The Ranger
Harry Walters arrived in the Horsefly country around 1890 and worked at nearly everything before the government gave him the fire job. He walked ditch for the Hobson mine, carried mail over the 108 and occasionally gold along with it, opened the first post office in 1897, operated the Horsefly Hotel from 1898, and served on the first school board. Rena Chandler, who taught here in 1911 and boarded at the Walters house that spring, remembered his handwriting as beautiful. In about 1914 he was appointed the district’s first forest ranger. He remained the only one.
The position was seasonal, running through the summer with a few weeks at either end. He patrolled on a saddle horse and carried an axe to clear trail, routing around any tree too large to cut. His son, Glenn Walters, then twelve, sometimes rode with him. On one patrol the two rowed thirty miles to the head of Horsefly Lake, sent the boat back with Glenn’s older brother, and walked out through Archie Knight Pass on a trail Glenn recalled for its brush and bear sign. They carried one .22 between them.
Most of what Harry found were abandoned campfires, caught before they spread. Anything past that stage was a different problem. Crews dug trench around it and it burned until the weather turned. Harry Walters died in March 1918.
Miles of Blueberries
Long before the province appointed a ranger, the Secwépemc burned this country deliberately and on a yearly cycle. Glenn described the result as open ground running from the Gruhs place through to Horsefly Lake, and the same at Lemon Lake. The burning held the range open and produced game and berries both.
Ground that has burned comes back in berries within a few years. The Walters family picked and canned what came up, and Glenn’s phrase for it was miles of blueberries. Around the 108 he remembered the ground nearly blue with them. At Fig Bay, three miles up Horsefly Lake on an older burn, the raspberry canes were bent under their own weight.
Timber was worth little then. Jack pine had no market at all until a use was found for it in chips.
The Bushes Are Still There
Bessie Lowry came out from Manitoba in 1933 after two consecutive crop failures and homesteaded 149 acres toward Horsefly Lake. Her husband built a log house and she chinked it with moss and clay from their own property. Gary Clarke bought the place from her some years later. In a good season she put up a hundred quarts of blueberry preserves.
By 1980 she was still making jelly from cranberries and Oregon grape, but she had not preserved blueberries in a long time. The bushes were still there, she said, and no longer bore, because “they have to be burned over every few years,” which was no longer permitted.
Her homestead sits on the ground Glenn named as having grown in. He argued the point with the Forestry for decades. What he wanted was burning done in June or earlier, ahead of the heat of the season. The Forestry’s position was that too many people now lived scattered through the country to accept the risk. Glenn’s was that the revenue from grazing was negligible beside the revenue from timber, and that this was the real reason.
Glenn Walters was born in 1902 and interviewed in 1977. He had seventy-five years of looking at the same hillsides. The Forestry had a district full of people living on them.
Sources
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Glenn Walters, interviews by Christine Houghton, Accession Nos. 1-3 and 1-6, July 1977.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Bessie Lowry, interview by Leslie Crow, Accession No. 21-1, August 12, 1980.
- Horsefly Historical Society Oral History Project, Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Rena (Chandler) Patenaude, interview by Christine Houghton, Accession No. 19-1, April 13, 1978.
- Horsefly Historical Society Textual Archives, “People of Horsefly’s Past, R-Z,” Jack-Lynn Memorial Museum. Archived at harperscamp.ca/textual/pplrz.html.