Manitoba in the forties

In 1940, from an apartment in Sherridon, Manitoba, my wife Mary saw her first dog team and her first ptarmigan. That year, as the town celebrated New Year’s, the decorations were centred around one of Mary’s large paintings of some trappers in a cabin deep in the bush.

Before the ice broke, we were digging out of the snow and putting up our first tents at McVeigh Lake. Our prospectors and diamond drillers included Austin McVeigh, Jimmy Sayies, Bob Brown, Nick Babi, Dave Foster, Bud Rycroft, Andy Flett, Angus McIsaac, Dennis Rice and Gib Rankin. We drilled more than ten-thousand feet but didn’t find a mine.

Some years later, we moved to Lynn Lake and into a 12-by-28-ft. apartment. By then we had been joined by daughters Joan and Brenda. Mary described the experience in her diary: “We are all going to smell like smoked herring, as the wood stoves are serviced by only one chimney, and they have to be filled every half-hour. In the morning, there is an inch of ice on each window. As soon as the house warms, this starts to melt. You can’t put anything against the wall for fear of it getting wet and freezing. If it gets really warm, the ceiling drips. Alan is gradually getting the storm windows on, thank goodness.”

Caribou were coming through the camp, and a couple of the locals thought they’d be able to catch one. Later that afternoon, two subdued and taciturn chaps returned from their efforts without making a sound. The story came out a few weeks later:

They had assembled some equipment and determined a suitable place to launch their attack — a steep hillside with a robust tree about half way down. They tied a strong rope to one tree and suspended a noose from a sizable branch. In due course, they managed to snare a large male caribou, which kicked into a gallop and circled the tree several times, ensnaring one of the would-be hunters. After several minutes of being face-to-face with the panicked animal, the rope was cut and both the hunters and hunted went their separate ways.

In another letter, Mary said: “I have spent the past week working on our grocery order for the year. The order is to be in John Ferguson’s hand by mid-December at the latest. We order from Mclean’s in Winnipeg, and they do a marvelous job. Wholesale prices plus winter freight make it quite reasonable. Our house uses a fifty-pound drum of milk powder in five weeks. I order twelve drums.”

Order hazards did show up from time to time, however. One summer evening, Mary and I were looking out our kitchen window and noticed John Kolysnick sitting on his steps eating something. Using field glasses, we ascertained he was eating sunflower seeds. He’d put them in one side of his mouth and spit the shells out the other. Marvelous! Later that fall, Mary ordered two dozen packets of the things. When the town’s grocery orders arrived in February, I was there to unload the items from the sleigh. An enormous carton was unloaded, and, sure enough, it was found to contain sunflower seeds. Over time, we learned how to eat them but eventually decided it wasn’t worth the effort and placed what was left in the storage tent outside. I came across them later that summer, when they had started to become rancid. What to do? Never one to waste anything, I decided to make some sunflower seed oil. I took four cartons into the house to cook them and extract the oil. I placed them on the stove and retreated to the living room to read a book. Within a few minutes, something didn’t smell quite right and I glanced into the kitchen for a closer look. The top of the stove was bright red, along with a good four feet of the exhaust pipe. The whole thing is sort of chuffing. I immediately shut everything down and poured an entire box of salt on it to get things under control. Later we found that the three-ring lid had sunk a whole inch. The rest of the seeds were burned one carton at a time.

— The author worked at the Lynn Lake base metals mines in northern Manitoba during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The above is an excerpt from a series of stories told during a Lynn Lake reunion in 2004.