The UnderTaker

Richard Was born May 3rd, 1943 in Chamblissburg, Virginia to Ruby James Moles and John Paul Franklin who owned and operated a Dairy Farm in Bedford County. Richard married Loretta Fay Clark at age 20. They had two sons, Curtis Wade and Christopher Richard.

Richard was a born hunter and traveler and never content to live his life in one place. In 1969 at 26 years of age, he moved his family to British Columbia where he worked as a cowhand, hunted and guided hunters for 30 years. He also retired from the Carpenters Union in 1994 with 20 years service. In later years he took up competition rifle shooting and eventually taught himself the art of building accurate long range custom rifles. In 1992 Loretta, his High School sweetheart and wife of 29 years passed away and sons Curtis and Chris was married with their own families. In 1999 Richard returned to Virginia to care for his aging parents. His Father had suffered a major stroke and was bedridden for the remainder of his life.

Richard started in on building custom rifles in earnest upon his return to Virginia. He built a stock duplicator and has never looked back. He has shipped fine custom rifles to nearly every part of the world. His rifles has won many competitions and killed thousands of varmints all over North America.

Today Richard is sort of retired, but still cranking out a few fine rifles for his customers.

Richard has written many stories from his life and will eventually post them all here if there is enough space.

A rolling stone gathers no moss, but if memories were worth anything I would be rich

Left to right, Sherril Thomas, Teddy Huddleston, Richard Franklin, Eugene Blount & Rich’s brother, Johnny

I grew up in Southwest Virginia hunting small game such as Rabbits, Squirrels, Coons, Possums, & Groundhogs which city folks call Woodchucks. I also shot and trapped a few Skunks, which was known locally as polecats, I never knew why they were called polecats. Ground hogs were the most fun and were plentiful. I had a trap line at about age 12 and trapped for Mink, Muskrats and Rabbits. I would catch Polecats, Possums and Rabbits in my box traps and I sometimes sold the Rabbits with the fur on to town people a few times for a buck apiece for their dinner table. I used wooden box traps mostly and if I caught a Polecat I would carry the trap to the creek and sink it under the water, standing on it till I thought the critter had drowned. They would not stink you up if you handled the trap carefully. I once caught a Polecat in a steel trap. The trap was set at the bottom of a six foot vertical bank at the entrance to a den. I had no gun with me so had to use ingenuity to kill the thing. I used my hunting knife to cut a sapling about 8 feet long and tied my knife to it with one of my boot strings. I leaned over the bank and stabbed the polecat till it expired. Unfortunately it sprayed me pretty good. I took it to the creek and skinned it under the water so I wouldn’t get ant more stink on me. When I got back to the house my Mama made me go to the barn to wash and change clothes. I’m sure I didn’t get all the smell off for over a week. After this episode I tried to leave Polecats alone.

When I got older I started hunting Deer and Turkeys but they were few and far between. There never was many around when I grew up there in Virginia. Nowadays we are over run with Deer and Turkey’s. In fact the Deer are a complete nuisance causing many Deer/automobile accidents. Its not uncommon to kill 30 Deer here in one fall now as the numbers are very high and the season long. This past hunting season I killed a doe and a 6-point buck with my truck going to and coming back from hunting trips. We can hunt with bows, muzzleloaders and Hi-power rifles for about 3 months. You had to hunt hard back in the 60s to get a shot and you might get one shot in a whole hunting season so we practiced with our rifles trying to get good enough so as not to miss an opportunity if one came your way.

One day Lewis Severson and I was Deer hunting over around Goose Creek. We were walking along side a cornfield which was on our left and a patch of woods on the right side. Suddenly we both saw a bunch of Turkeys run out of the timber and head into the standing corn.

1965 , My first Ground hog rifle. I purchased a Winchester model 70 heavy barreled action and made the stock.

They had to cross an opening about 20 feet wide and they were about a hundred yards ahead of us. Both Lewis and I threw up out rifles and fired at exactly the same moment. A big Tom was hit with one of these two shots and fell to the ground thrashing and flopping as we run up to it. It was a very big Tom with about an 11inch beard if I remember right. We took it home, dressed it out and froze it. While it was frozen we sawed it in half and we each had some Wild Turkey to eat. We never did know whose bullet brought down that Tom. That was the first wild Turkey I had ever eaten and it was better than the ones you bought in a store too.

I dreamed of hunting big game in British Columbia. I read every Field & Stream and outdoor life magazine I could get my hands on. I kept every issue and would read & re-read the stories on Bear and Elk hunting till I had them memorized. Today 40 years later I can still remember a couple of hunting stories I read in Outdoor Life. In 1968 I was 25 years old, working for $2.00 an hour and figured I never would be able to afford to go out to British Columbia on a paid Big Game hunting trip. I finally came up with a scheme that I thought might have a chance to work out. I got out my magazine’s and pored over all the advertisements of the Big Game outfitters that ran ads in the magazines. I wrote down fifty names and addresses of different outfitters that was guiding and outfitting from the Southeast corner of B.C. plumb on up into the Yukon. I wrote all these fellows and ask them for a job. I told them I had grew up on a Farm and was pretty handy around livestock and might be able to wrangle horses, cut firewood or otherwise just be a general flunky. I also told them I was a carpenter by trade and worked at it every day. At the very least I could swamp out the kitchen and do things like that.

Well, you can believe it when I tell you I was completely floored when five of them wrote back an offered me a job for the next years hunting season that would begin around the 1^st of September. One fellow in the Yukon had just purchased a new guiding territory and was going in to it in early spring to build cabins and airstrips for his planes and wanted to know if I could come in May to help with building the cabins.

Oh man, I couldn’t believe this, would I go? Darn tooting I would. Loretta did not think too much of this going off to British Columbia when I had a perfectly good job right here at home and the Yukon was nearly 4000 miles from Virginia. She was pretty cool on the idea at first but finally come around after I spent several months persuading her.

I saved up about a hundred and fifty dollars, spending 75.00 of it on a Greyhound bus ticket that would take me all the way to Edmonton, Alberta where I was to Meet S.R., the outfitter. S.R. had wrecked his stock truck that was loaded with horses at the time and was going to be in Edmonton to purchase a new one and I could ride back up the Alaska Highway with him. I wrote and told him that I would meet him there at the Edmonton airport on a certain date sometime in mid may. I plumb forget which day it was. Another outfitter located in Southeast B.C. Ernie Goodwin had also offered me a job. I knew this was where the best Elk hunting was and decided to stop off there to meet Ernie and see what the country was like there.

I can still see my wife standing there waving goodbye to me when I got on the Greyhound Bus in Lynchburg, Virginia sometime in April of 1968. She was wearing a brown polka dotted dress. I can see her standing there in the spring sunshine with tears in her eyes and waving goodbye to me. I have often wondered to this day what our lives would have been like if I had gotten off that bus. I was tempted to and nearly did.

Thus began a trip that has lasted to this day. A lot has happened along the way to be sure. That bus trip was my first experience on a bus and I can say it was very tiring as it took seven days just to reach the Canadian border at Sweetgrass Montana. Sweetgrass was a little border town at the north end of Interstate 15 out on the high plains of northwest Montana and in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. Coutts, Alberta was the Canadian Version of Sweetgrass on the other side of the border. The bus was slightly better than a covered wagon as you didn’t have to walk or sleep on the ground. I saw many Mule Deer and a few moose as we passed thru Montana on our way to the Border. I have never forgotten traveling from Butte over through Helena. Helena sits in a high mountain valley that to this day the only thing that looks to have been built this century is the Interstate. There are beautiful old ranch buildings all made of logs that have been there for a very long time. On the North end of the valley the road heads out onto the plains, crossing the Missouri River many times as the valley is narrow there. One can see many people out in boats haveing fun fishing the waters there. The Missouri is a bueatiful river here in that valley. The winters there must be cold with lots of snow as the elevation is around 6000 feet. I'll bet the people who live there are tough as nails. Elevation in the west means everything in how tough the winters are. If the elevation is around 2000 feet then there is a lot less snow and cold. I met a lot of different people on that trip. I remember a retired Doctor and his wife going out west somewhere to visit their son. Back then it was mostly real decent people riding buses, not the kind of people that travels on them today. The restrooms were always clean and smelled alright. They were not many Interstate highways back then and the buses would stop in every hick town they came to. Seemed like it took forever to get from one town to the next.

I arrived at the Canadian Customs in Sweetgrass with a trunk of clothes and a 30-30 Winchester I had bought from Gene Vaughan, my former employer and a new Marlin lever action in .444 caliber. Gene had traded the 30-30 off of an Indian somewhere. There were notches carved into the stock and it was decorated with brass tacks. It was well used but it still shot good enough. I had installed a good peep sight on the Marlin and figured it would protect me from any wild critter that might want to eat me. I believe that I had about 40 rounds for the Marlin and about 20 for the Winchester. I was only moments away from entering Canada when the custom agents put a stop to the whole thing. Hold it boy, where you think you’re going? Well Heck, I replied, I got a job in the Yukon wrangling horses for S.R., a guide an outfitter there. Sorry son, they said. " We ain’t giving no work permits to go horse wrangling in the Yukon or no where else. If you’re going to come into Canada and hold down a job you gonna have to immigrate ". "What !! I don’t even know what that mean’s, you’ll have to explain immigrating to me". "Well young fella, it’s like this. You will have to get any important documents we want and fill out an application about 5 feet long. If you’re up to the Queens expectations then we’ll let you immigrate and you can go on up to the Yukon and wrangle horses if you want too". It was several years before I found out what the reference to the Queen meant. I ask him how long all this would take and he told me “As soon as you can produce the documents”. You need your birth certificate, high school diploma if you have one and anything else that will prove you are who you say you are. Go on over to Sweetgrass there and take a room at the Glocca Morra bar & hotel and call your wife to send your papers. When you get them come on over here and fill out the forms. You can stop at Milk River just north of here and have a physical and the Doc can mail me the results if we decide to let you thru. I was a bit crestfallen and lost there for a spell. Never once did it dawn on me that I would have any difficulty getting into Canada, but I got my trunk and duffle and drug it all about a half mile over to the little town of Sweetgrass which was off the highway a bit. It wasn’t hard to find the Glocca Morra the agent had told me about as there were only about five buildings in town. I took a room there, I believe it was 10 bucks a week. The bar keep ask me how long I would be staying and I told him maybe 10 days or 2 weeks or so. I got on the phone and explained to my wife the dilemma and ask her to send out the necessary papers as soon as possible to me at the Glocca Morra Bar & Hotel in Sweetgrass. Well, I had been having second thoughts ever since I got on that bus in Lynchburg and this dampened my spirits even more. At night I would sit in the Bar and listen to this old cowboy playing a Guitar and singing “Ol Shep” and a bunch of other tear-jerkers. All the local cowboys, ranchers and farmers would come in every night for a drink and listen to the ole fellow singing. This was “Red Wheat” raising country and there were more Farmers than cowboys around. I got to meet some of them and ask them a lot of questions to be sure. I was amazed that they would just walk into the Bar with that Montana gumbo mud plumb up to their knees from all the spring rains that were coming down every day. They made no attempt to wipe or clean their boots and the barkeep never even seem to notice the dirt and mud they tracked in. In Later years I would hunt in Montana in that same gumbo mud and really found out that it was near to impossible to get it off anything, you just let it wear off.

My papers arrived in due time, maybe a week or so and I went back over to the customs office and filled out their forms. They were not kidding when they said it was about 5 feet long and when I unfolded it I saw that this was so. I finally answered the million or so questions that was on it and gave it over to the agent. He said me to “Come back tomorrow and we will let you know our decision”. He asked me how much money I had on me and I told him about forty dollars, He kind of got a funny look on his face but did not say anything else. I was back there at first light the next day. It took them a couple of hours to get to me but when they did they told me I was fine, that I could go on to the Yukon but I would have to stop in Milk River to have the physical at the Doctor there, that the Doc would mail the results back to the Customs office. I later found out that the money requirement was much more that the forty bucks I had but I guess they felt sorry for me and let me pass. Guess they seen I was determined and did not want to put a stop on my dreams of shooting Grizzly Bears and Elk and whatever else was up there in Canada. Man, I can just imagine the grief a fellow would come to if he tried to cross that border today. He would not even be able to buy his way into Canada if he was the President of the entire United States.

I caught the next bus north as my ticket was still good. The bus driver even took me right to the Doctors office in Milk River and let me off there. He told me I would have to go back out to the highway to catch another bus to Lethbridge. While in the Drs. office I met a Lady and her daughter who lived on a nearby wheat farm. I told them of my situation and they said they were going shopping in Lethbridge that day and I could ride the 75 or 80 miles with them. I took them up on their offer and they took me right to the bus station in Lethbridge and I caught the next bus going west into British Columbia where I was going to meet Ernie Goodwin at a place called Elko about 175 miles west of Lethbridge just over the first range of the Rockies. Elko was on the # 3 Trans-Canadian highway between Fernie and Cranbrook B.C.

When I boarded the westbound bus I ask the driver to let me off at Elko B.C. which he did about midnight that night. I did not get to see much of what the country looked like as most of the trip was after dark. The bus stopped at Elko and I seen right away that it was only a gas station that was closed and a beat up trailer court out back. There were not many lights anywhere and it was pretty near pitch black out. I was lucky as there was a phone booth over to the left of the store so I made for it and called Ernie who showed up in about a half hour in a stock truck. Ernie was a tall lanky fellow with a beard and a big hat. He did not say much as we threw my duffel into the back and headed down the road. Pretty soon we come to a ranch road and followed this for about a mile when we came upon some ranch buildings and what appeared to be a old-time schoolhouse. It was the home of Hank Lowen and his wife & kids. Ernie just stayed on the place and lived in a small log cabin. We stowed my duffel in there and hit the sack. It was a while before I got to sleep that night as I was still second guessing my dream of shooting Bears and Elk. We were up at first light and washed up in a horse trough and went in and I met Hank and his family. Hank was also a tall lanky fellow with tall riding boots that had real spurs on them and a big floppy hat. Turned out Hank was a real cowboy and he was ranching this place and running about 200 head of Herefords. His wife’s name was Lena and they had, I believe four girls and no boys. One of the daughter’s elevator did not go all the way to the top floor and she followed you around like a dog. They were all very nice to me and ask a million questions about what it was like to live in the United States of America. I told them that it was too crowded and I was looking for more space with less people and that I believed that I had found it here.

As it was a Saturday Ernie showed me around some. He took me into Big Sand Creek where in later years I would spend a lot of time hunting there. We saw a Grizzly that Saturday up on the side of the mountain and I thought that was something, to just drive up and see a Grizzly, just like that. He also showed me a herd of Elk over on the other mountain. He had a good spotting scope which he set up to look thru. I had never seen a spotting scope before.

On Monday Ernie went back to work at a Tie mill that was run by a fellow by the name of Ted Bellamy. Ernie came home that Monday night and told me I could get a few days work there if I wanted. Said the wages was 5 bucks an hour. I jumped at the job as the most money I had ever made was 2.00 an hour working construction for Gene Vaughan in Lynchburg Virginia and I was down to maybe 30 dollars. I ask Ernie what I would be doing and he said I would be tailing the mill. Well, I had no idea what this meant but I found out the very next day. I rode with Ernie in his stock truck which was the only vehicle he had and we arrived at the mill site about 7 A.M. which was on Gorden Earls ranch in Newgate, about 40 miles from Hanks ranch. I met Ted who was not a cowboy as I had already learned that real cowboy’s were very skinny and had bent legs and walked funny. Ted was a big burly fellow that looked as strong as a moose and had a big bellowing voice. He took me over to the back end of the mill where the sawn lumber would be coming out and showed me what I had to do. Ted said it was an easy job and he could do it standing on his head. After a trial run at lifting a railroad tie I did not think I could do it standing on my feet and it did prove to test all the strength I could muster. Ted ran the mill at such a fast pace that it was wearing me down trying to keep up stacking ties and cants and throwing the slabs over into a pile. Today I can close my eyes and still hear the whine of that 52” head saw. Every once in a while the blade would hit a knot or something hard in a log and throw a couple of teeth an Ted would have to stop everything and replace the teeth. I got so I was wishing he would hit a buried horseshoe so it would rip out about half the teeth and I could get a break. You can read more on Ted and his trying to kill me in the story titled “Ted Bellamy”.

The two weeks at Ernie’s and at the Tie Mill went by soon enough and I found my way on a bus headed to Edmonton Alberta to meet up with S.R. The Tie mill had toughened me up considerably and I had about $400.00 in my wallet that Ted had paid me. He said I did good and if I ever wanted a steady job to let him know. Little did I know that a few years later I would work for Ted again and years after that we would become great friends and shooting buddy’s. I also became friends with Gorden Earl and built a barn for him a couple years later. Gorden was a two-time winner of the All around Cowboy award at the Calgary Stampede about 10 years before I met him. Gorden had a steel plate in his skull from being kicked by a saddle bronc he got hung up on. I also met Bill Phillips who was falling timber for Ted’s mill. We became great friends a couple of years later and did a lot of cowboying together in the south country of the East Kootenay where Bill had a ranch. He called it a stump farm and that is what a lot of it looked like as he had recently logged a lot of it. Bill was another misplaced American and had come from the Walla Walla country in Washington state years before. He was as real a cowboy as one would ever meet. He was lanky like they all was, wore tall boots with spurs and a big ten gallon hat and rode a Buckskin horse he called Buck. Bill was married and had four daughters. I was beginning to find out that not too many cowboys had any sons, all daughters…...hmmmm must be a reason for this I thought.

I was at the Edmonton airport at the appointed time and met S.R. as he got off a plane an come up the ramp. I recognized him immediately even never seeing him before. He looked exactly as I figured he would look. Big hat and the boots thing without the spurs. An his clothes was clean. He walked directly over to me and said “Hello, I’m S.R., you must be Richard”. S.R. was originally from Pa. and had immigrated to Canada so he could hunt bears and Elk so I reckon we had something in common.

We got a taxi and went directly to the Chevrolet dealership where they had this five-ton truck complete with stock rack ready to go. S.R. signed some papers and we threw in our duffel and were off to the Northwest Tent & Awning Company who was outfitters for all the North Country. They had about everything a person would need to survive in the frozen North. I bought a 5-star sleeping bag, a canvas tarp the right size to wrap the bag in, a foam mattress and a nice roping saddle. This ate up nearly all the money that I had made working at Ted’s Tie mill but I would not need much money where I was headed and sure enough I did not spend 50 bucks for the next 3 months. Next stop was at a Lumber yard where S.R. bought about 4 lifts of plywood which was about 160 pieces. This was loaded up near the front near the cab. We then went to an appliance store and S.R. loaded a new stove, fridge and washing machine on top of the plywood. We was getting loaded I thought. I ask S.R. why he would haul all this up the Alaska Highway and he told me that the cost of anything in Whitehorse was very high as it all had to be trucked in from Edmonton and most of the time what you wanted was not available. His wife had been waiting a year for the new appliances.

We spent the night in a motel and were up around 4 am and headed out to Dawson Creek and Fort St. John where we would fill the remaining space in the truck with some horses that S.R. had bought. Turned out three had killed in the truck wreck and he had to shoot two more with broken legs which made him short of horses for the fall hunting season and there was not even one horse for sale in Dawson City, the jumping off place for S.R.s guiding territory. The Alaska Highway officially began at Dawson Creek British Columbia. It was paved for about twenty miles north of Dawson Creek and then again just before you got into Fort St. John. About 2 miles north of St. John it turned back into dirt and gravel and stayed this way for several hundred miles till we reached Fort Nelson B.C. It turned back to gravel north of Fort Nelson till about 20 miles south of Whitehorse Yukon Territory.

At Fort St. John we loaded I believe six or eight horses S.R. had bought from this fellow who supplied horses to outfitters. This made quite a load for the truck and barely room for our gear and duffel. After this we were off up the Alaska Highway. It’s hard to describe the sights I was seeing. I would see something and before it registered in my mind good I would spot something else interesting. Everything was so different from Bedford County where I grew up. This was a huge country and many miles between anything that would contribute to a person’s welfare. Sometimes we camped and a couple of nights there was a motel we could stay in for a night. All the motels had corrals for livestock with good hay, grain and water. The first motel we stopped at was a couple of hundred miles from the last one and another two hundred miles to the next one. We had to watch the gas and fuel up every chance we got whether we needed it or not. It was about midnight when we arrived at this particular motel and no one was around anywhere and all the doors were unlocked. I guess they all had gone to bed. There was a sign on the counter to get your own key and find a room that the key would fit and if you had livestock to put them in the corral and feed them, which we did. Next morning we had a good breakfast and S.R. paid for the room and horse feed and we were on our way again. I thought all this was unusual but S.R. said it was like this anywhere in the North Country, that everyone was a trusting soul.

I forget how many days we were on the road but we finally pulled into Whitehorse Yukon. I had seen many Moose, Bears and other game coming up the Highway and I enjoyed seeing every one. Too bad I did not have a good camera with me as it would be nice to have pictures of this trip. Many places in the road was bad an required low gear to get over. We would nearly sink out of sight in the mud holes but we never got stuck. In some places someone had felled trees and laid the logs crossways side by side so you could get over the worst places.

In Whitehorse I met S.R.s wife and had an immediate dislike for her. She was bossy and mean to S.R. and her two boys who were about 8 or 9 years old. I was only there in Whitehorse for 2 days, just long enough for me to saw all the plywood into 2 ft. x 4 ft. pieces with an old beat up skill saw S.R. had. I remember very clearly that it was a piece of junk and the blade was very dull. The plywood was cut into these small pieces so that it could be tied beneath the Cessna and hauled to the guiding area and dumped from the air by pulling on the rope it was tied with. I made several trips with the pilot who was younger than I was but a good one. I sat on the floor as they had the back seat out and pulled the dump rope whenever E. would shout for me to do so. He had made it very clear that the rope was to be pulled at exactly the right instant or otherwise the plywood would end up out in the bush or in the Tundra where it would be hard to locate and bring in to the building site. His name was Bill and he lived and breathed flying. S.R. had a Piper Cub and the 172 Cessna and Bill piloted them both for S.R. Bill owned an old Harvard trainer which he took me for a ride in once. He said it burned so much gas that he could only fly it a few times a year. After all the plywood was dumped E. flew me into the building site which was about in the middle of S.R.s territory nearly 200 miles from Whitehorse almost due north. We went in the Piper Cub as there was not enough room to land the Cessna on the short sandbar they was using for a runway. Even the Cub had to have its engine cut as soon as it was on the ground as it coasted into the brush at the end of the sandbar which would have ruined the propeller had it been still turning. Needless to say, it scared the dickens out of me.

Here at the site of the base camp to be, I met Bob who was S.R.s foreman, his wife, who was the cook, Her son who was about 13 then, Indian Joe who could see better than you could with a good pair of binoculars and John who was her brother. John was about 20 and was a big surly kid who liked to give orders.

They had one of the bunk cabins finished and was using it for a kitchen when I got there. They had coffee on so E. and I walked over to this cabin with them for coffee. The first thing I was aware of after getting out of the plane was this queer whining noise. I could hardly see my hand in front of my face for all the mosquitoes in the air. I finally figured out they was making the whining noise as there was billions of them. We sat down on the floor or on blocks of wood and they poured me a cup of coffee and it immediately got a film of mosquitoes floating on the coffee. I looked around and everyone else was enjoying their coffee and paid no attention to the mosquitoes. I took a spoon and starting dipping them out and someone snickered so I put the spoon down and drank the mosquitoes same as they did. After a few days I forgot about trying to get the insects out of my coffee and drank it as if they were not there. Reckon it never hurt me none but it sure bothered me at first.

To make a long story short we built three bunk houses and a big cook house out of the stunted Spruce that grew there along the rivers. We used a couple of the horses that was broke to harness for skidding the logs into camp. We also cleared enough run way that the Cessna could land even when heavily loaded. Sometimes E. would be ferrying supplies and would arrive after dark. We would hear him coming and rush down to the airstrip and light the gas we had put in cans nearly filled with sand. Bill could then see where the runway started and stopped and could make a decent landing. It was never completely dark but kind of like it is at dusk. You could still see well enough but if you were up in a plane it was difficult to make out the runway in the brush along the sandbar. One time I was at the base camp by myself as everyone else was out working on the fly camps. Bill arrived with supplies to be dumped at the fly camps and took me with him to do the dumping. He had removed the passenger door as it was difficult to open it more than and inch or two when the plane was in the air. We flew out to the two different fly camps and dumped the supplies without any problem and returned to the base came where Bill was to let me off and spend the night before returning to Whitehorse the next day. When we arrived back at base camp darkness had set in and there was no one to light the gas cans. Bill had to make about 8 or 10 runs at the strip before getting the plane down. At each pass he would cuss and pull up at the last instant and go around again. I was sitting on the floor without a seatbelt and was beginning to get a little concerned. Finally he got the plane down but we ended up in the brush at the end of the runway. I could tell that Bill was pretty upset over nearly wrecking the plane and killing us both. After this episode we always made sure there was some one there to light the fires on the runway. As each day passed the nights would get longer and darker. When I first flew into the camp there was no darkness or night at all. It was full daylight 24 hrs. every day. I found it tough to get used to this as we never knew when it was time to quit working. We would sleep awhile then get up have a meal, work awhile, sleep awhile, have another meal, work some more and mostly sleep when we were too tired to work anymore. I never did get used to this but as the days wore on the nights got longer and we went into a more conventional mode which was easier on everyone excepting we did not get as much work done. One day while we were working on the cabins Bill flew in with S.R. They were going to fly around looking for someplace to put a fly camp maybe 20 miles from the base camp. They were hoping to find a sandbar big enough to land the Piper Cub on so they could have a good look around. S.R. was going to do the piloting as he was taking lessons from Bill. They told us that if they did not return that evening that we were to try to raise Whitehorse on the shortwave and ask for a chopper to come in to look for them. There was no radio in the cub, only the shortwave we had at base camp. We had strung a wire between two tall trees about 75 feet long and this was the antenna. Sometimes it was tough to get thru to Whitehorse on the radio and sometimes it worked well.

Well, sure enough it got dark and S.R. and Bill never showed up. They got on the radio and finally got the airport in Whitehorse and they said a chopper was on its way. I had met the pilot before and he was a nice fellow. He showed up about noon of the next day and took Bob with him to show him where he thought the Piper Cub and the boys might be. About dark we heard the chopper coming back so we all ran out to meet it. Here it come with the Piper Cub in about three pieces and strapped under the chopper with S.R. and Bill riding in the chopper. They were all right but the airplane would require a good mechanic to heal it and put it back together. Turned out that S.R tried to land on a sandbar and had made a good landing but had ground looped before coming to a stop flipping the plane upside down. Worst damage to them was spending a cold night beside a campfire. The Cub was eventually repaired and put back into service although I never rode in it again.

Finally the camp was completed and tidied up and declared ready for the hunter’s that was booked for the hunting season which would begin the 1^st of August. We named the camp Fort Mosquito and I used a piece of the left over plywood to make a sign and nailed it to the cook house. There is a picture nearby of Indian Joe, John, the kid and myself standing in front of it. Our next project would be to fly out to Dawson City and round up all of S.R.s horses that was running loose on the range around Dawson and up Bonanza creek and trail them all into the guiding territory, a distance that would require over a week on the trail. I was looking forward to this as of yet I had not had a chance to do any cowboying.

Bill ferried us all out to Dawson in one day making several trips in the Cessna. Bob gave everyone the next day off to visit Dawson City and to relax a bit, have a shower and clean up. We had been in camp for a month without showers or running water and although we tried to keep clean and wash occasionally we still smelled to high heaven. We had become accustom to the smell of stinking bodies and our first indication that we smelled bad was when a couple of us was halfway to Dawson with Bill in the plane. Bill made some remark about something stinking in the plane and he could not figure out what it was. It did not dawn on us that it was us that he was referring to. But after a while in the tight confines of the planes cabin we started to notice an increase in the smell. When we got to Dawson we was taken to a house that S.R. had rented for us to stay in so the 1^st thing we all did was to have a shower and put on clean clothes. Our day off was spent wandering around Dawson and visiting the Saloons of ill repute that were going full swing during the gold rush but now were tourist attractions. We also went aboard the re-built riverboat Keno that was grounded and set up on the bank of the mighty Yukon River. Indian Joe had an old beater of a car and him and I crossed the Yukon River on the Ferry and drove a few miles into Alaska. This was the only time I ever was in Alaska. I was glad to get

Dawson City Yukon as seen from the top Horse Mountain while we were rounding up the horse herd.

back to Dawson as Joe was a lot better game guide than he was a driver. Nearly driving off the ferry into the cold water was the first indication he was dangerous. After a few miles into Alaska I seen it was going to be nip and tuck if we made it back to Dawson so I ask Joe if I might drive as it had been a long time since I had drove a vehicle and I wanted to see if I still could. He agreed that it would not hurt anything and let me drive the rest of the way. There was not one square inch of that old Chevy that did not have a dent in it. Of course the bottle of Rye he was sipping on did not help anything. Joe was like most Metie Indians of the north. They could not handle whisky and spent all their money on it and never had anything else. The only time they ate good was when they was in the employ of a white man. But old Indian Joe had exceptional eyesight. He would spot some Dall sheep up on a mountainside someplace about a mile away and tell us they were there. None of us could see them till we put binoculars on them and then it made you wonder how he had seen them with the naked eye. I am calling Joe old, but I expect he was no more than about 35 at the time I knew him. He would, if still living, which I doubt, be about 75 years old. He was the best game guide that worked for S.R. His hunters always got the biggest rams and the cape was skinned and cleaned well, as good as a taxidermist could do. Joe could flesh a Bear hide or wolf hide so close that it looked almost tanned when it was done. You could almost see the hair roots thru the skin. God bless Indian Joe, wherever he is.

Nearby is a picture of me and Spot, one of my favorite horses that S.R. owned. Whenever I got a chance to ride him I would. He was a good well broke saddle horse, something that cannot be said of most of S.R.s horses. Most were half wild and could hardly be packed but he did have a few gentle ones for the dudes to ride when they came hunting. When the hunters were in camp we had to ride whatever we could catch and as I did most of the catching every morning I would take my pick first. One gentle horse called Herman never strayed too far from camp and I could easily catch him and ride him to fetch the other horses. I rode him lots without a bridle or halter. I always took a stout string in my pocket and could control Herman with it tied to his jaw. I wonder whatever happened to Herman.

We spent several days rounding up the 40 or so horses that would be used in the guiding territory. They had been on the open range for 2 months and had spread out a considerable distance. Finally we gathered them all up and trucked them to the end of the Dempster High way which at that time only went into the bush about 90 miles. The Dempster left the Dawson High way several miles south of Dawson and went north into the tundra country towards Inuvik. I believe that now you can drive all the way to Inuvik on the Dempster High way.

We had a 2 day camp here at the end of the Dempster and made ready for the drive into base camp which was about 7 or 8 days on horseback. I remember us getting in a creek near the camp and catching the Artic Graylings with our hands. They were about a foot long and the cook cooked up a nice fish fry that night.

The horse herd on the morning of our second camp from the Dempster Highway. This was open country, almost like a desert as nothing grew except the tundra moss which was usually two feet thick.

Next day saw us pulling out at first light. We had packed several horses with our camp gear and grub to last the trip and the rest carried empty saddles. We tied the halter shanks to the packs and all the horses ran loose so in the beginning it was a chore to keep them headed in the right direction and bunched up. After the first day they learned what they was supposed to do and fell into line every morning and were not much trouble after that first day. I rode a bay mare this trip but can not remember her name. She was half broke when we started but after this trip over the Tundra she was better mannered. With us was myself, Indian Joe, Bob and his wife, her son we called the Kid, And a older fellow whose name was Buck and his son Tom. Buck was about 50 and I expect Tom was about my age. I was 25 at the time. It was about the 3^rd week in July when we left the Dempster, the weather was very warm and as we expected no foul weather none of us had any rain gear or heavy coats. About the 3^rd day out it started snowing and turned cold as the dickens. We all wrapped wool blankets about our shoulders and kept on going. The next day the weather was about as bad till about 4 in the afternoon when it cleared up some and we could see the sun. About an hour later we heard a plane coming so we stopped the horses and watched for the plane. We expected it to be S.R. and E. checking on us and it was. As they approached and spotted us they circled a time or two and on about the third pass we saw them dump a bundle from the plane and then they headed back to Dawson. We had to look awhile for the package as the Alders and stunted Spruce were pretty thick where we was. When we finally located it and opened it up we found it contained rain gear and wool coats for each of us. Now it was nice to know they was thinking about us and brought that stuff out. It made the balance of our trip much more comfortable. Bob mumbled some remark that the clothes would come off our paycheck at some point in time. It was snowing when we got up about 4 the next morning so we never broke camp but stayed put all that day which we spent playing cards and telling lies. The storm broke that night and the following day found us breaking trail in nearly 2 feet of snow but the temperature got up in the fifties that day and about noon the snow started to melt. The next day was quite warm and the snow had melted down to where it did not bother us too much.

When we left the Dempster I had packed my 444 Marlin on the bay mare. When Bob saw this he grumbled that it was just extra weight and not needed, that Tom had a Savage 99 in 308 caliber and that was all the gun we needed on the trail. I replied that I knew we was going into bear country and that if I was going into bear country I was not going without my rifle. I told Bob that I did not know Tom and did not trust my hide to someone I did not know. That I knew I could depend on myself and my rifle If I needed too. He rode away grumbling and muttering something about a dumb Cheechako which is a greenhorn in English. I loaded the magazine with as many rounds as I could push in it, maybe about 4 or 5 and put six rounds in the watch pocket of my jeans so they would be close at hand if needed in a hurry.

About the 5^th or 6^th day we had to cross over a high mountain pass. It was steep going up and we had to get down and lead our mounts so we would not be so hard on them on the steep mountainside. At some places it was so steep we held onto the tails of our horses and let them pull us up. You cannot lead a horse up a steep slope as he lunges and jumps trying to get up and will trample you if you are in his way. The least dangerous place is either on him or behind him and if you are behind him you might as well let him pull you up if you can hold on to his tail as sometimes he will jerk you off you your feet and the next horse in line will be bearing down on you. So it is dangerous work trying to get a herd of mustangs over a high mountain pass.

We had just crested the summit and had stopped for a breather. I was about last in line and when I broke over the top I saw the boys all lined up watching something way up on the ridge above us. I saw it was a yellow Grizzly sow with two nearly grown cubs. Bob mentioned that the cubs must be two-year olds as they was so big. The Bears was just watching us at about a range of 500 yards when Bob started the horses down the other side of the pass. I was always in the drag so I was waiting for all the horses to start down. Tom was there with me and about this time we noticed the bear’s was coming toward us. Then about the same time Bob came back up and told Tom to get his rifle out and shoot the sow if they came within a hundred yards. By now the horses had winded the Bears and were acting up and we had a time trying to get them started down the trail off the summit. The Bears were about 80 or 90 yards away by now and Bob shouted for Tom to dump the sow. Tom yelled back that he could not, that he did not have the rifle loaded and did not know where the shells were. Bob came over and ask me if I had bullets and I told him the magazine was full and I had 6 more in my pocket. He said “ Kill that damn bear before she gets into the horses and kills somebody”. I turned the mare towards the Bears and jumped off. She had by now sighted the Bears and was having none of them. I had the reins wrapped about my arm but she reared and broke both reins. Lucky for me I had one hand on the rifle butt which was butt forward in the scabbard. As the mare bolted I pulled the rifle out and turned to face the bears which was by now maybe 70 yards out. I drew a bead on the chest of the sow and let one go, pow, and a puff of dust rolled from her chest but she did not stop, Quick as I could I gave her 2 more in the same spot, each sending up a puff of dust. At the moment the third bullet struck her the sow skidded to a stop and lucky for me the cubs stopped as well. I remember shoving more shells into the magazine and that I could not get any more in. Then I realized the magazine was full and would not hold anymore. I had a quick look around me and there was no one in sight or hearing distance, not even a horse. A quick look back at the bears and I saw the cubs was muzzling their mother wondering why she was sleeping in the middle of the day. I decided to vacate if I could get off the mountain without the cubs bothering me so I backed down the trail the horses had made, keeping my eyes on the Bears. Finally I was out of their sight so I turned and got down the trail as quickly as I could. The horses had left a trail a blind man could follow and I followed it for about 2 hours finally finding a straggling horse that was packing an empty saddle. It was a mare and she let me catch her and finally about dark I caught up with the outfit. They had made camp and was getting ready to come look for me. Tom had to do a complete search of his duffel to locate his ammo which he promptly loaded his rifle with. I had not slowed down long enough to be scared but now that I was stopped an sitting down having a hot coffee and thinking about it I got the shakes. Bob asked me what happened and I told him. He did not say anything else, just sat there staring at the fire, same as me. The next morning we was late rolling out and it was light when Tom and I went for the horses. We always hobbled the ringleaders as we knew the followers would stay with them. The horses were across a pretty big creek from camp in some scattered spruces. When Tom and I got to our side of the creek we saw a huge black Grizzly stand up on its rear legs across the creek, maybe 50 yards from us. We both raced back for our rifles. When Bob saw what we was doing he said “ For the love of God, do not shoot any more Bears, S.R. will fire us all” When we went back the Bear was gone and we gathered the horses without further incident.

We made the base camp about two days later and had no more trouble with the Bears. When S.R. flew into camp a few days later he was quite upset with Bob for letting me shoot the Grizzly. But he was not there and did not fully appreciate the situation we were in. He never mentioned a word concerning the Bear to me. Before I left that fall Bob came up to me one day and told me he was damn glad I had that rifle. I slept every night with it inside my bedroll to keep it dry and it was never very far from me, but I never fired it again while I was in S.R.s employ. When I left to return to Virginia I sold it to one of the other guides.

We had two fly camps set up to hunt from. S.R. would be in charge of one and Bob the other. I was disappointed to learn that I was to go with S.R.s bunch as I did not care for his wife who would be doing the cooking. Nearby is a picture of the guide’s tent that was my home while in this camp. We had a tin stove set up in it and it was quite warm when the stove was going but cooled off quick when the fire went out. We all had good warm bedrolls so we always let the fire burn out at night and would make another fire the next morning.

My job consisted of bringing in all the firewood, sawing and splitting it, fetching the saddle horses that would be used for the days hunting, packing water from the creek and generally keeping the camp neat and tidy as well as keeping all the fires burning. This left me in camp all day, every day with S.R.s wife who I disliked. From the way she treated me she must have disliked me about as much as I did her. I tried to stay as far away from her as I could. Whenever I caught up my chores I would take my rifle and go for long hikes in the bush. No matter if I had been gone ten minutes or two hours she always ask me where I had been and why was not I working. No excuse ever satisfied her. She had about the same attitude for S.R. and everyone else in camp. I would bet that they did not stay married for long. She and S.R. slept in the supply tent which was a wall tent and one night it snowed enough that it caved in the tent. Our tent was on the other side of the camp about 75 yards away but she woke everyone up cussing and screaming at S.R. because the tent fell down. We all got up and pitched in an got the tent back up in record time. She stood there the whole time wrapped in a sleeping bag with a scowl on her face. I wanted to drown her in the lake and bet that S.R. did too.

Kitchen tent at the fly camp. Night time with a gas lantern burning inside made a neat picture.

The hunters that came to hunt the Dall Sheep, Moose, Grizzly and wolves were called dudes behind their backs by all of us. Mostly they were a good bunch of fellows. They all got a nice Ram and some shot a moose, bear or wolf. The guides would have to spend their evenings fleshing out the hides and capes from the sheep. Indian Joe was with Bobs outfit and S.R. bought in three fellows from Alberta to guide in our camp. One was John ? And a nice fellow, then there was Don ?, who was an asshole. If a hunter did not shoot anything it was always Don that was guiding him. Don never washed at all and after a couple of weeks he stank so bad that S.R.s wife made him eat outside the cook tent. Don slept in the guide’s tent with us and soon we could not stand him any longer. One night John, myself and the other guide, I do not remember his name tied Dons sleeping bag shut while he was asleep and carried him down to the lake and dumped him in. We let him stay in the water till the sleeping bag got wet enough to sink before we let him out. He was sure some upset and was going to whip every one of us. His bedroll was soaking wet and he had to sit by the fire all night and keep the stove going so he would not freeze. After this episode we noticed that Don would wash a little more often.

One of the horses was named Big Red. Big Red was mean as a snake. He was a Pinto and had two glass eyes and a blaze face and was so tall he was hard to mount. This horse gave me more trouble than all the rest put together. He was hard to catch and had to be hobbled every night but that didn’t help much as he learned to run about as fast with the hobbles on as he could without them. One morning I had caught Big Red and about 7 or 8 other horses and had tailed them together. If you had many horses to lead they did better single file in the thick brush so I would tie the halter shank of one horse to the tail of the horse ahead of him. This morning I had about 7 horses tailed up with Big Red in front and I was leading them back to camp. I came to this big mud bog I had to cross. I made the mistake trying to jump over the worst part as when Big Reds halter shank suddenly jerked from my jump he gave a big leap and tried to jump the bog also. But since he was tied to the next horse behind him his leap was a failure but he succeeded in knocking me down. Big Red and all seven of the other horses ran over me stomping me into the mud and then they got into a big wreck trying to run through the brush. I reckon the mud saved my life as if the ground has been hard they would probably have killed me. I was bruised badly but had no broken bones. I made a vow right then to kill Big Red if I got a chance.

It was not long before Big Red lost his hobbles and escaped one night. Next day he was nowhere to be found. This went on for about a week when one day S.R. told me to take the day off and search for Big Red. I got a lariat and about 10 lbs of grain, my rifle and went in search of Big Red. About three o’clock that afternoon I found him way on the other side of the lake but he would not let me close to him. I could sit there and he would come up to within 50 feet of me but no closer. The thought entered my mind to just shoot him and leave him for the Grizzlies but S.R. would probably drown me in the lake or at the least make me walk all the way back to Dawson City if I did that. I do believe that if he had been my horse I would have put a bullet right between his glass eyes. I finally figured out a plan to catch him. I tied one end of the lariat to a tree and made a noose at the other end about two feet in diameter. I poured about half of the grain into the center of this noose. I then made little piles of grain about five feet apart going in the direction of the horse. I then went back to my tree and sat down and waited for Big Red to feed his way into the trap. It took about an hour but eventually he had both front inside of the noose. This was what I had been waiting for and gave a quick snap to my end of the rope which tightened the noose on his two front feet. This startled Big Red and he tried to make his escape but when he hit the end of the rope his feet was jerked out from under him and he turned a somersault landing on his back. Quick as a wink I was on his head tying a rope to his halter. He got up and stood there looking at me trying to figure out how I had outsmarted him. Man, them glass eyes sure was giving me a mean look. As I was about a mile from camp I figured to ride him back instead of walking. I never forgot when he had trampled me into the mud so I did not want to lead him anywhere as you never knew when he would run you over. I finally found a big log I could stand on to get mounted. I tied both ends of the halter shank to the halter and this served well enough that I could manage him. I headed directly to the edge of the lake where there was a mud bog around the edge of the lake all the way back to camp. I made Big Red slog thru the knee deep mud all the way back and I believe he was very glad to get home as he was so tired I could make him do anything I wanted. After this he had more respect for me and let me catch him easily. I found that I could catch him first and if I could find a nearby log to help me on that I could just round up the other horses and herd them into camp. The hunting season finally came to an end and we broke camp after all the hunters had been taken out by E. in the Cessna. He had put floats on it and could land in the lake and taxi right up to camp. We put heavy packs on all the horses and trailed them back to base camp. It was now tough to cross the many creeks and streams as they had started to freeze from the bottom up due to the permafrost below. We made it back to base camp where we Met up with Bob and his outfit. We spent several days making a cache to store equipment in and then rounding up all the horses and trailed them back over the pass to the Dempster where S.R. was waiting with the truck to haul the horses back to Dawson. Several trips had to be made with the truck to get all the horses and equipment into Dawson. The trip out of the guiding territory was mostly without any major events other than the cold and iced up streams.

Bill took me to Whitehorse in the Cessna and I caught a plane from there directly to Seattle, Washington and from there to Lynchburg, Virginia. I took a taxi from the airport to our mobile home south of town about 20 miles. It was in the middle of the night and the wife and kids were as happy to see me as I was to see them.

I went back to work for Gene Vaughan for the winter and started making plans to return to British Columbia the next spring with my family. I found life in Virginia sort of boring as compared to western Canada and could hardly wait till I could go back.

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I returned from British Columbia in the fall of 1969 and went back to work for Gene Vaughan in Lynchburg, Virginia. Gene was building several town house’s and apartments in the Forest area and my brother Johnny and I both was employed as carpenters by Gene. Gene was a decent sort of fellow and treated us well. He was also one of the best carpenters I ever met. I learned a lot from Gene.

I started planning a permanent move to B.C. in the spring of 1970 with Loretta, my wife and our two small sons, Curtis, age 5 and Chris about 3 years old. I made arrangements to take them to the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. to get their immigration papers which we did sometime during the winter of 1969. We had no problems in getting this accomplished in the one trip and I do not remember it costing anything except the gas to get there an back. I did not make a lot of money at the time but we saved as much as we could for the trip. I bought an old International Scout from Gene’s father for around $500.00 and a homemade travel trailer from Gene that he had started building but never finished. I bought four used tires that came off a mobile home and not intended for vehicle use but they were 10 ply and I figured they would carry the weight of the trailer better than the 4-ply that were on the Scout. During the course of the winter I completed the construction of the travel trailer adding a gas range, an icebox and bunks and a folding table that made into a bed. I painted it a bright red with white stripes.

Everyone thought I was foolish in attempting to move to B.C. and gave me a hard time over it. But I was determined and held fast to my dream. Finally the day came that we were to leave and start the trip to B.C. Loretta had been very skeptical from the beginning about moving and had never confirmed that she was going. I loaded everything that we could reasonable haul and still have room for us in both the trailer and the Scout. At the last moment I said to her, well, me and the boys are going, are you coming? After a few moments hesitation she replied that she was and jumped in and we were off.

The trip was mostly uneventful. The Scout would only do about 45 or 50 mph on the level and up hill would slow to a crawl and all the traffic would be passing us. Once we were going up a mountain somewhere and the Scout grinded to a halt, the engine just plumb quit. I had up enough speed that I managed to coast to the shoulder and stop. I got out and raised the hood. The Scout was a 1962 model and back then vehicles had only enough wires to get fire to the plugs and the switch key. First thing I laid my eyes on was the coil. I could see that the hot wire from the battery had broken right where it fastened to the coil. I took my pocketknife and stripped some of the rubber from the wire and re-attached it to the coil. I closed the hood and got in and she fired right up and never gave us any more trouble after that. I believe it took us about 8 days to reach the Canadian border at Sweetgrass Montana. This time the customs agents looked over our papers and let us go on without any problem at all. Try that today, I am sure you could not buy your way through the customs.

That night about midnight we arrived at Hank Lowens place at Elko B.C. I parked near the yard and cut the lights off and got out. There were no lights anywhere and I figured they had all gone to bed. About this time Hank stuck his head out of a window and yelled out. “Hallo, who’s there” I yelled back that it was me. Hank was a little perturbed at this late night intrusion and yelled back to me that anytime you arrived somewhere in the middle of the night it was best to Hallo the house and let someone know who you were.

It was early spring around May when we arrived. Hank allowed as it would be ok to spend the summer there but that we would need to get better housing for the winter than the trailer. I set up the trailer in the corner of a hayfield near Hanks house. There was a nearby irrigation canal right by the trailer that was fed from a mountain stream across from the hayfield. I spent the summer helping Hank with his haying and chasing cows to summer pasture. About July a Mountie came in to the ranch with news my father had passed away. He said our family had no way to get in touch with us but knew we were near Elko so they had contacted the RCMP detachment over in Fernie, about 30 miles to the east of Elko. We rushed over to Hanks and phoned home and found out it was Loretta’s Dad that had died. She was heartbroken and had a tough time of it. We had no money for her to return to Va. for the funeral so one of her Uncles loaned us enough money so she could make the trip. I believe it was about $250.00 and it took us a couple of years to repay.

Loretta made the trip back and was gone about three weeks and I was beginning to wonder if she would come back to BC when I got a call from her that she was at the Cranbrook Airport. I got the boys loaded into the old Scout and we made the 40 miles to the airport in record time. The weather was hot and when we drove up Loretta was sitting on the steps in front of the building crying. I will ever forget that moment. She was glad to see us but she also hated leaving her family in Virginia.

Fall was coming and the nights were cooling down so that you had to wear a jacket or sweater. I had worked some with Weldon Parsons that summer and he had a place about 5 miles from Hanks ranch. He invited us to come over there and build a cabin to spend the winter in.

Chris, Loretta & Curtis standing in front of the Trailer parked in Hank Lowens hayfield 1970

Our First summer in BC was spent on the ranch of Henry (Hank) Lowens near Elko. We had the homemade trailer set up there in a hayfield near a creek. It was getting near the time when Curtis would start his first year of school and we thought we might want to get better accommodations for the winter as we was warned by the local folk that it might be a tough one.

Weldon Parsons, a friend I had worked with some during the summer invited us to come over to his place where we could put up a small cabin to live in for the winter. He was to not charge any rent and said we could have the run of the place. Deciding to go there and put up a cabin we knocked down the porch we had put up for the trailer at Hanks and hooked the trailer to the Scout and away we went to the Parson’s place.

There was a pretty big meadow that ran down near Rock Creek, a real nice size creek with the best water you ever saw. In later years I followed this creek upstream about 10 miles and found that it just poured out of a large hole in the side of a mountain which I thought to be very strange. Any way, that was about the best water I ever drank from a stream or creek. We pulled the trailer down to one corner of the field and set it up about 30 yards from the creek so it would not be so far to pack water.

We decided to build the cabin adjoining the trailer so we could use the kitchen already set up in it and the boys, Curtis and Chris could sleep in the bunks there. Loretta and I could sleep in the cabin. The time was late August and the weather was super nice and very warm. I started laying the floor logs which I was going to put plywood down on for the floor. I had the logs in place and was starting the floor plywood about the third day we was there. About ten o’clock that morning I had taken a break and having a glass of good Ice tea when I heard the awfulliest screams. Loretta had sent Curtis to the creek for a bucket of water and it was him screaming. I jumped up and ran around the corner of the trailer and Curtis nearly ran over me trying to make the trailer door. What I saw sent cold chills up my back. About ten feet behind Curtis was a Black Bear trying his best to catch Curtis. I was by now between Curtis and the Bear. I jumped up and down yelling and waving my arms at the Bear and he come to a dead stop as he put the brakes on. Reckon he figured this new human was much bigger than the scrawny kid he had been chasing and maybe he better think this over a bit.

While the Bear was thinking about what he ought to do I ran into the trailer and grabbed my 30-30 the only rifle I owned at the time. This is the same rifle I wrecked when I shot ole Jack horse a few years later. I got the rifle but could not find any cartridges for it. I knew I had half a dozen or so someplace. Finally I found two in the silverware drawer. I shoved these into the magazine and chambered one. Easing back out of the trailer the bear was gone. Finally I see he had elected to climb a tree to look the situation over. I eased over under the tree and put a bullet thru his dumb skull and he come crashing down. Weldon had showed up about this time and said Curtis was a mighty lucky kid. Appeared that Curtis had took off running the moment he saw the Bear which he said later was standing on a log in the middle of the creek. Running from a Bear will induce the dumbest Bear to chase you but Curtis did not know this so he figured running was better than a bad stand I guess. I skinned the bear out and gave the hide to Jack Ormiston who had it mounted into a rug. Reckon he probably still has this rug someplace. This was my first Bear encounter but was not to be the last as I had killed more than 50 Bears before returning to live in Virginia in 1999.

We spent the winter there in that little cabin. It was toasty as long as we kept the puffing Billy (tin heater) full of wood. Every morning the water bucket would have about two inches of ice on it. I remember one night just before Christmas. The temperature was around 20 below and it was snowing blue blazes and adding to about two feet already on the ground. We had a nice warm fire roaring in the puffing Billy and its sides was glowing red. Curtis and Chris had been playing near the stove when we all decided it was bedtime. Loretta put the boys to bed in the trailer bunks where we had put down a thick layer of fiberglass insulation under their bedrolls to keep them warm. We used a big down sleeping bag on our bed which we would pull up over us to help keep us warm. We would usually listen to the radio which I had taken out of the Scout and put on the wall above our bed. I had run a wire out to the Scout and would hook it to the battery each night when I came home from work. We had no power or TV or any kind of electrical appliance.

Well, we all hit the sack that night and soon we were all sound asleep. About midnight I was awakened by a very strong smell of smoke. I jumped up to find the wall behind the stove was roaring with fire. It was flaming plumb up to the ceiling and was filling the cabin with smoke. I got Loretta and the boys awake in no time flat and she got them outside with their quilts and sleeping bags. It was much colder that the minus 20 it had been when we went to bed. I put my boots on and grabbed a coat and the water bucket and headed to the creek. AAAAh, the water had frozen over, quick, back to the woodpile, grab the ax, run back to the creek, break the ice, get a bucket of water, run back to the house, dump the water on the fire, run back to the creek, get another bucket of water, back to the fire, dump the bucket of water, back to the creek, this went on for what seemed an hour but Loretta later told me I had used about 10 buckets of water getting the fire out and had done it in about 45 seconds..

Now the cabin was about as cold inside as it was outside as we had the door open for a spell and the place was all wet, Reckon my water bucket aim was not so good. I got the puffin Billy roaring again and we set there for a spell trying to figure out how the fire had started. Finally deduced that the boys had pushed a cardboard box over near the red-hot sides of the stove and this must have got the fire going. I reckon we were lucky. They say God looks after idiots and fools so I reckon he was looking after us that night.

Christmas that winter was about the poorest we ever had in monetary terms. We put up a nice Fir tree I cut beside the Cabin and Loretta and the boys made decorations for it with popcorn strings and tinfoil. I was building an addition to Jack Ormiston’s Motel that winter and I went up to his General Store and charged up some pots and pans for Loretta and a few toys for the boys. I sneaked these under the tree Christmas Eve and believe it or not it made our Christmas. Man, I do not know how we made it them first couple of years. “We wuz so poor that the lice would not even come near us” But I reckon it was fun as we did not give up. Curtis started school that winter and he would come home crying that the Canadian boys had made fun of his American accent. I had to go down to the school a couple of times and straighten out a few teachers and the principle. They did not like me before and liked me even less after the visits. I got a few black eyes over the years dealing with diehard Canadians but I gave as good as I got. I think they respected you more if you were hard to deal with. I made many a great friend and a few enemies in over 30 years living there. Curtis and Chris got onto their lingo much quicker than I did and fit in sooner I guess.

Lots of things could be written about this first winter in B.C. and maybe I will when I get the time

Chris and the Cabin at Parsons place. This picture taken one year after moving trailer off the place

Ted Bellamy owned and operated a Tie mill in 1969 when I first arrived in British Columbia. For those of you who have no idea what a Tie mill is and I imagine there are mighty few today that will know, a Tie mill is a Sawmill that cuts nothing but railroad ties and what that do not make a tie is cut into cants. Cants are sawn about 4” thick by whatever width that is leftover after the ties are cut and are hauled to a stud mill where they are run thru a gang saw and sawn into 2 x 4s. Cants were always 8 feet long. Regular ties were 8” X 8” X 8 feet. Switch ties was about 16 foot long. I hated these ones and was always glad there were not many trees that was big enough to make switch ties. The slabs and sawdust is left to rot. Ted sold the regular ties for 5 bucks each. Do not remember what the cants bought. He paid his help all $5.00 an hour regardless if you were a faller, buckerman, skidder operator, loader operator, truck driver, cantor man, or the tailer.

Douglas Fir, Ponderosa pine, known locally as Bull Pine, and Tamarack, the only Evergreen to loose it needles in the fall are the most common timber used for ties. Occasionally a Jack pine is encountered that is big enough to get a tie or two from. One thing all these woods have in common is that when it is green it is heavy, very, very heavy.

I arrived in the East Kootenay, British Columbia about the first of May, 1969. Outfitter Ernie Goodwin had put me up for a few weeks till I was to leave for Edmonton, Alberta where I was to meet up with Stan Reynolds another outfitter who I had a summer and fall job with in the Yukon. Ernie was operating a front-end loader for Ted for the summer months till September at which time he would return to guiding & Outfitting. Ernie had his own guiding territory and operated his own business. Ernie spoke with Ted and asked if he could put a greenhorn to work for a week or two. I do not know what Teds actual words were in reply to Ernie but after knowing Ted now for 30 years and eventually becoming good friends with him I can imagine his answer went something like this “Sure Ernie, bring’um on down Monday, we’ll put him to tailing the mill. The last fellow just quit after three days and he wuz a skookum built tough young feller. We’ll see if he can last longer than that”

I’ll have to stop here and explain what tailing a mill means. Ted was the sawyer and ran the mill. He had another feller turning the logs on the deck for him who was called the cantor man. The fellow tailing the mill had to throw all the slabs over into a pile and grab every tie or cant that was cut from the log and stack it in the proper pile so that the loader could come in and lift the pile (called lift’s) onto a truck for hauling.

There were two things working against you if you was tailing for Ted. First, Ted was one of the best sawyers in British Columbia and secondly the ties and cants were very heavy. Average weight of a tie or cant was upwards of 200 lbs. and some were heavier.

Ted tried his best to wear me out but the faster he sawed the logs the more determined I was to do my job stacking the ties and cants. Every time we broke for Tea & coffee I was plumb wore out and was glad for the rest. I outlasted the tough fellow that preceded me by about three weeks, until I had to leave for Edmonton.

In later years Ted and I became great Friends and hunting and shooting buddies. We would travel to distant Silhouette shooting matches together. I usually did the driving and Ted did the cooking. We had many enjoyable times together.

Ted had served in the Canadian Army during WWII and had fought in combat against the Germans (Jerrie’s) as Ted called them. It did not bother Ted to talk about his experiences during the war as it does some. He told me of many encounters with the Jerrie’s. He once shot down a German fighter plane with his Browning BAR which is a 30 caliber automatic rifle meant to be used against oncoming enemy troops, not airplanes. When I lived in Marysville, B.C. Ted lived about 3 blocks from me. He would walk over about every morning for coffee if I had no work that day and talk my ear off.

Ted had a great temper and used it often. Once we were at a shooting match in Lethbridge, Alberta and the wind was howling about 30 miles per hour for the whole weekend. Ted was shooting the 500 meter Rams and I was spotting for him and keeping his score. Ted was having a tough time hitting anything in that wind and was about halfway thru his 10 shots at the Rams when a big gust of wind blew Teds cap out from under his earmuffs. He turned and gave me the meanest look I ever saw him give anybody and said a few choice words that I never heard because of the howling wind. I thought for an instant that Ted figured I had jerked his cap off his head leaving the earmuffs in place. A group of onlookers behind us saw the goings on and had a big laugh. This about drove Ted over the boiling point and it took some time after that match for him to cool down. I remember that I slept in the Clubhouse that weekend with a couple of other shooters and we had to sleep on tables to keep the mice off us. It was cold and I had to get up every 2 hours and put more wood in the stove. The wind howled like a demon all night. I was feeling sorry for all those people that had to live on the Prairies all their life. A lot of them when they traveled to B.C. would always be falling down because they was so used to leaning against the wing that when they was someplace the wind did not blow they would lean anyway and just fall plumb over. Albertans was called stubble-hoppers because of all the wheat grown there. They in turn called people from British Columbia B.C. bush bunnies.

Four or five years before Ted passed over the Great Divide the Canadian government passed a new law requiring all long guns to be registered. Ted hated this law and was adamant he would never register his rifles. Ted never did register any of his guns as he passed on before the law was implemented. (In 2007 the government rescinded this law after spending billions trying to implement it) When Ted was on his deathbed I wrote a poem and gave it to him. His face lighted up with a big smile when he read it. I have included it here for your enjoyment.

I ask Ted in later years about the time I worked for him tailing his Tie Mill. He told me that he worked himself into a sweat trying to break me and that he could not put the logs thru so fast that I could not keep up. Said he actually missed me after I was gone off to Edmonton.

Ted built this wood-splitter about 6 months before he died. Each year including the last one, Ted would put up enough firewood to last the winter and more. Winters in B.C. were always six months long and tempetures could reach minus 40.

British Columbia has very harsh winters and most construction work is more or less seasonal. I would always be out of work at least by Christmas every year. Sometimes a job would open up around March at the earliest.

During the long winter months I usually would shoot Coyotes, skin them and case the hides and by spring we would have a little nest egg when the hides were shipped to the Edmonton fur auction. Sometimes a good pelt with not too many bullet holes would bring $175.00 or more. Coyote were at their highest price around 1972 thru about 1977-78. Usually mine were shot up so bad I would get less money for my pelts. I would shoot them with my Elk rifle as I could not afford a smaller caliber just for Coyotes. The 7 Mag was real hard on Coyote hide to say the least. I spent a lot of time sewing up the big holes blown in them with the Elk rifle.

The winter of 1974 saw me un-employed in December and I was hunting Coyotes again. Shooting Coyotes is best done over bait of some sort. Some of the local ranchers would call me when they had a dead cow or calf as they wanted to exterminate all the Coyotes. I would always put down a few Deer for bait at places I where I could just pull over the truck and shoot off the hood. It was real work to snowshoe very far in the deep snow so I hunted as much as I could from the roads.

One Saturday morning I was checking a Deer carcass above the bridge in the Elk river canyon. When I pulled to a stop I could see several Coyotes feeding on the Deer. I eased the rifle out and over the hood. The range was about 300 yards. I dropped a coyote with the first shot and the rest ran down onto the Canyon floor and stopped maybe about 400 yards away. Guess they was wondering what all the noise was all about and where their friend was . I knew the bullet would be about 3 inches low at that distance so I held the crosshair on top of the Coyotes back. The bullet knocked the Coyote down but it was up and running upstream toward the timber instantly.

I knew I would have a tracking job on my hands if I wanted that pelt so I made sure the truck was far enough off the road and grabbed my snowshoes out of the back. It did not take me long to cut the Coyotes tracks. There was drops of blood that was easy to spot in the snow. After about 450 yards the tracks disappeared into a hole in the ground. Upon a careful examination I determined it to be a Bear Den without a Bear in it. (good thing) I could see that it opened up to about four or five feet in diameter but I could not see the Coyote. The hole was too small for me to get thru but by sticking my head in as far as possible I could see a small tunnel off to one side. I figured the Coyote had dug this smaller hole and was now back in there somewhere. The Bear had dug the main hole partially under a big Fir stump and the ground around the other part of the hole was frozen solid so I could not dig it out to make the hole bigger. I sat there for a bit trying to figure out the best way to get that Coyote pelt. Probably the Coyote was dead by now and if I could get down in the Bear den I might be able to cut a switch stick and twist it into the Coyotes fur and pull it out of the small tunnel. Maybe Curtis could fit into the entrance to the Bear den and pull the Coyote out of the tunnel with a switch stick which would be much easier than trying to enlarge the entrance enough for me to fit into. Ha, a good idea. Probably better go get the 22 and Curtis to come back with me.

Getting back to the truck I headed for home about 10 miles away. Curtis was happy to go back with me after I told him the circumstances but Loretta was not too fond of the idea. I grabbed the 22 Brno, and a flashlight and Curtis and I was off to the Bear Den.

Curtis and I made good time getting back to the Bear den and I could see that the Coyote was evidently still in there as there was no tracks indicating it had vacated in my absence. Curtis could just barely squeeze in thru the entrance to the den. I gave him the flashlight and told him to have a look into the little tunnel which he did. Dad, it’s still alive and looking at me and was back out of the Bear den in a whole lot less time than it had taken for him to get into it.

Well I can tell you that it took a considerable amount of time to convince Curtis to take the 22 and pop the Coyote between the eyeballs. Up until now I do not think Curtis had ever shot anything but gophers and he was not too fond of the idea. Figured he might not kill it and the thing would crawl out and get him. Eventually he decided to have a go at it. This time he crawled back down into the den with the 22 and put the flashlight on the Coyote. I could see him taking aim with the 22 and about the time I thought he would shoot he burst out in tears. Dad, I can’t shoot this Coyote, I’m coming out. No amount of cajoling would get Curtis back into that Bear den. After all this I was getting a bit teed off. Reckon I’ll have to go back for the chainsaw and see if I could saw enough of the stump away so I could get into the den. So we hike back to the truck and head home for the saw. Loretta was happy enough to see that Curtis was still alive and even let him go back with me to help pack the saw in the event I did get the stupid Coyote. I kept reminding them that it might be 175 bucks in our coffers if I did get the critter. So back to the Bear Den once more.

I did manage to saw enough of the stump away so I could just barely squeeze into the den. Before I went in I looked around for a good switch stick. I finally found a sapling with some good stout limbs near the top and was cutting it with my folding Gerber which I kept razor sharp. I made a mis-lick with the knife and cut a finger nearly to the bone. Man, this was getting bad @#*#*%. I wrapped the cut finger up with my bandana and crawled into the den. Curtis shoved the flashlight and 22 in behind me. I finally got the light to shine into the little tunnel and there sure enough was the Mr. Coyote, still alive and staring at me with hatred, but at this point the Coyotes hatred would pale in comparison to mine @&%^$@@**%@. A few choice words eased the pain in my finger a bit. I raised the 22 and put the Coyote out of it misery and I’m sure it was in misery due to being shot with a 7 MM magnum several hours before and us pestering the hell out of it now

The switch stick did the job and we got the Coyote. Turned out it was a small female and wouldn’t bring 75 bucks for its pelt. I took it home and saved the hide anyway. I ought to have made a rug out of it so I would not ever forget what I went thru to get it.

About two weeks later I was skiing along the North rim of the same Canyon about a mile up from the bridge over the River looking for Coyotes. I could see the North facing South rim from the top down to the frozen river. I finally saw several Coyotes about halfway up the South rim about 600 yards from me. I got a good rest on a fallen pine tree and let loose with the 7 mag. The one I shot at bit the dirt and slid down nearly to the rivers edge. I remembered seeing a skid trail angling down towards the river a few hundred yards back and made for it figuring I could get down it on my cross-country skis. I got down it allright. It was pretty steep and the further I went the faster I went. Finally I came to a switchback and either had to crash accidentally on intentally. I decided to go for the planned crash. I tried sitting down to slow my decent but I ended up flipping and flying thru the snow and trees, finally skidding to a halt amongst the Jack pines I got up and examined myself for damage. Was not bad, only a few scrapes and bruises. I took the skis off and hiked the rest of the way down.

After getting to the edge of the river I could see there was fast water in the middle and the ice was not frozen all the way across so I put the skis back on and made it downriver the mile to the truck. I drove over the bridge and parked on the South side of the river. Leaving the rifle in the truck I took my snowshoes for the hike up river to where the Coyote lay. It was easy going on the ice at the edge of the river. I finally found the Coyote and it looked dead enough so I tied him around the neck with my rope and the other end around my waist like so many others I had shot.

I was making pretty good time and feeling good about this one when something grabbed me by the ass and startled the dickens out of me. Good thing I had on several layers of clothes for the minus 20 degree weather. The darn Coyote had woke up from the coma the 7 mag had induced on him and grabbed me right in the butt. Reckon he had no choice as he was tied to me and could go but one way. I managed to get a snowshoe off and ward him off with it. He was chewing mighty hard on the end of the thing and nearly ruined it. I finally succeeded in knocking the Coyote over and standing on it until he expired. This was quite the experience. After that I packed my pistol even if it was not agreeable with the law. In Canada you could own a handgun but could not take it off your property. Dumb law, huh. What good is a gun if it ain’t loaded and in your hand?

I finally quit shooting Coyotes when the price went down to less than 75 dollars about 1977 but I sure had some times with them critters. So did Curtis. I’ll have to ask him sometime if he remembers the Bear Den thirty years or so ago. Bet he does.

Today, 30 years later my grandson Mike and I shoot Coyotes for fun and a fifty dollar bounty if we can get it.

Jack was the first horse I owned after moving to British Columbia. Jack was a grass-cutter meaning that he was so clumsy that he tripped over his own feet. This happened many times and pissed me off a great deal. He could trip on a pebble a half inch tall. A few times he nearly dumped me right over his head. Jack also had another bad habit. This one finally got him in deep doo-doo. It did not matter what you tied Jack up with, if he wanted to leave he would just rear back with all his weight until he broke whatever you had him tied with. Sometime if he was tied to a small tree with a good halter shank he would just up-root the tree and be off, tree and all. Sometimes he would be gone for two weeks before somebody called and said they had ole Jack in their corral or had seen him someplace, still dragging the tree or trailing a broke halter shank. I would fire up the old pick-up and go bring him home. I reckon I can’t complain much, I only paid about a hundred bucks for him. Old Brian Ironmonger felt sorry for me cause I did not have a horse an gave me a “deal” on ole Jack.

I had Jack for a couple of years until he come to a sad end. Brian and two other fellows whose names I can”t remember ( it was 1972 ) was going into the Bull River country for a spring Bear hunt that spring. It was 3 days travel on horseback to get to where we wanted to hunt. First day we made good time and Jack did not dump me but he tripped and went down on his knees a time or two. This was discombubulating to say the least. The first time he went to his knees that day I swallowed my cigarette butt that was kind of used up but was still stuck to my lip as sometimes a roll-your-own had a habit of doing. I was ok for awhile but my stomach didn’t like the tobacco and I had to get down and throw up the butt and the nice bacon, eggs & pan biscuits I had that morning.

We made a camp that night by Long Lake which was really a slough. Supper was really good as I was mighty hungry after losing my breakfast. We were up early and I went after the horses that was hobbled so they could get a bit of feed that was growing good around the slough. Brian had breakfast made when I got back with the horses. We saddled them and got all our gear packed and set down for a last cup of coffee. I had tied Jack to a 12’ Fir tree with one of them new nylon halter shanks that I got in town the week before, just for ole Jack.

We were about half finished with the coffee when I heard Jack struggling to break the shank or else root up that Fir tree. Reckon he figured he had had enough of Bear hunting for this trip. I jumped up and ran over to him but was too late. I was just about to grab the halter when that fancy nylon shank popped from all of Jacks 1200 lbs leaning on it. The loose end of the shank whizzed past my face and slapped Jack right between the eyes. Well, I don’t have to tell you that Jack was off to the races.

I trailed Jack for a spell but seen he wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. He was carrying my good saddle with a 30-30 in the scabbard and a damn good pair of binoculars in the bags, not to mention a bunch of other hard-earned goodies. I was getting madder by the minute and finally made up my mind to get ole Jack for good. Him and I was finished. I trailed him for over a mile before I got him caught up. We finished that hunt with no further trouble out of Jack but him and I parted ways as soon as we got home.

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Now ain’t that clear water. I could sit here and watch the Cutthroats & Rainbow trout

I should call this story the Grizzly Draw instead of the Stump Draw as every time I went there I saw bears, sometimes several of them. By 1979 Grizzlies had been

put on a draw system where if you were lucky and had your name in the pot you might get a tag to hunt a grizzly. Before 1979 you could just purchase a Grizzly tag each year like all your other big game tags, including tags for Black bears which could always be hunted in the fall as well as the spring bear season. All Grizzly hunting was done in the spring, March thru May. I never went into the stump draw in the spring but I would climb up there almost every fall looking for Elk and big Mulies.

Climbing into the Stump Draw was a tough climb. It was a small creek that come down off the mountain right from the top and ran into Tanglefoot Creek which was a fair size creek. The Tanglefoot ran on down the mountain and into the Bull River about five miles below the Stump Draw. We could park the truck within sight of the stump draw but we had to ford the Tanglefoot before we could start the climb. I always took a second pair of boots and socks with me and would cache them in a tree where they would be dry went I got back down from hunting the stump draw. I hated to wade a cold creek and then have to climb a mountain with wet socks and boots. Tony would always ford the Tanglefoot and then make the climb in wet boots. I never figured out if the wet boots didn’t bother him or if he was just too dumb to think about bringing extra boots and socks. Tony was never in the real world a lot of the time as he was a heavy pot smoker although he did enjoy hunting but he eventually gave it up. The Stump Draw was very steep. For every foot of forward travel you probably went up two feet. The mountains on both sides of the creek kind of rolled into the creek and were so thick with Alders and windfalls that there was absolutely no way to climb up through them so we always climbed up in the creek bed. Over the years fallen timber had rolled down into the creek bed making a maze of logs that we had to climb under, over or around as we slowly made our way up. Sometimes a log was pointing up with the creek and we could walk on it. Some of these logs were three to four feet in diameter and nearly a hundred feet long and made for easier hiking than the creek bed which was cluttered with all kinds of broken limbs, stumps, rotten logs, rocks and boulders the size of pickup trucks. Only problem was staying on the top side of the log as it would be angling up the hill so steep that you could stand on it and reach out and nearly touch it with your hand in front of you without bending over.

There was about a half mile of steep, tough going in the creek bed and then it opened out into a fair size basin and the creek forked there with each creek

coming down out of two separate draws. The sides of the basin was still very steep and covered with Alders and patches of timber nearly to the top of the mountain on both sides. After we got to the top of the Stump Draw we would go up the right side high enough to see over the top of this jungle over to the top of the mountain on the left. The Elk would always hang out above the Alders as the going was much easier up there.

This one trip into the Stump Draw Tony Lund and I had planned to climb the mountain on the left side and camp there overnight. Once on top we would be able to overlook the Stump Draw basin and also the next basin over the other side. We both were packing our sleeping bags and enough grub to last us a couple of days plus our rifles, binoculars, spotting scopes and other hunting gear so we each had a pretty heavy load going up the Stump Draw. You could make about thirty or forty feet and then you would have to stop and rest for three or four minutes and then go again. When we got out of the truck this morning it was about an hour before sun up and we could hear Bull Elk bugling way up in the Stump Draw.

We finally reached the fork in the creek and climbed up a couple of hundred yards on the right mountain to where that was a small clearing that we could sit in and see the top and part way down the mountain on the left. As soon as we caught our breath we pulled our binoculars out of the packs and glassed the mountain. Right away we could see several cows up near the top. I bulged a few times but got no reply. After a while two bulls came into view behind the cows. I bugled again but they wasn’t interested in me at all. We could see the bigger bull was a six point and the other about a four or five. We had watched them slowly feed across the side of the mountain for several minutes when Tony said it was too bad they were so far away and out of rifle range. I told Tony that they might be too far for him but I was going to shoot the six pointer. He said he had been here many times with several other hunters and no one had ever killed an Elk up there where these Elk were and I couldn’t do it either. Well, Tony had not hunted with me much and had no idea if I could shoot or not. He wanted for us to try a sneak on the Elk and get close enough for a decent shot. Nope, I said, I’m gonna try him from here, Heck, it ain’t over 600 yards at the most. It was about a 40 degree uphill shot and I told Tony my rifle which was a Remington in 7 MM

Magnum was going to shoot flatter up there than it would on the level. Tony laughed and said, well, blaze away but I know you’ll never come close.

The place we were sitting was so steep that the only rest I could get was to stand my pack board up and rest the rifle over the top. I had my back to a big boulder and felt pretty steady. The pack board was as steady as any shooting sticks. It was a Trapper Nelson which had a wooden frame with canvas tightly wrapped around it. I lined up on the Bull and held what I knew would give me a hit on a six hundred yard target on that forty-five degree angle. Pow, the rifle went off and a bit later I heard the bullet smack flesh. The Bull never flinched or moved at all. Ha, Tony said, you never even come close. “Heck, I didn’t, I hit that elk” “ Well, why aint it falling down” he said? I ventured that it was probably a lung shot and to give him time, that he would come crashing down. We watched the Bull for nearly a minute and still he never moved and I said to Tony that I thought the Elk was leaning on the tree behind him. At any rate I decided to have another go with my rifle so I got lined up the exact same as before and let another one go. This time the Bull came crashing down. He rolled probably 50 yards before coming to a stop. All Tony said was, “I’ll be dammed” I replied that it would have been nice if he had rolled all the way down to the bottom, that it would have saved us a lot of work.

It took the best part of three hours to reach the Elk. The Alders were unbelievably thick and the trunks lay nearly flat pointing downhill from the snow lying on them all winter. The first part of the Alder you came to was the top with all the leaves and branches. You then had to climb up thru them and over the

woven trunks. A lot of the time you would be several feet off the ground climbing up the trunks. There was Devils Claw growing everywhere and you had to watch not to grab it to pull your self up. The Devils Claw was covered with sharp thorns that would fester and be sore for several days but the Elk loved to eat the tender leaves from it. We finally got to the Elk about noon. Both bullets had hit within 5 inches of each other, one just clipping the front of the lungs and the other a little more forward in the shoulder. I gutted it and then we sat down and made coffee and had lunch. We decided to take just the hind quarters and backstraps down to the creek (Stump Draw Creek) and sink them under the water with rocks so they would keep until the next day. We took our packs and rifles on up to the top of the mountain which was maybe another two hundred yards or so and left them there while we packed the hind quarters and back straps down to the creek. We were going to camp up there overnight and did not want to pack it all down and back up again, We had gotten down nearly to the creek and had stopped in a patch of Alders to catch our breath and to rest a minute. We were sitting there having a smoke when we heard bears roaring nearby. As we listened to them we figured it was two boars in a fight as they were really carrying on something fierce. I looked at Tony and he looked at me. We both were very concerned as our rifle’s were up on the top of the mountain with the packs. It was a stupid thing we had done leaving them. It was the first time in Bear country I did not have a rifle in my hands. I made an oath right there that if the Bears spared us that I would never be in Bear country without my rifle again. I have kept that oath right to this day. Finally the Bears quit their argument and shut up. We both was hoping they would not come our way as there was not a tree anywhere big enough to climb, nothing but the Alders. We sat there for awhile and finally hearing nothing further form the Bears we went on down to the creek and sunk the meat in the water, weighing it down with rocks to keep it under. We knew the Bears could not smell it there and would leave it alone. I can tell you that we both made haste back to the top of that mountain to our rifles.

Tony and I made a nice camp there on a level spot right on the very top of the ridge that was between the two basins. This ridge continued on over the side of the mountains all the way down to Tanglefoot Creek and on up from our camp to the top of the main mountain. After supper and just before dark we took our binoculars and had a good look into the second basin. From our vantage point I could see right to the top of the main mountain and I soon spotted a huge black

Grizzly up there digging for gophers. He was flipping over rocks and digging furiously at the ground so we knew he was after the little Columbia Ground Squirrels, known locally as Gophers. I expect he was maybe a quarter mile above us. We watched him a bit and then we went back to our camp and got our bedrolls and rifles and tying all our other gear up high in a tree we moved about three hundred yards down the mountain and put our bedrolls there and spent the night there. We both knew if we slept where we had cooked supper that we would have a bear in our lap before morning. Sure enough the next morning when we went back to the spot to have breakfast there were bear tracks all around the area where a bear had been checking it all out.

The night passed without any major events happening although neither of us got a lot of sleep. Its pretty hard to sleep when you got one eye open and both ears. The next morning was spent glassing the other basin for Elk and Mulies. We saw several Mule Deer but nothing worth the effort it would take to go shoot it and bring it back. About noon we broke our camp and started down to our cache of Elk meat. As we came up close to the Elk carcass we saw the same black Grizzly we had seen the evening before eating on it. A couple of shots fired into the air sent it running off into the brush. We very carefully picked our way thru the brush on the opposite side the bear had gone and made it on down to the creek. Tony and I both packed a hindquarter and a backstrap onto our Trapper Nelsons and started down the Stump draw. It was a slow go with all our gear and the Elk meat. We came to this big log that was angling down the creek on about a 45 degree angle and as Tony was in front he climbed up on the butt of it and started down. I was about halfway down the log when I heard a big thump, looking up I did not see Tony anywhere. I went on down the log near the end and there was Tony lying down in the creek on his back. He had slipped and fallen off and had fell about 10 feet, landing on his back and on the pack with the Elk quarter strapped to it. Guess he was lucky he landed that way as he was lying in about 3 inches of water and rocks. He was lying there smoking a cigarette when I found him. We like to never got him, the pack and the Elk meat back up on the log. Eventually we did and made out way on down to the Tanglefoot, forded it and went home. We were about eighty miles back in the bush there on the Tanglefoot and it was all gravel except for about twenty miles of paved highway.

A year or so later I took Gary Mummery into the Stump draw Elk hunting. It was his first trip there. Gary was a real decent fellow and also very talented. He could make about anything and do a first rate job of it. At one time back in the buck skinning days he was making muzzle loading rifles from scratch with the exception of the barrels which he bought in the raw down in Kalispell Montana. These rifle’s were so good that he was selling them for around $3000.00 way back in the 70s. In recent years he got into making ocean going kayaks. He would go into the bush and find dead standing Cedar trees the right size and saw these into ¼” by 1” boards and mill a groove on one edge and a round on the other edge. These kayaks were about 20’ long and were real beauties. Last time I saw Gary he was building an authentic birch bark canoe about 20 feet long. He told me that he looked for over a year for just the right Birch tree for the bark. I have yet to see the finished product but I know it will be as good as any of his Indian ancestors could have done. Gary was half Metie Indian. Nearby is a picture of Gary and his Kayaks

As you can see, the Kayaks are works of art. Gary was a skilled craftsman and could make about anything. Gary was also a good hunter and had many good trophies hanging on his walls. Bighorn sheep, Stone sheep, Bear, Elk, & Deer to name a few. Gary spent his life in the bush as his day job was cat skinning. For those of you who have no idea what a cat skinner does it is operating a bulldozer building logging roads and skid trails in the mountains.

Getting back to our hunt that day in the Stump Draw we made good time getting to the top that morning and climbed up to our right to the same spot Tony and I had shot the Elk from. We sat there awhile glassing the slopes and saw no elk at all but we did see a Grizzly up to our right about 700 yards above us feeding on the Huckleberries. Gary wanted to go on up and get closer for a picture and I replied that I thought we were close enough right where we were. Against my better judgment we climbed on up to maybe within a hundred yards of the bear. When we got close we saw that it was a sow with two cubs about a year old. Before Gary could get his camera out the sow winded us and took off up the slope with her cubs and went over the top of the mountain. She was huffing and puffin every step of the way as she did not like us near her at all. I was glad to see her disappear over the top of the mountain. She could just as easily charged at us and it ain’t no fun to be the target of a mean ole Grizzly sow protecting her cubs.

Gary was packing his Ruger # 1 which was a single shot in 300 Win. Mag. I didn’t figure a single shot would be much good in a close encounter with a mad Grizzly and told him so. I had my Remington bolt rifle in 7 mm Remington mag. And it held three in the magazine and one in the tube. Over the years it had never let me down and was exceptionally accurate on out to 6 or 700 yards. I once had to shoot a charging Black Bear at about 20 feet and it scared the crap out of me. It was a Brown Bear in color but was a Black Bear which nature made in several colors. Below is a picture of this mean ole she-bear in a position that she can’t harm anyone.

After the sow and cubs disappeared over the top Gary and I made our way over the ridge to our left. This ridge ran right to the top and we figured we could get on top of the mountain and walk the ridge glassing into all the basins. We got to the ridge and started up it and unbeknownst to us the sow was bringing her cubs down the ridge and we met up again, only this time we was in thick bush and timber and the distance was about 50 yards. Well, this sow was about as mad as I ever saw one, bouncing up and down on her front feet and clacking her teeth together. She was making short charges at us but would turn and go back to the cubs. I can tell you that this got our adrenalin going real quick. Both of us had our rifles up and ready and started backing slowly down the ridge. Finally the sow allowed us to escape without us having to shoot her. I told Gary he was bad luck around Bears, that I had never had this much trouble out of a Grizzly. He said, yeah, that was a close call alright.

We went on down the ridge to where it opened up some and we could see into the next basin. This is the same basin Tony and I had saw the big black Grizzly digging for the gophers. We got a nice vantage point that we could see from the top of the next ridge right down into the basin floor which was mostly clear and nice grass growing there like a big cow pasture. We sat there in the warm sun and had our lunch.

Black Bear (brown phase) that charged and got shot for her troubles. You can see the hide was useless as her head was covered with mange.

As we sat there enjoying our lunch and the sunshine commenting on how lucky we were to be rid of the mad sow we saw another Grizzly over on the other side of the basin in a Huckleberry patch filling his belly. I figured it was a boar as

there were no cubs in sight. After a while I ask Gary if he had ever called a bear in with a caller. He said no, he had never heard of doing that. I had never tried it before either so I decided to give it a try. I got out my elk bugling reed and made a few sounds like a dying rabbit. After a minute or two the boar looked up our way. We was about 500 yards above the bear and was not too concerned of any danger from it. I kept calling on the reed and finally the bear decided a dying rabbit would be a better meal than the huckleberries that he was tired of eating. He started down off the other side and crossed the basin coming our way. He disappeared under the brow of the hill in front of us but we knew he was coming our way. Gary said, you fool, you going to get us eat up yet by a bear. We got up and made haste down the mountain to the stump Draw and went home. There were too many bears in that country to be any elk there anyway.

Gary and I often hunted together and had many good trips into the mountains for elk and Deer. On one trip up the Bull River I called in and shot two nice Bulls. One was a big seven point and the other a five point. Curtis, my oldest son was with us and helped pack the meat out.

2011 update on Gary. He has been fighting cancer for the past 5 years. Today he is married to a sweet Japanese gal who would kill for him. Here is a picture of one of his birch bark canoe’s he has been building. Gary & his wife are dressed in their buck skinning outfits in the picture. I visited with them in July 2011 at heir home in Marysville, BC

Gary made the clothes, rifle’s & the birchbark Canoe. All materials for the Canoe came from the bush, the same way his ancestors made them.

Rob Nedjedly, Tony Lund and Richard in the Stump Draw basin 1987. The bear Gary and I called up the year after we took this picture was first sighted in the huckleberry patch behind us.

Richard in the Stump Draw 1995. This was the trip that Sherry went with me and she has never forgot that trip to this day. This was the last time I ever climbed into the Stump Draw. Don’t know if I could do it now in 2008.

This Elk had been shot a few years earlier in the rear hip area. I never noticed it as it was dark when I was quartering the elk but one rear quarter was much smaller that the other and the leg was shorter by several inches. When I boned out the meat I found the remains of a bullet and that one hip bone had been shattered and was several inches shorter than the good one. You can see the growth of calcium and bone where the break was. The wound was completely healed when I killed the bull. The antlers on the off side from the wound had grown deformed which all members of the Deer family when injured severely, the antlers opposite the wound will always grow deformed.

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I had not been in British Columbia long when I met Brian Ironmonger. Brian and I became friends and our friendship has lasted to this day. Brian had busted his neck a couple of years before I met him in a logging accident and it messed him up, left him without the full use of his legs and hands. He kind of shuffled around dragging his feet. But he was still a Cowboy, having rode many a Bronc and Bull in his younger days. Brian had more determination and was more stubborn than anyone I ever met. He never gave up. If he fell, which he did quite often, the worse mistake you could make was trying to help him up. He would give you a good cussing, which he was real good at, and say, “I fell by myself and I’ll damn well get up by myself”. After my first cussing I would always just leave him lying there and ignored him. He would eventually get back on his feet and act as if nothing had happened.

Brian was the biggest jokester I ever ran into. He was always pulling some pretty serious crap on his friends and neighbors. One St. Patrick’s day he went over to Howard Masons house when Howard and his wife was in town and put some stuff used for cleaning fish tanks in Howard’s bed. That was the night before St. Patrick’s day and the next day Howard and his wife had turned green from this stuff Brian put in his bed. Howard was furious and swore he would kill whoever pulled that stunt on him. Howard and the wife stayed green for over two weeks. I reckon the stuff finally just wore off.

Another time he took a pair of Mary’s dirty panties and put them in Big Joes pickup knowing Big Joes wife might find them which she did. She raised plenty of hell and gave Big Joe a hard time over this but the capper came a week later when Brian wrote a love letter to Big Joe, spilling perfume all over it and mailing it to Big Joe. Well, when Joe’s little wifey got her hands on this she just moved out and went home to Momma. It took Big Joe about two months to convince her that he had no part of what had gone down. He was suspecting Brian as he knew there was no one else that would do such a thing. I don’t know if Brian ever told Big Joe that he was responsible or not. Anyway it nearly ended Big Joe’s marriage.

Brian probably pulled off a jillion stunts like this over the years and if they was all recorded it would make a book. Brian eventually went down to the Dakotas in the states and enrolled in a saddle making school. He took to this like a Duck to water and saddle making became a way of life for him. Today he operates a school for saddle making and has clients all over the world. You can meet Brian today on his website, http://www.saddleshop.ca/index.html

One time a few years after the tale written below Brian and I had bought a piece of property together and both had built cabins there. One day in January with the snow about two feet deep and temperature down around minus 25 degrees I walked over to Brian’s and Mary’s for a visit and a cup of coffee. Brian had another visitor there at the time whose name I don’t remember. I do remember that he was always in trouble with the law and was reputed to be a drug dealer and a thief. I wondered right away what he was doing at Brian’s. Later on Brain told me he was hiding out from the law. I sat down at the table and was shooting the crap with them and enjoying a steaming cup of coffee when I noticed a Browning 22 leaning against the wall near the table. I knew Brian could not afford a rifle like this so I asked whose rifle it was. Brian visitor spoke up and said it was his and he wanted to sell it cheap as it was broken, that the barrel was loose in the action. I picked it up and right away saw what the problem was. It was nearly a new rifle and in mint shape. I figured the rifle had been stolen for dope money by Brian’s visitor. I didn’t let on that I knew the fix for the rifle and

asked what he wanted for the rifle and he replied fifty dollars. I remember that I had fifty one dollars in my wallet which at that time was a miracle in itself. I gave him the fifty bucks and the rifle was mine. When I finished the visit I headed towards the house which was about 200 yards away through the trees. I walked out of sight of Brian’s cabin where I would not be seen and unscrewed the barrel and tightened up the barrel nut a bit and screwed the barrel back on the action, it was a perfect fit. I later sold the rifle for two hundred bucks.

In 1970 Brian and his worse half, Mary, was renting a ranch near Elko, BC. And I visited him there many times. One fall day while there having coffee with Brian we saw a black Bear about 500 yards across the hayfield along the edge of the woods. At that time Brian nor I was any good at long range shooting. We both laid on the ground and got a good rest. Brian had a Remington 720 in 270 caliber and I had a BSA in 7 Rem. Mag. Both had 4 X scopes. Brian counted to three and we both shot. I didn’t think either of us came anywhere near the Bear as it took off into the Bush, hell for leather.

Brian had two old hounds that were pretty near useless but we decided to put them on the Bear to see if they would tree him. Brian put the dogs in his pickup and we drove over to where the Bear had been and put them on his track. Lo and behold, those old hounds took right off, baying like they had been doing it every day. There was a big hill there covered in timber and the Bear had went straight up it. I followed the dogs and Brian said he would drive his truck about a quarter mile further and come in around the back of the hill on a rough track you could get a 4 X 4 over and wait to see if the Bear would cross in front of him.

I could hear the dogs baying several hundred yards ahead of me as I climbed the steep hill. I got to the top and saw that the dogs and the Bear had gone down the other side towards the road that Brian was supposed to be on. I went on down and crossed the road not seeing Brian anywhere. I figured he had not had time to get this far. In front of me was a very steep hill, so steep I could hardly climb it. I could hear the dogs somewhere up there and it sounded like they were not moving. I climbed as hard and as fast as I could and could tell I was getting closer to the dogs. I came up over a slight rise and there about 10 yards away was the Bear standing on his back legs with his back up against some big boulders and he was pretty mad. I was very much out of breath, breathing hard and scared to boot. It would be a miracle if I would be able to hit a Barn if I was

inside it. The dogs were giving him hell but the very second he saw me he dropped on all fours and stared at me. My rifle was up the same instant and his big head filled the scope. The image was out of focus due to the Bear being so close but I could make out his features a bit so I gave him one between the eyeballs. All hell broke loose then as the Bear came down the hill in a blur with the dogs trying to grab a mouthful. If I had not jumped to one side I would have been run over. My first thought was that the Bear was still alive and about to eat me but when he came past me I could see he was rolling over and over. The dogs was raising hell trying to get a mouthful and I was plenty shook up. The Bear rolled and slid plumb down to the road I had just crossed.

I went down behind the dogs and the Bear finding the Bear piled up in the middle of the track. Brian was still nowhere to be seen so I started skinning the Bear out after I got the dogs tied to nearby trees. They was still excited and raising the Devil.

Brian finally drove up in the truck and helped me finish the skinning job. I cut off the feet and head, leaving them attached to the skin and finished turning them at home that night. We spread out the hide and measured it at a bit over seven feet square. Of all the Black Bears I killed over the next thirty years this one was the biggest.

I took the hide to a Taxidermist (Odd Ossland) to be made into a rug mount but he never did get it mounted. Three years passed and I finally got tired of calling him so I went over there one Saturday and ask him where my damn Bear hide was. He said he thought it had never came back from the tanners yet. I wondered why in Hell it would take three years to tan a darn bear hide. I could see a pile of hides there in a corner and told him I would look thru them as I could recognize my Bear hide by the bullet hole that was closer to the left eye than the right. About halfway through the pile I found it. It had been nicely tanned and the hair looked slick. I told Odd that I would take it with me as I didn’t think I wanted to wait another three years to have it mounted and made into a rug and so I took it home and nailed it on the wall. Several years later my Uncle Bob and Aunt May came for a visit and I gave the hide and a bunch of antlers to him and he carried them away to Virginia. I never saw the hide again nor Uncle Bob as he crossed over the Great Divide the following year and Aunt May a few years later. Uncle Bob had no kids and Aunt May left everything to her nieces and nephews so I guess the Bear hide ended up somewhere in North Carolina among her kinfolks.

I never did have anywhere this much excitement again hunting Bears and I never forgot this one. It was shot in the spring of the year and we figured if it had been shot in the late fall that it might have weighed 500 to 600 lbs. I never did shoot even a Grizzle that weighed that much but again they was all killed in the spring season right after they came out of hibernation and some Bears are downright skinny at that time of the year. Big Joe and I once shot a boar Grizzly that according to the tooth we turned in was 35 years old. He might have weighed 300 lbs but no more. When skinning him we found three 25 caliber bullets just under the skin. One had broken his lower jaw that had long since healed up but the lower jaw was twisted and the teeth didn’t mesh right. This might have explained the Bears poor condition as he probably had a tough time chewing his food. The bullets had silver jackets and we figured they were from a 250-3000 Savage as none penetrated very much. One was in his shoulder and one in a front leg. All had a hard growth around them. I was about 31 in 1974 when this bear was shot, so the bear, if he was 35 was four years older than I was. It was possible that this Bear could have been wounded way back in the 40s sometime as he was probably born around 1940.

On another Spring Bear hunt I was still hunting in some big timber at the back of Big Sand Creek along an old logging road. It was very quiet walking the road as it was covered with Pine and Spruce needles. I would walk about twenty feet and then stand still for about ten minutes and then move on for another twenty feet. As I was standing there as still as a mouse I heard quite a commotion over to my left. I moved ahead for a better look through the trees. I saw a Black Bear trying to either mate with or fight a larger brown black Bear. They were about 50 yards off the trail I was on. I decided to shoot the larger brown Bear which I did and it fell at the shot. I was carrying a Remington 700 in 7 Rem. Mag. And it usually did the trick on anything I pulled the trigger on. I always hand loaded the Sierra 160 grain Game King bullets at the fastest velocity I could get them to shoot good.

As soon as the sound died away the black Bear tore off in my direction about as hard as he could go. I did not know if he saw me and wanted to eat me or if he had been frightened by the sound of the shot and was merely trying to run away. Anyways there he was coming straight at me on a dead run. I bolted another round into the 7 Mag. And when the Bear was about 20 feet from me I gave it one in the chest which halted the Bear in his tracks. After a few minutes of trying to get my shakes under control I examined the Bear. It had been coming through some Alders when I had shot and I found that the bullet had went through a three inch Alder before entering the Bears chest. I was amazed that the Bear had been killed with this shot but when I skinned it out I saw that the bullet had went on into the chest cavity and through the boiler room doing some pretty awesome damage to the Bears heart and lungs. The Black turned out to be a Boar.

I skinned the Black out and then climbed up to where the Brown one was lying. It was a female and it had mange on its head and was nearly baldheaded but I skinned it out anyway. I skinned both Bears and turned the heads and feet as I was going to have to pack the hides out on my Trapper Nelson pack board and wanted to get rid of as much weight as possible. It was nearly dark when I finally made it back to our camp. I never knew if that Bear was going to eat me or what, but it did give me quite a fright. I guess it was trying to mate with the female and was really pissed off that I ended his love making session with the female. The time was May so I suppose that would have made the time right for Bears to breed. I could be all wet on that idea, heck, I ain’t no biologist. Anyways, the Blacks luck was bad and mind was good that day as his love life was wrecked forever.

Fast forward to about 1987. I took my old hunting and shooting buddy Dan Piccioni way up in the back of the Bull River Elk hunting. Dan was a great White tail hunter but had never shot a nice Bull elk. Dan had a by-pass operation on his heart the year before and he had to take it easy climbing and hunting in the mountains. Dan had bought along his Pop-up camper which was a nice big one and we parked it right beside the river in a nice little glade made by a push-out. A push-out is made by the road crew when making a logging road. They bull-doze the trees along for as far as they can push them and then bull-doze them off to one side off the road for about thirty or forty yards. They then cover the pile of broken trees, logs and stumps with some topsoil and plant grass on them. These places make good camping sites and also a good place to pick mushrooms as the mushrooms seem to like them and grow in great numbers every fall. All I ever picked was the Shaggy Manes and Morels, but Dan knew mushrooms better than I did and picked and cook several different ones. I was always afraid to eat anything other than a Morel or a Shaggy Mane so Dan got to eat all them other ones he cooked up.

Reckon I ought to tell you a bit about Dan. He was an Italian from the old school and very much a Northern Italian. He was very picky in his friends and would give them hell if they made the wrong comment about Italians. He had absolutely no use for Germans or Frenchmen. He once told me when we was on a bird hunt in Alberta that I was the only person that ever told him Italian jokes and lived to tell about it. We got along pretty good as long as he could be the boss, but if I asserted myself he would get pissed off. We use to shoot Trap together and traveled all over Western Canada and the Northwestern States to Trap shoots in the late 70s. Dan was about the best wing shot I ever saw, but when it came to Trap, I could clean his clock pretty good. We once ended up in Wallace Idaho in the late 70s on the way home from a shoot in Spokane Washington. Dan liked his women friends. I sat in the Bar and had a drink. Enuff said. Dan can’t deny this as he is now pushing up Daisies in his Garden. That’s where his wife Pat threw his ashes. She told me later that he wanted her to carry them up the Bull and throw them in the river but she figured that he had spent so much time in the garden that it would save her a 160 mile round trip on a gravel logging road so she unceremoniously dumped the ashes in the garden and then sold the place. I don’t blame her a bit as Dan treated her badly over the years and in later life she left him to do his drinking and womanizing and moved into town. Pat was a lot better friend to me than Dan ever was and she was a good friend to my wife Loretta, until Loretta passed over the Great Divide in 1992 and still to this day remains a great friend to me. The story I am about to tell you about was the last hunt I ever made with Dan. He lasted about another 12 years before his death in 2002.

We parked Dan’s camper in a push-out on the main Bull River road about five miles below the summit near Haynes Creek. Normally I camped at the mouth of Haynes creek but this time it was full of hunters and not enough room for another camp. The campsite at Haynes Creek was made by the loggers for their work camp when they logged Haynes Creek and Big & Little Tower Creeks that ran into Haynes Creek.

After a supper with a lot of Mushrooms thrown in we hit the sack. We was up early and had breakfast. It would take about three hours of climbing to reach the little lake in the basin near the top of Sugarloaf mountain where we planned to spend the next night. It was a good place for Elk as there was these huge Spruce trees left by the loggers as they could not get machinery into the basin. These trees were all around the little lake and looked just like a Park. There were a few open slide areas that ran plumb to the top of the mountain. I had bugled in Elk here several times before and I knew the only hunters we were likely to see was maybe the outfitter that guided this area although I had never run into him up here before.

Finally our packs were ready with everything we thought we would need for the overnight trip so we left the campsite and waded the Bull river and headed up the mountain. The Bull was not very big here as we were only a few miles below the summit where it started. We both had worn a pair of Running shoes for wading the river and after we crossed we removed them and put on our boots with a dry pair of socks. We left the running shoes and wet socks tied in a nearby tree for the return crossing.

Dan was not able to make much time as the going was pretty steep. There were no Alders here on the South side of the mountain which would have really slowed us down but the timber was pretty thick. I had been up here many times and knew the trail pretty good and Dan had to follow me. I would go up a hundred yards or so and sit down and wait on Dan. Occasionally I would whistle so he would know which way to come. When he caught up with me I would have to wait another twenty minutes or so for him to rest. The further we climbed the more I knew we would be lucky to reach the little lake above us before nightfall as our progress was greatly slowed by Dan’s slow go and having to rest so much due to his health. Normally I would reach the lake in about three hours if by myself. Whenever I was climbing really steep terrain I would climb counting ten breaths and then stop for as long as it took for ten breaths and then climb for another ten and rest for ten. It would be like that all the way up. What this amounted to was that I rested as much time as I was climbing and never got too much out of breath. The elevation was about 6000 feet and the air was a bit thinner up here. It made a big difference for a fellow that was not used to it.

I had been climbing for about a half hour and Dan was somewhere below me. I thought he would be within hearing distance as I tried to stay close enough that he could hear me whistling. Ahead of me was a big rock outcrop and I climbed up on the top of it and sit down for a rest and a little snack and to wait for Dan to catch up. I had been sitting there about fifteen minutes and had been whistling about every five minutes for Dan when I heard a little noise on my right side. I turned my head to see what had made the noise and I saw a huge Grizzly about 10 feet from me staring right into my eyes. He was so close I could smell him. My first thought was that I did not have a round chambered in the 7 Mag. And my second thought was that I would not have time to turn the rifle and fire if this Bear wanted to eat me. Before I could have a third thought the Bear turned inside out and took off down the side of the mountain like a racehorse, heading straight where I thought Dan would be. I fired the 7 Mag In the air three times to signal him and yelled as loud as I could. It sounded to me like the Bear had turned across the mountain and went crossways between me and Dan. I hoped the Bear would not run Dan over.

About this time the shakes started so I sit back down and thought about how close a call that had been. Evidently the Bear had heard me whistling and maybe thought I was a gopher or a Marmot (Western Groundhog that lives at high elevation) and that I was food for him to investigate. I reckon he was as surprised as I was when he saw me and made the decision to haul ass. If the Bear had been a sow with cubs I more than likely would not be here writing about it. The sow would have gone into a protective mode and would have beat me up before I had a chance to chamber a round and if she had two year old cubs with her they would have joined in on the beating. So I was just plain lucky or God was looking out for me. My Mom always said God looks out for fools and drunks. I wasn’t drunk so I reckon that made me a fool.

I waited and waited but no Dan, I was beginning to think the Bear had got him. I fired my rifle about every five minutes so he would know where I was. I gave up the whistling as that had nearly gotten me killed. Finally about a half hour later Dan showed up. He said he heard the shots but not me yelling. He had sit down for a rest and went to sleep. I had climbed on up further above him than I had thought. He said he never heard or saw the Bear.

I could see he was getting pretty worn out and tired so I mentioned to him that I knew where there was a level spot over to the East several hundred yards and we should just camp there for the night. Dan figured this was a good idea so we started over in that direction. There was deep draw with water in it between us and the level place and when we came to it we stopped to rest for a minute. About the time we were ready to move on a Bull Elk let out a bugle within 200 yards of us on the other side of the draw. Dan whipped out his bugle and made about the awe fullest Elk call I ever heard. I knew Dan had never hunted Elk much and did not have much experience calling Elk so I told him to put his caller away and let me do the calling. Well that was the wrong thing to say to Dan. He became extremely agitated and replied that he could call an Elk as good as anyone. I said to him, Dan, your bugling is about the worse I ever heard, you’re a damn good Whitetail hunter but you ain’t worth a shit on Elk, now put the damn caller back in your pack and let me do the calling. Dan jumps up and says, “Hell, I don’t want no damn Elk anyway. I’m going back to camp and go home”. Well, this kind of dumbfounded me and sort of hit me the wrong way so I says for the hell of it. “Hey Dan, I never saw an Italian that could hunt Elk anyway” At this he gets up and heads down the mountain. I yell after him “Hey Dan, if you don’t mind would you throw anything of mine out of the camper and leave it. I’ll get it later, I’m gonna stay and shoot this Bull and I might not get back before you go home, so don’t wait on me” I heard him mumble a couple of choice words as he disappeared down into the timber. That was the last time I saw Dan Piccioni for about two years and when I did see him it was at the Hospital in Cranbrook. I had gone to visit my friend Harry Struve and was going out the front door when I saw this old man sitting on a bench out front in a hospital gown smoking a cigarette. I walked on past thinking he looked familiar. Then it came to me that it was Dan. I walked over and sat dawn and said, “Hello Dan, how you doing, ain’t seen you since that Elk hunt up the Bull” He told me he had another heart attack and had driven himself to the Hospital the night before. He told me that Pat had left him and moved into town and he was by himself. I did not have to Ask him why she had left as I knew Dan spent his time at the Legion in Kimberly drinking red wine and chasing women. I wished him well and went about my way. I never saw Dan alive again. He crossed over the Great Divide while I was away in the states a few years later. My relationship with Dan was the hardest I ever endured in all my years and I did try hard to get along with him but our ways of living kept conflicting. So long Dan, hope you’re chasing Whitetails and there’s some Red Wine wherever you are.

About a half hour after Dan left I got out my bugle and give a few grunts on it. The Bull answered right away. I was not in a good place to shoot as I could only see maybe ten yards so I crossed the draw and went on to a place that had a ridge running down the hill. I climbed a Fir tree so I could see above the Alder patch that the Bull was in. I let out a good mean sounding bugle which was the worse thing I could have done. The Bull did not answer for a while and I started thinking he was not a herd Bull but a smaller Bull and he wanted nothing to do with a big old herd Bull. In a few minutes he did bugle from a farther distance away. I listened intently to determine if he was a smaller Bull and came to the conclusion he was. I grunted a few times and the Bull would answer but each time was a little further away. I got down out of the tree and made my way thru the Alders, finally finding a game trail going crossways of the mountain. Eventually I was close enough to hear the Elk. There were several cows with the Bull and he was having no part of a bigger Bull, being afraid he would loose his cows. He kept moving across the mountain just staying ahead of me. I knew I would not be able to call him close but was hoping to find a high place in the terrain that I would be able to see and shoot from. About a quarter mile further I finally topped out on a high ridge running up and down the mountain. I quickly moved up this ridge and found a small clearing I could see from. Watching carefully I finally spotted the cows moving single file through the Alders over the next ridge about 350 yards from me. I got ready with the rifle as I knew the Bull would be last in line and sure enough he was. I saw the antlers first then his left side as he turned a bit. I was ready and gave him one holding about even with the front of his shoulder as he was still moving. At the shot I heard the bullet impact on flesh and he disappeared from my view and I heard him crashing in some timber just below where he was when I shot. I made my way over to where I thought he was and found he had rolled over a bit of a cliff and was down the hillside about 75 feet from where he was shot. He was only a five point and I was disappointed at that. In some places a five point Elk is called a 5 X 5 but not here in Southeast B.C. Back east he would be called a ten point. Roy, my hunting pard here in Virginia still gets kind of perplexed when I call his 10 point Buck a five point. Heck, some of the fellows in Virginia call anything a point that they can hang a ring on.

The Elk I shot on Sugarloaf Mountain. I do not have the rifle but I still have that pair of Swaroski binoculars.

I opened the bull and gutted it and removed the rear quarters and back straps. I took one quarter and a back strap about 200 yards down the hill and pulled them about 15 feet up into a tree and tied off the rope to another nearby tree and lashing the other quarter and back strap to my pack board I started down the mountain. I would come back in the morning for the other quarter and back strap. It was almost a sure thing that the Bear I had the encounter with would be on the Elk carcass the next morning. I figured I ought to be able to sneak in and get my hindquarter and back strap without bothering the Bear if he was on the Elk. It was near dark by now and I had to use my flashlight to find my way. I didn’t care where I hit the river at, as there was an old logging road on my side running up and down the river and I would come out on it somewhere and then I could locate the crossing Dan and I had made this morning. Finally about Midnight I found the road and thinking I was further upstream than where I had left my running shoes I headed downstream and soon came to the orange tape I had tied on a tree there. Another fifteen minutes I was at the push-out. I had been hoping that Dan was not too mad at me to not leave my stuff. If he had not, I would have only Elk steak for supper. Sure enough I found my stuff in a pile right where the camper door had been. I took the Elk meat down the road about 200 yards and hung it in a tree so the Bears would not bother me during the night. I cut off a right nice size piece of back strap and went back and got me up a fire. While it was burning down I made up my bedroll and found the coffee, butter, bread and a can of Beans. After the fire was glowing coals I hung the steak over it and waited. When it cooked enough that I could not see the glow of the coals thru it I knew it was done perfect, and it was. I thought it was the best supper I ever had as I had only had a can of Sardines and crackers for lunch and that had been about 13 hours ago. Seemed like a week. I sat there for about an hour having my supper and thinking about the days events. Once a vehicle went by but it did not stop. I had hardly thought about the Bear after getting on the Elk and now I re-thought the whole thing, I came to the conclusion that I was very lucky with the Grizzly and somewhat unlucky with Dan, as I kind of felt bad because of the falling out we had. He was a hard man to have for a friend. I figured we both would get over the spat as we usually did and things would be as they were before, but I was to find out later that this day was the capper on our friendship.

The next morning I walked over to Haynes Creek about a half mile as I knew there was hunters camped there and I would know most of them. Sure enough Ernie and Bea were there and I had breakfast with them. Ernie and Bea Herzog were old friends of mine and still are today. They were getting too old to do much hunting but loved to just come and camp here during Elk season and visit with the hunters they had known and had camped with on this spot for years. Ernie asked me why I was walking and I said it was a long story, maybe someday I would tell him but I never did, just told him I was with Dan and he had gotten sick and went home. Ernie said him and Bea had planned a trip into town today for supplies and that they would drop me off at home. It was nearly 80 miles to Cranbrook and most of it was a gravel logging road. I told Ernie that I had to go get the Elk meat up on Sugarloaf and ask if he could wait. And he did and I went and got the meat. I did not go near the Elk carcass but I was sure the Bear was on it so I was pretty quiet getting my Elk meat. I was back at Haynes Creek in about four hours and Ernie hauled me into town after retrieving my camp and the meat I had hung in the tree there. I chopped the horns off the Bull and bought them out but should have left them as they were awkward to carry and were not a trophy. I later gave them to my son Curtis.

In 1984 Canadian Pacific Railroad decided to drive a tunnel through the top of Rodgers pass in an effort to cut the number of pusher Engines it took to push a freight train over the top of the pass. Rodgers Pass was plumb smack in the middle of Revelstoke National Park. At the time I was working out of local 1719 United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. I was one of the first carpenters dispatched to help build the three construction camps at the top of the pass to house all the construction workers. The first camp was on the east side or Golden side near the CPR pusher station and the second was near the top of the pass on the East side. The third camp was on the West side near the summit. This was the first camp built and where I worked. At that time we were allowed to drive our vehicles up to the lodge at the summit where we were to live until the first camp was built and in operation and then we would move into the camp.

We liked the Lodge as the food was great and we each had our own room with TV. The food was very expensive but Atco, our contractor paid for it. We brown bagged it for our lunch at the jobsite. I used to have a nice steak and lobster tail about 3 nights a week. After supper we would go into the Bar and have a drink or two. I remember that house coffee, Baileys Irish Cream, Kaloua and Grand Marnier with whipped cream and a cherry on top cost 10 bucks. Rye or Bourbon straight up was about 6 bucks. Needless to say, no one drank too much. I’ll never forget the Black Forest cake they had there. It was the best I ever had and I had a nice slice of it every night with my supper. It must have cost a small fortune for Atco to feed and put us up there at the Lodge. They must have been pretty happy when we finally got the kitchen going at the camp. That was the end of the Black Forest cake but I have to admit that construction camp food was pretty doggone good. We didn’t get Lobster tail but every Friday was seafood night and we had rib eye about two nights a week.

We had not yet finished the kitchen or bunk houses when the Bear came to dinner one day. There was a forty foot trailer set up that had a row of tables down the center so men could set on both sides. Everyone had their own place and when we got off the bus from the Lodge in the morning we put our brown bag lunches in the trailer on the table. We would come in at ten in the morning for coffee and tea and then have lunch at noon and another break at three for coffee.

There was this one carpenter Robbie Sorensen who was always first into the lunch shack every time we went for lunch or coffee. Robbie’s nickname was Sasquatch and he kind of looked like a Sasquatch and certainly had a Sasquatches disposition. His Dad, Axel who was a Union carpenter for years, had, at one time on his way to Canada from Denmark, stopped off in Greenland to work there for awhile and had married an Eskimo gal who was Sasquatches Mother. Sasquatch also had two brothers that was Union carpenters on this job as well as was their Dad, Axel.

This particular day we were all headed for the lunch shack at noon and as usual Sasquatch was leading the pack. He got to the trailer and was in there for a few minutes before the rest of us arrived. About the time we got to the door Sasquatch, yelling and screaming pretty near knocked the door off as he come tearing out. Before we could say a word, as quick as a wink this huge Black Bear came tearing out after Sasquatch, but he was not trying to catch him, he was only trying to escape. As the Bear disappeared into the bush we looked around for Sasquatch. He was about 200 yards away and still picking them up and putting them down. I swear his boots was smoking. He had never looked back and was headed plumb out of the country. It took us several minutes to get him calmed down so he could tell us his story. He said he had walked right in and sat down at his usual place and started to chow down when he noticed someone sitting across the table from him. Knowing he was always the first to enter the lunch shack he looked up to see who it was and saw this huge black man sitting there eating his lunch. Sasquatch said it took a few seconds for it to dawn on him that the huge black man was a Bear. He said the bear never made a move toward him, just sat there eating somebody’s lunch. He said it was at this point of realization that he got his feet moving and near tore down the door getting out. I guess all this commotion got the bear excited and got him into the idea that maybe he ought to vacate too.

I reckon this was the most fun I ever had in a construction camp anywhere. We all got a good long laugh out of that one. The Bear kept hanging around and after a few days the Conservation officers came and caught the Bear in a trap and hauled him off to another part of the Park.

Later that summer we had to park our vehicles out of the Park near Golden and ride the camp bus to camp which was nearly finished and we were living there. Sasquatch had the same light skin color that his Dad Axel had. If he had took after his mother he wouldn’t have had the problem with the sun. It was mid summer and it really got hot up there on the mountain and Sasquatch came down with bad sunburn and near heat stroke. He laid around camp for a day or two then he decided he would go home. When he couldn’t talk the company into letting a Teamster drive him to Golden where his truck was parked he decided to hitch hike. Well, he couldn’t get a ride. If you ever saw a Sasquatch hitch hiking would you give him a ride? Sasquatch looked much more like an Eskimo than he did Danish and with that long black hair and black eyes he was sort of mean looking. He told us later that he finally started waving a hundred dollar bill before someone stopped and gave him a lift to Golden. He said he was getting near a heat stroke and was barely able to stand before he was finally picked up. I know lots of stories on Sasquatch that took place over the years but I cannot tell them here.

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During the 1990s I was building houses in and around Cranbrook, BC. Cliff Lockrie and Monty Bisset were my drywall contractors. I also sold a home to Cliff in 1990. The following story was told to me by Cliff about 1994.

Lake MacDonald was located just north of Golden, BC. About a three hour drive north of Cranbrook. Cliff and Monty had planned a Spring Grizzly hunt in the area for the spring of 94. Lake MacDonald was a huge manmade lake backed up by Mica Dam and was really back in the boonies. The mountains surrounding it ran right down to the waters edge and held a good population of Grizzlies.

Cliff and Monty had taken a power boat up the lake to the mountain they wanted to hunt. Leaving the boat they hiked several miles up the creek that dumped into Lake MacDonald and made a camp here. The next day they glassed the mountain slide areas above them and located several Grizzlies feeding around the slide areas. In early spring Bears would search around the snow slides that had came down during the winter looking for the carcasses of dead animals that might have been caught in the slides. Sometimes they would find a Mountain Goat or gophers and other critters that had gotten caught in the slides. Finally deciding just exactly where they wanted to hunt they took enough grub to get them through the day and headed up the mountain to a slide area where they had spotted two bears, one of which was as far as they could tell a big old Grizzly Boar.

They finally got in a position just below the big Boar and a sow that was messing around the slide. The Boar was a bit further up the mountain than the sow. They decided Monty would shoot the Boar first. Monty had a .338 and he got a good rest and shot the Boar. The bullet knocked the bear down but it got up and ran out of the slide into the Timber to the right. The sow was not frightened by the shot and was still on the slide. Cliff decided the sow was big enough for him so he shot her, killing her outright with his 30-06. She fell and slid a couple of hundred yards down toward Cliff and Monty and came to a stop nearly at their feet.

Monty wanted to go on up and check out the Boar he had shot but Cliff convinced him to help him skin out the sow which would give the Boar time to expire and then they would both go and see if they could locate what they hoped would be a dead Bear. They had the sow nearly skinned out when Monty could not stand it any longer and told Cliff he was going to go up and check on the boar while Cliff finished the skinning job on the sow. Cliff told me that he knew it was foolish for Monty to go check out the bear by himself but that he could not convince Monty to wait.

Monty had been gone about fifteen minutes when Cliff heard a bear roaring and carrying on something fierce up above him, so fearing that Monty was in trouble he grabbed his 30-06 and tore out up the side of the mountain. About 200 yards up he found Monty lying in the water of the melting slide. Monty was not moving and Cliff thought he was dead. Getting up closer while keeping an eye out for the bear he found that Monty’s face and scalp had been tore off in places and ripped to shreds. The bear had first grabbed Monty by the thigh and had shook him nearly to death before going to work on his head. Monty was barely alive but talking. Cliff said Monty looked really bad and thought he would die. Monty begged Cliff to go for help but Cliff told him that the bear had to be killed or else he would come back and finish the job on him.

About this time Cliff heard something in the bush over to the right of the slide. He looked up just in time to see the big Boar Grizzly charging right at him and Monty. Cliff raised his rifle and shot at the bear, emptying his magazine. He did not know how many rounds had hit the Bear but it stopped his forward charge and he turned and ran off into the bush again. Cliff had come up the mountain with only enough rounds to fill his magazine and 10 extra rounds in the shell holder on his stock. Now he was left with only the ten rounds of which he reloaded with, leaving five rounds in the shell holder. Cliff could hear the Bear thrashing around in the brush so he decided to go after the bear to finish him off. He could hear the bear ahead of him as he quietly creped through the bush. He had gone several yards and then the bear became quiet. This lead Cliff to believe that the bear had expired. He advanced several more yards and then suddenly the bear came charging out of the thick brush right at him. The bear was nearly upon Cliff before he got the rifle working. He shot twice and when the bear was close he ran to one side and the bear passed him and tore down the side of the mountain. Cliff fired the remaining rounds in his rifle at the fleeing and enraged Grizzly.

Cliff said he followed the bear judging his location by the noise the bear made. About fifty yards down the mountain side he came to a clearing and the bear was going downhill in the middle of this clearing. It appeared that the bear could no longer climb uphill and he turned and saw Cliff but was unable to come uphill. Cliff had his last five rounds in the rifle and said he shot at four into the bear, The bear rolled down the very steep mountain side and off a small cliff. Cliff ran down to the edge and looked over. The Grizzly was lying there below him about thirty feet trying to get up. Cliff fired his last round into the Bears head which put him to sleep permanently.

Cliff made his way back up to where Monty lay and had a good look at Monty. His face was torn mostly off and to one side. Cliff said he tried to put Monty’s face back but Monty would scream at the pain. Cliff said he was surprised that there was not much bleeding. He dragged Monty out of the stream of ice cold water and built a fire on each side of him. He decided there was no way he could get Monty to the bottom of the mountain and to the boat so he decided to leave Monty and go for help. He said Monty begged him to stay with him as he felt he was going to die right where he lay. Cliff took off his coat and vest which was dry and put them on Monty and chambered a round in Monty’s rifle and laid it near him. As Cliff started down the mountain he figured he would never see Monty alive again. Cliff got down to their camp and reloaded his rifle from the ammo he had left there in his pack. He then made his way down to their boat and cranking it up he headed down the lake about forty miles to the highway. He had traveled about tem miles when he saw another camp of Bear hunters. He stopped and told them the story about Monty an asked if one of them would go for help and if the other fellow would go back with him to spend the night with Monty. He also borrowed a shirt and Jacket as he was getting pretty cold. The Sun had nearly set and the temperature was dropping fast. Cliff told me it was nearly midnight when he and the other hunter arrived back on the mountain side where Monty was lying. He was still alive but was getting hypothermia as the fires had gone out and he was still wet. Cliff had bought their sleeping bags so they got Monty into one and built up the fires. Cliff made coffee and they ate the grub that they had with them. Cliff said it was the first thing he had to eat since early that morning when the Bear attacked Monty. He said they all spent a very cold and uncomfortable night on the mountain trying to keep Monty alive.

The next morning soon after sun up a Chopper came in from Calgary for Monty. The pilot had located them from the smoke of their camp fire. They could not land the chopper as the mountainside was so steep so they lowered a basket for Monty and he was hauled up into the chopper and flown to the Calgary, Alberta hospital where he was treated. He was there for about three weeks before they let him come home. About a month after Monty went back to work he and Cliff came to do a drywall job in one of my houses. I nearly did not recognize Monty. I can tell you he was no where as pretty as he once was and he walked with a limp. We talked about the Bear attack for a few minutes and Monty told me the Bear had very bad breath when his head was in the Bears mouth and this was the hardest part of the whole thing to get over. Said he would wake up at night having nightmares still smelling the Bears breath. He told me his whole outlook on hunting had changed and at this point he didn’t care if he ever went hunting again. Cliff had skinned out both Bears and they had rug mounts made from them but Cliff kept both Bear rugs at his home as Monty wanted nothing to do with the big Boar Grizzly. I knew Monty for several years after that until I moved back to the states in 1999 and I never knew Monty to hunt again. I reckon if he lives to be a hundred years old, that he will never forget the Grizzly that nearly killed him.

In the spring of 1977, Dennis Head and I made a day trip into the back of Bull River hunting Bears. We were glassing the slides as the Bears in early spring spent a lot of time nosing around the slides looking for any critter that might have been killed by the snow slides. Bears are mighty hungry in the spring when they wake up from their winter’s long sleep. By fall of the year when a Grizzly goes into hibernation their claws are worn down from a summer of digging out Gophers and roots. During the winter nature replenishes the claws by growing them to full length again, sometimes reaching a length of four to 5 inches.

Bull River, look at the high water mark on rock at the left side. The river would be about 12 feet higher during the spring run off.

Hunting season on Bears in BC always was in the spring and Bears were always at their lightest weight at this time of the year. A bear in hibernation will use up nearly all of the several hundred pounds of fat he stored up during the summer. A Bear just going into hibernation will always weigh several hundred pounds more than in the spring. A lot of mountain Grizzlies killed in early spring would weigh no more than two hundred to four hundred pounds. One of a Bears favorite food is Huckleberries. They spend a lot of time in the Huckleberry patches in the summer and late fall. When Elk hunting in September you have to be mighty careful when going through a Huckleberry patch as there’s a good chance you will run into a feeding Grizzly or Black Bear. I have sat and watched from a safe distance, some really nice big Grizzles eating Huckleberries in September, wishing hunting season was open.

I met Dennis Head and his brother Steve about 1971 at the Wolverine sawmill at Elko where I worked for a summer running the de-barker. This was a stud mill only and sawed nothing but 2 X 4 studs. Both Dennis and Steve and I hunted a lot together in those years. They both loved hunting as much as I did and were pretty good hunters. Dennis was the oldest of the two and a big burly fellow with a good attitude. He had once gave an RCMP cop a good whipping and spent a couple of nights in the hoosegow for it. The Mountie had stopped Dennis for some sort of traffic violation and for some reason wanted Dennis to get out of the car. Dennis didn’t want to get out so the cop reached in and grabbed him and jerked him out. Whut-oh, bad news for the cop as this got Dennis all riled up and he proceeded to punch the cop’s lights out. Dennis went on home but the RCMP arrived shortly after with plenty of help. Dennis got a record for this and forever afterward his wife had to purchase firearms for him as he could not legally buy them.

Steve was younger than Dennis with a cool head and a steady aim. He was one of the best offhand shots I ever saw. He was about 24 years old when I first met him. Steve and I shot a lot of Trap together later on and he never missed many clay targets, always right in the center and the clays would burst in a puff of dust. One day Steve and I went Whitetail hunting on Sheep Mountain near Elko. I let Steve out of the truck and drove off to another spot where I would hunt. I stopped the truck about a quarter mile from Steve and when I got out I heard him shoot. I drove back to see if he had killed anything and he had. When Steve got out of the truck he had to answers natures call and have a dump. He had not much more than got his britches down when a nice Whitetail buck stepped out of the pines and Buck brush about fifty yards directly in front of him.

Steve’s rifle was nearby so he picked it up and shot the buck. He had to finish the dump and was just doing so when I drove up. We walked over to the Buck for a look and man was it ever a nice one. It had double brow tines on both sides that was about 6 inches in length. The G-2s was about 10 inches. If my memory is right after 35 years the Buck scored around 165. I believe the Buck took the East Kootenay for biggest Buck that year.

Getting back to the Bear hunt that day up the Bull River with Dennis. We were in my Ford 4 X 4 driving down a logging road in granny gear which is pretty slow. Suddenly I saw what I took to be a Bear cub come up the bank on my side into the road and turn and run down the road ahead of us. As soon as it turned I saw it was a full grown Wolverine. I threw on the brakes and jumped out with my rifle but Dennis was a bit quicker and fired at the running Wolverine that was hauling ass away as quick as he could pick them up and put them down. I saw the bullet strike just beyond the Wolverine. By this time I have a round chambered and took a snap shot at him. He was about fifty yards away and going around a bend in the road. Another few feet and he would have disappeared behind the road bank. At the shot the Wolverine went ass over tea kettle and skidded to a stop. When we examined him we saw the bullet from the 7 Mag. had entered just above the tail and traveled up the back, stopping right between the shoulder blades. I just knew the hide would have a pretty big hole where the bullet exited but the hide was not damaged in the least. We could hardly believe the bullet did not go plumb through the critter as it was much smaller than an Elk and most Elk I shot with the 160 grain Game King Sierra bullets would travel plumb though and stop against the hide on the far side.

When we skinned the varmint out we saw why the bullet had not gone all the way through. After getting the hide off, the body looked like a wrestler with huge bulging hard muscles. I had always heard that one of these things could fight off a Grizzly weighing many times what he weighed at about forty pounds and now I could understand why. His legs were short but very stout and the feet were big with short sharp claws. This was the first Wolverine Dennis or I had ever saw in the wilds and considered ourselves lucky to even see it, let alone shoot it. Many people and hunters have lived all their lives in the back country of British Columbia and never laid eyes on a live Wolverine. I had trapper friends that trapped a few each winter but even they told me they had never seen one in the wilds other than in their traps. I, later at home, fleshed the hide good, turning the lips ears and feet and salted it away. A couple of years later I had it mounted into a life size mount.

That morning on the way up the logging road we came to a big mud hole in the road so I stopped and put the tranny into four wheel drive. I eased into the mud hole and got stuck. The truck would not go either way. “Durn it, I said, I can’t believe we are stuck in this little bog hole in a four wheel drive pickup” I had a big chain come-a-long and a logging chain so we got this out and the chain just barely reached the one single Spruce on the side of the road behind the truck. We got everything all connected and I got in the truck to gun it and Dennis took up the slack. We managed to move the truck about two feet when the Spruce suddenly gave way and toppled over. It was only about a six inch diameter trunk on it and we didn’t have enough chain to reach another tree. We were pretty perturbed at this turn of events and just got out the thermos jugs and sat there having coffee and trying to figure out what to do. “Heck, said Dennis, there might not be anyone this way for a week, we gotta figure some way to get out or we might be here awhile”. “Yeah, I said, its about 80 miles to the highway, an I ain’t up to walking, just exactly what do you recommend?” “Well Dennis said, its breakup now and the logging crews won’t be driving up and down the roads, Maybe we just ought to sit here til the mud hole just dries up and we can go on our merry way,he he” We thought that was funny and had a good laugh. “Rich, you did turn in the hubs, didn’t you?” “Heck, I replied, I ain”t turned them out since we started Bear hunting a couple of weeks ago”. “Well shit, and speaking of that, I gotta have one” and he got up and went to the truck and got the ass swipe and walked off into the bush. I got up and walked over to the truck and looked at the hub on the drivers side just for the heck of it. Right away I saw that the hubs was not locked. Hmmmm..how could I be that dumb?, I thought. I locked both hubs and went back and sat down. I got to thinking this was a good time to get a good one on Dennis and when he came back I said to him. “Hey Dennis, I know what we can do”. “What, he sez? “ “Well,….... maybe we ought to do an Indian dance and pray to the Great Spirit”. “Shoot Richard, I know you ain’t dumb enough to even think that would do any good”. I got up and walked over near the truck and did an Indian dance and muttered a few words in what I thought would pass for Indian lingo. Dennis was laughing at me, but when I got in the truck and cranked it up and drove right out of the mud hole he stopped laughing and had a look of amazement on his face. Now it was my time to laugh and I laid it on good. “I don’t know what you did Richard”, said Dennis, “But I know that dancing jig didn’t do no good”. We loaded everything in and went on up the road and Dennis kept asking how I had got the truck to just drive right out of the mud hole. “Dennis, I said, I swear I didn’t do nothing but that Indian dance and praying to the Great Spirit to help us out of that hole”. And I did not tell him the truth until several weeks later when I heard him telling some friends how I got the truck unstuck by doing the Indian jig. He glared at me pretty hard and for a minute I thought I might be smart to run, but then he started laughing about it. I guess the Great Spirits was getting even with me as the next fall I was up Sand Creek Elk hunting by myself and got the truck stuck WITH the hubs locked in four wheel drive. I was right in the middle of the road and no one would be able to get by me on either side. It was a little after dark and I knew the chances was small that any one would be coming in tonight, so I got out and started hoofing it. I left the truck unlocked with the key in it in case someone did come by before I got back and they could pull it out and get by. I was about six miles from the highway and then another three to my house near Galloway. I believe I finally got home about midnight and had walked every step of the way. The next day I called a buddy that had a four wheel drive and he picked me up and we went and got the truck out. He asked how I got home and I said. “Walked it, every damn step” and I was thinking about getting stuck with Dennis and the Indian dance.

The headwaters are to the left, down stream is to the right, Fernie BC is just over the 1st mountain range

Dad was born in Pineville, Kentucky in 1916 in a rough and dirty coal mining town. His dad, my granddad, was George Robert Franklin and his mother, Sarah Jane Knuckles, was my Grandma. Dad was given the name John Paul Franklin. When Sarah was naming Dad, she said, “this boy is going to be a preacher one day so I’m going to name him John Paul, after two of the most important men in the Bible”. He had one brother that was two and a half years older. His name was Robert Edward Franklin. Robert was Granddad’s middle name and Edward was from his Great Grandfather, Edward Dearing.

In 1914 my Granddad George could not find work locally here in the Roanoke Valley so he and his brother, Archibald, my great uncle went out to Kentucky in search of work. They were carpenters and they built several warehouses and did misc. Carpentry work. Arch did not like being away from home so he soon returned to Bedford County. Granddad George remained in Pineville and found a job as a teamster driving freight wagons for a fellow by the name of Robert Sanders. This man Sanders owned a freighting and horse rental outfit in Pineville and freighted for the coal mines. He was an evil man and was a heavy drinker. He was mean as hell and had shot several men in his lifetime. Robert Sanders was married to a beautiful black haired gal of mostly Indian descent who was about 20 years younger than he was.

Granddad George worked as a teamster for Robert Sanders and the old man kept him busy on the road freighting stuff all over the place, but right off Granddad took a liking to this black haired beauty that old man Sanders abused about every chance he got. Wasn’t much Granddad could do about the situation as Miss Sarah was another mans wife. But this was about to change soon.

One day a couple of fellows came into the office of Mr. Sanders and wanted to rent a horse for dredging some sand out of the river. Mr. Sanders told them he only had one horse available at the time and that it was a mare in foul. He explained to them that under no circumstances was the mare to be put in the cold water as she might lose the foal she was carrying. The two men agreed to this and promised Mr. Sanders that the mare need not be in the water.

They took the mare and worked her for a couple of days and then brought her back. A couple of days later the mare sure enough did lose the foal. Of course Mr. Sanders blamed it on the men that used her for the dredging of the sand from the river. That Saturday, Mr. Sanders, being a drinking man started in earnest to get drunk. By Sunday morning, being sufficiently fortified with corn whisky, told Sarah he was going up to see those hoodlums and settle up the score for causing the mare to drop the foal. Mr. Sanders always packed a long barreled Colt .45 revolver every day of his life. He made sure all six chambers had a round in it and walked the mile to the house where the two men were boarding. When he arrived there the fellows were sitting on the front porch smoking. Mr. Sanders walked through the gate and called out to them that he was there to settle up and to send them both to hell for what they had done. Before he could get the Colt into action both men jumped up with rifles in their hands and promptly sent Mr. Sanders straight to hell. He never fired one shot. Instead of settling the score, he now lay dead in the dirt. These two men were never tried for the killing as it was considered self defense. Besides that, the general feelings about town was that the right man had been shot that Sunday morning.

Now that the picture had changed with the evil old man Sanders being removed from it, Granddad saw his chance and started courting Miss Sarah. In a few months they were married and set up housekeeping there in Pineville. Dad’s brother Robert was the first born and two and a half years later in 1916 Dad was born. Life was darn tough there in Pineville and about nine months later Grandma Sarah came down with pneumonia and never recovered. She passed away when Dad was nine months old. Dad and Uncle Robert never knew their Mother at all.

My Grandfather on Dads side, George R. Franklin while working for Mr. Sanders in Kentucky about 1909

That same year Granddad George moved back to his father John’s farm in Goodview, Virginia with Dad and Uncle Robert. He soon found a job with the Norfolk & Western Railway company in Roanoke. Granddad George then moved into a boarding house in Roanoke and left Robert and Dad with his Father John and his mom Pocahontas. My Great Grandma Poca, as she was called was a daughter of Edward Dearing. Before Granddad Robert and Uncle Arch went to Kentucky, Granddad had been courting Pauline Burkholder of Roanoke. He picked up this romance where it had been left a few years before and they were soon married. Dad and Robert would spend the summers together at Granddad John’s farm in Goodview. When Robert reached school age George would bring Robert back to live in Vinton so Robert could attend school there as George and Pauline thought the Vinton schools were better than the country schools in Bedford County where the little burg of Goodview was located. When George would come to get Robert to take him back to Vinton, Dad and Robert would run off into the woods and hide because they wanted to stay together on the farm. This happened several years in a row, sometimes George would have to return a week later to get Robert because the boys couldn’t be found and they wouldn’t come when they were called. Dad never liked Pauline and did not like living in town. When Dad became of school age, George would take him to Vinton as well as Robert, but each time Their Granddad John would drive the ten miles to Vinton, Dad would hide in the wagon and go home with his Granddad John to the farm. After this happened a few times, George finally gave in and let Dad live with his Granddad John and go to school in Goodview. So Dad grew up on the farm and went to school nearby and Uncle Robert lived in Vinton and attended the Vinton schools. Uncle Robert was like a second Father to me and my sisters and brother. He served time in the Army during the war but never saw combat. He married May Lily McLean from North Carolina, who became a schoolteacher and the boss around their house. Aunt May never had any kids nor did she want any. Her career was the most important thing in her life and took precedence over Uncle Robert’s work and everything else. Uncle Robert was a great woodworker and had a nice little shop behind his house where he spent many hours after retiring from his job at American Bridgeworks in Roanoke. Aunt May had four nieces and nephews on her side the same as Uncle Robert had me, brother Johnny and Betty and Sarah as nieces and nephews. Uncle Robert had a small farm where he raised a few head of cows but his biggest thing was the collecting of antiques. Uncle Robert an Aunt May drove to British Columbia in 1975 to visit my family and I. They were there about a week and we greatly enjoyed their visit with us. I gathered up a lot of Deer Antlers and assorted Bearskins and Coyote hides and gave them to Uncle Robert as he liked this kind of stuff. One day before they left Uncle Robert took me aside and said to me. “Richard, Next year this time I will be gone so I am glad I had this chance to see you again”

The next year, 1976, Uncle Robert took his old single shot shotgun that I had refinished for him many years before, and went out and sat on the porch of the old slave cabin that he had torn down, hauled home and rebuilt in his back yard and blew his brains out. This was a direct result of living his life with a woman he loved and who treated him as a piece of crap all his life. Her career was the most important thing in her life. She never bore any kids which Uncle Robert wanted badly. Some say she did get pregnant but aborted the pregnancy so it would not interrupt her life. Uncle Robert had wanted her to retire for several years so they could do things together and go places together. I guess Uncle Robert was tired of messing with her and shot himself on the very same day she did retire. I guess he thought this was his way of getting even with a bitch that he loved but had caused him much misery all his life. Aunt May lived on for several years, finally passing away at about 80 years of life. The property her and Uncle Robert owned was worth about five hundred thousand dollars. The will left by Uncle Robert never surfaced. Aunt May gave my brother, two sisters and I, four thousand dollars each and left everything else to her four nieces and nephews. Uncle Robert’s death was very hard on my Dad, as they had always been very close. Dad, over the years had helped Uncle Robert build up his farm, helping with all the Barns and house. Uncle Robert always worked in town so Dad put up all of Uncle Roberts hay and looked after his livestock for many years.

Granddad George had a sister whom was always called Aunt Bessie. She never married until late in life and always lived at home with Granddad John. Dad learned how to farm at an early age and was plowing fields and planting with a team of horses at the age of twelve. Grand dad John passed away when Dad was in his early teens, and left the farm to Aunt Bessie.

When Dad was 17 he joined the Army and was stationed in Hawaii at Schofield Barracks when his dad George was killed in a railroad accident. Dad was not notified of the death until three months later and did not have the opportunity to attend his Dads funeral. Dad spent four years in the Army and when he returned to the states he married my mother, Ruby Moles, in 1940. When they first married they lived at Granddad John’s farm but soon Dad purchased a hundred acre farm nearby which was called the old Feather place.

Right after Dad and Mom moved into the old log house at their new farm, Aunt Bessie, at the age of about 40 married a drunk by the name of John Cowhig, who was about fifteen years younger than Bessie. They lived together a couple of years until Aunt Bessie died and then John sold the old home place and drank up the proceeds. My Mom says that John Cowhig didn’t know how to do anything and what he did know he was too lazy to do. Uncle Arch, Granddad’s brother once said of John Cowhig, “The extent of John Cowhig’s efforts one summer was he built three rabbit traps and fell in the creek twice”. That is how the place got out of our family and all this goings on was hard on my Dad. His Granddad John had always wanted Dad to have the farm but that was not to be.

My granddad George had an older brother named Archibald Franklin. I grew up thinking Uncle Arch was my granddad as he was always around the farm helping my dad with the building of barns, outbuildings, a dairy barn and eventually they tore down the old log house and Dad and Uncle Arch built a new cinderblock house. I and my older sister Sarah were born in the old log house but we grew up in the new one that Dad and Uncle Arch built. My younger brother Johnny and sister Betty were born in the hospital in Roanoke.

Uncle Arch was a real jokester and was always teasing us kids. He had a small farm nearby and raised Burly Tobacco. He made his own homespun twists which he added a lot of licorice to. This made the chewing tobacco smell good enough to eat, which I did try to do later on and was made deathly sick from swallowing it. This gave Uncle Arch a good laugh. Uncle Arch always carried in his pockets a big red handkerchief, a folding carpenters rule, his plug of homespun chewing tobacco, a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes, a whetstone and a good Boker Tree Brand pocket knife. I can remember seeing him many times sitting in our backyard chewing tobacco and whetting the pocket knife. Once in a while he would spit out the chew and light up one of them Chesterfields. I never remember a time the knife would not be sharp enough to shave with. Uncle Arch took great pride in having a sharp knife. He taught me how to sharpen a knife and I have always remembered to this day. Arch was a good carpenter and built many of the old one room school houses around the county. Uncle Arch bought one car in his life, A Model T Ford. He never did get the hang of driving it and tore down several fences and gates, so he sold it. Dad did learn to drive the Model T and drove Arch’s son Harry and himself around in it some before Arch sold it. Uncle Arch would carry his toolbox on his shoulder and walk many miles to build things for people. He had a team of razorback mules that I would ride to and from the fields at times and I remember it was very hard on the crotch riding these mules. Dad had a team of good horses and they possessed nice round backs that a marble could be rolled down their backbone and was easy on your butt.

Uncle Arch had two sons, Harry and Berkley. Harry was an alcoholic all his life and died the death of an alcoholic early. Berkley, whom everyone called Mutt was into booze most of his life but became a confirmed alcoholic in his later years and died from alcohol abuse. I liked Mutt pretty good. He was a good woodworker and made many things in his little shop. He also became a Librarian and held this job for a long time. He was a collector of books and had many thousands of books. He bought a railroad caboose and made it into a place to keep books. Mutt’s big hang-up in life was his wife Betsy, who pulled up stakes and left him to his own devices. Mutt told me she even took the light bulbs when she left. Mutt was a second cousin on my Dads side and Betsy was a first cousin on my Moms side. Mutt never got over Betsy leaving him as he loved her always, even though he could not get his life in order so that she would live with him. He died a sad and lonely death without her. Whenever I would come in from out West to visit in Virginia I would try to always go visit with Mutt for I always thought a great deal of him.

My Mother was born Ruby James Moles. Her Dad was George Wilson Moles and her mother was Lillian Elizabeth Motley. Granddad Moles married Grandma when she was 16 years old. On the way home from the wedding Granddad stopped the buggy and took out a pint of Whisky. He broke the bottle on the wagon wheel and told Grandma that that would be the end of drinking in his life, and it was. Granddad Moles was a very religious man and lived a good life. He was an outstanding individual in the community and was thought well of by everyone all his life. Mom had five brothers and five sisters. They were Bernard, Aubrey, Edward the wild one, Alvin and George Walker, the youngest son. The girls were Princess Aurelia, Dorothy, Ruby, my Mom, Mary, my favorite Aunt whom I love as my Mother, Ellery and Rachel, the youngest girl who is only a couple of years older than I am.

All of these Aunts and Uncles have lived a good life and a Christian life which is a direct reflection on the parents that Granddaddy and Grandma Moles was to them. Mom was the third oldest of the eleven kids. She helped to raise all the younger ones till she and Dad married in 1940. Mom is 90 now and I go see her every day. Each time she will sit and give me a history lesson of things that happened long ago. Her mind is like a book, never forgetting even the smallest detail.

Mom and Dad attended the same grade school in a little one room school house. Mom and her sisters walked the mile and a half each day to and from school, thru rain, snow sleet and the mud. Dad had it a bit easier as he lived about a half mile from the school and did not have so far to walk. During those years around 1926 there were no gravel or paved roads. Every road was just a dirt road and in rainstorms and in wintertime they became a quagmire of mud. Here in this part of Virginia the soil is a dark red and made a very dirty sticky mud that showed up everywhere and was hard to clean off your shoes and boots.

Here at grade school in 1926, Mom met my Dad. She fell in love with him then, at about the age of seven or eight. She thought Dad was the most handsome boy she had ever seen, with his coal black hair and handsome good looks. She felt that Dad never ever noticed her, as he was older and they hardly ever talked. Mom and Dad attended this school to about the eighth grade. They then went to the High School at Stewartsville. Moms older sisters, Aurelia and Dorothy walked about three miles to this school each day but the year Mom started there Granddad Moles purchased a School bus, which was one of the first in the county. So Mom got to ride the school bus until she Graduated from High School. She also got to ride the School bus to town, to Church and every where Granddad took them as it was their first motor vehicle and it became a family car as well. Granddad bought the Ford truck chassis and drove it into North Carolina and had the bus body hand built onto the Ford chassis. Nobody made School buses at that time. Mom learned to drive on this school bus and could drive it as well as anyone.

Dad left School and joined the Army when he was about 17 which would have been around 1935. He spent four years in the Army as there was not much work to be had in civilian life and especially around Chamblissburg, Virginia. In 1939 he came home and soon started dating Mom. Things got serious and so one day they were driving down the road from Vinton to Chamblissburg in Dads Ford Coupe, Dad pulled off the road to a side road. He had with him pictures of all his old girlfriends. He tore all these up and threw them away. He told Mom they was gone forever and asked her to marry him. Of course Mom was very happy to accept his offer and they were married in Beaverdam Church in 1940. For their honeymoon they drove the one hundred miles to Wytheville, Virginia and spent a night in the Hotel there.

Mom and Dad lived for a while at my Great Granddaddy Johns farm which is just about a half mile down the hollow from where I am now sitting writing about it. They soon purchased a one hundred acre farm which was all growed up in timber and brush, with big red gullies all over it. Uncle Arch told Dad, “Paul, you will never make a living on that place, its just all rocks and gullies”. Dad set to work sawing timber with a crosscut saw and clearing the land by hand. Uncle Arch helped him build a barn and later on, a new house. The house that was on the place was an old log home built before the Civil war and the wind just kind of blew through the house as Mom put it. Sarah, my older sister was born here in 1941 and I came along in 1943. It was a very cold day in May that I came into the world. Dad had to go to Uncle Arch’s house and borrow a tin heater to get some heat into the room. Dr. Potter Richards was the Doc that bought me into the world. He told Mom, “Ruby, this is about the most healthiest boy I ever saw”. Of course he did not mention to Mom that he had to take away the pistol I had in my hand when I came out of the world. My brother Johnny and sister Betty were later on born at the hospital in Roanoke.

Right after I was born, the war in Europe was heating up and they was all getting ready for D-day. They were calling for volunteers and as Dad had fours years experience in the Army, he felt it was his duty to go. Dad was soon shipped overseas where he went across the Normandy beach two months after D-day. He fought across France and into Germany where he somehow manage to survive the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest. He said that on two occasions they were down to only a handful of men before new recruits came in. He was badly wounded here and that was the end of the war for him. He spent four months in the hospital in England and another eight months in Belgium guarding German POWs before coming back to the farm in Bedford County. He was awarded the Bronze and Silver stars as well as two Purple Hearts. Dad was a changed man after the war. He no longer enjoyed hunting and did not enjoy guns as he did before the war. Dad hardly ever talked about his experiences in the war, and when he did he would get tears in his eyes and have to stop.

Dad went back to work trying to make a go of it on the Farm. He cleared most of the land and eventually built a Dairy Barn and some Silos. He transformed the pile of rocks and red gullies into one of the best looking Dairy Farms in Bedford County. He attended night classes on Dairy and farming in general. He eventually attended a Veterinarian school in Ohio and became his own veterinarian and a Vet. for all the neighbors cows.

Dads farm where I grew up. Picture taken about 1990, 32 years after Dad sold it and bought a larger farm nearby.

In 1957 Dad decided he had outgrown the hundred acre farm and sold it and bought a much larger farm down the road about 30 miles. It was mostly cleared but had no barns or fences. Johnnie and I were big enough at this time to help with the work. We built a milking parlor and a huge Hay barn with a tramp shed under the hayloft. We built a grainery and other outbuildings and many miles of new barbwire fencing. Dad transformed this farm into a model farm. All us kids grew up here and left here to go out into the world on our own.

Dad had always felt a need to become a preacher and so in 1966 after all us kids were on our own he and Mom sold the farm and went to Fruitland Bible College in North Carolina. Mom attended every class that Dad did and both graduated with Associates degrees. I remember that Dad sold all the dairy cows, equipment, machinery and land for a total of fifty five thousand dollars. After paying off his debt, he had about twelve thousand left. That’s TWELVE THOUSAND DOLLARS for 26 years of hard labor. That figures out to be EIGHTY-THREE DOLLARS A MONTH.

Dad took a Baptist Church at Rustburg, Va. and never looked back after this. He kept on furthering his education until he obtained a Doctorate degree in Theology. He held pastor ship at eight Baptist Churches over the years and in many different parts of Virginia and Maryland.

Johnnie also eventually went to Bible college and became a Baptist preacher. He preached for several years and held several pastor ships until his wife Brenda decided her career was more important than Johnnie’s preaching. She had worked her way up in the lab at Lynchburg General Hospital and was, she thought, making more money than Johnnie ever would preaching. So Johnnie succumbed to Brenda’s will, letting her rule the roost. He eventually took a job at Liberty University in Lynchburg on Jerry Falwells campus police force, where he still works today. He fast became good friends with Jerry and Macel and took over the guarding of Jerry’s home in Lynchburg. Jerry passed away a year or so ago but Macel does not want Johnnie to leave. He has mentioned he would like to get another Church and go back to preaching, but I believe he would have to get a divorce before this could happen.

Johnnie and Brenda had two girls, Rachel and Elizabeth. He and Brenda sent both girls to the best college’s available. Today in 2009 Rachel is married and Elizabeth is furthering her education. Brenda is head cheese in the Lab at the hospital.

Johnnie is the only person in this world who ever succeeded in giving me a bloody nose. At about the age of 15. Johnnie was always quick-tempered and would fight at the drop of a hat. I usually took a little more prodding before I got mad.

Sarah married her high school Sweetheart Garry Patsel. They had two sweet girls, Angelia and Julie. Garry was a woman chaser and the marriage only lasted about three years. Sarah then married a devil in disguise and has been in misery since. She has two daughters, Rebecca and Felicia and a son, David, by this man, Paul Hair. Today Sarah is separated from Paul and lives in her own home near Baltimore, Maryland. Felicia is a drug addict, about 30 years old (2011 update. Felicia passed away from an overdose last spring) and David, who is about 25, has mental deficiencies and is addicted to a hardcore computer game he has been playing since about the age of 14. Both addicts still live and mooch off their dear and good Mother, and she, out of the tender heart she has, refuses to kick them out into the world. Both children are Demon-ridden and are slowly killing their mother, who is my sister. And then there is Betty, my youngest sister. Betty was the only one of us four kids to attend College. She graduated and became a School teacher. Betty married a classmate she met at college, Dwight Edmonds. Her and Dwight had one son, Jeremy. Betty divorced Dwight about 1980 or so. She has lived the rest of her life alone.(2011 update, Betty married one of her old high school sweethearts 2 years ago and they get along wonderfully) She obtained custody of Jeremy and raised him to be a fine outstanding young man. When Jeremy became eighteen he got a good job and saved five hundred dollars and bought his first car. He had not had it long when he was killed in an accident with it in 1992. His death nearly destroyed Betty. She has struggled many years with it. Today I believe she has come a long way. She lives with Mom and looks after her, devoting her whole life to her Mother as she did to our Dad when he was alive, these last ten years. Betty has spent many a long night at the Hospitals sitting with both Mom and or Dad when no one else could or would do it, I live nearby and Betty does many things for me as well. I am a bachelor and everyone knows bachelors have a hard time looking after themselves.

Dad preached nearly every Sunday and eventually began a successful correspondent Christian School. He had many graduates all over the world and did this in his spare time for many years. Finally at age 80 he stopped preaching regularly. He sat around for a month or two and did not like that. He then went back to School and earned a license to sell Real Estate. He always kept up with farming and livestock and decided he wanted to sell a few farms. After getting his license he went into Town one day to talk to a Real Estate Agent about getting his own office and selling Farms. The Real Estate agent told Dad that he would have to work for several years under another Real Estate office before he could begin his own. When he got back home, Mom asked him how it went. Dad told her what the agent had told him, finally saying, “Heck, Ruby, I have never worked for another man and I’m darn sure I am not going to start now” So that was the end of selling real Estate for Dad.

In 1963 I married my High School Sweetheart. Her name was Loretta Faye Clark. She was a five foot 100 pound red-haired beauty and the love of my life. She was a very cheerful outgoing gal that made friends easily. She had two brothers, Cedric Odell Jr. who we all called Junior and a younger brother David. She had an older sister whose name was Shirley.

We were married in Loretta’s parents home in 1963, She was 18 and I was 20. Kids, we were for sure. I gave the preacher ten bucks for marrying us. I had no car then so borrowed Dads car to drive home to a rented house from the wedding. David, being a smart ass, had let the air out of the tires. I wanted to tromp him right then and there but the families would not let me. We never had a Honeymoon and went to work the following day. Curtis, our oldest son was born that November. He was a happy go-lucky kid from that first day. That was the November that John Kennedy was shot. Even today when I think of one, I think of the other.

I worked then in a textile mill in Bedford called the woolen mill. I had been there for a couple of months when one night on the graveyard shift I went out on the fire escape for a smoke like we always did. The Boss came out after me and told me the rules had been changed and there was to be no more smoking. I said to him, “ well, boss, I reckon you can go fill out my time. I’m just gonna go on down this fire escape and get my car and go home, I ain’t never liked it none here anyway”. And so I did.

My next job was in another textile mill in the little town of Altavista, Virginia. I worked here for about a year until the grass turned green in the spring and the weather got warm again. Driving home one day, I figured I would like to go fishing the next day. So I went fishing and never went back to that job either.

My family raised holy crap about me quitting , said a man had to work to support his family. Well, I knowed a man had to work, but I also knowed I was not about to spend my life in a darn ole textile mill, heck I wanted to be outside, like on the farm where you could cut a good one and the wind would carry the smell away from you, not linger around like it did inside of a textile plant where there was no wind. I went fishing for a week or two that spring and then found a job as a carpenter’s helper in Roanoke with a nice fellow by the name of Onnie Williamson, who lived up the road a few miles from my Dads farm. I went to work for Onnie and that was the beginning of my work as a carpenter. It was outside and I was learning how to do something good, to make things with my hands, which I always enjoyed.

While growing up my folks never had much money and could not afford to buy toys and unnecessary things for us kids, so I learned to make about everything I played with. I made ice skates from the runners of an old sleigh-riding sled that worked great. I made snow skis from rough oak 1 X 4s. I went many a mile on them. I built a Canoe once from popular poles and covered it with burlap. I coated it all with a five gallon pail of tar my Dad gave me. When it was done Dad hauled it over to our fish pond on a trailer behind the tractor. We put it in the water and it immediately sank to the bottom. I think I worked on that thing all winter. I was maybe twelve at the time. Another time I built a nice Bow and a set of arrows. I made the Bow from a piece of Hickory, which was tough as steel, carving it with Dads drawknife and my pocket knife. I wrapped leather around the handle for the grip. It was a nice shaped bow with flat limbs. It was so strong that the only thing that would take the pull was to use a piece of the electric fence wire that was to found on any farm. I made the arrows from the straight shoots that grew in the hedge by our yard. They were tough and straight. I feathered them with feathers from Moms chickens and put twenty penny nails on the fronts for points. I wrapped the arrow and nails with fine stout fishing string and then soaked the string with glue. These things shot wonderfully straight and far, far away. Maybe three hundred yards. I remember one day Betty was sitting in the backyard on a blanket. I was shooting at a target on the house about 30 feet away. She was kind of in the line of fire and I eventually stuck an arrow in her shoulder, the nail being buried right up to the wood. I seen this was bad and not wanting anyone to see the arrow sticking in her, I ran over and jerked it out. Blood was flowing freely from the wound but soon there would be tears flowing freely from my eyes as my Dad lost no time in tuning me up a bit.

It must have been the following Christmas that one of my buddies, Eugene Blount, who lived about a half-mile up the road came down on Christmas morning to show me the factory fiberglass bow and arrows that his parents had given him for Christmas. Eugene’s family was better off than mine was and bought him a lot of good things for Christmas. We went out into the Alfalfa field and Eugene would shoot his arrows, bragging on how far they would go. He would not let me lay a finger on the bow so I went to the house and got my home made bow and arrows. I knew it would out distance Eugene’s bow easily, and proceeded to shoot about twice as far as Eugene could. He didn’t think this was fair play and took his factory bow and arrows and went home.

Well, anyway, I went on an growed up and got married. Our second son, Christopher was born on August 16^th 1966. I was at the little dirt go-cart race track about a mile from home when I was called that Loretta had to go to the hospital to have Chris. I rushed home and got her into the car and to the Hospital we went. She got all fixed up there with a room and since she wasn’t ready to have Chris yet, I went back home. About sundown I got on the Yamaha Bike I had and went in to see her. Chris was born and looked like any other baby. All wrinkled and red. I stayed awhile and finally left for home on the bike. It was a bit cold after sundown on the bike and I stopped at the edge of town and put on my jacket. I took off in a roar down the road and into a left hand curve. I had forgotten to put the kickstand up and it hit the pavement and nearly upset me. I had to go in a straight line, all the while trying to get the kickstand to fold up out of the way. I ran out of road before I could get this done and shot out over a high bank into a cornfield. The corn was nearly grown and it broke my fall some. I lay there for a while trying to get my wits back, feeling to see how many bones I had broken. Finally deciding I was still in one piece I pushed the bike back up onto the road. The starting pedal was broken and the headlight shone straight up. The front fender rubbed the tire and the gearshift lever was also broke off. I put the thing in second gear with my hand and pushed it and darn if it didn’t start, I was running along beside it so I just jumped on and drove the 10 miles home in the second gear. I found I did not like motorcycles, as they would hurt you in an instant and I didn’t like being hurt unnecessarily, so I traded the bike for a pool table. I figured the pool table was more safer if I didn’t abuse it. I did almost get hurt one time messing with the pool table. Douglas Howell, a friend since High School came over one Saturday night. He had cashed his paycheck, so we played for money well into the night. I won all his paycheck and he got real upset and wanted it back. I figured I had won it fair and square so I refused to give it back to him. He started pushing me around and saying bad things so I just gave him a shot in the nose. He just laid down for a few minutes and when he got his wits about him, he called up the stairs to his wife Carol, who was up there playing cards with Loretta. “Carol, get your butt down here, we’re going home. We never was much friends after that and many years later he came to see me and I ran him off and told him not to come back. I did not like the lifestyle he was leading.

The Smith Mountain Power Dam had just been built in 1963 and the first marina was under construction near Moneta. As I liked the water and boats I went over there and got a job on the building of the Marina. After the construction work was all done, the owner hired me as a mechanic and a boat refinisher. I worked there about two years, eventually becoming shop foreman and learning to completely refinish all the woodwork and to re-paint the 40 to 50 foot cabin cruisers. I bought a mobile home and parked it there at the end of the shop and Loretta, Curtis, Chris and I lived there. Eventually they hired a Northern Yankee to come be boss of the Marina. I did not see eye to eye with him so I quit. I moved the Mobile home down near Lynchburg, Virginia where Dad had his first church. One of his Church members was a contractor and my brother Johnnie and I went to work in Lynchburg for Gene Vaughan as Carpenters. Gene was about the best carpenter I ever ran into and he taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade. One time I came in from British Columbia and brought a Elk head I had mounted. I was going to sell it but as I could not get a decent offer I took it down to Gene’s and gave it to him with the understanding that if I ever wanted it back that he would return it. It was a nice Royal 6-point Elk. I don’t remember what it scored but I do remember that all four brow tines were each about 20” long. Many years later after I returned to Virginia to live I went to see Gene. He was now an old man and his memory was getting bad as I was soon to see. We were sitting in his living room and the Elk head was still there on the wall. I was going to ask Gene if I could have it back but as we were sitting there talking Gene started telling me about the nice Elk he had went to Colorado years before and shot. He motioned to the head on the wall. I allowed as to the fact it was a nice Elk. I did not have the heart to tell him that it was the one I had given to him about 23 years ago. A year or two later Gene passed away and I guess his wife either gave the head away or it is still hanging there on the wall.

I was working for Gene in 1968 when I got the idea to move to British Columbia to live. The story of that move is written elsewhere in this book and I will not repeat it here now. I, my wife, Loretta and Curtis and Chris moved to British Columbia, Canada in 1969. We had to immigrate in order to be legal residents there. Soon after arriving there I went in with three other fellows and purchased about a hundred acres of land near Galloway, BC. Their names were Doug Prutton, Paul Toma and Brian Ironmonger who I have written about here somewhere. Doug crossed over the Great Divide back in the 90s sometime. I don’t know what ever became of Paul Toma. His wife Melanie and Loretta was good friends during those years. Brian and I have remained great friends over the years and still keep in touch today, 2009.

We subdivided the place into four parcels, each ending up with about 20 acres each. Loretta and I built a home here and lived there about eight years, finally selling it in 1978. If my memory is right we got about $55,000.00 for it. We then moved to Maryland for a year to be near my parents. After the year was up we could no longer stand living in the populated Eastern part of the country so we moved to Kalispell, Montana. I was content to stay on in Kalispell and work there but Loretta would not have any part of it, she wanted to return to Cranbrook, BC where her friends were. We rented a house in Kalispell and the kids went to School there one winter. The next spring we moved back to Cranbrook, BC. I belonged to the Untied Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and there was lots of Union work at the time. I was working on the construction of the Greenhill’s Coal mine near Elkford BC in 1981. There I was involved in an accident and had my left foot and ankle busted up pretty bad. I was hauled in the back of a pickup to the little town of Elkford where there was a medical clinic. Here they gave me Morphine and I had to wait for an ambulance to arrive from Sparwood, the next town down the road. While waiting I called Loretta and asked her to meet me at the Hospital in Cranbrook in about three hours. She asked me what was wrong and I told her I had smashed my big toe, that all was fine otherwise. Finally the ambulance came from Sparwood and hauled me there where I had to await another Ambulance from Cranbrook to pick me up and take me on into Cranbrook. I believe it was about four hours later that I finally arrived at the Hospital in Cranbrook. Loretta and the boys was there waiting for me. When she saw my leg and foot she nearly fainted. I was laid up in the Hospital for about a week or so, then I was allowed to go home. In about 4 months the Company I was working for, NCI of Minnesota who was doing the slip forming on the coal silos asked me to come back to work and do takeoffs from the blueprints in the office for them. I returned to work and after a month or so I could get round on a cane so they made me a foreman out on the jobsite. I stayed on this job until it was wrapped up and then went down into the Dakota country in the US and helped build more silos there on a coal seam where they was building a new Thermal plant. When this job was finished I returned to Cranbrook.

Loretta and I rented a house in Marysville, a little town North of Cranbrook for one year. I then made a deal with a fellow to buy five acres of land from him down on the bottomland of the St. Mary’s river near Wycliffe which was between Marysville and Cranbrook. I sold the Ford Van that we bought new in 1979 and used $5000.00 of the proceeds to make a down payment on the five acres. There was enough left to buy Loretta an old beater of a car so she could get to work each day in Cranbrook. Well, she did not agree with what I had done and absolutely hated the old yellow Buick I had bought for her. It was a good running car but was ugly as sin. I continued to work Union jobs and saved money to build a house. I started the house but soon would run out of money. Every time I got a paycheck I would buy a little lumber out of it and build some more. Eventually the house was in good enough shape that we could live in the basement that winter. Right after buying the land I went into the bush where I knew there was an old forestry cabin that was in pretty good shape. The boys and I took it apart and floated the logs across a Beaver pond to the truck and hauled them home and I rebuilt the cabin there. I rebuilt it with a Gambrel roof like a barn so we could have a loft or bedroom upstairs. I had a wall tent which was about a 12 X 14 which I put up for the boys to stay in. I laid a floor of plywood and built plywood walls about two feet high and then set up the wall tent on this. It made plenty of room and was even enough room to store a few things. Curtis and Chris put up an American flag on the top and said we were American pioneers. And I guess we were.

We eventually completed the house, even building on a big woodworking shop on one end. I built a lot of furniture and kitchen cabinets here over the years. Loretta was working at a Safeway grocery store in Cranbrook. She went to work there in 1980 after moving up from Kalispell, Montana. In 1986 she decided she wanted to go find herself and rented an apartment in Cranbrook and moved out. I told her I would not help her move but that she could take anything she wanted, that she could use the pickup if she could get one of the boys to drive it for her. I remember it was about 2 feet of snow on the ground and cold as blue blazes that day. I stood in the shop and watched as Loretta and her best friend Carol loaded the truck. Although my memory of that sad day is cloudy I believe that Curtis came and helped and drove the truck for her. That was the worst day of my life up to that time. I never ever had any doubts that I would not always be happily married to her.

There was not any construction work around Cranbrook in those years. A lot of Carpenters was going out East to Toronto, Ontario where there was a housing boom going on. I decided to go myself as I needed to work. I rented the house out and Curtis went with me an two other carpenters to Toronto. We found work the first day we got there framing houses. We lived that summer in Indian Line Campground but when the weather got cold in the fall I rented a house and all the boys paid me rent to live there. We worked every day during the winter framing houses. We all bought cork boots so we could walk the walls and roof with all the ice on them. We had to go buy a new step ladder every week as the cork boots really ate them up quick.

Chris was still in High School when we had left for Toronto so he went into Cranbrook and spent the winter with Loretta in her apartment. In June when he graduated I sent him a plane ticket and he came to Toronto to work for me. We split the crew up with Tony Lund and Howie McLarnum going on their own and Chris, Curtis and I going on our own. Chris and Curtis learned a lot about carpentry during that time. I have to say it was a learning curve for me as well. There was lots of trying times teaching the boys to be good carpenters and I was living all the time with my own personal hell inside of me. I believe that in the two years that I framed houses in Toronto that I made 14 trips back to BC to see Loretta. Each time it was a wasted trip and I would go back to Toronto with a busted heart.

Finally I decided to move on back to BC where the Union work had picked up a bit. I moved the renters out of the house and moved back in. About this time Loretta figured that she had found herself and wanted to live with me again. So she came back home after about a two year absence. I wanted it to work for us and tried hard. Loretta thought she could have me and keep doing the things she had done when living by herself. Things got to a point where neither of us was happy. I finally told her that I loved her but could not live with her unless she changed some. She decided to move back into town. The only place available was that same crummy apartment she had the first time she moved out. But she moved back into it. We agreed to sell the place at Wycliffe which we did. We got about $95,000.00 for it in 1990. After paying off what we owed on it we each ended up with about $37,000.00. I remember the day we went to get the checks at the lawyers office. Loretta was bawling her eyes out. It was a tough day for both of us as we knew right there that it was about over for us. I bought another piece of land at Wycliffe and built a little apartment to live in and framed up a house with a woodworking shop in half of the building. That winter Chris and I was working a Union job at the Pulp Mill near Skookumchuck. One day the RCMP came to the jobsite and wanted to see me and Chris. I knew what they had to say before they opened their mouths. Loretta had passed away two days before, there in the apartment in Cranbrook on March 24^th, 1992. I was in no shape to drive so Chris drove me home. It was a very hard time on the boys and I. My Dad, Mom and Betty flew up from Virginia and Dad preached Loretta’s funeral. How many parents would have done that. I thank them from the bottom of my heart for what they did for us at the time of Loretta’s death.

I buried Loretta in the little graveyard near Fort Steele British Columbia in 1992, in the morning shadow of Fisher Peak

I was off work for about 10 days and the job called and said if I wanted a job I better come back. I went and worked there until spring, at which time I took my retirement from the Carpenters Union. I went to the bank and borrowed enough money to make the house I had framed up into a nice home. I worked on it until about fall of that year, completing it and then sold the place to a former RCMP cop for about $187,000.00. After paying the bank off I had about $145,000.00 left. There was a housing boom on in the area at the time and I thought I could make a big bunch of money by building a $300,000.00 house in Cranbrook. I had to borrow $100,000.00 from the Bank to get the house finished. By the time I finished the house, the boom had left and I was left holding the house and a hundred thousand dollar mortgage on it. I lived in the house for awhile. I finally took a new lower cost house in on trade for the big house and eventually sold that one. After all was said and done I had about $25,000.00 in my jeans. I then bought a small lot in Marysville and I built a small house there and lived it until it sold. I then bought another empty lot further down the street and built the green house, as I called it. I continued to build houses for other people till 1999. I never made much money at it but it kept the wolf away from the door. I built an apartment on the back of the green house which helped pay the mortgage. Which was, I think about $700.00 a month.

In the spring of 1999 my Mother phoned me and said Dad had a stroke and was in the hospital in Fredericksburg where they were living at the time. Dad was just 82 years old. They thought that Dad would not last very long. I got on a plane in Spokane and was back East in about three days. Dad was in extensive care in the Fredericksburg hospital and it did not appear that he would last the week. I stayed there with Mom for a few weeks. We never ever left Dad alone without one of us being at his side 24 hours a day. When I left to go back to BC it looked as if there was some hope for Dad. He was still in a coma but was responding to the Doctors efforts. At least thats what they told me. I went back to BC and finished up a house I was working on. A month later Dad had come out of the coma and the family decided they wanted to move Dad back to Bedford County and put him in the VA hospital in Roanoke. I flew back to Virginia and went to Bedford County and searched for a house for Mom. I finally found something suitable near Vinton. It was close to Moms home place and also close to the first farm Dad and mom had bought in 1940 in Chamblissburg. Using the money Dad had saved over the years, we bought the house and Dad was moved to the VA in Roanoke. Johnnie and I put up for sale the house in Fredericksburg and moved all of their belongings to the new house in Vinton, Virginia. After getting Mom settled in the new house I returned to BC. I was not there long before Dad was allowed to go home. He was completely paralyzed on the left side and could not talk much. He had lost a lot of memory and could not form a sentence any more. Mom did not care about this, she was only too glad he was alive and she could have him for a while longer.

Sometime that spring a piece of property came up for sale just across the highway from Dads old farm. It was seven acres with a modest brick house on it. Mom bought it as soon as she saw it. It was not enough room to keep Dad there so I made up my mind to go back to Virginia for awhile and add enough room on the house so we could keep Dad there. So I bought a newer pickup and loaded all my carpenters tools into it along with my best friend Louie, my dog and headed South for Virginia, not knowing what the future would hold for me.

I started work on the old brick house and began to add on about another 1200 square feet. My back played out that winter and I was in bad shape. I had an operation in 1990 and had some disc removed and now I was back to square one. I ended up in the emergency room in Roanoke Memorial Hospital and they thinking I was a Canadian, threw me out and charged me a thousand bucks for my short half-hour stay. Sister Betty was with me that night and she was LIVID to say the least. She went up one side of them people and down the other side. If she had been a man, she would have decked them all. I eventually had to have my brother Johnnie fly with me back to BC to push me thru the Airports in a wheelchair. I was in bad shape and was taking a lot of pain killers. I don’t remember much of this trip. My good friend Roy Petterpiece met us at the airport in Spokane, Washington and drove us across the Canadian border to Cranbrook. I went the next day to see my Doctor there in Cranbrook. He was a little bitty fellow but was quite wise in the way of Doctors. He told me that I had arthritis in my back and that if I would take the medicine he prescribed that I would eventually get back to normal. Johnnie was taken by Roy down to Sandpoint, Idaho where he got on an Eastbound train back to Virginia. He later told me that it was the worst trip of his life. He had to sleep in a chair as he could not afford a sleeper. It was about five days before he finally arrived back in Lynchburg, Virginia.

I stayed on in the house at Marysville for another three weeks or so. I could feel myself getting better and I thought I could make the trip by air back to Virginia by myself. The house there was not even half way completed. I got a ticket and Roy hauled me back to Spokane and put me on a plane to Virginia. I was suffering, but I had my mind made up that this was what I was going to do. Good ole Roy, he was like a son to me in a lot of ways and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for all the help he has given in many ways.

I finished the big addition on the house and completely remodeled the old part of it. Mostly from a wheelchair. I had a couple of fellows working and Johnnie was there about all the time. When the walls was raised no body could cut the rafters, so I managed to climb up onto the old roof and had them bring me the 2 X 6s and hold them for me and I cut every one. Someone had to put the skill saw in my hand for each cut. I don’t know how I did it but we got it all done. Every day my back got better even though I was abusing it. I did all the trim work and built all new kitchen cabinets for Mom. When it was finished we moved Mom and Dad into it. I bunked in the basement. Betty had a room upstairs.

My sister Sarah came down from Maryland during this time and helped with Dad. She bought a mobile home and set it up in the back yard and so was nearby for the first two years. She finally decide to go back home to Maryland and we rented her mobile home out. My back was pretty well healed by this time and I designed and built a big house for my cousin, Danny Moles. After this was done I built another house for another fellow and did a few additions for other people. Chris flew back here that year and helped me finish a couple of jobs before returning to BC. I am so glad he came and worked that summer. It was an inspiration to him to move his family to Virginia later. During this time I put my house in BC up for sale and sold it. After I sold the house and apartment I sort of figured I was in Virginia to stay.

I was tired of building houses and construction work. I was now 56 years old and it was about time I done something I had wanted to for a long time. I bought a metal lathe and a milling machine and taught myself how to build rifles. I never looked back from the beginning of this. I worked many long and hard hours. I had a website built and this made my business. I worked at this for two years and was starting to make some money at it. I loved building rifles but the old heartstrings was still pulling at me. I missed British Columbia. My two sons were there with all my Grandkids. I finally decided to sell everything I owned and return to BC for good. Johnnie made that road trip back to BC with me. He had never seen any part of the West, so we took the long way around by Arizona and then up the Salt Lake Valley to Missoula, Montana, where we turned North up route 95 to Cranbrook BC. I rented a mobile home in Canal Flats BC where Curtis lived and Chris was nearby at Windermere. Johnnie was taken down to Spokane and put on a plane for Virginia. He might have stayed there about 10 days with me.

I went to the Union Hall and signed up again and they put my name back on the hiring board. In a couple of weeks they called and told me I had been dispatched to a carpenter job at one of the Coal Mines in the Elk Valley. I got to thinking that I just did not want to do any more of that work any more. I decided I wanted to be a Rifle smith. And to be a Rifle smith I could not do it in Canada, I would only have a chance of success in a free country where about everyone owned guns and cherished them. I did not have to think long on this. I called the Union Hall the next day and told them I would not be taking that job and that they might as well remove me from the hiring board. They complained a bit and I told them to do whatever, that I no longer cared what they did....now, or ever.

Over the next couple of days I set my affairs straight and loaded up and headed out for Virginia one last time. It was a hard choice as I would be leaving the boys and the grandkids behind. I Knew also that Mom and Dad needed me there to help them. It was a winter drive, that last trip, and a tough one but I made it in due time and as soon as I arrived in Virginia I set about enlarging the shop I had built there and bought more machinery for the making of rifles. I designed and built a stock duplicator from scratch and also a gluing press which enabled me to make laminated stocks. I just kept on getting on and soon I was making a little money. I worked hard for a couple of years and was finally for the first time I my life was able to actually save a bit of money.

On January 22, 2006, Dad condition worsened and he passed away at home about 5:00 in the morning. Johnnie, Betty and Mom were with him. They called me, and I went over to the big house. It was sad, but we all knew that we lost Dad the day he had the stroke and we all had said our goodbyes. The funeral was at Beaverdam Church in the old part where Dad and Mom had stood 66 years before and was married. Jerry Falwell was supposed to preach the funeral but had other responsibilities that day so Johnnie preached the funeral and I am so glad he did. I have never heard a funeral preached so well. Johnnie did a magnificent job of it and we were all pleased.

I do not know how Mom held up so long caring for Dad. It was a tremendous job, she had to change his diapers several times a day and make sure he was fed and comfortable. I thought that she would die first and I believe she would have if Dad had not gone when he did. Mom showed us all what real love is. I never knew that someone could love their spouse as she loved my Dad. She had cared for him for seven long years, being there every minute of that time for him. Mom is an Angel to say the least. I am so glad that I came home and was here for the last years of Dads life and here to help Mom through the hard times. I had been living out west for thirty years and had done nothing for them but visit occasionally. When Dad had the stroke I had nothing in BC to hold me and I figured I owed them so I decided right there to devote my life and time to them as long as they needed me.

That spring of 2007 I started building a new house on the four acres I had bought off Moms place. I hired some of the work done but did most of it myself. Finally I had it complete and moved into it in October of 2007.

In January of 2008 I took the whole month and completed the new rifle shop which was in the West end of the house. I moved all the equipment and machinery in from the old shop and set it up, finally getting into production about the first of February. And I can say that it was a beautiful shop and work space. I merely had to walk from the living room through the office to be in the shop. The temperature was always warm and it was bright and sunny there. I have now worked at building rifles for nine years.

When I built the house I super insulated it and with all the windows on the south side it was heated to a large extent with passive solar with the sun coming in through all the windows. I built about 33 rifles here from January through December, 2008.

Curtis and Chris have both grown up and now have families of their own. Both are fine young men and both are good carpenters and make their living building with their hands. Curtis still lives in British Columbia. He and his wife, Heike, have been separated for some years now. They gave me two grand kids, both girls. They are Olivia and Sierra. Olivia graduated from High School last year and is now on her own. Sierra has a couple of more years before she graduates. Both are fine pretty girls and take a lot after their happy-go-lucky Dad.

Chris moved his family to Virginia several years ago and now lives about fifteen minutes drive from me. Chris met and married a very nice, smart and pretty girl that he met after coming back to Virginia. Audrey has done something for Chris no other person could do, she removed the chip from his shoulder that he had for such a long time. They have bought a nice home in Moneta and both are hard workers. Chris works for a contractor and is building houses for him. Audrey just completed her education last year and is now teaching school. Chris had two children with his first wife, Tammy. Rebecca is the oldest and she will graduate from High School this spring in Calgary, Alberta where she lives with her mother. Mike, my only grandson lives with Chris and has two more years at Staunton River High School before he graduates. Mike is planning to go in the Marines upon graduation. Mike is a fine young fellow, he steers away from most trouble that teenage boys can find themselves in if they ain’t careful. He spends a lot of time with me and hunts with me about every chance he gets. He has become a good shot with rifle and shotgun and can shoot as well or better than his Grandpa. Mike knows he has a load on his shoulders as he is the only grandson and has to carry on the family name. I was always taught that a man carries only one thing to his grave and that is his name. A man always wants to do whatever is required to ensure that when he is planted into the earth that people will always remember him as a fair, good and decent man that looked after his family and treated all his friends and neighbors square.

Mike went into the Army in July and is doing well. October 21th is his grad date and Chris, his wife Audrey, Mike’s lady friend Katlyn and their new baby Sophia and Missy, Katlyn’s mother will go down with me in the motorhome. Becky has graduated from school, attended college and is now working in a Dentist office making a great salary as is her sister Ashtyn. We are all very proud of Mike and his accomplishments. He was in ROTC the last 2 years in High School which has been a big help to him in the Army. Curtis’s oldest daughter is out of school and has a good job and Sierra still has one more year of school. Ashley the oldest is married and has a boy and a girl.

Milton and Eddie Earl Martin was High School chums. One time Eddie Earl and I was Squirrel hunting and came across this old abandoned house way back on a neighboring farm. It had not been lived in for many, many years. We decided to have a look at the inside as we could see lots of old stuff through the windows. We could not believe what we saw in there. It looked just like someone had been living there way back in the old days, maybe as far back as the Civil War. The place had been left with all the furniture, pictures, clothing and everything one might have in a house in those times. There was old Civil War saddles, spurs, harness and all sorts of old stuff. Over in one corner of an upstairs room I found and old brown paper bag. Looking inside was what I took to be black powder. “Hey Eddie Earl……..come have a look at this”. Eddie Earl walked over and had a look at the black stuff in the bag.

“Rich, you think that might be black powder?” “ Well, I said, we can sure find out quick enough, lets take some outside and put a match to it”. So we took a little bit and went outside away from the house so we wouldn”t burn it down if it did turn out to be black powder. Now neither one of us had no experience with powder except what we had seen in movies. I poured the black stuff out onto a flat rock, maybe about three tablespoons of it and stood as far away as I could and still be able to throw a match on the pile. BOOOOOOOM, one hell of an explosion, it durn near knocked me down, burnt my hand and singed all the hair off my face and the side of my head. Man, that was awesome. Hey Eddie Earl. I looked around and Eddie Earl was standing a good twenty feet from where the blast had taken place, guess he wasn’t taking no chances. “Hey Eddie Earl, that stuff IS black powder”. “Yep, he says, Lets take it home with us and build a cannon and shoot that stuff off in it. That ought to be fun”.

So we went back in the old house and got the bag of powder and packed it home with us, being careful to handle it with care as we had seen in movies that the stuff could be set off by a jar or shooting it with a rifle, or so we thought.

The next Friday I went home from school with Milton and Eddie Earl and spent the night with them, yep, I had that black powder with me all that day at School. Man, if you did that today, you would NEVER get out of Jail. Well, anyway we had plans to make a cannon on Saturday as their old man had a welder and Milton had learned to weld with it. We was up at first light on Saturday morning an as soon as the chores was done we had breakfast and then headed over to the old tool shed where Mutt, their Dad kept the welder. There was a huge scrap pile of metal there and we scrounged through it till we found a piece of 2” diameter galvanized pipe about five feet long. We found a piece of flat steel and Milton welded this over one end of the pipe. Then a hole about 1/8” was drilled into the side of the pipe about a half inch above the steel plate.

There was an old horse drawn hay mower sitting there that had not been used for many years. This thing had steel wheels on it so we drug it over within reach of the welding cables and Milton welded the cannon onto the side of one wheel. We figured this would allow us to elevate the cannon and also keep it from going rearward when it was fired.

Our first shots were with a small amount of powder with no projectiles and we fired it a few times. Man, that thing belched a huge cloud of blue smoke and shook the ground. After maybe a dozen shots, we got braver and decided to load it with a heavier charge. We would turn the wheel and point the cannon straight up for loading. We poured in a hefty charge of powder and one of us, I don’t remember which one ran in the shop and grabbed a handful of old nuts and washers. These were poured down the barrel and a piece of wadded up newspaper was packed in over them. There was a big plowed field out in front of the shop and about 100 yards out in the field was about 10 Beehives that their Dad had. We turned the Mower till we had the cannon pointing at the beehives and then lowered the barrel until it was aimed a few feet over the Beehives which we figured would account for any drop of the projectiles if any.

Mutt had been away in town that morning but it was just our luck that he was just coming down the driveway in his old pickup and saw everything that took place when we touched the cannon off. We was using fuses that we had removed from cherry bombs to fire the cannon. They were only about 2 inches long so we had to run like hell every time we fired the thing. We were so interested on what we was doing that we never noticed their Dad coming down the driveway which wound along the edge of the plowed field. Well, one of us lit a match and touched it to the fuse and ran like hell. We didn’t know if the pipe would withstand the charge we had put in it but we weren’t taking any chances. Man’ this thing went off with a powerful blast that nearly busted out eardrums. The recoil turned the mower plumb around and left the cannon pointing straight up like it was wanting to be loaded again. When the cannon discharged we saw all those nuts and washers kicking up dirt all around them Beehives, so did Mutt, and he came over and stopped the pickup where we were, “Boys, he said, just whut in hell do yu’all think you’re doing. Have you wrecked my Beehives or whut”.

He led the way out across that plowed field and we followed some distance behind as we all knew he would whip our butts in a heartbeat. Man, you ain’t going to believe the damage to one of them Beehives. Looked like most of the nuts and washers had concentrated on one hive. It was bust all to pieces with the Bees madder than hell and buzzing all around it. Old Mutt stood there for a minute and looked at it. We had no idea what he was thinking. We were all standing behind him and he turned to us with a grin on his face. Boys, he said, “I was a kid once myself a long time ago. That was a good Beehive. Now yu’all can just work in the tobacco this summer for nothing until its paid for. Is that alright with yu’all”?

Man, we all breathed a sigh of relief as Mutt walked away chuckling to himself. He stopped about twenty feet from us and said, “I reckon that will be the last shot fired with that thing” and turned and walked to the house.

Milton, Eddie Earl and I walked back over to the cannon. We saw that it could not be fired anymore as that last time had put a 3” split in it right where the fuse went in. The mower sat there with the cannon still welded on it for a long time. I went that summer and worked in the tobacco as I usually did. Old man Martin would always pay us boys 50 cents an hour to sucker, pick the tobacco worms off and to pull the leaves and tie them when they was ready. We carried a pail of lamp oil (kerosene) to put the worms in. Old Mutt never did deduct the cost of that Beehive from our pay. You reckon he forgot about it?

Milton went on to spend a few years in the Air force and then was a Border Guard on the Mexican Border for several years. He now lives on the old farm where we shot the cannon and does pretty well the same things his father did there when he was alive. Eddie Earl married his High School sweetheart and became a newspaper reporter somewhere in the Carolinas. I have not seen him since High School days and that is about 50 years ago. I went down and visited with Milton a few years ago. Damn, if he don’t look just like Mutt. The old hay mower was not there and I didn’t ask Milton about it.

Man, you never know what will come into your mind when you sit down and start thinking about the old days.

Arrowheads, the above reminds me of arrowheads. Those Martin boys and I spent many a Sunday afternoon looking for them. Eddie Earl and Milton had a couple of bushel baskets filled with them. We had certain fields where we knew there were lots of them. The best time to look for them was in late fall or early spring in fields that had been plowed in late summer and had a lot of rain on them. The rail washed the dirt from the rocks and stones and the arrowheads. Some times we would find enough in an afternoon to fill the pockets in our jeans. Most would be broken someplace or have chips out of them but we would always find a few perfect ones.

I remember one time I found the front half of a spear point that was about 4” long. The next year while looking in nearly the same spot I found what appeared to be the rear half of a spear point. I took it home and it matched perfectly the front half I had found the year before. Now was this a small miracle or what?

We found some tomahawk heads and once in a while we found a grinding stone that had a smooth round place in the middle. I guess the Indians or whoever, used these as a pestle to grind herbs and corn in. I found one once and it lay on my folks back porch where it was used as a doorstop for many years. I don’t remember whatever become of it. I used to sell arrowheads to town folks that would sometimes come by on Sundays. I sometimes would get a buck apiece for some of the good ones. I remember that a year or two after I got married that Uncle Robert came one day and traded me an old pocket watch for about a hundred arrowheads. I had them glued inside of little boxes that had a glass front. He got the boxes an all. I never saw them again. I guess that when Aunt May expired that her family got them. Man’ would I ever like to have them now.

One of the best places I found to hunt for arrowheads was on my Dads farm. The farm was located at the intersection of route 24 and route 43 and lay on the north side of rt. 24. It is about 10 miles South of Bedford Virginia. If you walk down the small branch which kind of runs North or Northwest from the barns about 300 yards there is another small branch that runs into the first one. When I lived there it was all pasture on the South side of the second Branch and crop land on the north side. At that time there was a fence alongside the second branch. That field that was part of the cropland right there next to the branch was loaded with arrowheads. Many a time I filled my pockets there in an hour or two. Sometimes I found one and when I straightened up I would see another from where I was standing. There was good arrowhead hunting all around that place for a mile in every direction. I guess there must still be thousands still lying there to be found. Maybe when I get slowed up a little in my rifle building I’ll go back and find some more.

Dad inherited a Winchester Model 12, 12 gauge shotgun and a Marlin model 97, .22 caliber rifle from his father George Franklin. Dad told me the following story.

Granddad George spent his last years working at the Norfolk & Western shops in Roanoke, Virginia. Him and his fellow workers would set outside on nice days and have their lunch there. They had a sort of game where they would shoot the Sparrows from the tops of the high smokestacks. Granddad got tired of being outshot with the single shot 22 he had and he bought the Marlin. He said it was the most accurate of any of the 22s the boys was shooting Sparrows with. This Marlin was made about 1920, it was a lever action repeater with an octagon barrel, and a case-hardened receiver. It also had a Marble fold-down peep sight. Dad said Granddad George won many a bet shooting Sparrows with this rifle.

When I was a 12 year old, Dad kept this rifle and the shotgun in his bedroom and we were not allowed to touch it unless he gave us permission. Ever since the war Dad was not crazy about guns, so the rifle and shotgun rarely saw the light of day. I remember only one time that Dad took the rifle out and gave me some instructions on how to shoot it. He took me out hunting only one time when I was a kid. One day in the wintertime he brought out the shotgun and the rifle and asked me if I would like to go rabbit hunting with him. Of course I said yes, as I was born crazy about guns. We went out that day and Dad jumped a cottontail and shot it on the run. Being a kid with no experience I thought that was quite impressive. Dad let me shoot a few sparrows with the 22 that day. I had a great time that day with dad and often wondered why we never went hunting again.

I would sometimes play sick on Sunday morning and Mom would let me stay home from church. As soon as they would drive out of the driveway, I would have the 22 out and go shooting sparrows or tin cans. It was a common thing to have only a few bullets. In those days parents did not give kids an allowance so I had to be creative to get my hands on some 22 bullets. I would get a couple of eggs out of the chicken house and take them out the road a piece to the little country store and the Lady there would trade me a few 22 bullets for the eggs. This is how I got ammo to burn up in the 22. Whenever I did get my hands on some money, I spent it all on 22 bullets. In those days kids could not afford a full box of 22s even though they were only about 40 or fifty cents a box. I never bought a full box until I was maybe 15 or 16 years old. Mom and Dad never knew I was swiping eggs to pay for 22 bullets. A couple of years ago when Mom was about 88, I told her about me taking the eggs and trading them for bullets.

When I was old enough to work for the neighboring farmers in their tobacco or getting up hay bales I would spend all of this money on ammo for the shotgun and 22 rifle. I can remember sometimes I would have 22 bullets in the top drawer of the chest of drawers in my bedroom several inches deep. I would dump them out of the little cardboard boxes and have them loose there in the drawer. Sometimes when I came home from school I would have a little while before chore time, so I would grab a handful and head for the woods in search of a Squirrel or rabbit.

By the time I left home I had nearly wore the barrel out on that 22 Marlin. Its no telling how many rounds I shot in it when I was growing up, many, many thousands I know. It’s a wonder there is a Squirrel or Rabbit left anywhere in the state of Virginia today as I killed a bunch of them with the 22 when I was a kid. Mom always cooked every one I shot except for some I would sell to town folks when they would drive out on Sunday afternoons.

About twenty years ago, Dad gave the Model 12 to me and the Marlin to my brother Johnnie. I went to visit Johnnie a few years later and the 22 was hanging on his wall. I got it down and had a look at it, remembering the good times I had had with it. Johnnie evidently realized what the rifle meant to me and so he gave it to me that day. Man, that made my day. Today both guns are displayed on the walls in my home. I haven’t fired the 22 in years as the bore is shot out for the first few inches and it is not accurate any more. My grandson Mike shoots the 12 gauge quite often and shoots it well. One day they will be his as he is the only grandson I have. I have been in love with guns since I was born and Mike is following right in my footsteps. My two sons, Curtis and Chris were never much on hunting and guns, although today Chris owns a few rifles and pistols and shoots targets some. Curtis has a good 22 caliber Brno I gave him a few years ago and shoots a few gophers with it each summer.

When I was about 16, Robert Arrington came to work on the Dairy farm. He had killed an uncle in a fight, with a steel pipe. As it was self defense he was not charged but the County Sherriff thought he might benefit if he could spend some time around decent folks, so he asked Dad if he would take Robert and work him for awhile.

We had a bunkhouse for the hired hands to live in. They took their meals in the house with the rest of our family like anyone else regardless of skin color. Robert was a black boy but his skin color was lighter than me or Johnnie. Robert liked to consider him self white, rather than black and was always looking