In the mid 1930’s, we spent a summer on Mather’s Island at the end of Long Island on the Kennebecasis River. There, one afternoon while the family was walking on the tide beach my dad picked up some nice shells cast off by sea animals, and there on the beach lay a perfectly shaped real Indian arrowhead. Its edges were neatly flaked and it had a balanced shape including the carefully fashioned part for tying the tip to the arrow shaft with raw hide. Probably it was formed from quartz and it stayed in a case in our house for years as a curio, and dad spent many a fruitless day looking for another one. And I was reminded of the Indian arrowhead that was in one of the milled boards in Doreen Reaman’s sun porch in a house they built on a lakeside in Ontario.  Doreen was a pupil of mine in my first class in Langstaff, Ontario in 1947. Her father had found the saw logs in a gully forming a water dam, built hundreds of years ago.  He had the logs milled and gave the lumber to Doreen and her sister for building their own homes.

It was hard for me to visualize at that time when real Indians canoed all over this region and hunted with ‘primitive’ bows and arrows to bring down deer and moose for their food. In later years I saw the expeditions of eager canoeists led by Dr. MacIntosh of the New Brunswick Museum, headed throughout the various waterways of the St. John River system in search of relics left by the early inhabitants. The expeditions would come canoeing along the river as a group headed for White’s Bluff where they would make camp in the sheltered cove on the welcoming beach, as they carried out their explorations. Overnight they would dismantle their tents and leave silently, making one realize that they had come and gone and we had hardly seen them.

Years later I remember Ted McLean travelling those same routes with a Chestnut canoe and sail and see him coming down from the Cedars in a strong blow that was coming up river from the south. Sometimes the canoe would disappear behind a wave crest. Then he would appear again on top of the wave, speeding through the water. Sometimes only the tip of the sail could be seen above the wave as we watched from the Brown’s Flat wharf and wondered, “Would he make it to his destination?” He always seemed to arrived sun-tanned in swim trunks, in great shape and relishing his trip.

I never dreamt that someday, I would meet some of these Indians in the flesh and hang-out with them long enough to become their friends and to be taught the basket making, woodcraft and water lore that they and their forefathers had known for hundreds of years. It made museum exhibits somewhat lifeless and lacking the reality of real people performing these tasks.

We overlook Caton’s Island, where years ago Mr. Howard Robinson used to plant non-native trees from all over the world and where ducks used to gather in clouds during the northern flight migrations each fall, which made him make the island into a Federal Waterfowl Sanctuary. D’Arcy Brown, the caretaker who lived in the white house on the mainland bank, (demolished) would handle the motor boat and scow and bring people and animals to and fro from the Island. Each day Mr. Robinson would be driven into Saint John to the Telephone Company and the Telegraph Journal by George Hector who played the banjo and lived in Gagetown. George was always a pleasant and polite fellow, even to those who were just casual friends. And I remember how excited we were when we found a deposit of “fool’s gold” on the north side of the island, where there was a white bench on a sand beach to sit and rest and look up river. We were always intrigued at the Historical Society’s cairn that reminded us of the original French settlers, Robert Grave who built his trading post to trade with the Indians.  There was another trading post at a later date off Anderson’s Point and also one on Oak Point. The book, ‘Caton’s Island’  by James A. Fraser C.S.A gives a detailed account of the settlement of the Island from the earliest French traders up through all the English owners by the grant system until Mr. Robinson and Mr. Parker. A friend, who was a boy soldier during the War, and was stationed on Chesley Street attending classes at the Vocational School, purchased a metal detector and found many foreign coins around the Oak Point trading post. These included coins used locally plus Spanish doubloons  and other strange currency.

After we came down here in 1958, the Island appeared to me as a place of great potential. Mr. Hardy Parker of Welsford owned it then and I was interested in buying it for our residence. Mr. Parker offered me the Island for $l00,000, but I found the price too high for me at that time. Since then I have reflected on the problems of winter access across the ice, young children growing up there and the difficulty of weekly shopping. D’Arcy told me that the land was quite arable and would easily support a large vegetable garden. I was particularly taken with the house that Mr. Robinson had built and felt that the other rebuilt house that was located behind the cairn would give us the space we thought we needed.

Up at Evandale, the old Eveleigh Hotel has just re-opened and they are serving breakfast all day, large beef or chicken dinners with all the fixin’s in their hotel dining room and they even have a “burger bar” for quick lunches. While on the lawn they have a swimming pool instead of swimming off the Evandale Wharf, like guests have done for years. Today, most guests arrive by car, whereas years ago they would arrive by sailboats and launches or the river boats. There was also daily train and bus service.

Long Reach Skates

In about 1859, James A. Whelpley of New Brunswick developed a skate that was well suited for long distance skating on the bays and lakes of southern New Brunswick. It was called the Long Reach skate, after Long Reach, a section of the Saint John River, between Oak Point and Westfield where the Whelpley family operated a factory manufacturing the skates. The skate had a steel blade about 40 cm long on a wooden platform that was attached by leather straps to normal boots. The skates were packed for export to Great Britain and the United States in wooden apple barrels. The staves of the barrels were sawn from local wood and the binding hoops around the barrels were made of split birch saplings. At one time there occurred a slip-up with a screw that held the skate to the shoe. It fell out and the business folded from customer disgust at the faulty screw. Today on the Jerusalem Road about two miles up river from us, a friend recently found the uneven ground which marked the factory. The Whelpley family continued to make the Long Reach skates in New Brunswick until about 1886, when the factory was moved to Keene, New Hampshire.

I began river skating using tubular long reach racing skates riveted to a leather skate boot. They were beautiful. You could take long strokes and glides for long periods.  Later I ‘graduated’ to hockey tubular skates and they required a choppy, short stroke and the carefree season of skating was over. On the river ice there were large expanses of hard ice, but every so often there were ‘frost-cracks’ which would move up and down with the ocean tide changes, sometimes as much as a couple of inches. You had to be careful skating into the edge of the crack or skating off with a sudden drop off the end of the huge ice-sheet.

I had thought many times of building an ice sailer using skates as runners and an actual sail to provide movement. For the rudder, a skate with a tiller on the stern would provide steerage. I was always afraid of hitting the frost cracks at high speed. Though I have seen some ice ‘boats’ on the river, friends of mine who sail on Grand Lake have less problems with the ice cracks than we do in the tidal estuary.

Long before insects, animals or mankind wandered over this province, the land was seriously affected by natural events like storms, tides and volcanoes. These left a lasting mark on our land that effects us to this day. When we cleared some acres of big tree stumps from our land, which Charles Donald left after pulping it, we used a mechanical stump-puller, loaned to us by Herb Paisley and built by some unknown blacksmith in years past. It was still very difficult work, the five of us struggling for months, until we had cleared many acres and built huge piles of stumps and allowed them to dry before burning them.

We found in some places we only had 4 inches of soil and in others, 24 inches. This influenced what we grew and it was a yellow forest soil that wouldn’t grow anything until we had tilled in many tons of manure from our dairy goats and Jersey cattle.  Then one day Dr. Cal Seaman walked on our land and said how surprised he was that our soil was so “springy” compared to his soil.

As we climbed the “front face” of our land, we could see the effect of the volcanic structure built over many years. When Ed Carson dug a pond for us he opened 5 boiling springs, in spite of the fact that we are the highest point of land around here. He had to quickly install a water pump to remove the water so he could finish the pond.

Years ago, our family of 6 took three, 16-foot canoes and camped for a week at Cody’s on the Washdamoak, where one morning I observed tens of thousands of dead salmon or trout fingerlings floating in the water. We camped on a beach by the abandoned railway abutment from the coal mines at Minto. I remember the years in the 1960’s when the osprey seemed to disappear. We used to watch them diving from a great height into the water and taking flight with a large fish in their talons. Before that, when Bill Campbell ran the Rockdale Hotel (now demolished) on the shore above the Brown’s Flat wharf, we used to find huge river salmon, some over 3 feet long, stored in sawdust in his ice house. I remember Bill used to serve salmon dinners. They were known for their fresh baked rolls, fresh vegetables, steamed salmon with white sauce and fresh-baked fruit pies. No wonder people would travel on the Majestic and D. J. Purdy just to have a meal at the Rockdale.

One cold, frosty winter day when the crusty snow was knee deep and we had no meat in the house, I stood in a grove of tall pine trees and watched a massive moose, with a shiny black coat, stride easily up an old wood road and head right for me. On the next property I could hear people cutting firewood with a chainsaw and I thought, if I killed the moose and took it home on the toboggan, I would leave a bloody sign and a trail of blood right to the house. So I decided it was too dangerous to kill it and I clapped my hands and the moose took off like a shot, over deadfalls in a bound, suddenly disappearing. I had to walk over the moose’s trail to make sure he had been there after all.

Each summer, a Maliseet family (the Pauls) arrived on the river boat from Fredericton.  They had their tents, their canoes and personal goods. They would embark and go to the beach on the north side of the wharf and pitch their tents. Then they would build an open workshop of poles, with a tar paper roof and make some tables for working on and eating on. They quickly constructed with an ax, a crooked knife and a draw knife, various tools and equipment from drift wood which they used to make black ash baskets.

Maliseet potato basket

One morning Tom and I canoed to Glenwood, where we walked up past the shore line to the side of a pasture.  There Tom spotted a nice black ash tree which he felled and cut an 8 foot length from the bottom of the log. Tom told me that the Treaty Rights gave the Indians the right to go on anyone’s property and fell a black ash for making baskets.  This we carried back to the canoe and brought it back to the campsite. Here it was dumped into the River to soak and tied to the wharf so that it would not float away.

In a couple of days, Tom cleaned the bark off the ash and after laying a driftwood pulp stick on the sand, he chopped a V in the pulp stick. Pulling the  8 foot ash piece from the water, he put one end in the V he had made in the pulp stick. Then he took his ax and began to pound the ash log with the back of his ax. Each time he would pound it he grunted and breathed deeply as it took a lot of effort. Each time he hit it, the new mark made by the back of the ax would just overlap his previous mark. He continued this the length of the log then began again at the top and went the length of the log again. He continued until the whole log had been pounded.

Using the sharp blade of his ax he put a V cut on the ash log 6 inches from the end.  Using the blade as a chisel he pried in the ash V and lifted 5 or 6 growth rings. As he lifted the growth rings he was able to peel them free of the log because of his pounding.  When the whole 8 feet were free he separated each growth ring from the next. These were basket splints that he had made and he began to weave a potato basket and a fishing creel. When he got to the top, he fitted a ring of wood from a fresh-cut tree and a handle which he made with a draw knife.

He split the growth rings into half thickness and they were taken by the women and dyed different colours using Rit dyes in a pot on the stove. Every time they stopped working they placed the splints back into the river water to keep them supple. With the dyed splints the women made delicate baskets for ladies.

Ten or fifteen years ago I met Tom in Mactaquac Park. He had been wounded during the War and was with a nurse. We talked and recognized each other. Here a War had intervened and many of us travelled to places we never would have found in ordinary life.

Editors note: With this issue we begin a new column by David Smith. He grew up in West Saint John and spent most of his summers until 1942, on the River at Morrisdale, Glenwood, Mather’s Island and Brown’s Flat. Smith is a retired educator and former director of the Kiwanis Steel Band. He lives in Glenwood.

D. J. Purdy River Boat on the St. John River in the 1940’s

Before the War, even before I reached my teens, I used to travel all over this  part of the River St. John. Firstly I used a slow rowboat to travel along the shore, down past Brody’s Point and across the river to White’s Bluff, along the high tide line to collect drift wood which I formed into a huge raft, which I could tow to the cottage we rented and then I cut it up with a Swede saw and split it so that mother could burn it in the wood stove, for hot water, for cooking and for heat. In those days, there used to be a large pile of bleached white drift wood amassed in a huge tangled mess above the high water line, having come in on the Spring freshet.

We had two large river boats visiting Brown’s Flat, one traveling down the river from Fredericton, the other, a coal-burning steamer, coming up from Saint John with Captain McMurtry as the  river boat’s master. The following day the diesel river boat, D. J. Purdy would sail in from Saint John on the way back to Fredericton, while the Majestic would call in on the return trip from the Belleisle, Gagetown and Grand Lake, and leave a black cloud of coal smoke which came from her funnel. When the  river boats  approached the wharf they blew their horns and “everyone” rushed to the wharf to greet the vessel, and to see who was arriving and what freight they left, and what freight was on the wharf to go. In those days we even had a local taxi, Mr. Appleby, who lived in the small house just outside the Camp Ground fence on the road up to Brown’s Flats.  At that time there was a freight shed built on the concrete wharf to hold shipments “safe” and dry. I think Stanley Gorham bought the shed when it went up for sale.

These river boats served full course meals, with wonderful fresh-baked pies and tea or coffee. I remember one Sunday, when the Majestic “hove to” opposite the Prince of Wales Elm in Westfield, and put off a tender which carried a huge beef stew into our Scout Camp at Harding’s Point. The meat and vegetables were supplied by the Men’s Brotherhood which sponsored the Scout troop, while the Majestic cook made the stew on the river boat in Saint John, especially for us. For us Souts a “red letter“ day.

As Scouts we travelled all over the Peninsula, up strange streams, discovered huge clouds of mosquitos, and thought we saw “ghosts” in the cemetery beside the road. We pitched our tents between the road and the River above the single Westfield Ferry, which plied its regular path across the River, leaving heaving waters forming a trail behind it. At that time, little did we dream that there was a War ahead and that many of us would travel all over the world and be part of it.