THE WESLEMKOON ALLIGATOR The accompanying photo is of the alligator, The Weslemkoon (meaning bank beaver), that was employed to tow logs on Lake Weslemkoon during the 1890’s. It is a photograph taken during a picnic as the craft was travelling from Weslemkoon down the Mississippi branch of the Madawaska River past McArthur’s Mills to the […]
Life on the Farm Mother did most of the gardening and I helped her. Andrew and I ploughed the garden with oxen. We raised cattle and sheep. We drove the animals to Fort Stewart where we bartered them at the General store. Father came along in the horse and buggy. He would buy a package […]
Some of those first Fire Rangers never mastered the driving of a car so they were given small patrols that they could work with a horse and buggy. Arthur Mershaw was one of those lads. Arthur’s patrol was along the Madawaska River north west of Griffith. He was an old country Frenchman who had been […]
In the use of the fire tower you had to have miles of phone line. We had the fire towers on high hills about every 15 or 20 miles. It was our job in low hazard weather to build and maintain those lines. In 1924, when the department built the Raglan fire tower they ran […]
We old Rangers were few and far between and everything in our equipment was painted red. So I likened us fellows to the old British Army formation, “ The thin red line.” The fire tower system of spotting fire by intersection came out of the First World War. There was a descendant of Exzeba Fronsway, […]
( Continued accounts of Henry Taylor’s experiences as a Fire Ranger) We were plagued with a lot of fires on Sundays, often caused by cigarettes being thrown from cars. Those roads were just the width of the wheel tracks and when a cigarette was thrown out it went into the dry grass and brush. The […]
To the Bush In 1923 I finished the ploughing and left the farm to accompany my older brother Jim Taylor to the Murray and Omaneque lumber camp at Cross Lake. At Madawaska we met the camp clerk John Conway of Barry’s Bay. He offered us a ride into the camp. Well we had been sitting […]
Hunting Stories One night Exzbya Fronsway and John Prentice ( son of Michael ) went jacklighting for fresh venison on the Mississippi near Loney Chutes. When dawn arrived the hungry meat hunters went ashore for breakfast. Fronsway pulled the deer out of the canoe and skinned a hind leg and cut off a haunch of […]
To the Bush In 1923 I finished the ploughing and left the farm to accompany my older brother Jim Taylor to the Murray and Omaneque lumber camp at Cross Lake. At Madawaska we met the camp clerk John Conway of Barry’s Bay. He offered us a ride into the camp. Well we had been sitting […]
Henry Taylor – Fire Ranger After he was hired by McRae’s, Jim Taylor recommended his younger brother as a replacement for the remainder of the season. “ I went by canoe from the old Conroy Farm, up the Little Mississippi River, for an interview with Chief Ranger Harry Legris. That Chief Ranger told me that […]
