126 Chapter 20

Ruth and Jack Paterson A pretty blonde wife, a four-year-old daughter, dubious health, and a determination to earn his own living as a writer - these were Jack ,Paterson's main assets (and liabilities) when he and his family arrived in the wild frontier town of Cranberry Portage in the summer of 1928. He had just been released from a T.B. sanatorium, and he and his wife, Ruth, had decided that a career as a writer was just what the doctor would order for a man who had to watch his health. And what better locale for an aspiring writer than the raw and booming North, where history, and fortunes, were in the making every day of the week? In Cranberry Portage, the Patersons had certainly picked the right place for action. Its one ragged street boasted twenty gambling and bootlegging jOints. Lake traffic and construction trains poured new supplies and new citizens daily into the town, from which the new railroad was being extended to Flin Flon - itself no more than a scattering of tents and log cabins. Among their fellow settlers were traders and rail-construction men, gamblers and bootleg gers, bush pilots and gold-mad prospectors. Here is the extraordinary story of a young couple determined to build a new life for them selves in a huge, implacable land where mira cles and mayhem, tragedy, humour, ana·plain old-fashioned courage were an everyday commonplace. PROVINCE OF MANITOBA l MANITOBA f~' CLASSIFICATION P:Yi ~, ,. , 1 190;:6 EC-b-7 Cranberry Portage ranb rry ortag Ruth and Jack Paterson McClelland and Stewart Limited Toronto/Montreal © Ruth and Jack Paterson 1970 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 0-7710/6955-3 The Canadian Publishers McClelland and Stewart Limited 25 Hollinger Road, Toronto 374 To all woodsmoke-and-bacolll people Printed and bound in Canada by John Deyell Limited / Lindsay Prologue The first night we spent in our gleaming tents on the edge of boom town Cranberry Portage, in Canada's raw North, we had late visitors, well-looped on bootleg alky. To them, a young, blonde, beautiful female locating in that womanless area meant only one thing. Their spokesman was an itinerant Toronto mining engineer, in sober daylight possibly not a bad sort. It's also possible that my handling of the situation was overbold for an eX-T.B. patient, only one week free of a sanatorium where, almost three years earlier, doctors had given me only six months to live. But the rough bush clothes I wore, and my height, five-eleven, bolstered the bluff. The three men apologized and left. The second time it happened it was broad northern daylight. I was gone only minutes, putting mail on a bush-plane headed for The Pas, a frontier town on the Saskatchewan River, fifty-five miles to the south. Rounding a clump of birch by our tents, I found a rifle jabbed at my heart. It was Ruth-doing a grim, steady job of it. She dropped the rifle and started sobbing in my arms. "You! Oh, I thought he was coming back!" A caner had refused to believe that she was only living in a tent, not making a living in one. Leering, confident, he had gone on argu ing until Ruth grabbed the loaded repeater from inside the sleeping tent and convinced him she would use it. When she calmed, I picked up the rifle. She had meant it; the safety catch was off. That was in the rousing, roistering summer of 1928, when men of a hundred nationalities were pitchforked into Canada's sub-Arctic to build eighty-seven miles of railroad to a wilderness tent camp, today the modern mining and tourist city of Flin Flon. In 'twenty-eight, by risky choice, Ruth and I had become part of that northern madness. Now, forty crowded years later, we were back. Together under summer stars, where once our pioneer tents had 1 stood, on ground which had recently been dedicated as a govern ment park, we sorted out memories. Well up from the lakeshore a diesel train rattled through and whooped a greeting: the labouring engines we had known were gone, and their descendants now moved in sweeping curves about the daily bus~ness of serving Bin Flon, a city still hundreds of miles removed from cities like Winnipeg, "Outside." No white tent camps of sub-contractors lined the railroad now; no night crews battled muskeg sink-holes through the long northern twilight. Wallowing barges and bridge-timber rafts were missing from the lakefront. There were no people there either; the crowds of men-and a few women-who had toiled and suffered in the first stages of the massive northern mineral development-all were gone. The present town was well up a sandy slope from Lake Atha papuskow. For centuries a link in fur-trade routes, modem Cran berry Portage knew a different breed of traveller. Rail-lines branched out to serve mines and settlements. A highway, leading hundreds of miles north from the u.s. border to Bin Bon, crossed between the two lakes at Cranberry. Cranberry'S posh lodges and camps for sports fishermen were known throughout America; lakesides were crowded with rows of mobile homes with licence-tags from points as distant as Florida, Texas, and California. Trailers arrived before spring ice left Atha papuskow, or First, Second, and Third Cranberry lakes, and stayed till autumn's first quick freeze sealed over the sport-fishing waters. These eager visitors knew: a sixty-three-pound trout, what was then a world-record fish, had been taken from Lake Athapapuskow -and by a woman, at that. To us, a formal government park, located in what we remembered as a crude stumpland, seemed incredible. Well back from the site where our raw settlement had once suffered its growing pains were family trailers, truck-campers and tents, utility buildings, a beach playground, a baseball field, acres of parking space for northern sports days-and a drive-in food bar. The lake itself no one had managed, or mismanaged, to change. There was still the clop, clop of waves on a sandy beach, and, farther along, on a wooded rocky shore. Only small trees remained where great spruce trees once had towered. The same old moon of our campfire and banjo days shone across upholstered islands fioat ing in the bay. The same old loon was out there, still laughing at the foolish ways of all humans. 2 "No howling dogs," Ruth said. "No clanging steel or thumping timbers," I added. "No snarling outboard motors, or buildings packed tight with about twenty boot leg joints on one ragged street." Ghosts. For us, there in the misty moonlight, the deserted lake shore swarmed with them. Ghost people, ghost buildings, ghost activities, lawful and otherwise. Only in phantom form could we find our Cranberry Portage-centre of trading, prospecting, railroad building, gambling, bootlegging, and quiet, almost respectable, whoring. An early outpost for what would become Canada's great bush-flying industry. From the quiet bay below us, exploring parties had laboured off in clattery one-engine flying crates, to probe the then unknown Barren Lands far into the Arctic. A crossroads where eastern money and brains teamed up with northern knowledge and daring. An unhealed scar in a birch-filled parkland. An ice-box in winter, a searing hell of flame and smoke in summer. Like many others, we had originally come North to gamble on a new way of life. We had welcomed the frenzied activity, the chance to study this wild collection of cursing, sweating men, many of them New Canadians, droves of what, in those rude and thoughtless days, we called "hunkies." As new and green as the settlement itself when we arrived at the developing railroad's halfway point, we had groped toward a future based only on our own uncertain hopes and a mad dream. Cranberry Portage had remade our lives, rebuilt those hopes, nurtured that dream. We had had to struggle in that town; now, looking back over the years from the safety and contentment of the jet age, we knew that we owed it much. There, in the moonlight, on the shore of Lake Athapapuskow, Ruth found my hand. I knew what she was thinking, what she was seeing. She was thinking of a young husband, wary and uncertain after three years in bed, and of the numbing problems of keeping him alive until he could master a strange new way of making a living. She was seeing a flanged-wheel rail truck piled with men, packsacks, mailbags-and us. She was seeing the two of us, with a trusting, four-year-old daughter at heel, picking our way past Indian tents, log shacks, fresh-cut tree stumps, and staring men and dogs, heading toward a great box of raw boards with its homemade cotton banner: "Lakeview Hote1." 3 Chapter 1 Before we reached the Lakeview Hotel that heat-crackling June day in 1928, we met a huge old man who had come with us on the rail trolley from The Pas. He had been talking earnestly with a young missionary, wearing a full-speed-astern white collar under an outing shirt. Now, free of his companion, the old man stood gazing about him at the shambles of the settlement. A black felt hat was tipped over his eyes; chewing-tobacco stains spread from a grizzly moustache down his neck and under his blue shirt collar. "Time God's church begun paying decent wages," he grumped, recognizing us. "I got a stoppinghouse here.

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