Paul St. Pierre story on the Chilcotin in today's Vancouver Sun
Mike Cleven
ironmtn at BIGFOOT.COM
Tue Dec 5 22:43:22 UTC 2000
FYI folks: full story copyright the Vancouver Sun in today's issue;
tried to get a web URL but it doesn't show up in the location window
other than as www.vancouversun.com; so am quoting full at length below;
if you want to see the accompanying pictures you'll have to visit the
website directly. There are a few uses of Chinook words here, as well
as mention that quite a few are still in use in the local parlance:
Paul St. Pierre:
The Past Frontier
CHILCOTIN: Folks on the plateau these
days have hydro, fast trucks, satellite TV
and the Internet. Then there's what they've
lost.
Paul St. Pierre Special to The Vancouver Sun
BIG CREEK - To
know the old
Chilcotin Country is
gone and is not going
to come back, drive
the old stage road
between Williams
Lake and Anahim
Lake on blacktop, the
car on cruise control
and two local radio
stations coming in
loud and clear.
You meet a truck
delivering bottled
water. Yuppiewater in
Chilcotin, land of the
wild and free rivers?
He's making a profit
selling it, otherwise
he wouldn't be here.
And over another
rise, confident his
radar detector won't
squeal, comes a
sporty Pontiac, driven
by a civil servant who
commutes between
Williams Lake and
Alexis Creek.
Commuting, to Alexis.
Well, well. Wasn't it
only the day before
yesterday that the
woman guest
complained at the log
cabin Chilcotin Hotel
that she had no night
light when the power
plant shut down at
midnight?
Sammy Barrowman,
the owner, who
boasted his hotel had
the only flush toilet
between Williams
Lake and Yokahama,
was severe with her.
"Madam, have you
any conception of
how far it is to the
next hotel?"
Not far now, Sammy.
Commuting distance.
In the days of the old dirt road, there
weren't many
vehicles of any kind. Red McCue's big
delivery truck
("Get the Hill Out of My Way," said the
motto) was called
The Stage, for reasons unknown. There never
was a
stage coach on the plateau. When the
occasional
government inspector turned up with weigh
scales it was
the duty of any traveller to warn Red to dump
his
overload into the jackpines until he'd been
weighed.
At the start of Cariboo Flats, where the last
migrating
caribou band was shot out to zero in the
1940s, was an
emergency cabin for travellers. When you came
over
this road in winter at 40 below, which was
the
temperature that used to come here and stay,
a wise
driver checked his mileage gauge from one
house
lantern light to the next. You needed to
know, if the
vehicle quit, which was the shortest walk to
safety
because you could not walk far at 40 below.
The
emergency cabins served where the road ran
too long
between lantern lights.
Ike Singh, the Chinese Canadian with the East
Indian
name, often used them when trucking in to his
general
store in Anahim Lake. He'd bought the store
from Stan
Dowling who, in the '30s, brought the first
gas-powered
vehicle into Anahim, driving on wagon roads,
cattle trails
and frozen lakes, because no complete road
yet existed.
Lester Dorsey was then still running pack
trains
following the old Precipice Trail to the
saltchuck at Bella
Coola for the Hudson's Bay company. Like more
than
one man, he'd come up here on the run. He was
making
his horse rear at a country fair in
Washington when the
horse came down on a citizen's head.
Lester ran until he couldn't run farther.
Years later,
someone from his hometown found him and told
him
laughing, "The son of a bitch got up and
walked away,
Lester."
Now, policemen with radar on the road? There
was only
one, count one, policeman for the whole area,
which is
about a third the size of France.
At least half of the highway's shiny pickup
trucks are
now driven by Indians. Week before last,
wasn't it, they
rode saddle horse or moved in wagons drawn by
half
broke cayuses. It took them days, not a few
hours, to get
to Williams Lake Stampede from the western
side of the
plateau and days to get home again.
Those who got drunk, and everybody worth
while was
supposed to get drunk at Stampede time, were
thrown
into jail. Public drunkenness was then a
criminal offence.
The ranchers for whom they cowboyed would
phone the
police to locate their strays and request
that they be
turned loose on the promise that the rancher
would be in
town to post bail for them some time real
soon.
Today the Indians have big cab pickups,
hydro, TV,
Internet connections, handsome band
administration
offices and lots of city lawyers on their
payroll, some of
whom are themselves natives. Finally, they
have a
heaping great pile grievances and land
claims.
Instead of the occasional drunkup at Stampede
and
other occasions, there is now a lot of
continuous heavy
drinking which peaks on the day the welfare
cheques
arrive. The suicide rate is now well above
the national
average.
In the old days -- must we note one more time
that they
aren't really old? -- many of these people
had the
reputation "Good man in the bush, poor man in
town."
Although some might like to deny it now, the
whites
tended to treat them as second-class citizens
and a few
would say no native matured beyond age of 14.
However there were also deep and lifelong
friendships
across the racial lines and a lot of mutual
respect.
This raises the question of whether today's
First Nations
people, provided with schools, health
services and
limitless forms of counselling and aid, are
happier than
in the years when they got by, proudly but
thinly, by
cowboying, shooting squirrels and taking hay
contracts.
It takes a wiser man than me to answer that
question.
However the same question can be raised about
whites.
Throughout this nation, cities, towns and
villages are far
better places to live than they were half a
century ago. I
know no exceptions to that rule. But how many
communities are happier places today? Are
there any?
I am persuaded that the happiness of
societies does rise
and fall, but it does not do so in
synchronization with the
society's material prosperity. Man is an
economic animal
to only a limited extent and dollars can
never satisfy the
hungers of his soul.
Whatever the case, the evidence of material
prosperity
is everywhere in this country, which was once
the last
stand of the North American open range cattle
rancher,
driven here out of the settled places to the
high, cold
land at the northwestern edge of the
continent's
grasslands, still searching for the
independence he
never found.
Logging long ago replaced ranching as the
cash cow, it
is the driving force of the economy, in a
region which
never expected to see payrolls, regular work
hours, paid
holidays, sick time and unions.
The chattering classes hate the loggers,
ostensibly
because of clearcutting, in truth because
they are guilty
of making money and profits.
As for the clearcutting, that was always
nature's way
here in the Lodgepole Pine forests but in the
old days it
was fire, not tree snippers, that bared the
ground. Those
fires, sometimes, were set by ranchers intent
on opening
up new land to grass and cattle. The ranchers
hadn't
much use for loggers either, but in their
case it was for
the usual reason -- that they had failed to
become
ranchers.
The land is now in comfortable middle age,
fatter,
slower, even a bit stodgy, certainly much
less rich in
God's great gift of foolishness.
Now it has Internet, 200-channel TV antennas,
marijuana grow operations, both outdoors and
the
indoor kind and although no community is big
enough to
have a resident lawyer, two lawyers might
make a living
in one or two places.
And, of course, as elsewhere, once a place
has
blacktop, stop signs, plumbing inspectors and
grief
counsellors, lovers of the wilderness are
never far
behind. They come with their placards, their
strange
slogans and their irritating habit of telling
the locals that
they know not the harm they do the
environment or the
wickedness that is theirs.
They can claim as much right to be here as
anyone.
There is nothing wrong with mortgage payers,
pro- and
anti-abortionists or people who like
McDonald's
hamburgers. They have as much right to be
here as the
people before them, although one might wish
they hadn't
lost the priceless gift of being able to
laugh at
themselves.
A few traces of the past are to be found.
Many a ranch
house, well supplied with reliable B.C.
Hydro, keeps a
wood cook stove because the woman of the
house
insists on it. (However, no woman has yet
been sighted
who wants to return to the days before
refrigeration,
drying moosemeat -- "the Queen's beef" -- in
the sun to
make jerky.)
Men who meet after a few months apart still
ask the one
important question: "How'd ya winter?" How
you
wintered was a life and death affair. Also a
regular form
of greeting is "Tell me a good lie."
You will hear a gas siphon called a Chilcotin
Credit Card
and people will say that when a Chilcotin
woman has
twins there are three of them. Hiyu (many),
skookum
(strong), mesachie (bad), cultus (worthless)
and other
Chinook words spot conversations but all is
fading,
fading, fading fast in this land that once
occupied a
position just on the outer edge of
probability.
Those now called old timers must have been
among the
world's most self-reliant people. Nothing
seemed
impossible once they made up their minds to
do it.
Norman Lee drove cattle to the Klondike gold
rush and
Dick Church drove a tractor to the source of
Big Creek
one winter to pull a wrecked plane out of
Lorna Lake.
Neither Norman nor Dick made a nickel on
their projects
and neither regretted trying.
Those people asked nothing of the government
and
were neither surprised nor disappointed when
nothing
was exactly what they got.
That is now completely reversed. When Wayne
Plummer's hay meadow cabin burned to the
ground
while left alone and untended, the police
were curious.
"Mr. Plummer, does anyone hold a grudge
against you?
Can you think of anybody who wants to do you
harm?"
He thought a while and said, "Only the
government."
One must beware. Few things are more tiresome
than
old farts going on and on about good old
days. They
weren't all good in Chilcotin. The land had
its share of
faults.
There weren't many murders, but there weren't
many
people either and statisticians might find
the murder rate
was high. The justice rate was low. One of
two
commissioners appointed to investigate a
death, there
being no coroner, reports, "He was beat up
pretty bad
but we figured if his heart hadn't stopped
he'd still be
alive so we put it down as heart trouble."
There was more than one case of incest in
that lonely
country. Too many young men knew no other
form of
social life than getting falling down drunk
before the
dance was two hours old. Teachers in one-room
log
cabins, and ranch wives in kitchens could
seldom bring
the great outside world to their students for
introduction.
A country okay for Swedes and grizzly bears,
but hard
on horses and school teachers.
I am reminded of one ranch wife who said "I'm
almost 60
and there are only three things I can do
well. I can
handle a wood stove, I make good bread and I
can back
up a five-horse trailer."
Or another, Mickey Dorsey, heroic wife of the
heroic
Lester, who noted that in ranch life the day
always came
when a mother could no longer tell her
daughters from
her sons. They could rope and ride and doctor
sick
horses. "They'll make wonderful wives for
ranchers, but
that is all they will ever know."
Why were they in Chilcotin, this happy little
band of
people, individualistic, resourceful,
independent and,
buried not far beneath the casual good humor,
immensely, some would say absurdly, proud of
themselves? Indeed, most were guilty of one
of what the
Bible calls the Seven Deadly Sins, the sin of
pride.
Was there something in the name? The word
Chilcotin
is, by one definition, an attempt to say in
English the
aboriginal word for "River of The Young Men."
They were there for a dream, the kind of
dreams young
men have and middle aged men think they know
better
than to hang on to.
Of course it is good that in the year 2000,
Chilcotin has
joined the rest of the world. A little
different now, but no
longer unique. It would be churlish not to
rejoice for
today's people.
But I will always be grateful that I knew
Chilcotin when it
was young, wild, funny and free, dreaming the
glorious
and impossible dreams that only youth knows.
____________________
Paul St. Pierre, novelist, syndicated
newspaper and
Internet columnist, former police
commissioner, lapsed
politician and a fair wingshot, divides his
time between
the Chilcotin, Fort Langley and Mexico. He
has been
exploring the Chilcotin for about 50 years.
He is the recipient of the BC Gas 2000
Lifetime
Achievement Award.
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