The Crew of the Henry Expeditions

Stan Clark, had trained as a forester, and been instrumental in the development of the Rocky Mountain and Athabasca Forest Reserves in Alberta. He homesteaded the Entrance Ranch near the present community of Hinton, and had also served as an Alberta Game Commissioner. Clark started outfitting north of Jasper Park, and one of his more notable clients was Major Townsend Whelan, who he took on a successful sheep hunt west of the Smokey River in 1922. Subsequent articles on the trip in Outdoor Life, gave his outfitting business a tremendous boost.⁴⁴  By the 1930s, it was starting to get a little crowded in the outfitting business on the east slope in Alberta, and Clark looked north. He purchased the Billy Hill ranch on Cache Creek, which provided a Peace River base for his pack horse outfit. The Henry expeditions helped facilitate moving his operation north, but he also outfitted for a number of big game hunting expeditions in the area during the 1930s. A number of Clark's horses were on the ill fated Bedaux expedition, and with their loss he appears to have focused his operations back in Alberta. As well as outfitting and ranching on the Entrance and Athabasca ranches, he also ran a store with his wife at Entrance. They had no children, and Clark passed away in 1957 in Jasper. Clark manned one of the several movie cameras on the 1931 Henry Expedition, and the BC Archives recently acquired two rolls of film entitled the Tropical Valley Expedition, with Stan Clark's name on both canisters.

Knox McCusker (Mac), was a Dominion Land Surveyor, who trained at Queens, and the Gault Institute, and worked extensively in the Peace River country, since his first trip as a field assistant in 1909. In 1927, on a geological survey in conjunction with the Marland Oil company, Mac headed a crew of five, with some 19 saddle and pack horses, that worked the area from Hudson's Hope, north along the east slope of the Rockies, to the Fort Nelson River drainage.⁴⁵  After an extensive summer of surveying in the Montney and Rose Prairie areas north of Fort St. John in 1930, he found himself looking for work as the Federal government decided to do its part for the Depression and laid him off. The Henry expedition came along at an opportune time, and launched Mac into a career of dude wrangling with partner Glen Minaker that lasted through the 1930s. After calling Onion Lake, Saskatchewan his home for a number of years, Mac moved into the Peace River country. For awhile his letter head read "Knox McCusker, Explorer and Topographer, Hudson's Hope, BC", but he eventually settled on a homestead in the Grandhaven District west of Fort St. John. Mac was a big man, and he often wore a crumbled old hat, bib overalls, and smoked a pipe. He hardly ever rode a horse, and would keep track of the miles with an odometer attached to his foot.

On the Henry expedition when the outfit stopped to rest, Mac and Mary Henry would climb to the top of the nearest mountain. Mac would get his bearings and work on his maps, while Mary Henry would work on her plant collection. As they were working, "...off the edge of known maps", the information that Mac acquired on these trips contributed substantially to the knowledge of the area, and McCusker's maps formed the basis of many of the subsequent topographical maps of the area. Many of the landmarks in the area were named as a result of McCusker's efforts, and current names such as Mt. Mary Henry, Mt. St. Paul and Mt. St. George, Beckman Creek, and Falk Creek, resulted from the 1931 expedition. The Alaska Highway, constructed in 1942, followed part of the route of the Henry expedition, and McCusker was involved with many aspects of the project; he coordinated fuel and supply movement into Fort Nelson during the winter of 1941-42, advised on layout of the route, organized pack outfit support during construction, and supervised the building of construction camps.

McCusker married Gwen Elliott in 1944, and they spent their honeymoon that summer, on the legal survey of the Alaska Highway in the Yukon. Mac conducted his last surveys in Alberta in 1955, and passed away that April in Fort St. John at the age of 65.⁴⁶

One of Lorraine Zean "Smokey" Neighbor's first jobs was driving truck for his brother Ed who had the delivery contract for the CN railroad around Jasper. A horse wrangling job with Stan Clark was more to his liking, and the pay was better at $75 /month. He was 18 that summer of 1931, when he rode north with the horses in a boxcar, and went on to wrangle on all four of the Mary Henry expeditions in Northern BC. Some seventy years later, at his retirement home in Vernon, Smokey could still recall every horse, and every camp they made on those trails back in the 1930s.⁴⁷  Smokey claimed there were "...68 head of horses on that 1931 trip, not 58 like the stories said", and he should have known as his job was to wrangle them and have them back in camp before breakfast each morning. There were horses from all over, and a couple of mules thrown in as well. Although Clark liked his mules, Smokey didn't, and that old Jenny mule would decide to pull out of the country, and the whole herd would follow. He got on their trail before daybreak one morning out of Redfern Lake, and by the time he got around them, and caught his saddle horse Ike, they were almost at Deadman (Trimble Lake). Well he sort of missed breakfast that day, and lunch for that matter, but it was a pretty happy camp that welcomed him back that evening with the whole horse herd in front of him. Wages on the trail went up to $4.00 a day, which included board, pretty good for a young man in the midst of the depression, and it was one of the biggest adventures of his life.

Smokey called the Jasper country home, and in February of 1933, was married to Lavada (Taggart). However, he was back on the trail with Mac and the Henrys again that summer. Mary and Josephine had new horses this year, since Clark had sold their two favourites, Chum and Betty-Lou, plus a nice buckskin to Charles Bedaux, who had taken them back to France. Both these horses had come out of the Cache Creek country, had some standard bred blood in them, and you couldn't ask for better dude horses. It was a very wet summer. The Henry's had spent over two weeks getting into the country from Edmonton as the EDBC tracks were washed out, and it didn't get much better once they hit the hills. Their route that year took them up the Graham River, which was in flood, and finally they got to a place where they had to cross. A raft was built out of burnt timber to ferry the supplies across, and Mac, Ben Calliou, and Smokey were the pilots. The trouble started when the raft got hung up on a rock in the middle of the river, the current turned them around and they were headed downstream into the bank. Ben started to pray, Smokey retorted "...its too late, He ain't going to help you now, start paddling..." As they got close to shore, Ben grabbed a willow, which broke off and he and the willow went floating by. Mac finally jumped off in waist deep water, but couldn't hold the raft and away it went, with most of their groceries. They never found the raft, but found one of Fred Cassie's caches with some flour and staples, and with fresh meat they got by and headed on up to the headwaters of the Graham River, Laurier Pass, and to the head of the Akie River. Apparently Cassie did find the raft later on, and although most of the food was spoiled, the canned butter ate pretty good over the winter.⁴⁸

Back in Jasper, the next summer, Smokey and Lavada were getting started on a family, and Ruth, the first of three girls was born. Smokey had hired on with the Athabasca dude ranch, owned by Harry Davidson and his brother Rufus was the foreman. Smokey cowboyed there for the next eight years, and a second daughter Della joined the family. Smokey was a good bronc rider, and would have won the Jasper rodeo, if his brother Rufus hadn't been the judge, and didn't want to be seen as favouring him.

Well, after some 75 days on the trail, the horse outfit pulled into McDame on September 22, all in one piece although the cook Jack MacMillian was very sick and was hauled in on a travois. After dealing their horses off to the prospectors, a boat took the party down the Dease River, and then they engaged a fellow named Morrison whose old truck eventually got them to Telegraph Creek. Here they caught up with the Callison family who had been ahead of them on the trail all summer, and they all made their way down the Stikine to Wrangell, Alaska and then via steamship down the coast. Smokey and the crew got off at Prince Rupert, and took the train back to Jasper. Something in that country must have caught his eye, and in 1941 the Neighbors moved out to a homestead on Ootsa Lake, where a third daughter Jean joined the family. Smokey was in the service from 1944 to 1946, and on his discharge, obtained another quarter section on a soldier's grant. Making a living on a wilderness homestead was supplemented by the odd logging and guiding job in nearby Tweedsmuir Park, and he made a few dollars at the Burns Lake and Vanderhoof rodeos. The Kenny dam brought the Ootsa Lake dreams to an end, and the Neighbors sold out and moved up the Kispiox Valley. In 1965, Smokey and Lavada moved into the Okanagan, initially to work on the Coldstream ranch with brother Rufus. Smokey retired from the sawmill in Lumby in 1974, and after the loss of Lavada in 1987, moved into Vernon. Here he was a terror in the local senior's bowling league, and was always ready to reminisce about those early days on the trail in Northern BC until he passed away in November of 2003.⁵¹

Knox McCusker and Smokey Neighbor were on all four of the Mary Henry expeditions, but there were a number of other crew members. Crucial to the success of the 1931 trip were three knowledgeable bushmen out of the Hudson's Hope area, Billy Hill, Fred Cassie and Bill Beckman. Hill had been in the country since 1914, when he had brought horses down through Laurier Pass with Jim Beattie after a summer prospecting in the Omineca country. He sold his ranch in the Cache Creek country to Stan Clark, and prospected throughout the north. Cassie was a well known trapper who been in the Peace River country since 1921. One of his first jobs was moving freight and machinery over the Peace Portage for the Ingenika Mining Company. He had trapped as far north as the Tuchodi (Henry) river and built a cabin there in 1927, and as well as his knowledge of the country, his bush skills were a tremendous asset. Cassie apparently drowned on his trapline on the Graham River in 1936, and although his dog came back into Beattie's Gold Bar ranch, he was never found. ⁵²  Bill Beckman brought with him a world of experience when he first journeyed up the Peace in 1924, with Harry Weaver on the boat Beulah. Originally from Indiana, Beckman had worked on ships on the Great Lakes, in mines near Hyder, Alaska, and had packed mules for the Forestry down in Montana. After the first trip with the Henry's in 1931, Beckman settled down to work on his homestead at the mouth of Grayling Creek on the Halfway. When he sold out to Art McLean (one of the Bedaux cowboys) in the mid '40s, Beckman ended up back in Hudson's Hope, working for many years at the fire lookout on Bullhead Mountain, as well as getting into a Beryl Prairie farming proposition. He was a "rigging" specialist, and could do anything with rope, which was well in evidence around the lookout and on the farm. Matrimony came late in life for Bill, and like the rest of it, it was quite an adventure.⁵³  Hill, Cassie and Beckman, along with Mac had taken a pack trip north in the spring of 1931, scouted out some of the trail, and laid in a good cache of supplies at a trap cabin on the Besa River in advance of the initial Henry trip.

The crew of nine earned their keep on the 1931 expedition, hacking out new trails and keeping the close to 50 packhorses on them. Rafts were built to cross the big rivers, "...July 22, ...necessary to build a raft to cross the Muskwa ... is composed of 7 large logs each about 33 feet long and 15 inches in diameter. These are notched at both ends and cross pieces are placed in the notches and bound to the large logs with rope, - thus we have a staunch craft... ⁵⁴  Ben Calliou had been on a number of the McCusker surveying outfits, and his skills with an axe came in handy cutting trail, or building caches. He was also on both the 1932, and 1933 trips. Fabe Long was a young cowboy who Clark had brought up from Alberta; he liked mules, and didn't always see eye to eye with Smokey. Long was always trying to rope something, and went by the handle of the "....long rope cowboy, until the boss got fed up with it and threatened to cut the rope into little pieces ". That didn't sit too well with Smokey, because it was his lariat. Cliff Falk, a trapper from down the Peace River, kept 16 people fed on the 1931 trip. Most of the crew smoked, and when they got back to the cache on the Besa they found that someone had broken into the cache and taken their tobacco. Falk had wisely cached his separately, and the crew found themselves in his debt for the rest of the trip. Falk Creek, north of the Tuchodi River, bears his name on today's maps.⁵⁵

Jack McMillian, the cook on the 1932, '33, and '35 trips had worked on dude outfits in the Jasper area, and although his grub was better than Falk's, Smokey didn't think he helped out as much packing up and on the trail. Tony Gerlinksy was a young friend of Mac's from the Lloydminster area, who came north in 1933 for the adventure, and liked it. Gerlinsky was back with the Henrys in 1935, and then also ran hunts for Mac into the McDame country in later years. Kelly Sheffield, came as far north as the Toad River in 1935, and then helped Gerlinksy trail the extra horses back to the Peace country. In 1931, the Henry outfit met the native MacDonald band camped along the Tetsa, and Chief Charlie guided them down to the hot springs. In 1935, the chief's son Charlie McDonald, along with Art and Pete accompanied the expedition through to McDame, and their knowledge of the country and the mountain passes came in handy. The Henry expeditions served to expand the knowledge of the Northern BC Rockies, and many of the crew went on to have important roles in the development of Northern British Columbia.

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Footnotes