Tag Archives: Lynn Shervill

Hans Tugnum

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Every June, we used to walk along the ridge above Driftwood Creek from Hans Tugnum’s gravel pit on Gilbert Road to our place—often with Gisela Mendel and Nancy Leighton. We were always on the lookout for clematis, warblers and bears; the clematis likes the brush under the spruce trees, the warblers like the sunny slopes and the bears like the anthills. We didn’t really know Hans and Emily then (though one of his foster daughters, Brenda, became friends during my writing of Canyon Creek: A Script as Elizabeth and Jack Joseph were her grandparents). But Hans is one of those neighbours you realize you can go to when you need to check the facts about local history. Since researching his story about Driftwood Creek bush mills, Lynn has spent time time with Hans and, if you’re a local history buff, you’ll recognize many of the names that come up in his story below.

 

Hans Tugnum

The headwaters of Driftwood Creek are located at one end of a glacier in a col high above the old mine workings in Silverking Basin. The other end of the glacier drains into the Reiseter or Twobridge Creek watershed. Within these two watersheds Hans Tugnum, who emigrated at age six from Switzerland to the Bulkley Valley with his family in 1936, has spent more than 80 of his 87 years.

Hans’ parents, Conrad and Walburga (Wally), bought property at Glentanna where the Telkwa High Road and Snake Road intersect, a site by then rich in Bulkley Valley history. Prospector Danny Moore built a roadhouse there in 1904 and George Duhamel, a Yukon Telegraph lineman, built a second roadhouse—Glacier House—about a quarter mile closer to Moricetown on the High Road.

An adjacent property, the Chapman ranch, was staked by Peavine Harvey in 1903, owned by mining promoter James Cronin (Cronin mine) and operated by Charlie Chapman for whom Chapman Lake is named. The land was later purchased by Mike Mesich, father of Emil, Tony, Tommy, Steve and Kitty Mesich.

Conrad bought his property (Lots 861 and 862) from the Lapadats and lived in the roadhouse built by Danny Moore. He dismantled that place and built a new, squared-timber home in which the Bill Brandsma family now lives. According to Stories of Swiss Settlement in the Bulkley Valley, Conrad had a mixed farming operation that included hay, grain crops, pork and dairy and beef cattle.

Other neighbours over the years at Glentanna included George Sharp, Matt Mackenzie, the Sturzeneggers, the Veenstras and Hark Vandermeulen.

Hans, along with brothers George and Florian and sister Margrit, fed or milked cows before and after school, cut firewood and helped in the kitchen. During the day they attended the Glentanna school. According to Hans, he started school in 1937 under the tutelage of Della Herman (nee Carpenter). She was followed by Florence Lundstrom and a series of other teachers including June Fletcher (Al’s wife and Della’s sister) and Anna Morris (nee Edmonds).

Some of Hans’ classmates included Johnny and Annie Lapadat, Helen and Irene Oulton, and Ernie and Otto Zust.

“Many of the kids, like the Malkows and the Lundstroms, had to walk three miles or more to school,” Hans said. “On the weekends we went exploring, hiking, squirrel hunting or horseback riding. There were very few cars then so mostly we just visited with one another.”

Hans quit school when he was 15 and stayed working on the farm until he was 25.

“Then I partnered with Hark Vandermeulen and we ran a sawmill on crown land up Twobridge Creek.”

For much of the next 10 years Hans lived either in the bush or at a property on Dieter Road and ran sawmills, one of them located off Old Babine Lake Road near what is now the Rabbit Road. He said a typical operation consisted of a bunkhouse and cookhouse, the mill and about eight employees. “Between Houston and Hazelton,” he said, “there were at least 100 bush mills.”

Just about the same time he started in the sawmilling business Hans married his wife Emily. “I met Emily in 1951,” he said. “We were on and off, mostly off, for the next five years. But I was persistent and we got married in 1956. We lived at Dad’s for about three years and then in the bush after that. She was my camp cook and a damned good woman.”

Together they raised six children—one of their own, two adopted children and three foster children.

The view from the ridge walk from Tugnum’s along Driftwood Road.

Hans quit the sawmilling business in 1966 after being injured in a car accident. In 1973 he bought his current property which borders Driftwood Creek just off Gilbert Road, spending time with his growing family and close friends such as the late Oscar Pederson, who started coming to the valley from Saskatchewan in the 1940s to work in the bush mills, and with Ronnie Gilbert, who was born in the valley.

Ronnie, Hans and friend Bev Brinkhurst built a snowmobile trail from Ronnie’s house on Dieter Road all the way to Smithers Landing on Babine Lake. According to Hans it took the “old guys” about eight hours to make the trip “but some of the younger guys could do it in five or six. We’re too old for that now and the trail is overgrown anyway.”

A director of the Bulkley Valley Credit Union for many years, Hans is now working with the Smithers Co-housing Association.

“The idea for that,” he said, “is to get back to the way it was … visiting, helping each other. To have a sense of community again.”

Thanks to Lynn Shervill and Hans for this story.

Silverking Basin

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by Harry Kruisselbrink

Harry has lived in Smithers since soon after his family arrived in the Bulkley Valley in early 1951. He served on town council for many years and was a dedicated environmental activist and researcher. He is a wonderful photographer (the photos here are from his collection) and has helped record local history, working with Lynn Shervill on Smithers: From Swamp to Village and writing his own Smithers: A Railroad Town. He is also a great friend. Like many of us, he can’t help returning, year after year, to the beautiful Silverking Basin where Driftwood Creek begins its journey to the Pacific.

 

Harry and Juanita

By the late 1960s, Audrey and I had been to Silverking Basin quite a few times before we had the kids. Once we had them, it became a little harder. Leroy was born in 1966 and Juanita in 1969 (Charmaine was still four years down the road). It then occurred to us that we could actually take the kids into the basin and stay for more than just the day. The first time we did that was in July 1970. Leroy was a three-year-old getting close to four. Juanita was a year-and-a-half old.

When my fellow CN employ Robbie Robinson found out what we were thinking, he volunteered to drive us into the basin with his 4-wheel drive. He also offered to pick us up later on in the week. Well, that was an offer we obviously could not refuse! So on a nice summer Monday morning, Robbie drove us into the basin. In those days driving a vehicle into the basin was allowed since the Babines were not even a Recreation Area. The road was muddy and bouncy but we made it into the basin in one piece.  Robbie said he’d pick us up again sometime on Friday. And so we moved into the cookhouse that was still habitable in those days. The cabin was built in the 1920s and was formally named the LaMarr cabin – after the beautiful and famous movie star Hedy LaMarr of the early 1900s.

Audrey, Leroy and Juanita at the cookhouse. 1971.

 

It turned out to be a beautiful week although that is not a word that we could use to describe ourselves. We agreed that Audrey wouldn’t fuss with her hair and I wouldn’t shave. All of us wore old clothes. So you can imagine that we were a rather forlorn looking bunch by the end of the week.

Everything worked out very well although Audrey was not happy about the mice that roamed through the cookhouse at will especially at night. The floor was of two-inch lumber and, over the years, the knots had dropped out of the knotholes and they had become just plain holes allowing easy access for the mice. The kids slept on the bunk at the back of the cookhouse but Audrey and I had to sleep on the floor. This meant that at night we could feel and hear the nice running over our sleeping bags. Not a situation to Audrey’s liking.

 

Lynn Shervill in Silverking – the bunkhouse and the foreman’s cabin. 1978.

We had considered moving into the big bunkhouse next door but seeing all of the mouse droppings on the floor and the even easier access the mice had there, we dropped that idea. For me, it wasn’t so bad. My family lived for sometime in a decrepit old log house in Barrett Lake, a haven for mice, and we discovered there that mice will run over you at the slightest opportunity but they will not touch the face of a living human being. I told Audrey this but she was not convinced nor impressed! The solution to the problem lay in the old garbage dump in the bush just behind the cookhouse. There were dozens of old rusty tin cans laying around with lids just the right size to cover the knotholes. In the bunkhouse, we found a pair of pliers, some rusty nails and a hammer. By the end of the second day, we had closed all of the knotholes and were now looking forward to a good night’s rest. We had just barely gone to sleep when we were awakened by the sound of “thumps in the night”. You could hear, quite loudly, metallic sounding thumps. Thump, a bit of silence and then thump again. Then the process repeated itself several times. Soon we were hearing thumps in three or four places on the cabin floor. It didn’t take us long to discover the source of the thumps. It was the mice trying to come up through the knotholes. You could practically hear them thinking, “I can’t figure this out, I’ve been coming through this knothole for years! What is happening here? Let me try it again!”  Thump…..! It was really quite funny but also very effective in keeping the mice out – and Audrey was happy.

 

Fortunat L’Orsa 1906 – 1953

We had a truly wonderful time. We hiked over Hyland Pass into Hyland Basin, we paid a visit to Fortunat L’Orsa’s grave and planted some flowers around it, we checked out the old mining adits, etc. The weather was great all week and we got totally relaxed though rather scruffy looking. So relaxed, in fact, that one day, while I was taking a picture of my crew, little Leroy suddenly blurted out, “Dad, there’s a man….!” In those days hardly anyone came into the basin so our intruder caught us completely off guard. It turned out to be Forbes Lee who was the Secretary-Treasurer of School District 54. We had not met before but as a result of that meeting we became good friends. Forbes explained that he tried to be as obtrusive as possible so as not to scare us but Leroy caught him in the act! He was the only person we saw for the entire five days!

True to his word, Robbie picked us up on Friday afternoon and drove us back home. When we arrived in town, it seemed to us that everyone was running around in such a hurry. We had become so relaxed that even the citizens of laid-back Smithers seemed to be in a perpetual hurry!

The following year, Joe L’Orsa drove us into Silverking again for, by now, we were totally hooked on the basin. We’ve been coming back there many, many times over the years always spending five days there. Even our grandchildren are now hooked on this beautiful basin. It has added a very meaningful dimension to our lives.

Lynn and Sheila at the Joe L’Orsa cabin with Harry. 2015.

Harry Kruisselbrink and Joe L’Orsa (more on him later) were two of the most important people in our introduction to the community and the Babine Mountains. Harry likes to tell of story of how he and Joe decided to befriend Lynn when he first arrived to work at the Interior News in 1976 because he wore hiking boots. Soon after, they took him into the mountains. And Lynn took me …

Driftwood Creek Bush Mills

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Thanks to Lynn Shervill and Hans Tugnum for putting this piece of history together.

Today folks accessing the Babine Mountains via Driftwood Creek can be forgiven if they fail to notice the several log-hauling roads branching off the creek below Sunny Point. Alder thickets, devil’s club and wind falls have obliterated them. But 40 years ago, when my wife and I moved into Driftwood Canyon, they were obvious and each ended in a sawdust pile and a story of enterprise, hardship and, sometimes, tragedy.

Working up the creek from the winter parking lot (just above the third bridge crossing of the creek on Driftwood Road), there were a couple of mills on the bench above the true right side of the creek. One was owned by George Sharpe and Louis Wick and the other by Emil and Steve Mesich.

bush-mill-one-2The next mill, owned by Bill Hickmore, was located between the third and fourth bridges,  and there was another one, again to the north of the creek,  just above the fourth bridge.

We often roamed through these old sites, cutting firewood and wondering what life must have been like for the people who lived and worked here. Maybe not so bad, we thought, having once found a decaying piano at the site near the fourth bridge. It was at this same location we managed to bury a neighbour’s borrowed pickup to the axles at the edge of a sawdust pile, sawdust we wanted as mulch for our hand-watered garden.

bush-mill-2-2Smithers rancher Bill Morris had a mill just above Driftwood Creek on the Lyon Creek Trail, the remnants of which are still visible, and Onie Leighton ran mills part way up the Harvey Mountain Road, just past the fifth bridge, and at Sunny Point.

 

Between the end of World War Two and the mid to late 1950s there were almost a dozen bush mills along the creek, each cutting from 2,000 to 10,000 board feet of lumber a day.

According to Hans Tugnum, whose family emigrated from Switzerland to the Bulkley Valley in 1936, there could be six sawmills operating along the creek at any given time, employing 40 to 50 people.  A typical mill crew consisted of one or two fallers, a skidder using horses or a cat, a sawyer, a slab packer, who disposed of the outside cuts in a fire pit, a swamper (labourer) and a cook.

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Gordon Jewell

Top price was $35 per 1,000 board feet of prime spruce or pine two by 12s or two by 10s, according to Tugnum.  Two by fours and two by sixes went for about $30 per 1,000 board feet. Mill owners – men like the Lubbers brothers, Jake Zust, Ralph Dieter, Al Fletcher, Jack Thomas and Danny Lemire – sold their lumber to a local buyer such as Gordon Jewel of Northern Interior Forest Products in Smithers where it was planed before being shipped out by rail.

Mill employees were often paid according to daily production, say $3 per 1,000 board feet. If the mill was producing 5,000 board feet a day, the employee would get $15 a day.

Tugnum, who owned a mill located between the Driftwood Creek corridor and Old Babine Lake Road, said employees lived on site in bunkhouses and worked from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday. “Supper,” said Tugnum, “was served in the cookhouse about 6:30 or 7 and then the guys would return to the bunkhouse to BS or play a little poker.  About 8:30 or 9:00 cook would leave a fresh pot of coffee or tea on the stove.”

On Saturday the crew worked until noon and then headed for home and their families. “And yes,” said Tugnum, “some of them headed for the bar. But they were on their way back to camp on Sunday afternoon or evening.”

It was good work, according to Tugnum, that paid reasonably well. But it could be dangerous. “George Sharpe was killed when a slab flipped the wrong way, was kicked back by the saw and hit him in the head.  A cat driver working for Onie Leighton was killed at Sunny Point when his machine rolled on him and another guy, working for Bill Morris, was killed when a tree fell on him.”

Safety standards, according to Tugnum, were non-existent. “You took what you got,” he said. “The mill owners paid into the workers’ compensation but there were no safety rules.”

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Harry Haywood (l) and Ben Miller.

Tugnum said there were probably 100 small bush mills in the valley like the ones on Driftwood Creek during the ten years after the war. But then it slowly came to an end. More restrictive BC Forest Service regulations and big industrial mills, like the one in Houston, made it impossible for the little guys to keep their books in the black.

“Bowater & Bathurst bought Harry Hagman’s big mill in Houston,” Tugnum said. “And after that all the timber started going to Houston.

ralph-dieter

Ralph Dieter contributed to many a musical evening all up and down Driftwood Creek, including at our place. This was taken in 1983.

Another mill owner, the late Ralph Dieter, who operated three different mills during the 40s and 50s, said the big mill owners bought up all the quotas held by the independents. “They spent millions just buying people out. They’d offer almost anything to get rid of you.”

The last logging operation on Driftwood Creek – a small clear cut in the fifth bridge area – was done by Tony Mesich in  the mid-1970s, just about the time work started on creating the Babine Mountains Provincial Park. For many years, we could still drive up the road and happily picked huckleberries there, often meeting the Yeker family. Like many of the other roads, it too is long lost to sight.