A Yankee in the Canadian Bush -- Red Lake in 1960

Shearn's Store, as seen across the narrows from camp, was moved to the town of Red Lake

The store was frequented by tugboats. Today only the dock crib remains underwater

Chapter 5

“Where is everybody?”

We were on the Trans-Canada Highway, Hwy. 17, between Sault Ste. Marie and Wawa, Ont., and we had yet to see another vehicle.

It was mid-September, 1960. We were travelling in two cars – Mom, Dad and I in a station wagon pulling a box trailer, and my sister, Sandi, and her new husband, Cliff, in another car. We were bound for our new life at Red Lake, Ont.

En route on the Pickerel River

The morning had started with a 10-mile boat ride up the Pickerel River, near Parry Sound. Mom and Dad had sold their cabin at the Pickerel River CNR river crossing and were going to use the proceeds to make a down payment on a remote fishing and hunting lodge called Bow Narrows Camp which Dad and a friend, Milt Young, had found in May.

Dad had loved the place, especially the location; Milt not so much. He and his wife, Carol, subsequently bought a camp on an island in Lake of the Woods. Bow Narrows Camp was a “fixer-upper” which appealed to Dad. Milt wanted a “turn-key” operation. They stayed good friends.

It was getting dark and we had yet to come to a town on Hwy. 17. We stopped beside a small lake where we got a pail of water and pitched our two tents right on the shoulder of the road. As we ate our supper cooked over an open fire, we speculated as to whether the road might be closed up ahead. It had only been open for a couple of weeks. The brand-new gravel highway was breathtaking for its views of Lake Superior

After blowing up our cheap plastic air mattresses, we laid down in our summer sleeping bags and quickly went to sleep.

Paul Stupack and brother, Bill, hunted for the mines

At dawn the next day we were awakened by a transport truck heading south. The road was open after all!

Two days later, after passing through the cities of Port Arthur and Fort William (now Thunder Bay) we headed up the Red Lake Road which Dad had told us was as wild as the Alaskan Highway.

We had not gone far when Mom called out, “Look, an elk!”

Actually, it was a moose, a big bull, and the first we had ever seen.

Awhile later, another creature, right in the middle of the road.

“Another moose, I mean, no, a deer,” Mom said.

It was a woodland caribou.

Then another big animal.

Mom hesitated. “Well, it’s not a moose or a caribou, and it’s not a deer either.”
It was a horse, a draught horse that probably had strayed from a logging outfit but the sight of it was totally unexpected on the wilderness road.

The town of Red Lake, when we finally got there, resembled something out of a Robert Service poem. Red Lake Road, or Hwy. 105, ended on Howey Street. Many stores along it had false fronts. There were lots of native people walking on the sidewalks or sitting around the outside of the hotel. The native ladies wore long dresses with leggings and many carried babies in tikanagans or back boards. Lots of the men were dressed in buffalo-plaid wool shirts. Black rubber boots, with the tops turned down, was the most common footwear for men and women.

Out on the bay, floatplanes were landing and taking off left and right, filling the air with the roar of their engines. There were several charter airways clustered along the waterfront. Hunters in red wool shirts and red-and-black plaid pants were loading their gear into a variety of floatplanes. One of the most common was the big mustard-yellow Norseman, a plane that was especially loud on takeoff.

There was even a biplane on floats, a Gipsy Moth, which was a prospector’s private plane. Like the Norseman it was fabric-covered but unlike the spiffy commercial craft the biplane was covered in what looked like black BandAids. It was electrician’s tape that the owner used to cover tears in the fabric.

There was a fish-packing plant on the waterfront where wooden boxes were filled with whitefish and walleye, covered in ice and destined for markets in the big cities.

Cars and trucks hurried along the narrow main street while pedestrians, many of them obviously intoxicated, would nonchalantly walk right in front of the moving vehicles. Dogs ran about freely. Ravens sat on the rooftops.

Everybody, it seemed, was laughing.

What a wonderful, bustling place and it was our new home town!

…to be continued

Other postings in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here? 

A Gold Mine

Talking Bill into Selling 

A Yankee in the Canadian Bush -- Talking Bill into selling Bow Narrows Camp

Del, Don and me, Dan, Baughman

Chapter 4

How in the world did my dad get Bill Stupack to sell him the camp?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. However, there are several factors that must have come into play.

1.  Bill hated the business.

Actually, he was entirely anti-social. His idea of a good tourism year was when nobody showed up. Sounds absurd but it was absolutely true. My dad must have realized that as Bill told his stories.

Bill would relate how guests would leave the cabin a mess, be a bunch of drunks (Bill was a tea-totaller), and then, the final insult, not leave an appropriate amount of money on the table when they departed. Bill didn’t have rates, at least not for a long time. He expected his clients to leave an “appropriate” amount of money on the table of the cabin. Few seemed to have met that high – and ambiguous -- bar.

Bill spent the entire winter alone, at his trapping cabin on Prairie Lake, 20 miles west of the camp in what is now Woodland Caribou Wilderness Park. His only human contact occurred when he snowshoed out to have Christmas with Art Carlson and his family in Red Lake and to sell his furs.

Bill and Art almost became partners in the tourism business. It was good fortune they did not because as the saying goes, “partnerships are sinking ships.” Instead they each built a camp. Art built Viking Island Lodge on Douglas Lake and as a result they remained lifelong friends.

Bill tried to co-ordinate his camp business with his summer prospecting and the two occupations were often at odds.

Incredibly, he did have loyal customers. How they even found out about the place is a mystery but they made friends with Bill and came year after year. One group consisted of three families from Kansas. Another was a machinist from Chicago and his friends. Another was Lawrence Harbach who had a lake named after him. So did his friend, Bud Leone.

2.      2. My dad was also a trapper.

There probably were few people in the United States who knew more about trapping than Milo Donald Baughman.

He started as a teenager in the Great Depression by trapping skunks in his hometown of Painseville, Ohio. In those days everybody, even in towns, raised chickens and gardens in their backyard. These attracted skunks and there was nothing worse than the stench of Pepe Le Pew after an altercation with the dog. Residents were more than willing to get rid of the varmints. The pelts, once fleshed, stretched and dried, brought $1 which was a common daily wage at the time.

Dad was a great reader of outdoor magazines like Fur-Fish-Game and got the trapping bug after reading about the exploits of E.J. Dailey and Elmer Kreps. There were fortunes to be made in catching wild fur. For instance, a single silver fox (a color phase of the red fox), could bring over $1,000 at auction, that is until people like Dailey figured out how to raise them in fur farms.

Skunks weren’t the only critters killing chickens either. Raccoons were just as abundant and raccoon coats were all the rage. Raccoons brought in $3 to $5. Dad started checking his trapline before school, after school and full-time on weekends. In no time, he was making more money than his own father who was a railroad engineer but due to the depressed times, only worked a few days a week.

His best friend, Ervie Kitzel, often joined him in his trapping adventures. But alas, everything wasn’t coming up roses or rather smelling like them. The other kids made fun of Dad because no amount of washing would entirely rid him of the smell of skunk. He was in his final year at Harvey High School when he quit and started trapping full-time.

As soon as possible he bought a Model T and enlarged his trapping range to all of northeastern Ohio as well as Pennsylvania and Michigan. His catch then expanded to red fox, coyote, bobcat, mink, muskrat and weasel.

When it wasn’t trapping season, Dad and Ervie painted houses. It is probably from that they both eventually also became carpenters.

3.     3. Bill’s favourite sport was boxing and Dad had been a long practitioner of the sweet science. He had been a Golden Gloves boxer as a youth and turned professional as a heavyweight when he became an adult.

Dad and Bill could talk for hours about famous boxing matches like Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney and the Long Count or about Joe Louis and Max Schmeling. Dad personally knew wild-haired Cleveland fight promoter Don King who would go on to promote the then-up-and-comer Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali).

Dad had been making quite a name for himself as a boxer in the Cleveland area. He was known as “Red” Baughman for his flaming red hair. Although his family had ignored his entire fighting career, they decided to turn out for his biggest – and final – bout. Dad said his manager told him that his best chance against his highly-ranked opponent was to “get to him” early. The guy would start slow but would get stronger in each passing round. So, Dad practically met the guy in his corner when the bell rang, and the man promptly not only knocked Dad out but also broke off his front teeth with a single punch.

“I was set up,” Dad said later. “My own manager set me up. I should have stayed away from him as long as possible, let him tire out. He had a punch like a mule.”

Dad’s mother and sister were just finding their seats when his mom asked, “Which one is Don?”

“He’s the one being carried out on the stretcher,” said his sister.

Dad regained consciousness in the locker room and that is when he had an epiphany: “There’s got to be a better way to make a living.”

He had gold caps put on his two broken front teeth and turned his concentration to becoming a master carpenter.

…to be continued

Other postings in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here? 

A Gold Mine

A Yankee in the Canadian Bush -- A gold mine of fish, wildlife and ... gold mines!

The picturesque Bow Narrows Camp boathouse

Wooden boats, freshly painted for the season, and the icehouse

Chapter 3

By the time Dad and Milt reached the northern end of Red Lake road in 1960 Dad had decided that if they didn’t find a camp to buy in Red Lake, he would sell the boat and maybe the box trailer -- they both had been pounded so badly by the road. He also decided not to bother replacing the muffler and tailpipe they had lost along the way until they had traversed the road in the opposite direction. What would be the point?

The road had been first made in 1948 and was a marvel for how it winded around hills, lakes and swamps, and over rivers for 110 miles. It was all gravel and the bed had not yet been built up enough to be unaffected by the severe winter cold. In early May it was a ribbon of frost boils, potholes and washboard. Beaver dams flooded several areas. Top speed on the best sections was about 40 mph. You crawled through most of the rest and prayed for your shocks, springs and oil pan.

When they finally reached Red Lake they found the town had seemingly changed little from the Gold Rush days. Most of the buildings crowded around the lake. They were all wooden. Most homes still used outhouses. There were a couple of town wells with pitcher pumps where residents drew pails of water. However, modernization was also beginning. A water tank sat atop a small tower at one of the town’s defunct gold mines and it supplied the downtown area and some homes with running water. There was little soil in this part of town, however, so the water line was run above the exposed bedrock in a wooden box insulated with sawdust.

Dad knew a man, Myron Slay, from Willoughby, Ohio, who had a camp for sale on Red Lake. Dad also knew all about the 1926 Red Lake Gold Rush. It had been in newspapers around the world at the time, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and in fact a reporter for the Plain Dealer, George Punker, was from Painseville, Ohio, the same as my dad. George would become legendary in the Gold Rush for being one of the few who made any money, albeit in an unusual fashion.

Up to 10,000 prospectors had streamed into Red Lake by dogsled and canoe in 1926 and were staking claims like mad. In order to do that they needed to fill out an official form from the Ontario Mining Recorder’s office, or in this case, tent since buildings had not yet been made. The Recorder quickly ran out of forms so George, using his typewriter and carbon paper, typed out new ones, selling them for $1 each. With the carbon copies, he was earning $3 as fast as he could pound the keys. Keep in mind the going wage rate in those days was $1 to $2 a day, so by comparison George was making easy money hand over fist. You could say it was a gold mine.

Fifty years later George would stay at Bow Narrows Camp where he recalled the excitement of the gold rush times to my dad. He also wanted to see if he could find the spot where he had taken a rock sample and then, years later, got assayed. It turned out to be mostly gold! He never found the spot again and in true prospector’s tradition, would not even give a general location of where it had been.

Dad and Milt got rooms at the Red Lake Inn and ate breakfast the next day at the Lakeview Café where they asked the owner, John Goodwillie, if they could buy a map of the lake as they were going to head to the west end and see the camp. John, a dapper man who usually wore a tartan vest, gave them a map and on learning they were bound for South Bay Lodge, advised them that it had been closed for years. He also noted that if they wanted to get a cabin, they might be able to do so at Bow Narrows Camp, about five miles farther down the lake.

The intrepid explorers then launched their boat and headed west. As they motored the 15 miles to Slays Bay they were astonished to see large piles of ice on islands and points. It turned out the lake ice had broken up the previous day and they were the first people to travel the lake by water that season.

They eventually found South Bay Lodge and it met neither’s liking. The buildings were log, had been built without foundations and were already rotting badly from the bottom. Dad was also wary of the location. It was in a long narrow bay that opened onto a larger bay. Back on Georgian Bay which was accessible by the Pickerel River where our cabin had been he had seen many days when fishermen in the small boats of the time couldn’t get off shore because of large waves.

Although Dad and Milt had brought their tent and were ready to camp for the night, they decided to see if they could find this Bow Narrows Camp that John had told them about. As they neared the camp Dad was awed by the location.

“This is exactly where a camp should be,” he would later tell my mom and me.

The camp was in a winding narrows that linked several other large and small bays.

“It’s protected from the wind in any direction,” he noted. “A person can always go fishing, no matter the weather.”

The owner, gold rush pioneer Bill Stupack, was astonished to see them pull into the dock as he still believed the lake to be frozen. He gladly rented them one of the camp’s four cabins. They settled into Cabin 1 for the night and that is when Milt began having serious reservations about becoming partners with my dad. Milt was a light sleeper and Dad snored like a foghorn. Milt flopped around on his bed in the one-room cabin for awhile with the pillow over his head then got up and moved to Cabin 2. He could still hear Dad sawing logs like a chainsaw, so he walked past Bill’s private cabin in the dark and settled down in the third cabin. No good, still within earshot. There was only one cabin left so he went there and picked the bedroom farthest away from the thunder. At last!

The next day they chewed the fat for a long time with Bill who they found to be a spellbinding storyteller and a real character. He was a short man, about five-foot four, with wide shoulders, muscular thighs and arms like oaks. He was built like a tank.

They also looked around the place. There wasn’t much to it: four rental cabins, Bill’s house, a boathouse, icehouse and a few sheds. Only one of the rental cabins was log; the rest were frame buildings. This camp too had been made in 1948 and all of its buildings were also setting on the ground without foundations,. But frame buildings are easy to jack up, Dad knew. It would only take a week to have the entire camp – with the exception of the log cabin – sitting safely on flat rocks for a foundation. Any floor joists that had rotted by being in contact with the ground could be splinted or, if necessary, replaced.

“Have you ever thought about selling the camp?” Dad asked Bill.

“No, never,” he said and excused himself to start preparing the camp’s wooden boats for being put back into the water after spending the winter overturned in the yard.

“We can help with that,” said Dad. “You know what the Chinese say: Many hands make light work!”

Bill laughed and was surprised to find that his new guests actually knew how to scrape, putty and sand a boat to make it ready for painting.

By supper they had all four boats ready for a coat of paint the next day.

“That would have taken me four days,” said Bill.

In the days that followed Dad and Milt explored the rest of the west end of Red Lake. They were awestruck at what they found. It was the best fishing waters they had ever seen although they only could get a couple of northern pike to bite.

“It’s too early,” said Bill. “Most of the fish are still spawning. You should try for lake trout, they will be biting. Try trolling the shores of Pipestone or Trout (Bays). Use a big spoon. You don’t even need to add weight. They’ll be right on the surface.”

They followed his advice and sure enough, started catching fish.

There also seemed to be an abundance of big game. On almost every outing they encountered moose, whitetail deer and black bear, usually swimming across the narrows and bays. And there was an abundance of beaver, muskrat, mink and otter.  To an outdoorsman, it was pure heaven.

The two would-be partners were also mystified by all the abandoned buildings around the lake. There were veritable vacant communities scattered around: in the narrows where the camp was located, on the west and northeast sides of Pipestone Bay, at the end of Trout Bay and Golden Arm. They were like ghost towns.

Bill, who had come to the goldrush as a 16-year-old, knew the stories behind everything having been there before there were any buildings, then when things were thriving and finally, after everyone had left.

Back in ’26, prospectors and developers found gold in basically two places, at the east end of the 30-mile-long lake and at the west end. As time went on, the finds at the east end proved to be paydirt. There was only a taste of gold at the west-end mines. So they folded and all of their workers, many of them with families, moved east.

There actually had been far more buildings than what was left in 1960. Many people moved their homes. If they were log, they were unstacked from the top, thrown into the lake and pulled in a boom to the other end of the lake. If frame construction, the boards were pulled off, stacked in boats or barges and then reused.

A building then being used for a liquor store in the town of Red Lake had actually once been a store right across the narrows from camp. Many buildings had been deconstructed and their lumber made into the Royal Canadian Legion in Red Lake.

There were a bunch of defunct mines left at the west end: one at the end of an old road at the end of Trout Bay, one on an island in Middle Bay, one on the west side of Pipestone Bay (it still had railway tracks running beside the lake), another at the end of a road on the northeast of Pipestone Bay, one just upstream from the camp, and two reached by roads at the end of Golden Arm. When you flew in a floatplane or a ski plane, you immediately noticed something: all of the mine headframes lined up. They seemingly had been made in the same gold vein.

Lots of the mines had old steam engines that had driven the hoists for the mine shaft. The shafts themselves were all vertical. If you looked down from the top, all you saw was water, at lake level.

…to be continued

Other postings in this series:

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here?