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From Broad Axe to Clay Chinking
Old Summit Lake Road
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Edward Kroagh Erickson and his wife came to B.C. in 1918. They came on the train that went on the steel rails after it was built. They had with them their two oldest sons, Ernest and Wilfrid. Erickson filed on a homestead on the Old Summit North Road. Here they built a log house, barn, and cabins. One was the chicken house, but the other cabin was for the boys. A sister, Elsie, was born here on this homestead and then another little girl, Alfild, but she passed away and Mr. Erickson had to carry the little body all the way into Prince George, where she was buried in the graveyard there.
At that time, a fire had burnt through the country and you could see a person with a sleigh and team all the way from the Johnson farm, a distance of five miles. By 1922, they had left the homestead because it was on the line where the PGE (now BCR) railroad was going to pass through. Where the house and barn were, that is where the track went, so they were demolished and the grade cut down, leaving a hill on either side and cutting the farm in two.
They moved to an area not far from town, at what today is known as the Jumbo café, which is on the Northwood Road where it meets Highway 97. Here they started up the Golden Rule Poultry Farm. Another Boy, Douglas, was born here in 1922. The last child born to the Ericksons was a girl, named Alice. She was born in January, 1932, on the coldest day of the year, a biting 65 below Fahrenheit. Wilfrid had to meet them with the horses when she came from the hospital because the roads weren’t plowed out yet, but his mother had wrapped the baby up well, and she arrived home, safe and sound.
Edward Erickson, his wife, and the younger children, then moved to Langley Prairie where they started up another poultry farm, but the Newcastle disease swept through the area putting an end to that venture so he moved back to Prince George and went to work in the mills, after having taken a First Aid course and a Scaling Course.
In 1948, Wilfrid, who was now 30 years old, married Mary Bowyer. The first time she saw Wilfrid, she was in a horse-driven cutter with her parents and sister, Margaret, and Wilfrid was coming down those steep hills on skis, dodging stumps here and there and making quite a spectacle of himself, showing off, and this really impressed young Mary. The families got to know each other and when Mary was ten she used to clean eggs for the Ericksons, by sandpapering them. They were not allowed to wash eggs at that time.
After Wilfrid and Mary were married, they went straight out on the trapline. This was because she wanted to go wherever he went, Going was slow at first but she soon became very good on snowshoes and by the end of the first winter, could keep right up to Wilfrid. They made their own snowshoes with bent willow frames and woven babiche.
They came upon a cabin the first year they were out that contained a bed, chair, and baby bed, all made out of willow saplings and wondered what strange tale could have been told had they known anything about this couple and their baby.
With lots of fresh air and exercise they felt really vibrant and strong and trapping was good. They trapped beaver, muskrat, mink, otter, marten, lynx, coyote, and different types of foxes - red, cross, and silver.
In the spring of the year, the lake was very treacherous and one time when Mary had left to go up to Summit Lake, Wilfrid came a couple of days later and you can imagine his fear when he saw her tracks leading in to the middle of the lake and then nothing but water. He wondered if she had made it. When he got into Summit Lake, he was a much-relieved to find out she had gone to town, by hitching a ride with the Highway guy, to see her grandfather, who was in the hospital.
Wilfrid had many close calls with his boat and they also had a few run-ins with grizzly bears. They moved back and forth from their trapper cabin to their home by the lake but when the children started school they had to stay on this side of the lake. They would go across the lake in the summertime and pick berries and things. Wilfrid and Mary had nine children but lost one, a twin, at birth. The Ericksons were in a way real conservationists and one time Wilfrid brought home some goose eggs that had been abandoned in a slough when the water got too high. Mary hung these eggs in a sheet beside the stove and hatched them out. Can you imagine the children’s joy at seeing these little goslings?
The first homestead that Edward Kroagh Erickson had on the Old Summit Lake North Road is now the Goodsir Nature Park and visitors go there every year to see the many trails, the old cabins, the flora and fauna of the area. The BCR train still goes through several times a day hauling coal, logs, and lumber.
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