THE ROUND-UP by Murray Gault

My son Jim was about four years old when Raymond Francis sold me the little calf which we named “Henrietta”. He told me it was a pure Hereford and the markings would lead you to believe this was true. I wanted a Hereford so I wouldn’t have to milk it when it got older, but as it grew the genes of what appeared to be a Jersey started to show themselves in its posture and in her hooves which were starting to point outwards instead of straight ahead. However we kept her anyway and she and Jim got along famously. When she first came, I tethered her out in the yard on some grass, but she didn’t eat. It was a hot day in the spring and Bentley King, who lived directly across the road called me on the telephone to tell me that I had better put Henrietta in her stall. I immediately thought of a cougar or a bobcat threatening her but he said she would get sunburned out in the hot sun without her coat being very thick yet. He also said that he thought she wasn’t weaned yet which was why she had not eaten the grass. I bought some feed for calves and took some milk out to her. I then dipped my hand in the milk and then in the feed and let her suck my fingers and hand. I did this for a week or so until she got the idea to eat it herself. It was easier to raise the two kids than to raise Henrietta. One day Jim came running into his mother crying. She asked him what was wrong and he said that Henrietta had butted him and knocked him down. Hilda asked him what he had done to her. “I was only trying to nail a board on her,” was his reply. We had a great laugh about that when I got home from the store.

Later that summer, Ron Barry drove in the yard with his truck which had two cows on it. Ron made his living by buying and selling livestock so he was here to sell me the two animals. They were fully grown but not very old and like Raymond Francis, he told me they were pure bred Herefords. Because they were fully grown, you could tell that they were definitely Herefords. Besides I had great respect for Ron Barry and trusted his judgement. I bought the two heifers. Ron said that he thought they were old enough and ready for breeding, so I made arrangements with Charlie Francis who had a farm on Darlings Island with a pure bred Hereford bull. Both Raymond and Charlie were brothers of Marshall Francis who was my partner in the Hardware store. All three heifers spent the winter in the big barn and I dug a hole in the comer or the pasture which filled with water so they could get it whenever they wanted it as I had taken the door off their end of the barn.

When spring arrived, I could see that there was not enough pasture to feed the three animals all summer and still have enough left for their hay next winter. I had been told that some people turned their stock out on the Nerepis marsh (the high ground part) just across the river from my place. I felt that this was the answer so I put a rope around each of their necks and walked them down the driveway, down the road and down the lane by Bentley’s boathouse. He was with me so I wasn’t trespassing. We got them to the river and proceeded to push them in with some help from switches. They would go in the water, swim away from us, then turn around and swim back to the same side they had just left. There seemed to be only one solution, so I took off all my clothes except my shorts, took an end of each rope and swam across to the other side. Then Bentley pushed the cows in the river again, one by one, and I pulled them over when they tried to turn around. They got up on the shore quite easily and took off into the bushes and disappeared. During the summer I only visited about four times, hoping that their calves had been born and that they were O.K. They were getting pretty wild but I saw they were fine and I got a glimpse of one calf which hid when I appeared and I hoped that there were two. While they were over there, we cut the hay with the little International Cub tractor and Ed Vallis came with his baler and we baled the hay and stored it in the barn hayloft. Over on the Nerepis interval, Bob Yeomans was busy building the new Sunset Valley summer cottages not far from where the cows roamed and sometimes got in their way. There were several more than my three over there.

Autumn was fast approaching and it was time to bring the cows and calves home. I didn’t feel it was wise to swim them back due to the new arrivals, so I called Ron Barry again and we decided to truck them home. This was easier said than done as the cows were quite wild by now and the calves had not been around any humans before. We called it a round-up as we had to chase them like the old cowboys out west, only we didn’t have any horses. It took several hours and I honed my lasso skills as we had to get a rope on them to get them on the truck. When we caught Henrietta, I could see that she was pregnant. There must have been a bull pastured over there as well as several other cows. It was in the early spring when her calf was born on a mild and icy day. She was on her way to the water hole, it was very slippery and she lost her footing, one leg going left and the other right. Her calf started to come but was only half out when I arrived with help from the Hogan boys, Jim and Danny. We assisted Henrietta with the birth and I was surprised to see that the calf was in a bag that looked like plastic. Henrietta used her teeth and opened the bag and the calf immediately tried to stand up. I picked it up and started for the barn and Henrietta got up and followed. I took them to a separate part of the barn and made a comfortable bed for them and brought feed and water for the mother. Hilda, Jim and Sandra all came to see the baby which was now standing and feeding off his mother. All three calves were bulls which I found disappointing so I had to make a decision whether to keep them or not. I chose not and sold them to Joe Oliver for a rifle, a rowboat and $800. I wasn’t a very good businessman or farmer, for that matter.

A & W – Angus & Winnie

Those of us who travelled on the commuter train to high school or work became a close knit group. Everyone got to know everyone else. In 1948-49, I was in my last year of high school when I became aware of a new presence among the high school crowd, a girl that I had never seen before. She was blonde and beautiful and I could feel palpitations in my chest so loud I felt everyone could hear them. Her name was Winnie Gorham and she lived at Crystal Beach, so she had to cross on the ferry and walk to Westfield Beach station to get on the train. It was also quite a walk from Crystal Beach to the ferry. It’s strange how one’s voice and movements freeze when they encounter a person of the opposite sex who they are attracted to. However, Winnie made it easy for me and I soon relaxed when in her company. We started dating and I spent a lot of evenings at the Gorham home at Crystal, quite often watching wrestling on the telly.

Mrs. Gorham was always very nice to me and brought tea and sweets and talked about life in general. Sometimes Winnie and I would stay in town after school and go to the show, coming home later on the bus. One of her sisters (Elsie I think) sometimes went with us. One of our first dates was to be a drive in my father’s car on a Sunday afternoon. I drove to the ferry but found that it had been unable to cross as the ice was running heavily. I was very disappointed and went to Ivan Kierstead’s store and looked out the window to see if it might eventually come. I waited quite a long time but it didn’t appear. Then,miraculously who should come walking up the road from the ferry landing but Winnie! She had come with some others in a rowboat.

Winnie’s father was Arthur Gorham who was one of the ferry operators and a fine man. He brought his car from his house every day and left it by the ferry landing, just out of sight of the ferry. The ferry didn’t run all night at that time, closing at 11 or 12 PM (I forget which) and the operator left at the appointed hour and went home. If there was an emergency, Bill and Edison Thompson lived very near and would be awakened to look after it as they were both operators. Art Gorham got used to me coming and going to court his daughter, walking the half mile or so to and from Crystal Beach. One evening he took pity on me and told me to use his car and bring it back before closing time. This I did many times until one night when I was very tired and brought the car back to find that the ferry was on the other side. I decided to wait in the car until the ferry came back and promptly fell asleep. Art couldn’t see the car from the ferry so he waited in the cabin for me to appear. He waited for over half an hour past his going home time, then decided to walk. He, of course, only went a few yards when he saw the car and me fast asleep. He wasn’t happy, especially since he had to start up the boat to take me across. My popularity decreased. However, my popularity also decreased with Winnie for other reasons as she had fallen in love with Eddie Leggett and eventually married him.

I met an older man on the train who hailed from Welsford, who sometimes used the train to get to work. Other times he travelled with his brother Stanley Jones by car. In the fall of 1949, after having graduated from Saint John High School, I started to work at the North End Branch of The Bank of Nova Scotia at the corner of Main St. and Douglas Ave. When I arrived the first day, having walked from Union Station to the bank, the manager Harry Burton introduced me to all the staff and lo and behold, there was Angus Jones, the assistant accountant, much to my surprise. It was interesting to watch Angus as he was a real country boy with no pomp or ceremony as he waited on customers and the older women flocked to him for his boyish charm and simplicity. Like all boys brought up in the country, Angus rolled his own cigarettes and these were the days when it was OK to smoke anywhere, even at work in the bank. I watched him one day as he was looking after a well-to-do woman, leaning with his elbows on the counter. He then reached into his jacket pocket and brought out the “makins”. He took out a cigarette paper and held it in his left hand while he poured tobacco into it with his right hand, letting the overflow drop on the counter. He then proceeded to roll the cigarette while more tobacco fell to the counter and he took great pains to lick the paper. The finished product wasn’t very pretty with tobacco sticking out both ends so he used his fingers to clear one end so that he could put it in his mouth. He left the tobacco sticking out of the other end and proceeded to scratch a match on the seat of his pants, all the while talking to the lady customer. When the match lit the cigarette, there was a burst of flame and smoke that got in the customer’s face until the loose tobacco was consumed. Then Angus drew a deep drag which you could tell he greatly enjoyed, and proceeded to blow the smoke into the lady’s face again. She took her hand to brush away the smoke from her face, smiled at Angus and carried on with her business. Angus had charm and he also was very good to me, helping me to learn the intricate workings of the bank and I appreciated his help. His habits never changed while I was there but in 1950 they transferred me to Belleville, Ontario and a whole different world.

The events that I have mentioned happened over sixty years ago, but these and many other incidents still stick in my mind. Imagine, remembering how a man rolled his cigarette over sixty-two years later.

The Olde Kirk Cemetery

Tom Laderoute at Olde Kirk Cemetery

One of the greatest pleasures in a young man’s life is the pursuit or courting of a pretty girl. After I met and started to court Hilda Greer who was later to become my wife, I found that I was being educated to be a country boy by her and was introduced to the area of Sagwa and Nerepis where she was born and brought up. She took me on a hike on a trail that began in her mother’s backyard at Nerepis. The trail went past a small lake which she called Mathers Lake and continued for a couple of miles until we came to the Brittain Stream, a large brook that ran from Capple Lake into Robin Hood Lake. The trail followed the hillside on the back side of Robin Hood Lake and soon came to the “Dardanelles” as I found the stream between Robin Hood and Little John Lakes was called. The only Dardanelles that I had ever heard of ran from the Sea of Marmara into the Aegean Sea between Bulgaria and Turkey. Hilda’s uncle, George Greer had a camp on Robin Hood Lake which he would let us use on occasion and a rowboat came with it so we could row to the other end of the lake where there was a lovely sand beach where we could swim.

Another pastime we engaged in was fishing in the small local streams for brook trout, which I had never done before. One day she took me to a brook that she called Camp Nature Brook at Nerepis. Why it was called Camp Nature I couldn’t understand as there was no “Camp” to be seen. After we had fished for a while she said, “Come with me, I want to show you something,” so she started walking up a trail from the brook. We shortly came to a deserted graveyard in the midst of the woods with the trees as large as pulpwood growing through the whole thing. I found this very interesting and wandered among the tombstones, trying to read the names and dates on them. I don’t remember what I found there at that time and soon forgot all about it.

After writing the column about Loch Alva and the old foundations that I had come across in the outback of Westfield and the road to Grand Bay through the woods, I received several calls from people, two of which told me that the old road in the article continued all the way to Prince of Wales. This prompted me to start thinking of other unusual things that I had come across in my youth. The deserted graveyard came to mind, so I drove to “Camp Nature” and pulled in beside the brook and tried to find the tombstones. However, I am not twenty-two anymore and soon became tired and out of breath, so I had to leave without any success.

Shortly thereafter I thought of Tom Laderoute who was a second cousin of Hilda’s and had grown up on the Brittain Road. Tom is one of those people who know a little about everything and a lot about other things. I felt if anyone could find the graveyard, Tom could. I soon got in touch with him and he told me he knew exactly where the place was and had been there recently. We agreed to meet at the junction of the old road and the new bypass at Nerepis. I arrived before Tom who soon showed up with a 4×4 truck, so I got in with him and we crossed the new #7 highway and went in a woods road just where they are cutting the woods out for the Welsford bypass. It wasn’t very far until Tom said we were just above the old graveyard and we walked down to it. This time I was going to get names and dates and try to figure out why it was in such disrepair. Tom told me that at one time, before he and I were born, there had been a Presbyterian Church on the old road and this cemetary was part and parcel of that church. His mother had told him that they just called it the “Old Kirk”. The place certainly didn’t look familiar to me, but many of the trees had been cut down, the efforts of a well wisher, a Mr. Kinney, who had passed away just a few years ago. But the worst part of the whole scenario was the desecration of the tombstones, most had been pushed over and laid face down on the ground so that the inscriptions could not be seen and others had disappeared altogether. Tom thought that people had stolen them for doorsteps or patios. Of the few that were standing, I read the name William Henderson, born 1819 -died 1898. Another was Maggie Henderson, born 1851 – died 1898 – Aggie Henderson born 1857 – died 1919. Also Samuel Parks, born 1790 – died 1864 -Ann Hunter (could not read the dates), the lichen and moss had done an excellent job of hiding most of the inscriptions. But there was Duffy Brittain – died 1870 and Leonard Brittain born 1850 -died 1903, perhaps the family that the Brittain Road was named for. Another name was John Godfrey – born 1822 – died 1900, his wife Catherine born 1841 – died 1919 and the last one I saw was James MacDonald born 1845 – died 1899. The year 1919 seems to be the last time anyone was buried here and it had already fallen into disrepair when Hilda and I were there in 1954. Tom felt that the land now belonged to the United Church.

Some of the people buried here may have been Loyalists, given large tracts of land by King George III for their loyalty to the crown. Others may have been wealthy from forestry or professional pursuits, but most were probably farmers making a living from the land and livestock. Whatever their status in life, rich or poor, tall or short, honest or crooked, they were all equal now. I felt very insignificant and realized that no matter what I had accomplished or what I had accumulated was of little significance a hundred years from now as no one would even remember me.

Therefore I have resolved not to take myself too seriously for the ambiance of the graveyard had moved me to realize how short is our time here on this earth.

It is a well known saying that it is better to be a Big Frog in a Small Pond than a Small Frog in a Big Pond and that is the way it always seemed to me to be the case in the small villages of Hoyt, Welsford and Grand Bay. To be a big frog in a small village you must be an entrepreneur who is the busiest man in town, selling, building, hiring, farming or trucking. Everyone comes to your door at one time or another to get a job, buy something, sell something or haul something. You will be the peoples first choice for an elected position on the council (County councils were eliminated in the 1960’s during the Equal Opportunity Program) or you may become an MLA or MP.

In the Village of Hoyt, a small village, the big frog was Gordon Moore. Gordon had a farm and also kept crews working in the woods and trucks to haul his wood to the mills. By 1950 he had prospered and enlarged his operations. Never being a shy or timid man, he painted a sign on the side of his barn ‘THE LARGEST POTATO GROWER IN SOUTHERN NEW BRUNSWICK’. As time went on his trucking business and woods business grew. He picked up trucking contracts that were quite lucrative and protected by the N.B. Public Utilities Board to keep the competition equal to the demand of the trucking clients. This prompted Gordon to incorporate a new company which he called Sunbury Transport Ltd. as  Hoyt is in Sunbury County.

Tom Worden, who now lives just off the Britain Road at Westfield but comes originally from Hoyt, told me the following story about Gordon. Early one morning before dawn, Tom went to Gordon’s house to see if Gordon could give him a job. He knocked on the door, even though the house was in darkness. He knocked again and finally a light showed in an upstairs window. “Who’s there?” hollered Gordon. “It’s me Tommy,” was the reply. “What do you want Tommy?” asked Gordon. “I want to see you,” he answered. “Well, I suppose you could see me if I put the porch light on.” This was a typical example of Gordon’s sense of humour. Another time he told me that he was stopped by the police when Grand Bay had their own force. The officer approached Gordon’s Cadillac and asked for his drivers license and registration. He told him that he had been speeding, which I found hard to believe as Gordon usually drove too slow. The officer said, “Well, Mr. Moore, this is going to cost you ten dollars and three points”. “I don’t think so officer,” Gordon replied. “What do you mean, you don’t think so,” was the angry reply. “Well Sir, I don’t have ten dollars and I’ve only got one point.” The officer told him to get out of there and slow down.

In Welsford the “Big Frog” was Hardie Parker who also had men in the woods and mills working as well as a farm and trucks to haul his produce. He was also the MLA for Queens County and I believe Vice Chairman of the N.B. Power Commission. He loved the woods and had a large camp on South Oromocto Lake (South Branch) and another small one on Cranberry Lake, a few miles south of South Branch. The South Branch camp had been a fishing club originally and therefore was large with several bedrooms. The lake was partly leased by the South Branch Fishing Club and the Parker, Brawn and McLeod waters had been granted by way of their deeds. The Parkers also owned Caton’s Island on the St. John River. There were two sons, Donald and Jack who Hardie brought up to love the woods and fishing as much as he did. Jack was close to my age and we became close friends. Jack was aware that I was born and brought up in the city and didn’t have the knowledge that he and his friends had about animals, tractors and the forest. In 1957 he invited me to go fishing at his father’s camp on South Oromocto Lake. Well, I had never been fishing in a lake, knew nothing about it and had no fishing equipment. He told me not to worry that he would tell me what to buy for gear and he would show me how to use it. I believe that there were six of us on that trip (Friday to Sunday) myself, Jack, Ken Cooper, Eddie Ogden, Geof Sloat and Dick McCracken. It rained on the Saturday so most of the boys decided to stay in and play cards except Ken Cooper and myself who went fishing (to clear our heads). It was a wonderful introduction to the sport for me as we caught over a dozen large lake trout. I was hooked as well as the fish. Of those six boys, only Jack and I are still living.

Jack’s father took us out to South Branch one Sunday, as he wanted us to build a shed for his tractor across the lake and a bridge across a stream for the tractor. This was the vehicle he used to convey supplies and outboard motors to his Cranberry Lake camp. The following morning, Monday, I heard Hardie hollering, “Come on you young fellas, it’s six o’clock, the day after tomorrow is the middle of the week and nothing done yet”. Wow, I never saw time fly like that!

There didn’t seem to be any “Big Frog” in Westfield, as most of the residents were of the same comfortable income level, unless you mention G. Earle Logan, the Magistrate. He had the voice and appearance of authority and used it to the fullest. Somewhere around 1952 or 53 he and some of the other year round residents decided they would like to make Westfield a Local Improvement District (LID). So he called a meeting to be held in the fall after all the summer folks went home to vote on the LID. If I remember rightly, only 11 people showed up and of course these were the ones in favour. Judge Logan advised the local newspaper next day of the unanimous decision of the meeting saying there were less than 200 attended.

In Grand Bay the “Big Frog” was Harold Gault, the proprietor of Gault’s Food Market and a partner with Marshall Francis in the pulpwood business, “Francis & Gault”. He was also, like Hardie Parker, an MLA, not for Grand Bay but for Saint John where he had been elected before moving to Grand Bay-Westfield. Like Hardie and Gordon Moore, he was a Liberal. (There had never been a Liberal elected in Kings County since 1935 and then only for one term) He and Marshall did the hiring for the store and woods work and were also instrumental in procuring jobs at the government garage while the Liberals were in power. However that was reversed in 1952 when the Conservatives under Hugh John Flemming formed a new government. Of course, all the Liberals were fired. After Harold’s death in 1955, Marshall became the “Big Frog” and eventually took over the new hardware store that he and I had started. He still had men working in the woods as well. Grand Bay started to grow very rapidly and many people started to winterize the summer cottages. Duncan Campbell, a retired railroad man either died or moved and his house was sold and the new owner was Joe Oliver who became a good friend, although contentious at times. One of the summer residents, Lem Sewell, kept honey bees at his summer house and each year the bee inspector came to Lem’s to inspect his hives. I was looking out the store window when he arrived in 1956 (I think) and he started across the tracks on the Station Road, just opposite the store, when a train came and struck his car carrying it down the tracks farther than I could see. Of course, the Bee Inspector could never inspect another bee as he was very dead.

I forgot to mention that Marshall Francis was a Kings County Councillor. The Council met in Hampton, the county Shiretown, once a month. The County Councils were abolished in the 1960’s during the Equal Opportunity Program of Louis Robichaud. The landscape was rapidly changing and the ways of doing business were changing with it so I had to change too.