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?