THE

HOMEMADE/ ' . BRASS PLATE

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The story of a pioneer doctor in northern Alberta as told to CORNELIA LEHN Ex LIBRrs UNIVERSITATIS ALBERTJENSIS

Bryan~Gruhn Anthropology Collection THE HOMEMADE BRASS PLATE

The story of Dr. Mary Percy Jackson as told to CORNELIA LEHN © Copyright 1988 by Cedar-Cott Enterprise 45940 Collins Drive Sardis, B.C.

All rights reserved

ISBN No. 0-9692962-2-1

Editor-Publisher, Helena Braun

Printed by Fraser Valley Custom Printers (1988) Ltd. Chilliwack, B.C., Canada

2 TO FRANK JACKSON

3 I Rainbow lake I I I I IL------

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APPROXIMATE DISTANCES ON PRESENT ROADS From Edmonton to Peace River Town -300 miles From Peace River Town to Battle River Prairie or Manning - 60miles From Manning to Keg River Post- 70 miles From Keg River Post to Paddle Prairie -30 miles From Keg River Post to Carcajou -40 mi les From Keg River Post to FortVermilion-100 miles

4 Taken in Yellowknife, May 1988 , when Chuck Ross was going to fly Dr. Jackson back to High Level.

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6 ' FOREWORD

When I informed another Dr. Mary Percy Jackson admirer that her autobiography was about to be published, he reacted with understanding glee, saying , "Great! She has · so much to tell and share for the benefit of young and old." It will be the response of countless Canadians who have heard bits and pieces of one of the most unselfi sh lifetime contributions made on our northern frontier. Nobody knew her better than those to whom she brought medical relief, often at the end of long and chilly rides on horseback. Her work, for years conducted under pioneer difficulties and hardships, won more affection and human hearts than dollars. The feeling for this lady doctor who "rode through a storm and saved my baby's life ," would never be forgotten. When I saw her in early 1988, the spry little 83-year-old with a bit of English accent still clinging to her tongue, greeted my friends and me warmly at the door of the quaint but lovely farmhouse that has been her home for most of her active years. There she was, Keg River's living legend, as natural and relaxed as could be. How could anybody fail to be fascinated by the story of the circumstances that brought her to the Canadian frontier, and by those that held her there. She might have remained in medical practice in England throughout her working years, but instead she chose a northern Alberta outpost, a log cabin home, a horse without a stable, and water drawn from the river. Her contract with the Alberta Government demanded that she stay as practitioner for at least one year. The betting in the northern di strict to which she was introduced, however, was that she wouldn't stay for a full year. But Mary Percy became everybody's doctor and was still practicing in the North 40 years later. To quote Dr. Jackson after she gave the address to the Federation of Medical Women in 1955 in Toronto, "the audience was suprised that after practicing in isolation from a farmhouse kitchen for a quarter of a century, I should have anything sensible to say about medicine." But since then she has delighted many with her speeches, and has received some of the highest awards in the country for her dedicated service. All things considered, nobody could say more convincingly than the author of this book that life on the frontier has been a full and rewarding adventure. Dr. Mary Percy Jackson's story as she tell s it , will fill a great need. Grant MacEwan

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8 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title page 1 Dedication 3 Map 4 Frontpiece 5 Foreword 7 Table of Contents 9

Chapters l . The Call to Alberta 11 2. Public Health Work 18 3. To Battle River Prairie 28 4. Pioneer Life ... .. 38 5. A Doctor on Horseback 49 6 . Fall 57 7. Winter 67 8. Spring 80 9. Frank Jackson of Keg River 88 10. At Home in Keg River 95 11. Family Life . . . . . 105 12. A Special Case Study 114 13. The "Hospital" at Keg River 122 14. Education in the North 130 15. The War Years 144 16 . Tuberculosis 156 17. Doctoring in the Bush 162 18 . "I Heard the Foxes Talking" 169 19. Master Farm Family Award 180 20. The Mackenzie Highway 188 21 . Life and Death 195 22. Capstone on Life 205 The Writer, Acknowledgements 213 Index ...... 214

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10 Chapter 1 The Call To Alberta

It was the year 1929. I was working as Casualty House Surgeon in the Birmingham Children's Hospital and had nearly finished the internships I was going to do. My hope was to get a job in Calcutta doing obstetrics in the Women's Hospital, but the position I wanted became available only every third year, and this was not the year. So, for at least a twelve-month period, I needed another job. While leafing through a British Medical Journal one day, came upon an advertisement that intrigued me. It read: February 23, 1929 Strong energetic Medical Women with post-graduate experi­ ence in Midwifery, wanted for country work in Western Canada, under the Provincial Government Department of Health . Apply in first instance to Dr. E.M. Johnstone, % Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, 13 , Victoria Street, London, SW! . Without delay, I wrote for information. Dr. Johnstone replied immediately and told me that the districts for which women doctors were wanted were in Alberta. The areas were very isolated, without proper roads, without telephones, many miles from hospitals, and the doctors would have to be able to care for all types of emergencies without help. Dr. Johnstone added, "The ability to ride a saddle horse would be a great advantage." Marvelous! Doctoring on horseback in a remote area of a northern forest! After seven years of solid study in medical school and hospitals always crowded with hundreds of people, this prospect seemed

11 very attractive. And I could ride. At least I thought I could. One of my fellow interns in the Children's Hospital had remarked to me some time ago, "Percy, you are all bum and bosom, you ought to get more exercise. Why don 't you take up riding?" So I had bought myself some breeches and spent my free time Wednesday afternoons out at the Sutton Coldfield Riding School. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The brisk exercise in the country was great and I got keen on riding. Little did I suspect what lay ahead for me on horseback. Alberta, to me, was an unknown quantity. I had to look up in an atlas which one of the prairie provinces it was. When I found out that it had the Rockies down its western border, I was sold on it. When I spoke about a possible job in Alberta to the other interns one of them remarked, "Oh yes, Alberta. They get Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. That is a kind of typhus . And they get Tick Paralysis, which resembles polio." I had never heard of either, but when I checked in a textbook of medicine, he was right. It sounded very exotic. The advertisement called for doctors who would be able to take care of emergencies without help - in other words, well qualified doctors. Well, I was certainly well trained! At that time the male instructors had decided that if women were going to be doctors, they were jolly well going to learn medicine thoroughly - everything. They gave us the worst cases, mighty grim stuff. Some things had really been hammered into me; it was a basis I was to be thankful for later on. Much hard work had earned me the Queen's prize for the highest combined marks for medicine, surgery and obstetrics on my graduation in 1927. My internships had been as House Physician to Dr. Leonard Parsons in the General Hospital, in obstetrics at the Birmingham Maternity Hospital, and anaesthetics at Queen's. I was fully qualified. From the time I was ten or eleven years old I had wanted to be a doctor. Most of the members of my family were teachers. So I was a misfit, aiming at medicine. I had never even met a woman doctor. I just wanted to be one, so that was that. My parents had not minded. My father had been determined that his two daughters should have as good an education as his two sons, which was quite advanced thinking in those days. He always said that if law should be open to women by the time I finished high school, they'd make a lawyer out of me because I

12 argued so much. But law wasn't open for women. It wasn't for quite a few years. Medicine was. Now, with two years of internships after graduation, ready to go out and practice on my own, Alberta sounded like an interesting place to start. I applied for the job. I hoped that I would get a reply by the time I was finished at the Children's Hospital - but, instead, I got a cable asking what my religion was . It had not occurred to me to put my religion on my curriculum vitae, and I certainly did not know the significance of the Government of Alberta wanting to know about my church affiliation . The cable came while I was on a long weekend walking with a friend in the Lake District. My father thought the matter must be very urgent, so he cabled back that I was Anglican. If I had been Catholic I would not have been accepted for the position. The United Farmers of Alberta Government, in power at that time, did not like Catholics. They did not want to hire Catholics because they might be Liberals. In fact, most of the Liberals were Catholic, and vice versa, so a government doctor obviously had to be non-Catholic. After receiving this bit of information, the Alberta Government cabled back that I was to come as soon as possible. This meant that I would have to leave the Casualty House Surgeon job a month before I had finished . The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf offered to pay my passage. This was an Anglican organization whose purpose was stated on its letterhead as being "For the consolidation and welfare of British Settlements Overseas by means of Christian Workers, Teachers, etc." Their focus was medical and church work. Most of the members were fairly wealthy English people who were interested in the Colonies. The executive secretary, and the heart and soul of the organization, was Canon P.J. Andrews. Canon Andrews was an erudite man. He had even preached to the Queen! As a young man, he had worked in the back blocks of Alberta, and thought that the most useful thing that the people who contributed to The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf could do was to finance doctors to go to the remoter areas of the western provinces, where people were living and dying without any medical care. I went up to London to see Canon Andrews and stayed with him and hi s wife. There I met Dr. Emma Johnstone, with whom I had been corresponding and who was a member of The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf. She was a great friend of the Andrews.

13 Dr. Mary Percy and Mrs. P. J. Andrews in London

Emma Johnstone was a pioneer doctor, who, during World War I, had been the only medical officer in a big mental hospital in Scotland. In 1927 she had gone to Canada and had become a country district doctor in Alberta. She had now just returned to Great Britain temporarily, and she and Canon Andrews filled me in on many of the problems that rapid settlements in remote areas were experiencing, far from roads, railroads, hospitals, or any kind of medical care. Dr. Johnstone talked especially about the problems of the Peace River Country. It was from her that I first heard about that area in Alberta. The women members of the Alberta Farmers Government had suggested that nurses returning from World War I with front line hospital experience, should be hired by the Alberta Government and settled in outlying districts to take care of the medical needs of the people. These nurses had been put into half a dozen remote areas in Alberta. Dr. Johnstone had stayed with one of them. She then suggested to the Hon . George Hoadley, the Minister of Health, that they should get English women doctors who could do more than the nurses could. Of course, female doctors would be able to live on their own better than male doctors, since they could wash and cook for themselves! Dr. Johnstone was able to give me good advice . Among other

14 things, she said, "Whatever you do , go to the Dental Hospital and get yourself a week's practice pulling teeth . It will be the most useful surgery that you do in the North ." So I went to the Dental Hospital, got myself a set of dental tools, and did a week's concentrated tooth pulling under supervision. It was very useful when I got to Alberta. As I said, The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf offered to pay my passage to Edmonton. This was a great help. After medical school and internship I did not have money in any quantity. My father provided a loan so that, in case I found I did not want to stay, I could get back to England. The advertisement did not say how much the Government of Alberta was going to pay me. We knew very little about Alberta, particularly about northern Alberta, but my parents accepted my decision to go to Canada quite readily and I went with their blessing. After all , I had been planning to go to India. That sounded much worse. And this was only for a year - so we thought. It was June when I took off for Southampton. I left my luggage there and spent the last night with a favourite uncle and aunt who lived on the edge of the New Forest. We went and listened to the nightingales on that last night in England. The next day I sailed for Canada on the S.S. Empress of Scotland. This was when I met Dr. Elizableth Rodger, a Scottish woman, and Dr. Helen O 'Brien, who was Irish. They too had been attracted by the same advertisement, and the three of us were all financed by The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf to get to Alberta to our new jobs. I must admit that the first day on the high seas was awful . It was very cold, very wet, and very rough . The sea washed over the promenade deck and even came over the top deck and soaked my rug. Every now and then as we went down into a trough, the propeller was right out of the water and racing - a horrible sensation! At one time I really felt that I'd like the ship to sink. I was not quite as good a sailor as I had thought I would be. However, my sea-sickness was not very bad - I missed only two meals. Many people were sick for thirty-six hours. Actually, I enjoyed the life on board immensely. The beds on the ship were extraordinarily comfortable; I slept twelve hours each night. The food was excellent and the variety astonishing. We got a newspaper each day at lunch time - printed on board with all the latest news from the wireless . There was a good orchestra, too,

15 for meals and dancing, and they gave quite a good concert on Sunday evening. There were a number of Canadians on board. I thought at that time that their accent was quite American; I couldn't always under­ stand what they were saying . I soon learned, however, that "My, it's fine! " spoken in an excessively nasal voice was the height of praise. One of my great hopes was to see an icberg. The stewardess said there were usually icebergs about - they had nearly run onto one on the last trip, and had had to stop and go astern. Well, the time came when we were held up for over twelve hours by fog and icebergs. Between Newfoundland and Cape Breton Isle the mist was so thick that we just had to stop. It seemed curiously quiet without the engines going, or the noise of the sea alongside; and the feeling that any moment the fog might lift and show an iceberg close by was most alarming. People talked about the Titanic, and that didn 't help matters any. There was an old seaman huddled in the crowsnest whose job was to smell for icebergs, and other seamen stood at the rails li stening for any echo of our fog horns, that sounded mournfully every few minutes. Finally the mist did lift and we saw a beautiful white and pale green iceberg less than a quarter of a mile away. It was quite an experience. The cold was intense. While we were watching the iceberg I wore all the warm things I possessed on top of each other and had my rug wrapped around my shoulders. Even then my nose nearly froze. It was exciting to sail along the St. Lawrence. What an enormous river! Even after two days, I could only see one bank clearly. Of course there was a lot of fog and mist. The country was much more mountainous than I had ever imagined - almost like the Lake District in England. After eight days on the boat we landed in Quebec and were met by the Port Chaplain, who put us into a taxi and sent us off for two hours to see Quebec City. I thought it was a wonderful place. We went right up the hill and around the Chateau Frontenac, where there was a lovely view up and down the river. It was very early in the morning and beautifully cool and clear. Then started our long train ride west. We were marvellously looked after. I was surprised to see that everything was done by

16 black porters, and at intervals throughout the day a black man came along selling cigarettes, chocolates, and magazines. The dining car was excellent, but expensive. On and on our train rolled through the forests of northern Ontario. Even the towns were only little clearings. I was delighted by the numerous lakes in the woods and the beautiful rivers and waterfall s. To my amazement I saw tree trunks floating down all the rivers; some of the rivers were covered from side to side with logs. I was tremendously impressed by the Canadian cities; they were clean and well built, and beautifully shady. However, I remember, how strange Winnipeg seemed to me. It was obviously growing very rapidly. The main street had seven or eight-story banks and insurance offices next door to wood and corrugated iron single-story eating houses, barber shops, shoe-shine places, and, of course, beauty parlors. What struck me most about the prairie provinces were the miles and miles of space. Yon could fall asleep in the train and wake up two hours later and have missed nothing - the same bush, prairie, and muskeg. It was a tremendous geography lesson. It seemed as if all the inhabitants of the small towns and villages, through which we passed, turned out to see the train. When we reached Edmonton, I discovered that its population was around 56,000, just about the same as Dudley, the small town in England where I had grown up. And this was the capital of Alberta which had about the same area as France! Another geography lesson. We were met at the train station by Kate Brighty, who was the Superintendent of Public Health Nursing, and Olive Watherston, who was one of the district nurses. They took us to a hostel for women that was subsidized by The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf. Canon Andrews had arranged this for us . It was the place where their church workers and Sunday School by Post people stopped when they were in Edmonton. The Parliament Buildings were close by. Finally we had arrived. The next day we were to see the Hon. George Hoadley, the Minister of Health.

17 Chapter 2 Public Health Work

We went to see Mr. Hoadley the next morning in his very elegant office in the Parliament Building. The whole government of the province was conducted from this one building in those days; there were none of the monstrous government offices scattered around it, dwarfing it, that there are today. The first thing Mr.Hoadley said after he greeted us was, "You can't buy liquor in this province without a permit, but I will see that you get permits before you leave the office." I thought it seemed an odd priority for a minister of health. He then went on to tell us, however, that he proposed to send us to various of the outlying districts first so that we should see something of the Province, the problems, and the kind of work they wanted us to do. Then after a month or two, they would send us to permanent districts. That seemed like a very good idea to me. The first assignment for the three of us and Dr. Margaret Owens, who was the fourth woman doctor they had hired, was to be part of the Public Health Travelling Clinic for a week. The Travelling Clinic was really a magnificent effort. As a rule, two dentists, two doctors , and four nurses worked together as a team. They carried around with them a complete operating theatre and hospital. We had six small tents and a big one, with buckets, a stove, tables , chairs, beds, and even an ice-chest. Not only that, we even had electric lights and a gramophone. We really lived luxuriously and I had never been better fed in my life. The first place to which we went was the town of Clyde, fifty miles north of Edmonton. The team set up the whole clinic on Sunday afternoon and started working on Monday morning. The first day they examined over a hundred children, and the next day they did all the dental work, removed tonsils, and did other minor operations. I think a total of about thirty-five cases were treated.

18 Doctors and Nurses on Travelling Clinic. Clyde. Alberta, June 26. 1929

Doctors Margaret Owens, Elizabeth Rodger, Mary Percy , and Helen O ' Brien Clyde, June 26, 1929

Most of the children that came for examination had been picked by a nurse who had come out a week before and examined all the school children in the district. I think there were about two to three hundred. She referred those that she thought needed treatment to the Travelling Clinic.

19 The school arrangements were very new to me. Children were supposed to start school at six or seven years of age, but since ome of them lived fifteen miles away from school, they couldn't tart until they were older. So, in the same class, you had children of ten and girls of eventeen or eighteen, who were working for farmers for their board and room in their pare time in order to attend cla e . Camping with the Travelling Clinic wa imply great! I enjoyed it immensely. Our tents were set up in a clearing among little silver birch trees and there were lots of wild roses, some honeysuckle, and little blue lilies. It was a mo t delightful spot. There we were, itting around a huge camp fire in the evenings - drinking coffee and listening to gramophone records. It simply couldn't be beaten. We knew we had to move on, however. Our next stop was to be Jarvie, thirty mile farther north. But the last night in Clyde it started to rain; it imply poured all night. The next morning all the people in the street were going around with grins from ear to ear. It had been frightfully dry in central Alberta for three months. The wheat was ruined for mile around. Some of the farmer had already begun plowing it in a manure since that was all it was good for. Now at last the rain had come and the wheat that was not quite ruined was saved. That was all very well for the farmer , but we had a problem. The dirt road were deep in mud and water. How were we to get to Jarvie? We packed up, however. Chains were put on the wheels. Every car carried a spade to dig it out of the mud, and an axe to cut down trees to help tart it moving again. The whole caravan started at about 4 p.m. What followed was my first experience of its kind in Canada and a very good initiation into travel in the North. In those days there were no travelled highways north of Clyde. After having done about eighteen miles in three hours, the little truck got stuck in the mud. The other cars were ahead of it, but the Ford went back to help. It couldn't pull the truck out. Meanwhile, up ahead, the Studebaker got stuck. We managed to get that out of the mud after half an hour's hard work. Then two of us went on in the E ex to get horses from the nearest farm to pull the truck out. When we had gone about half a mile, we too got stuck in the mud, right up over the running board. There was nothing el e to do but walk. It took us half an hour to walk half a mile. However we got a team and some men .

20 On the road from Clyde to Jarvie

In the meantime, since we stayed away so long, one of the doctors came after us in the Studebaker, which we had dug out earlier. He found the Essex on the road, abandoned, so he tried to pull it out with his car - and only succeeded in getting the Studebaker stuck again! When we got back with the team, there were two cars to dig out, and a mile back a truck completely stuck. We pulled the cars out and then went back to the truck. Seven horses and eight men failed to shift that truck by 10 p.m., so we had to send for a tractor. Finally, at 11 p.m. we started off again. There were only twelve more miles to go, but oh! the roads. All went well until 3 a.m. when the truck got stuck again. We managed to get it out ourselves eventually with the aid of two telegraph poles mercifully found abandoned by the roadside a mile or two away. We got to Jarvie all right - but not until 6 a.m. the next morning. It had taken us fourteen hours to travel thirty miles. But we were all elated, for we had been told that roads were impassable. Jarvie, too, was a lovely place. Our camp was just above the river. There were lots of wild strawberries, and the raspberries were beginning to ripen; wild gooseberries and currents were also getting on. I ate dewberries for the first time in my life and thought they were most delicious. Miss Conlin, the District Nurse in Jarvie, had a wooden shack with three rooms and a wide balcony, built on

21 the river bank. It was an ideal place. Her district was quite big - thirty to forty miles across. Our trip back to Edmonton was not as exciting as our trip out to Jarvie. The roads had dried somewhat and so we arrived back in Edmonton without any problems. I spent a few very interesting days in Edmonton. After I had seen the University Hospital and the Children's Hospital, a temporary wooden building full of paralyzed children from the polio epidemic of 1928, I decided that Alberta could certainly have given England some advice in building and running a hospital. There were two qualified dieticians in a hospital of hundred and eighty beds. They were also very keen on sunlight treatment. I was interested in the fact that they had built the University Hospital next to the University, the University hostels, and University Farms. Altogether they oc­ cupied what seemed to me an enormous area. I had expected Canada to be very much like England. At first it did seem very much like what I had known, but then I discovered the weirdest differences. For instance, just up the street on which I was staying, I saw a large house standing back from the road, with a big lawn in front, and a notice sticking up out of the grass saying, "Funeral Home." I couldn't think of why an undertaker should label his house "Funeral Home," so I asked about it. The answer amazed me. I found out that when people died they were taken to this place and embalmed. Then they were dressed in their best evening frocks, their hair marcelled and their faces rouged, so that they were made altogether better looking than ever they did when alive! It seemed a priceless idea to me at that time, because in England corpses were buried in white cotton shrouds. The food seemed to be very much like it was in England except for some exciting extras. I discovered the hot dog. I also found out that waffles with syrup, and pumpkin pie were favourites. And how strange it seemed to have tea served with every meal, not after it as it was done in England, and to eat pickles with everything, hot or cold! I was surprised that people all had ice chests or refrigerators; even in villages there were electric re­ frigerators so that you could have beautiful ices. I found Canadians very hospitable and much less formal in their entertaining than we were in England. I received standing invitations to go to four different homes whenever I should come to Edmonton. After a few days in Edmonton, I was sent back to Jarvie by

22 train to spend a week with Miss Conlin, the District Nurse, to go round with her to emergencies and accidents and maternity cases, to see how one coped with such things in the wilds. Mary Conlin had had frontier experience in France in World War I, and in 1919 had become one of Alberta's first District Nurses, so she had been coping for nearly ten years. I certainly began to feel the difference in doing medical work with no access to a hospital with x-rays and a lab. Suddenly we had an urgent message to go to a woman forty miles away, who had been gored by a cow. We made the trip in a democrat (a light two-seated buggy). The cow's horn had gone in under the woman's breast, lifting it away from the chest wall, and throwing the woman right over the fence, so there was a deep dirty wound to be cleaned out. At the sight of it I remember thinking, "Oh my God, and no hospital!" We had to give her pure chloroform as an anaesthetic. For most kitchen table surgery in the North, chloroform was the only anaesthetic possible, because in houses with open fires, wood cookstoves and heaters, lamps or lanterns or candles, ether would have been too explosive. After the woman recovered from the anaesthetic and the surgery, she got up and just wouldn't let us leave before she had given us some coffee and Scotch shortbread. I remember she gave me the recipe for the shortbread. I tried baking it later on but it was never as good as hers. But then she had an exceptionally good cow and unlimited butter, which you need for Scotch shortbread. The woman made a complete recovery.

Mi ss Conlin's shack on the Pembina River at Jarvie

23 The school house in Jarvie

Miss Conlin and Dr. Percy being taken in a democrat to a woman who had been gored by a cow

People were awfully nice in Jarvie. Everyone called me "Doc.," which amused me immensely. But I nearly terminated my career abruptly when I was staying there. One of the boys asked me, "Can you ride? I am going to get the cows - . "

24 "Yes, sure," I said. But I had never ridden without a saddle and the horse he brought me had none. I got on the horse all right, but without any saddle or stirrups I had extremely little control over my steed. The horse soon sensed this, of course, and when we were coming back to the house, he came up the hill from the river at a gallop and went dashing into the barn. If I hadn't got my head down on his neck in a hurry he would have brained me right then and there. Moose and bear wandered around in that area. A man had found a big bear and three cubs rooting around in his garden, so he ran to get a gun. He took a shot at the bear and missed. The bear ran off and the cubs climbed up a tree. The man had managed to coax the cubs down eventually and put dog collars and chains on them. He brought one of the cubs to show us. The little fellow was very friendly and simply loved strawberries. Half a dozen children were kept busy picking them for him! He also liked honey, condensed milk, and chocolates. I stayed in Jarvie over Sunday, so I attended a church service. There was no church in Jarvie as yet. so the Methodists held a service once a fortnight in the schoolhouse at 8 p.m. There were forty-two people present, including children, which I thought was pretty good considering that the total population, including infants and children, was only seventy-five. It was just as I had imagined early Methodism must have been in England - Moody and Sankey at their best and brightest. I wouldn't have missed going to that service for anything - it didn' t seem a bit out of place in this country. A church building had just been started in Jarvie, and the way they were building it was very interesting. There were no building contractors or bricklayers, so they just appealed to everyone to go and help whenever they could, and they expected to get it done in a week! In the afternoon I went to an ice-cream store. While I was there, two homesteaders came in. Neither of them had any idea which day of the week it was - they sort of hoped it might be Saturday! After my week with Miss Conlin, I took the train back to Edmonton. There a surprise awaited me. Kate Brighty, who, as I said, was the Superintendent of Public Health Nursing, told me, " Make a list of all the equipment you will need because you are going north to the Battle River Prairie district right away. The District Nurse whom we sent there has just returned with a broken

25 arm. She was thrown off her horse when she was crossing the river. Shortly after she left, a woman bled to death from a retained placenta, and so we are very anxious to get somebody in there immediately." I didn't get to see any more of the district . I immediately started making a list of the equipment and supplies I would need. The first thing I put on my list was a tracheostomy set. A few month earlier, there had been a death from diptheria at Fort Vermilion in northern Alberta. Apparently the disease had been carried in with some clothing from a child in Ontario who had died of diptheria, and whose clothes had been sent to a Hudson's Bay trader to give to the poor. It was urgent to get diptheria antitoxin to give to the contacts to prevent a major outbreak. Dr. Hamman had sent two Indians with a dog team three hundred miles to the nearest telegraph line, the railway telegraph in Peace River, to telegraph to the Public Health Department that he urgently needed antitoxin. The Deputy Minister, Dr. Malcolm Bow, had sent it with Wop May and Vic Horner who flew five hundred miles in an open cockpit plane, on January 3, in sub-zero temperature. The two men carried the antitoxin inside their shirts. This had been such a spectacular flight that people were still talking about it when I came out in June, 1929. Bush flying, without airports or radio or even very accurate maps, made many of the early pilots famous. This flight had endeared Wop May to the people of the North. Anyway, it seemed to me that if I should be stuck with an outbreak of diptheria with no access to any help or any hospital, I would at least have a tracheostomy set. I had seen lots of diptheria and many urgent tracheostomies in England. Next I put on the list all the surgical instruments and supplies that I thought I might need. All in all I had twenty-two boxe . The place I was going to was not on any map. The big six-foot-high maps in all the government offices stopped at a line a little north of Grimshaw, because there was nothing to show in the northern third of Alberta. There were no roads, no railways, no telegraph lines. A small settlement at Fort Vermilion with three trading posts, a few scattered Hudsons Bay posts, and a thinly scatterd population of nomadic Indians and Metis people (per ans of mixed Indian and white ancestry) were the only igns of civili­ zation. Battle River Prairie, I was told, was about sixty miles north of Grimshaw, or almost four hundred miles north of Edmonton. It lay west of the Peace River about twenty miles, on the Notikewin

26 River. There was no town there of course. Since there was no way that one could let the people at Notikewin know that I was coming, Kate Brighty, the Superintendent of Public Health Nursing. was going to accompany me and make arrangements. We would take the train to Peace River Town, three hundred miles north of Edmonton, and then take the boat down the Peace River to Battle River Landing. Only there was no real landing; the boat would just stop at a certain place and let us off. There was always supposed to be somebody at that spot to meet each boat, to pick up freight and mail. Since there was never any certainty when the boat would arrive, the teamster often had to camp overnight. The little house in which the District Nurse had lived and which would now be my house and office as the Government Doctor, was two miles away from the nearest other house and the store. Both were on the north side of the Notikewin River. I would need to ford the river to get there and also to see many of my patients. I was assured that I would get a horse in the near future. Mail would come on the riverboat and be thrown on the bank . Mail would go out the same way every two weeks until the end of September, when the boats stopped. There were no telephones in Battle River Prairie and there was no possibility of sending a telegram. Before I left Edmonton, I wrote home to my family, " It sounds exciting and 1 think it is going to prove primitive enough."

27 Chapter 3 To Battle River Prairie

Miss Brighty and I travelled by train to Peace River Town. It took about twenty-four hours . Our route took us along beautiful Lesser Slave Lake and through miles and miles of bush. Finally in the morning, as the sun rose, we came upon the marvellous view of the Smokey and the Peace River joining forces and majes­ tically rolling northward. At the railway station in Peace River we met a man who ran the livery stable, and who always came to the train to haul whatever freight had to be taken anywhere. He took all my baggage down to the boat landing. We did not go down to the landing immediately because we knew the boat would not be leaving until the afternoon. Miss Brighty took me to meet Dr. Sutherland who would be my nearest doctor. He was the only doctor in Peace River at that time and known as a first-rate surgeon and general practitioner. He was also a very interesting man to talk to. He told me, "One of the things you will find most extraordinary is the absence of cancer here in the North, and the amazing amount of tuberculosis." His hospital was the Irene Cottage Hospital. It had two graduate nurses . The hospital was heated by wood-burning heaters. The sterilizing was done on a wood-burning cook stove which also cooked for the patients. There was no lab. The wood pile was out in the yard and a man carried wood in all the time to keep all the fires stoked in the winter. There was a privy outside. This was the only hospital to which I would have access: that is, when it was possible to get anyone out from the Battle River District. At about 2 o'clock we went down to the river. The boat was in . It was the D.A. Thomas, a large paddle-wheel steam boat. We went to see the captain, and he said he thought we would be able to get away by five.

28 At 5 o'clock we went down to the boat again and went on board. We waited and waited and waited . Nothing happened. We found out the crew were all having dinner! Eventually the boat sailed just after 7 p.m. Since we knew it was over a hundred miles via the winding Peace River to Battle River Landing and we expected the trip to take five hours, we were a bit worried about leaving so late. Would we get off the boat somewhere in the wilderness at midnight? Nobody else seemed concerned, however. About 9:30 the boat tied up by the bank somewhere and proceeded to load the wood that was used as fuel for the engines. "Cord-wood" was cut in about 4 ft. lengths and stock-piled by Indians along the river at different places. The boat put up a drawbridge affair and the wood was rolled down on to the boat. It was a terrific lot of wood. While this was going on, the captain came, sat down , and talked with us . He had no idea when we would get to where we were going! Eventually he decided to tie up on the riverbank and wait till dawn. I had never heard of anything so delighfully vague as this in all my life. The D.A . Thomas was really a very elegant boat. The dining room was done in mahogany and we were served very good meals. Besides Miss Brighty and me, there was Mr. Lamberton , an Anglican parson, who was travelling to Fort Vermilion, about a hundred miles farther north than we were going; and then there were two fur-traders . They were friends who traded hundred and fifty miles apart and who had been to Edmonton to sell their furs. They entertained us with the most amazing stories. I was so new in Canada that I had no idea what to believe and what not. One trader was Sheridan Lawrence, who, as I found out later, was one of the most famous men in the Peace River Country, and the other was Frank Jackson. Finally we ladies took berths and went to bed. Since the captain said we might get to our destination at 6:30 a. m., we got up at 6. We eventually landed at 8:30! We had looked forward eagerly along the bank of the river to get a glimpse of the place where we were to get off. Finally we saw a man and a small wagon. That was it! The man had camped out all night waiting for us . I was distressed to say the least when I saw his wagon and compared the space on it with my luggage.There were twenty-nine pieces weighing over a thousand pounds in all - and, of course,

29 the nurse and I too wanted to ride. But without hesitation the captain jumped off the boat; so did the purser, the parson, the two traders , and some of the crew. We got the wagon loaded - each piece of luggage was stowed away carefully. Finally Miss Brighty and I climbed on board on top of the luggage and we set off -

Dr. Percy 's baggage being unloaded from the D.A. Thomas

Frank Jackson (back to camera) helps load Dr. Percy 's baggage

30 Dr. Percy 's luggage is all loaded. Sheridan Lawrence and Kate Brighty and the teamster, Bon House

cheered on our way by the entire ship' s company, who all got off the boat to wave good-bye. All went well for about half an hour, and then we came to a hill. Miss Brighty and I got off, and the horses managed to get about a quarter of the way up , but then they were stuck. There was no other way but to unload everything and carry the trunks and the twenty-two boxes of drugs and instruments up the steep hill. Then of course, we had to load everything back on again . I can still feel the weight of that luggage! And it was 95°F . Besides, there were mosquitoes by the millions. We had to go through this whole process twice! We managed four miles in the first four and a half hours, but that was still all part of the hill. We were, of course, terribly thirsty. We asked our driver, "Is there water anywhere?" He was a Cree and could not speak English very well, but he understood. Yes, he nodded, there was water to drink two miles ahead. He held up two fingers. Did he mean two miles more or two hours more? We plodded on, and on, and on. Finally we

31 stopped. The man pointed to a filthy little black water puddle, perhaps two feet by three feet - black with mosquito larvae! We were speechless. Then I managed to ask, "Will we get to some other water?" The man shook his head. No, there was no other water between the Peace River and Battle River Prairie. I thanked Heaven that among my things were a kettle and a little spirit stove. I hauled them out, strained the water through a clean handkerchief, and made some tea. I didn't feel quite so bad about drinking that water well boiled. It was a jolly good job, too, that we made tea at that place for it was 10 p.m. before we got to my shack. It took us eleven hours to do eighteen miles. Miss Brighty and I walked a good deal of the way. I had always liked the idea of going into a new country with all my goods on a wagon, walking behind in true homesteader style, but on this trip I decided that there were more comfortable ways of travelling. Although it was so late in the evening, it was still amazingly light this far north. We could distinctly see the shack ahead of us. We staggered toward it - finally we would be able to rest. I grabbed the door knob. The door was locked! Nor was there any other house in sight. I thought I would collapse on the doorstep, but the mosquitoes were eating me alive, so I didn't. Our driver directed us to the camp nearby where men were starting to build a bridge - maybe we could get help there. We trudged over to the group of tents, and fortunately the cook was a kind man. He gave us some tea and a sandwich; another man went to get a key for us. We got into the house eventually, fell into bed, and slept till 11 a.m. the next day. Miss Brighty then sent a man from the camp with a message to Joe Bissette, the storekeeper, asking him to collect all the settlers who understood English for a meeting in the store that afternoon. We were fetched in a wagon. She introduced me as the new Government District Doctor to the group of men who had assembled and told them they had to provide me with wood and water, and loan me a horse until they could buy one for me. They then elected a committee of four men to look after my affairs. They passed the hat around and collected thirty-one dollar bills. This was about all the money there was in the district. For

32 Joe Bisette 's store. July 1929

a while they debated whether they should buy me a mare, but fin ally decided against it. There were too many stallions running loose, they said , and so I might have trouble with a mare. They would get me a gelding instead. I did not know what a gelding was , but they did promise to buy me a horse on which I could ride. Thirty-one dollars did not seem to me to be very much money for a good horse, but then, of course, I did not know how much horses were worth in Canada. They assured me the money was adequate. The next morning Miss Brighty had to be taken back by wagon to the river to catch the boat on its way back to Peace River Town, otherwise she would have been stuck in Battle River Prairie for two weeks. And I started scrubbing the floor! The nurse who had lived in the house had been fording the river on her saddle horse when he stumbled on the rocks and threw her into the river, breaking her arm. A great many people had tramped in and out of the house with muddy boots, and she had been taken away, leaving the house as it was. Nobody had known th at I was coming and the house had been left locked. I had washed a floor before, but had never scrubbed one this dirty . I literall y dripped sweat into the bucket. I also found out that to get water I had to go down to the river, and si nce the water bucket had a hole in it , there wasn't much water left by the time I got to the top of the bank. Finally, the floor was c lean, but my next problem was where to put all the surgical instruments, midwifery forceps, the tracheos­ tomy set, the drugs and dressings and Plaster of Paris I had brought. The nurse had not been there very long and the Government had not provided her with a great deal of equipment. She had worked out of her kitchen. There were no shelves to put anything on; there wasn't even anything for a patient to li e down on - except my own bed. That I did not think was a very good idea.

33 I got a carpenter with all speed to make me a table on which to put a patient for examination. I also had him build me cupboards with shelves for the drugs and dressings and instruments - and my medical books, of which I had brought very few because they were so heavy . There was Osier's Textbook of Medicine, Gray's Anatomy, Rose and Carless Textbook of Surgery, Robert Jones' Injuries to Joints, John Thomson's Treatment of Sick Children, Bruce and Dillings' Materia Medica, and William's Obstetrics, which told of all the dreadful things that could happen. Two weeks later, with curtains I had brought from home, my pictures on the walls , and added cushions to the couch, no one would have known it for the same shack. I thought it was palatial - and I'm not joking. It was certainly the nicest house in Battle River Prairie, considering it was for one person only. It was fourteen by twenty feet and divided into three rooms . There was a big living room, which was also a kitchen, scullery, and waiting room for patients; a fairly good-sized bedroom; and a dispensary which was also the consulting room for me, and in which there was just about enought room for me and a patient! The windows were well screened and that was fortunate since the mosquitoes swarmed about by the millions. The screen door was the best fitting one I had ever seen in Canada. Not a fly nor mosquito got indoors. The house had been built of green lumber and moved around in the district several times while various factions were arguing as to where the nurse, when she came, should be settled. Now the wood had shrunk and had been pulled apart as they had moved the house from place to place, so you could almost put your fingers between the boards. Someone suggested that the shack should be shingled all over to make it weatherproof, and since they could get shingles, that is what they did. Someone also came with a walking plow and plowed some furrows around the house so a brush-fire could not get near it. The area was all burned-out forest and there were many old burned logs around - some of them standing and some of them lying in the grass. If ever we should have had a fire down in the grass, it would have burned the cabin very fast. This little house was set on the bank of the Notikewin River, about eighty feet from the stream, and I had a lovely view from each window. It had been just put down in the middle of the bushes - mainly rose bushes - and had no paths or fences around it. A few yards in front of the house was an old narrow trail.

34 Dr. Percy's shack after it had been shingled all over and moved closer to the river and banked.

Joe Rousseau ' s car is being pulled across the river.

This, I was told, was going to be the main road north. The river was very stony and rapid. Not far from my house there was a ford across it, but the water came above the hubs of wagon wheels. I crossed on horseback quite easily, but I always took my feet out of the stirrups in case I had to swim, because a few feet below the ford was a hole ten or twelve feet deep. The occasional car needed horses to pull it through, but there were only three or four cars in the whole area, and they didn't often cross. One night, about I a. m., there was a banging on my door, so I got up expecting to have to go to a patient, but it was only a man

35 and a little girl who wanted shelter for the night as he could not get his car across the river in the dark. So they slept in my kitchen-living room all night. The next morning he got across the ford quite safely. The Alberta Government had decided to put a bridge across the river and building had started a few weeks before my arrival. This bridge was the farthest north in Alberta. On my arrival there was only a wooden framework up, but it was possible to get across. It was rather a nightmare to do so, however, for in one place there were only two planks along twenty feet of it. This was fifty feet above the water and the boards were very springy. That is the way I had to cross until I got a horse. I found it quite impossible in a wind. Suddenly there was a third plank, and now it did not look quite so bad. The bridge engineer informed me that they had put only two planks there to begin with so that they would have a chance to help me across, but as I had managed without help they thought they might as well add another plank! A gang of fourteen men were working on the bridge. They lived in tents, and were my nearest neighbours. That was, of course, only temporary. But in the beginning they bathed in the river just above the place where I got my water. Fortunately the stream flowed swiftly. The river water was the colour of weak tea and was my only water supply. I got used to it very quickly, however, and soon liked the taste. Soon after I came to Battle River Prairie, the wild raspberries were getting ripe. They were marvellous and equal in size to our cultivated ones, and much finer in flavour. I picked over two pounds in one afternoon, and could have picked 10 pounds in the same place had I wanted them. That night I made raspberry jam - by lamplight. It was much too hot in the daytime to have my stove on. The whole shack got to furnace heat after about an hour during the day. Also, patients wandered in at all hours from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., so I had to do these things when I could. Cooking was a huge joke. I found that wood-burning stoves took some managing. They burned out in about twenty minutes unless you kept stoking them; and they got so hot that everything on top boiled furiously, however far from the fire you put it. They also required the most complicated cleaning out, above and below the oven. Then if you cleaned out the top too effectively, things in the oven got red-hot on top while they were still stone cold at the bottom. Since the weather was brilliantly fine those first weeks, my shack became unbearably hot. I used my primus stove when

36 I only wanted to boil a kettle of water or fry bacon and eggs. My district was extremely scattered. It was estimated by the Department of Public Health as two hundred and fifty square miles _ twenty-five miles by ten or more. The people there said it was certainly upwards of three hundred and fifty square miles. My house was roughly in the middle of this territory; it had been moved there so that I wouldn't have to ride more than twenty miles in any direction. There were no roads, and all the rivers and creeks had to be forded, although, as I mentioned, a bridge was being built across the Notikewin. l found out that the people all referred to the Notikewin River as the First Battle River, from which the district got its name. There was a First, and its tributaries: the Second, and the Third Battle Rivers. Together they eventually flowed into the Peace. Sometime between 1750 and 1775 there had been a battle between the Beaver Indians and the Cree Indians, who were en­ croaching from the south. The battle was won by the Beaver Indians, mainly because one of them swan across the river unseen by the Cree and started a grass and brush fire which killed most of the enemy. Afterwards Beaver and Cree smoked a peace pipe at Peace Point. They called the river where they had fought, the Not-nay-quewn Seepee. The Dominion Land Surveyors, when they were surveying this area in 1915, wrote it as it sounded to them: Notikewin, and named its tributaries - the Second and Third Battles - the Hotchkiss and the Meikle Rivers after two of the men in the survey party. It was a beautiful country. I soon noticed that there were wild animals about. One morning I saw a young moose standing in the river drinking, and I also noticed fresh bear tracks . There were two sweet little chipmunks living in my woodpile. They were so bright and attractive that I had great hopes of taming them. My garden - about fifty acres of bush - was full of prairie chicken, and there were any number of ducks in a slough a quarter of a mile away. I bought myself a gun, a .22, and spent my spare time practising by shooting at tin lids . As soon as I could shoot with moderate accuracy, I was determined to get myself one of those prairie chickens.

37 Chapter 4 Pioneer Life

It was most interesting living on the main road north. Of course, if you had not known it was the main road, you might have missed it and walked straight across it without noticing. Since it was just about in front of my house, however, I could see all the traffic. One day I saw seven vehicles! That was quite a lot of traffic for that area in 1929. All the world went past my door. I saw the land-seekers going north. I saw the homesteaders coming in: Norwegians, Germans, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and Americans. It was a thrill to see these people - the men and their wives and their children - their pots and pans, bedsteads, and sometimes children's toys, violins, and weird oddments - all on the wagon, with an odd cow or two and a dog running behind; the whole procession moving at about three miles an hour.

Settlers moving in - Battle River

38 Settlers arriving on their land - banks of the Notikewen River.

There was something astounding about their courage when they arrived, miles from anywhere. They had to simply camp out as best they could till the man had built a house to live in . No wonder those houses were one-roomed shacks - the sooner they had a roof over their heads , the better. I found one family in a tent - man, woman, and eleven children. The tent was about twelve by ten feet and the whole floor was about two inches under water after a heavy rain . The baby had whooping cough - that was why I had been called. Why it didn't have pneumonia beat me. The family had been there only ten days, but the man had built his house as far as the roof. That was pretty good work when his timber was four miles away. And somehow they survived. Most of the white women had come only in the last year, but old Mrs . Robertson had been there for over five years, and for two of those years she and her daughter had been the only white women in that area. They had come up in the days when there wasn't a trail, and they had to cut their way through the bush. There were men who had come up in 1922 when you could not even make it on a saddle horse. The only way was on foot - a hundred miles. Of course, men still walked in from Peace River, with all their worldly goods on their backs, but there was enough

39 traffic on the roads by 1929 that they could usually get a lift part of the way . It was tremendously interesting to meet all these people in their homes. One day I had breakfast with some Norwegians, dinner with Russians, and supper with Germans. One of the Russian families stands out particularly in my memory. I had gone out to see them because of a convulsing baby, and stayed there seven hours . The mother was a nice-looking, well educated woman. She did not know very much English, but she was picking it up very fast. She taught me some Russian. I could soon ask for boiling water, cold water, water to wash my hands, milk, sugar, and soup. Her shack was exquisitely clean and her clothes were hand-made and beautifully cut. She boiled every drop of her drinking water. I was impressed how splendidly she looked after the baby. It was three weeks old. There were three other children, aged four and a half, three, and one and a half. They were the best brought up children I had ever seen. Even the smallest one washed her hands and face and dried them herself before meals without being reminded. They were not goody-good children; they could be little monkeys, but they were awfully happy and jolly. I so wished I could talk Russian to them; their baby Russian sounded delightful.

The Russian woman, Mrs . Spirak, and her children

40 All six in this family lived in a shack about twelve by sixteen feet. Their nearest neighbour was a mile away. The shack was right in the middle of the bush, not on any wagon road, and you could not see another house from it. They had only come that spring and, I could tell , had very little money. However, the man was a good workman. The house was well-built, banked, and had a deep cellar. He had about fifteen acres broken , disked, and harrowed, though the bush was pretty heavy to clear. They also had a wonderful garden. A garden was rare. At first I could not get any fresh food whatever. There was no milk , meat, or fruit , and there were no eggs or vegetables. I could buy only canned and dried foods. Since this was an absolutely new district, only a few acres had been broken more than a year, and homesteaders needed all the land they had broken for crops and feed for the animals. They could not spare either land or much time for gardening. Such gardens as they had were too small even to supply their families' needs - they certainly did not have anything for sale. So in all Battle River Prairie there was not a potato to be bought. But, if peopl e had nothing to sell , they were very willing to share the little they had with me. Very soon I did have some fresh milk, fresh eggs, lettuce, new potatoes, and delicious carrots. They were all gifts! In fact, I soon had difficulty keeping up with the enormous quantities given to me by people who didn't even have enough fresh food for themselves. Unfortunately, I was extremely ill-equipped to come to a place where you couldn't buy any ready-prepared food except pork and beans. When I was a child I did not learn to cook because I was in school during World War I. There was no food to spare in order to teach children to cook, so we were given extra biology classes instead of cooking classes. At home the same thing applied all through the war. There was no food to ri sk spoiling. There wasn't any chance of learning to cook. Then, later, it was always assumed that since I was going to be a doctor, I should be able to afford someone to cook for me. So, when I came out to Alberta the only cooking I had done was to hard-boil eggs if I was going walking, and make tea. People were very friendly and very generous. I was often asked out for meals. One Sunday, Canon Naylor, a Church of England parson who had a church in Montreal but was in northern Alberta on a holiday, held a service in the school-house. (It was the only Church of England service held in Battle River Prairie that

41 year.) After the service I was invited to dinner by Bill Schamehorn, one of the farmers. I was amused at the wording of the invitation. He said, "You'd better come over and get a fill-up of peas at my place." By J :30 p.m. there were fourteen of us there - seven visitors collected casually like myself, and the family. We all sat around in the kitchen-living room watching Mrs. Schamehorn and her teen-aged daughter, Jenny, cook the dinner. No wonder they got a bit hot and bothered! It was a really good dinner though - fresh meat, peas, potatoes, and raspberries. Nothing was canned. And I came away with a small pack of peas that they had picked for me. The crops were good that first year I was there. The owner of the finest crop in the district said he could hardly sleep at night for fear something would happen before he got it harvested. He had only been out there eighteen months, and of course this crop meant everything to him financially. That was the snag about homesteading - you could not get a cent out of the land in less than two years, and if anything happened to that first crop, you were broke.

Bill Schamehom's wonderful wheat crop on Big Prairie

The settlers were new-comers. The Indians and the Metis had been there for a very Jong time. A few days after I had moved into my shack, just as I was having lunch, in walked an Indian. He informed me that he had not slept for three nights because of a tooth-ache and demanded that I should remove the tooth immediately. He also gave me to

42 understand that he had had teeth pulled twice before and each time the dentist had said that his teeth were awfully difficult to extract. I looked at the tooth . It was an upper wisdom tooth, nearly halfway down his throat! However, there was no dentist nearer than Peace River Town, a hundred miles away, so I went for it - bared my brawny arm - gave a colossal pull - and nearly went backward through the window! It came out as easily as any other tooth. We were both speechless, and he could hardly believe his eyes. My reputation as a dentist was most certainly established! The news travelled fast through the bush, as I found out when an Indian woman came to me from Carcajou, about a hundred miles away, to have her teeth pulled. Many Metis people lived in my area. They are the people about whom even now most Canadians know little, and yet it was through their skill and endurance as guides and hunters , canoe-men and freighters, that Western Canada was opened up to white settle­ ment. Some of the Metis looked like pure Indians, some I could not tell whether they were or were not white people, but most of them were obviously half and half. When I learned a few words in Cree, I was fascinated to discover that the Cree for Aspirin is pronounced "taystigwanan moskeke." Literally it means headache medicine. I was a "moskeke wenou" - a medicine man; and the preacher was an "ime wenou" or a Sunday man. At first I found the Metis extraordinarily interesting to deal with . They would come into my house and sit down and say nothing. I would talk to them politely for about half an hour; then they would say something and I would think that I had grasped what they had come for. But no! They would stay for about another half an hour, and sometimes just as they were going away they would say what they really wanted. For instance, I would need to talk to a woman for an hour before she would ask me to pull out a tooth. It was really astonishing how cheerful and friendly the Metis people were. They would always help me out if I lost my horse or needed firewood . A little group of Metis lived about three miles east of me. I got to know the trail out to their place very well because there were many illnesses and accidents in their midst. They would all move on when they went out moose hunting or berry picking, but there were some log houses there and so they would always come back to this location. Some of them were well-known trappers. One of them was Louison House. When I heard his name mentioned I thought it sounded like Weaselhouse

43 and so I politely called him Weaselhouse for years before I discovered his correct name! He was a famous old trapper. One Metis woman was the greatest joy. Her name was Mrs. Blue. I did not want to spend any of my spare time scrubbing floors again, so I hired her to come and do it for me. She spoke English quite well, and her favourite expression was "Gee-whiz." She came out with it about once per sentence. She gave me an enormous piece of meat from a moose which she had killed herself. She did quite a bit of hunting, as she once said, "I no frightened him bear, gee-whiz! I got gun, I shoot um bear, I shoot um moose, gee-whiz!"

Mrs . Blue, enthusiastic hunter of moose and bear, who helped out cleaning the doctor's cabin.

I got to know a number of Metis quite well, and asked one of the women to make me some deerskin gloves and some moose-hide mocassins for the winter. Most of the Metis wore mocassins all the year round. Later, one dear Metis woman gave me as a gift a beaded moose-hide camera case. It was really a lovely thing, done with my initials, D.P., in beads. It took me a few seconds to get the D.P. Of course -D.P. for Dr. Percy! One of my first patients was a Metis child who lived in a tent about ten feet by six feet, and about five feet high in the middle. I had to stoop to get in, and crawl around on hands and knees inside. The mother, the father, and at least three other children

44 were living in it. Besides. there were four or five dogs. Just outside the tent was an erection of branches over a fire, and strips of deer meat hanging on them to dry. Some of this would later be pounded to a powder called pemmican. The rest. looking hard and brown like leather that has been wet and dried quickly, I was told would make good broth when boiled. Inside the tent sundry bits of suet were hanging up, and the bladder of a deer was stuffed with clothes, and put in one corner to dry. Needless to say, the flies were rather troublesome.

Johnny Freeman and family drying meat - the son was Dr. Percy's patient. tuberculous meningitis.

I had a suspicion that the child might have typhoid. It was too early to say, but if it did. I knew we could have a big problem on our hands. They were living right by the river, and the river was the drinking-water supply of the district. It turned out that the child did not have typhoid (it had tuberculous meningitis, from which it died), but I became much more aware of the danger of the water supply. Many people drove in every day from one or two miles away to get water from the river. I urged everyone to boil their drinking water, but because they had never had typhoid up there, they did

45 not bother. Also, since it was a rapid, stony stream, they imagined that it would therefore be less likely to be contaminated than a slow sluggish one. I decided to have a well dug as soon as possible. It was such a nuisance to boil and cook my water. I didn't do it for a few days, but then it struck me how horribly risky it was. There were not many people living higher up the river than I was, but I knew one woman washed her husband's dirtiest shirts in the river, above me! And the bridge gang swam in it, the horses were watered in it, and the people crossed the ford - all within half a mile above where I got my drinking water. Of course, I could not say anything about washing shirts in my drinking water when I went swimming in the drinking water of the people living downstream! Pioneer life also had its social aspects. Immediately after I came to Battle River Prairie, I went to the store one day. Joe Bissette, the storekeeper, told me that Joe Rousseau was opening up a store at Notikewin, which was four miles from where I was living. There would be a dance at the schoolhouse on Friday night to celebrate the event. He said he and his wife were planning to go and they would be glad to take me with them in their car. So I rode over to their house on my borrowed horse. The dance was supposed to start at 8 o'clock, but we didn't get away until hours later because Mr. Bissette was still busy at his store. When we got to the dance, however, everybody else was just arriving. No one dreamt of coming until ten or eleven. It was a very new experience for me. There was just one big room; you hung your coat and hat on a nail somewhere, and powdered your nose in full view of the world. There were many more men than women, and more than half of the women were Metis. The men wore their ordinary clothes. Their boots were assorted - heavy hobnailed clogs, high riding boots, rubbers , and moccasins. I could feel my feet by morning, to say the least! There were no programs the way we had them at a dance in England. In fact, you didn't even have a dance with only one man; every now and then another man would come up behind the one you were dancing with, tap him on the shoulder, and then go off with you! As there were lots more men than women, this happened very frequently. The music was produced by one violin and a homemade instrument resembling a mandolin. Supper, I thought at that time, was priceless. We all sat down on the benches around the wall, women on one side and the men

46 on the other. Then a big wash-tub full of cups was brought around. Each person took one. Next came a tub full of sandwiches, and then a huge kettle full of coffee. The cake was in wide slabs in th e tins it had been baked in , and they just cut it into hunks and carried it around. However, as my partner remarked , "It sure was a dandy supper." [ discovered at this dance that I was a "bachelor." Anybody who was living alone and doing his or her own cooking was said to be ·'baching." About a month after I came, the bridge across the Notikewin Ri ver was finished and there was an official opening on Sunday afternoon. The program seemed to me rather unique. First came the bridge opening at l o 'clock. That was followed by a picnic; then a baseball match four miles away at three, then a church service in the schoolhouse, followed by a dance for the bridge crew - also in the schoolhouse. The Premier of Alberta (John E. Brownlee), two members of Parliament, the Chancellor of the University of Alberta, and several other important persons came out to Battle River Prairie to see the new settlement. They made sundry speeches, and were very com­ plimentary about the Government Doctor. They felt I had a crucial role to play in the development of the community. Most of them

Opening of the bridge across the Notikewin River (First Battle). Dr. Percy shaking hands with Premier Brownlee. Hugh Allen M .L.A . and Sandy Maclean at left. Joe Bisette in fo reground .

47 called on me . I thanked Heaven I had just finished scrubbing the floor when the first one arrived, and I tried to behave as if I was used to the society of Prime Ministers! I must say they were right about the importance of a doctor. The hundred miles to Peace River Town to the nearest doctor, until I came, was a three or four days journey. Several women told me that it made all the difference just to know that there was a doctor available if necessary. I thought again of the young Russian woman in whose home I took care of the convulsing baby. Just before the baby got sick, her husband had to go to Grimshaw to hunt for horses . The ten-day-old baby was quite well when he left. But soon afterwards the baby turned ill and became progressively worse. She was alone with a sick baby and three small children . There was absolutely no place she could go for help. Fortunately a neighbour, Mrs. Frith, who lived a mile away, happened to send two of her children around for some eggs and they came back to their mother and told her about the sick baby. She went over and found the baby in convulsions. Mercifully she was one of those intelligent people who know what to do in most emergencies. She looked after the baby and sent one of her children for a friend who lived three miles away. By the time the child reached the friend's place it was pitch dark, so she stayed till dawn. Then the friend went on to a neighbour who owned a horse, and the neighbour sent his boy on horseback to fetch me. It was eleven miles. I didn' t get there until 9 a.m. and by that time the infant had been in almost continuous convulsions for twelve hours and was absolutely at its last gasp. I expected it to die at any moment, but it made the most dramatic recovery I had ever seen. That was what pioneering meant to women with children. Sometimes I felt apprehensive, I must admit. There were several women with children out there at the time who would have remained in town, but their husbands had told them they might as well come up , now that they could get a doctor as easily as at home. I felt most frightfully responsible, but I was glad I had come. I missed my family very much but I was not homesick enough to want to go back. I would not have returned to England for a thousand dollars. I knew I was doing the right job.

48 Chapter 5 A Doctor on Horseback

About two weeks after I had moved int o my shack, my horse . .. Dan T' arri ved . That was fortunate because I wo ul d not have been able to do my work w ithout him . Dan ' I was a very ni ce horse, we ll broke n and com fo rtable. He d id . however. run away w ith me th e first evening. I suppose it was my fa ult fo r letting him trot down a steep hill - he went o ff at a gall o p w ithout any stimulati on fro m me. At first people were awfull y funny about my rid in g. Of course everyone around the re rode horseback . C hildren coul d ride as soon as th ey could walk . When I was asked whe th er I could ride, I said carefull y. " I can ride aft er a fas hi on." The first time I went o ut on a horse, one of the me n looked at me and said. "Oh , yes. you can ride - but you ' II know a whole lot more about it after six months." How ri ght he was ! The barn was not built as yet, and so I ti ed Dan ' I by a rope about thirty feet long, a little di stance from the ho use. He got the rope wound round a ll the bushes and trees within reach . That was a bother and a worry. Fortunate ly I could see him fro m the w indow and could go and untang le him. It did not take me very long to get used to ri d in g; however I also had to learn to feed , wate r, and saddle the horse. In Eng la nd I had only ridden on the sma ll fl at saddle that Canadi ans re fe r to as " the postage sta mp ... but in Battle Ri ver I was provided w ith a weste rn stock saddle, the kind with a wide hump in front w ith a horn in the middle, and the seat c urved up at the back. The stirrups were wide wooden affairs, quite unlike the narrow metal Eng li sh ones. The who le thing was very heavy, and at first I fo und it difficult to throw o ve r the back of a restl ess horse. Cinc hing was also rathe r tricky at fi rst as Dan had a habit of blowing himself out so that whe n I had pulled the c in ch absolutely

49 as tight as I could, the saddle would be loose when I got on. George Robertson, a neighbour, happened by when I was struggling with it, and showed me the trick of kicking the horse sharply underneath just as I went to tighten the cinch. After saddling him I still had the problem of fastening the saddlebags in which I carried all my equipment, often a considerable variety of drugs and dressings and instruments. I had to take everything I might possibly need, and had to be very careful to pack them so that nothing would break and that nothing would rattle and scare the horse. When I started my medical work on horseback there were only trails in that area - no roads. The trails never went straight. Usually they had to go around a lot of muskeg, but even when the terrain was as flat as a billiard table, they curved here and there and everywhere. I soon got to know why: we had the most terrific storm one night; it blew down a number of trees and branches across the trail through a little wood I travelled every few days to see a patient, but no one bothered to pick up even one branch - they just made another trail around it. About the time Dan'l joined my household, my dog also came. I had bought a little pedigree Great Dane just before I left Edmonton on the way up to Battle River Prairie. He was six weeks old then and was kept by a construction gang until I got settled. Now, finally, I got him. He had grown enormously; I could hardly believe my eyes . He had been a little puppy and now he was about as big as a collie. I called him Brutus.

Brutus, Dr. Jackson's efficient guard dog.

50 I soon found out that Brutus had an enormous appetite. I had to cook about six times as much as I used to, and even then he looked at me hungrily. I cooked six or seven pounds of moose meat for him on my primus! I didn't like the smell of moose meat at all , but I knew there would be no other meat to eat during the winter. I .was very busy with patients. One week I did over hundred and fifty miles on horseback. I discovered that I needed the strength of an Amazon on my job. There was hardly any illness about just then, but there were many accidents. J had five fractures in five weeks, and even four patients could be very demanding when one of them lived eleven miles in one direction and another seven miles in the opposite direction. The case that took up much of my time was a little girl of seven, who lived fifteen miles north of my place. She had a compound fracture in her arm and a dislocated elbow - a beastly mess. Her little brother, Max, aged twelve, came to fetch me. I th ought he was the bravest kid I had ever met. In order to get me he had had to ride fifteen miles, after dark, ford two rivers, and come throught a wood in which he had seen bear tracks. Max arrived at my place at I a.m. We started back to his house at 2 a.m. and did not get there until 5:45 a .m . as his horse went lame. But through all this the fatherly way he looked after me was delightful. It was bitterly cold (we had our first frost that ni ght) and he wasn 't very warmly clad. He must have been exhausted when we got there, but he insisted that he wasn't tired. Any number of things could happen in one day. One morning I went out immediately after breakfast to see a man seven miles away. When I came back I found another patient waiting to see me . After I had taken care of her, I had a meal and then rode off to see three more. Fortunately I was given supper at one of the houses. Then I rode on again seven miles north, and got home at midnight. The next morning J was fetched before I had had my breakfast. When I got to the place - the man was dead. That was the second death in one week. I got back home about 11 :30 am . to find a man waiting with a truck to take me to his brother, about ten miles south. The brother had split his foot open with an axe. I sewed that up, had a meal there (the first since 6 p.m. the night before), and got back at about 4 p .m.

51 I had just watered the horse and was thinking of making my bed, when the little girl with the broken arm, whom I mentioned before, arrived, so I redressed that; and saw a man with some bad teeth. I had supper and then went to get the horse in order to see another child on my list. Dan had disappeared! He could be quite a nuisance. I still had to picket him as I had neither a corral nor a barn. So now I had to wait till morning to borrow the storekeeper's horse in order to go after mine. And I had three patients I knew of to see that next day - fourteen miles riding at least, without having to do another ten looking for my horse. Hunting for horses was quite common in the North during those days . Since it was such a new district we still had what was called Open Herd Law. You didn't have to keep your own horses and cattle on your own land, and you were not responsible for any damage they might do on anyone else' s land. It was up to the man with an oat field to keep it fenced so that horses could not get in. If my horse got into my neighbour's oat field (as he did one night), then the neightbour had no redress , and my horse got a free feed. For that reason enormous numbers of horses wandered around. A bunch of about seventy ran around over a big patch of bush to the south-east of where I lived, and Dan usually made for them when he broke loose. That is where I found him this time too. Between Battle River Prairie and Grimshaw there were probably five hundred or more horses running loose. They seemed to like to get together in bunches and so, if your horse ran off, you set out on another horse to hunt through these bunches to see if you could find yours. That might take a day or a week or a month. Sometimes well-known horses were recognized a hundred miles from their home. In that case a message was sent to the owner. The message sometimes took a week or so to arrive, and so when the man came to look for his horse he sometimes found it was the wrong horse after all, or it had moved on in the meantime. My horse was very well known. First of all, he had won the races at Waterhole for four consecutive years, and he was shod on all four feet. Very few horses were shod in that part of the country, and as far as I knew, he was the only one with more than two shoes. That made him easy to track. People sometimes remarked when they met me coming back from a case miles away, "Oh, I saw you were out that way today." The dust was inches thick on the roads and showed the tracks beautifully.

52 My district was growing at an unbelievable rate. Very soon it was over forty miles long and becoming quite unworkable from my point of view. Poor old Dan could not do more than twenty miles a day on the average and then be expected to do an odd thirty-five or forty in a hurry. I got back one night after a thirty-eight-mile ride to find another call to a place five miles away, and couldn't do it. Dan was nearly all in, and ten miles more would have been the last straw. They brought the man to me instead. He had almost severed his big toe with an axe, and had had a string tourniquet on his leg for sixteen hours when I got him. However, I sewed his toe on again and prayed hard. It healed perfectly. Speaking of accidents, I must mention the one that happened because we were getting so frightfully civilized. Finally the bridge was finished, as I mentioned before, and the road that was being built was through to the store and six miles south of my shack. Only four days later I had the first car accident. Now that we had a road with ditches, it was possible for a car to slide into them. That is what happened this time. It wasn't a bad accident, but some of those ditches were twenty feet wide and ten feet deep to drain water from the road. If you drove a little too fast you could quite easily get onto the soft shoulder and go into the ditch. No one could possibly have had an accident on the old trail - you could not do more than about fifteen miles an hour in a car on it. Not all my cases were due to accidents of course. One maternity case almost turned my hair white. She was a Polish woman who had been in strong labour for three days before they sent for me. The cabin was built of poplar poles, with slough grass for the roof; there were no windows, and pigs and chickens were running around on the dirt floor. The pigs were under the bed while I was working on the woman. lt was a very difficult case. I needed an expert anaesthetist and somebody to help me, to say nothing of some light, but most of all I needed somebody who could interpret for me and tell the woman what I was going to do. The two families who were living in this little shack didn't understand a word of English. Finally, the father fetched the teen-aged son of a Russian neighbour, who could make himself understood in Polish and who could talk a little English. We fastened a piece of blanket between him and the bed, so he wouldn't see it all, and he struggled to explain in Polish what I said in English. He must have made the woman understand, or perhaps she

53 was too tired to fight the anaesthetic. I had to give her pure chloroform because the other woman was busy frying potatoes on the wood stove to feed her family. I delivered a live 9 lb. baby, and the mother didn't bleed. But just as I was thinking all was well , the other woman, who had been watching me instead of frying potatoes, snatched the frying pan off the stove as the thing caught fire and the flames shot up between the poplar poles into the grass roof. I'll never know why the house didn't catch fire. There seemed to be a special Providence caring for homesteaders' wives in the North. One day I went out to see a man with pneumonia. He was camping out in the bush. While I was in the tent, another homesteader came in. He said he was living in a tent also and had caught a bad cold - oh, a frightful cold. He thought it might tum into pneumonia, but he was quite sure that a drink of gin would cure him. When he discovered that I did not stock gin and that although I was a Government Doctor he would have to pay for my services, he decided it was only a light cold and already getting better! Pneumonia was very common. Even in a hospital, in the days before penicillin and sulfa drugs , the death rate was over 20 percent - and when patients were out in tents in the bush, pneumonias were very worrying; I had to try to visit them every day until they had made it through the crisis, which was usually a week,. It was astonishing how well these people did, and how very few deaths we had, especially considering how little we had in the way of drugs with which to treat them. Small doses of heroin were useful. Most white people used mustard plasters as first aid, but the Metis used fried onions covered with muskrat skin, hair side inwards. It seemed to do just as much good. My longest journey on horseback that fall was to the Meikle River, twenty-two miles north. A man working on the telegraph line was sick. The man who came to fetch me was almost sure the man had diptheria because he could smell it. He told me it had started with a sore throat five days ago and now the man was awfully ill. He could not swallow and could hardly breathe. Diptheria does have a typical smell; you can recognize it if you have once smelled it and that is why I was so sure that this man was going to tum out to be a real disaster. Chances were that the diptheria would be rapidly fatal unless I could make a hole in his trachea to let him breathe. This is one of the times I took my tracheostomy set along. I went off expecting something really serious, and it turned

54

I . out to be a quinsy! A bad quinsy could, of course, be fatal in those days when we had no antibiotics, no penicillin. A quinsy is an absess behind the tonsil and it swells up until the throat is practically blocked. The patient has a high fever and is very ill indeed. The thing to do, of course, is to stick a knife into the quinsy in order to let the pus out. After that there is usually a tremendous improvement in the patient's condition. This man was very sick. Lying in a sleeping bag on spruce boughs was none too comfortable for a sick man. Besides, it was pretty cold at night under canvas. I had to stay there for the night, and the next morning we brought the man down to the store by wagon. I commandeered the store's upper room and turned it into a hospital. The man recovered and went back to work just a week after I saw him . I was amazed. Sometimes it was very serious not being able to send bad cases to a hospital quickly and I became really panicky. It was an awful responsibility to keep very sick people up there in the wilds, but because of the cost of getting to the hospital in Peace River or Edmonton, and high doctors' and hospital fees, I simply had to try to keep everything possible up there. The hospital fee was only $3.00 a day, but for people who did not have $3 .00 it was an impossible sum. Besides, the roads were almost impassable for weeks that fall because of the rain. My worst case I could not get to the hospital for a week. I had to ride thirty-two miles a day to see him before the roads were dry enough to take him to Peace Ri ver by car. Taking a patient to hospital by car sounds as if we were now quite civilized. We finally did get a road from Grimshaw, but in actual fact it was often more impossible to get out on that road in the car than it had been on the old trail. It was a dirt road, constructed by making parallel ditches and heaping the dirt that had been taken out of the ditches into the middle. The ditches had to be deep enough to drain the water off, but if there was a lot of rain the loose earth that had been piled up in the middle to make the road, became bottomless mud. It was much more difficult to travel on than the old wagon road had been since it had had a grassy foundation. On the new road, if you could travel on it, the trip was thirty-five miles shorter, but there weren't many cars available, and it wasn't much of a road when it came to getting patients out to the hospital. Finally we could take the patient just mentioned to the

55 hospital. We arrived in Peace River at 1 a.m. After my patient was safely settled in the hospital, I went to the hotel to check in for the night. The first time I had brought a patient to Peace River to the hospital, I could hardly believe my eyes when I went to the hotel. It was after midnight, and the door not locked. I went in. There was nobody about, but on the desk there was a list of rooms vacant, so I went up and had a look at three or four. I chose one, went down and crossed it off, put my number down under the time I wanted to be called, and went to bed. This time I found to my delight that the hotel was almost full because the Travelling Clinic from Edmonton was there. It certainly was good to see them all again and have somebody with whom I could talk shop. It amused me how differently I saw Peace River Town from the time I saw it when I first came there fifteen weeks before. I had thought of it as a priceless little one-eyed town - almost a model for "Main Street". Now it had become the centre of the universe, the metropolis. I felt as though I was really in the centre of civilization again, where I could buy clothes and vegetables and postcards! Although it was great to get to Peace River every once in a while - it was a much needed change - I was always glad to get back to my shack. Dan was so pleased to see me - he would come running up to me and rub his nose against my shoulder - and the pup ran round me in circles. I realized that this had become home to me. I would never go to India.

56 Chapter 6 Fall

Winter hung over us like a shadow. In August already people would say to me, "Be sure you get everything you need from town before the middle of September. That is when the boat stops coming down the river, you know .. , It was obvious that official dates for autumn and winter had no meaning in the North. The first frost came in August, which is still supposed to be summer. In September the weather started changing rapidly. We still had brilliantly fine hot days, but it froze every night and it got dark quite early. The Northern Lights became more and more beautiful. One night I rode seven miles under a wonderful sweep of coloured lights - pink and green . They were not just in the north - they spread over half the sky. I got an awful crick in my neck looking up all the time. [ loved riding horseback. And these weeks of hard riding in the open air from morning till night made me browner and fitter than I had ever been. I got a feeling of unlimited energy when I galloped across the Big Prairie and Dan was full of oats. One day I had a most exciting ride; I had fastened my lamp-oil can to the saddle and was going to the store to get if filled . Dan was feeling perky and started to canter. Of course the can rattled against him; he didn't like it and went faster, and by the time I managed to get the can unfastened we were going up the hill absolutely all out - we must have covered the mile in about three and a half minutes. As an imitation of John Gilpin it must have been rather good. Most times I rode at a steady trot. When I was out for pleasure and not visiting patients, I occasionally galloped for a mile, but at first the pup couldn "t keep up with a gallop for very long. I took Brutus whenever I was doing less than ten miles, and that was not very often. [ also went out shooting prairie chickens, but my shooting

57 was abominable. One evening I was out for an hour and achieved nothing - not a feather. And I did want a chicken for supper! I missed six, startled twenty, and nearly trod on two. I realized I would have to leave the pup at home - he believed in fair play for the chickens and went ahead and warned them all. I did shoot a prairie chicken once in a while, but I remember weeping over the first one. It seemed like such a pathetic thing after I had shot it. If I hadn't been so hungry for meat I wouldn't have thought of killing the poor creatures. But prairie chicken was good, and all I could get in the store was canned corned beef that was about half fat. The time came when geese and cranes went south. They flew very high and only came down on the lakes and rivers at night. One morning I saw a big flock of cranes; there must have been about two or three hundred of them. I was told it usually meant bad weather when they flew in big flocks like that and since the wind was from the north, I knew something was going to happen. It did. The next morning I awoke to torrents of rain. I was very glad I did not have any patients to go and see. Suddenly, in the evening, I realized that the noise of the rain had stopped. I looked out through the window and thought the moon must be shining - but it was snow! It was corning down thick and lovely, and kept on corning. Snow in September! In a way I was thrilled. It was the beginning of the really exciting part of my adventure - so far I had only been playing with it. It snowed all night and in the morning the wind was still howling fiercely and threatend to lift my house off its feet. By now it was alternately sleeting and raining though. I carried in lots of soaking wet wood (drying wood was a darned nuisance and it took such a tremendous lot of it when you used nothing else) and fetched in all the water I would need. Attired in boots and leggings, a blazer, a mac, and a ground sheet on top of all my clothes, I sallied forth to feed poor old Dan, who was shivering in misery. I still did not have a barn for him. I sat down in my big easy chair, with three cushions, my feet on the stove, and coffee, chocolates, butterscotch, and oranges by my side. I also had the gramophone and an unread Punch within my reach. I was not entirely without the comforts of civilizaiton. It was a funny feeling being shut away in my little shack with no sign of life or any habitation - nothing but a lovely river valley and snow-covered banks. I was quite excited when I saw a man riding past my house since he was the first soul I had seen in two

58 and a half days. There was no sound but the crackling of the wood in the stove, and the rain coming with gusts of wind. It was extremely silent in the North at all times. The birds made very little noise and there were none of the comfortable farm noises of roosters and hens and cattle and wagons. There were no church bells, there was no traffic worth speaking of - just silence. Sometimes I would ride for hours on end with no sound but Dan 's hoofs thudding on the ground and the creak of my saddle, seeing nobody for ten miles at a stretch. It gave a sensation of being absolutely alone. It was different from loneliness, however. I loved it. We got nine inches of rain and after that the roads were simply frightful. Miles and miles were under water. The rivers were flooded. I very nearly had to swim my horse across the Second Battle River one day, and, but for the bridge over the First Battle (or Notikewin), I should have been absolutely cut off. The river mu st have been at least five feet deeper than usual and very swift. It was very muddy and the colour was grayish-white like the glacier streams in Switzerland. I had to filter every drop r used. I couldn't see the bottom of a cupful of water so I even had to filter it for washing dishes. In October we had marvellous Indian Summer Days. It was hot in the daytime but the nights got very cold; it was usually below freezing by 8 p.m. Every morning I had to chip the ice out of my water bucket. About this time, the whole district was just bubbling with excitement. All the trappers were getting ready to go off to the "Bush". Wherever I went, the women were washing shirts and patching pants, and the men were acting like school boys off for a holiday. What they were really going to was five months of absolute isolation in uninhabited forest - deep snow, intense cold, bears, wolves, wolverines, foxes , si lver foxes, beaver, ermine, moose and deer - but no human beings. Many of the men would be underway for two weeks. After the first twenty miles there was no visible trail in many places. They took up food, guns, and other provisions on pack horses, and after depositing the things where they were going, they brought the horses back home and returned to their trap lines on foot. Some were about fifty miles away, but most of them were one hundred to two hundred miles away from home. Most of the men had about six cabins built on their lines, and went from cabin to cabin, spending a night in each, but the Metis often lived outside all

59 Trappers leaving for the bush, Battle River winter, sleeping on the snow with a couple of blankets and a fire to keep them warm - and that when the temperature could go to 65 degrees below zero. I had a cellar dug, boarded, and the house moved over it. The new location was about a hundred yards farther north, close to some spruce trees. Now the house was off the hill, did not catch the wind so badly, and was facing south. It stood on a nice flat patch of ground with a sort of natural lawn in front, all surrounded by brush. For a while that fall I was overrun by mice. There wasn't a corner of the house that they didn't get into - they had even made a nest in the cotton batting stored in my instrument cupboard. So I set a trap. Every time I set the trap I got a rriouse, but the little pests seemed to get more instead of fewer in number. They even got into my clothes and ate great holes in them. One night the mice were so bad they wakened me about a dozen times, so I swore vengeance and borrowed a cat. I had to bring her from three miles away - on horseback. The cat was tied up in an apron, clutched firmly in my right arm. Suddenly she let out a simply heart-rending yowl. Needless to say, Dan shied violently right across the road into the bush, and there I was, trying to control a scared horse with one hand and holding a struggling and highly indignant cat with the other! However, we got home eventually.

60 Then the fun began. This cat did not like dogs. Brutus did not mind her much, in fact he ignored her as far as possible, but if he got within a yard of her she spat and swore at him. She wouldn't even let him sleep in peace. She was also a wretched little thief; I had to shut everything up - I didn't dare leave anything on the table and go out of the room for a second. However, she killed the mice. My dog was an enormous joy. He was very intelligent and easy to train; I only wished I had more time to spend with him. It took me just one day to teach him to shake hands. The next day he kept following me around on three legs , sitting down and holding a paw out every time I stopped to look at him . I also taught him how to "talk. " Soon he always said " Please" before I gave him anything. Unfortunately I had to do the training during meal times since I had no other time to spare, and it rather encouraged him to be a nuisance, but he was fun. He was awfully heavy and so he overbalanced easily when I taught him to sit up. He brought me his dish when he thought it was mealtime, and asked for a quilt when he wanted to go to bed. He was very good company and I don 't know what I would have done without him. At that time I sti II felt Canada was a strange country when it came to keeping house. In the wilds you couldn't get half the things you needed when you needed them , and you had to buy vast quantities of food at one time. I bought fifty pounds of flour, a side of bacon, thirty pounds of sugar, and a box (forty pounds) of apples at one shot. Already in fall I booked my winter's supply of beef - the hind leg of an animal that was still running around the prairies but would be killed as soon as it was cold enough to freeze the meat. I would then just hang it on a nail outside the house and let it freeze hard. It would keep all winter. Of course I needed to slice it down to the bone almost as soon as I got it because meat freezes so hard in winter that you can't cut it - you have to chop it with an axe. Now that I had a cellar, I got three sacks of potatoes, a sack of carrots , a sack of turnips, and a sack of onions. I hoped that would do me for the winter. I still bought things in smaller quantities than most people; I just wasn't used to big quantities yet. Many people bought their whole year's supply of groceries at once. They called it a "grub-stake." The trappers earned quite a lot of money during the winter. When they sold their furs in the spring they often got a thousand dollars or more, but after that they didn't get any more money all year round. So, while they had money, they bought their grub-stake. Then whatever happened, they wouldn 't

61 starve even if they spent all their money before they earned any more. Many farmers did the same after threshing, when they had sold their grain. As the weather got colder, I discovered that getting water from a half-frozen river was really exciting; the ice got thinner and thinner the nearer I got to where the water flowed . It was hopeless unless there was a handy rock. There were lots of rocks, but they were awkwardly arranged. Also, standing on a rounded rock covered with a thin layer of ice, while I reached over to get a bucketful of water, was no mean balancing feat. Even after I had the water, turning around on the aforesaid rock, and then stepping from one slippery rock to another to get to the bank, had its moments of suspense. One day I went through the ice - with one foot only - but it was cold! A committee of four bachelors had been formed to look after my house and my needs. They were priceless. They were all of different nationalities: a Yankee, a Canadian of Danish extraction, a Russian, and a Norwegian. They all talked English, but quite differently. They got frightfully excited when they argued - some­ times I thought there would be bloodshed. I tried to put the fear of the Lord upon them, and told them that if my water barrel was ever empty or my wood unsplit, I should quit work and go for a holiday.

Bill Tyson, on the bucking horse, came from Oklahoma and was one of the committee who looked after Dr. Percy.

62 One day in October the telegraph line arrived in my back garden, and I greeted the workmen with a loud cheer. That row of poles cutting right across the slough and along behind my shack, spoiling a group of spruce trees by the river, was a sight I thanked Heaven for every time I saw it. I knew it might mean life or death to people up there to be able to get in touch with town quickly. The previous winter, I had been told, the only way Peace River Town could communicate with this district was to telephone to Edmonton and get the Broadcasting Station to send out a message half a dozen times on the off-chance that someone up here would hear it. There were only three radios in the district, and reception was poor when the Northern Lights were bright. We were really getting civilized: we had a bridge across the river, we had a bit of road, such as it was; we had the telegraph line, and we were starting to have weekly mail service. We also got a cemetery. It became the stock joke - that everyone was sure to tell me - "Oh, we're getting on awful fast, first we got the doctor and now we've got the cemetery!" I got a little tired of it. And the Metis did not seem to count. They had an old burial ground three miles down the river, but when the first white person died he couldn't be buried among the "half-breeds." Someone remarked to me that this must be the first death I'd had there. I told him that there had been two others. But since both were Metis, he said, "Oh well ," as if their deaths did not count, though they were aged five and twenty-one, while the white man was sixty-seven. With civilization also came social problems. One Friday there was to be a Threshers' Dance at the schoolhouse. Apparently $200 worth of alcohol had been shipped in for the event. In Alberta at that time it was an offence merely to be intoxicated in a public place - it wasn't necessary also to be disorderly, or driving to the public danger - so a policeman came up from Peace River to keep an eye on the dance. He was known in Peace River as Baby-face and had the reputation of being dead nuts on clapping folks in jail. Needless to say, the news that there was a policeman in the district was all over the place before he got there, so not only was there no moonshine (home-brewed liquor) about, but they did not seem to have consumed much of the $200 worth of alcohol. Other trouble also developed in the district. There were thefts and wife-beatings, and moonshine was produced in large quantities. Soon it became necessary to get a resident policeman. I met many people on my job, visitors as well as patients. I

63 Pat Solway, first Alberta Provincial Police (A.P.P.) at Battle River also got a unique class of visitor - men enquiring how to get to. various places. It was the penalty for having a pretty good all-round knowledge of the district and a home-made map. Newcomers, generally unable to speak English, went to the storekeeper for direction, and he saved himself much time and trouble by assuring them that I had the only map of the district in exi tence, and then sending them over to see me. So there I was, dragged from my bed in the early hours of the morning, expecting nothing short of a broken neck, greeted on the doorstep by a Ukrainian who inquired if I was "Meeses Doktor." (All the Eastern Europeans called me Mrs. Doctor.) When I said yes, I was, the man would burst into Ukrainian. I assured him in my best Ukrainian that I didn't understand, upon which I got another bur t of Ukrainian - all this on my doorstep at 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and me in my dressing gown. Eventually he would either give me a bit of paper with his section number on it or make me understand the name of the man he wanted. I would then get out my map, and having found the place, tell him how to get there. It often took ten minutes to explain, pointing in the different directions, and showing him on my fingers how many miles it was. I was fetched out of bed in this way three times in one week. As far as my patient load was concerned, there were times when I was riding day and night, with serious cases in all directions. One morning in November when I got up and saw a snow-co­ vered world, I thanked Heaven that I had nobody ill on my li st.

64 But, before I started my breakfast, a car arrived. The patient was a thirteen-year-old Hungarian boy, whose "throat was swollen inside." Tonsilitis? Temperature I 03. I looked at his chest, and sure enough, scarlet fever! They had brought him with a temperature like that in a rattly Ford car when the outside temperature was below zero. I shot him off home to bed, and told them to come back and fetch me in an hour's time (there wasn't room for three in the car) and hurried to get my breakfast finished. I hadn' t got very far with my breakfast when another car arrived. This time it was a man with frozen feet. I thawed him out, dispensed the necessary medicine and cleared up. Then I collected what I would need for the child with scarlet fever: throat paint, serum and disinfectant. I had just finished before the first car arrived for me. At the home of my patient I gave the other children serum all around, inspected the isolation and sanitary arrangements, warned the family they were liable to a hundred dollar fine if they left their quarter section of land or allowed anyone to enter it , and put up a large quarantine notice. All infectious diseases used to be quarantined in Alberta in those days, but particularly scarlet fever. Then I went to see a child with pneumonia, who lived only one and a half miles from there. I got home to find a message awaiting me that a baby, three miles away, was very ill, and that a man living near them was thought to have pneumonia. The man who sent for me had a car, but it had broken down and he had no team and wagon, so I would have to ride. I decided I must have a meal before starting; the temperature was just below zero F. and dropping rapidly. I was just stoking the fires to keep the heat up while I was away, when another car arrived with the man whose frozen feet I had thawed out in the morning - he called for a pair of gloves he had left behind. Hearing where I was off to, he offered to take me in his car but warned me that he had broken his battery during the day and so had no lights. I assured him that I knew the trail so well that I could find my way blindfolded. (I had already had four cases along that trail, and there were only six houses.) But it was one thing to find your way along a well-marked cart-track on horseback, and altogether another to pick out the way when it is entirely covered by fresh snow in a car going fairly quickly. However, we got there quite safely, and sure enough, the man had pneumonia - temperature I 04.5 . Looking after him took about an hour. He was a bachelor and had only been looked after

65 by two other bachelors who happened along. It took me about a quarter of an hour to make his bed - it was just a jumble of blankets and coats when I started. It was a great life having to do the nursing as well as the doctoring! Adding insult to injury, the other two bachelors inquired if I would come and tuck them up if they were ill . I threatened them with a dose of castor oil and so they shut up. After that I went to see the baby. It was pretty bad, and so it took me another half an hour. By the time we started back it was 7:30 p.m. and absolutely dark with no stars and the moon not up. We got .on pretty well, but slid backwards down two steep hills, and had to take another run at them. In fact, the second hill we had to try three times and did an elegant sideways skid whose real beauty I did not appreciate till I saw the tracks next day. The man who had offered to take me in his car, drove me from patient to patient all evening. People were very kind. In November I was still riding horseback to see my patients when it couldn't be helped, but I knew that soon it would be too cold for riding and I should have to be fetched to all my cases. It would make my work awfully difficult, but even if I bought a cutter (small sleigh), I was told I would probably freeze while hitching up the horse. Looking after a horse was no joke. Even when I had no visits to make, I would have to go out twice a day to feed and water him (that meant melting the snow first), so it was hardly worth it. I made plans for someone to take Dan and look after him during the winter - for winter was almost upon us .

66 Chapter 7 Winter

Daylight was getting very short - about 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. - and the evenings seemed very long, but I was almost beginning to wonder whether the winter I had heard so much about was only a myth. I had been expecting it since the middle of September, and even in the beginning of December we were having weather almost too beautiful to be true; it was marvellously warm and sunny. Of course, we had had snow and the river was frozen . I was learning to skate. With the aid of my next-door neighbours, two stalwart young bachelors, I spent all my spare time staggering up and down the river. A stretch of river half a mile long and from hundred to two hundred feet wide, had " black" ice, perfectly clear - you could see every stone and shell through it - and so smooth that it reflected the starlight just like water. It was not told. The Chinook, a warm dry wind coming down the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, was blowing again, and so the temperature was mostly between 10 and 25 degrees above Fahrenheit (-4 to -11 C.), which felt quite warm. But then one night it came: snow, snow, and more snow. There was a drift about two feet deep in front of my house and between the door and the wood pile. It snowed steadily for about twenty-four hours. Soon I was careering around in sleighs, temper­ atures varying between 10 and 40 degrees below zero which was very cold indeed. One day, during this cold weather, I was busy washing the dishes when I suddenly looked out the window. There I beheld three women on skis, attired in the most stylish skiing suits. The effect was absolutely startling. They came in, and I learned that they were from Malvern, only thirty miles from my home, and had just come out from England. They were busy walking, together with the mail carrier, from Peace River to Fort Vermilion, which was

67 three hundred miles. It was certainly the most surpnsmg way of spending a holiday that I had ever heard of. I am sure those women had no conception of how cold it would be. I didn't have much of an idea either at the time, but I knew a bit from what the trappers and others had told me. I only hoped they would get to Fort Vermilion all right.

The trail that became the Mackenzie Hi ghway; the present site of the town of Manning

About three times during the winter the mail carrier, Louis Bourassa, took the mail down the Peace River on the ice. But, since that year we had had such a marvellously warm fall , the river had not frozen over completely and so he was going overland. That sounds simple enough, but the pack trail via Keg River to Fort Vermilion was not wide enough for sleighs and Louis had about two tons of mail. He was taking four flat sleighs, so he was planning to go up the line the telegraph men had cut as far as that went, and then cut thirty miles of trail to Keg River. From there he was going to take the wagon trail to Fort Vermilion. Camping out for a few nights in a forest full of moose, deer, bears, foxes

68 and timber wolves, would not have been so bad, but there was the prospect of the weather turning even colder at any moment. It was 45 F. degrees below zero and a north wind blowing very soon after Louis and the three English women left. Later I heard that Louis had had to give up ·the overland route because the telegraph crew had come to a belt of heavy timber and had had to stop. So he had come back to Battle River Prairie and was going down the trail to the river. The temperature never rose above zero, and most days it was 20 to 30 degrees below. His companions of this trip became known around Battle River as the three mad Englishwomen. Even 30 degrees below, Fahrenheit, is very cold. It made my eyes and nose water so that they promptly froze; my eyelashes often froze to my glasses; my nose froze inside so that I couldn't breathe properly, and if I opened my mouth to breathe, I got a tight feeling in my chest. Everything I breathed on got coated with ice; if I tried to cover my face with a scarf it got frozen to my face within half an hour. I simply couldn't keep warm by walking, and even when I ran, and the rest of me was hot, my face froze. If I warmed up in the house before going out, my hands got damp and then my woollen mittens were stiff with ice inside my leather ones before I had been out for long. Then my fingers froze. Metal got so cold that when I touched it my hand stuck to it and blistered like a burn. All the windows got frozen, not just with pretty patterns, but with ice half an inch thick . You don't feel the cold so much - you just freeze . And the agony of thawing out frozen fingers beats anything I had ever felt. You feel so utterly helpless, very tired, and very weak and tearful; it is a ridiculous sensation. Sometimes I had very busy times - four nights without sleep - and any amount of travelling in sleighs. I got awfully sleepy through missing so many nights, and so keeping awake in the sleigh was a great effort. Yet to have gone to sleep for any length of time would almost certainly have led to frostbite . My house kept warm enough if I stoked the fire two or three times during the night. Even with the fire on day and night I still had to thaw out the ink (which, of course, we used at that time) to fill my pen before writing - it was frozen quite solid. One day I went out at 11 a.m., expecting to be back at Sor 6 p.m ., but didn't get back until 3 a.m. I had to take my mitt off to unlock the door, and by the time I had done that and turned the door handle, my hand was beginning to freeze. I was so cold I could hardly get the fire going. I had left my lunch and gone out in a

69

I hurry in the morning, and so everything on the table was frozen - canned milk, ham, bread, oranges, apples, butter, the tea in the teapot, and, of course, every spot of water in the house. Not a very warm welcome! Melting snow for water was funny too. It took so long, and if I didn't put water at the bottom, it burned. I wouldn't believe it until I tried, but I got water that tasted burnt if I didn't put a little water at the bottom first. Sometimes at night it felt awfully weird, living all by myself in that little house. I had the whole valley to myself - not a light to be seen. There were old burnt-off tree trunks all around, very white in the moonlight, and the spruce trees were intensely black against the sky. The wind in them made a noise like the sea. The sound of the river was gone since it was frozen over. I felt as if Brutus and I were utterly alone in the middle of this immense country. There was something overpowering to me at that time about the size of Canada. I got the sensation sometimes that the people there were tiny beings struggling with their backs to the wall against something enormous that was bound to beat them in the end. When I saw acres of land broken, I felt a queer sort of triumph, but, looking down on Battle River Prairie from the surrounding hills, I realized what a little scratch on the surface it really was. And all around, shutting it in on every side, was bush and forest and muskeg, unmapped and untouched. It was strange, I kept noticing not only that Canada was so big, but that I couldn't figure out the cause of it; it seemd to be something apart altogether from one's knowledge of geography. I was having a marvellous time, however. My work was hard occasionally, but I was getting a thrill worth paying for, and I was seeing the Northwest the way it really was. At the same time, I felt I would never recommend homesteading in Canada to anyone. Farming there was just as uncertain as anywhere else, and the homestead, with a unit of 160 acres, practically forced people into growing grain, which was notoriously the biggest gamble of all. There were a good many families up there that winter who were much nearer to starvation than any I had ever seen in England. And as for housing conditions - two families, six to ten people, living in a one-roomed house of ten by twelve by seven feet was not considered overcrowding. At that point there was no paid work to be obtained in the district. Almost the whole community was living without money.

70 It meant carrying a load of feed for a sack of potatoes, sawing and splitting ten cords of wood for thirty dollars' worth of groceries, clearing twenty acres of brush for your neighbour in the hope that he would break five acres for you next spring - if he didn't forget, or trade his place, or lose or sell his · horses, or decide to leave the district, or quarrel with you in the meantime. There were no real roads. There was only one school which accommodated thirty children - while there were between hundred and fifty and three hundred children of school age scattered all over eight hundred square miles - and 60 percent of them couldn't even speak English. The school inspector told me that the average retardation of the thirty children who were at school was four years. That meant that the next generation of adults in the district would have the education of ordinary children at ten years of age. Living was exceedingly expensive. The cost of clothing was extremely high and yet it was of utmost importance. You had to have woollens and lots of them. You didn't just catch a cold if you didn't, you froze to death. For that reason the government sent out clothing which I, since l was working for the government, distributed among the destitute. It was very necessary, but frightfully difficult to decide whether twelve children of a lazy father were more needy than the four children of a hard-working man, when all were equally in­ adequately clothed for the weather, and the supply of clothing was limited. I had seven big sackfuls but that was not nearly enough. I was beginning to miss civilizaiton quite a lot, and I think all the settlers did also. I certainly appreciated receiving good magazines from England, and it was amazing how they were appreciated when I had finished with and handed them on. One man took a bundle up to the telegraph camp; he had to walk forty miles, but still wanted all I could possibly spare. Four or five families were always waiting on my doorstep after mail days. There were some Hungarians who simply loved London Opinion! I don't think they understood more than a quarter of the jokes, but they always asked for the magazine. What a treat it was to get mail from home at Christmas time! It was simply of staggering proportions - literally so when I had to carry a big sackful, with drifts three or four feet deep across the trail. I got a Christmas pudding (the pudding basin was broken, but the pudding was intact, praise be). I also received a magnificent cake. The expression on sundry old bachelors' faces when they tasted it was a sight to behold. Cake like that they had never seen

71 m Battle River Prairie! There was no danger of my having Christmas all on my lonesome; I went out nearly every day that week and mortally offended lots of people by accepting other people's invitations first. That first Christma in Battle River an old bachelor trapper named Hal Reber offered to take me moose hunting. I got myself a big game licence, borrowed a 30/30 rifle , and practised shooting with it. Then I went out with him south and east of North Star. We rode single file through the bush, Hal ahead of me, looking for moose. Suddenly, quite close in front of him , he saw a moose. Quickly he was just getting off his horse to shoot it when one of the dead spruce branches of a wind-fall ran up between his waist coat and his shirt and he hung there while the horse moved away, as well as the moose. That was the nearest I ever came to shooting a moose. Obviously I couldn't shoot when Hal was in front of me, even ifl had not been too dumbstruck, seeing him hanging there! Right after Christmas we had a Chinook wind which sent the temperature up from 10 degrees below to 40 degrees above, Fahrenheit. It came overnight and melted most of the snow. Then the temperature went down below freezing once more so all the melted snow on the river froze again and there was good skating. I spent part of an afternoon skating, and an almost equal part sitting on the ice. But I did skate about two miles - I was getting better at it. Poor Brutus just hated the ice - nothing on earth would persuade him even to put his foot on it. He ran up and down the bank howling like a lo t soul, and he had a voice like a fog horn . It must have carried four miles! Brutus was an interesting dog. He was quite well behaved - he never stole - but the way he dallied with temptation wa a great joke. He would walk up to the table, for instance, put his nose within an inch of the meat, take a deep sniff, then sigh and walk away again. He would lie down for a minute and then repeat the performance. Finally he would come and put his head on my knees and sigh most soulfully; then back again for another sniff, but even when he could easily reach the meat, he would not touch it. As a watchdog, Brutus was marvellous. He would not let anyone touch anything of mine, or my horse, unles I told him it was all right. I was really quite concerned that he was growing up so fierce. He not only barked when anyone came but went up to them growling savagely and looking horribly dangerous. He even prevented a man knocking on my door one day; every time the man put his hand up to touch the door, young Brutus seized it

72 firmly. Finally the man had to shout through my bedroom window. When he took a dislike to people I had to hold him while they got into the house, and even then he lay and growled at them till they went. I wished I knew how to teach him not be be quite so fri ghtening. He was a great protection, however. Two young lads to whom I had given a meal once, and to whom Brutus had taken a terrific dislike, were later taken to jail by the policeman for stealing. Brutus's bark was very useful and his reputation even more so. People all knew him and marvelled at his understanding and obedience. At the beginning of January it became bitterly cold again. We had 30 degrees below zero weather and a strong north-east wind that went through my five layers of wool plus moose-hide plus fur as though they were thin silk. One day when I went for my mail, about a dozen men, who were in the store, greeted me with a chorus of "Well, is it cold enough now for you, Doc?" I had been ragging them about this winter they had talked about so much, and telling them that it was not nearly as cold as an English November. Of course, I assured them that the day was not anything to make a fuss about, but I didn't mention that I had gotten my nose frozen before I got five hundred yards from my house. After there was a lot of snow and it was so cold that getting lost would have been really dangerous, I never went out on my own very far from home. I had to be fetched by sleigh, or by car if that was possible, to all my patients, so that I was always with someone who knew the trail well. Usually the sky was clear and it was possible to steer by the stars. One day I went in a sleigh to a sick Hungarian baby. The baby' s father came down to my place, told me about the child, and said he would call for me in about two hours . I couldn't make out why the delay was necessary since he did not talk much English. Two hours later he appeared with a priest, and we went off. When we got to the home, I had to wait another hour while they christened the infant before I could get at the baby to treat it. It was three I weeks old and had pneumonia. Strange to say, it recovered, whether due to my efforts or the Father's, I do not know. Another one of my patients was an old woman dying of heart failure. She was Ukrainian, and didn't speak or understand any English. She was also an obstinate old woman. All the Central and Eastern Europeans went to bed in their clothes; they slept on the mattress and covered themselves with an enormous feather "comforter," a sort of feather bed three inches thick. They had no

73

I I sheet and no blanket . This woman wa wearing undry cotton and woollen ve ts , a marvellou ly hand-embroidered linen blouse, and a thick cloth skirt. She was pretty sick and couldn't move much , o I told her granddaughter to give her ju t a cotton or woollen nightgown since I didn' t want her to get bed ores to add to her trouble . The old woman, however, wouldn' t hear of it. She told her granddaughter to tell me to go away and stop bothering her! The Meti also went to bed completely clothed - they even wore their moccasins. Consequently it wa difficult to tell when you descended on them unexpectedly whether they had been staying in bed as you had told them to, or whether they had merely hopped into bed when they heard you coming. I had two Metis patients who had tuberculosis and who, I was convinced, would get better of they would only do what I told them to do . One little Metis girl was improving. Everyone knew she had TB and was expected to die. When she wa out of bed and gaining weight, the people thought I could cure even consump­ tive who had been coughing up blood for weeks. If I could only have gotten them earlier they might have had a chance! I did have one lad for whom I had hope . He stopped coughing (he had been coughing up blood), he started gaining weight, and hi temperature had been normal for three weeks. If he recovered, he would be about the fir t Meti in the di trict to do o. However, he too died later on. The Metis regarded TB a we did the plague - inevitably fatal. There wa no need to enquire about TB in the family - there always was. The boy I mentioned earlier was twenty-three year of age. His mother had died of TB years ago. His brother, aged twenty-one, was the fir t death I had in Battle River. He was ab olutely hopeless when I fir t aw him . The lad whom I wa seeing at the time had u pected that he had it all ummer, but he didn 't come to see me till December, when he had started coughing up blood. Hi younger brother, aged eighteen, was trapping up on the Hay River (about two hundred mile away), but wa al o brought in. He too was dying of TB. There was only one other boy in the family, aged fourteen , who wa deaf and dumb. This family lived in one hou e with their wive and families and half a dozen other people. That wa typical. There were half a dozen families that I knew about that were being wiped out at the same rate. That was what I was up against. I could not know at that time how much more experience I would have with TB in the North.

74 Later in the winter I had a somewhat special experience with a patient. I brought a man with a fractured skull down to the hospital in Peace River in a caboose. He had been working on the telegraph outfit, eighty miles north of my house, when a tree he was felling dropped on his head. It took his buddies from Friday night till Monday at 6:30 a.m. to get him out to me, and he was so bad that I did not dare keep him up in Battle River. I was afraid he was bleeding inside his skull and would probably die on the way out to Peace River, but if I had kept him up there he would have died without anyone attempting to operate. Then I should have felt that I had taken hi s last chance away. We travelled all night and did ninety miles of fairly heavy sleighing in nineteen hours: thirteen hours driving and six hours for rests. We did it all with one team of horses.

Heated caboose. Ninety miles in 19 hours to take a patient to Peace River Hospital.

The old man was difficult to look after. He was exceedingly irritable in spells, and tried to get up and go for walks. Then he would suddenly sit bolt upright on the camp bed - all this in a small tent on the top of a rocking sleigh. We had to have a stove inside the tent and I was terrified that I might drowse off, that he would si t up, and that a jolt of the sleigh would send him head first onto the heater. Our outfit looked quaint at night - the little tent, lit up inside, a sort of glowing orange color, crawling over mile after mile of

75 snow, with the Northern Lights shimmering and swaying above us , pale apple green and gold edged with mauve. It was a perfect night, outdoors. We got the man to the Peace River Hospital alive. He stopped bleeding and actually did very well afterwards. He was in the hospital for months and saw double for quite a long time - finally he regained his vision and also his memory for everything except the week after the accident. He had no memory of the journey to Peace River. I did a lot of travelling by dog team. That is an amazingly smooth, comfortable way of travelling and the speed is remarkable. It is very quiet; one lies at full length in the sleigh, and the sensation is almost like drifting downstream in a canoe, with the shoosh of the sleigh on soft snow sounding like water. One of the cases I went out to with dog sled was a maternity case. I was there for twelve hours. The people were Ukrainian and spoke no English. There was only a wooden bench to sit on, and nothing to read or do for hours. When the baby was born we had to wrap it in a dirty old cloth skirt. They didn't have so much as a binder, napkin, blanket, or clean rag. He was a lovely baby, but I hoped I wouldn't have any more as difficult to deliver as that one was. It certainly was no joke when there was no assistance whatever and no one to translate. Later I took the baby a complete outfit. Poor little beggar! His skin was already chafed. One day in January I received a letter from the Superintendent of the Public Health Department, saying that they realized that the pressure of work up in my district was great during the cold weather, so they were sending Miss Phillips, a nurse who had been relieving in several districts, to help me. Half an hour after I got the letter, Miss Phillips arrived. I didn't know whether they thought I was dying of overwork or going loony from loneliness, but since she was going to stay for two months, I would be able to get away for a holiday. I must say, I was ready for it. I had always wanted to get down to Slave Lake to see Dr. Rodger, the Scottish woman who had come to Canada the same time I did. I had never been able to manage it because I had too many maternity cases in the offing, but now was my chance. I would stop off in Edmonton, too, of course. Just to think that I would be able to have a real bath in a bathtub was excitement enough. I hadn't had a bath for six months! I thought I would wire ahead to Edmonton for a bathroom with

76 bedroom, instead of the other way about. There had been great excitement in the district recently when our policeman had chopped his ankle with an axe while splitting wood with which to heat water for a bath . While stitching up the ankle for him, I told him he should give up trying to bath, as I had done . My getting away was delayed for almost three weeks because the last thirty miles of the trail from Battle River Prairie to Peace River Town were blocked by snow difts. But finally I heard that two men with trucks were going to try to make the trip to Grimshaw, so I sent a message that I would like to go along too. We had quite a trip to Grimshaw with all the excitement of travel in the North. From Grimshaw to Peace River I travelled by freight train , and then on to Edmonton by regular train. I had a marvellous time in Edmonton, and in Kinuso with Dr. Rodger. The thing I want to mention particularly, however, is the trip back to Battle River Prairie; it reflects so well the attitudes and actions of people in the North.

Taking a woman with meningiti s out to hospital

Back in Peace River Town, after my trip from Kinuso, I began phoning round to see how I could get back to Battle River. The roads were absolutely blocked to cars for it had snowed steadily for days after I left. Someone told me, however, that two Battle River homesteaders, George Robertson and Slim Jackson, were about town. so I hunted them up and found they were going to start back by sleigh in the afternoon, taking an old winter trail

77 which angled north-west from Peace River, across three lakes and out into the highway about ten miles south of Whitemud, missing Grimshaw and the thirty miles of blocked roads entirely. George, Slim, Dick Norquist, and I started at 5 p.m. with the temperature dropping rapidly. We made the nine miles up the long Peace River hill to Weber's place in three hours, and it was minus 45 degrees when we got there. This was George Robertson's father-in-law's place, and his wife's sister, Jacqueline George, decided that she would like to come along too. Next morning we set off at 39 below zero. Four miles an hour was about all the horses could average. Four of us lay in the sleigh box, two at each end , all our eight feet on the heater, with piles of feather beds and blankets on top.

From Peace River to Battle River by sleigh: George Robertson, Slim Jackson, Dick Norquist, Dr. Percy , and Jacqueline George

At about 2 p.m., after crossing the first lake, we came to a little trapper's cabin in a marvellous place. It had great trees all around and a wonderful view of the second lake between them. There was no one at home, but of course the door was unlocked (that was an unwritten law in the winter in the North), so we camped there for lunch. The stove was a real trapper's stove; the sides were made of mud nearly a foot thick, and the top was a piece of iron. A length of stove pipe at the end went through a hole in the roof. There was no door on the front, one just fed the fire through the opening. We got a terrific fire going and then set to work to thaw out the sandwiches and other foods , which were all frozen stiff.

78 The horses needed a two-hour rest and then we started moving again at 4 p.m. The second lake was two miles wide; the snow had drifted three or four feet deep, and it was very heavy going for the horses. The trail from there was gone, absolutely blotted out - windfalls and new trees had just covered it. It hadn 't been travelled for about six years and I discovered that George hadn't been over it for about ten years. Sunset and forty degrees below zero! There was nothing to do but cut a trail. Two of the men went ahead and chopped, while the third drove. We had three miles of that before coming to the old trail again. It took hours; we thought we were in for a night in the bush at 40 degrees below, with insufficient bedding. We were twenty miles short of the place where we had hoped to stay for the night. At the first house we came to at Whitemud, we stopped. Again the owner was not at home, but we made a fire, drank lots of coffee, had a vast supper, and were just sitting around smoking when the owner came home. He was a delightful old chap and had known one of the men years before, so that was all right. It was a one-roomed house and there was only one bed so Jacqueline George and 1 had that and the men slept on the floor. The owner was very funny when he offered us hi s bed. He said he didn't thi nk we should find the blankets too dirty since he had only had them for three years. The next morning we started off again and safely made the last forty miles home, changing teams at Slim Jackson's saw mill. In all the two and a half days I never got so much as a fin ger or the tip of my nose frozen . It was perfectly lovely lying in the bl ankets , only my face out, watching the sky and the trees . It was brilliantly sunny each day, and the snow sparkled and squeaked under the runners. It was a good holiday. Miss Phillips, the nurse who had taken care of things while I was gone, le ft soon after I came home, and 1 was alone in the house again. Winter was far from over, but I was looking forward to spring .

79 Chapter 8 Spring

Spring. Old Mrs. Auger scraping a moosehide. Beyond her is the area where Manning is now.

Spring did not come suddenly. The weather fluctuated between warm sunny days with trails of bottomless slush and terrible blizzards with tempertures of 10 and 25 degrees below zero. The winter, which seemed to go on and on, wa very trying sometimes. The effect of the silence was strange, especially at night. Sometimes I stood outside when I went to get in wood at dark, and li stened and heard nothing except my own breathing. It was almost like some exceedingly refined torture! I would go in and put the gramophone on a a sort of protection against the silence. I began to hate the Northern Lights - they made the snow look a queer greenish colour, and they swirled and waved so silently. I didn 't feel like this very often, but it was a rather overwhelming 80 sensation when it came. I felt so insignificant and helpless, as if the whole nature was antagonistic. And then in April spring did come with a rush after all. The snow disappeared like magic, the prairies were knee deep in water, all the creeks rushed along, the beaver ponds were full, and down by the river were dozens of waterfalls. With break-up the river rose rapidly, about three feet in one day; the ice had gone out where I lived , but apparently there were great chunks as big as a house higher up. By the end of April the birds were arriving by the millions - geese , cranes, thousands and thousands of wild ducks, blackbirds, bluebirds, and lots of tiny birds. Hawks were common, and I even saw an eagle. Later that spring I spent a most interesting Sunday afternoon crouched on a steep hillside, watching the eagle' s nest. It was built in the fork of a poplar tree which grew lower down the bank, and so was on a level with me. At first I was not sure that it was an eagle's nest, but I thought it must be because it was over two feet in diameter, and the four young birds were as big as hens, though still unfledged , and they had the true bird-of-prey beaks. So I crouched in the bushes, waiting for the big bird to come home. I took a couple of snapshots of the young ones, and then sat with my camera open, ready for the mother bird. But when she arrived I was so frightfully thrilled and excited at seeing a golden eagle only a few yards away that I quite forgot my camera and nearly took a header down the bank. It is incredible how enormous an eagle looks when you are close to one. This one's wingspread must have been six feet or more. My yelp of excitement startled her and she flew away - fortunately away from me! Plowing started at the very end of April and went on into May. That left a very short time to grow the grain since frost could be expected in September, and often came earlier. That was what made farming for the settlers such a gamble. From the beginning of May the men had to work about sixteen hours daily, plowing and seeding and later also cutting, even at 11 p.m. It was light almost all night. Even at the beginning of May there was enough light from the sunset to see the time by my watch at 10: 15 p.m. The long days made growing much faster, so the farther north you went, the earlier the grain ripened. That was just about balanced by the earlier frosts, however. Many of the women and children worked in the field with the men . Entire families, even children too young for school, were

81

: busy clearing and piling brush. They made progress at an amazing speed. Great stretches of the district that had been unbroken bush when I came, had already in fall been fenced in , with houses on them and patches of land cleared. I could hardly ever ride over the same trail twice since everywhere people were fencing the land and forcing the trails to follow the road allowances. That spring many tractors were coming in and working eighteen hours a day. I could hear one of them at work across the river - it was still going at 11 p.m. and was at it again before I woke in the morning. That was very different from breaking the sod with horses; though many of the settlers still did it that way. I loved seeing the individual homesteaders driving four to six horses and guiding the plow at the same time. It was a great picture. If anyone wants a really good reducing exercise, I can recom­ mend digging a garden, preferably out of virgin soil full of the roots of a great forest which has been burnt down! I dug a patch about three feet square one afternoon at the end of May. I only went down about two feet, perhaps Jess, and removed four bucketfuls of tree roots from the area. The garden was anything but smooth and elegant, but I planted sweet williams and some columbines, and a little spruce tree in one comer. I should have liked a week in bed to recover! Many new things happened that spring. First of all, my barn was finally built. Eight men came and did it for me one day. That was at the end of March and there was still snow on the dirt floor of the barn, so they made a fire in it to dry up the melting snow. In a few days Dan could move in . Later on I also got about an acre of land around my house fenced in . I let Dan go loose in it in the hopes that he would cut and roll my "lawn," but unfortunately all he did was trample on the garden. Of course the flies and mosquitoes were bothering him intolerably, poor beast. I also had a well dug. That was a great joy. At first it was a bit milky from fine suspended clay, and it had a faint taste from the spruce wood of the cribbing, but it was such an improvement on the water I had had so far that I didn't even notice these things until they disappeared; soon it was sparkling clear and ice-cold. It was certainly the best water I had tasted in Canada. I had never fully appreciated the water at home; I liked it, but I had never thought when I turned on a tap and got good, clear, safe water, what it would be like to manage without it. Another thing that happened that spring was the building of the church. It was a United Methodist and Presbyterian Church,

82 and it was built very rapidly. When it was fini shed and I went to church, Brutus came with me. He stayed outside of course and I hadn 't thought of the fact that he regarded it as hi s duty to guard anr house or place I was in . Suddenly I became aware that Brutus w~s lying on the top steps of the church and refusin g to let anyone pass! The people also wanted to build a manse and started in brightly with a bazaar. The fact that no one had any money with which to buy the things, even if they had had money to purchase the materials to make them, did not seem to worry the women. They proposed to charge one dollar each for admission to the bazaar and the supper. Eventually the minister, Harry Parker. arrived. He was young, and liked to ride, swim, skate, canoe, and shoot. His wife, who came in June, was also a University graduate, keen on riding and swimming. The couple was a welcome addition to the community. The young minister even helped to promote a baseball team. One of the biggest jokes happened because of a new teacher that was expected for the school . The previous year they had had a man teacher. For the new school year, which started in April , the trustees had engaged a woman teacher. Since there were several bachelors among the trustees, they got a lot of ragging because of it. The real reason they hired a woman was that they wanted to have things all their own way; the man they had had was a good teacher, but not very easy to manage. He knew hi s own mind. He had gone on strike and shut the school in the fall till they paid him his wages. One day the telegraph operator said he had had a wire from his pal, the operator in Peace River, and it said the new teacher was forty-five years old, gray-haired, wore spectacles, and had a wooden leg. She was coming up with the mail! Of course we all waited in great excitement, but when the mail came, there was no teacher. It was just a hoax. When the authentic wire came that the teacher was coming, however, the excitement was really terrific. All the old bachelors in the district shaved and spruced up. They were all at the store to greet the lady. And when the mail came - the teacher was a man! The expressions on the men's faces were really a sight to behold. As I mentioned earlier, now that spring had come, Dan was back with me, and I did a lot of riding again. I was glad that I was able to get to my patients on horseback once more, but sometimes Dan was really mean. He was very fit and fre sh after

83 his winter holiday, and thought he could do what he liked. One day he nearly got rid of me - I went so far forward over his head that when I came back, the horn of the saddle tore my breeches almost from knee to waist. That took some mending! But Dan soon got a thorough work-out. In April I was up to my eyes in work. In one week I was up three nights running, and did seventy-eight miles on horseback in forty-eight hours. One day I was out all day, got home at 12:30 a.m. in freezing weather, to find a man waiting to take me to a case twenty miles away. I repacked my bag, snatched a biscuit or two, and started off again. They had had to send for me to come on horseback as the trail was impassable to anything else. There were miles under water, and a couple of creeks to swim. When we were two miles from our destination, a man met us and told us to hurry, so I did the last stretch of a forty-five-mile day at a dead gallop. I found the woman pulseless, cold, and clammy, so it was very good that we hurried. I stayed there from 4 a.m. to 6 p.m. and got home at 10 p.m. I took care of the horse, made some supper, and went to bed. At I a.m. a man's voice outside my window said, "Can you come and see my wife? I think she has appendicitis, and the trail to our house is only fit for a horse." I dressed, packed my bag, and was off again. Sure enough, the woman was starting an appendix. I was arranging to take her down to Peace River to the hospital , when another man arrived. He too wanted me to come and see his wife. He had had to follow me over to where I was, which had taken an hour, so we hurried back home to fetch my bags and then ride nine miles to his place. Since we had had another heavy snowstorm we took Mrs. Guttau, the woman with the appendix, to the Peace River hospital by sleigh. The sleigh was pulled by a caterpillar tractor. It was the only possible way to travel. I kept her nearly unconscious with morphia, but the rat-a-tat of the caterpillar became very trying after I had travelled seventy miles behind it. At the hospital I gave the patient the anaesthetic for the operation, and then returned home. The return from Peace River to Battle River was a major problem because of melting snow. There was enough frost that night that a car was able to take me from Peace River to Grimshaw next morning very early; the seventeen miles took two hours. Then I sat in the Chinaman's Cafe watching through the window to see if there was anybody around from Battle River. Finally Ed Sharpe, a neighbour, came in; he was planning to get back to Notikewin

84 in his truck before the roads got any worse, and was giving a lift to five other men, so he said I could come along too. We only did two miles an hour, in compound low, even when going downhill. We spent the night at Dixonville, all of us - the six men and I - sleeping (without bedding of course) around the heater on the floor in old man Dixon's store. Next day we got nearly as far as Slim Jackson's sawmill before the truck became completely stuck, still twenty miles from Notikewin. I walked to the mill and borrowed a horse, rode as far as Lay's and changed to one of their horses, rode it to Guttau' s and borrowed a horse from them, and then rode home in a blizzard, arriving in the middle of the night. I was very glad to get home since I had left cases I would have said were impossible to leave if the appendix case had not been so bad that I had no choice. The melting snow continued to make travel very difficult; I nearly got drowned one day. To get to one case I had to cross Jack Knife Creek. It was so deep and swift at that time of year that you could almost call it a river. There were two bridges over it, but both had gone out with the flood. Of the three trails possible, the absence of the bridges cut out two, since the creek was uncrossable where the bridges had been. The third trail was the shortest and just crossed the creek at a narrow, fairly safe place. In going to my case the first time, the man who got me and I swam the horses across easily. Coming back by myself I had no difficulty, though I was more than a little frightened . When I went to see my patient again, the creek was one or two feet lower and I did not anticipate any difficulty. I didn't realize, however, that by that time the bottom of the creek had thawed and washed out badly. The horse got in, but couldn't get a footing in the almost vertical wall of mud on the other side, and nearly drowned me in trying to. We had to swim upstream and get out on the same side of the creek where we had entered. The water was only up to my waist, but rather chilly, for the snow was still melting in the bush. So there I was, soaked to the waist and still on the wrong side of the creek. Fortunately there was a man loading hay on the other side, who had nearly drowned his team the day before. He saw me and hauled my horse over with a rope. I crossed over on a couple of thin poplar poles, which, incidentally, rolled over with me and tipped me in again! I didn't get much wetter of course. Then I had the four-mile ride to my patient's house in my wet clothes,

85 and the wind was from the ea t. I certainly should have had pneumonia if I had had time. Coming back from my case at night, I took a long trail through two miles of shallow water to get to a place where they had mended the other bridge after a fashion. Two men were nearly drowned and one horse was drowned the following day in this creek. One day I was called out to a man who had been found unconscious out ide hi s house. He was living alone and there wasn't another hou e nearer than one and a half miles away; nor was there any woman in a five-mile radius whom I could get to look after him, so I had to tay there myself. I found flour, sugar, baking powder, cloves, lard, rolled oats and coffee in the house. And of course there was a stove on which to cook. I had to feed the pigs too! The old man didn't need any food; he had had a stroke and was unconscious. He died the next day. Then suddenly there was an outbreak of dysentery in the district. It came from drinking creek water. The creek was fouled by barns, stables, pigsties, privies, and manure heaps, but it was the only source of drinking water in that region. One man tried to dig a well, but at eighty feet it began to cave in, and he still hadn't found water, so he gave it up. The other people hadn't even tried . I had ten patient and one death due to dysentery. Three children, ages three and four, had convulsions with it and very nearly died. The last case was a little girl, aged four, who went to bed apparently quite well, and who wa deliriou , having con­ vulsions every few minutes, when I got there at 7 a.m. She looked as if she would die at any moment. I was in and out of the place for nearly forty-eight hours . So, one day I, together with a policeman, very solemnly did a sanitary inspection. I tried to make all these people shift their pigsties and barns and manure heaps. Some of the farmers were old-timers whose barn had stood there for five or ten years, and so I certainly wasn't very popular. It hadn 't mattered when no one was living below them, and they didn't realize how the situation had changed. There had been less than three hundred people in the area three years ago, and at this time there were over a thousand, with more coming in every day. A Ukrainian couple with whom I had had contact when their baby was born, got dysentery also. Fortunately they recovered very quickly, but when I called on them I found the young mother spoon-feeding the baby with a horrible looking yellow fluid . I

86 couldn't imagine what it was. She could hardly speak any English but finally she managed to explain to me that the dysentery had stopped the breast milk completely. Since they had no cow, none of their neighbours had a cow, and since they had no money to buy canned milk, she was feeding the child a raw egg. The child looked perfectly well and happy! I took the mother a can of dried milk the next day and showed her how to make it up . When you come to think of it, what else could she have done? It was just luck, too, that I happened to drop in when she was feeding the child , otherwise she would never have tried to explain the situation. After the dysentery was under control, work was not quite so hectic for a while. Dan was in better shape again and felt quite foxy . I could tell because when I went to get him one day he didn 't intend to be caught; he kicked up his heels, snorted very rudely and galloped off. I chased him for a bit and got him into a comer. I thought I was going to catch him, but, no, he just jumped the fence. Finally, with the aid of two men, I caught him, but I decided he would not go unhobbled again . Brutus, too, was full of beans when he didn't have more than a few miles of exercise per day. He was always ready for a run . He got wildly excited when he saw me change my shoes, or start to pack my bag, or write a note to put on the door. He would jump round Dan and lick his nose, nip his hind legs to make him go, and if that wasn't enough to start us off at a gallop, he would pick up a stick and rap him sharply. That always worked! Thus we galloped into summer. Well, not quite. Even in May there were times when it was wretchedly cold - it hailed and snowed, and it was certainly very cold at night. But finally in June it became hot. The wheat was already six inches high two weeks after it was planted. The wild roses came out in thousands; everywhere there were Canadian bluebells, and the birds were thrilling to see and hear. My first year in Battle River was almost over.

87 Chapter 9 Frank Jackson of Keg River

The news that Frank Jackson of Keg River had Jost his wife when their third son was born, had filtered through the bush. We knew about it in Battle River, and I realized that this was the wife of the fur trader I had met on the D .A. Thomas when I first came into the country. I was grieved, in fact horrified, to realize that I had been the closest doctor to her and had not had the opportunity to help her. I had been riding hard for months and was in good enough shape that I could have ridden the hundred miles through the wilderness and have reached her faster than any other doctor. Her husband had sent an Indian on horseback to Peace River to telegraph from there to Edmonton to send a plane to Keg River to take her out. If that man had stopped at my house and I had turned around and gone with him, Frank's wife might not have died. I was a well qualified obstetrician and she had a retained placenta.

Wop May takes Louise Jackson and baby Frank out to hospital in Edmonton

88 However, my next meeting wi th Frank Jackson was when he came to me as a patient at 40 degrees below zero with a septic hand and blood poisoning. 1 opened up his hand . There were no antibiotics in those days of course. All that one could do was let the pus out and hope that nature would do the healing. He began to recover quite quickly and thought he was fit to ao back north to Keg Ri ver and manage on hi s own. It was bad ~eather, the middle of winter, and he had to camp out at ni ght. He tried to keep the fire going but it was very cold . His arm was again giving him much trouble, and even though he steeped it in hot water and chl orazine, he fo und no reli ef. He got a cold in it , attending to it out in the open in 38 degrees below zero weather, and so he turned around and came back to me. I fixed it up again , and this time he stayed several days with Sandy Maclean, four miles away. He came in every day so I could look after hi s arm . I found Frank Jackson an extraordin arily interesting man to talk to. We reall y went at it arguing about Indians and the education of Indians. He was able to tell me an enormous amount about the North. He was also very keen on music. I had a gramophone and some records that I had bought in Edmonton. 1 had not been able to get nearly all or even most of the records I wanted because classical records were hard to come by in Edmonton in th ose days. I had, however, managed to get some of Puccini 's operas - some of the songs from La Boheme, Madame Butterfl y, and Tosca. So we often sat beside the fire, li stenin g to records and talking. He told me all about the tragedy of his wife's death. Her first two chi ld ren had been born wi th Dr. Brander in Camrose looking after her - with absolutely no problems - so that she had thought it was perfectly safe to have the third child in the North without a doctor. She hadn't really needed one with the first two. All the native women were having babies without doctors, why shouldn' t she? I began to wonder whether this exceptionall y strong man's sudden development of severe infection was in any way the result of the tragedy of hi s wife's death reducing hi s resistance. After Frank's hand had healed and he had returned home, a very unusual and funny courtship started. He kept finding reasons to come and see me. Usually he brought me a pati ent. The patients were really a series of di sasters. One of the worst cases that he brought over was a man who had been cutting trees on the Naylor Hill s where the telegraph line was being cut through. There was reall y big timber out there, and of course in the days before chain saws they cut trees with

89 axes. One of the trees this man was cutting, bounced when it fell, caught his leg and twisted it around, tearing the cruciate ligaments in his knee joint so that he urgently needed to go to the hospital. While a neighbour took him to Peace River with his truck, Frank visited with me. In addition to bringing patients, Frank created another very good reason for coming to see me. He bought a 1927 Chevrolet. Of course he couldn't drive it to Keg River since there were no roads there, but he could drive it from Battle River Prairie to Grimshaw or Peace River, providing that it hadn't rained too much. So he decided to leave the car with me and let me use it whenever I could. Every time he wanted to go to Peace River he could ride a saddle horse from Keg River to Battle River Prairie, stop at my place to get his car, and drive on. It was the perfect excuse for many a visit, and of course having a car at my disposal saved me a lot of riding and time whenever a patient lived near the road. I had learned to drive a car in England but had never owned one nor done much driving. Frank thought I would be safe enough on the trails in Battle River. I had no experience of brakes getting frozen in the winter, however, and so when I was driving down a hill on one occasion, the brakes simply didn 't function and I hit the front of a house with something of a bump. I didn't do too much damage either to the house or the car but I was very lucky, and Frank was fortunate to get his car back intact. Finally Frank ran out of excuses. He had no machinery to get from Battle River and no injured man to take out, so one day he just came to see me, driving his dog team. He had left at day-break and arrived at my place as it was getting dark. "You have come just in time," I said to him . "I have a call to a maternity case about three miles away. There is no rush so we shall have supper first, and then you can take me over with the dogs." That's what he did. Since it was so bitterly cold and the cabin had only one room, Frank crawled into his eiderdown and went to sleep in the canvas "carry-all" on top of the sled. There we were on this evening together - I in the cabin and he outside with his dogs. Toward morning the young father went out to tell Frank that the baby had been born, and Frank awoke to find that his dogs had chewed up their harness and were nowhere in sight. He patched up the harness with some bailing wire and found the dogs bedded down in a haystack. It was very fortunate that they had not decided to go home!

90 Another time Frank received a message through the radio to tell the telegraph crew who were working about sixty miles south of Keg River, to cut a thousand more poles. So Frank left right away on horseback, planning to continue on to Battle River to see me after he had delivered the message. He even shot a goose to bring me as a gift. When he got to the place where the men were supposedly working, he saw by the tracks that they had just left. He thought he could catch up with them before they reached the river, about twenty miles away, but the wagon tracks went right into the river. The river looked pretty wicked, but since they had obviously crossed with a team and wagon, he though surely he could cross with a good saddle horse. First thing he knew, however, the water was up to the horse's belly and far too swift for the horse to carry him across. Frank got off and held on to the horse's tail, hoping that while the horse was swimming, it could pull him across too , but when the horse struck deep water, the current just rolled him over. Frank scrambled back to shore. The horse went a quarter of a mile down the river, rolling like a barrel, till he came to a sand bar in the middle of the stream. Frank saw him cross over to the south side of the river, the opposite side from where he was. Frank tried to find a log on which he could cross and get to the horse. Suddenly he came to the telegraph line. By galley, he thought, he could cross on the wire. He tied the goose up in his coat, climbed up the telegraph pole, went hand over hand across the wire, and came down the pole on the other side. He couldn't find his horse on the south side of the river, so he came to my place on foot, bringing the goose with him. That exploit has gone down into the legends of the north country because nobody looking at the poles and the wire would ever have believed that it was possible that anybody could be that crazy. Frank's horse was found later and returned to him alive and well. The pole-cutting crew, whose wagon tracks went into the water and never came out the other side, as Frank had established before going on, had been washed down stream. The men had jumped ashore but the team and wagon went down the river. Frank caught up with the men at Battle River Prairie and delivered the message. Another time when Frank came to see me he brought me a chicken. I put the chicken into the oven and after some time I

91 said, "I'll see how the chicken is doing." I opened the oven door and discovered that the chicken was just as cold as when I had put it in. There was no fire in the cook stove! My cook stove and the heater were side by side in my kitchen-living room, and with a good fire in the heater, I didn't realize the cook stove was cold. I wasn't so experienced a cook that I had an instinct to stoke the fire all the time. Frank never let me live it down. At intervals for a year Frank came to see me. The time came when I had a very good reason to go and see him. I happened to be the Coroner for that area - the only female Coroner, I believe, in all of Alberta. One day the police picked me up to investigate a suspected murder in Keg River. Mr. MacMillan was an old bachelor there who lived near a family by the name of Trosky. The police had received a message saying that Mr. MacMillan had been shot and that the gun used in the shooting belonged to the Troskys. It seemed a genuine murder case. When we went into the house, however, there was a long, meandering letter from Mr. MacMillan written in pencil on a writing tablet lying on the table, saying why he was going to shoot himself. Troskys had borrowed the gun from Mr. MacMillan some time before and Mr. MacMillan had just borrowed his own gun back. One of the Trosky boys had seen Mr. MacMillan through the window the next morning lying dead in his bed, and had sent the message. There was no reason to suspect the Troskys. The policeman and I camped at Frank Jackson's house that night before starting back south to Battle River Prairie. It was interesting to see Frank's place. The house was very well built - out of logs - and well furnished. Few houses in the north country had much furniture in those days because it was so difficult to get it by wagon forty miles from the Peace River over one of the roughest trails in Northern Alberta. Frank had made his own furniture. He had made arm chairs and book cases. He had big cow hides tanned for rugs on the floor. It was a much more attractive house than most people were living in at that time. I still have the armchairs that he carved, and the book cases are still in use. There was quite a bit of communication back and forth that year between my house on Battle River Prairie and Frank's log cabin at Keg River Post some eighty miles farther north. Frank built some cupboards at my house; I had to give him advice on what to do with someone at Keg River who was sick; he had to come and buy supplies for his trading post- and so it went on and on . One day I asked him whether I should buy a homestead on

92 Battle River Prairie, which was being sold for five hundred dollars by its owner. Frank, of course, was considering it as a farm and said, "It isn 't worth two bits. There is nowhere to make a decent field and it is just up and down gravel ridges . If you have five hundred dollars to throw away, throw them into the river. That will save you a lot of headaches - though who's to know?" That homestead was where the town of Manning is today and if I had bought it, I would have become a millionaire! When we finally decided to get married, Jack Hayward of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Battle River, and his wife, Rose, wanted us to have our wedding at their house. The minister, Harry Parker, whom I have mentioned before, was going to perform the marriage ceremony. In order to get a marriage licence and a wedding ring, we had to go all the way to Peace River. It was in the winter. Martin Wener, a fur trader in Peace River, who was buying furs in Battle River, said he would take us there in his car. The Battle River highway was better than it had been, but it was still a bad road and there was a lot of snow. In those days there were no snow plows. When we arrived in Peace River, Frank and I staggered out of the car - and realized that we both had mild carbon monoxide poisoning. We discovered that there was a hole in the muffler and since we had been sitting in the back seat, the fumes had been getting to us. We managed to get the marriage licence and a ring - the ring was too big but it was the only ring available! Martin drove us back to Battle River, but by that time we were three hours late for the wedding. When we got to the police barracks, Rose met us on the doorstep and said, "Well, I've got dinner waiting, but did you go and get married in Peace River after al 1?" We explained that we had been struggling out to Peace River and back all that time and that we certainly hadn't been married nor had we eaten. We were delighted that she had a meal waiting for us . So then Harry Parker performed the wedding ceremony and we ate the wedding feast. We were married, but I could not go north to Keg River with Frank right away. I had to stay in Battle River until the government could get another doctor to replace me. You just couldn't go away and leave a settlement with two to three thousand people without any medical help closer than Peace River. Finally Dr. Helen O'Brien, who travelled with me from England and who had first been sent to Lac La Biche, came to Battle River and took over when I left.

93 After Dr. O'Brien arrived I packed up all my worldly goods, mainly books and some surgical equipment, and Frank took me home with him to Keg River Post.

Frank Jackson 's house at Keg River

Frank's store and warehouse

94 Chapter 10 At Home in Keg River

When I first came to Keg River, Frank and I were alone. The two older boys, Louis and Arthur, had been taken out to their grandparents in Ferintosh (Alberta) to go to school, and the baby, little Frank, was there also. In July Frank and 1 went to Ferintosh to bring Louis and Arthur home. The baby stayed with his grand­ parents and was raised by them.

Arthur, Frank, and Louis

Very soon, then, I had two stepsons in the house. They were twelve and eleven at that time, and there was no school available. Frank had taught them at home as well as he could, but their education was very uneven . Their knowledge of arithmetic, for instance, was at least two years ahead of their age, and their

95 Frank and young Frank at Ferintosh spelling three years behind. They were, however, expert horsemen, crack shots, very good fishermen , and able to recognize a cow or a horse from a mile away and identify it. If I wanted fish for a meal , they would go down to the river and bring me trout, caught in their hands under roots and branches. If I wanted prairie chickens, they would gallop off, shoot some, clean them at expert speed while still riding, and bring them back, ready for the frying pan by the time they got to the house. They found it absolutely hil arious to di scover that I didn't know anything: that I didn't know how to cook, that I didn't know how to clean a chicken, and I didn't know how to milk. Their mother had been a super expert farmer's wife, who had been able to milk five cows before breakfast and think nothing of it. The boys tried to teach me how to milk but they were soon rolling on the floor in absolute agonies of laughter when I finally managed

96 to get some milk out of the cow but couldn't get it into the bucket. They thought this was the funniest thing they had ever seen. To teach these two boys was my major problem. I tried to set aside a time at which they would do lessons, but there were many interruptions. They needed to fetch some freight teams, or they needed to quickly feed the team of some visiting freighters who had just come in from Ft. Vermilion or Battle River, or they needed to go hunting. Life was so much more interesting outside th an in the house. My knowledge of Canadian history and geography was negli­ gible. The books they had were books I had never read. The Readers in those days were a series of excerpts from different books all put into one book. The boys were neither very good at reading nor interested in learning how. All their contemporaries at Keg Ri ver were natives who didn't go to school at all , who didn't speak English much, and who certainly couldn't read and write. Louis and Arthur had grown up in a world where to be able to hunt was vastl y more important than to be able to read. All the men in the di strict who were greatly admired hunters could not read and write - most of them could not speak English very well. The boys had gone to school when they were with their grandparents but they had been very difficult to place because of the uneveness of their education and so they had not made as much progress as they might have. Frank had a store and a warehouse. He was buying fur and, if possible, paying for it in goods, not money. In his store he sold the basic necessities of life in the North: flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, tea, ammunition, and tobacco. If you had those, the onl y other things you needed were white and black cotton material - the white to line a coffin and the black to cover it on the outside. A good many coffins were being required for the natives who were dying of tuberculosis. Frank also sold a very heavy tarpaulin which was used for making tee-pees. Besides operating the Trading Post, Frank also raised cattle and hogs . The log cabin in which we lived was close to the store and warehouse. It was beautifully warm in winter and cool in summer. The logs were all hewed square, and moss had been put between them when they were put up. The house had then been lined with heavy building paper, almost like thin cardboard, and painted cream. There were heavy squared beams across the ceiling. The inside of the house reminded me of many old Elizabethan houses in England. The spot where the cabin stood, was lovely. It was close to

97 the Keg River and Frank had made a lawn in front of the house, fenced it in , and put flower beds along the fence. There was also a big garden behind the buildings along the edge of the river. I remember how anxious I was to grow mushrooms. I had put some mushroom spawn into the ground and was eagerly waiting for the mushrooms to come up . One day I came out there and saw them - row upon row of healthy mushrooms! My dear husband and his two sons had picked some mushrooms in the woods and had stuck them in there to fool me. It was a great joke! I didn't know how to garden, I didn't know how to cook, I didn't know how to bake. My mother sent me a cookbook from England but it was no help at all since the recipes all called for ingredients in pounds and ounces and I didn't have a clue what a pound of flour was. I needed to know how much it was in cups. Fortunately our neighbour, Mrs. Rankin, whose husband, Clarence, was the manager of the Revillon Frere's Trading Post, out of the kindness of her heart, came over to our house to teach me how to make bread. The process was quite different in those days from the way it is now. I had to start twenty-four hours or more before I could hope to get the bread out of the oven. The yeast came in square cakes as hard as card-board and had to be soaked in water with a little sugar for hours before it would start to work. I had to keep the yeast in the sugar water until it began to make bubbles and then I mixed flour into it to make a so-called sponge. I beat up the batter until my arms ached too much to beat anymore. This sponge had to be kept warm all night so that by morning it was a mass of bubbles. I then worked flour into it until it was stiff enough, let it rise, and then made it into loaves and baked them. It was certainly a long drawn-out process and the thing that was so terribly important was to keep the sponge warm all night. If necessary, we had to take the blankets off our bed, and freeze , but the sponge had to be warm! I had a big leather coat that was fur-lined and which I wore in the winter. It seemed the ideal thing to wrap around the big bowl that had the sponge in it. It worked all right until one night when the sponge must have been a bit warmer than usual and rose into the fur lining of the coat! Gradually, however, I learned to make edible bread, though it always seemed an awfully time-consuming business and hard work. I found that all the dresses that I had brought from England soon became quite useless because I developed muscles in my shoulders and arms that had never been there before so that the

98 sleeves were too tight. Being very slow at housework, uncommonly slow at cooking, slow at making bread, very incompetent at looking after the garden, it was always a great joy when some patient required my services immediately and I could drop everything and rush away in order to do something that I knew how to do. That brings me to my profession. Jn those days women did not usually continue working after marriage, and I had not really expected to either. But the people in the community had depended on Frank to help them. In the years before 1 got there Frank and the Indian medicine man had taken care of most of the emergencies. Frank had set fractures , cared for an epidemic of smallpox, manually removed placentas, opened abcesses, and sewn up wounds. We would have gone on doing these things as neighbours anyway, so I thought I might as well continue doing them as a doctor. Since l was there, Frank thought he didn 't need to worry about medical problems anymore and very kindly offered to let me castrate all his little pigs so as to keep my hand in surgically! I refused because l didn't 1ike the idea of operating on anything that wasn't anaesthetized. A great many of the accidents that were occurring constantly in the North in those days were axe wounds. Some of them were also knife wounds that happened when a knife would slip and produce a deep wound. When it came to something for which the patient required a general anaesthetic, th e obvious person to give it was Frank. He became a very good anaesthetist because he wasn't afraid of giving pure chloroform. He didn't realize how dangerous it was, of course. The trouble was that even in those days chloroform and sutures and Plaster of Paris cost money, and this was in the Depression. The fur that the trappers brought in was bringing in less and less money because people couldn't afford to wear furs anymore. The prices went down. Whatever Frank had bought in the store was worth less when he came to sell it than it had been when he bought it. So we had no money. Nobody had any money. Patients who would have willingly paid if they had money, would bring me a quarter of a moose or a big basket full of Saskatoon berries. Whatever they had that they could give me, they did . One old Indian made me a beautiful pair of snowshoes because he was so sorry to see me pushing myself ' on skis when I might have been walking on snowshoes. They also made moccasins for me and mitts and a moose-hide jacket.

99 The homesteader at Keg River thought that the government should hire me as the District Doctor, as they had for the settlers in the Battle River Di trict. They sent in a petition, but by this time the government was as badly off a everybody else. They weren't collecting any taxes and had no money. They also knew that I was " tuck" at Keg River and they did not have to hire me as District Doctor. They refused the petition of the Keg River people. The medicine that was required wa very difficult to afford because by this time Frank wa not only not making any money - if he hadn' t been raising cattle and hogs we would have been in bad trouble ourselves. As it was, we did have our own meat - beef, pork, ham, bacon, and chickens; we had egg , we had our own milk and butter. (I learned how to make butter after a while, instructed by my step-son!) We had unlimited vegetables, and we had wild fruit. We also had prairie chicken, wild gee e, wild ducks, moo e, and deer meat. Frank would quite often trade flour for loads of firewood or give groceries to a man who would split and stack the wood for u . Sometimes there were so many men who had to split firewood for necessitie from the store that we had a fence three sticks deep most of the way around the yard, but at least the wood was all split, stacked, and dried well by the time that we wanted to bum it. We canned moose meat and beef in ealers. Frank had a big cooker for cooking feed for hi s pigs, and he built a wooden rack in it so we could put in thirty quart-sealers at a time. That speeded up the canning of meat very much since we had to keep the water boiling for three hours. There was no pre sure cooking in those days but at least we could do a big batch at a time. When I first came to Keg River, the root cellar was full of hundreds of ealers of meat, vegetable , pickles, jam and jellies that Loui e, Frank's fir t wife, had put up. Fortunatly, therefore, I had time to learn to can before we had used up all the supplies that were in the hou e. Clearly, we were not suffering any want. But the matter of paying for the drugs and medical supplies that I needed for my patients continued to be a problem. One morning in April during my first spring at Keg River, an old man burst into our kitchen and gabbled an excited tring of Cree to Frank. "Old Man Bottle," the oldest inhabitant of the community, had suddenly gone crazy. He was running amuck in the village and was terrifying the women. All the able-bodied men of the settlement were away on the pring hunt, and only the

100 women and children and four old men of over eighty were left in the village. So what now? It appeared to be up to me to do something about it. (They had, however, already sent a message to the bush to fetch their medicine man.) We went over to the old man's cabin to investigate, and found him busy sharpening his buffalo knife! He was a thin old man, with thick white hair hanging to his shoulders. I could not understand a word of the conversation between my husband and the sick man, but he was obviously insane. Finally Frank persuaded him to sit down on his blanket on the floor, and I gave him a shot of hyoscine. J also examined him as well as I could and was enormously impressed with his muscular strength and physical condition. His teeth were good and his eyes were perfect. His heart and chest sounded perfectly normal and his blood pressure was a rather surprising 120/80. 1 could find nothing wrong with him physically. When we left, the old man was asleep. Three old men of the community watched him very cautiously from the doorway. As soon as the sick man started to rouse, one of them rushed over to our house to give me a warning. Frank and I then went over to administer food and sedatives. We went back and forth like this for several days. His mental condition remained unchanged. The problem was to know what to do with him. Alberta had a mental hosptial, about six hundred miles from Keg River, but it was completely inaccessible. The rapid melting of the winter snows had put ten to twenty feet of flood water into small rivers like the Keg , making an overland journey to the highway out of the question. The Peace River was still frozen, and it would be weeks before the boats would be put into the river. No plane on wheels could land on the water-logged prairie, and there was no lake anywhere near for a plane to land on pontoons. To make matters worse, my scanty supply of hyoscine was nearly used up. The nearest drugstore, two hundred miles away, was just as inaccessible as the mental hospital. Major tranquilizers were not developed until twenty-five years later. Not only the old squaws were relieved when the medicine man arrived and took over. I don't know what his treatment was, but that afternoon Old Man Bottle was completely sane! And in the early hours of the next morning he died. I did not have the slightest idea what he died of. It was rather a relief, therefore, to find that such formalities as death certificates were unknown at Keg River at that time. People just went ahead and buried the body. The priest, on his annual visit, made a record

IOI of the deaths in his little black book. And that was that. Another tragic incident happened soon after I had come to Keg River. Frank had a trading post at Rainbow Lake. The fell ow who was trading there had Frank's shotgun and he was in the habit of leaving it loaded. Frank had told him, "Never leave any shell s in that gun because the least jar and it will fire. " One day Archie Fife, a man who was going to trap that winter at Rainbow Lake, came into the store. He saw the shotgun hanging up on some nails and took it down to look at it. When he took it down , he set the butt down on the ground. The gun went off and blew his jaw cl ear off. They brought him down to Keg River with dogs - it took them about three or four days. By the time he arrived at our place, he would have been dead if he had been a white person, but he still had a chance because he was an Indian. He stayed in our kitchen because there was no other place to put him. We put a tube down his throat and fed him. The injury was just like a war wound. It was pretty tough. It all went septic with a terrible stench, and , of course, we had no penicillin. By this time there was a telegraph office in Keg River and so we got word out that we had a seriously wounded man to fly out to the hospital. But it was two days before Wop May, the famous bush pilot, could come back from Fort Vermilion and fly him out. Wop had a load of mail in the plane and Archie still crawled into the back of the plane over all those sacks of mail.

April , 1933 - Wop May takes Archie Fife to hospital. Brutus, Louis , Arthur, and Frank in the foreground

It was starting to chinook, and the snow was going fast. Wop raced back and forth across the prairie with his little plane to pack

102 the wet snow down enough with his plane so that he could take off with Archie's weight. The planes that the bush pilots had at their disposal were so small that the extra weight Wop could take on the plane besides the mail was just this one man. Archie Fife's son had come with him, but he had to stay behind because Wop could take no more weight. Wop got Archie to the hopsital - but he died. Another case at Keg River in those early days was quite a challenge. It was a women's fifteenth pregnancy and it was ending at about four or five months with a hemorrhage. She lived about twelve miles from our house, and so they sent for us because she was bleeding. When Frank and I got there she was lying on a deer skin, hair-side up. On the deer skin, with the blood, were some little red blisters. There is nothing else that produces them - the moment you see the blisters, which are supposed to look like little red currants, you know what you've got. It is hydatiform mole, which occurs in some pregnancies - once in a thousand perhaps - where there is no baby. The whole pregancy develops into a mass of cysts that will cause the womb to get bigger and bigger, not because there is a baby there but because it is full of this degenerated malignant placenta. The treatment is to empty out the uterus completely and make sure that you don't leave as much as one little blister. If you do, it may go on developing into a sort of cancer. So here we were, twelve miles from Keg River Post, and Keg River was still five hundred miles from Edmonton. When it comes to doing anything like this you should be in a city hospital, but we could not take her to the city and we could not leave her like that. There was no question of what to do. The thing to do was to go ahead and empty her uterus. We had one candle perched on the post of the bed. This was a house that had a bed that was built into the comer; the two walls formed two sides of the bed - in other words, the three comers of the bed were on the walls, and the fourth comer was a post. We stuck the candle on that post. Frank was struggling to give her the anaesthetic. The woman weighed a lot more than he did - a good two hundred and fifty pounds, and most of it was muscle. Frank had to get her husband to help him hold her down. She kept screaming that he was trying to kill her. Frank of course was giving her pure chloroform. That was the only anaesthetic that could be used because it isn 't inflamm­ able. While he was giving her the anaesthetic T was trying to

103 spread sterile sheets under the woman and then get my hand into her uterus to clean out this bucketful of little blisters. The woman survived. But Frank, who knew Cree, had the difficult job of explaining to the husband that this was what his wife had produced and that there was no baby.

The telegraph camp at the Meikle River (Third Battle)

104 Chapter 11 Family Life

My first child was born in England. Since I couldn't stay in Keg River for the delivery and I would have to go out anyway, it seemed a good idea to go to England, visit my parents and all my relatives, and have my baby there. J had to leave Keg River while I could still ride the hundred miles to Battle River Prairie, from where there was a road to Peace Ri ver, and so I was away from home for several months. By the time Anne was born, I was just absolutely climbing the wall to get back to Canada. Anne was born on Guy Fawkes day, November 5, in a pea-soup fog . You couldn't see the sun for a week. By that time I was really hankering for northern Alberta, so when the baby was six weeks old, right after Christmas, I left. I brought an English friend , Marion Aitken Crossen - always called Mac - along with me. She was a school teacher in England and had just spent a year in South Africa. Since she was back in England when I had Anne, she came with me to Canada to see more of the world. We got to Peace River Town, and from there flew out in one of those little planes that I have mentioned before. They were made out of canvas, fastened together with safety pins, and then varnished! People were beginning to fly quite a bit in the North, but in Keg Ri ver we were still off the map; no proper survey of the remoter parts of northern Alberta had been made at that time. All our pilot had to go by was a map drawn in pencil on the back of an envelope by Wop May, who had been to Keg River before. The pilot, Bythel, was a great big heavy man with an enormous fl yi ng suit, made out of eiderdown or some similar material. He was determined not to freeze to death . Of course there were no hangars in those days. You came down on the ice on the Peace Ri ver, below the bridge, and erected a tent over the engine. When

105 you wanted to fly again, you put a fire pot of some kind underneath the engine to heat it enough so that the plane could take off. The exhaust from the plane's engine was somewhere under the seats, so that was some warmth in the cabin, but there were no fancy heaters or anything. When the windshield iced up, the pilot just opened the little window at the side so that he could see out. Then he referred to the little pencilled squiggle on the back of the envelope Wop May had drawn for him to tell him how to find Keg River. There I was, at 40 below zero, with a six-week-old baby and a friend who had just spent a year in South Africa. We were flying north, following the path where the telegraph line had been cut through. We could see the line through the forest and when we were over the Battle River area, we could see the little patch in the bush which was the settlement. Then, as we came over the Naylor Hills, we - at least I - could see the spot which was Keg River Prairie. Just when I was able to see it, the clouds started coming in from the north, very fast, and the pilot turned around and beat it back all the way to Peace River Town because he could not come down without visibility. He could see the storm coming from the north; I could see Keg River. I knew it was Keg River Post. But he did not know it. All he had was a pencilled map. The storm went faster than we did. These planes did not fly very fast - perhaps a hundred miles an hour - and long before we got to Peace River Town the storm was around us and underneath us and the pilot was scratching a little hole in the ice on the window. He could not see anything and the plane was getting heavier because the wings were icing up. The people in Peace River Town heard us go over. There weren't that many planes in the North at that time; everybody who heard the plane knew who was in it and they knew we couldn't see where we were. The pilot turned west, up the Peace. He dido 't know exactly where the river was, of course, but he knew about where it should be. Fortunately we got out of the storm enough to see the valley, so he turned around, flew just above the ice past the Shaftsbury Mission, and back to Peace River Town. The next day we did it all over again. This time the plane came down right outside the store, at our own front door. We were at home. And that was Anne's first trip by plane!

106 Frank helping Bythel cover the motor of the plane after the flight from Peace River with Dr. Jackson and baby Anne, January 1933.

The same fall, when Anne was nine months old, we took a little trip. Frank had earlier bought some Aberdeen Angus cattle from Abbita, a Beaver Indian who lived at Fort Vermilion, because they were much hardier than the purebred Herefords that Frank had . Now it was time to go and get them, and we thought we mi ght as well make a little vacation out of it. The weather was marvellous. It was September. The trees were changing colour - they were simply glorious - and all the geese and ducks were coming in . The North we knew at that time doesn't exist anymore because now there are always people, roads, cars, planes, helicopters , forestry people, and all the rest of civili­ zation. At the time I am talking about, our area was more isolated than the Arctic is now. We were completely cut off from everybody, except from the people who lived there. And the people who lived there - Indians and Metis - were scattered all over. There were no farmers there as yet. It really was one of the loveliest holidays in my life. We all went: Frank and I, Mac, who was still with us , Louis and Arthur, and the baby, whom I was still partially breastfeeding. Anne was a good child and made no fuss . We took saddle horses because Louis and Arthur were riding, and I was riding part of the time. There was the milk cow which we were taking primarily so that when Frank brought these strange cattle back from a hundred miles away, they would have a quiet animal to follow - an animal who would keep travelling homeward. It was, of course, also very handy to have fresh milk for the family during the whole trip, and the cow had to be milked anyway - you can't just leave a milk cow at home and not milk her. ln addition to all these animals, we

107 took the dog Le Rouge, alias Little Red, because it was a good cattle dog, we took Brutus, and we took the cat because we could not leave her at home alone. On the way home we had added the heifers with which Frank planned to start a herd of Aberdeen Angus. When we stopped at an Indian's place, the man gave us a couple of silver fox pups that he had caught. Frank thought he would keep them until the fur was prime in the winter. So now we had the foxes in the wagon, along with all the other animals. And then at Paddle Prairie a former patient paid his bill with chickens, so we had chickens as well. Mac thought it was a bit like Noah's ark. There were chickens as well as foxes, three Aberdeen Angus heifers, one milk cow, one cattle dog, plus Brutus, one cat, three saddle horses, a team and a foal - quite a procession coming across the country! We were away about ten days. We couldn't do much more than twenty miles a day, herding cows along the way. At night we camped where there was water. Frank would put up a tarp as a lean-to for shelter. As far as food was concerned, Louis and Arthur would ride ahead and shoot some prairie chickens and come back, plucking them as they went, so that we could have fried chicken for supper. We fried them over an open fire of course. There was none of that foolishness with propane or gasoline stoves at that time. We just started a fire somewhere - this was before there were any recognized camping spots. In order to fry the chicken, you ran a willow through it, propped it up on stakes over the fire, and kept turning it until it was done. It really is the best way to cook a prairie chicken. In spite of the meat the boys were bringing in as we went, I found we were running short of supplies. I had grossly underesti­ mated the amount of food we should require. Fortunately we were able to buy some potatoes from Abbita at Fort Vermilion. Not many Indians grew gardens in those days, or even kept cattle for that matter, but Abbita had grown potatoes. They were about the size of prune plums, however, and trying to peel potatoes that size was an impossible task. Frank always deeply disliked potatoes cooked in their jackets except when baked, so the size of the potatoes was a nuisance. I remember cooking big pots of stew dumplings to eke out the bannock supply, which was getting low. I didn't have the ability to make bannock like the Indian women did; they mixed the bannock right in the sack of flour and then cooked it in a frying pan tilted in front of an open fire. One day we stopped at Chuckegg Lake. Since it was in

108 September the lake was so covered with ducks I wondered how they could swim without colliding. They were all talking at the tops of their voices and were so tame they didn't even fly up when we walked up to the edge of the slough. Farther along we saw a cow moose with a calf. The boys and I walked towards it because I had never seen a moose so close before; we never even thought about it being really rather dangerous. I still have this lovely picture in my mind of the beautiful lake with all the ducks quacking around us and the moose and the calf standing there up to their ankles in the water, just watching us. The trees had all turned color. It was rather like the Garden of Eden; the way it had always been before anybody started making hard surface highways and telegraph lines and power lines all over the place. It was a marvellous trip and belongs to the nicest memories of my whole life. Back in Keg River, we picked up our ordinary lives again . Anne was a delightful child. She loved riding, and Louis used to take her whenever he could - when he went to fetch the cows or when he went somewhere and was coming right back. Anne always got to ride on his saddle, and she dearly loved horses. Dan (not my old Dan') - he belonged to the Battle River Community and had to stay there) was her greatest joy.

Louis with Anne on Dan

One day when Anne was about two, she invited Dan into the kitchen. J had just gone out to the garden to get some potatoes for dinner and had put a pot of water on the stove to get boiling

109 by the time I came in with the potatoes. When I came back from the garden, there he was! He had drunk the water that was in the water pail by the door and swished my pot of hot water into the stove with his tail so the kitchen was full of steam and ashes. The horse and one small child were completely unhurt. The possibilities of him having scalded himself, stampeded, and killed the child were horribly real. But Anne was terribly pleased to have the horse in the house! One day a stranger came into the yard and left the horse standing there with the lines hanging down so that he would wait for his rider. When we came out we discovered Anne hanging by the stirrup and getting her feet up under the horse, trying to climb into the saddle. It was quite miraculous that the horse didn't take off with her. Anne was a real farm child. She could hardly walk when her father made a place for her to ride on the mower when he was mowing hay. He took the tool box off the mower and fastened on a little wooden box in its place, in which she could sit. I made her some bib overalls in khaki-coloured material. When they came in she was just as black as Frank was. Before she was two years old she knew every oil hole in the machinery. The moment Frank would stop the machine she was out there with the big oil can ready to squeeze oil into every hole. She also helped me look after the chickens and was frightfully thrilled when we had setting hens and she first heard the chicks peeping in the eggs before they were hatched. I said, "No, you can't hear the chicks yet. You won't be able to hear them until they get out of the eggs." "But I hear them, I hear them!" she insisted. Sure enough, I too could hear the peeping when I picked up an egg. I hadn't realized that you could hear chicks when they broke through into the air space. Anne was quite ecstatic when the chicks hatched out. When I was pregnant again, I thought that the right thing to do was to prepare my daughter for the fact that there was going to be a baby. I let her help me get baby clothes ready , and when the baby was moving I let her get into bed with me and feel the baby moving around. One day when an old Metis, old Octave Ducharme, came to the house, Anne rushed out to meet him and told him excitedly, "My Mommy has a baby in her stomach!" Poor old Ducharme was so embarrassed that he blushed. Of course Frank

110 and I thought it was frightfully funny , but it was definitely not the thing to do. The problem was that I would again need to leave home to have the baby. Not only was I going to have a baby, but I knew I had a child that was in breech position, and I was unable to turn it. I planned to go to Grande Prairie this time and not to England, smce 1t would have taken two months again before I could get back. Grande Prairie had a good hospital, and Dr. O'Brien was an extremely good doctor. If I was going to have a breech delivery, I would obviously need to be close to Dr. O 'Brien before I went into labour, so I intended to go out to Grande Prairie six or seven weeks before the baby was due, in the hopes that Dr. O'Brien might be able to turn the child. I had done a lot of external versions very successfully without any problems but there was no way I could turn this baby. From the time that I was able to distinguish that the presentation was breech, I tried, but with no success. I didn't know whether it was that I just couldn't do it on myslef as I had done on other patients, or whether there was another reason . Daisy Lawrence, one of Sheridan Lawrence's daughters, came to take care of the household while I would be away. We had an absolutely appalling winter. It was intensely cold and there was very heavy snow. We were using the telegraph line by this time as a winter highway and no one had come in since the last snow, so the trail was unbroken. We were all packed up and ready to go . I had put my suitcase with the baby clothes on the sleigh and Frank had put our sacks of bannock and frozen baked beans, plus sacks of oats and bundles of hay on top of the bed rolls. It would be a long journey. We had well over sixty miles to do with one team of horses, through deep snow up over the hills, so we got everything ready in the evening for an early start in the morning. Suddenly the RCMP constable and his teamster appeared in the yard. The constable used to come over once or perhaps twice in a year, and all the cases which had to be heard were saved up until he came. Since Frank was the only Justice of the Peace in the district and there were three or four cases to be heard the next day , I said, "Oh, well, it doesn' t matter leaving for Grande Prairie a few days later, and anyway now we can go out with the police. There will be a broken trail and the teams can take turns going ahead ." Everything seemed to be turning out right, and I was rushing around to make extra supper for the police and his teamster, but

111 just as I stooped to take the casserole out of the oven, the water broke. It was quite obvious that I was going to have the baby that night. So here was poor Frank, with a second wife having a baby in the North, and this time it was a breech. He told the police and his teamster that they would have to go to the Harringtons, the telegraph operator's place, for the night. He himself went to get Eva Harrington to come and help me. Mrs. Harrington had helped the doctor in Spirit River with many deliveries, but she had never seen a breech. I directed her and Frank what to do, and so actually there was no great problem. It was a very easy delivery of a small six-week-premature baby. We didn't bother weighing little John Robert - we just hastily wrapped him up to keep him warm. Everthing seemed to be fine except for the milk cow, which was busy having her calf in the barn at 70 below zero. The barn was ordinarily very warm but at that temperature it was much too cold for a new-born calf. So after all the excitement of our son being born, Frank brought the calf into the kitchen, put it down on a gunny sack in front of the stove, and thankfully came to bed. Everything was under control and there were no great problems. Sure, it was cold, but we had a good fire in the stove, the baby was born, and both John Robert and I were fine. Frank and I were both very tired, so we slept right through all the excitement that followed. We didn't hear our little daughter go to the kitchen. She had heard the calf, and though she was only three, she knew all about rubbing down new-born calves. So she got our best wedding-present bath towels out of the linen cupboard, and rubbed the calf down! It went down to 72 below zero that night at Fort Vermilion, and we thanked God that we had not been out in deep snow on the top of Naylor Hills. If I'd gone into labour there it is most unlikely that I should have lived, and the small premature baby would have frozen to death.

112 Mary Percy Jackson with Anne and John Robert, February 1935. It was chinooking and had turned very warm after the intensely cold January

Anne on snowshoes to hang up diapers, Arthur coming out of the igloo

113 Chapter 12 A Special Case Study

A year after I came to Keg River, a group of people called Mennonites started coming down the Peace River to settle at Carcajou, about forty miles east of us. Because many of these people became my patients, and also because I had many experiences with them later on when I was a member of the school board, I shall here include some information on their background. The Mennonites, who had their religious roots in the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation, had travelled a long and weary road from their ancestral home in Holland to the wilderness of northern Alberta. The Anabaptists were the radicals among the reformers in the sixteenth century. They believed passionately in the freedom of thought, the freedom of each individual to interpret the Bible and to make his own response. When they first started reading the Scriptures themselves, this in itself was heresy. The Roman Catholic Church of that time did not allow it. Then when these rebels started interpreting the Bible on their own and found there a Christ who demanded complete obedience, they were on the way to committing what the State called a capital crime. How, for instance, could they serve in the army and kill other human beings when they were followers of Christ, who bade them love their enemies? It was a serious matter, indeed, to decide to follow this Christ. And who but an adult could make this decision? They decided that the church must be made up of mature people and so refused to baptize their infants. Their children, too, must have the freedom to make their own choice when they became adults. But just as soon as they refused to baptize their babies, the whole system of the state church was threatened. Not all would as adults choose to join the church. Therefore not all members of the state would also be members of the church, and you would have a separation of church and state. This neither the Catholic Church nor the reformers like Luther and Zwingli could tolerate because

114 it shook the very foundation of the ecclesiastical system. And so the Anabaptists or the "again-baptized" were hunted and persecuted not only by the Catholic Church but also by followers of Luther and Zwingli . Many of them were tortured or beheaded or burnt or drowned. Finally a large number of the Anabaptists in Switzerland migrated to America; many of the Anabaptists in Holland, organized by a Catholic ex-priest called Menno Simons and called Mennonites after him, moved to the delta of the Vistula River in East Prussia. Here, with their know-how of dykes, they drained the marshes and became excellent farmers. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, because of the militarism of the Kaisers, they accepted the invitation of Katherine the Great to come to Russia. She wanted good farmers, and promised them freedom from miliary service and freedom to have their own schools, where they could teach their children according to their own beliefs. But promises of governments that are to last for all times tend to be forgotten when a government comes up that "knows not of Joseph." And so Iike the children of Israel, who had to leave Egypt, some of the Mennonites who had come to Russia left their beautiful and productive farms when their schools and their non-re­ sistance were threatened, and emigrated to America in the I 870's. Some settled in Kansas and the Dakotas; the more conservative wing of the the group went to Manitoba, where the government again promised them their own schools and freedom from military service for all time. Here, too, the government did not keep its promise. When the Mennonites were forced to send their children to public schools, they again left their successful farms and emigrated. This time a large group went to Paraguay, some went to Mexico, and some came to northern Alberta. Surely, they thought, here, far from al l civilization, they would be free to live their own lives acording to their conscience. To them the German language was very important. They took seriously and literally the admonition, "Therefore come out from them and be separate from them, says the Lord," 2 Corinthians 6: 17 . They could not see how they could remain separate, keep "the world" from squeezing them into its mold, if they took on the language of the people around them and adjusted to their culture. And so it was that this extremely conservative little group of Mennonites, called "Old Colony Mennonites" because of the location they came from in Russia, and not tied organizationally in any way

115 to the larger Mennonite body, started its trek to the north. The first group came down the river on boats and barges from Peace River Town in 1932. Two years later a smaller group made the journey on home-made barges. Without any experience in handling barges on the great river, this journey almost ended in tragedy. After about thirty miles, the leaders thought they had chosen the wrong channel . They wanted to make a tum , but while they were turning, some water got into the boat and ran toward the belt that was driving the propeller. When the belt was in the water, it flew off. The reverse wouldn't work. They hit a rock on the shore and this broke a hole in the scow. The boat bounced back into the river from the impact and then the water started filling the boat. There were two barges. One had people and a McCormick tractor loaded on it and the other contained cattle and horses. Fortunately one of the leaders quickly cut the barges apart; otherwise both barges would have sunk. One of the boys in the group, Peter Friesen, who was thirteen years of age at that time, was lying on the boat right at the spot where it crashed against the stone. As the water gushed in, he jumped off the boat and onto the bank. But the river was very high and the barge hit a cut bank. There wasn't any grass growing there; it was that steep. As the boat bounced back into the river, young Peter was left all alone on the steep bank, clinging to whatever he could to keep from falling into the water. The boat drifted down stream; the people knew the boy had been stranded, but they could not stop the boat. In the meantime the barge with the cattle and horses on it sank. Only one horse and one bull were saved; all the rest drowned. Fortunately, because they got the two barges separated, no people lost their lives. They got the belt fixed and the water pumped out of the barge that had the tractor on it. Then they turned the barge around and rescued the boy. The group was in a pretty sad situation since half of all their belongings were gone. News about their predicament reached the Mennonites who had settled in Carcajou two years earlier and so one of the men from there came to meet them on the river boat. Finally they all got to their destination, but the Peace River had flooded and so the log houses that the earlier settlers had prepared for them were under water. Many houses were floating . The people who had settled there earlier, had moved to higher ground. Initially the second group had to live in tents on the river bank.

116 Since all this happened in May, the people still made gardens when they got settled, but it was too late for th e plants to mature and they had an early frost. Consequently the settlers went into the winter without an adequate supply of food . That winter was a bitter one. One day in February a Mennonite woman from Carcajou was brought to me who was apparently dying. She was so desperately pale that I thought she had either leukemia or had had a hemorrhage somewhere. She was almost too weak to lift her head. We asked the men to carry her into the bunk house since there wasn't room in the house. The bunk house was built of logs, had a stove in it, and was used for trappers when they came in from the bush to sell their furs. It was empty, so the woman and her husband could stay in it. When I came to look at the woman, I realized that she had classical scurvy, the kind of scurvy Jacques Cartier's men died of when they came to Canada in 1536. Her gums were almost black and her teeth were falling out. Her mouth had a horrible smell. I had seen scurvy and rickets when I was in England. Scurvy in th e adult takes six months of inadequate diet to develop. The Mennonites probably had had enough to eat but what they had to eat had no Vitamin C in it. New potatoes have a high Vitamin C content , but they did not get any of those in their gardens that summer. Turnips are an excellent sauce of Vitamin C too. Sir Leonard Parsons, one of England's excellent pediatricians, with whom I worked, was very good with helping the sick children of the very poor. In the case of scurvy, he would tell mothers to buy a turnip (which in those days cost a penny), cut it in half, and with a spoon keep scraping out the raw pulp to feed the baby. That was enough Vitamin C for a child's needs. In 1934 Vitamin C had not as yet been synthesized. We had no Vitamin C in the North except what had been stored from the garden. I had preserved potatoes, turnips, and tomatoes; I had also made English marmalade with lemons and oranges. We didn't have any fresh lemons and oranges since there was no way of getting them in the winter. They would have frozen , and at this time of the year the supplies that we had had brought down on the last boat in the fall were used up. All that I could give this woman for her scurvy were tomatoes and potatoes and turnips. The speed at which she began to recover was absolutely phenomenal. She was pregnant at the time and she had been nursing another baby. It was this that had been such a tremendous drain on her when they were already short of food. Within a week the

117 woman was able to get up and walk around in the bunk house, and soon they took her back to Carcajou. She went full term with the pregnancy, which I thought was rather remarkable. The Mennonites, obviously, had no money to pay me , but later on they brought me a lovely wool quilt for my baby's cot. It was light as a feather and beautifully warm. They also made heavy wool socks for Frank that he could wear inside of moccasins or rubbers. The socks were heavy enough to stand by themselves and were made of wool that hadn't been washed and so they were relatively water-proof. In addition to the socks, they also made mittens for Frank and Louis and Arthur and me. I was called to Carcajou at various times to deal with serious illness among the Mennonites. Sometimes, in the dead of winter, I would have to stay for several days to look after a patient. So there I was, with nothing to do for hours on end except read a German Bible. That was the only book the Mennonites had. Ten years earlier I had done a year's "scientific German" in my last year at school, enough to enable me to puzzle out medical articles with the aid of a dictionary. I could not really read or speak German, but I managed to figure out quite a bit of what the Bible said. And I did have fellowship with the people - I lived among them. Somehow we managed to communicate with each other in signs and gestures. What struck me particularly about them was the stark hard work they did and that the women took such pride in their work. They got a lot of satisfaction, for instance, in trying out a new recipe.

Mennonite children going to school in a "democrat," 1958

118 In those days there was no plumbing in the far North , and ce11ainly not among the Mennonite settlers. During the winter they did not even use out-houses; they went to the barn. This made sense because it was nice and warm among all the animals. The trouble was that I never knew how the cows would take to my colorful attire when they were used to only women in black! Mennonites, as a rule, had large families . They positively wanted twelve or fifteen children. They believed each child was sent by God, and so, for instance, a woman would refuse to have her tubes tied, although another pregnancy would endanger her life. A young woman with an Rh factor was having a third child although she already had two healthy children by means of blood transfusions. They insisted on having more children. Some small women were slowly being killed by bearing a child every year. I simply could not visualize a God who favours such indiscriminate breeding. ft seemed that the Old Colony Mennonites had given up too much, generation after generation, in country after country, for conscience sake, not to cling strongly to that which in centuries past had been found good. But truth is a living thing, and virtue in excess becomes evil. In trying to save for their children the spiritual heritage of the past, the leaders no longer allowed their people the freedom of thought and decision that had characterized their begin­ nings four hundred years ago. They had apparently come full circle. They were now themselves carrying out what their ancestors had so passionately protested: a coercion of thought and belief. I highly respected the Mennonites, however. I respected their moral life . I never saw a case of venereal disease among them. Their ethical standards were so high and they were so hard working that it seemed a shame to me that all that ethical strength was locked up in northern Alberta instead of benefitting all of Canada. The group of Mennonite people later left Carcajou and settled farther north around Fort Vermilion and La Crete. Doctors Julius and Hanna Kratz, when they were practicing in Fort Vermilion in the I 950's, saw a great epidemic of streptococcal tonsillitis among the Mennonites. Since they had large families, lived in small houses, and were reluctant to accept modern medical care and penicillin shots, in a very short time the whole family was infected, and in due time the whole community. About ten years after the Kratzes had left Fort Vermilion, I was seeing a great many Mennonites and doing a good deal of prenatal work among them, even though most of them lived about a hundred miles from me. I was interested to discover how many

119 leaking heart valves there were among them. When three medical students from Edmonton came to study general practice in the North, I suggested that they go to La Crete to the Government Nur e's office and try to get as many as po sible of the Mennonite women to come in so that they could listen to their hearts. I was sure that they would hear more heart murmurs in a matter of a week or so at La Crete than they would hear anywhere else in Alberta. Subsequently a sociologic and medical study wa undertaken in 1966 of the incidence of rheumatic heart disease in this isolated Mennonite colony. A group of Metis in a nearby ettlement was u ed as a control group. The medical tudents wrote a paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal of that year, describing their findings and the number of leaking heart valves that they found. Out of a total of 1,294 individual examined, evidence of carditis was found in 42 of them. Years later, a great many of the women I had seen were requiring open heart surgery for the replacement of those badly damaged valves. Dr. Kratz happened to be visiting me when there wa an article in the Edmonton Journal which had u both gnashing our teeth, because it suggested that there were an abnormal number of patients being sent in from Fort Vermilion for open heart surgery, and the reporter wondered whether this had anything to do with the extra billing! So I wrote a very annoyed letter to the College of Physicians and Surgeons saying that I thought it was quite obvious that an epidemic of leaking heart valves could be the long-term result of an epidemic of streptococcal ore throats in the I 950's for which Julius Kratz could vouch, and the leaking heart valves starting to develop in the I 960's to which I could testify. These ca es were all coming to surgery now - it had nothing to do with extra billing. The Metis also had large families and lived in small houses, but most of them, unlike the Mennonites who usually ought medical help and services as a last resort, were getting penicillin when they got bad sore throats. It always seemed to me that one of the most valuable things I could do was to make sure that no child with a strep throat ever developed rheumatic carditis. So I had a Metis population who were in the habit of bringing children with bad sore throats and fever to me to get penicillin. Here then I had two communities, that of the Mennonite and that of the Metis, practically on opposite ides of the river from one another - both with an epidemic which we knew was cau ed

120 by the kind of streptococci that produces rheumatic fever - and yet there was a minimum of rheumatic fever with no residual leaking heart valves in the Metis Colony in Paddle Prairie, and in Keg River, while across the river at La Crete there was this extraordinary number of young women with damaged heart valves. Several years ago Dr. Harry Bain took me on a tour of the Toronto Sick Children' s Hospital and asked me what my particular interests were. I told him that I used to see a tremendous number of children with rheumatic carditis and leaking heart valves when [ was a medical student and intern in England. "It has practically di sappeared." he said. "Now there isn't a rheumatic heart in the hospital." He took me to the heart department, however, and there were dozens of children running around who had had congenital heart di sease, which in earlier years would have been fatal , but for which they now have open heart surgery. It was extremely interesting to see the very sudden change in disease patterns. All of those children would have been dead in infancy if we hadn't learned to operate on them, and many children, not only Mennonite, still would have rh eumatic fever and rheumatic hearts if they had not received penicillin .

121 Chapter 13 The "Hospital" at Keg River

During the Depression the price of fur was very low. For this reason Revillon Freres, the big French buyers, decided to close their post at Keg River. The manager and his family left and so the buildings stood empty. Frank and I wondered whether it would be possible for us to buy the buildings so that I could use the old house, in which the manager had lived, as a "hospital." It was only a quarter of a mile from our place so that I could easily get there in a hurry.

Revillon Freres Trading Post, Keg River. The building on the right is the one that was used as an outpost hospital.

To have a place where patients could stay for a short while would be a tremendous help. I needed ·such a place especially for maternity cases. If I could have the use of the building, a woman who was nearly due could move into the house with her husband

122 and children and live there - they could split their own wood and cook their own food - until the baby was born and the woman was fit to go back by wagon or sleigh to her home. I would be able to get there in a short time and take care of the case much more easily than if the woman was in the bush somewhere twenty or thirty miles away. In fact, as it was , people from Carcajou, fo rty miles away, couldn't possibly come to my place and get back to a woman in labour with any certainty that I would be there in time. And even if I could have arrived before the baby was born, I couldn' t have gone so far away from home to do house calls because I shouldn't have been home when the next disaster happened. In addition to the advantage of having the patients within walking distance, I should also have a good light by which to work since we had two good gas lanterns. And if there should be two deliveries due at about the same time, there would be two rooms available , with the two families sharing the kitchen. It really seemed like a marvellous idea, and it actually happened. With assistance from the Anglican Bishop, Sovereign in Peace River, and The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, we bought the building and started our outpost hospital. Eileen Elgar of Bour­ nemouth, one of the women members of The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, offered enough money to equip the three-roomed house with a cook-stove, a heater, three beds, a table and some chairs. She was the wife of a clergyman, and had scarlet fever as a teenager, which left her completely deaf. She took a great interest in the work of The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf and gave us in valuable help in setting up the outpost. We started using it in 1937. In February 1937, Frank's niece, Isobel Moulton, came from California to visit her uncle and stayed on with us for more than two years. She was great fun and fitted into the family very quickly. She drove a team and went freighting to Peace River with the boys, she rode horseback with me, she relieved Frank of the job of giving anaesthetics, and she helped with the chores. Isobel was really a tremendous help to me. The effort of looking after a practice was rapidly becoming more difficult as the population grew. By 1939 the Metis Colony at Paddle Prairie was started and this doubled the number of people I needed to look aft er. Not only that, but these people were living an average of twenty-five miles away from me. There was a trail, but not a good road, so that a good deal of the work had to be done on horseback, or with a team and wagon, or with a dog team in the winter. Having Isobel to cope at the house and see to it that the family

123 Isobel and John Robert whitewash­ ing the bunk house, 1938

wa fed while I was gone for a day or more at a tretch wa an enormous help. I obel wa also able to come with me to my newly opened "ho pital" when I had maternity ca e there, or when I had accident to look after. She was a willing anae thetist and assistant in general. It wa marvellous to have her. A great many babie were born in our outpost ho pital. The first patient in the "hospital" was an emergency maternity case. She wa a young woman with her first baby, who e mother had been looking after her while he was in labour. They lived at Paddle Prairie twenty-five miles away. When a fore t fire came through quite close to their cabin the mother had to go out to beat out the little fires that were being started by falling embers round the cabin and the barn, but the baby arrived afely. The afterbirth didn ' t come, however, o finally they had to bring her over to

124 Keg River in a wagon. I put her into the " hospital" and then removed a stinking placenta from a woman who was already running a fever. When the baby was born it had been wrapped in a little bearskin. hair-side inwards, and when I unwrapped it the child looked as though it had a rash. there were so many fleabites. The bearskin was just hopping. One of my maternity cases in the outpost hospital ended in tragedy. A Mennonite woman was there for a week or two awaiting the delivery of her first child. She was a perfectly normal , healthy woman, but when the baby was born, it had the shortest cord I have ever seen - it was just a little short piece - and so it tore the afterbirth away, causing the baby's death. We couldn't revive it. It was very sad. I was appalled at having a still birth . I had had hardly any still births before, and this was such a beautiful baby! The parents had been delighted to have the child. The woman subsequently had a large family but this was a disastrous first baby. Other than this baby, I don ' t think J ever had another child born dead or die in the " hospital." There was another very special case in the "hospital" which I would like to tell about since it involved my first use of penicillin. Before I do so, however, J must give some background about the drug situation. It was during the Depression and, as I have previously said, nobody had any money. People who would ordinarily have been able to buy their drugs , couldn't. But if I was going to do any medical work I had to have some basic things, particularly anaesthe­ tics (local and general). sutures. bandages, Plaster of Paris, and some drugs . In those days we had a very limited number of drugs, which were quite cheap, but without money I could not even buy those. The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf had been supplying me with a little money toward my drug supply right after the Depression started. But sometimes I had ordered drugs. expecting to get money from England via the Maple Leaf. and it didn't arrive. This was the case particularly after the war started and the Foreign Exchange Control Board limited the amount of money that could be sent. In situations like this I had to borrow from Frank. who was as short of cash as I was. And yet if I didn ' t supply the drugs myself there was nothing I could do for my patients. Help from the Maple Leaf was absolutely vital at that time. On one particular occasion I again received word from Canon Andrews that donors had contributed $25 .00 for my use and that he had sent it to the Anglican Bishop in Peace River, who would 125 forward it to me. I promptly ordered drugs, of course, and waited for the money to arrive before writing to the donors to thank them . The drug came and had to be paid for (I had to borrow from the bank) but the m ney did n t arrive. It eemed that the Bi hop felt there were better u es for the money than to buy my drugs, and how could I question his right to determine where the money was to go? It was a very awkward situation. Finally, however, Canon Andr w wa able to per uade th Bi hop t end the donation on to me. We were all de perately hort of m ney. Then as the miracle drugs, one after another, started coming on the market, the price f drug b came almo t prohibitive. The fir t penicillin that I got wa a Chri tmas pre ent from Dr. Emma Johnstone. It was three million unit that co t $25. In tho e days $25 .00 was a much as $100.00 is t day. During the war the small upply f peni illin that there wa in the world was all being u ed for the troop . I remember on one cca ion the whole i ue of th British Medical Journal was full of account of patient who had been uccessfully treated for variou complaint with thi wonder drug. It all ounded like a fairy tale and it was impo ible t imagine one drug that would cure many different thing . So t receive a little bottle of penicillin wa really quite a thrill. f cour I felt I needed to ave it for omebody who wa definitely going to die therwi e. Long acting penicillin had n t yet b en developed, and this wa a little b ttle of cry tals I had to mix with water. It had quite a sh rt life after it wa mixed; that wa why it came in such mall quantities. We gave infinite imally small do es compared with the am unt required today. ne day a baby was brought in from Paddle Prairie which had pneumonia and as far a I could ee had nly a few hours to live. Baby and mother were promptly in tailed in the "hospital" and I mixed up the penicillin. The hour had come to use the preci us gift. I gave the baby a h t. The effect wa unbelievable - within a couple of h ur the child wa obviou ly improving in tead of dying. I went back and forth t the "ho pitaJ" e ery three hours to give the child additional shot . The penicillin wa so short-acting that if you were going to get any effect from it you had to keep repeating the do e before the previou dose had worn ff. Running back and forth every three hour , night a well a day, wa exhau ting bu ine . I could not teach the m ther to give the h t becau e he couldn't bear the thought of sticking a needle into her baby, and by the econd night I wa beginning to be really

126 weary. However, the baby did amazingly well. She is a grown-up married woman now. After that, of course, I just had to have penicillin. Having seen what it would do. it seemed criminal to practice without it. We already had had sulpha drugs from about 1936 on, and they were miracle drugs in their own right, but nothing to compare with penicillin. The sulpha drugs were not nearly as expensive as the antibiotics became: the costs were manageable as compared with the cost of penicillin. The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf continued sending me money toward the cost of drugs for several years. A donor in England also provided me with the money to buy an operating table for the outpost hospital. It was a very primitive operating table to be sure, but it was absolutely without price at Keg River, and donors saw to it that I got a resuscitator to use for artificial respiration when I needed it. I also received help from doctors in Edmonton whom I knew. As the big drug manufacturers came out with one miracle antibiotic after another through the I 950's and 60's they would send a doctor a box with perhaps $50.00 worth of the new drugs so that he or she could check its miracle effects personally. The doctors would send me their samples, which enabled me to use the expensive antibiotics on people who couldn't pay anything for their medicines. Some of the people alive today certainly would not be if they hadn't received this kind of help. In addition to helping me with the "hospital" during the Depression. The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, the Anglican Church in Toronto. as well as my parents and uncles and aunts sent supplies of clothing to Keg River for distribution among the needy. Sometimes the gifts from England were really funny. The Bishop of Norwich was a very tall man and he wore a very heavy clerical grey overcoat, which was among the gifts from The Fellow­ ship of the Maple Leaf. Isobel and I took it all apart and made a child's snow suit out of it - it was a marvellous, practically wind-proof material. But the riding breeches that had belonged to some wealthy man in Norfolk were given to one of the Indians who was short of clothing. The riding breeches were very English - a rather bright sort of yellowish orange color - and so when he wore them together with a moose-hide jacket. moccasins. and a French Canadian black felt hat, the effect was priceless. But he was wonderfully warm. A woman's group in a Toronto church had a knitting party once a week and knitted the most beautiful baby outfits for us, so

127 that all the native babie for a period of year had not mer ly diapers and ve t , but al o hand-knitted jackets and bonnets and bootie . They looked very nice, but actually they were not practical in the Indian life tyle; they were not nearly a efficient a a mo bag. In a mo bag a child could be taken from Keg River to Carcajou or any other similar di tance without needing to have its diaper changed. If you were travelling at 40 degree below zero with a child who had to be undre ed to have a diaper changed, you had a problem. I found it difficult to per uade the people that the Indian mo s bag wa the most efficient and practical. The babie never got a diaper rash. Of cour e, it is a great deal of work to collect a big enough pile of moss, with no stick and other material in it, in order to make the moss bag. Actually thou ands of dollars worth of clothing came into the North. These helped to put the community on its feet. They raised the tandard of living of the Meti people enormously because when their fur brought in very little money - little more than they needed for food - the provision of clothe for infants and children as well as for ome of the adult made a very great difference. Several of the Metis women who had ewing machine would take ome of the cloth coats that came and cut them up into squares and make quilt , which were extremely durable and very decorative. They were rather heavy, very warm, and much better than cheap blankets. ome of the thing that my father sent from England we made into nowsuits and they kept the children going when they were small. One day a friend of mine came to help me make ome clothe for my children - I had b ught ome material to make shirts - and he said to me as he tarted to cut out, "You know this is the fir t time I've ever put my scissors into new goods." All through the Depre ion she had clothed five children in what she made over from other people' clothe . After the war Frank stopped trading, and in 1949 we moved to the house he was building on the farm, about a mile and a half away. Once we were on the farm, it wa too far for me to get back and forth to the "ho pita!." I used it for a year or so after we moved, but then, in 1950, after being in u e for about thirteen year , it wa clo ed. It had served it purpo e well.

128 Clara Chalifoux and John Ferguson married at Keg River Catholic Church. Elsie Halabisky, Miss Lawrence, and Isobel at the right. Anne, kneeling on the left. All the babies are wearing knitted outfits from Toronto.

129 Chapter 14 Education in the North

The problem of education for our children was a continuing one. When my friend, Marion Aitken Crossen, or Mac, came back with me from England after Anne was born, it seemed sensible that she take over teaching Louis and Arthur while she was with us. She was a teacher by profession. We got Correspondence School lessons from the Department of Education in Edmonton, so Mac had an outline of what they had to learn, but with only eight mails per year, it took a long time for corrections and comments to get back to us. In a year and a half Louis and Arthur caught up about four grades in spite of the fact that they were continually being interrupted with the necessity to do something or other on the farm. When Louis was fifteen he was ready for grade nine, and so we sent him to his grandfather in British Columbia to go to highschool. Mac returned to England. By the time that Anne was five years old, there was still no school at Keg River. There were plenty of children of school age, and had been all those years that Frank had lived there, but the native population knew no need for a school education and did not ask for a school. The boys went to the bush with their fathers as soon as they were old enough, and learned to hunt and trap. The girls learned to tan moose-hide and make moccasins and moose-hide jackets; they ran rabbit lines to catch rabbits, and made rabbit-skin eiderdowns. They also picked berries and learned how to cook whatever there was to cook, and made bannock. Indians had done remarkably well for thousands of years. They had continued to make a life for themselves under extremes of climatic hardship. They had been the typical hunter-gatherer, follow­ ing the game, gathering berries, catching fish , collecting eggs - and starving to death when they were not successful. Yet until they caught TB, brought from Europe, they had survived. With the

130 country opening up to white settlement, however, it seemed to me that the answer to a great many of the natives' problems was education. Without it, they would never be able to reach their full potential in the present world. Frank and I decided that we would try to get a school. We went to Edmonton to see Mr. McNally, the Deputy Minister of Education. He had been the school inspector in the area in which Frank's sister had taught. We talked to him about the problem. As a result 'of this visit the Keg River School District was formed. We were fully aware that the tax payers of the Keg River District were no more than sixteen farmers altogether. They didn't have any money and so they could not pay large school taxes. If money were to be borrowed to build an elegant school , equipped with ready-made desks, chairs, and blackboards, we should have had to get a debenture, which would have had to be paid by the farmers, who needed every dime that they could make to tum their homesteads into farms. So Frank and Harry Bowe, together with the help of the community, built the school with logs donated by Harry Bowe off his homestead. The only things the government paid for were the windows and the shingles and a wood-burning heater. Frank made a proper insulated chimney. The blackboards were made of black-tar­ red roofing with the smooth back outwards, that was still very rough to write on, but which served the purpose. George Hryciuk built the desks and some cupboards. The problem was to get a teacher. I wrote to Canon Andrews of The Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, telling of the desperate need of this district to get a teacher who could cope with thirty beginners, all the way to age sixteen, who spoke no English beyond a few words. Canon Andrews persuaded Winifred Lawrence to come out from England to teach at Keg River on an Alberta Teaching Permit. She came in 1937 before the school was completely built. In fact, when she came down the river by boat and got off at Keg River Landing, I think that the windows and heater that had been shipped in , plus the metal with which Frank was going to make a Selkirk Chimney, were all unloaded from the boat at the same time. The teacherage hadn't been completed either and so Miss Lawrence had to live in the outpost hospital temporarily. She was there when the first emergency case arrived. Poor Winifred Lawrence, she had quite an introduction to life in the North! Winifred Lawrence was an exceptionally good teacher. I think of her so often even today when I meet people whom she taught.

131 She had boys and girls in her one-roomed school who couldn't speak English and who at the end of three years had progressed to grade six or seven. It was really quite an achievement, especially when this was done in a school where the teacher and the students hauled the water from the river, split the fire wood, and did the janitor work. We had the barest in conveniences but we had a superlatively good teacher. She taught with enthusiasm - the children loved her and she was liked by all the parents. Homes in the district vied with each other to have the school teacher come over for supper. The government paid her $600.00 a year, but of course she wasn't teaching for the money; she was teaching because she loved the children and because she believed that the one thing she could do for the people of the North was to help them get an education. It was very difficult to get teachers during the war. After Miss Lawrence left in 1940 we were without a teacher for some time. One man whom we did have, and who was very popular because he made moonshine in the teacherage, was an excellent teacher when sober. We had him for one year. We also had a woman teacher who was practically illiterate. So we were delighted to have Louis' wife, June, as Correspondence School teacher in 194 7, 1948, and 1949. Each year, as soon as the University closed at the beginning of May, the Department of Education sent in teachers for the months of May and June. One of the teachers who came to Keg River for two years in this way was Christine van der Mark, who was teaching English at the University of Alberta. She was at that time writing her novel In Due Season which won

Louis Jackson and his wife June

132 the Governor General's Award in 1948. It was a vivid description of life in a northern homestead district, and the Indians and Metis who lived there.

Christine van der Mark , taught at Keg River 1948. Author of In Due Season.

Even though correspondence school lessons were better than nothing, for the person supervising the shoot they were extremely difficult to teach . And even though this learning by correspondence was being supplemented by University people for a couple of months in the summer, it didn't make for a very consistant kind of an education. We had a great many more children now, and what Keg River needed most desperately was a good teacher. I wrote once more to Canon Andrews. On the very day that my letter arrived, a teacher, Miss Paul, came to see Canon Andrews because she wanted to teach in Canada. She had a brother living in Alberta, near Calgary. Miss Paul always regarded it as an act of God that my letter happened to arrive just when she did . Canon Andrews, of course, immediately passed my letter on to her, and she came to Keg River right away. That was in 1949. When Miss Paul started teaching, the school was still the original log building, and she moved into the little log teacherage in the school yard. They were still getting water from the river and

133 still had no light except a gas lantern. The desks, by this time, had been replaced by proper desks, but a great number of the children still had long distances to come, either on saddle horse or with little caboose sleighs in the winter. They were farm children, scattered all over the area.

The first school at Keg River was used from 1937 to 1951

Since the enrolment had become so large, the log school house was abandoned and the Peace River School Division built a consid­ erably larger school, with a teacherage built on to the end of it. The school room had a beautiful hard-wood floor, and Miss Paul

Miss Paul and her class in the new school , 1951

134 saw to it that the children kept it polished. She still taught all the grades in one room - a total of forty-four children one year. The children's attendance was gratifyingly good. They liked coming to school. When it was too dark first thing in the morning - it got light very late in the mornings during the winter, of course, and there was no electricity - Miss Paul would start with a long continuing story, say "The Arabian Nights," so that they just had to get to school on time in order not to miss part of the story. Then, after the continuing story, while they sat around and warmed their hands in front of the heater, they would do some singing to get a bit of energy into them by the time it was daylight enough to start on the ordinary work of the day. It may not have been all according to the curriculum from Edmonton, but it worked. I can still spot the people Miss Paul taught when they were children. Their letters are correctly punctuated, and difficult words like stomach and pneumonia are correctly spelled. When I see that, I think, "There was Miss Paul." She really made a dent in the education of the population.

Dr. Mary Jackson on left; Miss Paul and School Superintendent Hooper at right, with the grade eight graduates

We gradually accumulated too many children for one teacher to teach in one room and so another building was built on the school yard, and we had two teachers in a two-roomed school. In 1954, when Miss Paul had taught five years in Keg River, and a great many of her grade eight students had gone to high

135 Farewell party for Miss Paul, 1954 school and to train as nurses' aid and teachers, she left, and Mildred Mallinger came. Mildred MaJiinger was an enthusiastic, dedicated teacher, who thought that the very limited library at Keg River was a disaster. She badgered the Peace River School Division and friends of hers in CaJgary to supply the school with books. The next very good principal we had after Mildred left was Stella Backstrom. By this time a third room had been built on the schoolyard and there were two other teachers. Stella's husband was farming their homestead near High Level and they had three small children. She wanted to get a Mennonite woman to look after her children while she taught at Keg River, and since she felt that a Mennonite girl would be very home-sick by herself in a non-Mennonite community, she asked whether I would not want to get a Mennonite housekeeper too. We could then get the two girls together frequently enough that they would not be too lonesome. That is how I came to have a marvellous housekeeper for a year or two. Stella was another very good teacher. We were extremely fortunate. The teachers that I remember from those early days were obviously getting a great deal of joy out of their teaching, though singularly little money. They managed to start a large number of rural children from northern Alberta on their ways to careers in education and medicine. Teaching for them was a vocation, and they did it with dedication and enthusiasm. They gave it all they had, and the students showed it. It reminded me of my mother

136 and uncles and aunts and cousins, who were all teachers and who would get together, when I was a child, and talk with great excitement about teaching. About 1958 we were transferred from the Peace River School Division to the Fort Vermilion School Division. This happened in the process of a redistribution of school districts by the Department of Education. Since Keg River was a long way from Peace River's most northern school in Manning, it was decided that it would be better to put us into the Fort Vermilion School District, together with the schools in the La Crete-Buffalo Head Prairie area, the one-roomed schools in Carcajou, High Level, and Meander River, and a four-roomed school in Paddle Prairie. At this time I was elected a school board member - being a woman who had a car and "time" to be on the school board! The problems of getting back and forth to meetings were considerable. The Mackenzie Highway was now a passable gravei road, but my driving to school board meetings in Fort Vermilion - hundred and twenty-five miles away - once a month, was complicated by the fact that there was no bridge across the Peace and one had to go across on the ferry. Once the river began to freeze up in the fall, there was always the uncertainty as to how soon the ferry would have to be taken out, and, when you got to the river, there was always the possibility that there was so much fog that the ferry could not run , or that it had just left and you had to wait for it to go across the river and then back again before you could get on. In spite of all these problems l found my work on the school board extremely interesting. The schools we were dealing with represented the many different kinds of people that were living in the area. The Fort Vermilion, Carcajou, Keg River, Paddle Prairie, and Meander River schools had either entirely Metis, or half Metis and half white students. Rocky Lane School had mainly Ukrainian students, and the schools at Buffalo Head Prairie and La Crete were completely Mennonite. The Mennonites of course had come to northern Alberta, which they thought was far from all civilization, in order to have their own schools where they could teach their children according to th eir own beliefs. Their Bishop had donated a piece of land, they built a log schoolhouse, hired their own Mennonite teacher, and proceeded to teach their children in the German language. The teacher with his family lived in one part of the building and the other part served as a school as well as the church. The people themselves had built the school and supported it.

137 After a few years, however, the Government of Alberta first built a school at Buffalo Head Prairie and then at La Crete in order to make compulsory Canadian education available to the Mennonite people. They, of course, resented this and only very reluctantly obeyed the Law. In some cases the teacher had to take men to court because they did not send their children to school. The families who lived beyond the three-mile radius in which the government could make them go to an existing school, were very happy; some deliberately moved out of range so that their children would not have to go to the "English School." In 1958 the road between La Crete and Fort Vermilion was upgraded and gravelled, and this put a very large number of children within school bus distance of La Crete. We planned to add two more rooms to the existing school at La Crete because we now had plenty of children to fill it, and thought the children living at the north end of the settlement could be taken by bus to the Fort Vermilion School, which had room for them. This would get almost all the Mennonite children into school. During one of our school board meetings half a dozen of the Mennonite elders, dressed completely in black and very solemn-look­ ing, walked into the room. They said they would not allow the children from the north end of the La Crete settlement to go to the Fort Vermilion School because they did not want their children to be mixed with the Indian and Metis children who went there. They asked us to build a school at Blumenort, which was within the Mennonite settlement. We said we did not have enough money to build a school for children who lived ten to twelve miles from an existing school that had enough room for them. I still remember the hostility that seemed to be radiating from these men . They did not want their children to go to La Crete and they certainly did not want them to go to Fort Vermilion; if they had to go to school at all it was to be a school of Mennonite children, not mixed with Indians! The Mennonite elders subsequently went to the Department of Education in Edmonton with their request. This made headlines in some of the papers and magazines because these old men had made this terrifically long trip in winter to tell the Department of Education that they needed a school for their children. The Department of Education then made the Fort Vermilion School Division build a one-roomed school at Blumenort. That is how they got their first school. Not long after this there was an influx of Mennonites from

138 Saskatchewan to La Crete. Their representatives also came to a school board meeting, but to our amazement they were extremely indignant that La Crete was not offering high school education! They had expected their children to be able to go to high school immediately upon arrival and there wasn't any. This was a different group of Mennonites altogether. We realized they were not all the same. By this time there were enough children who required high sc hool and so we had to add more rooms to the La Crete School. But the moment we got such an enormous number of children bussed in , we ran into the major problem of arranging for sewage disposal in mid-winter. If in the late fall you get very cold weather before you have any snow cover, the ground may freeze ten feet deep on occasion, and you get almost perma-frost. We certainly had interesting school board meetings on the subject. The next problem we encountered was the proximity of the Rocky Lane School, attended mainly by Ukrainian children, to the Indian Day School on the Boyer River Reserve about half a mile away. The Indian Day School was getting overcrowded, and since the Indians were a Federal responsibility it was the Federal Govern­ ment who would have to add another room to the school. But in the Fort Vermilion School Board, we felt we could build two rooms for what the Federal Government would spend to build one room, so if they would give us the money, we would add two rooms to the Rocky Lane School and create Junior High classes there for both the Indian and the Ukrainian children. I thought it was a marvellous idea because we could save money that way, so I was absolutely dumb-struck when we came to a school board meeting and were confronted by a delegation from Rocky Lane who were also exceedingly hostile toward having Indians in school with their children. The Ukrainian immigrants were even more upset than the Mennonites had been. One of their spokesmen said, " If those people had been fit to live with us, they would not have been put on reserves in the first place!" I found out that none of the Rocky Lane settlers kn ew the Indian people by name though they lived across the road from them. This was very startling to me because [lived in a community which was predominantly Indian and Metis at Keg River, knew all the adults and children by name, and considered them my friends. We had a prolonged argument with the Rocky Lane delegates and explained the financial advantage to them . Finally, at a sub­ sequent meeting we got the Chief of the Boyer River Band and

139 his enior high chool-age daughter to explain why they wanted to have their children go to a high chool instead of being isolated in the Indian Day School. We finally made a compromise. At no time would more than twenty-five Indian children be admitted to the Rocky Lane School. I felt later on that it was an iniquitou arrangement. lf there were more lndian children ready to go to high chool at Rocky Lane, we had no right to hinder them from doing o. Experiences like this made it very difficult for the school board. Sometime we felt that if we weren' t lynched by the Men­ nonites we were sure to be lynched by the Ukrainians. But it certainly was an interesting study in race relations and the problem of education in a pioneer community. Rocky Lane School had an extremely good principal and the Rocky Lane children did exceptionally well. Even though the school wa out in the ticks, they got top mark in departmental exam province-wide. The Northland School Division was formed in 1960. The idea was to put all the isolated one-room school , cattered over Indian re erve and Meti settlements in the northern part of the province, under one school division. The Keg River School was also transferred from the Fort Vermilion School Division to the new Northland Scho I Division and so I was suddenly no longer a tru tee because the job was gone. However I watched with great interest the continuing develop­ ment of education. Building a school is not education, of course, but it makes education pos ible. The new Northland School Division decided to integrate the chool at Keg River, Carcajou, and the Junior High students at Paddle Prairie into one school and build this school in a more or les central area on the Mackenzie Highway, ju t outh of Keg River. This would be a big enough chool to justify four cla room , library, cience room, a teachers' room and proper wa h-room facilities. The children would be brought in by bu . Since my step- on, Louis, had already given two acres of land for the Naylor Hill School, they decided to build the school there. It was a very nice school. When Dr. John W. Chalmers, who wa in charge of Northland School Division, came to a meeting, he aid that they thought they should call it the Dr. Mary Jack on School. Schools had been named for local bi hops, but since several schools had already been named after Catholic bishops and the Anglican bishop didn't come to Keg River, they decided to name thi chool after me, and informed the people of their decision. If

140 the people had been asked, the name would probably have been Naylor Hills School or Keg River School.

The Dr. Mary Jackson School - the consolidated school built south of Keg River, on property donated by Louis Jackson

Dr. Mary Percy Jackson. Taken by Martin Giles in 1976.

141 Compared with the old ones, the school building was quite impressive. We were lucky in having a whole series of excellent teachers, and could see the advantages of a much larger school - not only becau e of the improved facilities, but because of the increa ed competition amongst the tudents. My grandchildren were all at chool tho e days and did well. The school also had a hockey rink, built and flooded by some of the parents, and they developed a very good hockey team. I did, however, become very concerned about how the bussing affected the children. Parents had to snatch their children out of bed oon after 7 o'clock in the morning, get clothes on them, and throw them into the school bus before they were half awake. That was some job on a cold morning because the children didn't want to get up . On the long, long dark mornings they just simply didn 't wake up. Thi i physiological; we all sleep longer in winter than summer. It isn't that they didn't want to go to chool. You couldn't wake them up! You couldn't get a decent breakfast into them becau e you couldn't wake them enough to eat. So they were thrust into the chool bu , half asleep, and of cour e the bu was not kept in a garage; the driver managed to start the engine because it was plugged into a block heater. Buses have the strongest heaters that are made, but all that heat blowing into a 40 below zero bu did not begin to thaw those confounded plastic eats. It was ju t like sitting on blocks of ice. And the poor little children, snatched out of bed, thrust into the cold bus, were then driven all over, collecting pupils from four different areas. This was what wa o idiotic. Instead of taking them a speedily as pos ible to a nice warm school, they went past the school door and then , on occasions, were taken down the road another twenty miles because the teacher couldn't be in school till five to nine. By then they were o thoroughly chilled that when they did get warmed up in school, they went back to leep. After the teachers finally got the children roused and had tried to teach them omething, they thru t them into the cold at noon so that they would get some fresh air, and all they had to eat for their lunch was andwiches. Because the school was out of the settlement, there was no possibility of the women getting together, with one woman each day making a hot soup for the children. After having had practically nothing for breakfast, they had chilly sandwiches and an ice-cold apple for lunch - so they didn 't eat all of it. Then, of course, when they got home at dark, at half-pat four, they were hungry, and were not going to wait for

142 any 6 o'clock supper, no matter what was cooking. So they tucked into a high carbohydrate diet: bread, bannock, jam, and syrup. Having eaten their fill, by the time the meat and potatoes and vegetables were ready, they had no appetite anymore. The children' s diet is about as appalling as could ever have been devised. It is producing overweight children, and I'm sure if J live to be a hundred, I am going to see them all dropping dead of coronaries in their thirties . Their ancestors were thin and tough and in remarkably good health in their old age. If they hadn't died of TB, they more or less had it made; they lived on until their ei ghties and nineties. But they didn't do that on bread and jam; nor on sweet cookies, fresh frozen strawberries, candy, and pop. Pop is bought by the case; and the children eat all the things they should not have. Then we expect their brains to develop normally! There is also another problem. The parents don't make much effort to get their children to school, don 't mind very much if they play hooky, and then wonder why some of them end in the penitentiary . You see this pattern time after time, child after child. The parents will take their children to the sports at Fort Vermilion, or Rocky Lane, or Manning, or Bear Lake, so they don' t miss any rodeos, but they don 't see that they get to school. A child that doesn't attend school regularly gets behind of course, and then, in order to show the others that he isn 't stupid, he does something that 's usually very clever and quite illegal. We had many problems when we built the little log school house, but today' s educational problems seem even more difficult, and education more essential than ever.

143 Chapter 15 The War Years

When England and then Canada declared war against Germany in September of J 939, we got news over the radio every hour around the clock. Some of us stayed up the first few nights till all hours, expecting to hear about air raids over England. I cabled home and invited my father and mother to come here, but my cable reached them just after the Athenia was sunk and so it wasn't suprising that they thought the crossing too dangerous. I felt terribly cut off up in northern Alberta; I didn't know what was happening to my two brothers, I wondered whether people were being evacuated, I worried about my friends and relatives. The whole thing was unbearable to think of, and the news seemed to be getting worse hourly. We watched the clock all day, waiting for one station or another to bring us news. Even in our community there were hard feelings. There was a high percentage of Pole among the settlers, and some of them informed us that Poland would be far better off under German rule than her own, and hoped Germany would win. We also had an old Austrian who had been an officer in the previous war, who hoped the same. They were our neighbours, and we were all on reasonably good terms till the war started. If Keg River was typical on a small scale of the whole of Western Canada, we knew there would be many "little wars" in this country. On the whole, however, everyone wanted to help; there were no grumbles except from the men who volunteered and were refused. It was terribly difficult to write to my friends and relatives in England; I couldn't say anything cheering or helpful about the war and it eemed heartless to write about our life here, which was practically unchanged. I felt very helpless. I could not abandon my family and rush off to do some war ervices, but I wished I could do something besides live in peace and comfort when my family and friends were in danger of being killed .

144 In the three months from April 1940 onwards, the Germans had taken Finland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and France, and the Battle of Britain had started with intensive bombing of British cities. An invasion across the English Channel seemed imminent. English children were being evacuated from the cities and billeted all over the English countryside; arrangements were being made to evacuate children to Canada and the United States by boat across the Atlantic, when we received a cable from Donald and Edwina Hague asking whether we would be willing to take their two children, Patricia and John, into our home for the duration of the war. Donald and Edwina were both doctors and had been in medical school with me. They felt they could not under any circumstances leave England. They wanted to do what they could to help, but they wanted to send their chidren to safety. Of course Frank and I were very happy to have the children come, and Anne and John Robert immediately began planning picnics, swimming in the river, and berry-picking expeditions for them. How to get the children from Edmonton when they arrived there, was somewhat of a problem. The Hagues could not let us know when the children would be sailing; we could only be notified when they arrived in Quebec. From Quebec they would be put on the train to Edmonton. That was simple since there were no changes and we knew everyone would look after them - particularly at this time people would be doubly kind to English children . But it took only three days to get from Quebec to Edmonton, and most of a week for us to travel to Edmonton, so where were the children to stay in the meantime? We finally decided to ask the officials to notify Dr. J. F. Brander, an old friend of Frank's, when the children would reach Edmonton. He consented to meet them at the station and keep them in his home until he could put them on the train to Peace River. There were only two trains a week to Peace River. At Peace River they would stay with Osborne Lawrence, also an old friend of Frank's, since there was only one boat a week down the Peace. Osborne would put them on the boat; then the children would sti ll have a day and a half's wagon journey from the landing at Carcajou to Keg River; we would have a team down there to meet them. We knew it would certainly be quite an involved trip for two little children separated from their parents for the first time in their lives. Patricia was nine and John would soon be seven. We made all the plans and then we waited. One week after

145 another went by without any word from the Hagues. The news broadcasters told us practically nothing about the raids; we didn't know whether they were near where the Hagues lived. Over the radio they kept saying that very little damage was done, but we found that difficult to believe since the news coming over the uncensored American stations was much more depressing. We wished the government would hurry with their plans for evacuating children and that there wouldn't be so much red tape. We didn't know whether Pat and John would come over when the other thousands were sent or whether privately arranged evacuations were allowed. In the meantime Anne and John Robert were sorting out their toys and getting ready for their new friends to arrive. Finally in the beginning of August the children came. Our friends picked them up and looked after them along the way as planned. Osborne Lawrence met them in Peace River. Osborne always went around looking even more decrepit than Frank did, so when Osborne met them, wearing overalls, the little lady from England asked him, "Are you Mr. Lawrence?" "Yes," he said. "How do I know you are really Osborne Lawrence?" Patricia insisted, and quite rightly, on Mr. Lawrence showing his credentials before handing over her papers and possessions to him!

Patricia and John Hague at Peace River Station August I 0, 1940

I was awfully relieved when the first week was safely over and nothing terrible had happened to the two children from England. I lived in a state of terror lest they should fall into the river, off the truck, get tangled up in the tractor belt, or meet with some major accident.

146 John , Anne , John Robert, and Pat with vegetable marrows from the garden.

r had a terrible scare the day after they came. I was in the chicken house when I heard the most ear-piercing screams from the house. I beat all records in my sprint, thinking that at the very least one of them was scalded. But it was only the two from England teaching my two how to make a noise like an air-raid siren! If the sirens really sounded like that, I didn 't wonder that Pat was scared of them . Of all the blood-curdling noises I ever heard , that was the worst. The children really settled in together amazingly well, and there were practically no squabbles. I finally got Pat and John's things all unpacked and sorted out. I put away all their new clothing, to Pat's great indignation. Their mother had thought of everything they could conceivably need - sometime twice over. I was startled to discover that they had sixteen tooth-brushes between them. I asked Pat how often she cleaned her teeth, and the little monkey informed me with great glee that she had never cleaned her teeth once since she left England! I wished their mother would have sent a diet sheet along with them. I didn't want to give them anything which would upset them or which they really disliked. I thought they should drink more milk . I was throwing seven or eight gallons a day to the pigs, and the children could have all they liked. But they ate astonishing amounts of cream and butter and eggs. I wondered how many eggs they were allowed daily . Pat seemed to think that up to ten eggs

147 would be all right! At first we were a bit worried at their lack of appetite, but they certainly soon made up for it. I had to do extra baking the first week becau e they liked the wholemeal bread so much better then the white that I didn' t have a scrap left. However, Pat didn't like vegetables and salads very much and I wondered whether I should make her eat them. They both ate well, but John was much more willing to try new foods than Pat was. He tackled everything with a "Well, I'll try anything once" attitude, while she watched his face to see how he liked it before she would even taste it. There was enough to do for the children. Pat and Anne spent most of their time on horseback, and were very pleased with themselves. They rode nine miles the first day, and I thought Pat would be too stiff to move the next morning, but they were off again as soon as they had had breakfast. It was quite amusing though - when they went off to pick berries and came back with none, they said Dan, the pony, had decided to take them to the farm instead! Pat came running in one day and told me cheerfully that she had fallen off the horse and cut her head, hurt her leg, and sprained her ankle. But it all turned out to be two bruises and one scratch. She was off riding again within an hour. I realized later that I had certainly taken more of a chance than I knew when I allowed Pat to ride. She gave us the impression that she had done a lot of riding in England; when her mother wrote me that she always had her horse led, I felt quite weak, remembering how I had watched Pat and Anne come home at a dead gallop, whooping like Indians! Anne, of course, had been crazy to ride from the time she could toddle and had fallen off Dan in every possible direction by the time she was four. She knew how to hang on. John Robert, who was not quite six, thought he would make Dan gallop too, so he kicked him in the wrong spot, and Dan started to buck; the third jump sent John Robert sailing off, to land on his head! I gasped when I saw it, but there was no damage done, and we reminded him how the cowboys got thrown in the bucking contests at the Sports, so he hardly even cried. The children had a great time getting Frank's heavy stock saddle on Dan. It weighed over 40 lbs. But, beyond making sure that the cinch was tight before they went off, I let them feed, water, and saddle the horse themselves; they got a great kick out of it. Pat and Anne had to fetch the milk cows home morning and night. One day I caught Anne bringing the cow home in full gallop!

148 Pat and John were soon as brown as Anne and John Robert. Sometimes I was glad that Pat and John's mother couldn't pop in unexpectedly, for I had given up the unequal struggle to keep the children clean. I spent a strenuous hour every evening bathing the four of them, but the rest of the day they just had to wash themselves. I had thought Anne and John Robert were the two dirtiest kids on earth, but they had met their match at last. The boys got lots of fun out of playing at being trains; they scuffed their feet along in the dust, which was inches deep on all the trails after a long dry spell, and left a regular cloud of dust behind which was supposed to be smoke. They were quite a sight after that. And they also "helped" the haymakers which was a nice dirty job. But they certainly enjoyed themselves. Right from the beginning I tried to take as many snapshots of Pat and John as possible so their parents in England could see what they were doing. Frank even made a movie of the children. We and the children also wrote letters as often as the mail went out, and, of course, their parents wrote regularly. I knew they missed their children terribly, but when we heard about the raids over England, we were always so glad that the children were safe with us, particularly as the next boatload of children that left England after the one Pat and John came on, was sunk by a submarine in mid-Atlantic, and evacuation to North America stopped. It appalled me to think of the damage that was being done to children through fear. Life in the North was so good for children. There was plenty of strenuous outdoor exercise, lots of things going on all the time to interest them, plenty of the right kind of food, and eleven hours of undisturbed sleep. To Pat and John it was just a holiday; they talked all the time of the things they must remember to tell their parents when they got home after the war. But, who knew how long the war would last? We were horrified when we heard Churchill talking of what might happen in 1941 and 1942. Could it possibly last that long? At first Pat and John were quite worried that the war should be over and they might have to go home before they had some skating and skiing and toboggan rides. Unfortunately that fear seemed unfounded. In the meantime summer was drawing to an end; the birds were beginning to go south, great flocks were flying over all day, I saw some Arctic geese, and the owls began to hoot at night. The children were thrilled when they saw the Northern Lights for the first time. To us the whole war seemed as unreal as a nightmare. It just didn't seem possible; it was so quiet and lovely where we were, and the trees were a blaze of gold and scarlet along the

149 river. The spruce forest behind them looked very black and mysteri­ ous. The children just loved to go into it; the boys imagined they could ee bear tracks every few yard . My greate t concern was the children' education, however. Mi Lawrence had left and we were tuck without a chool teacher that fall. As I mentioned previou ly, there was a great hortage of teacher in Alberta becau e so many had joined the armed force . There was no other solution to the problem but to teach the four children myself. I got orrespondence School les on from the Department of Education in Edmonton and started in ; the most time I could give to teaching wa two or three hour a day, and that only when there weren't many people ill. I had to tart John Robert off from the very beginning, and that wa quite unexpectedly complicated. I carefully followed the instructions ent to me, and all the object in the kitchen were prominently labelled, WALL, DOOR, STOVE, TABLE, CHAIR, WINDOW, so that he would learn to recognize the words and pell them that way . Pat and Anne were tudying hina and Japan and eemed to think it was nece sary to it on the floor and talk pidgin Engli h. All four of them tried to eat with chop-sticks. We got a lot of fun out of it. Each child received an enorrnou et of question and in truc­ tions to do various thing . It nearly ent me up a wall when I was teaching the four of them, in three grades, because of all the cutouts and other thing they had to have. The hou e wa a hambles from morning till night with four children madly cutting pictures out of magazines. I remember one le on for which they had to make an armor. They must have been doing something about the middle age or the crusades. The curriculum contained detailed pattern on how to make suit of armor; they had to be fastened together with paper clip . It wa an enormou job to make four uits of armor out of heavy brown paper! But when the fir t batch of lesson came back, it eemed the children had done very well; Mi s Bell, the Corres­ pondence School Teacher, was plea ed with them. I often sent the returned les on on to their parent in England so that they could tell how their children were progre ing. For Christmas Mr . Harrington, the telegraph operator's wife, had all the choolchildren in the di trict come to the choolhouse to rehearse a Christma concert with them. Pat was to be Britannia in a tableau. Judging by the rehear al our children held on their

150 own in the kitchen, it promised to be quite a show. Anne and John Robert were absolutely tone deaf, and their rendering of Rule Britannia, while Pat posed, had to be heard to be believed! The concert was a great success, and the children all did very well. John Robert said his "piece" all in one breath, and fairly brought the house down; and one little Ukrainian girl said hers so fast that it could have been Polish for all that one could understand. Pat made a very dignified little Britannia, and managed to keep still , though she had been sure she would fall off her throne before it was over. The small boys' boxing was very exciting; they completely forgot that they weren't really fighting, and slammed into each other so hard that Mrs. Harrigton had to go on to the stage and stop them! Pat and John's parcels from England had come early because there was no regular mail after the beginning of October, when the boat stopped coming down the Peace, so I had hidden them until Christmas. They also included many lovely gifts for Anne and John Robert and me. Opening all these parcels at Christmas was thrilling, but otherwise Christmas was rather a washout. Keg Riverites changed the traditional greeting into, "What a Merry Chri stmas!" for a flu epidemic began Sunday before Christmas and whole households went flat with it at once. I started mine on Christmas Eve, and retired to bed Christmas day; but I didn't get much chance to stay there as they hauled me out the next day to a baby who was pretty bad. When I came back I found Anne was down with it and John Robert followed the next morning. Then Frank and Louis had it. Only Pat and John never had the slightest sign of the flu, and they were a real help. They valiantly hauled in wood, load after load, and fed chickens , laid the table, and helped wipe dishes. I don't know how we would have managed without them. But it wasn' t a bit the kind of Christmas we had expected; no parties, nobody came, none of us went anywhere, and I was frantically busy with patients. The population I was taking care of had practically doubled because of the number of Metis that had moved into the Metis Colony about twenty-five miles away from us . Sometimes I went with saddle horse and sometimes I hired someone to drive me with dogs. It was one of the worst winters for illness that there had been since I came to Keg River; it was always cheering to come home from a case and find our four children simply bubbling over with

151 energy and high spmts. I was so very thankful that Pat and John escaped the flu entirely. We had a very widespread epidemic which included almost the entire population. After that awful winter came a lovely, warm spring. The children had a marvellous time digging ditches through the snow to drain the yard. They were often wet to the neck. I had to keep two complete sets of clothing on the go for the boys, and let them wear one set while the other dried behind the stove. Then it froze quite hard several nights so they spent the weekend skating. Donald and Edwina Hague were very concerned about the children and whether they were being too much of a burden to us. I think they also wondered whether they might be getting spoilt. They need not have worried about that. In fact, sometimes I thought I might not be quite indulgent enough. But I did my best to treat all four children exactly alike. I realized soon after they came that it would do them infinite harm to treat them as visitors indefinitely, and that it would be unfair to Anne and John Robert too. Since Anne and John Robert were Canadians and farmer's children, they had to be taught from childhood their duty to the land and to the animals. Pat and John had to learn the same thing and were expected to help with the chores too. The discipline of weeding and hoeing, fetching home the cows, and carrying in the firewood, for instance, did not seem to irk them much; they all four quite enjoyed doing their chores. John especially liked working in his little garden, and Pat loved looking after the setting hens and baby chicks. In one of their letters Donald and Edwina asked about the size of our household. It was an interesting question for it varied from meal to meal , all the way from five to fifteen. Sometimes I was alone with the children; usually Frank and Louis were there too . Arthur and his young wife, Margaret, were there frequently. Then there were a varying number of hired men. Always there were people coming in off the trail , and people who just happened to arrive around meal time. Ninety percent of our guests were not invited, they just came. Freighters had an awkward way of coming in at about 2 a.m., half frozen and with the most enormous appetites. We did the same when we were on the trail. Everyone in the North did . Pat and John had the opportunity to mix with many different kinds of people. There were none of the social distinctions so prevalent in England. Our hired men ate with us at the same table, as equals; we would have had small chance of keeping them if

152 they hadn 't. People were judged differently in Canada. The ability to get out and rustle, against all odds Nature had provided to handicap a human being, counted for more than the possession of an expensive education or a large salary. It was a totally different scale of values to which the children from England were exposed. In May one of the Indians in the area made bows and arrows for the boys. It was difficult to get them to think of anything else. It was almost a waste of time to try to get them to do their lessons until they were over the thrill of trying to shoot with them. By the end of June, however, the girls had finished grade four and John was half way through grade two. They all did very well. For the following year, however, we managed to get a school teacher for Keg River. I had begun to despair in August as school was supposed to be open on September 2 and we still did not have a teacher. So, since I was elected a school trustee , I began sending out telegrams. We never would have had a teacher if someone had not introduced a little hustle into things. Unfortunately we had a blizzard just when the teacher was on his way and it took him a week to get to Keg River. He was nearly frozen to death. And so the weeks and months wore on, and the war was still not over. Louis had gone into the Air Force - the children missed him frightfully . The second Christmas came and went, and the children could still not go home. Winter turned into spring, spring into an extremely hot summer, and summer into fall once again. In the summer of 1943, the British Government was planning the return of some of the evacuees. Donald and Edwina could not wait to get thei r children home; the air raids over England had not hit them where they lived and so they asked us to get the children ready to return to England. I expected a cable at any moment to get them to New York , so I rushed to start their washing and packing, llung things into the trunk without stopping to iron or darn them . But my excitement was as nothing to Pat and John's. If I hadn't seen them enjoying themselves for the last three years, I would really have believed from their ecstasy that they had thought of nothing but getting home again. John's first word of regret, after about three hours of excitement, was, "Well , and I did want to see a grizzly bear, and now I shan't!" They also added no end to the general uproar by collecting all their toys and books in one enormous heap in the middle of the living room lloor and then rushing into opposite corners with books of Anne's and John Robert' s that they simply had to read

153 before they left. To make the confusion wilder, ome sleigh dog from the village broke 1 o e and killed five pig , and I had to ru h off t take care of a little girl wh e face had been ma hed in an accident. It wa 10:30 p.m. when r got back, and the ame sleigh dogs had returned, got into my hen house, which I had not stopped to shut before I left, and killed about twenty-five hen . Then two of my mat mity ca e came off premature( , a third had me out two night for fal e alarms, and I had half a dozen men arrive for medical exam as they had been called for ompulsory Military Training. Altogether I can' t ever remember quite uch a hectic tim . But aJI the ru h to get the children ready wa quite unneces ary. There was a great deal of red tape and nine months' of difficultie to be ironed out before they could leave. We all had to ettle down to ordinary living again. In 1944 the Mini try of War Tran port said they would take the boys back on battle hips, but the girl would have to wait. Pat uggested that she would dres as a boy so h could g too, but didn't have any idea how t deal with the problems of the pa port and e it permit. When John left in the pring of 1944 I wondered whether he would greet hi mother with, "Lay that pistol down, mate; pistol­ packing Mamma, lay that pi tol down!" It wa his favourite tune at the time. Pat left later that summer. A very lovely reminder of the years Pat and John Hague were with u , wa a letter of appreciation we received from the Queen. It read: I wish to mark, by this personal message, my gratitude for the help and kindness which you have shown to the children who crossed the sea from the United Kingdom many months ago. Since the early da s of the War, you have opened your doors to strangers and oJfered to share your home with them. In the kindness of your heart, you have accepted them as members of your own family, and I know that to thi unselfish ta k you and all your hou ehold have made many great acrifices. By your generous sympathy you have earned the true and lasting gratitude of tho e to whom ou have given this hospitality, and by your understanding you have shown how strong is the bond uniting all those who cherish the same ideals. For all this goodwill towards the children of Great Britain, I end you m warmest and mo t grateful thanks. Elizabeth R.

154 It is a beautifully illuminated letter. I suppose it must have been mass-produced in some way, but it looks hand-done, and it looks like a genuine signature. It would have been quite a task for the Queen to sign all the hundreds that must have been sent out. The Royal Arms of the Queen in brilliant colour at the top are very impressive. The framed document still hangs on my living room wall.

Dr. Jackson's House

155 Chapter 16 Tuberculosis

Tuberculo i was brought to the North American continent from urope and it seemed an especially vicious enemy of the Indian and Meti . I met thi killer immediately when I came to Canada and wa horrified at the number of people in Battle River Prairie dying of the disea e. The problem of TB wa as erious at Keg River as it had been at Battle River Prairie. The Hud on's Bay manager, Revillon ' manager, the Roman Catholic prie t (Fr. Quemeneux) and Frank and I at down one evening after upper and made a Ii t of al l those they knew of who had died of TB in the pervious ten years. They didn't realize that tuberculou meningiti in babie was al so a form of tuberculosis, but the number of deaths they knew of averaged three or more per year. That was a rate of 600/100,000, or ten times as high as the Canadian average. There had been as many a twelve deaths in a hou e. One man who wa till living in the di trict when I arrived in Keg River, came from a family of fifteen. Of the fifteen only three survived. All the rest died of TB . Of hi own dozen or more children, eight had died of this disease. It was a much more evere and rapidly progres ive form of TB than European had . It was a relatively new di ea e to the native of North America, and adults, maybe in their twenties, went down with TB of the type that I had een in children living in England. Up until 1935 there was no admission of people with Indian blood into the anatorium , and when there wa no way of isolating people that were infectiou , there wa no way of doing anything to help cure the di ease. There wa no treatment. The fundamental thing was to get the infectious case away from those that had not yet caught it, and this could not be done unle a sanatorium wa available. Since there wa none, an adult with TB leeping in a bed next to ten children huddled together on the floor, would

156 cough, and then aiming at the fireplace, spit right over them. Of course all the children got TB too. There was no way out. I did attempt to isolate one little girl, living on the Peace River at Carcajou. I put her in a tent and tried to keep her there. At least there would not be quite such a concentrated fog of germs in the tent, and she could not cough over the rest of the family . She died anyway, but the other children did not catch it. TB is quite viciously infectious. One girl who hadn' t been X-rayed when the Travelling Clinic came north, got influenza which lit up her TB. She infected ten people in the adjacent three houses. In one of the houses she had slept in bed with the woman for one night only; she stayed there for the night since her mother and father had gone to the hospital in Manning to see their grandson who was dying of Leukemia. The husband of the woman with whom she was staying was on the trap line, so the two slept together. Six weeks later that woman was down with TB. Alberta got its first Social Credit government in 1935 and shortly after that Melis were admitted into the sanatorium. Now at last it was possile to remove the source of infection from the community and the patients could be put into the hospital where there was at least the prospect that they might recover. Until then they had had no chance. They had to die. This was, of course, before there were any drugs for TB. All that anybody could do was put the patients to bed, feed them well, give them cod liver oil and let them have lots of fresh air. Some of them got better. Once TB patients could be removed from their community there was a sporting chance that the others in the family and in the neighbourhood would grow up without being coughed over by someone with open TB . Even after a sanatorium was available, however, there was still the problem of persuading patients to go, and to keep them there . I had one child in the sanatorium whose father heard, from a friend who was also in the sanatorium, that the child was very well. He had been very hostile about letting the child go to the sanatorium in the first place, and now when he heard that the child was all right, he could not see why they were keeping him there. He sold his milk cow to get down to Edmonton and get his child. It was quite a trip for a Metis trapper who had never been out of the North; it took a lot of courage to brave the traffic in the big city and to go and take his child out of that hospital . He

157 felt the doctors had no right to keep a child there that wa n't sick anymore. He brought the child back, and of course his TB flared up again . Hi s baby sister caught it and died of TB meningitis, and a brother al o caught it. The child was going downhill badly when we finally got him back to the sanatorium. He had another three years there and then came back and subsequently died. I especially remember, with great respect, one woman who had TB and whom I wanted to send to the sanatorium. She said, "I can't go yet; I can't go until the geese have gone south - I must see them fly once again." The Indian attitude to the birds, the animals, the trees , and the land was different from that of the white people. The last active TB we had around Keg River was much , much later. It was an especially interesting case. The girl came from Fort Smith in the Northwest Territories. She was a Treaty Indian, and some of her relatives in Keg River had invited her to come to babysit for their children so that they could get away for a while. She was still of school age, so she could go to school with their children and come home with them at night. The parents thought it would work out well. The school principal took a very dim view of her presence in the school because she came with no transfer papers from Fort Smith. She said he was in grade eight, but she appeared to be completely unable to do grade eight work. He got very frustrated trying to find out where she fitted into the school grading system. While the principal was still in the process of trying to get a transfer from her school, one day the house where she was staying burned down. The children had apparently been playing in the bedroom with matches while the baby itter was in the living room. That settled the babysitting service. The girl then came to live with another family in the district, and they brought her to me becau e she had a fever and a very bad chest. She had what appeared to be influenza and possibly pneumonia. However the chest wasn't right for that either. I asked her if she had ever had a tuberculin test, and she didn't think she had. But she had two brothers and a sister in the sanatorium so I thought someone surely must have been tuberculin testing this child every few months. But I tuberculin tested her anyway just as a routine and got the most enormous reaction! It was just as if I had burned

158 her with a live coal in the middle of her arm. With that, plus an X-ray that I did, and the suspicious-sounding chest, I was quite sure it was TB. Unfortunately I could not send her to the sanatorium because there was nobody in Keg River who could sign for her. She was a dependent child and she did not have any close relatives in the area. If she had been an orphan she would have had a legal guardian somewhere. If not, being a Treaty Indian, the Indian Agent could have taken the responsibility. But since she was a child of parents living in Forth Smith I had to send her back there so she could be transferred to Edmonton. Finally, after months, I received the report via the Health Unit that the girl had open, active TB! We were indeed very fortunate that she had not been in school for more than a few days, and that she had not lived with the second family very long. I tuberculin tested all her contacts and X-rayed them all, but apparently nobody had been infected by her. We were lucky we didn't have a bad epidemic. Potentially, TB is just as dangerous as it ever was, in fact more so because we are now crowding children together in consoli­ dated shoots who would normally live forty or sixty miles apart. But things have changed dramatically. In those early days the death rate from TB in Metis or Indian cases was over 95 percent. After 1948 there were no deaths from TB in Keg River, and no deaths from TB meningitis since 1943. A number of factors were responsible. The provision of sanatorium beds for Metis cases was a tremendous help; routine tuberculin testing of school children, X-raying of new positives, contacts, and ex-sanatorium cases helped me spot the TB patient at a much earlier stage; the return of arrested cases from the sanitarium encouraged the Metis to regard TB as a curable disease instead of a death sentence; and then in about I 955 when freeze-dried BCG vaccine became available, we started with a BCG program. This was just at the time that the Keg River area was taken into the Peace River Health Unit, so their nurses were able to do all the work, as well as all the other immunization programs that I had been doing. We BCG'd all the children in the area for ten years, and none of them caught TB . But all these important steps toward eradicating TB would have been useless without a program of education to make the native people willing to accept help. They had no idea why a person would suddenly start to cough and cough, and cough and cough, and get thinner and thinner, have fever, and finally start

159 coughing up blood and die. They had absolutely no idea at all of germs. Sickness was something that struck without rhyme or reason. It was very difficult to explain to them that TB was spread from person to person or that there are such things as minute creatures that are too small to see. How could they understand that the TB germs were actually in little drops they coughed out and were dropped on the baby's face and then caused the baby to get the sickness. It was hard to make them understand because communication was so difficult. There were a few who could understand English well and so I tried to talk to them and hoped that the information would spread. There was no way of setting out to teach them. I just had to give the idea to people who could understand me . We did have a vigorous education campaign about tuberculosis in the school. For instance, one year the school children came to me for information regarding the number of deaths. Then they made graphs, using crosses to indicate the deaths each year. I remember how thrilled I was one day. A child was brought in who was badly burned. As I put on a mask and gown and gloves, I said to the teen-age sister who was there holding the child, "Why am I putting this mask on my face?" She said, "So you won't blow germs on that bum." I thought, if I haven 't done anything else but teach these people to think in terms of germs, then all this has been well worth while. At last it made sense to them. They could see why TB could spread from one house to another, from one child to another; they could understand why it was worth trying to islolate the sick from the well. They could also see the wisdom in preventing a child with impetigo from playing with children who didn't have it; the value in cleaning up with soap and water, and even washing the basin with Lysol every once in a while when there was a lot of skin infection around. It takes a long time to get an idea across - it takes years and years. But the idea and the knowledge about germs finally did spread. The people in my district turned up one hundred percent to have their babies vaccinated and inoculated against diptheria, whooping cough, and smallpox. In 1948 we still had five deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis in less than a year and this from a population which numbered about five hundred altogether. Such an astronomical death rate was

160 extremely discourag ing , but the great breakthrough in the treatment of tuberculosis came with the development first of streptomycin , and then of izoniazid . They made sanatoriums almost obsolete within the next ten years, and most early cases of tubercul osis could be safely treated at home with pills. It is too bad that the sanatoriums rapidly fill ed with cases of cancer of the lung due to smoking.

16 1 Chapter 17 Doctoring in the Bush

General practice is never boring - one can never guess what a day may bring in the way of sudden or unusual complaints; but always, until we had a gravelled highway in 1949, a major com­ plication was transportation to hospital. The early bu h pilots flew many mercy flight in the North, without airports, weather stations or radio; but often the weather made flying impossible, and that seemed to be the time when emergencies would happen. In 1933, oon after I returned from England with my baby daughter Anne and my friend Mac Cros en, Nellie Fedorchuk arrived with her baby, who was obviously in shock. She lay pale and limp, but every few minutes she would scream out with obviou colicky pain, then lie still again. I thought I could feel the ausage­ shaped swelling, so I was sure this was an intussusception. Intus­ susception is one of the acute surgical emergencies that can occur suddenly, out of the blue, in healthy babies and small children. It is due to part of the gut telescoping into a lower part of the gut, and unless it can be reduced the child will die. I got Frank to go over to the telegraph office to send a message to Dr. Bow, the Deputy Minister of Health, in Edmonton, that I needed a plane, right away, to get a six-month-old baby with an intussusception out to hospital. About an hour later the reply came that there wa no plane available to land on Keg River Prairie; they were all on pontoon . He told me to do the be t I could for the child myself. So we had to operate on the baby at my house. We put her on top of the old Singer ewing machine, because she would have been lost on our big kitchen table; we shouldn' t have been able to get around her. Frank gave the anaesthetic and I did the surgery with the aid of Mac Cro en . I couldn't help feeling that the chance were slim for this badly hocked baby, given an anae thetic by an amateur anaesthetist, operated on by an amateur surgeon, assisted

162 by somebody who had never even seen an operation before. The situation was aggravated by the fact that I didn't have as much surgical equipment as I'd had when I was Provincial District Doctor in Battle River. I remember we made retractors out of my best silver spoons; they were never quite the same afterwards. When I reduced the intussusception I discovered that the appendix, which had been in the intussusception, looked ominously red, so I removed that too, though it increased the length of the operation. I made up a bed for Nellie and a cot for the baby in my living room so that Nellie could look after the baby and breast-feed her once she was fully recovered from the anaesthetic. Nellie was frantic with worry; she kept coming into the kitchen, saying over and over again , "Mrs. Doctor, my baby not die, my baby not die?" I was very worried about the baby myself. I wasn't at all sure that she wouldn't die , though by the second day she was beginning to take fluids fairly well. Suddenly Nellie came into the kitchen beaming with pleasure, and said, "Mrs. Doctor, my baby all right now, eat plum pudding." It had simply never occurred to me that food I was giving Nellie might be tried on the baby! If ever a child should have died it was this one, but she survived. She is a grandmother now. There was another case of intussusception, in 1943 , in a healthy little girl seventeen months old. She had wakened at six in the morning, screaming with pain and vomiting. She kept getting attacks of colicky pain, and then passed a little blood. By the time the mother got to me, the child was pale and limp. Her mother said that when she had been rubbing the baby's stomach, in an effort to ease the colic, it had seemed to her that the left side felt empty. I couldn't feel anything till I did a rectal examination, and found the tip of the intussusception just inside the anus. It was visible as the baby strained when I withdrew my finger. Heavy fall rains had made the ground much too soft for a plane to land, so the alternatives were either a thirty-six-hour journey to the hospital, carried on a saddle horse, or operation by me, single handed. I decided I would try the old method of reducing the intussusception by inflating with air, despite the fact that my textbook of children's diseases said that it was unsatisfactory and had only been used in the old days because of the high mortality of abdominal surgery in infants, and that nowadays the treatment

163 was immediate operation by a competent surgeon. I got Eva Harrington, the telegraph operator's wife, to come over and help me. I started the anaesthetic, and then got her to carry on while I introduced a catheter alongside the intussu ception, attached it to the bellows of a Junker's inhaler, and pumped very gently. After keeping the pressure steady for a minute or two there was a clearly audible "plop" and no further resistance to inflation. In a few minute the baby passed a little blood-stained mucus, and then a large normal bowel movement. Her recovery from shock was dramatic; within half an hour she appeared perfectly normal. In 1946 there was another one, in a very husky little boy fifteen months old. This time it was a snowstorm that made it impossible to get the child to hospital by air. So I tried inflation again, just as successfully as before. In a few hours he was sitting up and playing. His stool contained ome paper, though I don't know if this had anything to do with the intu susception. I wrote these two cases up in a letter to the British Medical Journal, because it seemed to me that this method could always be tried while preparing for surgery; if it didn't work there was no time lost, no damage done. I had several most interesting letters afterwards from doctors in outlying places in Australia and Africa who had also tried this method successfully. The chief reason these three children survived, I think, was that they were all seen soon after the onset of the illness, even though the second one had to be brought nearly forty miles in a wagon, over a rough trail. I don't know whether intussusception is as common nowadays, but in my subsequent thirty years here I never saw another case. There was another sudden illness in an apparently healthy two-year-old Metis child at Paddle Prairie. It was so acute that he collapsed and died while his father was getting the dog team harnessed to bring him over to my place. They came over with the body anyway. There was a blotchy red rash developing but otherwise the body looked normal and well-cared for. I wondered if it could be a case of haemorrhagic measles or possible strychnine poisoning; the baby's father was a trapper, and in those days most trappers kept strychnine for poisoning wolves. The father gave me permission to do an autopsy, though not to open the skull. I found that the suprarenal glands were just bags of blood clots, so the obvious diagnosis was Waterhouse-Fridericksen syndrome. This condition is usually due to a fulminating meningococ­ cal infection, but the interesting thing was that there had been no

164 recent cases of meningitis in the area. This family lived in one of a group of four houses, twenty-five miles from Keg River. There had been no illness whatever in the same household, nor in the three houses nearby; there had been no visitors during the previous month; and with the temperature at 40 below zero there wasn't any possibility of a mosquito-borne infection. The mystery was how the child could have caught so devastating an infection without any of his contacts having any illness before or afterwards. Several years later I saw another very similar case, also dead before they reached Keg River, but they had nearly a hundred miles to come. Again there was no meningitis in the di strict. Another apparently healthy baby caused me some excitement. He had been born in hospital in the Northwest Territories. His father was a Fort Vermilion man, but when the mother went off and left them he brought the six-month-old baby to his sister at Paddle Prairie, knowing that she would be delighted to adopt him since all her children were girls. She brought him over for a check-up, and as I passed my fingers over his head to feel the fontanelle the skull crackled! Then I discovered a scar along his head. After tracking down the hospital records I found that he had been born with a skull that was abnormally fused, that he had been sent out to Edmonton for a linear craniectomy, and that plastic had been inserted to keep the bone from growing together again. The surgeon was pleased to find out where the baby had got to , as he wanted regular follow-up and measurements of his skull. The plastic gave the child no problems and his brain developed normally. I've always been interested in thyroid diseases because I de­ veloped a goiter myself when I was a teenager. Goiter was common in England at that time; it was known as the " Derbyshire Neck." The Canadian doctor who did my medical when I was applying to come to Canada strongly advised me against coming because goiter was so prevalent in western Canada. When I came to Keg River I found that all the women had goiters, varying from the size of a small tangerine orange to a swelling so large, in one woman, that she couldn't see over it to tie her moccasins; it was nearly as big as her head. Frank had noticed that sometimes sleigh dogs and calves had goiters, and some of the sows had litters of hairless little pigs, which is also due to iodine deficiency. It was just about this time that iodized salt was coming onto the market, and I persuaded Frank and also the Hudsons Bay Co. 's manager that they should not ship any salt that wasn't iodized. Frank also shipped in iodized cattle salt.

165 I obtained a supply of little iodized chocolates from the Alberta Government, to be supplied free to all chidlren. It was surprising how rapidly the goiters vanished in the teenage girls, and no new ones developed. Despite all the goiters I saw only three cases of myxedema, which is due to a failure of the thyroid gland to make enough hormone. They were all women, and all did well on thyroid tablets. One Mennonite woman was a particularly severe case, and made me realize why the medical textbooks said the voice sounded like a croaking frog. I guessed the diagnosis before I ever saw the patient: I heard her talking in the waiting room. She was a woman who had had a beautiful singing voice and had sung in the choir before her voice had become this harsh croaking sound, and her skin had become coarse and cold and dry. There had only been one cretin in the district in fifty years. Cretinism is the failure of the thyroid gland to develop in the baby. Untreated it results in a severely mentally retarded dwarf. On treatment with synthetic thyroid hormone the child did very well, but it was amazing how incredibly sensitive she was to exactly the right dose; it had to be right to the nearest hundredth of a milligram. Luckily she had a very intelligent and observant mother, who saw that she never missed a dose and came regularly for check-ups. The only near disaster was when she had developed into a mischiev­ ous three-year-old and took half a bottleful of her tablets. Mercifully it happened when they were in the city for a check-up and she was close to the hospital . One young Mennonite woman who had cancer of her thyroid gland was not my patient. She had been out to Edmonton and had had her thyroid surgically removed. When she was ready for the twenty-hour-long journey back to La Crete, Wayne Wright, of Fort Vermilion, who was in the city, offered her a ride in his little plane to Fort Vermilion. When they were north of Peace River, Wayne realized that the girl was becoming desperately ill; he didn't know if she would live till he reached the Fort. He knew there was a doctor at Keg River, so he landed on the road near a farm where there was a truck and got the farmer to drive them to my house. As they carried her into my living room it was obvious that she had severe tetany; she couldn't speak, and her arms and legs were twisted in agonizing cramps. I ran calcium gluconate into her, intravenously, and within a short time the cramps relaxed and she was able to speak. Wayne was quite astonished that I had the treatment right

166 there in my bag, but I always carried calcium gluconate with me because it was the treatment for milk fever in milk cows! The girl's tetany was due to having had the parathyroid glands removed at the same time as the thyroid, so that her blood calcium was too low. Milk fever, so called, in milk cows, is also due to the blood calcium dropping too low, after calving, when the milk comes in; the cow is likely to die if untreated, but recovers quite quickly if given calcium - in fact I had one milk cow who got up and nearly kicked me before I'd finished giving it. Since people are doing so much travel! ing now, I think most doctors are getting wise to the importance of asking all patients if they have ever been out of Canada. But when John Schellenberg, a young Mennonite farmer from La Crete, came in complaining of a chronic sore throat that hadn' t improved with penicillin or sulfa drugs, I did not ask him that important question. It didn't look like any sore throat I had ever seen. The soft palate was indurated, lumpy, and fissured. Some of the cervical glands were hard. It looked like a malignancy, however unlikely that seemed in a young man of twenty-four. I sent him down to the Cancer Clinic. The experts were mystified too. John told me he had been seen by every Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist in Edmonton. Finally the diagnosis given was midline granuloma, and he was given radiotherapy. His throat seemed to improve a little at first , but then the disease continued its steady spread to the root of the tongue. He was given a long course of cyclophosphamide. We thought he improved a little but then the disease went on and destroyed the uvula. He was having great difficulty in swallowing fluids with them coming through his nose, and his voice had become very nasal . He continued to work on his farm and as a graderman on the highway, though he had to make frequent trips to the Cancer Clinic. About eighteen months after I first saw him , he made a trip to Winnipeg to visit some of his relatives. There he discovered that when they had come to Winnipeg from Paraguay in 1949, his mother and sister had been suffering from Brazilian leishmanniasis. That was the clue to the puzzle. John, nearly twenty years later, was suffering from muco-cutaneous leishmanniasis ! Treatment for a few weeks with intravenous antimony produced immediate im­ provement. His throat healed, though of course with extensive tissue loss and scarring.

167 Even if, when I first saw him , I had asked him if he had ever been out of Canada, and if so, where and when, I doubt if I should have thought of the possibility of a tropical disease taking twenty years to show up. Finally, there is another unusual case I would like to mention. Nellie Fedorchuck, the mother who fed her baby plum pudding to see whether it was recovering from intussusception, a few years later became ill herself. She got severe headaches and was beginning to have tunnel vision only. I sent her to Edmonton to a specialist, suggesing that it might be a tumor. She was X-rayed, and she came back with a diagnosis of a tumor in the pituitary gland. There was no treatment in those days; they could not do anything for it, and had told her that she would become blind. Nellie decided that while she still had enough vision, she was going to embroider an altar cloth for the little Catholic Church at Keg River. She embroidered a most beautiful, beautiful cloth. It really lit up the little white-washed log church. And after she had finally finished embroidering the cloth, her vision improved. She didn't become blind, and she lived many years after that. There was no medical explanation why she didn't lose her vision and why she did not die finally because of the tumor. She had had no treatment.

168 Chapter 18 "I Heard the Foxes Talking"

In September 1950 a monstrous forest fire - one of the largest ever in North America - swept in from British Columbia. We were able to see the smoke from our house for more than two months. Before the fire reached Keg River, the smoke had been very thick for days, and we had no way of knowing where the fire was. The sun in the daytime was a dark red ball that gave little light, and at night the whole southwest and western horizons glowed red. A neighbour, Larone Ferguson, was out hunting along the Chinchaga River the day that the fire roared in . It came so fast that he knew he couldn't keep ahead of it, so he went down into the river. He tried to get hi s horse into the river with him, but couldn't pull him down. Larone lay in the water with only his face out above the surface; he just lost his eyebrows and a bit of his hair, but his horse was gone. We were all frantically fighting the fire - plowing fireguards and doing what we could to save our houses and crops. Our sawmill , logs, and 15,000 feet of lumber were totally destroyed. Our house wasn't burnt; we happened to be almost surrounded by plowed fields ; but we had to keep watch around the buildings and barns to see that embers didn't set the grass or the roofs on fire. The house was full of smoke; we had to keep the windows open to get some air for there seemed to be so little oxygen in it. Ashes covered everything; floors and furniture were all gray. The smoke from the great fire changed the colour of the moon in England; many people spoke of it when I visited there in 1952. Peter J. Murphy, Associate Dean of the Forestry Division of the University of Alberta, wrote me recently that the tremendous quantity of smoke generated by this fire became trapped between two inversion layers so it did not disperse but drifted northeasterly over Nova Scotia, th en easterly over the Atlantic to Britain and Holland and finally dissipated over Germany. The Readers Digest

169 referred to this event as one of the occasions on which the moon turned blue as a result of atmospheric pollution. The fire destroyed enormous numbers of animals. Our neigh­ bour, Dave MacDonald, flew over the burned out area that fall and took some pictures. It was horrifying to ee the number of moose carcasses. Many animals, however, running ahead of the fire , crowded into areas that did not bum and o were saved. When rabies, which wa endemic in the Northwe t Territorie , came southward and reached the north Peace River country in 1952, it began to spread faster because of the great density of the wild animal population. We were still quite unaware of the impending danger of a rabies epidemic when Ors. Julius and Hanna Kratz came to see me. They were German doctors who were practicing in Fort Ver­ milion, about a hundred and twenty miles northeast of Keg River. After they had escaped Hitler and gone to Israel, there was an epidemic of rabies in that country and so they certainly knew what a rabid animal looked like. They actually made their own rabies vaccine, according to Pasteur's classical directions, to cope with person bitten by rabid animals. So, having recently come to Canada and settled in Fort Vermilion, there was no question about it in their minds that some of the animals they saw were rabid. Julius and Hanna Kratz didn't talk very good English at that time. They wrote to Edmonton, they wrote to Ottawa, they wrote to anyone they could think of, that there was rabies in the Fort Vermilion area, but nobody would pay any attention to them and nobody would do anything. Everybody thought these crazy Germans didn't know what they were talking about. So finally they came over to my house to tell me about rabies; they knew that I should be seeing rabies and that I would probably not recognize it. And they also thought that I might make omeone sit up and listen since they had failed so completely. At that time we had a number of Metis harvesters working on the farm. While we were sitting at the dining-table, talking of what Dr. Kratz had said, Octave Ducharme said to Frank, "That sickness in the animals is here already. I heard the foxes talking across the river and there is something the matter with them." Sure enough, he wa right. Rabies was in Keg River. In a matter of weeks it was everywhere. I never understood why, of all the diseases - diptheria, typhoid , smallpox, and other dramatic and serious diseases there were in those days - Pasteur chose rabies to work on. I didn' t understand

170 until l saw rabies. After I had once seen rabies, I could quite understand why this would be the disease on which to start. I immediately began demanding the vaccination of dogs and cats, and urging the authorities to try to prevent the spread of rabies. Finally the Department of Agriculture started a poisoning campaign against predators. Five or six men distributed poison bait, moving north along the Mackenzie Hi ghway and on either side of the Peace River. The object was to establish a barrier against the southward spread of rabies by foxes and wolves and coyotes, migrating south in search of food since there were few rabbits in the far North that year. The only way to stop the dreaded disease seemed to be to poison the wild animals, who were infecting the already heavy concentration of wild animals left by the fire. It was impossible, of course, to vaccinate them. But the poisoning efforts were too little and too late. What could six men do in an area as large as Great Britain! Relentlessly , rabies was moving south. Soon everybody had a rabies story to tell. Our dog. old Shep, died of rabies. We never even thought of it and couldn't understand why he didn' t come around for days. We found him curled up, dead, and realized he must have had dumb rabies. When an animal is infected by a bite from a rabid animal the vi rus spreads up the nerves to the brain, which then ceases to function normally. Some animals become paralyzed and unconscious and die. This is the "dumb rabies ," and mercifully is the kind that affects the majority; but about 20 percent of infected animals will develop "furious rabies," and these are the dangerous ones, since they will run for days biting at everything that moves; their bites spread the infection, and the more animals they come in contact with while running rabid, the faster the disease will spread. Rabid foxes were trying to get into the houses. People's cats went rabid. One woman had a rabid cat latch on to her dust mop as she shook it; she just had time to throw the mop out and shut the door. One man was doing the chores one day when he noticed there was something wrong with his horse. He had a couple of pails in hi s hands. As he was going to the house, the horse took after him . He threw the pails at its head in order to stop it, but he never made it to the house. There was a big woodpile in the yard, and he scrambled up it. He had rubber boots on, and the horse grabbed one of these rubber boots. They were loose so the horse pulled it off his foot; otherwise the horse might have pulled him down and

171 torn him to death. He called to hi wife to bring the rifle and shouted, "Keep that door hut!" She said, "How are you going to get the rifle?" "Well, shoot the hor e," he said. So she shot it. Some children were liding down the straw tack on the snow and uddenly aw a fox ga ping it last in the pasture. The one little boy tried to call the rabid fox into the house, "Here kitty, kitty!" He thought it wa such a pretty animal and o tame! Fortunately the fox was too far gone to bite the child, but there was always the danger of rabid animal biting the children. Adult all carried stout clubs whenever they went out ide, even just across the yard. The teen-age on of Raymer Ro , the Hud on Bay manager, had a saddle pony. One morning the pony wouldn't get up, and the boy was trying to pull it to its feet when the horse' teeth took ome kin off hi knuckle . Of cour e the animal was rabid. We did get that head out to the lab and it was a proven ca e. One day I was called to the Michalchuks. They had a sturdy sensible little hor e that pulled the children to chool every day - he wa the children's deare t friend. When the ten-year-old boy went to harness him to go to school one morning, he couldn't get the bridle on. He went back to the house to tell his mother that the hor e was mad at him and kept putting hi ears back. Annie Michalchuk went out to the barn, wiped the long icicle from the horse' face (it wa 40 below) and tried to move him . Not until the horse kept falling down did it dawn on her that he probably '

The five Michalchuk children drove to chool in a little caboose until the horse died of rabies.

172 had rabies! By the infinite mercy of God she had been wearing stout leather pull-over mitts when she had wiped his face off. The horse was dead the next morning. That left five children with no way to get to school, but mercifully no one got rabies.

Pony with furious rabies 1953

Pawlowich's milk cow dying of dumb rabies 1953.

173 ick Tomilo, a Ru ian who Ii ed north of us, had a very bad outbreak of rabies in hi stock - almost the worst of anyone in Keg River. The first of his animal to go rabid wa a big three-year-old bla k teer. It wa a really beautiful, enormou animal. He couldn't bear to hoot it himself. He wa a bachelor and all of his animals were his friend . He a ked Harry Bowe, our neighbour, to hoot the teer for him. Harry picked me up to go and ee it a well. At that tirn there wa ome que tion a to whether the government would reimbur e the owner to a certain extent for the lo ses from rabies. We thought the g vernment hould, e pecially ince they had not made the least effort to pr tect the farmers from rabie oming in from the north, and had taken no notice of the ix-month ' warning. So I saw a Jot of the animal that had rabie ; people figured that if I vouched for it that the animal had had rabie they might get ome compen ati n - they would have me a a witne . We drove to Nick's farm in the truck. When you drive down a road at night and the light hit the animal' eyes, the eye light up. That i a normal refle , but the animal with rabies ha e tremely dilated pupils o that when the truck headlight hone on this big steer, his eyes glowed absolutely a brilliant red. They looked huge. And the animal, of cour e, could not wallow it aliva. It was winter and ery cold, o the t er had great long white icicle of saliva hanging down from his m uth . And he kept bellowing and bell wing. It was a horrifying ight. You never realize how ane an animal I k until you ee one that i in ane. It i a picture 1 shall always e . Harry h t him. Three time into hi head. And the thing didn 't die -. It was lucky that the corral had uch a trong fence; a weak one would never have withstood such a powerful animal. Nick had hi weaning pig penned up in a barn with a divided door; the bottom half wa closed. A rabid fox jumped over the half d or, in among t the little pig , napping at them. Nick ran to the kitchen t get hi rifle, but by the time he came back to kill the fox, about twenty-five of hi little pig had been bitten or got cratches on them. They proved to be a good check on the incubation period, becau e Nick knew when they were bitten and could watch th m. The pig went rabid about ten day later. And then Nick's other cattle got it. Hi cows were out in the field. Of cour e n body knew whether the animal were incubating rabie r not becau e none of Nick' animal , for in tance, had any evere bite . Nick, who talked t them, fed and wat red them

174 every day, would certainly have noticed it if there had been any blood on them, and there wasn 't. But when he cleared the bottom of his old bundle stack where a lot of his cattle had died, there were thousands of dead mice in the bottom. In all probability this was a little local epidemic of rabid mice that bit his cattle and caused so many to die. Almost everyone in the community had some experience with rabies . Until the epidemic we did not know that mice could have rabies, but we had one mouse go rabid right in our own hallway. We had a dozen men sitting around the dining table - it was harvest time - suddenly there was a little mouse right in front of us , standing on its hind legs, twirling around and squeaking. Frank spoilt the evidence by smashing it with his fist. It was one way of killing a rabid mouse, but unfortunately it didn' t leave any brain for testing, I would have liked to send it out to the lab to prove that mice had rabies; no mouse every behaved like some of them were behaving. I saw a couple of people who were bitten by rabid mice while they were sleeping. One dear old woman was bitten on the face. She showed me the sharp tooth marks on her cheek and said, "Sure wasn't bitten by a bedbug, was I?" The trouble was , the health authorities did not want anybody to be panicked by rabies. They would not admit how wide-spread and how dangerous a disease it was; neither would they admit that the farmers were suffering very severe losses from rabies. In order to prove that an animal had died of rabies its brain had to be found positive at the lab, and it was most difficult to get this proof. The brain deteriorates very rapidly after death , and the Negri bodies can't be found if the brain has gone too soft, too liquid. You had to get the head off the animal - and it is not without risk to handle a recently dead rabid animal. Then the head has to be packed in ice and salt and sawdust in some kind of container and sent off to the veterinary lab. Often by the time it arrived, it was impossible to use. There was only one veterinary lab in Alberta, in Lethbridge, and the technicians there didn't have time to look at even ten percent of the animals involved. They were prepared to do all they could to tell you whether the animal that had bitten had rabies or not if there was a human life at stake, but, if it was just a question of whether a farm animal had died of rabies or not, they just did not have time to process it. That was very sensible and logical.

175 No technician can do more than a certain amount of work, and you can't train a person in half an hour or so to do a staining, or to look for Negri bodies. It takes a long time to learn to see through a microscope. We were therefore asked not to send out any animal head unless there was a particular reason to know whether it had rabies. But since this made it impossible to get proof that an animal had died of rabies, the authorities could say with all truthfulness, and did in the paper, that there had only been twenty proven cases of rabies in the North Peace Country. It made us so mad because this was deliberately misleading the population. We lost over a thousand head of domestic stock - not twenty. Frank and I spent most of our letter-writing time concocting indignant letters to our Provincial M.L.A. 's and Dominion M .P. 's and the Canadian Cat­ tlemen magazine on the subject. We felt the government should pay for the losses from rabies because it was the government foxes that brought it in, but when there were only twenty proven cases, they would have only had to pay for twenty; actually they never paid any compensation at all. We had a steady flow of vets coming into our area. The government authorities wanted them to see rabies for one thing, and they wanted them to vaccinate the dogs, but the trouble was they mostly came through at the wrong time - when the trappers were in the bush. Frank and I vaccinated most of the sleigh dogs. We put on a three-ringed circus in our yard with some of them! Dogs don't like to have a needle stuck into them - not one bit! And a sleigh dog doesn't hesitate to say so. So Frank would wind a strap around the dog's mouth in an attempt to control it while I stuck a needle in it, and then let it go before it was as dangerous as a rabid animal. It was in the days before the ski-do, and all the trappers had dog-teams, so we had to vaccinate them for the protection of the people if nothing else. The danger would have been terrible if a dog had gone rabid in the village. Rabies is a fatal disease. Rather illogically, we say that if anybody recovers, it wasn't rabies. But thirty years ago when rabies was treated with vaccine, the patient might, as a side effect of the vaccine, get a fatal or near fatal brain condition. Vaccine itself had a death rate , of about one in a thousand. Unless it was certain that the biting animal was rabid, the patient was possibly more endangered by the treatment than he was endangered by the bite. Even if the animal was rabid the risk of developing rabies depended

176 on where the bite was, how quickly it was washed out thoroughly. Bites on the face or hands, where there are a tremendous number of nerves, are very much more dangerous than if the person is bitten, for instance, on the back of the leg . The deeper the bite is the more difficult it is to clean out any saliva that is in it , and the more likely it is that if the animal was rabid. the person will be infected. Risks had to be taken. Where it was possible to get the head of the animal out to the lab the technician sectioned the brain and looked for Negri bodies. ff they saw Negri bodies, the animal was rabid, and they then phoned back to the doctor. After that the vaccination could be started since it was absolutely necessary. But if the animal ran away, or if someone blew it to pieces with a shot through the head, there was no way of proving that the animal had rabies . In that case there was the possibility of fighting an enemy that wasn't even there . It is a tricky situation. Whatever the doctor does is liable to be wrong in medicine sometimes, but this was one of the most agonizing decisions to make because so often the animal was lost. The vaccine was no joke. Fourteen shots were given in fourteen days. There was nothing much to the first one or two, but with each successive dose the patients reacted more and more violently, and by the time they got to the end of the fourteen shots they were getting bigger and bigger reactions; they were really sick and sore, but, of course, rabies meant death. So, Johnny Vos, my nice brand-new son-in-law , was the first human being that I vaccinated! Here was the classical case: whenever a doctor is trying to decide whether to use a dangerous drug or not, or a dangerous treatment, he or she is supposed to say, "Would I do this if this was my father or mother or wife or child? Would I use it or wouldn't I?" If the answer is yes, it is all right. If it isn ' t, the drug should not be used. You must not expose anybody to any greater risk than you would consider justifiable for your own family . Johnny and Anne had been married less than six months and were looking after a neighbour's farm and stock. One day one of the heifers could not eat properly, so Johnny put his hand into the animal's mouth to feel whether it had bits of rose bush stuck there that would prevent it from eating properly. He didn't know it, but the animal was developing rabies. Johnny had all kinds of bits of skin knocked off his knuckles different times. What farmer hasn't? And some of them were quite

177 fresh. Heaven know there wa no que tion that his hand were contaminated with the aliva while he wa feeling around the animal' tongue and throat. It was at least a day after he put his hand in the cow' mouth before they came to get me to ee the cow. It wa an ab olutely typical ca e of rabie , and the cow died oon afterwards. During mo t of the rabie epidemic I kept rabie vaccine in my offic becau e we had only once-a-week mail ervice in tho e days, and so I made my deci ion and tarted vaccinating Johnny at once. It didn't make him very sick at first. He used to drive to our place every day in a pick-up, but when it turned very cold he had to walk the fourteen mile to get the sh t . He did not have any after-effect . By February 1953 rabie was appearing in coyotes a far south a Edm nton and a larger poi oning campaign wa begun. Finally the epid mic began to die down. But in 1954, ju t when control seemed a real possibility, to the horrified astonishment of all of us who had experienced the epidemic, the poi oning campaign wa topped. Government official till did not take the matter eriou ly enough. The next year rabie wa again raging thr ugh the North. Now, finally, the Federal Government was disturbed. Dr. E. Gariepy, Veterinarian of the Office of the Health of Animal of the Federal Department of Agriculture a ked us to get up off our seat and begin to take notice of the horrible threat which wa growing stronger every day! If it had not been o eriou one would have been tempted to laugh . I as ured Dr. Gariepy that the farmer in the area had taken considerable notice of the "horrible threat which grew tronger every day." It had left me of them ruined . They had written letter and petition to the M.P. and M.L.A., to the new paper and magazine , begging for a more trenuou effort to deal with the problem. They had , to the best of their ability, and with whatever weapon they had available, fought back when they or their tock were attacked by rabid animals, but the coy te that needed destruction did not re ide on the farm - they were in the bush. The poisoning campaign went into high gear again. Alberta introduced the large t rabie contr 1 program ever undertaken on the continent. Because of the cope of the epidemic, it wa possible to introduce new large-scale method which had never before been attempted in rabie control. One new method wa thee tabli hment of more than five thousand miles of trap line to provide ettlement

178 protection where the forest and agricultural areas met. Professional trappers under the direction of the Forestry Branch, Department of Lands and Forests, manned these trap lines, keeping the disease greatly reduced through trapping, snaring and poisoning overpopulated wildlife wherever possible. The new techniques became valuable contributions to the field of veterinary and public health research. Officials from eastern Canada, the United States, and overseas countries requested full details on Alberta's program for possible use to solve their own rabies problem. The number of wild animals killed in the North was shocking. Hundreds of thousands died of rabies, thousands died of poisoning in the effort to stop the epidemic; most of the latter would have died of rabies anyhow, had it gone on spreading, since the epidemic would only have died out when an animal running rabid would have found no other animals to bite before it died. The poisoning was a sort of biological "scorched earth" policy. The immunization of dogs and cats, though it protected the people to a certain extent, did nothing to stop the epidemic. Rabies had been endemic in Ontario for more than fifteen years, and is still a major problem. It is spread largely by wild animals, particularly foxes and skunks, just as it was in Alberta thirty years ago. Control and vaccination of dogs has done a good deal to protect the human population, but the losses amongst livestock run into hundreds each year. Now Federal and Provincial Governments reim­ burse farmers whose livetock die of rabies, up to $I 000 per head of cattle, $500 per head of horses, $200 per head of sheep and hogs. Had the governments done this for the farmers in Alberta in the l 950's it would have saved many farmers from near ruin. But perhaps the money was better spent on the program to eradicate the epidemic in the wild animals, since Alberta has been practically free of rabies ever since. There was only one positive case of rabies in a domestic animal last year, and only twelve in wild animals, though it is obvious that Albertans are still suspicious of rabies, since a total of 689 heads were tested. Diagnosis of rabies in brains by the immunofluorescent antibody test is faster and more accurate than the old method of searching for Negri bodies; and it appears that it may soon be possible to use a tissue culture test instead of mouse innoculation, which will reduce the time needed to get an answer as to whether the biting animal did have rabies. The vaccination of people with the human diploid cell vaccine is much better and infinitely less painful than the old method. Ontario is investigating the possibility of an oral vaccine for wild animals.

179 Chapter 19 Master Farm Family A ward

Master Farm Family photo: Frank and Mary Jackson. Fall of 1953 - Alberta Government photographs

Each year through the I 950's the Alberta Department of Agicul­ ture sponsored a Master Farm Family program. The objective of the program was to give farmers in Alberta a practical demonstration of successful farming and to encourage young people to go into agriculture. It emphasized the spiritual and material advantages of farm life, the ideals for which professional farmers strive, and the achievement of good family and community life. The slogan of the Farm Family program was "Good Farming, Right Living, Clear Thinking," and in order to win the award at

180 least three neighbours had to nominate a family. It was one of the most generally respected honours that a farm family in Alberta could receive. The candidate had to be a Canadian citizen and must have operated a farm for twenty consecutive years. The province was divided into five regions for this program, and each region corresponded roughly to one of the five Alberta soil zones. A farm family in each region was selected for the award by a regional committee made up of a working farmer, a technical agriculturist, a home economist, a housewife, and a representative from the Dominion Experimental Farm. Later a provincial committee confirmed the selection. Points were given for each of eighty-seven factors which related to the farm operation, farm life, community work, and business management. The award consisted of a thousand dollars and a name plate for the entrance to the farm . In 1953 we won this award. One day Mel Jones and Robbie (S . L.) Roberts from the Department of Economic Affairs, Province of Alberta, Publicity Bureau, came to our farm to take pictures. They didn't tell us why they wanted the pictures, and we didn't ask them. At that time we had no idea that we were being considered for the Master Farm Family Award. All the people who were nominated for the award were inspected several times by various experts from the Department of Agriculture, from the Experimental Farm at Beaverlodge, and from the Farm Women's Organization. We were finally informed that we had been nominated, but these people would appear unexpectedly and want to see the garden and the grounds; they would stop and have a meal, to see how I was feeding my family and how well I kept house. They also tried to find out how much we were involved in community affairs, the school, the church, and how we related to our neighbours. And, of course, they took a good look at the farm. Frank was a cattle man. He had moved into the North in 1919 with a big herd of purebred Herford cattle because pasture was getting scarce in southern Alberta. When he found that Aberdeen Angus cattle were hardier for the severe winters, he changed to Angus. He took up a homestead in 1929 when homesteaders started moving into the Keg River area. He grew oats for his cows, and also for the horses that freighted supplies for the fur-trading post that he had started in 1922. In 1949 he gave up the fur trading

181 and concentrated on the farm; we moved from the house in the village, beside the trading post, to the house on the homestead. By the time we received the award he was farming six hundred and forty acres. Until the Mackenzie Highway was good enough for trucking most of the grain he had grown was fed to cattle and hogs; the hundred and twenty-mile journey to the nearest elevator, in Grimshaw, made it more profitable to feed barley to hogs. It didn't pay to truck it. (The new variety of barley that has just been developed by Dr. Wolfe at Beaverlodge Experimental Farm has been named Jackson, after Frank, and became available in 1986. How delighted he would have been!) Hogs were his major produce, and they also had to be trucked to the railway in Grimshaw. He had some purebred Angus beef cows, and a purebred bull, Eston Compress 9th; his two milk cows were a Shorthorn-Holstein cross. There were about two hundred Yorkshire pigs, and a half dozen Suffolk sheep, whose grazing was to keep the yards clear of weeds, and who were to provide lamb chops for me. Frank took good care of his implements. When not in use they were stored in a long shed and were always well protected against rust and weather. He still had a forty-year-old wagon - the second wagon to be hauled into the Keg River area. Although he had used it all the time, the wagon was still in perfect condition and could still have made the forty-mile rough trail to Carcajou for freight. Maintenance of his own and his neighbours' equipment was carried out in a large and well-equipped repair shop. Many di strict farmers brought their broken-down machinery to him . Although this made a lot of extra work for him, he liked working with machinery and liked helping his neighbours, who also frequently borrowed machinery from him , and sometimes forgot to bring it back. The repair equipment included both an electric and an acetylene welder. This was absolutely essential equipment when the nearest commercial welding shop was at Manning, sixty miles away. Frank also had a hammer mill which he used to crush feed for the hogs, and a seed-cleaning plant, which he ingeniously designed and built so one man could handle all seed-cleaning on our farm as well as for many of the other settlers. Every building on the farm was made of logs except a new barn which was built quickly when the old barn burned suddenly in 1952.

182 He had installed all the electrical wmng, and heating and water systems himself. We had a 32-volt power system, with a windmill which charged the batteries when there was enough wind, and an electric generator for the rest of the time. The windmill also pumped water to a five hundred gallon tank up a tower which was used for watering the garden. Our two-story house was built around a pair of log buildings. Frank worked on it for five years; he even cut the trees and sawed the lumber for it. In the basement we had a big cistern for the rainwater from the roof, and an automatic pump and electric water heater for this, so that the water in the hot water taps was soft. There was a well in the basement and another automatic pump, which gave us drinking water in the cold water taps. This water is very hard . Frank built a massive brick wood-burning furnace in the basement and a big open fireplace in the living room. The hot air ducts from the furnace to the bedrooms were built into the fireplace on either side of the chimeny. We had an interesting experience with the fireplace one night. An agent from the Wear Ever cookpot company had come to show us cook pots in which you could cook without water. He said he would make supper in the pots if we would invite a dinner party. So we invited a number of guests and he had the demonstration. It was a terrifically cold night. We encouraged the guests to stay till next morning, but they all left except the salesman. Frank was sitting in the front room near the fireplace when I came in and said to him, "Well, the agent has gone to bed. Let's go to bed too; we have had a strenuous day." He said, "We can 't go to bed." "What' s the matter?" "The house is on fire," he announced calmly. So here you have the perfect host! Rather than ask the guest to help him put out the fire, he even let him go to bed without alarming him . The fire was behind the fireplace, in the two-inch gap between the double layer of fire-bricks and the log wall. We were burning tamarack, which generates tremendous heat, and the house logs were on fire; Frank could smell burning spruce. I would never have noticed the difference. There was no smoke; the logs were just smoldering.

183 Frank and I neaked up tairs and then up into the attic with pails of water and poured it all the way down the chimney into the basement. We could hear the water sizzle when it hit the fire, and there was a lot of steam. It took us until 6 o'clock in the morning, carrying pail after pail of water up into the attic. The alesman slept through it all. Finally after he had gone, Frank drilled through the logs and we could put out the fire completely. Frank had to take the burned logs out from behind the fireplace. He sawed them all the way through, removed them, and filled up the gap with cement. Much of the furniture in our living room, as well as in the bedrooms, was carved by Frank. The fine ornamental designs he did with a jack-knife. The deer heads and moose antlers in our living room were mounted by Frank. When he had time to spare, he would prepare, stuff and mount the skin of some animal. We had a loon on which the grandchildren loved to ride. Frank was very artistic and there seemed to be absolutely nothing that he could not do. He bound books; we have row upon row of National Geographic magazine , as well as other books that he bound. He was an expert tin-smith. He painted pictures; a huge mural in the old community hall that stretched across one wall and showed life in the North - canoes on the water, geese winging their way across the sky, and animals on the land - was done by him. Frank also tried his hand at making a statue for a fountain in a pond he had made near the front door. He built this statue in the basement, and all the grandchildren were goggle-eyed when they came to our place for Christmas and saw it there. The next day the Anglican minister came out to conduct a service. Since our children were coming to our place again anyway, they brought him. On the way, the three-year-old said to him, "You should see what Granddad has in the basement - a woman with no clothes on!" So much for the sculpture! The Master Farm Family Award called for clear thinking. In Frank they got more than that - there seemed no end to his creative thinking. It expressed itself in many different ways, not the least of which were his peacocks, his garden , and land caped lawns. In the summer we had sweet peas, sweet william, peonies, candytuft, columbines, pansies and petunias. In time there were groups of spruce on the lawn, a weeping birch tree, and poplars. With the years, our Balm of Gilead tree grew huge. (It is also called Balsam Poplar or Tacomahac. The sticky buds and young

184 leaves have an odor of balsam.) Under some of the large trees, Frank made a little pond for John Robert's ducks. Frank tried to grow plum and apple trees. That was very difficult because of the long hard winters and early frosts . Finally he tried to train two apple trees against the south side of a cement wall where the north wind wouldn't hit them, and had some success with them. Frank certainly qualified for the Master Farm Family Award. As far as I was concerned, I too enjoyed farming. Frank and were in it together. Over the years I had learned to cook and bake, and to enjoy gardening. We had a huge vegetable garden. Frank could no longer claim that I weeded out the young beets and left a neat row of pigweed standing! One spring when I was planting peas, I was so busy placing the seeds in the trench I had prepared that I didn't realize that the peacock was following close behind me and gracefully and elegantly picking up every kernel as soon as I had dropped it. When I turned around, there was the peacock innocently standing beside me, and Frank, at the other end of the row, almost laughing his head off. We started keeping bees in 1937. One spring, just when the Keg, ordinarily a little bit of a river, was running twenty feet of flood water, the bees swarmed. They settled on a tree that was standing right in the middle of that wicked river. The tree was fairly shaking with the force of the current. A swarm of bees was valuable, so Frank went through the water and leaned a ladder against the tree. I stood on the ladder, over the flood water, holding a big tub to catch the heavy swarm of bees when they dropped down with the branch which Frank sawed off. That was definitely one of our more idiotic moments. Anybody in his right mind would have let the swarm go. We ought both to have fallen off the ladder into the river and been drowned. But we did get the bees. Even though my role as a farmer's wife was an important factor in deciding on my score, all the papers that came out after the award mentioned my services to the community as a medical doctor. The Peace River Record Gazette said, among other things, "In a tiny but well-equipped dispensary in the basement of her home she looks after the health of the community and the nearby Paddle Prairie Metis colony which has no nurse ... " After we had moved into the house on the farm, I had a larger office, with a waiting room that had some toys for the children to

185 play with. Then there was an examrnmg room and a place to do X-rays. In the room behind that was the dispensary. I couldn't prescribe any medicine that I didn't have in my di pensary because the patient had no place where they could have prescriptions filled. It was at the door of thi office that I finally fastened my " Brass Plate." In England, when tarting to practice, a young doctor would put a brass name plate on the door. I didn't put any notice on my door in the early day , because everybody knew who I was and where I lived, and more than 90 percent of the people couldn't read anyway. There were no office hour either. Most of the patients were emergencies. But when we had fixed up my office at the farm and we had roads, with many patients coming from La Crete, Manning, High Level , and other places, I thought it was time to put up my "Brass Plate." I made it my elf. I u ed the back of a copper picture that I had, and with a harp stylu engraved my name and office hours on it. It read:

DR. MARY PERCY JACKSON MB. CHB. MRCS. LRCP. OFFICE HOURS 2:30 - 4:30 P.M . WEEKDAYS AND BY APPOINTMENT

I don't suppo e anybody looked at it much, but for me the homemade "Brass Plate" had ymbolic significance. I did not take weekends or Sundays off. When I was at home, I could hardly refuse to see an emergency when the nearest doctor wa seventy miles away and often inacce sible. With luck about half of my Sunday were uninterrupted. The time aspects of my practice were very irregular. The estimate of an average five hours a day is little better than gues work. An occa ional home visit could involve a hundred-and-fifty-mile round trip. Even much horter distances could be very time con urning. Before we had a highway, I delivered most of the babies - in the patient's homes or in the outpost. Since the Farm Family Award came right in the middle of the rabies crisis, the articles all mentioned my involvement in that and recognized my efforts in bringing the eriousnes of the epidemic to the attention of the public and encouraging action by the Alberta and Canadian governments.

186 We probably also scored quite a bit because of my efforts that summer to treat the red measles outbreak twenty-five miles away in the Metis Colony at Paddle Prairie. I had had to go back and forth practically every day for three weeks. Some of the children were desperately ill with combined measles and streptococcal ton­ sillitis, which was a very devastating combination. One of the objectives of the Master Farm Family Award was to encourage young people to go into agriculture, so what the children in the nominated family did was very important - you should manage to keep at least some of your young people on the farm . At this time Louis and his wife, June, with their four sons were farming a homestead eleven miles from us; Arthur was a dairy farmer at Aldergrove, British Columbia; and Frank, the little boy who was flown "out" when he was a baby, was an oil-field driller. Anne and her husband, John Vos, whom she had met when they were both students at Vermilion School of Agriculture, lived seven miles away on a quarter section which she had homesteaded. John Robert had taken a good many vegetables and fruits to the Agricultural Fair in Manning in 1952 and come home with a handful of Firsts; he was very much interested in gardening. He was studying restaurant management and cuisine at the Calgary Institute of Technology. The Award itself was given at the annual banquet of the Battle River Agricultural Society in Manning, the town that had grown up around the place where I first started my medical practice when I came to Alberta. Three hundred people gathered in the Agricultural Hall to celebrate and wish us well. Thirty of these were our neighbours from Keg River who had travelled over seventy-five miles to be with us on this memorable night. The Honorable Dave Ure, Provincial Minister of Agriculture, made the presentation of the cheque and the plaque. Frank built cement gate posts for the yard . At the top of one of them he engraved the name: KEWETENO FARM, and underneath he placed an enlarged version of the plaque:

MASTER FARM FAMILY AWARD 1953 FRANK JACKSON ALBERTA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

Keweteno is the Cree word for Northern.

187 Chapter 20 The Mackenzie Highway

When I started a Provincial District Doctor in Battle River in 1929, a little trail ran northward pa t my door; but by 1930 this trail was being developed into the "Battle River Highway." It wa just a dirt road. Hundred of men were hired to chop down the trees with axe ; other men , with hor es pulling large metal shovels call ed slips, made parallel ditches , throwing the dirt scooped out of the ditches into the middle to form the road . When wet it could be nearly bottomless, much harder to travel than the old trail , but it was only sixty-five mile to Grim haw, in tead of ninety. The next year they were packing and gravelling it. In 1935 the road that i now the Mackenzie Highway was tarted a a winter tractor road, from the Meikle River to Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, a distance of nearly four hundred miles. It wa needed for hauling the big machinery for the Snare River Power Dam, to provide power for the gold mines in Yellowknife. We were in the depths of the Depression, so the Mackenzie Highway wa also a make-work project for dozen of unemployed men who were being fed at Soup Kitchen in Calgary. They were ent north by bureaucrats who knew nothing of the northern winter conditions. The men were in poor physical condition after living on one meal a day; they were inadequately clothed, had no mitts, and were wearing hoe . They had to walk from Notikewin to Keg River - eighty mile by the telegraph line - without anything to eat, becau e the food provided (bread, bologna, cans of pork and beans) wa all frozen olid and impos ible to thaw at a campfire. For winter travelling in the North it i e ential to have food uch as pork and beans, or stew, frozen into thin cakes that can be thawed in a frying pan ; thin bannock that will thaw through when propped up beside the fire, and doughnut that can be threaded on a tick and thawed over the fire.

188 A number of the men played out on the trail and wanted to just lie down and rest, but others knew enough to keep them going, so nobody was frozen to death. When they reached Keg River, however, I saw more frostbitten faces and fingers and toes than I'd seen in all the previous six years. Finally, once all the swamps had frozen solid, the winter road was passable for tractors pulling heavily loaded sleighs, but when spring thaws came we still had no road except the old telegraph line trail, which was only fit for saddle horses much of the summer. Fortunately, after we had bridges across the Hotchkiss and Meikle Rivers, we no longer had to ford them or swim the horses across. In 1942-43 the American Army used this winter tractor train route when they were building the oil pipe line from Norman Wells, on the Mackenzie River south of the Arctic Circle, to the Alaska coast. The oil was needed for the U .S. Navy because the Japanese were advancing along the Aleutian Islands west of Alaska, and the navy's nearest source of fuel supply was the oilfields of California. It was a fantastic undertaking, this Cano! project; the pipeline had to go right across the almost uninhabited stretches of northern Canada through the Mackenzie Mountains and the Yukon to the coast. All the supplies had to be hauled through Battle River and up this winter tractor trail. Anybody who had a truck could get a job transporting supplies north . What we didn't know at the time was that the heavy little black bags that were on the trucks when they came back, contained uranium from Great Bear Lake, to be used for the manufacture of the first atom bomb. Even after the Americans left we still had only a winter road, passable only when all the sloughs and swamps it crossed were solidly frozen. Then we were able to truck hogs and grain to Grimshaw. We were thrilled when the Mackenzie Highway was built after the war; even though it was only a rather narrow gravelled road it was passable year round. By 1955 there was even a bus service three times a week from Peace River to Fort Vermilion, and once we had the Keg River Road built up and gravelled we were able to get three mails a week. That was quite different from the eight mails a year we had when I first came to Keg River! And, unless there was a blizzard, I could get patients out to hospital in Manning or Peace River at a reasonable speed. While the Mackenzie Highway made a tremendous difference to our lives, it soon became hopelessly inadequate for all the oilfield drilling rigs that were being brought to the oilfields of Keg River

189 and Rainbow Lake. In 1958 big machinery moved in - sixty-five big Caterpillar tractor and draglines - to widen and rebuild the highway. In ummer the Mackenzie Highway wa terribly dusty. Once people were able to travel fa t we had a great number of fatal or near fatal accidents. Travelling in the du t one had to keep a mile or o behind the vehicle in front, unle there wa a wind to blow the dust away. We had horrible accident when people, not realizing that the vehicle they had been following, perhap for fifty miles, had overtaken and pas ed a road grader moving at four miles an hour, era hed into th grader in the du t. We had three uch accident in one ummer. When I wa called out to highway accidents I always tried to get Frank to drive me, because he would drive so much faster than I dared, and he was so good at organizing the prying apart of ma hed vehicles. There was no hospital nearer than Manning, and many of the accident occured a much a fifty miles from Keg River. One of the wor t accident happened ixty mile north of Keg River. The driver of that car wa following a truck which was throwing up a lot of du t, and didn ' t realize that he was overtaking the truck until he ran right underneath it. He and his wife, a on, a daughter, her boy friend , and a hitch-hiker were in the car, and all were injured, but I had no idea how many people were involved, because each car or pick-up that pa ed this appalling accident picked up one of the victim and brought him to my house. As m re victim were brought in I had patient in the office and the waiting room, the living room, and the bedroom and all in urgent need of attention. The boy with a depressed fracture of the skull wa uncon cious; he had two black eye and a great swelling, but the man who had picked him up had enough en e to tell me that he had noticed a deep depression in the skull above the eye before the welling hid it. The man, who had hi houlder very badly tom, had bled c n iderably; the fellow who brought him in aid, "The whole trunk was full of blood." The driver had a relatively mall cut in hi arm, but it had got the artery. He had had enough pre ence of mind to tie a big handkerchief around it and twi t till it topped the bleeding, o he was in fairly good hape; but hi wife had a fractured pelvi , a compound fracture of one arm, and a punctured lung from a fractured rib . Frank' ister, Dots, who was staying with u at the time,

190 was only five feet tall , but she was a tower of strength; she did everything she could to help. At one point she came down to the office where I was trying to cope with the mother, and said, "You will have to come and see this girl l have in the living room; she screams every time I touch her." I discovered that the whole windshield that had shattered when the car ran under the truck , had gone down inside the neck of her dress. She had a thousand sharp pieces of glass cutting into her when she moved. The hitch-hiker had something mild, like a fractured rib; all the others finally recovered in hospital. Another very bad accident involved half a dozen men coming south on the Mackenzie Highway from a job they were doing farther north. The man who was driving the van was from England and was relatively new to northern roads. He did not realize the danger of the ridged gravel on a curve, and was driving too fast. When they got to the corner of Paddle Creek, the van swerved violently, turned over and over several times, landed upside down , and then caught fire . Two people were killed outright and two or three injured. One man who had had his seat belt fastened was hanging from the seat belt inside the flaming vehicle. When he was pulled out of the wreckage he was very severely burned. A pilot who was flying south in a small plane saw the flaming car and the people around it. He landed on the highway, and against all rules and regulations took the badly burned man to Edmonton. There was no room for anyone else to go along with him . I rushed home and phoned the specialist in Edmonton, telling him what I had done and that the man was coming in by plane. An ambulance was at the airport by the time the patient arrived. He was in the hospital for years, but he lived to walk out, which was something I had never expected. Years later at a meeting in Banff, a man came up to me and said, "I guess you don't know me." "No," I said. "I don' t." "Do you remember the vehicle that was on fire on the Mackenzie Highway, and the plane that landed on the road and took a burned man to the hospital?" "I certainly do," I answered. " l was that pilot," he said. I was delighted to meet him. I said, " Do you realize that you

191 saved that man' life by breaking all the rule and landing on the highway, and taking him out without an accompanying nurse or doctor?" That the patient lived at all was due to this man's knowing an emergency when he aw it and acting like a Northerner. Another accident on the Mackenzie Highway, which I remember particularly, happened to some men who had spent the evening in the bar at High Level. When they came out, they headed south on the highway instead of ea t to Fort Vermilion where they intended to go . They ran out of gas south of Paddle Prairie and stopped their car right on the highway. It was in the middle of the night. One of the men got out to walk back to the nearest hou e to get some ga . The truck that came barrelling down the road did not expect a stationary, unlighted vehicle around the comer, and ran right over it. The first trucker that came by tried to get the people out of the wrecked car. The roof was folded down on top of them; the doors had sprung with the impact and then closed again with one of the fellows trapped between the seat and the door. Another man had his head down on the floor under the steering wheel though he had been in the back of the car. They were all mushed up. The truckers managed to get two of the people out, and put one on the eat of one truck, and one on the eat of the other truck . Someone had seen the accident and came racing to Keg River to get us. We drove out there, Frank doing 70-75 miles an hour down the ice-coated highway. While Frank was helping the men decide how to pull the cars apart and get the other people out, I went to see the two men that had been put in the two trucks. As I climbed into the cab of the fir t truck, I slipped on something on the step and discovered that it was blood running down under the door. The man was pumping blood from his Temporal artery. I always carried a supply of Ten or bandage in my first aid equipment, so I put a tourniquet around the skull and stopped the bleeding. When I got into the other truck to see how the other fellow wa getting along, I wa a bit flabberga ted to find that he too was bleeding from the head. Both of them were semi-conscious and , incidentally, very drunk. These two men recovered . Frank and I took another of the men to the hospital in Manning. The other were dead. The one

192 we took out also died .

In another very trag ic accid ent, a woman wa~ driving south fro m High Level on this dusty grave ll ed hi ghway. when she had a tire blow-out. The car swerved into the ditch . turned end over end. and stopped upside down . A forestry man who was driving down the road behind her, saw the accident and was the re almost before the whee ls had stopped turning . The woman onl y had a sma ll cut on her head but she was dead with a hroken neck . If she had had her seatbelt fastened she would probably have had no more than a small scar that would have been hidden by her hair. This was in contrast to the fellow who got badly burned because he was tied down in a seatbelt, tho ugh of course without a seatbelt he might have had a broken neck or fractured skull and join ed the other dead . When the High Level hospit al was opened earl y in 1973, the first seven pati ents admitted were dead - th e result of car accidents on th e road. A large number of the accidents were due to the dust. The road graders were a parti cularly g reat hazard because they travelled so slowly compared with the rest of th e traffic . As I mentioned , three graders were demolished in our area in one summer . I fe lt this was absolute ly ridicul ous, so I wrote the Department o f High­ ways suggesting that they put li ghts at the top of the grader in addition to the reel rear li ghts. T he rear li ghts could not be seen through the dust. Flashing li ghts on top mi ght be visible because the dust would not be quite so thick higher up. Maybe they thought of it themse lves, but the next year all road graders had flashing li ghts at th e top. C ivili zati on had come to us: we fin a ll y had a hi ghway. It was a long, long time since I saw my first car accident victim in Battle River. The road had been vastl y improved. but we were getting a tragic toll o f injuries and deaths. In the earl y I 970"s the Department of Highways started pavin g the Mackenzie Highway, doing only ten miles per year, but slowly it came north . At last we have a magnificent hi ghway paved all the way to the Northwest Territories. Accidents due to dust are eliminated , but now we have accidents clue to excessive speed and impa ired drivers, and the deaths are just as trag ic. I have been saying for a long time that a better way o f getting impaired drivers off the road than taking away their li cense to dri ve, would be to take away the car they are dri ving.

191 A car in the hands of a drunken dri er i a lethal weap n; it h uld be taken away. Providing parking for all the impounded vehi le would be ea ier and cheaper by far than providing more jail to hou e impaired driver ho are con icted. W ' e got to do om thing to prevent all these death .

The beginning of the Ma kenzie Highway at Grim haw, Alberta.

Pea e River cene off the Mackenzie Highway

194 Chapter 21 Life and Death

Frank and I celebrated our silver wedding anniversary on March I 0, 1956. We didn 't think anybody except the family would re­ member the fact, so we were quite overwhelmed the day before when a group of friends arrived and brought us a beautiful chest of silverware from the community and a silver tea-pot and cream and sugar basin from our neighbours, the Harringtons and Harry Bowe. They also gave me an envelope containing $60.00 from the community, with a note saying, "Toward our doctor's medical supplies," and a good wishes card with everybody's signatures. It was wonderfully kind of them all. Anne had made a lovely three-tier wedding cake and so we all had tea together. The weather was terrible. If it had blown like that twenty-five years ago on our wedding day , we should probably have frozen to death on the road to the wedding. Life after our silver wedding was just as busy as it had been after our first. There was much work on the farm, in the garden, and on the grounds. We had a steady stream of visitors; after our Master Farm Family Award many officials of one kind or another came to see us. My medical practice was often very time-consuming. There always seemed to be a bad outbreak of influenza, or a flare-up of TB, which meant school-bus loads of patients for X-rays, and there was even an epidemic of polio. The extra people who worked on the highway almost doubled our population. Seismic survey crews, oil drillers, pipeline welders, and the crews of three sawmills, all producing Workmen's Compen­ sation cases with many forms to fill out, gave me a lot more work than I had had before. Medical record-keeping and book-keeping were becoming some­ thing of a night-mare; so many patients came under some form of insurance or another, and all the forms were different. With so

195 much paper work, I ometime wondered how to find time to do the washing, the cooking, the gardening, and the canning. One new element in our lives were our grandchildren, and we thoroughly enjoyed them. Loui and June, and Anne and Johnny Yo , lived at Keg River so we had more contact with their children than with the children of Arthur and Margaret, and of John Robert (Bob) and Doreen, or Frank and Vera. Frank and his family of two daughter , Loui e and Ramona, lived in Ferintosh, south-east of Edmonton. Louis and June's four little boys were: Ronald, Donald, Robert, and Leslie. For a year Ronnie tayed with us during the week, to go to school, since it was too far from their hou e. Donnie was a good little gardener - he liked to know the names of all the plants, and was ecstatic when we gave him a "Ballerina" fuschia plant to take home with him. When a little girl, Margaret, was born in the family, her brother were all delighted with her, though Bobby was under the impression that when she grew up, she would tum into a little boy. Anne's first baby, Patricia Mary, arrived on Christma day 1953 . Dr. Emma John tone (who had written the advertisement in the British Medical Journal which prompted me to come to

Emma MacDonald, godmother of Dr. Jack on's two granddaughters, Patricia Vos and Margaret Jackson. Miss Paul on the left. 1954 Emma's father wa first M.L.A. for Peace River

196 Canada) was visiting us at the time and assisted me with the delivery. Patricia was a lovely baby and did very well. At three months she was already starting to push herself along on her head and heels , just like Anne had done when she was small. I didn't think I had ever seen another baby start to crawl on its back. After Patricia came Henry, a fine big lad . Patricia' s first question was, "What' s that?" But she tried to feed him raisins through the crib, so apparently she approved of him . Since the Anglican minister came to Keg River to conduct services on the first Sunday of every month, I usually saw June and her children and Anne and Johnny with theirs at church. I was especially amused when Patricia did not merely help with the hymn singing, but also sang lustily through part of the sermon. After that she played at singing hymns at home. She took a little book from the bookcase, held it open, sang, then turned the pages and sang again! When Henry was not quite two years old, he walked up the aisle to the platform at a school Christmas concert and started to conduct. That seemed very odd indeed because he had never seen anybody conduct a choir, and the teacher was not conducting the carols; she was in the background accompanying them on her violin. I wondered whether the genes could have skipped two generations - my father was an excellent conductor. Anne' s third child, David, was a character! He could get into more mischief, faster than any child I had ever seen. One day when I was there, Anne was just getting the supper table laid, and before she could turn around, David had climbed on the bench and poured salt all over the coconut cream pie she had just baked. At fifteen-months there was absolutely nothing in the house that he couldn't reach; he would drag a chair over and climb on to the table and on top of the bookcase. The other two did their best to keep an eye on him, but at intervals of about five minutes there would be sudden yells of "Mummy! David!" The year Anne taught sewing at the school one afternoon a week, I kept the children on that day. It was always a delightful, if somewhat exhausting experience, and served to remind me how hard all the mothers of young children have to work. Each of the grandchildren was unique. For instance, Penny, Anne's youngest daughter, was always greeted by a flock of chick­ adees when she returned from school. She fed them peanut butter cookies.

197 AH of them managed to get into trouble now and then and became my patients. Patricia broke a collar bone; Bobby was thrown off a horse and broke his arm just a few days after Ronnie had his cast off; Mary Lou got her foot into the machinery of the potato-grading machine and was very fortunate indeed not to lose her foot; Neil managed to get into conflict with a thermos bottle full of hot tea, which he poured over his leg. And of course there were measles and chicken pox and the flu. I also liked sewing and knitting things for the children. Often I made pants and jackets from old suits of my fathers which he sent me. The material in them was so good! One year I even made kindergarten tables and chairs out of plywood for Patricia and Henry and for Margaret and Leslie (Margaret's little brother) . Of course they were not the same class as Frank's work, but Miss Mallenger and Mrs. Befus (the two school teachers) were most impressed. Arthur and Margaret lived in British Columbia for many years. Their boys did very well, especially with their livestock. One year we read in the paper, "The four Jackson brothers just about swept the board in the 4H section of the B.C. Ayrshire Breeders' Associ­ ation at Cloverdale." We were especially amused by a cutting from a Vancouver paper in 1957 about Arthur's fourth son, Robin: A Langley visitor to Hotel Vancouver last week caused a bit of a stir for its unorthodox appearance there. It was a senior Ayrshire calf which the Rotary Club had invited to be a special guest at its luncheon. Robin Jackson, I I -year-old member of Otter 4H Club was selected by the PNE to represent the 4H Clubs. A truck delivered the calf, Robin, and Jim Clark, supervisor of entrees, at the entrance of the hotel in downtown Vancouver. The calf had to be led through the hotel lobby into an elevator which took it up a few floors, and then led to the banquet room. There Rotary Club members interviewed the PNE participants and the calf was paraded around on a stage. Before being trucked back the Ayrshire left its personal stamp on one of the carpets of the plush hotel. Bob and Doreen and their two boys, Bryan and Dale, lived in Calgary for a number of years, but managed to visit us sometimes, nearly always seeming to be accompanied by a blizzard. Bryan tried to teach his grandparents to play chess, but had little success. When Frank and I were driving to the Coast, or to California or Mexico, we used to go through Calgary so as to visit them. We went to see the boys diving in the pool at the Winter Club; it was

198 the first time I had ever seen any fancy dives like backwards somersaults. I was most impressed. Frank finally had twenty-five grandchildren, and there are now twenty-three great grandchildren.

Kelsey Elliot, Dr. Jackson's first great-grandchild, at Pangnirtung in Baffin Island. February 1988 .

We had some great family gatherings at Christmas, but even before the children and grandchildren arrived they were always speculating on what interruption I would have this time. For years I usually had to miss the Christmas dinner. One Christmas, just as we had dished up the dinner, a very drunk fellow with a bad axe wound was brought in . The nurse at Paddle Prairie couldn't stop the bleeding even with a tourniquet. He looked almost bled out when he got to my office, but he certainly didn't need any anaesthetic; he sang Silent Night at the top of his voice while I picked up the bleeding artery and sewed him up. I was interested to note that he sang all the verses word-perfect.

199 How quickly the grandchildren grew up! Before we knew it, they were helping us mow the lawn, or bring in the tomatoes; they were going off to high chool; they were getting jobs; they were getting married - and we were growing older. Frank had always been extraordinarily healthy except for ar­ thritis in the knee joint that had been severely damaged when he was a teenager. Even with that he did an enormous amount of work, and when he was 82 he did not look more than 72. We did , however, start slowing down a bit when Arthur moved back to Alberta and farmed the land. We had no cattle or hogs to worry about anymore. During the summer months Frank did a lot of work in the garden and on the grounds. We used our greenhouse to start bedding plants and delighted in the flowers we were able to grow. At our age we thanked Heaven for each year of gardening. When the seed and nursery catalogues started to arrive, we could hardly wait to get started again. And we did have lovely flowers: delphiniums and snapdragons, pinks and petunias and sweet peas, huge dahlias, marigolds, pansies, larkspur and tiger lilies.

Dr. Jackson talking to her husband Frank: " Do try and look intelligent, my love; I know it's an effort!"

One day we heard a helicopter coming in very low over the house. I wondered if he would hit the trees, but the pilot wanted

200 to look at the garden, as he had heard about it from other pilots. He decided to land and come and look at it on foot. His father was a horticulturist, and so he was interested. We started going away for months in the wintertime. We went to New Zealand, to Spain, to Mexico, to Japan, to South America, and usually we went to visit Frank's sister in California, but always we came back to our farm and to the usual round of activities. When Frank was 82, he developed asthma. He had had peacocks for years and always looked after his setting peahens. One day he was going to feed them and forked down some oat-sheaves that had become musty. This gave him an attack of bronchitis. He became allergic to the peacocks and had to get rid of them. But in spite of the fact that we also removed all the feather pillows, he sti II got severe attacks of asthma. Then he got heart block - a Stokes Adams attack - and very nearly died. His heart recovered, however, and began to beat slowly. Apart from a forty-eight hour gap in his memory, his mind was not any the worse, but he went to see Dr. Rossall, the cardiologist, and had a pace-maker put in. I retired in 1974 in order to have more time to be with Frank. Since I was almost seventy I figured I had done my fair whack by then, and it didn't seem right to be busy seeing other patients when he was sick. After Frank had the pace-maker he was determined to live as normal a life as possible. Because he could not work as hard as he had been doing, he started writing his memoirs. Sheila Douglass, who had taught at Keg River, persuaded him to write his life story. This really gave his something to live for. Every day he would say, " Well , now I must get on with this writing." This is how he came to write, longhand, 1500 pages of his memories. I was fascinated to discover how much better his memory was than mine. I had forgotten about many of the things we had experienced together until he wrote about them. He and Sheila Douglass had some great arguments about what should be put in and how it should be said. He insisted that Sheila, who put it all together, should not elaborate on anything. The first part of the manuscript was published in 1977 as Candle in the Grub Box, and its sequel in 1979 as Jam in the Bed Roll. Even after he had his pace-maker changed, he was still deter­ mined to live a normal life and insisted, for instance, on going down to stay in a Mexican village a hundred and fifty miles from

201 the nearest hospital. When we came back, we knew that he was already developing other problems with hi s circulation. One day he had a coronary artery attack, a myocarial infarction. He recovered from that and went on, but then the circulation in his feet became critically poor. He was now 87 and I realized that this was going to be a disaster. When he started to get gangrene in the toe of the leg which had always been so bad because of the injury to the knee joint when he was a teenager, he said, "Oh, anyway, I wanted to have that off fifty years ago!" His leg was amputated and healed extremely well. He suggested that while he was in the hospital and I didn't have to look after him, it would be a good idea if I had my varicose veins done. They had needed it for years but I hadn't been able to get away. So I stayed in the hospital and had my leg done. It had been done several times since 1933 when it was first tackled, so the surgery was pretty involved, and I had quite a rough time. But at least I was able to spend my days sitting with Frank. We had droves of visitors. The nurses were astounded at the many grandchildren and their boy and girl friends who came. Some of them thought it would be fun to load their grandparents into a couple of wheel chairs and have a race down the long corridor, but we discouraged that. Frank was transferred to the Glenrose rehabilitation hospital to get his artificial limb and learn to use it. Everything seemed to be going very well, so Frank wanted me to go back to Keg River to get busy with the canning! Two days later I broke my arm when the handle of the lawn mower came apart at the bottom and threw me. And the day after that Frank developed a clot in the other leg, and was transferred back to the University Hospital in the middle of the night, but there was nothing they could do. He wanted so badly to come back home; it was all he asked for. So Patricia, our grand-daughter, arranged to take her holidays, assembled a wheelchair, oxygen tanks, and other equipment and flew home with him . She stayed to help care for him. I was so useless with my right arm in a cast. When Patricia had to go back to the city we had to move Frank into the hospital at High Level. They were infinitely kind to him and me. They put up a cot in his room so that I could sleep there. But it was terrible to watch him dying. Even with heavy

202 doses of morphia at night he said he could still feel the pain through his sleep. In the daytime he would not accept anything for the pain as he wanted to be able to talk to all his visitors! His second book, Jam in the Bed Roll, came from the publishers a few days before his death , but he couldn't see to read, and could hardly see the pictures even with his magnifying glass. But at least he knew that it was out. Frank was very insistent that he should have the simplest possible funeral; he believed expensive funerals were a wicked waste of money, and he wanted to be buried just like all the other old-timers had been: in a homemade wooden box . So Johnny and Arthur built his coffin, and his grandsons dug the grave. He died on September 1, 1979, and so we had lots of flowers in the garden. Anne had grown the most gorgeous gladioli, and put two vases on the altar in the little Catholic Church in Keg River. Bob made a wreath for the coffin. Father Lesmerises, the Catholic priest whom Frank had liked very much, read the service. He offered to read the Anglican service, but we compromised, and the service was strictly non-de­ nominational. The Pentecostal choir sang the music. Father Lesmerises read Cardinal Newman's prayer, my favour- ite: Oh, Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of l(fe is over, and our work is done . Then Lord, in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Keg River Post. The little white Catholic church is in the centre.

203 The farm , 1982

Wedding picture of Penny Vos and Tom Elliot, August, 1984

204 Chapter 22 Capstone on Life

After Frank had died there didn't seem to be much point in going on. But I decided to stay in the same old log house in which we had lived for such a long time. As long as I was able to garden and keep the house moderately clean, it seemed the best place to be. A one-bedroom apartment would have been a lot less work, but it would not have had the memories that this house has. Here I am using the furniture that Frank made even before I met him, and the furniture he made after we were married. He built the house. It is very old-fashioned - it does not have any modern elegance - but I like it. I still have the little greenhouse that Frank added to the house the year of our silver wedding anniversary. I can still grow cucumbers and tomatoes in there, as well as start all the bedding plants that I need for the flower beds and for the huge vegetable garden. It keeps me working. My friends and neighbours, indeed the whole community, are all very kind to me, and when they come to visit I enjoy talking with them to find out what has happened to all my old friends. If Anne and Johnny weren't living in the neighbourhood, I could not possibly continue living here of course. They are as near as the phone, and they are everlastingly kind in helping me cope with such problems as tiles blowing off the roof in a terrible wind storm, or the basement flooding. Johnny provides me with firewood for the fireplace; Anne rototills the garden. My grandson, David, gets a moose each fall and remembers that his grandmother loves moose meat better than all other meats. I have had many requests to speak to various groups and at various occasions, both in years gone by and now. It seems my address to the Federation of Medical Women, which held its 1955 meeting jointly with the British and Canadian Medical Associations

205 in Toronto, made me well known . The audience was surprised that after practicing in isolation from a farmhouse kitchen for a quarter of a century, I should have anything sensible to say about medicine. But I always believed that a doctor who didn't keep up to date had no right to practice; it is too dangerous. I seemed to have made quite a hit with the psychiatrists - of all people! In my effort to explain how well the old-time Metis was adapted to life in the North with all its hardships - including mosquitoes - I said that though he was bitten by mosquitoes and his skin itched, his mind didn't itch and therefore they didn't bother him as much! The convention was really a wonderful experience. There were about three thousand doctors at the meetings. I listened to and also met some of England's and Scotland's most famous doctors - men who had been known to me by name for years. I also met hundreds of Canadian doctors. I got my membership in the College of General Practice in 1955 - soon after the College was started. But in order to remain a member, the doctor had to do a minimum of a hundred hours of formal po tgraduate work in every two year period. That was not easy for me; it took so long to get to the city, and the annual refresher course in Edmonton gave me only thirty-six hours. When the Mackenzie Highway improved, however, and it was easier to get to the city, I managed to attend Canadian Medical Association conventions in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Edmonton, and was able to get down to Peace River Hospital for their monthly medical meetings. On July 1, 1967, I received the Centennial Medal of Canada. It came by registered mail with a certificate that says, "On the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the Confederation of Canada the Centennial Medal is conferred on Dr. Mary E. Percy Jackson, in recognition of valuable service to the nation." I was also given the Alberta Centennial Award. In September of 1969 I was given a Senior Life Membership in the Alberta Medical Association. The certificate says, "Mary E. Percy Jackson has been elected to this honour by colleagues in the Association because of contributions and long service to the public and the Profession. " I went to the Canadian Medical Association convention in Halifax in June 1971 to be elected to Senior Membership. I was one of the three from Alberta. I found the solemn procession unexpectedly impressive; I suddenly felt as though I belonged to

206 a very ancient and dedicated profession . But it was a bit disconcerting when Dr. Eva Mader Madonald, who had been made a Senior member the previous year, mentioned that of those who had been elected that year more than half were already dead! I was the only woman elected in 1971 . The College of General Practice was re-named the College of Family Physicians. They gave me Life Membership in 1974. One day in 1975 Helen Ferguson, a neighbour, came over to my house. She said they were going to have a party at the community hall and would like me to come also. I thought I was being invited to a Metis party, but when I got there I discovered that they were going to name me "Woman of the Year" for "The Voice of Native Women." The woman making the presentation had us look back over the years and think of all the changes that had occurred. I had always been concerned and deeply troubled about the Indians and Metis. They were my friends, my neighbours, as well as my patients. I was very much aware of the change in their physical fitness from the lean strong people I knew when I came to Keg River over fifty years ago, to the now often obese men, women, and children, so prone to disease, heart attacks and diabetes. I was also painfully aware of the deteriorating race relations between the native people of Canada and the white people. I was therefore deeply moved by the honour of being named "Woman of the Year" by native women. I have in my file a little poem written by a little Metis girl in Keg River. I shall always cherish it. Here it is:

The Faithful Ladie Doctor We all know a very important person Doctor Mary Percy Jackson, She came all the way from England And has travelled all through this Northland. Don't dare call her just a dame, As she's accomplished a mighty fame . She has saved many a life, Without any grumbling nor strife. Also delivered numerous babies, And even helped to prevent rabies. She visited her patients, rich or poor, In fact went to the poor house much more. Where they lived it didn't matter, In teepees, tents, cabins, or better.

207 And when meals we offered, she didn't care If they were full of food or bare, Just a cup of tea you see, Would please her anywhere. Now I must tell you the rest, Which is of course the best. Years ago her only transportation I must not forget to mention Was in four-wheel wagons and toboggans. But now, oh my! As she passes by I sit back and just sigh. She now travels far in a beautiful motor car. With the roads, much better! Dear God, please abundantly bless her!

In 1976 Frank and I both received Alberta Achievement Awards "In recognition of outstanding service in the Community with best wishes and congratulations of the people and government of the Province of Alberta." These awards were presented by Premier Peter Lougheed, after a dinner. There were large numbers of awards given in different categories, and we met some people that Frank had known before he went North in 1919, who were also getting awards. In November of 1976 the University of Alberta conferred an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree on me, and I gave the Convocation Address. In this address I chose to speak about the changes in social relations between the native people of Canada and the white population. I hope the next generation can improve on some of the things we have, with the best of intentions, bungled. The convocation was really quite impressive - the scarlet gowns, hoods, and all the pomp and ceremony. My brother Leslie flew over from England for the occasion, which was wonderful. We were having the warmest November on record; there was no snow, and there were no Northern Lights. So, after all I had been writing home all these years about Canadian winters, he came equipped with gum boots and heavy clothes, only to find it was warmer than in his home in Yorkshire! On December I , 1983, I was awarded Membership in the Alberta Order of Excellence. I was given a very beautiful medal, and a marvellously illuminated framed certificate which says, "In recognition of service of the greatest distinction and of singular

208 November. 1976 - A lberta Government Premier Lougheed prc>cnting the Alhena Achievement Awards for Service to Dr. Mary and Frank Jackson (far right)

Boh Jackson. Anne Vos. Dale Jackson ( Bob·s son) and Frank Jackson Jr .. w ith Dr. Jackson after the Order of Exce ll ence award gi ving. December I . 1983 excellence for and on behalf of the residents of Alberta." The award was establi shed in November 1979 and I was the first woman and the first doctor to receive thi s award. The ceremony took place

209 - PROTOCOL, Government of Alberta Dr. Mary Percy Jackson with her son John Robert Jackson at the Investiture Dinner December I, 1983, when Dr. Jackson was awarded Membership in the Alberta Order of Excellence. at Government House in Edmonton. Former Progressive Conserva­ tive Prime Minister Joe Clark, and diplomat Chester Ronning of Camrose, Alberta, were inducted into the Order of Excellence at the same time, but Chester Ronning's medal was received by his daughter as he was ill. More recently, in April 1985, I received Honorary Life Mem­ bership in the Geriatric Medical Society of Alberta (at which occasion I gave the after-dinner peech) and in June, an Honorary Diploma from Fairview College. I had always been a doctor with a passion so all these honours and awards meant a great deal to me. They were a capstone on my life. I am still being requested to speak at different occasions. Whenever I speak to a gathering of doctors it is always a bit disconcerting to realize that I was practicing medicine before most of them were born. The generation gap is made more enormous by the fact that medicine has changed more in the fifty-eight years since I graduated than it had since Hippocrates. I don't really feel that old till I remember that in my student days in England I learned to apply leeches, and grind up and compound drugs, make them into pills, and gild them with goldleaf!

2 10 Dr. Mary Jackson giving the Convocation address at the University of Alberta, 1976

Modern drugs, antibiotics, diuretics, antihypertensives and all the rest of them, are now enabling many more people to reach old age, though existence for many of them is "medicated survival." The geriatric population is no longer the select group it used to be when only the strong survived. One of the great challenges of general practice is to give a worthwhile life to those we keep alive. It calls for empathy as well as drugs . To know when to let old people die is something that many doctors still have to learn . "Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive Officiously, to keep alive." It appals me as a physician, and frightens me as an old woman over 80, that I might fall into the hands of some doctor so afraid

211 of death that he would resuscitate me time after time. Modem medicine has added a totally new dimension of fear to old age. Just when doctors are old enough to have added wisdom to knowl­ edge, they have to retire, and younger doctors imply do not understand how very willing many old people are to die. For many death may be much easier to face than life. What we fear most is to be kept alive, useless and helpless, to die slowly, perhaps brought back several times when we already had one foot in Heaven. If anybody ever starts my heart again after it has stopped, I'll sue him! It would be an interesting test case. When I die I hope I shall be able to quote Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem: Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live, and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

212 The Writer

Cornelia Lehn grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. Nurtured in a story-telling family, she became interested in writing and has spent most of her working life in the area of educational journalism with the Commisssion on Education of the General Conference Mennonite Church. After receiving a master's degree from the University of Iowa, she authored four story-books for children: God Keeps His Promise, Peace Be With You, I Heard Good News Today, and The Sun and the Wind. Cornelia is now retired and lives in Chilliwack, British Columbia.

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks to Dr. Mary Percy Jackson for trusting me to write her story, for her constant help during the process of writing, her gracious hospitality which enabled me to learn to know her in her own home, and for her willingness to make available many letters she had written to her parents in 1929 and 1930 which were published in 1933 in a booklet On the Last Frontier. Texts of speeches she had made and other source material were invaluable, as were the many hours we spent with the tape recorder between us . I sincerely thank the people in the community of Keg River who enabled me to see Dr. Jackson through the eyes of patients, neighbours and friends. I would like to express my appreciation to my sisters who have been a constant source of encouragement and support during the writing of this book, to John Hiebert for making the map, Janette Thiessen for typing the manuscript, and especially Helena Braun for the editing and publishing.

Cornelia Lehn

213 INDEX

Abbita ...... I 07 , 108 Hague, Donald and Edwina . 145, Allen, Hugh, M.L.A...... 47 152, 153 Andrews, Canon P.J. . 13 , 14, 17, Hague, John ...... 145-154 125-26, 131, 133 Hague, Patricia ...... 145-154 Backstrom, Stella ...... 136 Halabisky, Elsie ...... 129 Bain, Dr. Harry ...... 121 Hamman, Dr. H.A ...... 26 Befus, Margaret ...... 198 Harrington , Eva .... 112, 150-151 , Bissette, Joe ...... 32 , 33 , 46 164, 195 Blue, Mrs...... 44 Hayward, Jack ...... 93 Bottle, Old Man ...... 100, IOI Hayward, Rose ...... 93 Bourassa, Louis ...... 68-69 Hoadley, George ...... 14 , 17 , 18 Bow, Dr. Malcolm ...... 26, 162 Hooper, Superintendent ...... 135 Bowe, Harry ...... 131 , 174, 195 Homer, Vic ...... 26 Brander, Dr. J.F...... 89, 147 House, Bon ...... 31 Brighty, Kate .. 17 , 25 , 27 , 28-33 House, Louison ...... 43 British Medical Journal ...... 11 , Hryciuk , George ...... 131 126, 164, 196 Irene Cottage Hospital ...... 28 Brownlee, John E...... 47 Jackson , Anne. See Vos, Brutus ... . 50, 51, 57, 61 , 72, 83, Anne ...... 105, 107, 109, 110, 87, 108 113, 129, 130, 145, 151 Bythel , Pilot ...... I 05-107 Jackson , Arthur ..... 95 , 107-109, Canadian Medical 113 , 118 , 130, 182, 203 Association ...... 120 Jackson, Bryan ...... 198 Chalifoux, Clara ...... 129 Jackson, Dale ...... 198 , 209 Chalmers, Dr. John W. 140 Jackson, Donald ...... 196 Clark, the Hon . Joe ...... 210 Jackson , Doreen ...... 196, 198 Conlin, Mary ...... 21, 23 Jackson , Dots ...... 190 , 191 Crossen, Marion Aitken Jackson, Frank .. .. 29, 30, 88-180 (Mac) ...... 105 , 107 , 130, 162 Jackson, Frank, Jr.. 95, 187, 196, Dan'! ...... 49, 83 209 "D.A. Thomas" ...... 28-30 Jackson , John Robert .. 112, 113 , Douglass, Sheila ...... 20 I 124, 145, 187 , 210 Ducharme, Octave ...... 110, 170 Jackson, June ...... 132 Dudley ...... 17 Jackson, Leslie ...... 196 , 198 Elgar, Eileen ...... 123 Jackson , Louis . 95 , 107-109, 118 , Elliot, John (Kelsey) ...... 98 130, 132, 140, 141 , 151-153, Fedorchuk, Nelli ...... 162-3 , 168 187 , 196 Fellowship of the Maple Leaf . I I , Jackson , Louise, Mrs ..... 88, 107 13 , 15, 17, 123, 127, 131 Jackson, Louise ...... 196 Ferguson, Helen ...... 207 Jackson , Margaret . 152, 196, 198 Ferguson, John ...... 129 Jackson, Margaret (Deedee) . 196, Ferguson, Larone ...... 169 Jackson , Ramona ...... 196 Fife, Archie ...... 102-103 Jackson , Robert ...... 196 , 198 Freeman, Johnny ...... 45 Jackson, Robin ...... 198 Friesen , Peter ...... 116 Jackson , Ronald ...... 196, 198 Frith, Edith ...... 48 Jackson, Slim ...... 77 , 79, 85 Gariepy, Dr. E ...... 178 Jackson, Vera ...... 196 George, Jacqueline ...... 78 , 79 Johnstone, Dr. E. M . . 11, 13, 14 , Guttau , Dessie ...... 84 126, 196

214 Jones, Mel ...... 181 Roberts, (Robbie) S. L...... 181 Kratz, Ors. Julius and Robertson, George 50, 77-79 Hannah ...... 119, 120 , 170 Robertson, Mrs...... 39 Lamberton, Hugh Witticlas 29 Rodger, Dr. Elizabeth 15. 19, 76 Lawrence, Daisy ...... I I , 129 Ronning, Chester ...... 210 Lawrence, Osborne ...... 145 , 146 Ross, Chuck ...... 5 Lawrence, Sheridan 29 , 3 1, 111 Ross, Rayer ...... 172 Lawrence, Winifred ...... 131 -132 Rossall , Dr. Ri chard ...... 20 I Lesmerises, Father 203 Rousseau, Joe 35, 46 Lougheed. Peter ...... 208 Schamehorn, Bill 42 MacDonald, Dave ...... 170 Schellenberg, John ...... 167 MacDonald, Emma 196 Shaftesbury Mission I 06 Macdonald, Dr. Eva Mader . 207 Sharpe, Ed ...... 84 Maclean, Sandy ...... 47, 89 Social Credit Government 157 Mallinger, Mildred ...... 136, 198 Solwax, Pat 64 May. Wop ...... 26, 88, 102, 105 Sutherland, Dr. F.H. 28 Max ...... 51 Tomi lo , Nick ...... 174 McNally, Fred . . . . . 131 Trosky 92 Michalchuk, Annie 172 Tyson, Bill . . . . 62 Moulton, Isobel 123 , 124 United Farmers of Alberta Murphy, Peter J ...... 169 Government . 13, 14 Naylor, Canon ...... 41 Uri , Dave, Hon. 187 Norquist, Dick ...... 78 van der Mark, Christine 132 O ' Brien, Dr. Helen 15, 19 , 93, Vos, Anne, See Jackson, 111 Anne .. 177, 187 , 205 Owens, Dr. Margaret 18 , 19 Vos, David 196 , 205 Parker, Harry ...... 83 , 93 Vos, Henry 196 , 198 Parsons, Sir Leonard 12, 11 7 Vos. Johnny 177-178, Paul, Theodora May 133-136 187, 203 , 205 Percy, Leslie ...... 208 Vos, Mary Lou .... 198 Philips, Mi ss ...... 76 Vos, Neil ...... 198 Public Health Travelling Vos, Patricia Mary 196, 198, 202 Clinic ...... 18, 56, 15 7 Vos, Penny 197 Quemeneux. Fr. 156 Watherston, Olive 17 Rankin , Mrs. Clarence ...... 98 Weber ...... 78 Reber, Hal ...... 72 Wener, Martin ...... 93 Revillon Freres ...... 98 , 122, 156 Wright, Wayne ...... 166

215 DATE DUE SLIP

F255 0

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Dr. Mary Jackson giving the Convocation address at the University of Alberta, 1976

Dr. Mary Percy came from England to northern Alberta in 1929 when the country was still a wilderness . She intended to stay a year, but got too involved to leave,. She fell in love with the Peace River Country, and with Frank Jackson who matched her in spirited resourcefulness. Her skill and dedication earned her recognition and awards in high places. But to her, as meaningful as these, are the love and respect of her patients, who are her neighbours and her friends.