George Caissie Interview 2006

 

NIPIGON HISTORICAL MUSEUM                         February 22, 2006

Interview

 

George Caissie

Resident of Nipigon

Children; Rita, Donna, Nanette, Georgie.

 

I came here from Bathurst, New Brunswick in 1945.  I was single and was 22 years old.  My wife and I were married in 1950.  I came here because there was no work back home and I heard they were hiring in Red Rock at the mill.  It didn’t work out that way for me though because I ended up working in the bush.  When I first came here I came up by train, which cost me twenty two dollars for the ride to get here.  I came up here with a couple of other guys but hardly any of them stayed here, one of the guys got married to my sister and they went to Hornepayne and was a Foreman in the Bush there. My other chum went to B.C., and my brother came up with me and a couple more but they’re all passed away now.  The one guy who came up Urban Luce he stayed and is still here he worked in the Cabin.  Three or four of the guys I came here with all moved to B.C.   It didn’t take no longer than it would take today and it took three days to get here.  The trains were run by steam engines back then and there was no diesel then.  I landed down by the Little Mill, and there was a little CN station there and there was no houses down there then, it was all bush and when I got off there I thought “Holy cow, there’s nothing here”.  There was another station up by the main street which was the CP rail line and there was a water tower up there for the steam engine to fill up.  There was only one house down by the CN railway station and I thought “Where the hell are we now?”.  The next day when I woke up I thought “Gee I’m not going to stay here very long by the look of this place. There was only the one house and there was no lights, Brevo’s was the only house there, they just burnt that house down last year.  There was nothing in Nipigon in those days, the Ovillio and the Nipigon Inn which was where I stayed for about 75cents a night which payed for your room and board.  There was a taxi stand at the corner on main street beside where Doc’s store is, and all they had there for their office was a little shack.  Nick Salo was there too and he had a store and E.C Everett had a store too and I remember E.C coming into the Bush camps to sell the workers pants, and socks and suits but he would make exchanges with you instead of getting money.

 There was nothing but bush up where Greenmantle is.  There was nothing up on the highway either just a trail up there.  Rajala’s owned a lot of land then and it ran all the way to Red Rock and where the trailer park is too.  They still own land and there’s a lake in behind the trailer park and he and his wife are buried there and one of their grandchildren too.  He owned all the way from where the police station is and across the Golf Course road and up to just past where the weigh scales is.  They passed on all their land to their children and they had at least seven kids. 

 

Back when I worked in the bush, everything was done by hand not like today with everything being automatic and I probably wouldn’t have gotten hurt like I did. In our day, we had to haul a buck saw into the bush and we had to pile all the wood by hand and when the cut was all done in the winter and fall the wood was hauled out by a team of horses and we would be up at five in the morning to work and sometimes it was thirty or forty below and even sometimes fifty below.   The first camp I went to on the river drive was camp 16, and the first bush camp I worked at was camp 43 and I worked for Nipigon Lake Timber.  That was the area up by Polly Lake and we used to take the horses up from Polly to the camp in the fall.  Sometimes there would be thirty or forty horses kept there and we would bring them up the road.  There were barns at the bush camp to keep the horses in when we needed them in the fall and winter.  We stayed in Bunkhouses which were made out of logs and sometimes there were 75 to 100 people to a bunkhouse.  I also worked in Beardmore at camp 72, and I worked at Black Sturgeon in camp 14 on this side of Gull Bay. 

 

We had portable saw mill’s here too and we used to saw ties and we loaded them into box cars, there was one down by the Plywood Mill way down at the far end by the lake.  They weren’t very big mill’s there were two of them down there and they were portable and we used to saw ties for Don Clark and he sold them to CN or CP.  After we sawed them they peeled them and took them out of the water and there were guys there peeling the ties and I used to holler down to the guys from the Saw Mill and I had a team of horses and I would haul the ties to the CN station that was down that way.  We used to haul the ties there and we had a raft there, then we had to load them by hand and there were two guys to load and one guy in the truck.  I used to load 1800 ties a day and I got paid 2 cents a tie and I would make sixteen or seventeen dollars a day which was big money in those days.  There were a lot of smaller outfits too back then including Don Clark.  Ken Buchanen got started back then because he inherited his father’s company but he always worked when he was a kid.  

 

When I first went on the river drive there were two taxi stands here.  There was Nykannen and he was doing the hiring for the Great Lakes Paper Company so we got there in the morning and they were hiring for the Red Rock Mill right on the street.  I had just quit from a mill down home and I quit to come here so I said to myself  “I  just quit from that mill why should I work for a mill here”.  So I put my name in for the River drive and I went and seen the guy who was hiring and he said “I’ll take you up tomorrow morning” he said.  There were three or four of us who were hired that day and he used to drive us up the Cameron Falls road by taxi to camp 16 which was the Elizabeth Lake road and was where the Great Lakes had their road.  He would drive us and drop us off at the beginning of that road and from there we would ride in on a four wheeled wagon on the back of a tractor that would tow us behind it.  You couldn’t get into the camp by vehicle because of the shape of the roads you’d get stuck for sure, they didn’t have roads like they do today.  Highway 17 wasn’t built then they started to build that later on to Marathon and it was all gravel there for a long time.

 

I first started to work at the age of fourteen in New Brunswick and I worked on the river drive there.  I made fourteen cents an hour.  For a while there was a paper mill down there and they had camps all over. I got hired on at the paper mill because my dad worked there and that was the only way to get into the mill there was by family. The first job they gave me at the mill was cleaning bricks the red little bricks they saved and we had to clean the mortar off, In those days they saved everything.  There was lots of bush down there, I think one time in Quebec, Shelter Bay was the name of the bush camp there and we used to have to take a ferry to get to work.  I remember it took a long time to get to work because the ferry made stops all along the way and they would deliver mail because there was no road all along the St. Lawrence.  Then finally we got to Shelter Bay, you couldn’t get out of there in the winter time we had to get out by plane.  But, I worked whenever there was work.  I used to do rafting down here in the Nipigon Bay and we used to send the wood to Great Lakes Paper Mill and there was big tubs down here that would grab a hold of the rafts and we used to drive the wood down the river under the bridge.  They used to beach comb down in the Bay, Leo Lespi, and Carl Atkinson, and the Dampier’s beach combed too.  The money wasn’t the greatest in Beach Combing but it was something to do and they made ten percent of everything they pulled in.  When Don Clark died his son took over the business and he didn’t do very good with the business and it folded up and that was the end of our job.  So then I worked with the Construction Company in 1954, as an iron worker and I got paid 50 cents an hour, and I did that job for 25 years and I worked all over, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and I used to go three months at a time sometimes.  My wife and children stayed here and I would go to work.  I was up in Little Lake and Fox Lake for three months at a time and it was tough in those days because you had to leave your family behind.  When I worked in the bush in the winter time  I would be gone for six weeks at a time there too because you would stay there in the camp.  They had everything there for us to live they had Cooks and Cook-ees and we were well fed.  We paid 75 cents a day for room and board and when our saws broke we paid for that too. If we broke our buck saw blade it would be a dollar and something and it would come off our pay cheque that we would get once a month or a cash order which was an advance along with our room and board   There was a scaler that would come into the bush and scale the wood, every two weeks he would come and scale.  Dr. Jefferey would come up every once in a while to pull a tooth or something but there were no doctor’s stationed at the camps so you had to survive the best you could. If you got hurt it took a long time to get you out because there were no planes to get you out so you either came out by horse or by truck if it could get in.  I worked in the Bush up at Black Sturgeon too and at the time I worked up there I remember there was only two camps.  They were pretty big camps though and the name of that outfit was Pigeon Timber.  We got up at five o’clock in the morning and we finished at six o’clock when supper time was and we would get back and harvest the horses, come into the camp and wash and everybody would be eating just like a bunch of wolves because we were so hungry and then to bed.  When I worked at the Black Sturgeon camp they would bring us a hot lunch right in the bunch.  We would cut the wood in the summer time and in the winter time we used the horses to haul the wood out. 

 

When I came here it was just after the war and there were hard times then and everybody suffered.  My wife was working at the Pine Portage camp when I met her in 1948 and she worked in the commissaire which was where they came in and played games and had something to eat. She  worked in the Post Office there too and the camp was split into separate dormitories with the girls in one camp and the boys in the other.  There were married couples there too but they slept in separate quarters too.  I went there to eat quite often and you could eat for a dollar.  I was working up at Pine Portage on the Slasher and we had to slash all the wood from the lakes before they flooded the lake out. We also slashed the hydro line trail that ran from Pine Portage all the way to Thunder Bay. We stayed in tents in the winter time and when you came in at night after work everything would be frozen all the eggs and potatoes.  It was contract work and so it was cheaper for them to pay us then to build camps.   Pine Portage wasn’t there when I first came here there was a beautiful river there before they put the dam in.  If you were to see the river before they built the dam, it was terrible what they did to that river.  When you used to fish on Lake Superior you could come up the Nipigon River and up to Lake Hannah and Lake Nipigon.  They built Cameron Falls, Alexander dams first to supply electricity to the Thunder Bay District and then they built another one up at Pine Portage. 

 

 

?Salo had a camp up the Cameron Falls road and he wanted to know if I wanted to go and cut Poplar for him, so I went up and my wife and I built a little shack to live in.  And it was just big enough for my wife and I who was pregnant at the time with our son Georgie.  So I took my wife up there into that little shack which we built just by Jessie Lake.  The only way we got food up there was Fred Shwetz who used to take groceries up to Pine Portage for Zechner’s store and he would stop by our place.  I dug a hole in the ground to keep the food from spoiling and I put a wooden box in the ground and the meat stayed good.  We cooked on a Coleman stove and it was alright to cook that way.  When it was close to my wife’s delivery I had been gone down to the Rossport Derby and my mother in law lived in Nipigon and our son was born then.  My wife would walk from our cabin all the way into Nipigon and sometimes she would get a ride, but everybody walked then because not too many people had cars. There wasn’t that much work here at that time , Abitibi had camps up Cameron Falls but that was long before we went. What brought Nipigon up quite a bit was Pine Portage and the Gas company too.  At that time you couldn’t get across the tracks at lunch time because it was that busy.  You couldn’t get a place to stay either because all the bush workers, and pipeline workers were renting down town.  There were a lot of tourists in those days too because the fishing was so good, and in the summer time it used to be just packed here. The Hudson’s Bay store did really well then too.  A lot of people contribute the fish loss to the river drive but that’s where the fish would hide was under the logs, and they blame it on pollution from the mills but after they built the dams was when the fish declined.  I was working on Lake Superior in the bay and when we used to come into the Nipigon docks you could just see big schools of Pickerel there.  And where the Nipigon Bridge is we used to go down and fish Pickerel there Dr.  Somerleigh fished there and a bunch of others and you could see the Pickerel running through the river.  You could pretty near walk across the river then and then they built the dam at Pine Portage and that was the end of the Pickerel there.  There were big trout there and everything and the fish would go and spawn up into Lake Nipigon but then Pine Portage came.  It also hurt the commercial fisherman too because where the dams are is where the fish would go to spawn.  You used to be able to swim down at the Mudflats too but they diverted the water down there.  There used to be a little creek down there too but that’s where all the smelts were. We also used to get smelts in the Stillwater Creek down at the bottom of it where it flows into Lake Superior.

 

 Back then there was only one Forest Warden who was Garr Evans, not like they have now which is a whole bunch of “Conservation Officers”. If you were walking down the street in Nipigon and there was a forest fire, and they saw you they would recruit you right on the spot to go and fight the fire.  That was in the sixties and you couldn’t turn them down then.  

 

Billy Milne and Johnny Ahl used to bring supplies out to the camps and they stopped up in Beardmore too.  Buster Gagnon used to work on the boats too for Domtar on Lake Helen.  When we worked here we got paid by the day and we made six dollars a day.  There was a union started in around 1955, and all it did for us was go on strike.  I was 64 years old when I retired and I’ve been retired now for about 16 years.