by Chris Meyers Almey
Northern News Services

NNSL (May 09/97) - Jean Heal says her husband Smokey described the early days of Yellowknife as eight months of winter and four months of poor dog sledding.

Heal, not quite 79, came here in 1947 as a stenographer. She was reminiscing the other day with three other Yellowknife pioneer residents of Aven Manor. The four are now all widowed.

After working in the land registry for a year, Heal worked three more at the Yellowknife Inn, even though she couldn't afford to eat there.

Rosamond Smith says she and her husband Arnold were the first ones to get married in Yellowknife, with the number 0 on their licence. She's 82 and came here in 1939 to get married.

Betty Stevens, 86, recalls the time her husband Jack pulled a toboggan as they struggled to reach the four-bed Con Mine hospital from their "little shack" on School Draw.

Stevens describes it as the most snow they ever got and the worst storm she ever saw. "My husband had the toboggan in case I didn't make it. There were no roads, just paths," she says.

"It was terribly expensive and there was no food to eat. There was no transportation and no roads."

There weren't many cars in the early days, but the odds of having a head-on crash seemed high. Heal recalls two cars in Old Town driving around the rock and they "smacked into each other."

"Everything was around the rock. There were no lights," Smith says.

Smith's husband poured gold at the Negrus Mine and then at Giant Mine. Prospector Jack Stevens discovered a couple of mines, one being the Ray Rock Uranium Mine.

"I was here five or six days and Jack took off to the gold mine and left me with two kids and nothing to eat," Stevens says. "I never cried so much in my life. My husband found the Ptarmigan Mine."

Tom Forrest was a cook at the Ptarmigan Mine. He and his wife raised four sons.

Heal married Knight "Smokey" Heal in 1950 and they raised two boys. Smokey was first in the construction and then the trucking business. He died this past March 30.

Living conditions were rather primitive in the early days of Yellowknife.

"The first present my husband bought me was a plunger. He couldn't see me washing the clothes on a scrub board," Smith says.

"Seven years after we came up here he bought an electric washer."