The search for Jack Laflair brings his son home
Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services
Nahanni Butte (Nov 06/00) - It was a hot sticky day in August when a Parks Canada warden led Al Paquette to his father's grave.
They found it near the confluence of the Liard and Nahanni rivers, southwest of Fort Simpson: a white cross fenced off from the thick bush. Paquette pressed a ballpoint pen against the flaking white paint and wrote: Alvin Jack Laflair, 1841-1950.
It was the closest Paquette had been to his father in 38 years.
"I always wanted to know about my father," said Paquette from his law office in Vancouver.
In 1971 his mother passed him a letter from an American cousin Larry Laflair, who had searched for his black sheep uncle. RCMP directed his search to Emmerance Paquette, Jack Laflair's common-law wife and Paquette's mother.
The letter piqued Paquette's curiosity and he continued to dig for the story of his father. His search took him to contact with Dr. Norman E. Kagan, a Northern history buff and director of the Albert Faille Wilderness League, a non-profit corporation dedicated to retelling the stories of pioneering Northerners.
Kagan's search for stories of Northern pioneers brought him to Vancouver in 1994 where he discovered the unmarked grave of Poole Field, a trapper from the Nahanni region.
Field wrote to Laflair. Despite the friendly tone of the letters the two didn't always get along.
Independent trappers often competed for share of the trade and Laflair had tried to get Field's license revoked. He accused him of being a secret agent for Northern Traders or the Hudson's Bay Company.
Field never lost his license but things came to a head on New Year's 1928 during a turkey dinner in Fort Simpson where trappers gathered for the big feast.
"An altercation of some sort as the next day Billy Clark, the town's poet wrote the Saga of Baron Butte and Lord Goldfields."
The next year there was no turkey dinner and Laflair did not go to Fort Simpson but the poem was read on Signal Corp Radio on New Year's day, 1929.
A long way from home
Jack Laflair was a long way from the home he left in 1902 after a fight with his father Louis Napoleon. He fled Odgensburg, New York for the life of a ranch hand in Wyoming. He swore to return a richer man than his father.
Laflair was the ninth of 16 children. He was christened Jean-Baptiste Laurentum Laflair but his parents renamed him Alvin Jack for an older brother who drowned in 1892.
The 15-year-old Laflair worked for several ranches, then headed south to work on the Panama Canal. He fell ill with yellow fever and returned to the U.S. and lived in Los Angeles.
Laflair returned to Ogdensburg in 1911, threw down a money belt lined with gold and said, "whatever you're worth I'm worth more."
Louis Napoleon offered him a beer, but Jack was restless. He went to Montana for a ranch job but was fired after he and other hands put bullets through cases of canned milk because they wanted real cream for their coffee.
Laflair headed North with horses in 1914 to start a ranch in Peace River but sold them and headed to the Nahanni region. He returned to Ogendensburg for the last time in 1920. It was a short stay.
The Ogdensburg Journal for May 3, 1921 noted: AL LAFLAIR PROSPECTING IN THE WILDS
"With five years prospecting to his credit on the Nahanni River, in the far north, A.J. Laflair...is again preparing for the long trek to his lonely cabin on the upper Nahanni, in the foothills of the Rockies, west and north of the Great Slave Lake."
Laflair chose the wilds where he trapped and traded with the local tribes and played the violin where the Nahanni River flows into the Liard. He met Emmerance Paquette, a Metis nurse, in the summer of 1938. They never married but had a child in December, 1941 and named him Alvin.
"I remember planting spruces along the sides of the frozen river so ski planes would know the runway," said Paquette.
Alvin waved good-bye to his parents as he headed off to the second grade at Sacred Heart School in Fort Providence. He never saw his father again.
That was in September 1950. A month later, on Oct. 17, Laflair sat down on a log to have a cigarette after chopping wood. He had a heart attack and fell, cigarette still clenched between his fingers.
Laflair's body was wrapped in a Hudson's Bay blanket and buried 200 meters from his cabin. He wanted a boulder to mark his grave but Al Paquette wants a bronze plaque. Maybe he would be proud that his son is going against his wishes.
