A Rock Fell on the Moon

by Alicia Priest

  Wernecke’s sudden death, coupled with the war, temporarily silenced Elsa and the whole region. The war dealt two strong blows to Treadwell Yukon: a labour shortage and the US government’s decision to stop buying foreign silver, an ill-advised move given that the Americans would soon need all the silver they could get. After the war, in 1946, two Toronto-based mining companies—Conwest Exploration Ltd. and Frobisher Exploration Ltd.—joined forces to buy what remained of the Treadwell Yukon holdings. The new consortium called themselves United Keno Hill Mines Ltd., first because they now held rights to more than thirty-five different mine sites scattered over the area, and second because Keno Hill was the first to be explored. Nonetheless, UKHM chose Elsa as its main townsite and northern headquarters, and over the company’s lifespan, most of the silver taken from the area came from Galena Hill, not Keno Hill.

  Apart from a four-month hiatus when the mill burned down in 1949, UKHM would unearth silver, zinc and lead continuously for the next forty-two years. Silver accounted for 80 percent of the ore’s value. A mini-empire, UKHM owned sawmills, lumberyards, a transportation system, part of a coal mine and even a greenhouse. It operated ferries, maintained roads and helped operate the docks in Skagway, Alaska. That’s because UKHM chose to ship its ore to a smelter thousands of miles south in Montana, USA. In 1962, Canadian mining giant Falconbridge Nickel Mines Ltd. took control of the company and initiated an aggressive and successful exploration program. As with all natural resources, and especially in the north, much of that prosperity flowed south to shareholders in cities such as Toronto, Montreal and New York. Regardless, UKHM powered much of the Yukon economy for four decades, and brought more wealth to the Yukon than the Klondike.

  Elsa was that engine’s heart.

  Chapter 5

  My Elsa

  Oh how good it is to be Foot-loose and heart-free!

  I left Elsa but it never left me. It is here inside, a hard, gleaming gem of good things. The mustard-yellow woods amidst a black-green forest sliding into a crimson valley rimmed by violet, snow-splashed crags, all crowned by a turquoise sky. The many nights we motored home along the Mayo road, rocking in the back seat, sleepy but sensing the cold and beast-filled void just a window away, until, as we climbed a hill, rounded a corner, a cluster of lights drew us home like a lifeline at sea. Springtime, climbing Crocus Hill: a birch grove carpeted with cupped blooms of lavender and white. Picking wild blueberries and cranberries at the top of Keno Hill… the air crisp, fresh and sweeter than any fruit. Sometimes, on Sundays when the roads were clear, we’d go for a drive just to see if the other side of town was still there. A shower on a blue-sky summer’s day with sun shining through the rain meant either a fox’s wedding or a monkey’s birthday. Winter and 40 below, Vona and I racing through supper, stuffing our bodies into tubes of wool and then running out to play with Alan Mitchell, Darryl Andison, David Mills and Dale Ekens. We’d toboggan down an icy hill in the blackness until someone got a wooden projectile in the gut. Or we’d jump off the pipebox into snow pillows so deep our boots got stuck and we yelled to be rescued. Some nights we played nicky nicky nine doors until Mr. Wall threatened to whip us good if we knocked on his door one more time.

  All my Christmases were white, as were my Halloweens and Easters. Winters—six months of sub-zero cold and snow, and for half that time all-day darkness—were the best. On Christmas Eve we gathered at the community hall where Santa called us by name and presented us with the perfect present. Living so close to the North Pole meant Elsa was Santa’s first stop. Crystal daggers hung from roof edges, growing so pointed and heavy that grown-ups knocked them down with shovels and picks before the ice pierced some kid’s skull. We’d spread out on the snow, five-pointed angels, under stars so big and bright we reached to pick them like apples from a tree. On cloud-covered nights snowflakes drifted into our open mouths like frozen bits of sugar lace. Hours spent studying the phosphorescent light streams shimmering above—neon green, purple and pink ribbons swimming in a jet-black sea. Nothing separated the outside from my insides. And when I closed my eyes and pulled the covers up at night, the cosmos came along.

  One night we wandered past the mill, past the mine, past the coffee shop to the first bunkhouse, where the single miners lived and where my sister and I were forbidden to go. Plunked on a rise of land, the bunkhouse was a hulking shoebox of a building with two floors of small six-paned windows and dim hallways with communal showers in the centre of each level. It was home to about 140 single men. I’d never been inside but everyone knew it as a tough and grungy place with pockmarked walls and splintered doors. Two men shoe-horned into a single room with opposing narrow iron cots and space for one trunk of belongings each. Housekeeping services consisted of a mop and a bucket but no soap. Miners were expected to clean up their own messes. Or not. An open door released a stink of tobacco, beer, urine, and sweat.

  On this night, we heard accented voices spit out words I didn’t understand—and didn’t want to. “We’re not supposed to be here,” I whispered to Vona. “Don’t be a baby,” she shot back as she and the others moved deeper into the blackness behind the bunkhouse’s back steps. The voices were harsher now and hateful. Two dark-haired hulks emerged, swaying and clutching each other’s shoulders. Something glinted and wavered in the air. They shuffled, shoving each other down the stairs, tugging at each other’s shirts, a fog of breaths suspended before their faces. Lurching toward us, one shouted, “Hey, who there? Scram, you little rats!” Without so much as a snow-squeak, we lit out running till our lungs ached, heading straight for our houses. The next day the town buzzed with the news that there’d been a stabbing at the bunkhouse. One man had been seriously wounded.

  From 1953 to 1963, Elsa was home. They don’t make towns like that anymore. Along with Calumet, its sister settlement four miles up Galena Hill, Elsa was a company town in an era when companies, particularly in the north, strove to keep employees and their families, if not happy, then content enough to stay put. In my day, Elsa was a remarkably accomplished, self-contained and well-endowed community of about four hundred people. Wages were generally higher than those “outside.” As chief assayer for UKHM, with four to five workers under his command, Dad made from $600 to $700 a month, which was a good wage when the company charged only $30 a month for housing, heat and electricity, and subsidized the cost of groceries, beer and, for a time, even cigarettes. Water and steam heat generated at central heating plants at the mill travelled to homes and buildings along a pipebox—a long, raised, flat-topped wooden box containing insulated pipes that snaked through town. Sewage travelled the pipebox in reverse. For kids, the pipebox was our house-to-house highway—we ran on top of it all the time, jumping off at will.

  Housewives ordered essentials such as Squirrel peanut butter, Pacific powdered milk and Libby’s canned Bing cherries from the cookhouse, where Chinese men baked bread and cooked meals for the miners. In the mid-fifties, “fresh” (previously frozen) prime rib roast sold for 75 cents a pound, bread for 25 cents and butter for 75 cents a pound. Specialty items were pricier: a package of Velveeta cheese slices was $8.19, and Jell-O chocolate pudding mix was $4.12. Almost every imaginable fruit and vegetable came in a can, including oranges, peaches, pears, spinach, peas and beets. Mom so longed for fresh food that one winter she cut out magazine pictures of pineapples, tomatoes, cucumbers and watermelons and glued them to the front of the kitchen cupboards. One week later she ripped them down, saying they only made her sense of deprivation worse. In the early sixties, a real grocery store appeared where customers could pick whatever goods they wished off the shelves. A sign on the building, which sold everything from hats to ham to Hershey bars, read: “The Elsa Market is owned and operated by UKHM Ltd. to supply a service to company employees, their dependants and residents of Elsa. All unauthorized persons are required to do their shopping elsewhere.”

  Such preferential and paternalistic treatment lasted well past the 1960s. Joe a
nd Louise Volf ran the Elsa Market from 1966 to 1989, when the UKHM mine—and the town—shut down for good. “The company liked us to take special orders for German sausage or exotic cheeses from Denmark to please employees as much as we could,” Joe says. “We were not allowed to make a profit. In fact we were told not to make money and I was scolded once for charging too much.”

  Not all requests, however, were granted. When Joe asked the company to stock underarm deodorant, the response was “No—let them smell.” The Volfs, then retired and living in Mayo, look back on their Elsa days with fondness.“It was one of the nicest companies in the country,” Joe says. “They took care of people. And we had a nice place to raise our three children. “

  My best friend growing up in Elsa, Darryl Andison, spent more years in the town than he cares to admit. After high school graduation in Mayo, Darryl worked for UKHM, above ground, until the mine closed eighteen years later. His work, on the bull gang, the green chain and as a carpenter’s apprentice, was a tempting trap: United Steelworkers Union wages, room and board for $2.60 a day, including good food and lots of it, and “beer that was $1.50 a glass in Elsa and $4.25 in Whitehorse.”

  Many company employees, including my dad, received a month’s paid holiday a year and an annual paid trip outside to either Vancouver or Edmonton. For Mom, Vona and me that meant regular summer outings to Vancouver, where we stayed with my grandmother in her Mennonite friends’ homes, while Dad traversed the Rockies on horseback or canoed a Yukon river or two.

  An entity called the United Keno Hill Mines Recreation Club donated hundreds of dollars every year to a huge range of sport, social and hobby clubs. The money came from UKHM commissaries such as the beer parlour, coffee shop and pool tables, the objective being to do “the most good for the most people of the community.” It was corporate socialism of a sort, and it worked. The company even handed out engraved silver and copper medals to eight- and nine-year-olds on Children’s Sports Day.

  Children’s Races

  30 yd. Girls 7-8 ys.1. A. Priest 2. L. Bennett 3. M. Grundmanis.

  Wheel Barrow Race

  Girls: 1. V. Priest, A. Priest; 2. M. Grundmanis, S. Conway. 3. L. Bennett, G. Swizinski.

  Egg and Spoon Race

  1.A. Coyle 2. A. Priest 3. M. Grundmanis

  The Tramline, August 31, 1962

  Things to do in Elsa? There were a few: curling, choir, bridge, badminton, bingo, ski club, rod and gun club, ladies’ and men’s baseball, square dancing, Brownies and Cubs, handicrafts, library, English lessons, first aid classes, film club, a branch of the Canadian Legion, a women’s social group called the Silver Queens and a camera club that my dad initiated, presided over and eventually became the sole member of. A weekly mimeographed newsletter—called The Tramline after the tower and cable system carrying ore from Calumet to Elsa—and astutely edited by indefatigable long-time Elsa resident Virginia Grundmanis, reported everything from dances, major-run movie showings, club meetings, church services, dentist visits, cooking tips, community concerts and bazaars, who was visiting whom, who went on vacation and where, who was back from vacation and whether they had a tan, who had an operation, new arrivals and permanent departures, to items lost, found or for sale, the weekly temperatures, precipitation and mining accidents. The Tramline always finished with a flair such as “Most husbands know how to manage a wife but their wives won’t let them.” In the early days Dad, who viewed himself as a bit of a wordsmith, was a frequent Tramline contributor. Writers were not named but the following has G.H. Priest all over it:

  “SABRINA” Set against the luxurious background of the fabled ‘400’, Sabrina is a Cinderella story of a chauffeur’s daughter, Audrey Hepburn, who, after a trip to France, is transformed from a gangly legged adolescent to a drenchingly beautiful young woman. William Holden and Humphrey Bogart, the scions of the family who employ her father, become enraptured by her and what happens is as romantic and frothy as the first rose of summer with a bug on it and twice as sweet.

  The Tramline, September 13, 1956

  The almost imperceptible creep of time combined with the material simplicity and communality of Elsa life created a universe apart. Before 1960, Elsa and Calumet residents didn’t have long-wave radio or TV stations or telephones. Short-wave radio was another matter, and Radio Moscow came in loud and clear. Don White, who later moved to Port Hope, Ontario, spent part of his boyhood in Elsa. “We got the results of the 1954 Grey Cup from our buddies in the USSR. Don’t think they were cheering for the Als that year.”

  Major transportation hurdles isolated the community even more. All vehicles heading south, including transport trucks, had to cross three rivers—the Yukon, Pelly and Stewart—by ice bridge in winter and by motor ferry in summer. Ferrying the long, heavy trucks across a full, rushing river was often a harrowing exploit, and breakup and freeze-up periods—when the rivers were neither wholly liquid nor solid—meant no one went anywhere by road for one or two months. Even taking on the 32-mile gravel road to Mayo in the winter was a challenge. Most people, Dad included, put their cars up on blocks for the winter and hunkered down for months of quiet domesticity, relieved by weekly movie nights, concerts, drop-in visitors and impromptu all-night parties. Custom dictated that one couple went next door for drinks and then the foursome continued to the next house and so on until unsuspecting souls would be rudely roused in the wee hours by a mob of twenty or more inebriated but friendly folk.

  There was no hospital, but we did have a clinic of sorts and a resident doctor. More often than not, somebody’s wife was a nurse. Dr. Kirk also treated pets, including our dog Caesar when he came home yelping with a snout full of porcupine quills. Babies were born either 32 miles down the dirt road in Mayo (as I was) or “outside” in Whitehorse, Edmonton or Vancouver (as was Vona). As for dental care, the company brought in Dr. B.H. Wischert twice a year to drill, fill and pull. Sometimes his dental office was set up in the post office, sometimes the school and one summer he plopped his black and yellow chair of pain outside in a clearing just above the school steps.

  COMMISSARY ANNOUNCES REDUCTIONS

  Effective Saturday, January 7th, 1956, cigarettes purchased by the carton will be less 25 cents the regular price, that is Canadian cigarettes will be $3.25 instead of $3.50 and American cigarettes will be $3.75 instead of $4.00.

  The Tramline, January 5, 1956

  In my day, Elsa was a patchwork of white, tar-paper frame structures trimmed in either dark green or bright red, and highly varnished Panabode log buildings. Homes, mining offices, churches, sheds and other places could be of either style, but if your home was a Panabode, your dad had a better job than dads in other kinds of homes. Houses sat along one side of three roads carved out of the bush, punctuated on the south end by towering, snow-covered Mount Lookout, officially known as Mount Haldane and once home to a healthy population of grizzlies. On the north end of town, the main road split, to the right climbing the hill to Calumet and to the left meandering to Keno City, about six miles away. If you took the road south, you’d arrive in Mayo. A company-sponsored bus made regular and frequent trips between Calumet and Elsa in an effort to keep residents connected. For years, Vona and I took that bus to Calumet every week for piano lessons with Mrs. Lopp, a German immigrant like many others in town.

  Elsa’s attributes included a Catholic church, a cookhouse where single miners and staff ate, a coffee shop/beer parlour/barber shop/library, bunkhouses, the mine shaft (a cold black breathing maw), the railcar track, compressor houses, machine shops, electrical shops, the sprawling crusher and mill (deafening roars and dust fumes), Dad’s assay office (smelly four-room wood-frame hut accessible via a long flight of stairs), the Elsa Market, the Royal Bank of Canada (perhaps the smallest branch in the country), a few white wood-frame homes, the log-cabin Anglican church, the rectory and a large, square white tar-paper shed we called the Three-Door Garage. Somewhere along the strip was an RCMP stati
on with two full-time Mounties. Then, perched on a short slope, came the Walls’ white and red-trim abode, fronting the road leading to our house, the last in a row of three copper-coloured Panabodes. From our big single-paned living room window we gazed out over the McQuesten River Valley, where wolves hunted and howled. Beyond lay a vast blanket of northern boreal forest that petered out at the alpine treeline.

  We walked to our three-room school, on the road below, by following a short path through the bush. A ways beyond the school, through more bush and across a road, was a collection of flimsy homes known as Flat Creek, where several miner families lived. Below Flat Creek huddled a hidden handful of wood-heated shacks housing three or four Indian families. For some reason, that area was known as Millerville. The houses lining the highest road were large two-storey mansions with basements and breathtaking views and even, in summer, green lawns. One was a guesthouse for government officials and UKHM executives visiting from Toronto. That road was also where the general manager, assistant manager, mine manager, general superintendent, doctor and other boss-men and their families lived. During my time, the chief geologist and engineers lived in Calumet, where the geology department had its own log building.