Highlights from "On the Trail of the Pioneers"

Written by Sherry Stewart

The Larson's

Ole Larson- “The next day I walked to Roe Lake, taking the old trail. After several weeks of scouting all the country between Roe Lake and 100 Mile House on foot, I picked my place, set out my stakes, and went right to work.” “By the end of November my house was built. I went back home to Oregon for the winter, and in March of 1914 I brought my wife, Irene, and my children to our new home. It took us a week to make that trip from Ashcroft to Roe Lake by sleigh.” To insure his place in the wilderness, a homesteader was obliged to “prove-up” his chosen piece of ground according to Government regulations. The men hewed logs and raised houses and barns. They cleared the land and built fences, trapped and hunted for a grubstake, and raised cattle, sheep, chickens and garden vegetables to feed their families. Children pitched in and worked right alongside the adults. Inside the hand-hewn log homes, women busied themselves knitting, sewing and spinning, hooking rugs and making soap, baking bread, churning butter, preserving meat, putting up jams, and tending to the ever-growing number of children. Once when Ole Larson suggested to his wife that it seemed she was slowing down a bit, she reportedly countered in her crisp Norwegian accent, “I've got one child in the wagon, one under the arm, one on the mantle, and one elsewhere, and you say I'm slowing down!” It was not unusual for a woman to handle all the outside chores as well, for she often found herself alone while her husband spent day on the trapline or “worked out” in a logging camp, on a road crew or at a hay ranch for the necessary cash to make that all important yearly trip to the store. “Once a year, usually in the fall,” Hilda Larson says, “We'd hitch up the wagon and head for Ashcroft to buy provisions. Goods would come by CPR from Vancouver. The trip would take about 10 days, and wouldn't that wagon be loaded!” “We'd buy 1500 pounds of flour at $27 per hundred, 1000 pounds of sugar at $26 per hundred, 25 pounds of lard, 25 one-pound cans of coffee beans, salt, tea, rice and plenty of dried fruit and beans. People practically lived on beans in those days. 'Cariboo strawberries' we called them.” “For breakfast,” she explains, “we'd always have good sourdough pancakes with plenty of homemade syrup and butter, and milk or coffee. For dinner we'd have parsnips and turnips and beets and deer meat and gravy and biscuits. For supper we'd turn it around and have biscuits and gravy and deer meat and beets and turnips and parsnips. And, if meat was scarce, we always had plenty of fish and beans.”

The Faessler's

“I arrived here in the spring of 1946. I came out by train to Vancouver, and Charlie picked me up and took me to Nanaimo—I stayed there for 10 days, and I came down with a terrible cold. It did nothing but rain, something I wasn't used to. And back then you couldn't get rain coats or rain shoes, there was no rubber at the end of the war. So he sent me up to Bridge Lake to be with his parents until he could join me. I came into Bridge Lake with (Ray) Flaherty, who was a once a week mailman. The bus dropped me off at Flaherty's place at the 93 Mile, and they put me up overnight on their chesterfield, and then he brought me out in the morning—but I had to go around the whole mail route with him first.” “So, all my family was in Ontario, and I came out here to start my life in the Cariboo. I have to admit it was hard on me. I was only 18. There was nothing here then, not like today. In 1945 there were only two vehicles in the area, Law's and King's. I had never been out on a farm or ranch; I had never been away from home. My dad gave me six months. But I fooled him! I've been here for 60 years!”

“Up until the early fifties it was an all-day wagon trip to the Bridge Lake store and back,” Lorraine Faessler, young Charlie's wife, explains. “When I married Charlie and came here from the East, it was like going back in time. I didn't know the first thing about what a rancher's wife should do. I had to learn to make my own bread and butter. The yeast came in the mail then, and I remember my first attempt at bread making was so bad even the chickens couldn't peck through it; but by the next year my bread took prizes.” “And when Charlie asked me to make butter, I told him I just didn't know what to do. He put the cream in the churn and said, 'Just sit there and crank the handle.'' So I did, and when the cream suddenly turned to butter, I was so excited I jumped up and ran out to the field where Charlie was plowing. 'I did it! I've got butter!'' I told him. 'Now what do I do?'' 'Wash it,'' he said calmly. Wash it? I couldn't believe my ears; and I couldn't believe that washing my great achievement wouldn't melt it away!’”

The Local 'Do'

“People were happier then,” Lee Hansen says, “because they made their own good times. Why, no one thought anything of riding a saddle horse 20 miles in 40 below weather to attend a dance. People would go for miles around. We had great music: violin, guitar, organ and an autoharp. We made one of our Roe Lake buildings large enough to hold dances, and we had a 'do' at least once a month. Everyone had a fine time, and old Ellingson, he was a smart looking fellow on the dance floor; he and his partner usually won the prize.” “When there was a dance, everyone would usually go the day before and stay until the day after,” Gordon King's daughter Rita McAninch explained. “Pattie Law, one of the north shore school teachers, played piano, Charlie Faessler Sr. played the fiddle, and my father played the banjo. Later on, Russell Ross joined in with his guitar.”

Childhood

Childhood was especially a time of being productive and having fun all at once. Karl Larson recalled, “At one point mother had more cream than she could sell, so she let us use it up making ice cream. Of course, we needed ice or snow for the freezer. Well it wasn't long before we'd noticed how the sawdust around Dad's sawmill would hold the snow under it through summer. You can bet by that next spring we made sure a lot of snow near the house was under sawdust. But there was one hitch. Every time a wind came up, some of our precious sawdust blew away.” “The next year, I was 16 then, I decided to fix the situation by building walls around our snow and sawdust pile. I cut those logs myself, skidded them behind a horse to the snow pile and built my walls. It looked like we had the problem licked, and we could just see the summer ahead as one big bucket of ice cream.” “But we thought too soon. Dad came along, looked at my log walls and said, 'Say, son, that would make a fine ice house now, wouldn't it? All it needs is a roof.'' “Well then he took over; put a roof on it, built inner walls, and explained that all we had to do was cut blocks of ice from the lake and stack them between the log walls and the inner walls, and we'd have 'refrigeration.'' It was nice having a place to keep fish and hang meat in the summer, but we sure didn't like hauling that ice, and we were back where we started with the ice cream.”

Curly's Leg

It was December 1957, just after Christmas, and the boys were glad to get some work. The carriage on the mill was slipping and they thought that they had corrected the problem, but suddenly Curly's pant leg became caught in the carriage. In an instant it had pulled him into the blades, severing his right leg high above the knee and his left leg just below the knee. Simultaneously he reached out with his right hand and lost four fingers. Glenn Higgins was just 18, a young and inexperienced driver, but when the two World War II veterans working alongside Curly moved him into the back of Benji's shiny new '56 Ford, each holding an artery, young Glenn nervously took the steering wheel. Slipping and sliding, they made it precariously to the McNeil ranch. Mrs. McNeil applied black pepper and flour to the two gaping wounds and put flour sacks on what remained of Curly's two legs, while the two men held Curly's arteries closed and Curly kept pressure on his right hand. Glenn drove as far as Lone Butte where they met up with Benji and he took over. Then Benji drove like hell. Had it been summertime, with rough, potholed roads, Curly wouldn't be here now. Because it was winter, the roads were in better shape, covered with hard packed snow and much smoother. They arrived in Clinton needing gas. The Clinton RCMP offered to give an escort, and Benji shouted, “Just stay out of my way!” The RCMP officers tried to follow Benji for 10 minutes and then gave up. In the 1950s the roads were curvy and snowbanks loomed everywhere. Worse, there was construction going on at the Savona Bridge. A one-lane Bailey Bridge with a stop/go light was the only way across, and the stop wait was six minutes. As Benji approached, the light turned red. “Hang on!” he yelled and they headed pell mell across the forbidden bridge in the darkness. When Benji careened up to the Kamloops hospital doors, five and a half hours had transpired since the accident. Curly had not only stayed conscious throughout the trip, he reportedly kept stealing drags off the men's cigarettes with his good hand. But he was almost completely without blood. Ten more minutes would have been two minutes too late, they were told.

Curly was kept in the Kamloops hospital for ten days before being sent by train to Vancouver. During that time it is reported that his legendary humour never failed him. Apparently, the day after his arrival in Kamloops, close relatives hesitantly came to his room to visit. Curly just patted the end of his bed invitingly. “Come on in,” he said. “Sit down, there's lots of room at the end of this bed.” During Curly's rehabilitation in Vancouver, a long three years spent learning how to walk again, the people at the Workers Compensation Board told him that he would now have to train for a job sitting down. They suggested that he consider becoming either a shoemaker or a bookkeeper. Curly's reply was that he was a rancher and always would be.