Where to sit and rest
Nazaire wandered the main road in Edmonton. He hoped to sit someplace quiet and think while Raoul sought the general mercantile for pipe tobacco. He… Read More »Where to sit and rest
Nazaire wandered the main road in Edmonton. He hoped to sit someplace quiet and think while Raoul sought the general mercantile for pipe tobacco. He… Read More »Where to sit and rest
“She stays here,” Nazaire yelled as white knuckles squeezed one edge of the coffin. Spit flung from his mouth as he rocked on his heels.… Read More »The Home Viewing of Victoria Poulin
Rarely did Raoul Poulin pray. A practical man, he found happiness each day while he expected hard work to make good things happen. When it… Read More »Wayside Cross
“What’s going on? Are you attached to this woman?” “No.” Nazaire sat on his cot, putting on his socks and pants. “How’s it going to… Read More »Discord
The prospectors walked, slipping over mossy cover. Lazy black slugs thicker than a hog-eye slithered across leaves, dropping sperm in their shadows. On the underside… Read More »Smokers in the Rocky Mountains
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“Me, I got a working team, Louis, and Joe, they’re geldings and black, so black you can see the slightest bit of dirt on them.”… Read More »Louis and Joe
They maneuvered around the body with their feet fighting the snow for balance. Nazaire grabbed the inside of the elbow and pulled down, revealing a… Read More »The Snowburst
Nazaire felt a growing unease and could not place the source. Thoughts of stinging words from his brothers-in-law collided in his mind. One ghost town after another displayed a lack of civilization for hundreds of miles. How had all these villages come to nothing? The isolation became too much for his unsettled mind. It seemed the world had come to an end.
The only signs of life were foreign; a few pictographs of braves in canoes on cave walls, and once, an impressive Thunderbird above a herd of bison painted on a rock. Nazaire pointed out each discovery for Raoul. To be so cut off seemed unnatural. One morning, Sherman dispatched Lennox to reconnoiter ahead for flooded waterways, and then Ignace appeared on the shores of Agimak Lake, another nothing village surrounded by nothing for hundreds of miles in every direction, home to less than thirty souls.
Everywhere the ghost town held remnants from gone-by gold mines and quarries. Abandoned bits of scaffolding sat half-built, resembling bones of a skinned whale. One silent roadhouse made up the entire affair. Its one feature was an old steam warping tugboat used in the lumber boom years that all the men were looking at with severe interest.
“Alligator, they called it, on account it moved in water, then crawled up on land,” one old villager said.
He pointed to the rusted cable lying idle on shore. “The steel cables or ‘warping rope’ wound onto a winch drum thirty inches wide, the first amphibious craft of its kind. The winch would drive onto the main line shaft from its steam engine, a West and Peachy engine.”
Sherman’s men looked at the rusty body with more interest and circled it for a better look.
“They’re good an rotted out now, but down here, the black was once white oak runners on the flat bottom there.”
“I’ll be damned. How big was she,” Nazaire asked.
The old villager scratched a chin and gave it a think. “The hull stretched thirty-two feet long and four feet deep with a beam of ten foot.”
“How’d it work.”
“The alligator would tie up to a log boom on the river there, and hold back hundreds of logs. The head logger moved the boom with that cable, one-mile long it is, tied to some tree on the other side.”
The men found a welcome distraction in inspecting the odd, flat bottom tug. A few miles beyond the village with the banks of Agimak Lake still visible, a sudden whack struck the dank air. Some of the men crouched down, surprised and unmoving.
© By Charles Macnamara – This image is available from the Archives of Ontario under the item reference code C 120-3-0-0-33.
Read More »Ignace, Ontario 1907
Nazaire thought of the Cree who stopped in camp last night. The Camp Boss had asked how the men would go forward with word of… Read More »The Cut Line