Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

NNSL (Apr 12/99) - The plan was straightforward enough -- a spring dog team trip across the big lake, down the Talston to Uranium City, then known as Goldfields.

Jim Turner, then a strapping 27-year-old, and fellow prospector Lloyd Nelson would hunt and trap along the way -- maybe do a little prospecting -- but the main goal was to get to Edmonton to enlist in the Air Force.

That was the plan the two men had when the two men drove their dog teams out onto the ice of Great Slave Lake in the spring of 1941.

Not a newcomer

Though he had only been living in Yellowknife for a few years, Turner was not a newcomer to the North or bush travel.

He had been on a couple of spring hunts, trapping beaver and muskrat and worked on fishing boats plying Lake Athabasca. He had worked as a young cook, responsible for feeding the 80 Scandinavian and Russian fishermen who worked for McGuiness Fisheries winter camps.

"I saw guys there eat 20 hotcakes in one meal," he said.

Turner knew most of the rough and eccentric characters who then made up the tiny mining town of about 400 people.

He recalls on of the renown moments of that time, when Two-Gun Kelly rode a horse into the first Old Stope Hotel.

"It was open 24 hours a day and guys would go in there for a few days at a time. When he road in the old soaks in there looked up and it was like they were sober just like that."

"Old man (Vic) Ingraham yelled 'Get that God damned horse out of my bar!'"

"I can still hear the clickety clack sound the horse made walking in."

The bars were also the sight of some royal rumbles between the rough-edged miners and prospectors who then populated the town.

Turner recalls one at the Wildcat that ended with 12 men being sent to the hospital.

Doing their duty

For Turner and Nelson "signing up" meant doing their duty for their country, and included the exciting promise of travel and adventure.

But enlisting was a lot more complicated for the young men of Yellowknife.

"We tried to sign up at the post office three times and they just said, 'Oh, if they want you they'll call you,'" said Turner.

The nearest enlisting office was in Edmonton, and the government would not pay the $3 fare for the sail on the Hudson's Bay boat from Yellowknife to Fort Smith.

But after making their way to Rocher River, Turner and Nelson took separate paths. Nelson boarded a Mackenzie Air flight to Fort Smith and then Edmonton. During the war he earned the rank of Sergeant Major.

"I think he had it all figured out in Yellowknife," said Turner of his partner's travelling plan.

A few days after the two men parted ways, Turner lost his only other companions, his five dogs.

"They were going along like they were all played out," recalled Turner. "Two caribou came along the hill and down onto the river. I pulled out my gun and shot at them and the dogs took off like lightning."

The dogs chewed through their harnesses after escaping. Turner retrieved one of the dogs where the caribou he had wounded fell. The rest returned after a day and a half, their feet chewed up from running on the spring ice.

"I unloaded all of my excess baggage in the bushes at Twin Gorges," said Turner. "I drove as hard as I could and came across Cecil Oulton, who was spring hunting on the river."

"He was surprised to see me, or anybody, on the river. We made a deal. I helped him with his spring hunt and we went across to Smith together."

Cecil was the youngest of the Oulton brothers, who ran a trapline, mainly for beaver and muskrat, for hundreds of miles in the area.

"That Cecil Oulton, he was an exceptional hunter and trapper and canoe man," said Turner.

He also remembered Oulton being a very tough person to keep up with when it came time to bring the furs to market.

"I went three days and three nights without any sleep," said Turner. "Oh, he was a tough one. I'd have blood running out of my nose trying to keep up with him."

Teen sailor

Turner was no stranger to hard work. As soon as he arrived in the North from England in 1928, at the tender age of 14, he started working on a fishing boat working off Crackingstone Point on Lake Athabasca.

His brother, Lee, arrived here nine years before him, and had been fishing the lake for years. Their parents had died early and Jim had been raised by his sisters. Lee paid his way across.

"We fished there for three months on a three-and-a- half man boat -- I was the half man," said Turner. "My job was to tail the net behind the guy pulling it up."

The day started at 2 a.m. and ran until 3 p.m. -- "but if it blows and you can't dress (the catch) coming in, you've got that job to do when you get back to the dock. Sometimes we'd go until 10 at night."

That season they hauled in 165,000 pounds of fish, recalled Turner.

"Sometimes you couldn't see the boat (for all the fish in it). There'd be six inches of free board with one man pumping out water to keep us afloat. We swamped three times on the lake."

26-kilometre portage

Getting back to the plan to enlist...

Travelling on the thinning ice, Turner and Oulton mushed up the Talston to where it met the Hanging Ice River, the start of the 26-kilometre portage to the Slave River.

As gruelling as it was, the portage saved the 241-kilometre paddle to Lake Athabasca and back down the Slave to Smith.

As was the custom each year, trappers in the area combined forces to help each other through the portage.

Turner and Oulton teamed up with Ned Heron, Bob Behrens, Archie Mandeville and Cecil's older brother, Bob. All told, the men had about 1,000 pounds of fur.

"It's swampy and there's cricks where you can get in and pole, and when it gets too tough you hook the dogs up and they'd pull," recalled Turner of the terrain between the two rivers.

"There was a couple of fellas out in the lead, shooting ducks to feed the rest."

Turner said the group took about two days to travel the 26 kilometres, but says it's tough to tell, since they were moving day and night.

Bob Oulton had a cabin on the Slave River, where the portage ended. There Turner and the Oultons loaded their fur and belongings, including their 15 dogs, into Oulton's freighter canoe and another two smaller canoes it towed for the 64-kilometre trip upstream to Smith.

The freighter canoe was powered by a 10-horsepower outboard, so the last stretch of the trip was a chance for the men to recover from the exhausting portage.

But by the time they got to Smith and traded in their furs, they were ready for more action.

"We were going to buy one bottle of rum, but we ended up buying a case," said Turner. "And the next morning we were on the plane."

As with most good journeys, this one ended with the travelling being more important than the destination.

Turner arrived in Edmonton to find the recruiting office overrun with men looking to enlist.

"There were men from all over the place rushing to sign up, so they had a better pick."

Cecil Oulton, who had taken the flight with Turner, ended up going to Vancouver. He bought a boat there that had been seized by the Canadian government from Japanese Canadians.

When Turner and Oulton crossed paths in the North again, about two-and-a- half weeks after Turner returned, Oulton had a new wife and no boat.

It wasn't long after he returned, in 1943, that Turner was married himself. He met his wife, then Catherine Erasmus, on a trip down through the lakes and rivers leading to Tibbitt.

The two celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1993 in a big party of friends and family at Northern United Place.

Today's Turners

The labours of his younger years -- commercial fishing on Lake Athabasca and Great Slave Lake, cutting and hauling firewood for the mines and town by dog team, trapping and prospecting -- have taken a toll on Jim Turner.

Now 85 years old, he's been slowed by a bum leg and bright light bothers his eyes.

"That life -- today I think they would just roll up and die, a lot of them," said Turner.

A resident of Yellowknife since 1938, Turner knew long before that, as soon as he set foot in the North as a 14-year-old, this was his home.

"It was God's country to me," said Turner of his first view of the North, near Lake Athabasca. "I never looked back."

The Turners now live in a comfortable home on the shores of Great Slave Lake, on a small road that bears the family name.

Along with a steady stream of relatives (they have nine children and 25 grandchildren) the Turners also play host to a pair of bald eagles that stop by the backyard for fish put out for them.