YellowknifeLife: You moved North in 1950?

Cal Mains: Yes. I went to Aklavik in 1950.

YellowknifeLife: Was it your choice to come up North?

Cal Mains

CM: Yeah. When I went to enlist in the RCMP, I asked the corporal of the detachment if you had to go North. He said it was all a volunteer basis, so I volunteered, because I didn't think winter could be any worse than it was in Southern Saskatchewan.

YellowknifeLife: What were your first impressions when you got to Aklavik?

CM: I was quite pleasantly surprised, because I'd been in Northern Cape Breton, where we didn't have telephones. If someone wanted to get in touch with a policeman, they had a telegraph office. They'd send this telegram up and we might get the thing a day or several hours later. By the time you got down to where the complaint was, it was generally all settled. The roads were pretty bad there, so when I got to Aklavik, I thought it was pretty good there. They had all the facilities there. No running water, mind you.

YellowknifeLife: How long were you there?

CM: I spent about three years in that subdivision; about a year-and-a-half at Herschel Island and the rest of the time at Aklavik.

YellowknifeLife: What kind of law enforcement was necessary on the island back then?

CM: There was no law enforcement. We handed out the aspirins and tried to look after that sort of thing. We also handed out the welfare rations.

We started a little trading business there actually. It was kind of and experiment. Instead of just handing out the rations, we would also trade for handicrafts.

We did really good. We shipped it all to Ottawa and it sold like hotcakes. I think they even made money on it.

YellowknifeLife: Where did you go from there?

CM: I went back to Aklavik and then at the end of three years, I went to Alberta. Grande Prairie, Spirit River and Manning. I figured I'm going back North, so I might as well go to the Yukon. I went to Whitehorse then to Mayo and then to Tuk.

YellowknifeLife: How long were you in Tuk?

CM: A couple years. That was after I got married in Aklavik to Alice Farrow. She was working for the Anglican Mission.

YellowknifeLife: Any unusual cases you worked on while you were up there?

CM: The only thing really unusual was when the special constable in Arctic Red River murdered his wife. Law enforcement was not a big problem.

YellowknifeLife: I guess for the most part, you were just a representative of Canada?

CM: Well yes. We patrolled Aklavik every night, but a lot of your time was spent looking after yourselves and your dogs.

YellowknifeLife: Oh, you had dog teams?

CM: Oh yeah. We used to take them up to Herschel Island in the summertime because there were no mosquitoes up there.

But it was a lot of work. You had to cut your own ice from the river for your water and get oil for the oil stoves.

We also had to look after the family allowance. You'd keep track of the credits in a big ledger. They'd come in and there was a list of staple foods and what they could have. But that's how their family allowance was paid out.

YellowknifeLife: I guess this was before there was welfare?

CM: There was welfare as well, if they really needed it, but welfare was a pretty hard thing to come by. It was just on the fringe of when things were changing over.

YellowknifeLife: Where did you go from Tuk?

CM: We went down to Fort Churchill to the Central Arctic subdivision. It was the headquarters for the Eastern Arctic.

They didn't ask if you wanted to go some place. They told you and you went. When we were in Tuk, they forgot to send me a memo telling me I was transferred to Fort Churchill. One day the pilot radioed over and said, 'I'll be over to pick you up tomorrow to transfer you.'

I said, 'Transfer me where?' I heard I might be going there, but I hadn't received anything. My wife was doing the laundry at the time. The pilot said, 'I'll arrange to have the aircraft unserviceable for 24 hours.'

So she did the laundry in Tuk and ironed it in Churchill.

YellowknifeLife: And from there?

CM: From there we went to Fort Smith, where I retired and took another job.

YellowknifeLife:Who did you go to work for?

CM: I went to work as the deputy clerk of the court in Yellowknife, in what was called at the time the Territorial Court. I stayed there for about five years.

YellowknifeLife: And then you moved to Hay River?

CM: Yeah, I had a job as a transport inspector.I never really expected to stay here this long.

YellowknifeLife: No thoughts of moving to Arizona?

CM: No, I think we've moved enough.