveled in that day. And you sit in your cabin at night thinking, "How much gold is there in my sluice-box? Behind those riffles?" There may be ten dollars or five hundred collars, no one can tell, until you "clean up". In the meantime in your mind you have taken a trip to New York, or if more modest to Vancouver, or perhaps you have built a cottage, a love nest somewhere, with the gold that may or may not be in that sluice box; and that was the way with the five boys as we see them in their cabin, after spending the last day of work on their flume. Their hopes were high, --- and why not? They had spent all their money working all winter to bring the water to a gold-carrying gravel on the Columbia River. They knew there was gold there, but how much no living man could tell; why not one million dollars, just as well as one hundred? This was a gold country; five- and ten-dollar nuggets were common in those days.

The next morning the boys went to the gravel bar to put the water to work and found her bone dry. They ran up the flume to find the cause and discovered a leak where the 6

flume had been set up on posts; actually, washed out at the foundations. A quarter of a mile of it was smashed and even repairing it would have been too late. The high water in the Columbia River would prevent them from operating their low gravel bar that summer.

But although down and out, they were not discouraged.

They came into town and got the glad from everyone: then after working all summer they were able to get another grubstake by the fall, and by the next spring their flume was in good working order and the boys managed to get a fairly good crop of the pale-yellow nuggets so precious.

The Big Bend is a gold country. The four creeks before mentioned carry coarse gold, and they have not been working except where the bedrock was found to be close to the surface, on account of the high costs of transportation it has not been profitable to operate. Here comes to my mind the two oldtimers who were doing the packing to the Big Bend in those days. John Dun and Ike Stephan; they were old Cariboo and Cassiar miners, having twelve or fifteen pack-horses, along with the important part of their outfit, Joe, a good-looking collie dog. This collie dog, "Joe", was a real wonder and worker, and believe me there was plenty of work for him to do.

Ike took the lead on the trail with six horses behind him with John at their heels; another six horses come behind John, and the at their heels; and you can bet that any of those horses that got off the trail soon got back on again, for Joe was on the spot like a flash. The horses were well acquainted with Joe and seemed to realize that they could not get away with anything in front of him; so that after the first day out on the trail all that Joe had to do was look ahead. If he saw a horse get off the trail, he let out a bark

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and the horse would jump back on the trail as quickly as though Joe had grabbed his heels.

There were a number of camping places along the trail where the horses turned out to feed overnight. Sometimes the pasture was some distance from the camp, and in that case the horses were unpacked, and Joe took them out to the pasture. In the morning when they were ready to pack up again for the day, old John would say, "Joe, get the horse," Joe would go off on the hop and was never known to leave one behind. This dog, Joe, was as good as any two men on any pack train, and old John knew it. Nothing is left of these three old timers; that is, Ike, John, and the dog; - unless it is a tender memory of them by the very few oldtimers that survive.

I cannot say when the Big bend trail was built, but I know many of the man that walked up and down it, oft-times with high spirits "going up the bend", as we used to say, with the hope of finding gold, and a good number came down with their share of it. Many of them blew it in and went back to get more, but some of them came back downhearted. A few oldtimers stuck to the Big Bend for years and made nothing. John Sanderson worked his claims on McCullow Creek, "The Last Chance", for years, and sold out in time to settle down and have a few years comfort, then "cashed in". Andy Park, John Cranson, Glover, James Gray, George Laforme, Gus sung, and many others have worked in that country for years without making what is called a stake, the biggest drawback being high cost of transportation.

Such was the ups and downs of the "Gold Miners" in the Big Bend country of forty years ago.

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Another Big Bend old-timer comes to my mind, George Platt; I think of him as the man who played a trick on me when I was a greenhorn. This is now it happened. A well-known B.C. policeman, the late Jack Kirkup then of Revelstoke, later of Rossland, sent me up to restake McCullow Creek for a Mrs. Johnson of Vancouver. After getting a horse for this trip from another old-timer, San Crowell, I went up and staked the creek. coming back, I came to Cairnes Creek thirty miles from Revelstoke, and camped for the night. Here I found George Platt, a man of nearly sixty, but strong and healthy. He told me that he had followed all the blooming mining booms in the bloody country but had never made any bloody money. He showed a good patch of grass where I could picket my horse for the night at a short distance from the camp. That done, we went back to camp, and he cooked supper.

Now women are taken for good talkers, but George could talk so fast, say so little, and use more dirty slangs than anyone I ever heard. He would have made any woman look like two cents for speed and any man disgusted with the words he used; but when he got tired of blowing off we went to sleep.

When I went for my horse in the morning it had got its picket rope all tangled round a stump, and of course had very little to eat, and I had to go thirty miles to make town that night. George knew what to do. He had too much flour on hand; he would sell me a fifty-pound sack for what it cost. I could feed it to me horse; it would be good for him, and I would get to town all right. I did not know better, but I believed he did. The flour was fed to the horse, then I got on him and rode thirty miles up and down hill, never stopped until I got to town; had I stopped at any time I believe the horse would have died on the spot as it was it took him two weeks to get over it.

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George was a hard drinker and they who knew him tell this story about him. Some of the boys working with him went to town for grub and promised George they would bring him back a bottle. But on their way back, getting near the camp they discovered their bottles all dry, none left for George. They knew him too well to land in the camp without a drink. There was a soda spring just across the from the camp; so, they went across and filled a bottle with this spring water, putting enough tea in it to give it colour. George took the bottle with a smile downed a good portion of it; smacked his lips, "That's bloody good stuff, boys." And in a short time, he was singing as happy as a king. I cannot say whether the boys ever told him about it or not.

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THE SPRING OF 1887 The winter before this we spent part of it at the mouth of Jordan Creek, two miles west of Revelstoke, where three of us took possession of a log cabin that had been built by a C.P.R. construction outfit and used as a logging camp to take out logs and pilings for the construction of the first railway bridge across the Columbia River at Revelstoke.

We settled down here for the winter; but we soon got tired of batching, not that the cooking was hard to do, for bacon and beans, or beans and bacon, dried prunes, evaporated apples, with now and then a little rice was all that we could get, but we wanted something to do besides cooking.

While in this camp I got to know something about Indians. There was a group of them camped in an old railway construction camp that winter on the bank of the river, close to town. They were a mixture of American and Kootenay Indians. Their chief called himself Melture. He was a young man, well built, and not bad looking; he spoke some English, good Chinook, and another language of their own. He and some other bucks came to our camp off and on, and we had to go by their camp whenever we went to town. One of their band was called Cultuse Jim; he took sick during one of the winter cold spells. Going by their camp one day on my way to town I noticed what they called a sweat hole built on the edge of the river bank and saw Cultuse Jim come out of the camp stark naked, with some of them helping him to get to this sweat hole. He was only in there a few minutes before he crawled out. Two other Indians helped him down to the riverbank, where they had cut a hole in the ice. They let him down into ice cold water until he was clean out of sight, then pulled him out and let him go. He was apparently cured, for he ran up the riverbank and into the camp. But the most interesting part of this was that while the cure was going on there 11

were five of six squaws squatted on the bank singing or crying, I don't know which. It was a dull, droll rambling sound that made you think of someone departed, but Jim was well after that and lived long enough to get shot in Galena Bay some years later by a good Irishman named Sam Hill; but that is another story.

We went to work for George Buchanan who had a small sawmill fourteen miles east of Revelstoke and put in the balance of the winter there. When we came into town in the spring, Judge Sproat, Gold commissioner, came after my partners to go and take a boat down through the canyon. It appears that a gang of men had been working on the Big Bend Trail and had taken their grub and tools up the Columbia River, as the trail follows the river for forty-seven miles; and by the time the work was done they came down in this boat as far as the canyon, but as this canyon is very bad for any boat to go through when the water is high, they decided it was too high for them to go through and left the boat with a big stove in it. My partner being an old river boatman was wanted to take this boat through. Dunk MacGuilaray had worked with my partner on the river before, and after talking things over, they said they would go and wanted me to go with them, which I did; and never forgot my first boat ride on the Columbia River.

We walked up to the head of the canyon, six miles from town, and got into this thirty-foot boat with a big stove in it. Dunk and Joe (for Joe was my partner's first name; I will let you into the secret of his last, or family name later on).

Each had their own paddles. A paddle to a river boatman is like a saw and hammer is to a carpenter. He will work with other men's tools, but not if he can help it, because often a boatman's life depends on his paddle only.

But we pushed off from shore. Joe in the Bow and Dunk in the stern, I rowing with twelve foot oars. As we got out 12

into the strong current I noticed Dunk pick up a sweep that the boys who had left the boat there had used.

There two pegs in the stern to work this sweep between.

Dunk wanted to see how it would work. We soon got into the rough water; Dunk took a sudden pull on this sweep and one of the pegs broke off, wending Dunk over backwards, his head and body into the river, but his legs, from the knees down, hanging on the inside of the boat, Joe in the bow of the boat with his back to us and facing the outlaw canyon, did not know what had happened at the back of him, nor did he have time to look back just then, This was the time that a heave of the paddle when the length of its blade was dug into the water just under the bow of the boat, the boatman putting all his strength on the paddle would almost lift the boat out of the water and would throw it right or left.

This was the only way we could keep out of cross currents, eddies and whirlpools. This was the time that a boatman, and a boatman only, could keep calm, and work with good judgement.

Joe soon noticed that Dunk was not doing his work, and he yelled at him. "What in the hell is the matter with you?

Now heave it to the left, now to the right." But Dunk did not respond. "Allright," Joe shouted, "Let her go; there is room in hell for all of us." By this time, I had pulled in my oars and was helping Dunk back into the boat, and this was no easy job. We were in the worst part of the canyon, with waves coming from all directions. One would make the boat almost stand on end, and the old cook stove would slide a foot or two, then a side wave that almost jarred you off your feet and overhead; then one of those boils that pick the boat up and throw it ten feet to one side in the gutter. With a roll of building water on each side of you 13

higher than the boat a slight dip of the boat from side to side would have caused these boils to tip you over like a chip. But Dunk got onto his feet, grabbed his paddle and soon had the boat under control. We shot by a whirlpool, the first I ever saw. The roar from it was something one cannot forget.

We came through without taking much water, and landing in town we found a bunch of boys waiting for us.

Some of them did not expect to ever see us again, for many men have lost their lives before and since this in that canyon.

Joe and Dunk owned a thirty-foot boat that they had used during the C.P.R. construction to take passengers from Revelstoke to Little Dalles, Washington, down the Columbia River 190 miles. As this was before the days of the gasoline engine, they had to use oars going down, and sixteen-foot poles going up the river, of which there is 90 miles out of 190. The other 100 miles being the Upper and Lower Arrow Lakes. But now that the railway was completed, there was no work for this boat, so Joe and I took it and with a month's grubstake went down the river.

Joe was ten years my senior, and that ten years he had spent in many places along the Mississippe River and in Mexico. He had travelled in the old mail stages throughout the country and had put in three years on the Ottawa River, logging and river driving. From the Indians around these logging camps he had learned how to trap and hunt, so that he was right at home on the water or in the forest.

He was fearless anywhere, good natured and calm, but when you got him mad, good-night. He would hit, kick, bunt all at once. His long bony fingers were like a steel trap and when he grabbed anything, he had it. We drifted down the Columbia to the Upper Arrow Lakes or today 14

Arrowhead, then turned to the right to Cranberry Creek.

There we saw acres of water surface covered with ducks and geese. Here we made our camp.

The next morning walking up the bank of the I was my first forest beaver. He saw us first and was crawling into two feet of water on the bottom of the creek. Joe took a shot at him with no effect, and he explained to me that there was too much water over him; a bullet would go no further in water than in wood, he said. After prospecting for two days up this creek, we came back to our boat and went to what is now Galena Bay. Here we prospected for some time. We were looking for those pale-yellow nuggets in the gravel; nothing else was good in those days. There was not a building between Revelstoke and the Little Dalles, Washington; the only means of transportation towboats. So we packed our gold pan, small pick and shovel, dug holes here and there, filled our gold pans with the good looking gravel, took it to the creek and washed it out; and whenever the pan began to show the black sand and small rubies in the bottom, our eyes would stick out expecting to see the edge of a small nugget pop through, but as the black sand and small rubies worked out, we knew there was nothing to expect but what we called "collors", and that could be found anywhere on the Columbia River from the Big Bend to Washington.

This bay appeared to be a home for bears. There were bear tracks before you all day and at night you could hear the bears prowling around. We made our bed by a big windfall one night. A rifle shot woke me up the next morning. On looking up I saw Joe sitting up in bed with his gun over this log; he had shot a young bear. He said, "I think it will be good and tender meat," and it was. We fried and boiled it, then Joe cut out a roast of it, and stuck it on a stick in front of the fire, and by being turned now and then 15

it cooked through and was real good eating. What we did not eat that day we cut into strips and dried over a fire.

Then we dried meat to take with us when we were out from camp for only one day.

There were also a number of bank beavers on a creek that flowed into this bay, but we did not bother them for it was too late in the season, their fur was no good.

This was a great place for geese. They would come past before dark at night in bands of perhaps one hundred or more. They would circle overhead, getting lower and lower, until they landed on a long sand bar by the water's edge. There you could find them in the morning, with the heads of the sentinels stretched above the rest, keeping watch their flock, like soldiers on guard.

By this time, I had learned how to make a bannock, cook a pot of beans, fry the bacon without burning it. I knew how to kill a porcupine with a club, and skin it, and I found that the meat was good to eat. I knew what kind of brush made a good bed to sleep on. That was my job, getting the wood and making different kinds of fires. A fire to cook beans or fry bacon would not do to make bannocks with; and many other things that belonged to outdoor life, and which an indoor man would never think about until he got up against it, were getting common to me. Also looking for gold. In spite of the recognized fact that gold is where you find it, one has to learn that he cannot find gold in a loose sand bank or in clay bed; and he should know that his gold pan must not have a speck of grease on it, or the gold will work out of it with the gravel. One has to size up his surroundings, the particular gravel that carries gold in that country. Look out for old creek beds, the depth of the bedrock, how far it was to the rim rock, chances of getting water nearby, how to make sluice boxes, how to set them 16

up, the size of your riffles, and how far apart to set them in your sluice box. In fact, there are too many things to learn in connection with looking for gold to even make a beginning here.

We got along alright, but found no gold, only collars. Joe said he knows another creek further down the lake. We packed up, got into out boat and rowed down to what is now the St. Leon Hot Springs. We found the water too high on this creek for us to do any prospecting on it. Our grubstake was getting small, so we started back up the lake the next morning.

We rowed up the lake against a head wind which by noon was blowing so hard that we could make no headway against it. We landed in a small bay that was fairly well sheltered from the north wind. My partner proposed that I make a few bannocks for the next day, while he would see if he could get a chicken for dinner. He returned with the news that he had found a hot spring. after having our dinner of the usual pork and beans, for Joe did not get the chicken, we climbed up the side of the hill, only a short distance we came upon what is now the great Halycon Hot Springs. Looking around we found two names carved in a good-sized fir tree standing beside the spring. One was John Reynold, and the other I cannot remember. After putting a few logs across to make a dam we had several not baths during the two days we stopped there. This was early the spring of 1887, and these hot springs had absolutely no value at that time. They were too far from anywhere, and there was no means of transportation.

They were not staked until some two years later by Bob Sanderson. The discovery of Toad Mountain and the Silver King Mine, now Nelson, which caused the building of the steamers to operate on the Columbia River from Revelstoke to Robson, 150 miles, made these hot springs 17

attractive for a stopping place if nothing else. In later years this hot spring was made up to date by building a modern hotel and providing hot mineral baths. It became a well-known health resort and it is today managed by the White Cross Society.

Leaving the Hot springs, we made our way to Arrowhead, which was then only the mouth of the river.

There we took our sixteen-foot poles and poled up the river to Revelstoke and went to the Stockholm House. This hotel was operated by John Stone and his son, Albert. It was a log building, twenty-five feet wide and sixty feet long, with a partition through the middle. The front part facing the street was the bar room, and the other part was the dining room, with a lean-to at the back for a kitchen.

Here Albert, a young man of nineteen was doing the cooking, and looking after the dining room in general, and he knew how to do it. "Cold John" as the boys called him, looked after the bar, one walking into the bar room, found the bar about twelve feet long, and the top of it made of three-inch planks. Back in the corner on the same side as the was an ice-box used to keep the beer cool in the summer. In the corner was a stairway which was so steep that one had to use his hands as well as his feet to get up it.

At the top of this was what they called a ram pasture, one big room. The roof came down to the floor on either side so that the standing up space on this floor was not large.

One had to get on his hands and knees to unroll his blankets to make his bed on the floor as almost everyone did in those days. Under the stairs in the bar room was the place to wash. Here nailed to the wall was a square box made of two-inch plank; a board across one end of it was the stand for the water pail with a tin dipper in it. On the bottom of this box were two tin pans to wash your face in.

On the wall over this wash box were two roller towels, and perhaps a dozen four inch nails driven into the wall to 18

hang your coat and hat on. In the rest of the bar room were two long benches and a few bar room armchairs which were used most of the time around a large, round poker table.

19

JOHN STONE AND HIS BOARDERS It made no difference to John how any man came down that steep stairway from the ram pasture in the morning, they all had an eye opener coming to them. John would put a bottle and a glass on the bar with a smile and sing out, "Have a drink before breakfast boys." He would give you anything you called for. If one called for beer he would take his old hand corkscrew, work it into the cork, then placing the bottle between his knees would pull, and sometimes pull hard before he could get the cork out.

Then it would come out with a jerk and the foam would fly all over him and onto the floor. The corkpulling machine had not yet appeared, the bottles with the tin top had not been thought of. Drinks had taken a drop. Six months before drinks were twenty-five cents each, now they were two for a quarter, or ten cents each. Meals were twenty-five cents each, or four dollars a week for board and bed, with your own blankets on the floor of the ram pasture upstairs.

John was a real man of the day. He gave many meals, drinks, and yes, many dollars away, and forgot about it, while others would growl and whine about having to help someone who happened to be in need. This hotel was well kept. It was clean and as orderly as could be expected considering the times. While the kitchen was managed by the son, Albert, who was a good cook, furnished good meals.

But we were looking for work, and John told us that George Buchanan was moving his sawmill from Tweenbute to Greely Creek, seven miles east of Revelstoke, and he wanted men. So, Joe and I rolled up our blankets and the next morning walked the C.P.R. tracks to the new camp.

Here we found G.B. as everyone called him, a tall, slim, well 20

built man of middle age with a rather delicate, refined face, snappy glue eyes and a well trimmed almost red beard. All his movements were of the live wire kind; his very talk was out of place in the woods of this wild country, you would look for a man of that type on the main street of a city, but never in the woods. However, he proved to be all man.

He had a partner, a stout heavy built man, his name has slipped my memory. In this camp we say activity. There were men everywhere. One crew was clearing land for the mill and its lumber yard; another crew was making square timbers for the mill frame, and another crew was in the woods cutting saw logs and making boom sticks. A wing boom had to be put across the Illicillawaet River to shoot the logs into a branch of the main river where the mill pond was going to be.

On getting a job we had to find a place to unroll out blankets; the bunkhouse was full, and a number of the men were camped in the woods nearby. We got some cedar bark and built a good shelter for ourselves, then went to work. In a short time, the boom was ready to swing across the river. G.B. wanted river and boom men to handle this work, but there were none in the country. However, he was not a quitter, he took charge of the boom. They built a small boat, square at both ends that we called a punt. It was not fit for this work, but with it we managed to get a heavy rope across the river to swing this boom on. This rope was fastened to a big tree on either side of the river, but we could not get it high enough by these trees or could not pull it tight enough to keep it out of the water. It wagged in the center, and the strong current could drag it down, as far as it could stretch, then it could spring out of the water with a hum, that only for the roar of the river, one could have heard half a mile away. It would swing up into the air twenty feet and back to the same place. In 21

spite of this we got the head of our boom across, but when the full force of this racing water got onto it, the lower end of it broke loose from its anchor and swung across. Now the boom was all on the other side. By this time G.B. who had been on the job early and late, always on the go, was getting nervous; he stood on the riverbank talking to his partner, who was now on the job. They were up against something that they did not understand, fighting against high water. For the past week the burning sun had been shining on the glaciers of the Selkirk Mountains, and had turned these ice monsters into a flood of dirty water.

Standing on the bank of this river, one could feel the ground quiver under his feet as the roaring, boiling, racing river rolled boulders on its bed weighing perhaps a ton, tossed them from right to left. This river had gone wild; it knows no limit; we say fifty feet of its banks washed out in less than an hour and saw trees four feet in diameter fall into this mad rush of water and sand. It was a sight to see a tree of that size standing with all its green branches undermined by the water and topple over, then tossed about like a chip. The top of it was rammed into the woods and jammed between trees, then the main current forced the butt with all its roots down stream until it got at right angles. For one second, we wondered which was the stronger, wood or water, but soon we saw the water shoot over this and the spraying foam break over the roots. Then came a crash like a thunderbolt, and the tree was smashed in two. The top was left in the woods; the other part was carried a short distance and thrown almost high and dry on an old driftwood pile.

G.B. did not realize what he was up against. He and his partner got into the boat with the man that looked after it and went across to the head of the boom. The crossing was made above the rope that was still across the river and working up and down with the current. But coming back 22

they did not start high enough above this rope to allow for drifting. About halfway across they came to it. G.B. and his partner grabbed it thinking they could go hand over hand over hand along this rope and take the boat ashore with them. But as soon as they grabbed the rope the boat went from under their feet. Here were our two bosses George Buchanan, and his partner hanging onto a two-inch rope in the middle of the river. We stood on the bank, at least twelve of us, paralyzed. We knew that the rope they held onto for dear life would either break or jump out of the water in a second or two. But we could do nothing quick enough to help them. One of the boys grabbed an axe and ran to cut the rope where it was fastened to a tree; but before he got there we saw the rope jump out of the water with that awful hum, and the two men were left adrift in the center of that roaring river.

G.B. being a powerful swimmer, struck out for shore, but one of these boils came up now and then and pulled him down out of sight we thought every time that he was done, but he came up again, and finally made shore, and, with our help, got out. He was too weak to get out alone. By this time, our foreman, a big, fat dark man as good natured as he was big, had given the alarm, and the whole crew came from the woods and the mill site. We ran down the river, in our minds following the current that G.B.'s partner was in. He had gone out of site at once, no one had seen anything of him. As we ran, one of the boys shouted, "Here he is", then we saw him go over a shallow place that was an island at low water. His feet hit bottom and the current threw him out of the water up to his waist with his face towards us and his arms raised as though he was calling for help. It was an awful sight, for none of us could do anything for him. The only boat on the job had gone down and smashed on a driftwood jam, the man in it had a narrow escape with his life.

23

We ran out on driftwood and sweeper that extended out into the river, at the risk of our own lives, thinking we would be able to grab him as he came by, although we knew that he was dead. We worked this way down the river several miles and up again and walked into camp at dark that night in small groups, crawled into the cookhouse, where Jerry the cook had our dinner still waiting for us. There had been no dinner or supper for us that day, but we ate little that and talked less, our afternoon work had been for nothing, he was never found.

Such was the work of the pioneer lumberman in the interior of British Columbia forty years ago. G.B. did not sell out and walk out of the country as some would have.

When the water went down a few days later, we swung the boom across the river, and the mill worked all that summer.

24

TROUT LAKE COUNTRY A number of men came into this camp now and then from Revelstoke, gave us the news that two men had gone into the Trout Lake country that spring and came out with some coarse gold which caused quite an excitement and now men were flocking in there fast.

Among the bunch of men that G.B. had brought in from the east was one young man from Winnipeg. I have forgotten his name, but we call him Pete, we cannot be far out because he was French. He was all worked up about the gold at Trout Lake and wanted us to take him there. He did not know anything about prospecting, but he was a good head and was willing and able to work. So Joe and I decided to go and take him along; then another man wanted to come; his name was Richards; he was from the United States. We had noticed him around the last four or five days, and he seemed to be all over at once. He was short and stout built like a bear, and he walked like one with his bowlegs. But he was a good-looking man, as smart as a whip and as full of humour as Mark Twain. It did not take him five minutes to talk his way into our outfit. The four of us packed up our blankets, went to the office and got an order on the C.P.R. store to get our grubstake. We found the store car at Revelstoke, got our pork and beans, flour, dried apples, brown sugar, rice, tea, baking powder, matches, some tobacco, gunpowder, and lead to reload our own cartridges. We started off some time in the month of August. Landing at what is now called Beaton, we found a small log cabin on the high bank of Simon Creek. From here we packed out three month's grubstake to the foot of Staubert Lake, making one round trip a day. Then we built a raft, piled all our grub on it and went to the other end of the lake, about two miles then we packed from here to Trout Lake, a round trip a day. The trail was only blazed.

25

There were no logs or brush cut out. Our friend Richards was the life of the party, he always had a joke. He could mimic any nationality, from a Chinaman to a French diplomat, and he was a good singer, he sang in four different languages. We often wondered who he was; we were not of his class; Joe could not read his own name, while I could not do much better. This man had been in nearly all the big cities of North America and knew its people. He had a good leather club bag always near him and always locked. We never saw the inside of it until we had been at Trout Lake three or four days and had satisfied himself that there were no other men in the country beside us four. Then one rainy afternoon he told us this story.

"Six months ago at Fall River, Massachusetts, a man murdered his wife and two young children. I was set on his trail with regular pay and with fifteen hundred dollars reward when found dead or alive. I trailed him from Fall River to Winnipeg, he had lived there before going to Fall River, from there I trailed him to that sawmill camp where I found you boys. He got on the train I came off of, and went west; he does not know me nor do I know him but he knew Pete here", pointing at our friend from Winnipeg with a smile. Pete jumped up and shouted, "What in hell are you getting at? You've got me mixed up in a murder case have you?" "Hold on, Pete", smiled Richards, "let me finish my story. You will see in a minute how you are mixed up with my man. He worked with you the day before you left the camp, and the reason he left was that he recognized you. That's more than you can say about him.

His name is Jack Plante; you knew him in Winnipeg before he went to Fall River. Then you went to Fall River and there you worked with him. But that's three years ago; he had a long red moustache then, now he has none. He gives his name as Bob Smith". Then getting his club bag, he opened it, and that was the first time we saw it opened.

26

Here were guns, handcuffs, maps, and photos. He gave us the photo of his man to look at and we all knew him.

Pete wanted to know how he got to know about Jack Plante and himself. "Well, Pete", replied Richards, "all I know about it is from what you told me from time to time, just a bit at a time, then I knew that he had left the camp on your account, and you know he is an old prospector, and with all the talk of finding gold down here I was sure he came here. When we went to Revelstoke to get our grubstake, I went to the policeman, Jack Kirkup, and through him I found out that my man had bought a boat from R.R. Peterson and got a grubstake at J.F. Hume's store to last a month, then with a partner by the name of Black, went down the river, but he must have gone through to the United States. I know by my maps that there is not a house between Revelstoke and Little Dalles, Washington; no place for him to stop, unless it is at the hot spring you found this summer", looking at Joe. Our friend was changed man from this on. He told us of his life's work as a detective. "But this experience," he said, "is the best I have ever had. If I had life to start over, this is what I would take; put in the woods where there is no fence, no laws; this is what I call freedom, liberty". Then he gave us his plans.

"You boys take me down in your boat to your hot springs; he may be there; then back to Revelstoke. I have money there with Judge Sproat. I will pay you for your time, and you can have my share of the grubstake. As much as I would like to stay with you boys to learn more about this outdoor life. How to catch a beaver; how to skin him, how to cook the beaver meat, and many other things I see every day that one should know if he wants to do his

27

share of the work, but I can not. My work is cut out. I must get my man."

The next morning, we made an Indian canoe by finding four small trees close together and fastening poles from one to the other about eight feet up in the air, and then piled our grub on top of these. Then we put a good cedar bark roof over it; and hit the trail for Beaton, where we left out boat. Getting to the hot springs, there was no sign of anyone being there from the time before, but we improved our dam across the stream and stopped there two days.

We then took our friend to Revelstoke, where he took the only west-bound train in twenty-four hours at that time, that was at 4 p.m.

After spending the night in town, the drinks only two for twenty-five cents, and parting with our friend Richards, our heads were not very bright the next morning when we left on our way back to Beaton, and we did not forget him for a long time. He was a real man. Back at our camp at Trout Lake we found that the flies had got into the side of bacon, which had not been properly cured, and it had to be thrown away. Then came the question of how to do without it. Joe said he would make a dugout canoe and go around the lake. We would surely find some game or fish.

This canoe was made out of a cottonwood tree, twenty feet long, properly shaped, and sprung out in the middle.

Joe was wonder in the woods. He could do anything, do it at the right time, and do it well. Our canoe finished we took a spin around the lake, which is twenty miles long, and wound up in a creek that comes into the lake from the Beaton direction. Here was fish enough to supply an army.

In places we could not see the bottom of the creek for them. They were all sizes from one and half feet to three feet long. Again, Joe was right at home. "This kind of fish 28

will not bite," he said. We went to the camp and made Indians spears. They were made with wood, three nails, and some string. These made, we went back and speared, in a short time, all our canoe would carry, Then we cleaned them, cut them down each side of the backbone, put in salt and hung them on poles with a slow fire under them, and smoke dried them.

This took the place of the bacon we had lost. We took a week's grub with us, went ten miles down the lake in the canoe, and struck up the mountains side prospecting. We reached the timber line before dark and camped. Here was the most beautiful spot I ever saw. Here and there were plots of level ground covered with green grass, with now and then a small water pool, with a few streams running between them. And all through this were groups of pine trees standing in bunches as though put there by an expert hand for sight effects. And these trees were what we call scrubby, as all timber is at that height. These trees were from one to two feet in diameter, but none of it would be fifty feet high, while the branches were very long and full of glittering gum. The whole of every tree seemed to be coated with this gum that had the appearance of running or dropping from the branches.

We were getting our supper ready, Pete warming the fish and beans, Joe cutting wood, and I making bannocks for the next day, when very suddenly it began to get foggy.

In a few moments we could not see ten feet away. Joe came with an armful of gummy wood and threw some on the fire. "It's too early to get dark", he said, "I think we are in for a storm." As he spoke, a wind came up and fanned the flames of our gummy wood fire ten feet into the air and caught into the branches of the trees around us that were also full of gum. Then we heard and felt the crack of thunder and looking around the streak of lightening was 29

going through the fog. It looked like gold or silver threads dashing through the clouds, moving snake like, and the crash and roll of thunder went on for at least fifteen minutes. By this time, we were feeling our way out of the hell fire we had started. There was not a strong wind blowing and this gum fire flew from tree to tree and we could feel the heat around us but could not see far enough ahead to run in any direction very fast. Not knowing the country well enough, we may have been on the edge of a rock bluff. We came to one of the water pools; here we decided to lay down on the ground and stand the heat, but the wind stopped, and the rain came down in pails full. In another fifteen minutes the rain stopped, and the fog disappeared. Here we had a clear sky with broad daylight once more. Then the grub and blankets that had been left over the place had to be picked up and a good fire made to dry the blankets. We got our supper and finished the bannocks for the next day.

That was a lightening storm on a mountain top, the only one I ever was in and I never looked for another one; one can get along very well without them.

The next morning, we make the top of the mountain.

Here I had trouble in getting enough air in my lungs; I had to sit down every hundred feet to get air. I was like a chicken looking for water, with my mouth wide opened.

Then my nose started to bleed, but it did not last long. We went up and down a number of mountains that fall and it did not affect me anymore.

The Trout Lake country was very poor for game, at least, that fall we got very little meat in our travels, a chicken now and then, and perhaps a squirrel or two; we ate everything we found in the line of meat. A lynx swam across the lake; we saw him coming and shot him, and 30

after skinning him, the meat looked good. We cooked some and found it extra good and there was not a pound of it thrown away.

The days were getting cold by this time, and we moved a few miles back toward what is now Beaton. Here we found some beaver dams along the creek that we had got our fish out of. There were also big hay meadows along this creek; and we settled down to trapping. The furs were good now; the nights were cold enough to make ice and the days were not warm enough to take in all away. The beavers were working hard every night getting in their winter's supply of willows and storing them under the ice. I will not try to tell you everything about beavers, because my pen could not do them justice. However, I have watched them of a bright moonlight night, when the wind was in my favour, heard them talk, saw them obey orders from the boss, saw them fight with a lazy one who would not work, and drive him away. We cut out their dams, and pulled down their houses, so I know how they are made. But a good trapper does not always do this unless a beaver has got away with his trap and one is not always sure of finding it.

Soon the snow came and drove us out. We had no winter clothes to wear and by this time our summer clothes were about all gone. We did not have enough blankets for the three of us to sleep at nights so we took turns at keeping the fire going at night so that the other two might sleep. So, we packed up a good number of beaver skins, but no gold, and we decided to go down the river to Washington for the winter.

31

THREE FINGERED FRANK After going through the Arrow Lakes and what is now Robson, then the Kootenay Rapid, Rock Island, Steamboat and Shipwreck Rapid, we landed at little Dalles, Washington, fifty-two miles by the river below Robson. On the right side of the river from the boundary line to Little Dalles was an Indian Reservation. Here we found out old friend Chief Melture and many of his tribe who had put in the winter before at Revelstoke. We were welcomed by them. This boundary line between the two countries did not seem to affect them. They all claimed to be good King George Man, of the years gone by, of course ............

On the other side of the river, Old Jack, as they called him, had a patch of land and grew some vegetables for himself, and there was a mineral claim or two that the owners worked on now and then, somewhere about Northport now, and Old Jack supplied them with his garden stuff. George Bolten and Old Jack were opening up a claim on Jack's land. About two miles below this was the Little Dalles. Here on the same side of the river was Pete Ellison's store; a good-sized log building with a number of outbuildings around, including one small house with a cook stove in it ready for some one to go batching. Pete's store was first a fur trading post, then a hotel. He would sell you anything you wanted to drink and cook you a meal if you wanted one and do it right. He was an old Cariboo and Cassiar miner, perhaps sixty-five years old, but smart for his age. He always wore blue overalls and washed them every week. Everything about the place was kept in order. He was a good old scout; would give you anything he had and was a hard worker.

Getting into the store, we were a hard-looking lot, long hair and whiskers the rest of was rags. Old Pete looked 32

over our beaver skins, and we soon had the clothes needed and had moved into the small house of his for the winter.

"Well, boys," said Old Pete, "there is another Canadian around here, that came in yesterday. Maybe you know, this is Three Fingered Frank." "Of course, we know him," said Joe, "where is he?" "He's up at Old Jack's trying to sell him a boatload of dynamite that be brought down from Revelstoke. Jack needs the powder to work on his claim. I think he will get it alright; Frank will give it to him cheap enough. You know (he smiled and winked with that one good eye, his other eye he had lost in years gone by) that powder did not cost him much." We agreed with Pete. We knew that no man could buy dynamite in Revelstoke and take it down the Dalles in a rowboat about two hundred miles and sell it at a profit.

Frank had lost three fingers off his left hand, God only knows how, but he was called Three Fingered Frank. He was perhaps thirty-five years of age, rather short and stout, well set up with broad shoulders. He was of the nervous type, smart on his feet, and quick in thinking and acting. He was a good looking man, only for his strong manly chin, he had the complexion and the round face of a girl, and a soft, pleasant attractive smile, that he seemed to know how to use when in a pinch; and he often got into trouble, although he was not all bad; he would give you anything he had; but generally it did not belong to him. He had the habit of taking and packing off anything he wanted, from anyone or anywhere and nearly always got away with it. He was a gun man. No one had ever seen him use it to harm anyone, but we had seen him practice with it. A day's work did not appeal to him; the poker table was his home, then sometimes he would get too course at that, and Jack Kirkup, the policeman, would order him out of town.

On one of these occasions he set up a tent across the river, 33

ad when Jack went out of town as he had to do now and then, Frank came in and made a clean up. When Jack came back he went over the river to Frank's tent, looked in; Frank was apparently asleep. "I'll give you two hours to get out of here", Jack shouted at him. Frank never moved but his gun came from under the blankets like a flash, and he growled at Jack, "I give you two minutes to get out of my sight; not move." Then he got up and followed him outside and watched him go back across the river.

When Jack went back that night prepared to arrest Frank, he had gone.

We were hard at work fixing bunks to sleep in getting a fire going on the cookstove to cook dinner, and I had to make baking powder bread for that meal at least, as one cannot make bannocks in a cook stove. Joe was out at his old job getting wood, when Pete and I heard someone outside calling, "Hello Joe, how in hell are you?" "I'm fine," replied Joe, "where have you been keeping yourself all this summer, Frank?"

"Principally out of Big Jack Kirkup's way. And here I am with Uncle Sam, safe and sound. Who is with you, Joe?" "Oh, the young fellow, and friend from Winnipeg."

Frank threw open the door and shouted to us, "Come over to the hotel you Protestant pups, and have a drink with me. You look so dry that you'd catch fire striking a match."

We went over, and here were three other men, Ike Lawheed, W. Meserve, and Big Jack Armstrong. The first named lived for the time with Old Pete, the other man had just come down from where Northport now is. They were 34

working on a mining claim for Savage Brothers of Colville.

They were in for provisions.

Frank called them up to the bar; then another man called for drinks, and then another, until we were all feeling good and the talk turned to river work and the Little Dalles, Frank who was more than half drunk, said, "Boys, you talk about your Dalles; a small boat can't to through them. I'll bet you all I have that I'll go through there with that twelve-foot dugout that's at the head of the Dalles." Big Jack Armstrong turned to Frank, "Say, partner, I don't want your money, but I know that you or no other man can do that."

Then Joe and I knew that Frank would do it or die in the attempt. We knew him well enough never to challenge him at anything, especially when drinking. He walked out of the hotel; we after him, begging him not to do it, but he did not hear us; and after all we did not know anything about the Dalles; perhaps he could make it. He stepped into the dugout, picked up the paddle, and out he went. We ran up to the top of the rock bluff and here we saw the Dalles.

The Columbia River when going through the Dalles, has all the water from the Selkirk and Gold ranges of mountains in British Columbia and also in the Pend d'Oreille and Kootenay Rivers which drain part of Idaho and Washington states. Here it goes through a narrow space with a perpendicular rock wall on either side perhaps twenty feet high. The water shoots through this like racing down a flume. At the foot of the Dalles is a whirlpool that opens and fills every few minutes as all whirlpools do; but this was biggest we had even seen. It was big enough to pull down a dozen canoes like the one Frank was in. We saw it open with a roar that made one feel cold and lonesome. At first almost all the river seemed 35

to come into this big hole and race around at an awful speed; then it got smaller and smaller, and the smaller the hole got, the faster the water raced around until it almost spun like a top. Then the hole was full, and with another roar the water seemed to come up from the bottom and boil up like a pot boiling over, the water shooting in all directions with a terrific force.

As we stood looking at this enormous body of water racing, boiling and foaming between these two stone walls, the whirlpool opened again. Then we saw Frank within one hundred of it, paddling backwards for all he was worth waiting for it to fill up again. As soon as it did, he dug his paddle deep ahead and shot over it. The boiling water tossed him about from left to right like a chip floating around; but he kept his. No Indian could have handled his paddle better. He passed the whirlpool and was safe and he kept on going, but he drifted into an eddy, and feeling safe dropped his paddle and with his hat is one hand, waved to us on the hand, and kept on waving until the eddy he was in took him back toward the whirlpool.

We stood there and saw him drifting toward his death, with his back to and the whirlpool he had just gone over.

He did not see it open again. What could we do, a perpendicular rock bluff between us, impossible to get near him? We shouted at him with all there was in us, but the roar of the river was greater than any noise we could make. We made all kinds of motions, but he was not looking our way, until the outside current of the monster whirlpool began to turn his canoe around; then he saw what happened. He dropped the hat and grabbed his paddle; but is was too late. We saw him grab a short rope in the front end of the canoe as it stood up on end and went down.... that was the last of Three Fingered Frank.

36

We ran down the river and watched for him or his canoe to come up, but all in vain. He was never found.

Getting back to the hotel we saw old Dan standing at the bar talking to Old Pete. They seemed all worked up over something; throwing their arms about as though the country had just been saved from plague. Dan was the watchman on the Kootenay Steamer. He was perhaps sixty hears old, had a heavy moustache and a long goatee. He was a good plug who had passed his hard workdays. The company that built the Kootenay Steamer in 1884 to carry goods from Little Dalles to Revelstoke during the construction days of the Canadian Pacific Railway left him in charge of their boat at the Dalles, as there was nothing for the boat to do after the C.P.R. was completed through Revelstoke from coast to coast. Dan put in a lot of this time with Pete. They were good friends. When we told them what happened to Frank, neither spoke a word; they stared at us to see if it was true; and soon Dan turned his back to us and we saw him take a handkerchief out of his pocket then we knew that he was crying. Pete behind the bar facing us could not turn his back to us to hide the tears in his eyes. Such were the oldtimers, the bad men of the west. Both Pete and John had been men of the West from the Goldfields of California to the most northerly post of the Hudson's Bay. They saw things done in their days and perhaps had to do things, too; but they were still men.

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TOAD MOUNTAIN The excitement of Dan and Pete taking over the bar was the discovery of the Silver King Mine at Toad Mountain, now Nelson, B.C. The Hall boys of Colville, thirty miles below the Little Dalles, had been prospecting up the Kootenay River and found this big body of ore. This was good news for them, here they were thirty miles from the nearest town, and many months at a time had gone by without their meeting a white man. They knew this discovery, although on the Canadian side would start a boom. The country would be opened up. Men would come up the Columbia River, the only public highway in this country at the time, and they were not mistaken. In less than a week, prospectors were going up to Toad Mountain.

I told you before that first Old Pete was a fur trader. He had a big stock of furs on hand, and the prices in the United States were very low, and from reports he had furs were high in Canada. He asked Joe and Ike if they would take his furs to Revelstoke and sell them for him. They left with this load of furs in the month of December. Facing a fourhundred-mile trip with a rowboat at that time of the year was job for men only. They got within ten miles of Revelstoke and could not go any further, for the river was frozen over. They walked the rest of the way to find that the fur prices were not any better than they were in the United States. They did not get back to the Dalles until after the New Year.

While they were away, our partner, Pete, from Winnipeg left for Spokane, and I haven't heard of him since. Three man came in while Joe was away. They were hell-bent on getting up to Toad Mountain at once. There was a boat at the Dalles that Jack Buchanan had left with Old Pete. He told me I could have it to take them up in. We land at the 38

mouth of the Kootenay River early the afternoon of the fourth day. My three man took up their packs and away they went in such a hurry that one would think they were trying to save the country from destruction, when they were only going to locate a mineral claim somewhere on Toad Mountain, where there was at least two feet of snow.

They left to put in first night alone sleeping under the stars without a shelter, and above all, not knowing anything about the music of the woods .... but I knew all about it the next morning. As soon as darkness came on the coyote began to howl, and there seemed to be thousands of them, when perhaps there were only ten. I did not know what they were, for I had never heard them before. I kept the fire burning as long as the wood lasted and fired a shot now and then with my 40-82 rifle, which seemed to silence them for a short time. Soon the fire went out as my stock of wood has all been used, so there I stood in the dark, foggy night with a band of these howling animals all around, expecting to feel one on my back any minute. After firing a shot now and then all through the night, my cartridges were nearly gone, while here I stood like a sentinel on guard, gun in hand, tired, sleepy, hungry, and half frozen. At last daylight came peeping in, the most welcome morning I can remember, with the bread of day, my musical friends stopped their discords. It did not take me long to roll up my blankets, take them to the boat, and pull out for Little Dalles. However, my troubles were not over yet.

One of the four rapids I had to run before landing back, was only a short distance from this night camp. When out on the river the fog was so low that one could only see a few feet ahead, and one is up against it if he cannot see ahead going through a rapid. One man in a 24 foot goat made it very hard to make any headway, but on hearing 39

the roar of the rapid just below me, although tired, sleepy, and hungry, every nerve in my body got ready for the work ahead, for after all, when a river man hears the roar of a rapid he is like a baseball player on a diamond, when the umpire shouts, "Play Ball," he gathers every muscle he has, and gets on his toes for the way to get it done. This roar is the master voice and very hard master at times. The opposite side from the camp was the best to run this rapid, but my paddle could not drive the boat fast enough to get through in time. I took the first three waves broadside, but the water came clean over the boat and almost threw me overboard, leaving ten inches of water in the boat. The worst was over, and the rest of the rapid was not bad, and I got ashore alright. My blankets, which were at the bottom of the boat were wet, but to stop and dry those blankets would take too long.

These were the cold days of December, and the fog did not clear off the river more than five hours in the twenty-four, and one man in a boat of this size could not make much progress. After taking the water out of the boat with a lard can and having a piece of bannock with bacon grease on it I went and landed at Fort Sheppard.

There was a log house which was guilt by Uncle Sam in 1884 and used as a custom house while the Kootenay Steamer was making her runs from the Little Dalles to Revelstoke. It was a good-sized building with a good floor and ceiling, and a big fireplace in the wall.

My first job was to gather wood. With a good supply of that on hand the door was closed, and the fire was started in the fireplace... why, this was a real home. It did not take long to get a meal ready, everything being good to eat by this time, and with my blankets dry I unrolled them in front of the fireplace and prepared to have a good night's sleep to make up for the night before. As soon as the fire 40

went out, the room was in darkness and then I discovered that I had friends with me in the shape of wood rats. They were over the ceiling having a party. You could hear the floor manager squeal now and then, and the rest would gallop all around the ceiling. You would think they had on hob-nailed boots, by the noise they made. Then there was another party on the floor, but they danced around half respectable for a awhile until they finally decided to investigate who I was. They ran over me, and I soon had to put my nose under the blankets before they satisfied their curiosity about me, it stopped their game and I went to sleep. The next day I got home.

We spent the rest of the winter batching in Old Pete's house, living practically on sauerkraut and deer meat. We could go out any day and get a deer in an hour or two, as they were plentiful in this country. When spring came, we had the Toad Mountain fever, as we had talked about it all winter and we now were going there to get rich quick. Ike Loughead, George Holter, Hoe and I got together. We got a two month's grub stake, including drills, steel and hammer to open a claim with. Loughead had a claim on the Little Salmon River up the Pen d'Oreille River, 18 miles from where it empties into the Columbia River, and would get that on the way up.

We said good-bye to Old Pete and Dan and struck out for Toad Mountain. George Holter was an Old Country Englishman, strong and heavy set, with a very heavy moustache. Talking about chasing a deer, he would say, "The bloody thing went catawumpuss through the thicket".

He could always find a new word or new names for things that no one ever heard of. He was of the happy-go-lucky type, who takes things as they come with a smile. Ike was also a good scout, but of a different type who took life too seriously, very particular about some things but always 41

sure of himself. When we got to the mouth of the Pend d'Oreille River, Ike said we had better take an axe as his was on the other side of the river. There had been a foot bridge over the river last when he had come down from his claim, but it might have gone out on account of the heavy snow-fall. "We'll only take a lunch," he said," I left all kinds of grub in the cabin and we can make it easily by night".

We took our lunch and followed the river for 18 miles, through rock slides and swamps, and when we got to the Simon River, the bridge was gone and it took us some time to find a tree big enough to reach across the canyon. We found a small cedar that would span the canyon, but it was too small to walk across on. I, being the lightest man of the four given the job of cooing this tree across. With an axe in my belt to cut a bigger tree on the other side; so that the rest could cross safely I ventured forth. Cooing across a canyon on a small cedar pole, with a river roaring forty feet below you, is a job I have not applied for since, But I got a tree across from the other side, and my partners were able to cross on it. The cabin was only a short distance from here, and we found it with the door open and everything gone except the dynamite which was cached in the woods nearby. Here we were, 18 miles from our boat with no blankets, no supper, no breakfast, no dinner in sight, and a forty pound box of dynamite for each of us to pack 18 miles the next day, or as soon as possible in order to get something to eat. This was a snug little log cabin with a fireplace in the corner. The fire made, we sat or laid on the floor, tired out, our first day’s walk in almost four months.

George did not mind it as he had worked all winter on his claim with old Jack.

As strange as it may appear to the reader, in my few years of pioneering through the country, I have always found that there are times that draw the line between the 42

fit and the unfit. This is the time a man will tell you the story of his life or more of it than he will at any other time.

Sitting here in the light of the fire, I listened to my three partners, all of them much older than I was, comparing their experience in life through different parts of the world, until sleep got the best of me.

George woke me up the next morning at daybreak, when he shouted to Joe, "ham and eggs for breakfast, Joe, wake up you lazy devils, and get up." We got up rubbing our eyes, and looking for the ham and eggs, and George laughed, then we remembered we were hungry and we had nothing to eat, "Well you fellows," smiled George, "Old Pete told me that you three fellows bloody well cleaned up on a 45 gallon barrel of sauerkraut of his last winter, so I thought to make a bloody good change, you could have some ham and eggs, "Shut up," shouted Ike, "Oh, I see," said George, "It's codfish you want, well there is no blooming island around here," then turning to Joe, "I suppose you would like some green peas for breakfast -- will get today, that's your penances for the sins you told us about last night." I know what would like, George," smiled Joe, "Roast mutton with mint and a jug of beer to wash it down." "To hell with your beer, give me a bottle of good French wine, the kind Napoleon Banaparte drank when he was the little corporal and went out on the river Seine bridge contemplating suicide, that must have been bloody good wine to make a man feel that way, of course the French are funny anyway, it doesn't take much to knock them off their proper balance". Ike and I laughed, but Joe turned to him and said, "Look here George, you'll see a bulldog knocked off his balance in a minute if you don't shut up." "No, you will not", replied George looking at the open door, "Unless you can leap like a bloody bull frog you can't bloody well catch me." We walked out of the cabin to get our load of dynamite but kept looking back as though something had 43

been left behind. There seemed something wrong. We walked slowly at first, but after each of us had a fortypound box of dynamite on our back, and had hit the trail back to the boat, we then remembered that we had had no breakfast.

We came through a rockslide that afternoon, where we had to very careful not to slip and fall. We would see the oil coming through the boxes after the hot sun being on them all day, and to drop or fall with a box meant instant death, for the four of us. Ike said, "let us keep apart about 200 feet until we get through this rockslide." and we did.

George, looking up and down the rockslide said, "Boys, this is a perfect home for snakes, but I haven't seen one yet. St. Patrick must have travelled through here and killed all the bloody things." Joe smiled, "No George, his Bull Dog chased them to Bull Dog's Island, for all I have ever seen in this country came from that Island." George liked nothing better than to have one come back at him. "Life is a joke," he would say, "Why not live?"

We got to the boat that night just before dark, too tired to make a fire and get something to eat. We were a sore lot that rolled into our blankets back all day in a blazing hot sun. The next day was spent in this camp, greasing sores and eating. Three days later we landed at the mouth of the Kootenay River. Here we unloaded our boat and hauled it out high and dry above the high-water mark. We did not figure on coming back for a least two months. We packed our grub to the head of the first falls or canyon, where there was a canoe that Jack Buchanan had left; Red Jack as he was called because of a wine coloured birth mark on the side of his face. We took this canoe, put everything in it except three rifles. Joe with a long pole fastened to the bow of this so as to hold it in or out, and Ike with a rope

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over his back --away they went, George and I packing the guns.

Joe and Ike were two of the very best river boatmen in this country, so George and I did not worry about the canoe. We walked along with our guns, looking back now and then when they appeared to get in a rough place. We had not gone over half a mile, when they came to a small rocky point, when we saw Joe make a quick move and hollered to Ike ahead to stop pulling on the tow-rope.

Apparently, Ike did not hear him. The river current was stronger here than it appeared to be, so it swung the bow of the canoe out from shore and Joe could not get it back.

He told Ike to slack the rope, so it would back into shore.

Apparently, Ike did not hear, as the canoe sheered out, pulling the pole out of Joe's hand. He took a last pull on it, and it being only a round log dugout, it went under and turned over. It was all done in less that second. Or course, everything fell overboard, and down the river it went. Ike came back with the rope and said, "Boys, its my fault," no one spoke for a moment for we did not know what to say, it had all happened so quickly. Two minutes before we were on our way to Toad Mountain to stake a claim and we had grub enough with steel and powder to do a lot of work on it. Now all this was going down the Kootenay River and into the Columbia. Then Joe came to, as if from a dream and struck out on the run down to the river and shouted as he was to come down quick as we (line in original manuscript unreadable) of the Kootenay River and pick up some of our stuff as it came down. We followed him, got our boat into the river in a few minutes when it had taken us hours to get it out, and we got into the mouth of the Kootenay River, and picked up a can of lard, after watching for an hour. We then went ashore to talk things over. This was early in the afternoon, and by starting now we could get back to the Dalles noon the next day. But why 45

go to the Dalles? There was nothing to do there and none of us had any money. All the clothes we had were the things we wore, and Joe and Ike did not have a coat as they had left them in the canoe. All the tobacco in the bunch would not last that day. George spoke up, "Well, boys, It's easy to jump in this boat and run down to the Dalles, but what are you going to do when you get there?" "That's it, replied Ike, "by starting now, we can get to Toad Mountain easily tomorrow, and there we can surely get some work. I know there is no trail up there, and it may be hard travelling, but we have our guns to get something to eat with on the way." Joe said he did not care which way he went, so all hands were put to the boat and once more she was hauled out high and dry. Then three men with a gun each and one with an axe that been left in the big boat, left for Toad Mountain.

We travelled until sundown when Joe shot a young deer and here camp was made. The axe came in good use getting wood for the night, it being too early in the spring to sleep under the stars without blankets and no fire. The deer was cut in strips and set in front of the fire to cook on sticks, which were stuck in the ground, It did not taste very good without salt, but a man gets used to a lot of things when he has to. After getting a good brush bed made and taking turns at keeping the fire going through the night, we managed to get enough sleep, having another go at the deer meat the next morning. We started out for that get rich quick spot called Toad Mountain, now known as Nelson. We followed the Kootenay River all the way as there was no trail out yet, and we soon came to place where the river was a mass of big boulders and the water was going and foaming over them, which made a pretty sight. Ike who was very quiet was getting more talkative.

He stopped to look at this dancing water and turning to us, he went on telling about riding logs on the Ottawa River at 46

a place just like that. As he said this, I noticed Joe looking up at him with contempt on his face that I knew so well and knowing that he blamed Ike for losing our outfit, a cold chill ran down my back. He took a step toward Ike and growled between his teeth, "Did you say that you rode logs on water like that?" You're a damn liar," he shouted, and made a dive at him. But George who was a good sailor along with many other things, jumped between them and told Ike to step back. Joe turned loose and said a lot of things that I could not tell you about, but when things got back to normal again Ike said that he was going back to the Dalles again. George, looking at Joe with a smile, said, "Joe, let's go back to the Dalles, and hit for Spokane Falls --that's God's country, and this country was not made for white men." In two minutes, we were on our way back to Little Dalles Washington, and that was the nearest I ever got to Nelson until the summer of 1915.

On getting back to the Dalles, when we told Old Pete our hard luck story, he smiled and said, "Boy's you are welcome to everything I have, if you want to go back."

Then Joe said, "Pete, you have been good to us and I don't think it would be right for us to take a chance of losing what you have saved, so for my part I am getting out to leave this new country to whoever wants it. I have had enough of the Great West." The next day he left with George for Spokane Falls and I have not heard a word from them since.

By this time the little town of Farwell that we had left the summer before on the main line of the C.P.R. had in some way heard of the Toad Mountain discovery and boom. although this was an American discovery, Toad Mountain was on Canadian territory, and as soon as the river opened that spring, the B.C government sent Big Jack 47

Kirkup down by rowboat to look things over. As might be expected, every boat obtainable came downloaded with prospectors and businessmen. The one looking for money that he could get out of the ground could handle that money. Dunk McGillivray, who owned part of the boat we had with Joe, came down to the Dalles to get this boat.

There would be work for it now running from Farwell to the mouth of the Kootenay River, and as he had to have someone to help him take it up, I said good-bye to Pete, for the last time, and took my place in the bow of the boat with a 16 foot pole and landed at the Kootenay River three days later. Here we found a group of men waiting to go up to Farwell. Jack Kirkup had been up and saw what was afterwards the Silver King Mine. He wanted to get back and report. J.F. Hume the original builder of the Hume Hotel in Nelson, had come from Farwell, and so had Harry Sheron, later well known as a mining man in the Slocan and had something to do with the LeRoi mine in Rossland.

Tom Ward, a man over six feet, with a big, bony frame, and a voice like a foghorn, full of pep and humour, also become well known figure with his brother, W. Ward around Nelson in the years that followed. Bob Sanderson and his partner, Jack Evans, were here with their rowboat ready to start on that 150 miles of lake and river to Farwell. Bob Sanderson, J.F. Hume, and W. Cowan of Victoria Hotel at Farwell formed a company that year and built a steamer called the Dispatch. It was operated for some time on this by Bob Sanderson, as captain. However, as we walked around our campfire that night, Tom Ward heard J.F. Hume tell Jack Kirkup that they too would go with the Sanderson boat, because the boat and the men were better than Dunk and the young fellow outfit. Tom got Dunk, Harry Sheran, and I together and told us what he had heard and stretching himself to his full height of 6 ft. 2 or 3 inches, he said, "Boys, if we can't beat them fellows up 48

there, you can dig a hole in one of them Indian graveyards and drop me in it. What do you say?" We agreed, and Tom took charge of the cooking for that trip. Harry looked after the wood to cook with, and the race was on. One hundred and fifty miles from what is now Robson to what is now Revelstoke, with rowboats, four in each boat. Our boat was 50 feet long, 7 feet beam, and Sanderson’s boat was 26 feet, 6 feet beam. It was smaller and lighter built than ours. When we got up at daylight next morning Sanderson's outfit was gone, but we soon saw them poling a mile up the river and Tom shook his fist at them and shouted, "You won't be too fresh when we get through with you." We passed them in the middle of that afternoon on the Lower Arrow Lakes and did not camp that night until it was too dark to go along the shore to find a camping place. There was no fire made that night as we did not want the Sanderson outfit to know where we were.

After swallowing cold beans as we rolled in our blankets.

During the night we saw a small white ripple on the calm lake and heard the oars working and knew that our opponents were going by us. At daylight the next morning there two miles ahead of and going strong. Tom and Harry said a few things that could not fit here. We pulled out and before sundown, we passed them at the mouth of Cariboo Creek, just below Burton City today, but we did not camp until we were in the Upper Arrow Lakes. After some of us had gone to sleep, Sanderson's boat passed us again, and again at daybreak they were a long way ahead of us.

Before sundown we had passed them, however, and went two miles up the past Arrowhead to camp, and by this time it was quite dark. These were the long days of spring, when it did not get dark before 9 o'clock, and was daylight at about three in the morning. Sanderson's outfit must have worked hard from say three to ten and so they could not have had more than four hours sleep out of the twenty-four. They did not go by us that night, but the 49

next morning their poles rattling on the rocky river bottom as they went by us, woke us up and they were a good ways ahead before we got started that morning as we were out of bannock and Tom had to make some for dinner.

They were out of sight when we started , and although we worked as though we had never worked before, we did not get a look at them all that day and they got there less than an hour before us. That night when the Sanderson outfit landed in town they told the boys about the race and every man in town with his gun , was on the High River Ranch to welcome us, and there was a hot time in the old town that night.

A few days later Dunk and I loaded 47 hundred pounds of general groceries in our boat and left for Robson and took Hugh McDonald with us. For three man to handle a boat of this with two and a half tons in it was no small job, especially going through the one hundred miles, of lakes, where a strong wind can rise in ten minutes and make you pull for shelter if such can be found, and it not, you pull for the shore and jump in the water up to your waist and unload as fast, as you can. Then in perhaps half an hour they will calm down again, and you can load up and go a few miles further on again or you may make the trip without trouble. We made two trips, and then Dunk found a partner, and I went up the Big Bend country on a timber survey party for an American outfit. Hill and Campbell of Michigan, U.S.A. came in and picked up five of a crew to go up in the Big Bend and there they staked thousands of acres of timber land. These men Jack Sand, John Dick, Jack Reed, P.R. Peterson, and myself.

Jack Sand, John Dick, and I took a big canoe, called the "Irish Nell" up the Columbia River to Smith Creek about 65 miles above Revelstoke. The balance of the crew including 50

Lee, a land surveyor from Kamloops, walked up the trail with their packs. A camp was made on the Columbia River above Gold Stream. A starting point for this timber land was to be at Jim Green's cabin. This was somewhere near our camp but no one in the outfit knew where, except Jack Sand, who claimed to know of the cabin. It had been built there perhaps at the time of the gold rush in 1865, and few men knew anything about it. Starting out from our camp the first morning, Lee, who was in charge, put Jack Sand in the lead, to find this cabin and the rest of us followed, all but Jack Reed, who was left in the camp to do the cooking.

Jack started off north with the sun shining on our right. By ten o`clock we were facing the sun and walking fast, when every now and then Lee would ask, "Are we getting near, Jack?" "We should be there by now," he would reply and start walking a little faster. By eleven o'clock, the sun was on our left and we were going through the woods like a bunch of wild deers. Jack was jumping over logs and running half of the time. At twelve o'clock the sun was shining on our back and we came to the edge of a high bank and looking at the of it, we saw our cook, Jack Reed, spreading some sides of bark on the ground to serve as a table for our dinner. We had been travelling five hours and made a complete circle and had come back to where we had started. After dinner Lee took the lead and the Jim Green cabin was found. We staked out timber stands in the Big Bend for weeks, and then using our Irish Bell canoe, morning and night to cross the Columbia River, we staked timber for weeks on the other side around Smith Creek. About this time the town of Farwell which had been just a little more than a construction camp changed to a more permanent settlement. The saloons were all done away with, and the hotels were cut down to four -- The Victoria, The Central, The Columbia, and The Stockailum.

The Government had given the the name of Revelstoke instead of Farwell, this being used because of the original 51

location of the townsite and the surrounding lands. This country three or four years before, had been a wilderness, but during the railway construction, towns or camps had sprung up here and there and these had done well as long as the construction gangs came in and spent their month's pay, but when the railway was finished, there were no more pay-days, and as many of these towns had no other means of support, it became necessary to get out and find something to do. Every other man then became a prospector, and in a short time we had discovered many different kinds of mineral all through this country. Then it was necessary to get outside capital to open up these prospects. There comes to my mind a man who is now dead and gone according to newspaper reports. He was found dead in a cabin on a north bound steamer from Vancouver to Klondike and was at the time taking a gang of men and supplies to open up a claim in that country. This man's name was J.W. Haskin, who came into Revelstoke about 1888. He was a man about 35 years of age and was action from the tip of his toes to the top of his head. He did not pack grub out into the hills to merely eat it, as some did, (line in original manuscript unreadable) found and how to find it. He talked about concentration, crushers, smelters. He was a miner who knew what he was talking about, but we did not understand him, and, of course, as always when one knows more than we do, the easy way out of it is to say, "Oh, he's a windbag", or some such name as that. But in spite of this J.W. Haskins made an estimate of the mineral there was in the surrounding country, and with his knowledge of mineral, he went to Winnipeg and organized a company to build a smelter at Revelstoke, and it was built when he was nominated for M.P. in a B.C. election in the Assembly Government that was before the party lines. He was defeated simply because he knew more than we did. I do not know what success he had after leaving Revelstoke, but he was of the class men that one 52

cannot pass by without noticing that they are big men, no matter how poor. They are upright, honest, think of their fellow man, their country, and this class of men do not look for money at any cost, nor do they care for cheap honours.

They get their reward in knowing that they have helped their country and some poor devils climb the hill to the top, then pass on forgetting about it. These are the real men that open up a country, and not the men who get rich quick doing it.

These were hard times this part of the country. There was no government work to speak of -- a few miners working in the Big Bend, and a few working at George Rousamour's sawmill, an old prospector would come into Town now and then to get a grubstake and pull out again in a day or two, perhaps leaving a few dollars over the hotel bar. Old John Hedinton went in for a pig ranch where the C.P.R. yard is today. Paddy Miles and Joe Dolan took a farm across the river, that they called the Cat-tail farm.

R.W. Green and W.H. Vickers staked a piece of land two miles up the Big Bend trail. Sam Crowell took up a homestead down by Montana Slough -- and this was about all the progress that had been made around Revelstoke in two years, so that when Toad Mountain came on the map with no other way to get to it, only down the Columbia River from Revelstoke, J.F. Hume, W. Cawss and R. Sanderson built their steamer, "The Dispatch", to take passengers and supplies to Sproat's Landing, near Robson and that put some life into the old town. R.E. Lemon, general storekeeper, built a ten ton scow and practically moved his store down to Nelson also J.F. Hume moved part of his stock down there and opened a store. Frank Teetzel moved his drug store, McGillivray Brothers of the C.P.R. hotel went to Nelson, G.M. Sproat who was Gold Commissioner, Government Agent, and Judge sent a gang

53

of men down to build a pack trail from Sproat's Landing or Robson to Nelson.

Then the Winter of 1888 that shut off all connection with Nelson and the Big Bend with the exception of the Government sending the mail once a month to the miners in that Big Bend country, Johnny Nelson took the mail up there with a dog train at least 150 miles to the round trip.

Travelling sometimes on the river ice, and other times on a steep side hill holding on to his sleigh. He had no road to follow, there being only a summer pack trail it could not be followed. He had to cross a number of creeks, with no bridges over them. they were hard and dangerous trips to make, and everyone in town would anxiously await his return -- would he come back or not? He had narrow escapes but managed to finish his mail contract. That winter two of the hotels closed their dining rooms for there were only a few men in town and some of them were batching. It did not cost much to batch in those days, as No. 1 smoked bacon was 13 cents a pound, butter 15 cents, eggs 15 cents a dozen, tomatoes 10 cents a can, and sugar 4 cents. Hull Brothers, butchers of Kamloops had a branch shop here managed by J.P. Sutherland, where fresh meats and fish could be bought very cheaply.

The wild West days were gone, and the care-free, don't-give-a-bang spirit had changed to looking ahead.

There was not much money in circulation, so very little drinking or gambling went on that winter. One could at most any time find four or five of these boys in J.F. Hume's store setting around a big dry goods box with a deck of cards, playing crib.

You could hear them count, "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, a pair is six, and his nobs is seven, -- only playing for pastime. It you went into the Victoria Hotel in the afternoon, here were a few young men

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with the boxing gloves on trying to knock one another out, just to pass the time as there was nothing else to do.

The town was dead, and almost buried in five feet of snow. Then spring came. The snow-slides began to roll down over the C.P.R. tracks all through Roger's Pass, east of Revelstoke, and all men who wanted to work could have it shoveling snow.

Jake Serchern, who was then superintendent of bridges for the C.P.R., gathered his bridge crews and gave them shovels. It would sometimes take days before they could get a train through and no one had yet thought of the big rotary snow plough of today, that can do the work of perhaps fifty men. Some of the crew men came in town now and then between slides and spent their money over the bar and down in the red-light district. There was nothing else to do and there was no bank in the district to put their money, no cars to buy and pay for, no moving pictures to go to, and one did not need to dress to walk out in the hills on Sunday, and there were no respectable girls to go out with. The bar rooms were every man's home, for he had no other place to go. It was about this time the great gramophones came out and here was a new way to spend money -- 25 cents to hear two records, which were small cylinder records, that lasted two minutes. One could stand by this machine with a rubber tube in each ear and listen to something sometimes very hard to tell what one hear, but you could stand there four minutes for 25 cents. Of course, this machine was operated in the bar rooms for there was no other public place for it.

The Town Hall, the Church, the School-house had not yet made their appearance. Edison's gramophone were the greatest discovery that man had ever know at that time, and although it was only a crude affair, and one could make out a word here and there after a dollars worth of music, there was something hypnotizing and supernatural about it. To think that a big brass band in New York played 55

a military march, and that music had been printed in every small detail on that small black record and it was now playing to us 3000 miles away. Some of the boys said that it was a fraud and that the machine should be smashed and the owner kicked out of the country. J.W. Haskin said, "Boys, do you remember the man who discovered that the earth was round? You said he was a fraud and you put him in prison, and tortured his while there, then you finally murdered him, just because he knew something you did not know. So be careful, you have a lot to learn yet. I don't know any more about the machine than you do, but I don't think I know it all, and apparently you fellows do." Had it been any other man talking that way there would have been trouble, but Haskins was not a drinker, nor a fighter --his fighting was done with intelligence, not with his fist, and that compelled a certain amount of respect if not love, for we know it is seldom that one loves anyone more intelligent than himself unless the intelligent one is a master in some form.

But we have been fooling our time away on town gossip, so let's get back to solid foundation on terra firma.

As the spring days got longer, the got stronger, and the ice on the Columbia River got weaker. Capt. Sanderson had his "S.S. Dispatch" ready for the summer run to Robson and from here the goods went into Nelson by pack-train. We discovered the ice gone one fine morning and in a short time the Captain found he had all the freight and passengers he could handle so away we went and landed at Sproat's Landing with enough lumber on board to build a small warehouse and here I camped to build this and a bridge across a back channel that floated at high water. The warehouse finished, I had Arthur Dick, Andy Green, and Dutch Pete helping me with the bridge. We camped in the warehouse, and all the it was half full of 56

goods, mostly cases and five-gallon kegs of good whiskey.

We could sometimes take a hammer and drive one of the hoops on a keg back, then we would bore a small hole through, then by putting a straw into this hole we could get all we wanted out of. By plugging the hole and driving the hoop back, no one could ever know what happened. A quart or two was never noticed in five gallons, and the best seven-year-old at that time only cost $2.25 a gallon, so the damage we did was not very great. Before we had one bridge finished there was a saloon and a hotel built up a mile or so below us, on the bank just above Kootenay Rapids. The first one was a big tent set up by R.E. Lemon of Revelstoke, and he had old Ike Stevens running it for him.

You will remember Ike Stevens who operated a pack train up to the Big Bend with John Dunn. He was getting too old for the trail, and so Lemon gave him this job, as he had a good stock of booze and general store goods. A short distance from him was George Gilpin's Hotel, which was a storey and half house made of logs. A kitchen, diningroom and bar room was on the first floor, and a stairway in the bar room led to the room upstairs, George was an English gentleman of medium height with a straight military walk, broad shoulders, dark complexion, and a very heavy black moustache. He came to Revelstoke sometime during the winter and proceeded to spend money over the bar. By all appearance he had money without end. He stayed at the Central Hotel, and then took the cook, Tom Roberts, as partner, then came down here and built that hotel. George did not know anything about the country, not the things it was made of. To him a gold pan, frying-pan, or a bannock was all the same to him, so he supplied the money and Tom, who was also English, but had been in the country a number of years, was to do the work or have it done. The hotel finished, they settled down to do business -- Tom into the kitchen and George in the bar. Before long George would be drunk in the middle of the afternoon, and Tom 57

would have to attend the bar. Often Tom went to bed with his clothes on and got up the morning with a big head.

This went on for a few weeks as there wasn't much doing only on boat day. Soon the well known Captain Armstrong, who had a few years before built a canal connecting the heads of the Columbia and Kootenay Rivers up in Canal Flats, and who was now operating boats from Golden up the Columbia, saw an opening for a boat on this run, and he shipped a small steamer from Golden to Revelstoke and put her on this run. This was called "Marion". A big tall boned Scotchman got the big scows that R.E. Lemon had built in Revelstoke, to move his store down with and with it he got a charter for a ferry across the Columbia at Robson or just at the head of the Kootenay Rapids.

Them G.M. Sproat, the Revelstoke Government Agent, came down and got Nels Demars to build him a house at Sproat's Landing. Nels Demars was a real old timer, having worked for the Hudson's Bay Company, even before the Big Bend discovery in 1865. He had followed the trails of this company, from the coasts to its most northerly post, and had travelled through the canyons and rapids of many rivers in the interior of B.C. Nels spoke English, French, Chinook, and three or four Indian languages. The Crooked Mouthed Tom, as we called him, his last name being Dunlop, came in with a mule-pack train, with seven or eight horses to pack from Robson to Nelson, James McClery had his ferry boat running in a few days and quite a number of men came into Robson in that way. It was apparently good going on the west side of the river from Colville to the Indian Reservation, and by what is today Trail to Robson, about 80 miles. The Hall Boys who discovered the Silver King Mine at Nelson came up that way often that summer on horse-back, and some claim that they made it in a day. However, all this extra traffic, and of course more men moving about, gave more work and trade 58

to old Ike in his big tent, and George in this log-house bar-room, and now and then there would be enough men drinking around these bars to have fights, and one fight I saw ended very funny was Paddy Miles, partner to Joe Dolan in the Cat-tail Ranch at Revelstoke, and Tom Ordell.

Tom had been the time-keeper on the government trail from Robson to Nelson the summer before, and Pat claimed that Tom did not give him enough time. Tom was a big man, short but stout and heavy, and a hard-looking man to tackle. Pat was tall and slim but wiry looking. Tom went after him and we all thought he was going to clean up on Paddy in a minute. Pat put his hands up to protect his face and backed up until he got into the corner of Ike's tent where barrels of whiskey and boxes of goods were all over the bare ground, as Ike had no floor for his tent. Pat got between some of these boxes with his head down and his hands over it and Tom could not get at him. He skinned his hands on the boxes trying to hit him and that make him madder still. Then he tried to kick him and hurt his foot on a barrel. By this time, he was getting so mad he was jumping around like a wild man and of course he was getting out of wind. When Pat saw that Tom was gasping for breath he came out in the open and made a few passes at him that made him dizzy, and he smiled and said as he looked at him, "Tom, you can't fight, and I could punch the daylights out of you now, but I won't do it. Come on and have a drink, boys." We all lined up around a big drygoods bow that Ike had for a bar, and had a drink with Pat but Tom would not let him pay for it, for he said it was up to him to pay, and he did. Pat was on the police force a year or two later and the last report of him was that he was drowned near Nelson.

About this time one of the C.P.R. Chief Engineers, Steards, I think his name was, came to Robson,and after a long talk with James McClary, whom he apparently knew 59

well, agreed to go with him to locate the Crow's Nest Pass railroad. James had prospected through the country and knew all about it. He came to me and asked if I would take his ferry boat for two or three months. He knew the ferry did not pay be he wanted to hold his charter as he thought it would pay later on. He had staked a homestead on the west side of the river and built a neat log cabin, which was clean and cozy, the walls being almost covered with shelves of books and papers. He was also a crank on guns, so here were guns to suit most any taste, big, small, light, and heavy. However, to operate this ferry was no boy's gob, for it would take eight horses with their packs at one trip. James had a quarter of a mile to make his crossing and had he failed to make it in that distance, he would have gone down Kootenay Rapids, and that at high water would have been the last of James and his ferry boat. The only way to propel that boat was with twenty-foot oars or sweeps. One had to stand up and walk with them, and he did not have to be smart to do this work, only a pair of strong arms, a stiff back, and lots of sweat. James said I had these qualifications, and he would give all I made with the ferry and $45.00 per month. My bridge was about finished so I took this ferry the next day. Jame's log cabin did not appeal to me so my time was spent around George Gilpin's hotel or old Ike's saloon, where the travelling men were if there were any around at all. If a crossing was made from the east side to the west side, the ferry was left there until the next customer came, although one did not know from which side he would come. I had a small boat to cross with at any time. I had only been on this job a few days when Billy Perdue came along with a drove of cattle from the Okanagan and were for Burns and Perdue's Butcher. Of course, these cattle were wild, but after Billy Perdue and his man, a half breed, drove them that long distance they were getting tamer, although not tame enough to cross on the ferry, so it was necessary for me to 60

get help to swim them across the river. I went down to the mouth of the Kootenay River where some Indians were camped and got three of them with their bark canoes to help. The two men drove them into the river and believe me it was a job for two men to drive some fifty or sixty cattle into the water. Billy was an old cowboy who had worked for big outfits in different parts of America, and a few years later was recognized as a cattle man from Calgary all the way up to Prince Rupert and this man was a wonder on horse-back. After getting them into the water, the two Indians and myself had to work fast in order to keep them from going back ashore, but after they got some distance away they separated into three branches, my bunch being the lower one, and only a short distance from Kootenay Rapid which was now at its worst with high water. No boat or steer would ever come out of it, once into it, but in spite of all I did, even driving my boat among them and over their back still they swam down with the current. One big white-faced steer was in the lead right from the start, and the rest followed which ever way he went. Billy, who was on the west shore watching, saw that this big white face was the cause of my troubles. He took his rifle and shot at him, the bullet just grazed the side of his neck, but that was enough to make him change his mind, and he made for the shore and they all landed. My boat was into the first big wave of the rapid when I made shore, and that was too close to feel comfortable.

Sometime Joe Wilson came up with his pack-train of twenty-two mules. We swam across in spite the fact that some mules cannot swim, and that if a drop of water gets into their ears they will drown. We took that outfit across without losing one.

We went farther up the river with this lot so as to have lots of room to cross without getting into the Kootenay Rapid. Billy Perdue's half-breed, came back from Nelson 61

after landing the cattle there stopped at the Gilpin hotel to have a drink. There were three or four Indians around at the time, and he got up a poker game with them.

Apparently, he was a good poker player for he got their money, then asked me to take him across with his horse.

One of the Indians we called Louis, came with him, and getting across they went down the first trail perhaps five hundred feet from my cabin, and sat in the shade of a big cottonwood tree. They had a bottle of rye and a pack of cards and appearance they were going to have a good time of it. I got into the cabin, picked up a book, and laid down on my bunk and read for nearly an hour. You know how hard it is for one interested in a book to tell an hour from fifteen minutes. However, I heard someone shouting so I looked out of the window and saw Louis running up toward the cabin as fast as his legs could carry him and shouting like a madman, and he was blood from head to foot. Then I saw the half breed get on his horse and come after him. I grabbed a gun off the wall and got outside. By this time Louis was getting close enough to see that his nose was cut across and the blood was running down his face and down to his feet. He was trying to stop it from bleeding with his hands, and of course he was all over blood, and an awful sight to look at. The half breed came straight for him, shouting something about other not paying. He was drunk and a hard-looking customer. I pointed the gun at him and told him to move along. After taking Louis into the cabin, and fixing him the best I could, we got into my small boat and ran down to the Indian camp, where he was attended to in that way and he turned up a week or so later with a small kink in his nose, and we called him Crooked Nose Louis from that time on. This Crooked Nose Louis was a good gambler, and every time a poker game started, he was there no matter where.

Whenever the Hall boys came up from Colville, they would stop here over night -- then one could see a good poker 62

game. These had sold the Silver King Mine by this time and were going around with their pockets full of gold coins and did not seem to care how long they lasted. Three of these came in one night and after having supper at Gilpin's Hotel, the game started. These three boys who were Tom Dunlop the packer, Crooked Nose Louis, and a man whom we afterward knew by the name of Ritch. He came from Nelson and by all appearance he had been drinking for some time as one could see that he was shakey and nervous at times. Nevertheless, he handled his cards like an expert, but he had no luck that night. He and Dunlop were getting the Hall boys' money, and Louis was getting it all from him. The rounds of drinks were close together, and they were soon talking fast and loud to Louis. George Gilpin who had managed to keep on deck that night, kept peace in the outfit simply by talking to them like the gentleman that he was. His manner and speech were so much out of place, that it took the grit out of them and the game went on until daylight. Then the man from Nelson was broke and he walked out without saying a word to anyone and was not seen again three days. There was nowhere for him to go only Nelson, and George and I did not think he would hit the trail in the shape that he was in.

Tom Dunlop, who had played poker with him three nights before, came back from Nelson with his pack-train and told us that he had seen nothing of him. Then George said, "Boys, that chap is around here somewhere and he is sick, so it is up to us men to find him and look after him." The three of us then struck out in the woods from the hotel going towards the Kootenay River, and we found him without much trouble, but we could not get near him, for he had the D.T.'s. We ran after him in the woods until it began to get dark and had to give it up. He had lost nearly all his clothes, no hat, no coat, no boots on his feet, all he had on was a pair of socks, pants, and undershirt. He was a wild looking man. We went back to the hotel, and of 63

course, George felt badly about this man, and the only thing for him to do was to drink it off, but before getting drunk he got me to promise to come over early the next morning and help him get that wild man. As no one could break a promise made to George, I was over the next morning and found our man not far from the hotel sound asleep. When I woke him up, I found him sick but in his right mind, and after talking to him for awhile we went over to George. Here we found clothes for him, and I took him across the rover to my cabin to sober him up. The first night he was with me I made him a bed on the floor with a bunch of goat skins that my boss had left. We went to bed and Ritch was soon asleep, but I did not feel sure of him thinking he might take a spell through the night and get outside, then it would be a job to get him. I left the lamp burning by the head of my bed and laid there for perhaps an hour expecting him to jump up any minute with a scream, but finally sleep got the best of me and it was two o'clock in the morning when a howl like a timber wolf woke me up. Ritch was reaching up the wall for a rifle, "I'll get him," he was shouting, and he was shivering from head to foot. His teeth were rattling like a man out in the cold winter storm, his eyes stuck out staring at the lamp along side of me, then I remembered that the gun he had in his was loaded and he did not know what he was doing. It took me perhaps five minutes to get it away from him and the hardest job I ever had on my hands, but I had no more trouble with him; he stopped with me ten days and proved to be a real good temporary partner, then he went back to Nelson. A couple of days later Tom Dunlop brought me back the clothes George had let him have, and I have not heard of him since. He was at that time supposed to be partner with Hugh Madden, the man who built the first hotel in Nakusp - The Grand Hotel. There was not much doing around Robson that summer, in spite of having two boats on the run from Revelstoke, they were only small 64

and had no speed, seven miles an hour at the most, and they had no headlight, therefore could not run at nights, except on the lakes when not too dark. Most of the supplies were shipped in from the other side of the line, from Sandpoint, Idaho, down the Kootenay River, and through Kootenay Lake to Nelson. In fact, we Canadians should take off our hats to our cousins across the line, for the discovery and building up of Nelson, and we could do the same for the making of Trail, Rossland, Slocan, New Denver, and Sandon. All these mining camps that were built up in this district, within a year or two, they were built more or less by Americans. The prospectors came down the Kootenay River from Nelson to the mouth of the Slocan River, and up the Slocan River to the Slocan Lake, and here they located claims at Slocan city, New Denver, Silverton, and up to Sandon, many of them are still working today, a few prospectors came up the Columbia River. There are two of them I remember crossing one morning by my small boat, they had no pack-horse, one was a Dutchman, and the other was an Englishman, and this is how the Dutch beat the English and me. "Dutch" was a little slim bony fellow with a half sick look upon his face, he was about thirty years old. His partner Charlie was a short chap, about the same age, but full of life. They were going up to Nelson to locate a claim and of course, get rich quick, that is the hope that most prospectors live on.

But "Dutch" took sick, when his partner looked after him for three or four days, then came to me and told me that they were broke. If I would look after his partner, he was not bad, he had fixed his hammock outside, I could give him something to eat out there and help him in and out of the hotel at night... He wanted to go to Nelson and get some money some way, and get him up there, then he would pay me for my trouble. The ferry work did not take up much of my time, the most of my days were spent around the hotel, so I looked after "Dutch" and nursed him like a baby, got 65

him everything he asked for and tried in every way to get him better, but he only got worse. In a few days he could not get out of his bed and it became a real job to look after that man, helpless, and with no money. Almost another week went by before Captain Armstrong came down with his boat the "Marion". I went to him and explained my troubles. "This man has no money, and he is sick. Will you take him to Revelstoke". "Why, sure", said Armstrong, "put him on board and I will look after him". We carried him on the boat, and he was off for Revelstoke. But when Captain Armstrong came back next trip, he told me about "Dutch" dying on the boat, on the way up, and when the Revelstoke agent took charge of him, he found $700 on him. I had treated him for almost two weeks, not because I liked him any more than any other man, just because he was a fellow man. As for his partner, Charley, I have not heard from him since.

Tom Roberts, George Gilpins's partner, and cook, was getting sick of this place, they were not making any money.

He decided to go away. George being left alone, did not improve in any way, some days he would hardly open his door at all, and many days one would find an open door, and walking into the place, would discover George sound asleep most anywhere, behind the bar, on the floor, into the kitchen, upstairs. George was far too gone with drinking to think of quitting. Had he had anyone to talk to around, one that knew something about English schools, colleges, university, football, opera, then talk about art, politics, George would have been half at home, but what did he know about this country and its people? There were Indians around the hotel every day, only a few of them could talk English at all, and that very poorly. As for the average white man he came in contact with, they knew nothing of his world, they were railroad builders, prospectors, trappers, and gamblers, tin-horns. True there 66

were a number of educated smart men, too, going through at this time, men of business, but they had no time to talk to George, who was now the picture of drunkenness, with a puffed up red face, with blue patches, here and there, and a well-known red nose, deep worried lines in his forehead and heavy floggy wrinkles around his jawbones. Although he had the face of a fat man, his body was a mere frame of skin and bone, and so weak that he staggered even when sober. But if his body was gone beyond recall -- his brains were still in working order, he was a good hearted and good-natured gentleman. On being left alone, he made no pretence of serving meals in the hotel. If anyone wanted a meal badly, he would take them into the kitchen and tell them to help themselves. As time went on the class of traffic through here changed from the labourers looking for work on government trails, and prospectors looking for claims to the business class. J.A. Mara, who was then member for the Donimion House, looking for an opening for railroads or navigation propositions which resulted in the following year in the development of the Inland Development Navigation Company. Houston the mayor of Nelson, came down and located in Nelson. My old boss, George McKinnon, and his brother James came down with their sawmill machinery and finally located at Kalso, on the Kootenay Lake. Tom Madden, of the Madden House, Nelson, came through and settled in Nelson. I knew Tom well, having worked with him in the summer of 1886, on the C.P.R snowsheds in Rogers Pass. James Gilker, of Gilker and Wells, Revelstoke, then opened a branch at Nelson.

Judge Tonstel of Kamloops who had taken the place of Judge Sproat, made a trip through here now and then. Tom Ward who had been to blame for our four day boat race, was now operating a ferry boat across the Slocan River on the Robson-Nelson trail, and a half-way house where he served meals to the travellers, and it was reported that Tom was a good cook. He would get a meal ready, finding 67

all his boarders outside waiting, he would stand at the door, his head rubbing against the top of the door jam, and with that fog horn voice of his would shout to the boarders outside waiting for the meal, "Grab a root", that was his dinner bell. Dinner was about the only meal he served, as the travellers would leave Robson in the morning for Nelson or vice versa, and Tom's place was about half-way, it took most of them all day to make the trip, with a good dinner of pork and beans at Tom's on the way. Many of these travellers were from other parts of the country, they were different in many ways from the men of the west, and their customs and habits were soon adopted by many of the oldtimer. One of the things that was very noticeable at that time was a tooth brush stuck in the left hand vest pocket, every man wore a vest in those days, but no working man ever thought of packing a tooth brush with him, there no dentists in the country, and no one seemed to have tooth ache. But one first noticed the business man with a brush in his vest pocket, then a would-be business man fell for that style, then we saw our gamblers, tin-horns with one or two in their pockets, and soon you saw a pencil fastened with a clip alongside the brush. Some of these birds could not write their own name, nor would they clean their teeth, but they packed these tools around with them.

The wild west days were gone. Quite a number of these outsiders would not take a drink. Some of them talked about churches. Now and then a respectable woman would come through. Up to that time there had been very few in the district. Toad Mountain was already out of date.

The town of Nelson had taken its place and here and there were permanent homes for real women. The oldtimers knew that their days of pork and beans grubstake were getting out of date. They would soon have to get clothes to walk around the town on Sunday, although the hotel 68

bar-room would still be their homes, with drinking and gambling as part of their lives.

Jim McClary, my boss, came back after locating the Crow's Nest Pass Railway, with the Chief Engineer Stewart, and he took charge of his ferry boat. I stopped with my old friend George Gilpin a few days, he was the same old George, a good-natured gentleman, but otherwise hopeless. While here these few days, a little Irishman came in from down the river, he was but a handful of pep and grit. He had a heavy, almost red moustache, a long narrow face with a big Roman nose, heavy chin, high prominent cheek bones, small piercing blue eyes, and his face and hands were covered freckles. He had been drinking before he came here, and he kept on drinking. His Christian name was Jim, his surname has left me, but he became well known later by the name of "Jimmy, the Goat".

But for the time at least I left "Jimmy , the Goat" at Robson, after getting the grubstake together, most of which came from old Ike Stevens, pork and beans, flour, salt, tobacco, and a good gun which one had to pack around even without prospecting. However, I had done a lot of work for my friend George Gilpin through the summer, and I knew that his money was about gone, so part of my grubstake was 12 bottles of rye whiskey, which cost about $15.00 at that time. Saying "good-bye" to George, old Ike Stevens, and Tom Dunlop the Packer, and Nels Demars, I took the S.S. Dispatch, Capt. Bob Sanderson, and landed on the Upper Arrow Lake, a mile above Demars. Here, being alone, Revelstoke being 65 miles away, no one to talk to, there was plenty of time for work. The first thing to do was to make a raft, so as to be able to go up and down and across the lake. Then a raft proved to be too slow, and not safe enough in a storm. Then with an axe and round nosed shovel I went to operate on a big cottonwood, the operation was to make a canoe out of it, and while 69

chopping one bit out of it one afternoon, the lake was calm, the air still, the echo from my chopping came back to me from across the lake a fraction of a second after each stroke of my axe. It was one of those calm days that one could see over the water for miles, that everything looks big, every sound is registered, the call of a loon can be heard for miles. Anyone who has had any experience with outdoor life will recognize the particular atmosphere. At any rate between the strokes of my axe and the echoes across the lake, a peculiar sound came to my ears.

Dropping my axe, I listened. It came from across the lake.

Looking across, a small brown object could be seen, moving along on the long sandy beach. Could it be a man 65 miles from Revelstoke, and 75 miles from Nelson? How could a man be there and in need of help? Then thinking of the prospectors that were going into the Slocan District at this time, it struck me that one of them might have got lost.

My canoe was not ready, but the old raft was there. I shove her off, and away I went across to see what was wanted.

On getting near the shore, I saw a small man slowly staggering towards me. He walked along for perhaps a hundred yards like a man drunk, then fell down, he rolled on his face than got up on his hands and knees, and with a great effort stood up on his feet. Then coming headlong from side to side, he fell again. I ran to him and picked him up. It was "Jimmy, the Goat". "What in hell are you doing here Jim?" He looked at me and smiled, "Take me where there is something to eat and I will tell you"! He had been hollering at me across the so long and loud, that he could scarcely talk. Jim was down and out with hunger. We got on the raft and started back for camp, but before we were half-way across, the wind came up, and soon the waves were running over our raft. As the wind got stronger the waves rolled higher. Jim was too weak to stand up. I was afraid a big wave would wash him off the raft. Having the rope I used to tie the raft on shore with, I fastened Jim so 70

he couldn't roll off. By this time nearly ever wave went clean over him. One can easily understand that a man in that condition could not stand much knocking about, to say nothing about this mass of ice-cold water that fell on him and tossed him from side to side. The only thing holding him was this rope around his body. The water would throw him around like a chip, many times he was half off the raft, then the rope around him would cut into him and he would groan with pain. He was too weak to fight this battle, and I could not help him. This raft made up of small driftwood picked up along the lakeshore, fastened together with a few old spikes, pieces of old rope, was not made for a storm like this. Had it turned broadside to the waves at any time, it would have been the last of Jim and me. It took all my strength and knowledge of water to keep this raft at the right angle so as to get ashore sometime. Up to then Jim had shown his fighting spirit, by keeping his head above the mass of water, as these waves rolled over him, but now he apparently gave up. I saw three big waves go over, and he never moved. He laid with his face down in his hands, and not a move in him. At this time, we were no more than two hundred yards from shore and a good place to make a landing. I gave him a kick, and shouted at him, "Is that the kind of man you are?" Have a fellow take a chance of his life to get you across, and then give up a few feet from shore? I always thought the Irish were gritty fellows. But you are a no-good tramp, a quitter!" He turned his face to me. I could see fire in his eyes. "I'm no quitter. Not by a damned sight! I'll stay with you." The water picked him up and laid him down again, then his head went up and he looked. (Line in original manuscript unreadable) there for a rest we needed badly, then we crawled to the camp. There was bannock, pork and beans, prunes and rice, and a number of bottles of whiskey. Jim had a good drink while I was making the fire to get something to eat. Jim was now feeling fine and told me 71

how he got here, -- as near as he could remember, he had stayed at Robson drinking as long as his money lasted, then he got the D.T.'s and while in that state he got it into his head to get to Revelstoke. 175 miles up river and lakes, no roads not even a trail, and there was not a living soul in that stretch of country at that time. He had left Robson without blankets, and without anything to eat. He did not know how long he had travelled before he had come to his proper sense. Then not knowing where he was, he kept on walking, expecting that at every point on the lake he would see Revelstoke just ahead, but he was only about half way when I found him. He must have been on the way at least ten days, and all he had to eat was berries. He had to climb over a rock bluff one day, and almost fell on a goat. It made for him. He picked up a club and killed it. That is why we named him "Jimmy, the Goat". In about a week Jimmy was about as good as ever, full of humour and Irish wit. Then Captain Sanderson came by with his boat, and he took Jimmy up close to Revelstoke, and gave him a job cutting wood for the boat. Sometime later I went up to Revelstoke and met Jim in front of the Stone Hotel. He came up and grabbed me by the hand, "Come in with me," said Jim. "I'll pay you for what you did for me." I walked up to the bar with him. He put ten cents on the bar and shouted to old John Stone behind the bar, "Here is my last ten cents. Give this man a good drink". I paid for the two drinks, and when Jim got through telling me how sorry he was to have no money to buy me more drinks. I left him and have never heard of him since.

There are a number of oldtimers at Revelstoke who remember Jimmy the Goat. Jimmy gone, I decided to move up the lake as there was nothing around here to prospect for, with the exception of what we called at the time flour gold on McDonald Creek. But there was not enough of it to make it pay. My canoe was now finished. I packed up my 72

camp and paddled to Fosthall Creek. Before landing I saw a fire on the lakeshore, perhaps a mile on the other side of the creek. There were no tepees in sight so they could not be Indians. Wondering what they might be, I kept on paddling, getting within a short distance of the fire, I saw a stout man coming towards me at the water's edge. It was Peter St. Lawrence, "Comment, que fais-tu ici?" (Now what are you doing here?) he shouted, "I'm looking for a pot of pea soup, have you any?" "No, by gosh, we are stranded here, three of us. Captain Sanderson was supposed to pick up on his last trip, and he went by and forgot us, and by hell, we are out of grub. Have you got any? Pork and beans, prunes, rice, sugar, condensed milk? I have two babies here that wants milk, "looking up at the camp, where two men stood by the fire. "They can't talk French," said Pete, "Come on up to the camp."

Peter, a French-Canadian of the old school, quiet, easy going, the happy go lucky sort that do nothing wrong, and of course see nothing wrong. He was always ready to make a joke out of anything that displeased him, and like many of the boys in those days, he had two names. There was "Silver Jim", "Red Dunk", "Keno Jack", "Pot Hole", "Little Brandy" was Pete's name. Every man drank more or less in those days, and many drank more rather than less, but Peter drank brandy, and just a drop of port wine in it, and would drink nothing else, no matter when or where. When a bartender said, "What will you have, Peter?" He would bring his hand over slowly toward the bartender, and with a smile on his face he would show about an inch space between his fist finger and thumb, "a little brandy for me", and a drop of port wine. "If you don't mind." That "little brandy� stuck to him. It was not what he called for, but the way he did it. Let us for a moment look at a man over 200 pounds, rather short but stout and well set up and as strong as a bear, a big moon face, bright blue smiling eyes, standing at the bar, and with a little port, all the while 73

holding his finger and thumb an inch apart, to show the bartender how much he wanted, knowing that he would (line in original manuscript unreadable) what made the boys laugh and he would laugh with them. "By gosh," he would say, "can't I get what I want without you fellows all the time looking?" Then looking at them all the time, he would say, "Now, all you boys have a drink on me." Peter was always the same, rain or shine, money or no money, drunk or sober, he was always smiling and ready to help anyone. His English was very poor, and he scarcely ever spoke it to anyone who could speak French. Here he was a Fosthall Creek with two young men from California, on their vacation from University, out big game hunting.

Peter was their guide. Getting to their camp, these two men had looked to be from eighteen to twenty years old.

They told me what their troubles were. They had bought an outfit at Revelstoke, two rifles, 1886 model, the best made at that time, two hundred rounds of ammunition, a camping outfit, grub enough to last them two weeks. They had been up Pingston and Fosthall Creeks, round Mosquito Lake, their two weeks were gone, they had to be back home by a certain date, and here they were out of grub.

The steamer "Dispatch" had gone by and could not be back this way to take them up for about another week, and they were supposed to home in that time. The boat that they had was alright on the lake but it was too deep on the river.

"Would I help Peter to take them up to Revelstoke, and sell them what grub I had?" Money was nothing to these boys.

They had lots of it. My grub was turned into their camp at once, and we left at daybreak for Revelstoke. On our way Peter always spoke to me in French, and often made fun of these boys, "Are you sure, Peter, that the boys cannot understand?" "By gosh, I have been with the boys over two weeks, and I have not heard them talk yet." Going over the river that afternoon we came to a gravel bar where the current was too strong for us to pull up. Peter 74

took the rope and walked on the shore towing the boat, while I stood in keeping it from going on shore with a pole.

One of the boys took his boots off, and got into the river walking alongside of the, holding on to it. Now and then his feet would slip on the rocks, this would jerk the boat, and of course, would jerk the rope that Pete was holding on. He turned our way two or three times, and I could see that he was getting mad, and finally he said to me in French, "Hit the s-- of a b---- on the head with your pole!"

He let go, and I noticed then that the young man went into the boat and did not come out again. We made camp well up the river that night, and here I saw for the first time how a moneyed man could be made comfortable over the night, even in the wilderness. Peter was an expert in this work, and they way he looked after those boys would make one think of home and mother. The brush bed he made for them as good as any hotel bed, and he did not stop short of tucking them in, when they rolled in for the night. But they had a surprise for us that night, after the had been made comfortable in their bed and Pete had tucked them in , they started to sing as they usually did, but what were they singing? Peter's eyes stuck out looking at them, then looked at me with a frown on his face, but did not say a word until they had done with their song, which was an old French song, which they sang better than we could have done. "By gosh", said Peter, "that's what I call a dirty trick boys." Your two weeks with me through the brush have never talked with me that way before, what for?" As he spoke, he backed away from the fire, stumbled and fell into it. The two boys were out of bed as quick as a flash to pick him up, and they were ready to nurse him as he had done them; the whole affair ended in a good long laugh, with the echoes coming back to us from across the river, but Peter never spoke English to them from then on.

We landed at Revelstoke the next day at 2 p.m., and they had to take the west bound train at 4 p.m. that day. They 75

took us to the Hotel Victoria, which had been much improved during the summer, and after giving us the best that was in the house, they left at 4 p.m. They were real boys.

Peter and I took the town in that night, as was customary in those days, and we noticed many improvements and changes, as we went from one hotel to another. We had no other place to go to. We saw a big gold letter sign, made in a half circle over the main entrance of the Hotel Victoria - we had seen gold letters before, but not in the Rocky Mountains. We noticed that someone had got hold of a paint brush and daubed paint on buildings here and there, the bar-rooms were well prepared, woodwork newly painted, they had done away with the one board shelf at the back of the bar, and put in a back bar with a mirror in it, so that we could take a look at ourselves when taking a drink. They had installed a machine for pulling corks out of bottles. They did not put the bottle between their knees anymore and pull on the old corkscrew until blue in the face, and then get the beer foam all over themselves. The bartenders advertised their beer in order to advertise their machine, and a customer did not stop drinking their beer to see the machine work. Selling beer had been hard work for the bartender, now it was a pleasure. They also had a money drawer under the bar, fixed with five pull keys. If you did not know which key to pull it would ring the bell, that prevented any outsider getting money out of it. The old benches were replaced by good strong armchairs. There were a number of pool tables in town, and we would play for the drinks, but very few of the oldtimers took to this game. There were few families in town with boys and girls of the school age, and J.W. Thompson was the teacher. The schoolhouse being the old Mounted Police barracks on top of the hill. This building was also used as a church by Rev. James Turner, 76

and Mr. Sinclair who came to town regularly and held services.

Peter did not like the way things were going. "By gosh," he growled, "This place is getting too good for us. Do you know they told me the other day "Wild Bill" was going down the street singing and dragging his coat as he always does when singing? Big Jack Kirkup got after him and told him that this town would not stand for his kind of sport anymore. "The construction days are gone, we are making a white man’s town out of this", he said. "If you want to sing or make a fool of yourself, stay inside. You can't do it on the street."

Of course, you know, there are ministers, women and kids on the street all the time. "I guess Jack is right, but that means that you and I have to get the Sunday suit of clothes and go to church before any of these people would even look at us. By gosh, I’m going through to Nelson.

Maybe I can pick up a claim of some kind down there. I'm not good enough for this town". And Peter went to Nelson.

Some years later I was told that Peter and a partner by the name of Derrien who had a placer claim around Sheep Creek and when this claim got worked out Peter went north. He was one of the boys who followed the Trail of '98, in the far north, and that was the last I ever heard of him.

Going back to my canoe I had left at Fosthall Creek, I found a good log cabin, just on the edge of the wood by the lake shore. It had been built a year or two previously. It had what we call a "caboose" built into it; it takes the place of a fireplace. It is built in the centre of the cabin. A box of split cedar is made, about four feet square, 18 inches high.

It is sitting on the ground and filled with dirt. A post is set up from the floor to the roof at one end, and it is made so 77

that it will turn, then by making a hole in this post, one can put a stick into this hole, and then he can have a pot of beans at the end of this stick, and he can swing it over the fire, which is in the centre of this box, or swing it off. A square hole is cut into the roof and a funnel shaped box is fitted into this hole to draw the smoke out like a blacksmith's shop. This fire arrangement in a small cabin is very good as long as you have a fire going, but as soon as the fire goes out the cold comes down through this square hole in the roof, and it soon gets cold inside. This cabin made a good temporary home until I could find a trapping ground for that winter. Striking out one cold, foggy morning, but expecting the fog to clear off any moment, I climbed a high bench by the lake, and struck off for the head of the creek to find beaver. Here is an almost level flat extending for miles in every direction, and the whole of it had gone through a brush fire the year before, and that fire had burned the whole of the flat, almost as clean as the floor. There were only a few burned stumps left standing here and there and an out crop of bed rock looming here and there. But as I had no compass to go by in the heavy fog, and not being able to see any distance ahead, I got lost and walked in a circle. I soon found footmarks, where I was crossing my own tracks, but kept on walking until late in the afternoon, then it began to rain, and the next thing it was dark. Here I was with just a lunch, a piece of bannock and some bacon, no water, although somewhere through this flat there was Fosthall Creek running, but where was it? The darker it got, the more it rained and the colder it got. Having no axe to cut wood with, and very little wood to get because of the fire, after working for an hour on a burned stump with a jack knife and using all my matches, I decided to keep on walking to keep warm. Daylight next morning found me still walking, but not very fast. About noon that day, I stood on the edge of a high bench, and looking down there was sunshine down below at the 78

mouth of Fosthall Creek, although it was still foggy on the bench where I stood. There was the little log cabin just on the edge of the woods near the lakeshore, perhaps a mile away. To get to that cabin was the only thing worth while just then. That was home, yes, heaven, with a fire going to get warm and dry. There was no such thing as packing extra clothes with you to change when you got wet. One stood by the fire until dry, and very often one had to roll into his blankets still wet, at night. When it rains for hours when you are travelling through the woods looking for water to make a camp. However, I got to the cabin and made a good big fire, fried some bacon with the bannock and a cup of tea. I was soon in the land of honey and sound asleep. Sometime before daybreak the next morning, I woke up, and this is what went through my mind while waiting for daylight. "Is this sort of life good enough for a white man? Is he any better than an Indian when he lives this way? Or is he as good as an Indian? No doubt the outdoor life is a great life, as free as the birds of the air, no customs, rules or laws affect him. One can come and go as he pleases. He may be clean or dirty, eat with his knife, or his hand, or a wooden spoon. He can wash once a day, or a week, for that matter. Who cares? Government, politics, or progress means nothing to him. He is out of touch with almost everything. Why should a white man be a trapper when he has to become an Indian to become one?" When daylight came my mind was made up to quit this life for good. A few days later found me in Revelstoke. Here was a new world to face after three years of the wild west, from the C.P.R. snowshed camp at Roger's Pass in 1886 with fifty men in one bunkhouse, everyone doing his own washing or going dirty. Pork and beans on the table three times a day with a piece of boiled beef now and then for a change. All served in tin plates and cups but no saucers, and black iron knives and forks. Every man had to have his own soap and towel in order to wash his face in the creek 79

by the camp. When fall set in this creek would freeze over almost every night, then it became necessary to break the ice every morning before having your morning wash. Then many of the boys quit washing altogether, and shaving was almost forgotten. Here I may say that only a very small proportion of the men shaved compared with today. The young men grew moustaches as soon as they were able, and the middle aged or married men did not shave at all.

That was the custom. More so with country folks or farmers. Nevertheless, it was very unusual to meet a middle-aged man with a smooth face as we do today. Then from these camps to the logging camps things went a little better. In these camps one would find a few oldtimers who were used to this life and who knew how to keep clean, and how to make themselves fairly comfortable in spite of their surroundings. Every Sunday these oldtimers would have a coal oil can sitting on a camp fire boiling clothes to make sure that nothing alive would stand the boiling, and if they found that too many of the boys carried livestock in their underwear, they would move out and build a camp of their own. But the tenderfoot or greenhorn did not know anything about the wild west life and many of them went from bad to worse, until the got a chance to get with someone who would show them what to do. But now the oldtimers' days are over. Revelstoke has settled down.

Three of the hotels had girls waiting on the tables. The other hotels had young men decked up in white coats. Bills of fare were passed around the table so that you could order what you desired. Pork and beans were seldom found on these. Dinner would be soup, roast beef, mutton, pudding, cakes, pies. Tin plates and cups were thrown over the riverbank. There were side dishes big and small, all heavy crockery ware, and the dining room walls were nicely papered. Even the floors that were made of common wide boards were kept washed and clean. One could not do as he liked any more. Nor did you care to eat 80

with your knife in that dining room, when you saw a welldressed stranger eating with his fork. And the old-timer had lost his home, the bar-room. The bar-room has been used as a bar-room, parlour, sitting room, a dance hall and a washroom. All this had changed. The bar was for drinking only. If one did not drink, he was not wanted there. At the end of the bar-room was a card-room, but if you were not a card player, or had no money to play with, the players did not want you around them. Then they had a sitting room with a pool table in the centre of it. This pool table cost money, and of course it was put there to be used, and not only to be looked at. That's how some of the old boys learned to play pool. Some played for the drinks only, others played for money. But the man of the wild west was lost. He could not sit around the bar-room as they used to, smoking their pipes and chewing tobacco, and spitting all over the floor, not could he pinch an old deck of cards and sit at a poker table in one corner of the bar-room, and play even up for drinks. They had to go into the card room to play cards. There were no more night dances in the bar-room, where the girls from the red-light district of all shades and colours used to gather at nights to dance, and they would waltz up to the bar with their partners as every dance was over. Now there were a number of families in town, the Hamiltons with one boy and four girls; Batten family Valentines with seven girls.

Between the father and the daughters they set up a shingle mill, close to where the C.P.R. roundhouse is today, and turned out shingles for two or three years, then sold out to Dan Robertson, who built and operated a sawmill for years. Then the Needham family came out from England in the summer of 1885, who followed the C.P.R. line until they got to Revelstoke. J.W. Thompson the first schoolteacher, and a year or so later one of the first settlers of Beaton, then called after him Thompson's Landing. With all these families in town it became quite respectable, and one did 81

not belong if could not clean up and put on good clothes when around town.

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