Joe McWilliams
A version of this story first appeared in August of 2002.
Some people don’t care much about history. They see garbage where somebody else sees the remnants of a lost civilization.
The anti-historian would bulldoze the junk and build a shopping mall. The history nut would start excavating and cataloguing.
I stayed up way past my bedtime one night watching a story about the Sphinx. I’m not sure if it has improved my life to know that until about 1900 the old Sphinxter was nothing more than a head rising out of the sand, but it sure is interesting. Apparently, nobody knew about the rest of it until an enterprising Italian started digging.
There’s nothing Sphinx-like in our neck of the woods. But we are not exactly bereft of interesting stuff or stories. Not at all!
A few years ago, for example, a friend with a cabin by the river had some willows bulldozed, exposing the sandy soil in the former old town of Slave Lake. What emerged was an amateur archaeologist’s dream. The soil there is full of bits and pieces of glass and metal implements – many no doubt dating back to the days when a busy Hudson’s Bay Company trading post was located there. A perfect place for a science class dig, if anyone was so inclined.
You may have read in an issue of this newspaper about a sunken paddle wheeler near Dog Island. Seen from the air on a perfect day in the late 1970s, it begs to be rediscovered by divers.
I stumbled on an interesting piece in The Leader archives from Feb. 5, 1992. It’s an Alaska Highway story about a famous plane crash during the wartime construction of the highway. The plane disappeared on a flight from Fort Nelson to Edmonton and was missing for five years. Rumour had it the plane was carrying gold or cash and lots of it.
The plane was also carrying Bert Paul Coté of Falher, who died along with 10 others. Their remains were brought to the Fort Nelson inquest in 1948, at which my mother was the stenographer.
“There wasn’t any gold,” she said, although that didn’t stop the Edmonton Journal, Time magazine and others from breathlessly reporting the possibility. Coté’s brother Amos showed me a copy of a Journal story from 1948 that repeated the rumours of lost bullion, without offering a shred of evidence. Those were the days, when newspapers could toss around God knows what kind of crap with little accountability.
What? They still do? I’ll have to look into that!
I had a lot of fun researching and writing that story and reading it again after a few years. That’s why I’m looking forward to the next big thing, historically speaking.
Maybe it’ll be a forest fire that wipes out all the trees in Alberta. That’s what an elderly fellow from Wabasca is predicting. He calls it ‘The Regeneration’ and says it happens every hundred years or so. The last time it did, the sky went dark for 10 days and when it was over there was nothing left – so he says.
That’s history on a Biblical scale! About as verifiable as the Bible, too!
I hear there’s an ex-WW II POW camp sinking into the leaf mould near Fawcett Lake. Or rather the garbage left over from the camp.
Might be worth checking out!