Dane Gibson
Northern News Services

NNSL (Feb 10/99) - Rose Smith slowly opens her photo album. The 83-year-old Aven Manor resident pauses on the first page and smiles.

Smith peels off a raggedly black-and-white image of a beautiful young woman, standing in front of a rustic log cabin.

"There was nothing up here back then," she says wistfully.

"We could climb up the hill where Bush Pilot Monument is and see nothing. We called it 'Around the Rock' in those days."

Smith was looking at a picture of herself, and memories of a much different Yellowknife surface.

She came here with her husband, Arnold, in 1939 when she was 23.

He poured gold bricks at Negus Mine and together with 26 other families, they settled Negus Village.

"That's what Yellowknife is made of," Smith says.

"It's made of gold."

She said she's excited about upcoming Heritage Week because without it, people wouldn't realize what the town is all about.

Yellowknife still invokes frontier images in the minds of southerners, but it's nothing like it was.

"I remember pulling my baby on a sleigh from Negus to Con, where Dr. Stanton was. A man passed us and said, 'Do you know it's 80 below?' I replied, 'So what!'"

She raised seven children here and said the community was stronger in the old days because of the challenges they faced together.

She tells the story of her husband arriving home from the Second World War in the same Wardair bush plane now mounted by the airport.

Both her and her husband are also xxxYellowknifer alumni -- Arnold wrote the Old Time column for the paper and she headed up distribution back in the mid-'70s.

Through it all, she said they always found ways to stay entertained.

"Nowadays, I hear people saying the kids have got to have a new pool or arena. I think that's kind of amusing," she says shaking her head.

In the '40s and '50s, her husband and boys played hockey on Great Slave Lake. In the summer they swam in the lake -- without griping about the cold.

"When we were young, we got along without all that, and we had fun doing it," she says.

When asked why she never left, she laughs.

"I know a lot of people who retire to places warmer but I'm going to stay," she says closing her album.

"People think I'm crazy but I like the snow. To me it's a part of life."