DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country
A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush ~ Robert Cuerrier
Chapter 14 Gold Rush
A FALSE CLAIM
In 1982 I was busy losing all my dough in a downtown venture. To kind of pull myself together I went into Boom Lake, a pretty little spot where I kept a cache- canoe, axe, bucksaw, woodpile and a few pots and pans. A few days on the land would be a tonic. And it was.
Packing up on the last day it struck me, I’d been so self-absorbed I’d missed the obvious. There was a gold rush just begun and it looked like all of Northern Ontario was going to be looked at again. There were some claim and camp ruins that I passed over innumerable times on the hike in and out of Boom. The lines on it were cut and still visible. I would stake those claims on the way out.
There were other past connections with the claims. One camp I’d built was on the sit of a fallen-in cabin where the prospector who originally made the discovery had lived. The claims had passed on to old Rochefort and then to Giroux, both of whom had made stakes by stirring up exploration interest around them. Both men were dead now. Giroux had often told me to take them over when he was gone. I hadn’t listened well since Giroux had a penchant for making headlines out of little words as well as being a man who was fairly economical with the truth. But now that I realized the possibilities, I was gripped with a renewed energy and purpose.
There was a tent on the site as I passed through, and I knew right away it was too late. A couple of fellows form the Soo became near millionaires and I went to work for an exploration company on those same claims for a few bucks a day. It made me stronger. To handle it I had to view it as my personal Sun dance, immolation for personal growth and from my Catholic point of view repentance for hard living.
THE FUTILITY OF HINDSIGHT
“Ya and if the dog hadn’t stopped to shit he’d have caught the rabbit.” ~ Leonard St. Jean Baptiste
SEARCHING FOR GOLD AT PAQUETTE LAKE
Silas and I took contracts to line cut from a gold exploration firm. These companies are highly speculative’ some say they are the biggest same that the law will allow. Buying shares in one can be likened to a high-toned nigh at a casino. Yet sometimes like Hemlo they strike it rich.
To find gold, grids are cut through the bush (line cutting) and soil samples taken every twenty-five meters or so on these lines. Soil analysis will tell where promising mineral concentrations are. The geologists make decisions from there.
There’s nothing romantic about the quest for gold this way for the men in the field, since cutting a site line through he bush is for sure an unnatural act. Because it’s a straight line, you’re cutting your way up and down rock faces mountain goats wouldn’t climb, through tag alders so thick rabbits couldn’t run and muskeg so spongy moose won’t walk.
You are moving along with a chain saw- just taking out just enough to sight through –and because you’re going straight you have to keep looking back to the stakes your partner plants behind you in order to keep the line true. You’re not paying enough attention to the saw, which you surely should be doing but can’t. Further, you’re all the time trying to defy gravity when felling big stuff because you don’t want a tree to fall on the line and be held up in removing it before moving on. And since you’re paid by the kilometer, it’s only a quick glance upward to assess how to drop a couple of tons where it doesn’t want to go. The whole thing is a little strained.
There were incidents. If you hit a pond, you had to offset cut around it but weren’t paid for the extra distance. To save time I took to wading and swimming them to plant stakes in the middle and did this even in poor weather. Silas wondered!
There were close calls with trees. A big poplar took a bounce off a slope and came at me butt first. I spread my legs, jumped up and with one arm extended holding a running chain saw, rode the tree backwards for forty feet while expecting to hit something.
There was one magic day that gave me a few grey hairs and carved several permanent anxiety lines into my forehead. We were working up a sunny slope in mid-September and came upon what must have been a garter snake migration. There seemed to be a snake entwined on every other branch along that hillside. Now I hate snakes- everything about them- and I was brushing them off my head and body as they fell out of tress I was cutting. A few hit the saw and little raw chunks spit all over me. I didn’t say a word, knowing that if I did Silas would have contrived to bring a couple home and put them in my pillow.
Silas got misplaced one time crossing a bog. I went back to look and found him shoulder deep stuck in a mud hole. After a pause and a careful assessment of how we were getting along, I figured to fetch him out.
At one point Silas and I were dispatched to Paquette Lake in late October to build a tent camp and then to line cut. We had to boat, then canoe and portage the whole outfit in, which took about a week. Since it looked very much like we’d winter there, we built strong. We laid a base of big eighteen-inch diameter spruce, banked it with dirt for insulation and put in a floor, sidewalls and a pole rafter system strong enough to defy any amount of snow. Then the 10’ by 16’ tent was pulled over this framework like putting on a sock. We put in a tin woodstove, built bunks, a table and two chairs that had been painstakingly portaged, shelves and a countertop for food preparation. We built a door, called it home and baptized it “Skookum Camp”, which translates to “a tough and good place to be”.
Silas and I had just added a tarp to overhang the entrance against snowdrifts and to shelter the woodpile we were starting to put up, when word came up form the city. We were to stop digging in and go to work on the line.
We smoldered over this, our feelings hurt, insulted. Here was some suspicious, city pavement, self-referential, talcum-powdered-assed executives wanting us to work without the essential comfort of having dry and ample wood ahead in winter in a tent camp ten hard snowshoe miles from the track. We’d worked every daylight minutes and had attended the camp chores after dark. We lived by the code and would never take a nickel from the company that we hadn’t earned and here were the Bay Street boys going to the whip. Silas and I didn’t explain, didn’t complain. We were proud. The next morning saw us cutting line.
The lake froze over and it snowed a couple of feet. Most of the lines were going through a cedar swamp and every tree I cut landed a snow load on my head that would sometimes drive me to my knees. Naturally this crawled down my neck and melted. Snow hitting the saw made it cranky, it’d stall, be hard to start and I’d had to often repeatedly pull that starter cord past the point I’d ever push a lathered horse. By late morning melting snow and sweat would soak me right through.
Silas wasn’t doing much better staking behind me. We couldn’t stop for lunch in this condition and so carried sausages in our pockets that we’d take a chaw off time to time. Stopping to gas and oil the saw was an ordeal. I’d had a bout with hypothermia some years before on a moose hunt that had changed my system forever and during those stops I would shake, tremble and shiver simultaneously and uncontrollably.
Ah hell, let’s go back to the tent. There were no windows in it, which didn’t matter much as we were never there in the daylight hours. In the evenings we lit up with candles, which was pleasant. Every week Silas and I would trade chairs at the table to give us a different view, which we believed prevented us from becoming too cross-grained.
There was a lot of time in the tent in the evenings with the short winter days. We had wine with supper, not enough to get loaded but enough to give us the illusion of having lain the foundation for a good drunk. Every night we had to check in by radio with headquarters to tell them we were “ok” and to send or receive messages. From all this “The Skookum Camp Big Time Radio Show” was hatched.
Our chatter was likely as stupid as it was funny: we said things just as they came out of our mouths. We let on that we drank more than worked, that it was quite a holiday and privilege to hunt, fish and relax on lovely Paquette Lake- a real lodge in the wilderness. It was a bigger thrill to be so well paid for it by a bevy of idle rich Toronto investors. God but we vented! We took a particular mean spirited pleasure knowing how much it bugged the project leader at headquarters, a guy with a real constipated disposition.
The guys in other outpost tent camps listened in. They told us privately how we kept their spirits up with our independence, how they liked us having our release at the company’s expense and the fact that we didn’t seem to care if they sent us packing down the tote road. People today would say we empowered them.
Silas would always let me babble the most so he could mock me later.
TREASURE MAP
We were humping along site lines taking a soil sample every twenty-five yards. You had to grub out a hole a couple of feet down through roots and stones, fill and label a paper bag with dirt and stow it into a progressively burgeoning packsack.
At the end of the day you lugged the pack out to the canoe and then to the camp where the samples were stacked in a corner. When they were piled high enough to worry that the shack might heave, my partner Silas and I would load it all into the canoes again, paddle and portage over to the geologists headquarters on Spruce Lake. The samples were dropped off, then analyzed for gold content. It was a while I was doing this kind of work that I had a recollection. Years before in an antique bookstore I had picked up an obscure and single printed autobiography of a prospector on Great Slave Lake in the nineteen twenties.
He was high grading gold on a humble claim and lived in a small one-room cabin on a stream draining into the lake. He made enough to keep things going, married and took his bride into camp.
The smothering intimacy of cramped quarters eventually ruined the marriage. Think about winter from October till June, unwashed bodies, chamber pots, exhausted conversation, no company and a few diversions. He speculated that it just naturally ground down the union. He judged their time together had been like fifty traditional marriages. When they split up he quit the north forever.
I’m drifting all over the place here: this memory does that.
So I called up a buddy, a broker with all kinds of connections. We’d partner. He would check the maps to see the claims were still open and would finance a working vacation for us to stake them. The rush was on and a big profit was there for any claim just hinting of gold. It was going to be “money for nothing’”.
All that I needed to do was to pick up the book from my brother Earl to whom I had lent it some years before. Like all of my brushes with gold this one ended tragically too. Earl had lost the book and had given me something else to brood over while digging all those holes.
THE MEKATINA PURPLE RAIDERS
Like everywhere there is ice and snow, hockey is pervasive up the line. As soon as there was a skiff of ice on Paquette Lake, Silas and I were out there –boots on, a potato as a puck, Silas with the brood and me with a curved maple whip as a stick. We wore life jackets for forays out further onto thinner ice in pursuit of loose pucks. Competing.
But Silas and I never were the ACR hockey story. That belonged to Harry Wolfe, the radio voice of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. Harry had a strong personality and a voice to match. He would shout at his mic with such a vengeance his broadcasts could be comfortably listened to while, say, running a chain saw.
Harry Wolfe had a lot of credibility within the hockey world: he saw scores of games –big league scouts looked to him for hot tips on prospects. Too many idle hours on the team bus moving brought forth the best prospect in the modern era, the like of which had never been seen. Wolfe had a big windy.
Harvey Keck was born, his team the Mekatina Purple Raiders. Harvey was a Métis who studied the game on the swamps of Mekatina where you learned to skate fast and shoot hard and far since the nets were three miles apart. Like traditional Indian lacrosse the games went on for days, players communicated with coded animal calls. The play was rough –injuries, maiming and occasional death not uncommon. Scores of players on the ice at one time. No officials. Keck, the game’s top scorer and warrior. Aeii!
The story grew by a purposeful and carefully-laid design. Wolfe got clandestine nibbles from scouts looking for the inside, exclusive scoop on Keck and how to get to Mekatina. Harry told them you had to go by dogsled and only on a clear night when you could see the stars because a compass wouldn’t work that far North. They began to catch on. So did Sports Illustrated which wrote a story on the extent of the hoax.
SILAS
My prospecting partner Silas was a rough ticket and there’s no getting around that. He was a Polish- Russian hybrid raised in Kirkland Lake, one of the roughest old-time gold mining boomtowns ever, anywhere, anytime. He grew up hard, would not be wronged and nobody fooled with him. His motto was Polish by nature, but Russian when necessary”. I took a hell of a chance by baptizing him Silas.
One time the exploration company we were working for hadn’t met their contract with us and mortgage payments and Christmas loomed. Silas called Toronto and told the head of the outfit how we had to live and work for him in the bush and how dare he take his cash flow problems out on us. Lean on somebody else. He suggested that he might drive down to the city to talk. We needed our dough and we got it.
The big boss had remembered him from Thanksgiving dinner up in the bush. He had brought in a couple of potential investors he was stroking (guys with lots of rings) and Silas and I come up to Spruce Haven Lodge that night to provide a little local colour. That’s why he invited us, he had nothing but contempt for us and we knew it and resented it. So we gave them a show, wore suit jackets and toilet paper ties to indicate that we were shitheads, drank too much, were ribald and generally entertained his guests. He knew we could have blown it on him. By this time he wasn’t paying us.
That was Silas. On the other hand he is a thoughtful, giving and reasonable man –very easy to live with as a bush partner. If the Indians adopted him his name would be Gentle Thunder.
INFLUENCES
“Lay down with a dog with fleas and you’ll get up with fleas.” ~Leonard St. Jean Baptiste
KLONDIKE
After a year in camp with me, my brother, Earl, had enough and figured long distance was the ticket. He headed north to the Yukon to search for gold and to live out some fantasies he’d always entertained.
He partnered with a very old fellow who had a line of placer gold and trapping shacks. They went in the spring using dogs with saddlebags to pack the outfit. Once there they didn’t feed them and terrorized them on sight. The dogs figured it out and eventually drifted back to where they came from where a pick-up man rounded them up and cared for them.
They worked up enough gold to keep them in socks and beans while rationalizing that it’s the journey, not the end. New age thinking before it was vogue.
But the point of this story is insight into the mind and attitude of an old man used to living fee and lonesome. When they were putting the outfit together Earl wondered what he was getting into as his partner staggered and swayed drunkenly down the aisles of the grocery store. He’d say “some of this!”, stick an arm into the shelf and accept whatever number of containers that fell into the cart, then “some of that!” and do the same all through the store while filling up baskets.
Earl mused that their diet might be high on parsley flakes or some other heavy-duty purchase, but on arrival at the old man’s camp realized that his partner was just filling in holes in the already substantial inventory he kept. It had all been a show, his actions contrived to embrace the myth of the hardy northerner.
JIM MACDONALD KNEW WINES
Old Jim was a prospector and a wilderness sophisticate in Township twenty-four, Range 14, Mile 71 on Algoma Central Line. Whenever one of the boys was going “downtown” to the Soo on a spree Jim was right there placing his order. “Hey der, bring me back a case of de Red Chablis for my suppers, hokay!”
