Our Gold Claim
In the late 1930s my father,
Oliver Donaldson, and his brothers, Gib and Albert, made their living by
panning for gold on two gold claims on the Salmon River, now called the Salmo
River, south of Nelson, British Columbia. In 1980, Dad, my Mom, my husband
Mike, our five children, and I went on a holiday to the Salmo River and the
site of the former claims. We found the bottom two rows of logs, all that was
left of one of the cabins they had lived in and the second cabin, which was
still standing, on the other side of the river.
Under Dad’s direction we all panned the
river. The children were quite excited at finding gold to take home. We toured
the area seeing the route Dad and his brothers had taken into town to sell
their gold and to buy some staples and where they had hunted for deer and
picked apples to live on. After the trip, Mike and I had vowed that someday we
would return.
In the spring of 1992, Mike, and I found
ourselves preparing for a death and a wedding in our family. At the beginning
of that year, Mike’s oldest sister Sallian had been diagnosed with terminal
pancreatic cancer and one of our sons and his fiancé had set a wedding date.
For almost five months we visited Sallian, first at home and then in the
hospital. I cannot describe the anger, sorrow, and frustration I felt as I
watched what the disease was doing to her. She lost weight and the ability to
look after herself. During her final month she was hardly more than a skeleton.
For those same five months I experienced
a mother’s delight and happiness as I helped with the marriage plans. I made
the cake, watched my son pick out his tuxedo, found my dress, arranged for my
hairdo, and planned a mixed shower of friends and family.
Balancing my life while dealing with the
opposing emotions was truly hard.
Sallian died on May 25 at age 54. On
June 27 over 300 people attended the wedding and partied well into the night.
Like most people it took the death of
someone close to me to make me realize how important really living is. I
knew Mike and I had to do something adventurous with our lives, something out
of the ordinary.
That summer of 1992 we decided to leave
life as we knew it in Spruce Grove, Alberta, and get a gold claim in southern
British Columbia, preferably in the Nelson area. We sold our house and quit our
jobs. For our new home we bought a used twenty-four foot holiday trailer. I
phoned the Minerals Branch of the B.C. government. They sent us a map showing
the separate gold claim regions of southern B.C. We picked out three regions,
Salmo being one, and I called back requesting more detailed maps of the staked
claims in those areas.
On September 1, we began our journey west.
Mike was pulling the holiday trailer with our half-ton truck, which had our
all-terrain vehicle in the back. I was in our smaller four-wheel drive pulling
a utility trailer with our prospecting equipment and other paraphernalia we
thought we might need.
It took two days of slow travel to reach
the Selkirk Motel and Campsite on the side of the highway at Erie, about three
kilometres west of the town of Salmo. We set up camp, hooking up to the water
and power. We had until freeze-up to find a claim.
Next morning we were up early and off to
the Gold Commissioner’s Office in Nelson where Mike bought a Gold Miner’s
Certificate and received two red metal tags, and a topographical map, and was
given his recording form. We were hopeful as we headed back to the campsite.
According to the maps the Salmo River
was all staked so over the next two weeks we checked rivers and creeks in the
area with little success. But the Salmo River kept calling us and we returned
to Dad’s former claim and the remains of his old cabin. Just past it we stood
on the bluff looking down on the river as we had done twelve years earlier with
my parents and our children. The memories came flooding back: the walk to the
river with each child carrying a pie plate to use as a gold pan, finding gold
only to discover that we had nothing to put it in, one daughter coming up with
the idea of sticking it to bandages, camping near the river.
But we didn’t have time to linger. We
were working against the weather. Mike went over our maps of the Salmo River
again and this time noticed that there is a small portion on the curve of the
river near the old cabin that was open. Because the claims on either side
formed rectangles it was missed by both of them. We found the posts of those
claims then hurried to Nelson to confirm that the piece was available. It was.
It was possible to lay one claim over
part of another but the first one had priority for that section enclosed in it.
There wasn’t time to stake it that night so we had to wait until morning. We
rose early, went out to the river and put one of Mike’s red tag on the post of
the claim to the east of ours. Mike took a compass and orange flagging and we
began to mark off the distance, tying the flagging to trees as we went. At the
end of five hundred yards Mike cut a tree, leaving a stump about three feet
high. He squared off the top and I nailed up our final tag with the information
scratched by knife point onto it. The claim was five hundred yards by five
hundred yards and was called the Donaldson.
We hurried back to Nelson and handed in
the recording form. We were ecstatic. Not only had we located an area on the
same river as my father, but we actually had part of his old claim. We went to
the river and found a clearing for us to set up camp the next spring. Mike took
his gold pan and headed down to the water’s edge.
I followed and sat on a large rock. As I
watched the water flow sedately by, a deep sense of relaxation settled over me,
the first I had felt since the beginning of the year. It helped me begin to
deal with the fact that I had witnessed Death at work.
Sallian was the first one in either of
our immediate families to die. I had seen the tragedy of death strike my
friends but didn’t understand how devastating it could be until it happened to
me.
We spent the winter in our trailer in
Vancouver visiting with my sister, my aunt, and some cousins.
Near the end of March we drove out of
Vancouver eager to get back to our claim. We pulled our trailer in and set up a
campsite was in the middle of tall pine, birch, spruce, and cedar. We could
just barely see the mountain tops to the south. The mountains to the north were
higher and made a lovely backdrop to the trees. In the morning I walked through
the bush to the river. I sat on a large triangle-shaped rock and watched the
water drift by. A partridge drummed in the distance. Birds sang in the trees. I
took a deep breath of the cool, fresh air. It was a good place to be.
It rained just about every day for the
next couple of weeks. We sat under the trailer awning and listened to the drops
hitting the canvas. Sometimes the awning sagged with the weight of the water
and we had to empty it. Sometimes we let it overflow, creating a waterfall.
Rain or shine it became my morning
ritual to go to the river before breakfast. I loved to sit on my rock and stare
at the water. Because of the rains and the snowmelt in the mountains the river
level was rising each day. Soon I was watching logs and other debris rush past
in the torrent. The water dipped over some boulders, and created a backwash
when it hit others. The force of the water was mesmerizing.
One rare sunny day we went for a walk
down the road past our camp. I carried my camera. A short distance from camp we
saw spring water seeping out of a hole under a large rock in the embankment
beside the road. Mike reached in the hole to feel how big it was and found a
bottle of wine. It had been opened at one time and then put in there to keep
cool. Mike set it back.
We followed the long, hilly road as it
wound its way through trees and past cow pastures. On our way back we
encountered a herd of deer. They did some scrambling to get into the bush while
I did some scrambling to take pictures. They were faster than me. We reached
the spring and Mike decided to set up a water system. He went for a pail and a
hose. When he returned he put one end of the green hose into the hole and soon
water began to trickle out of the other end. He let it run for a while to clean
the hose then filled the pail. Mike carried the pail back to camp. We had fresh
water for our camp.
There was always activity around us. We
heard rustling and cracking in the bush and it wasn’t unusual for a deer to
trot through the clearing at any time of the day. Birds sang, a woodpecker
occasionally tapped on a tree, partridge thumped, and trees scratched and
rubbed against each another in the wind. All day and night there was the
thundering of the boulders as the whirling river water rolled and bumped them
against each other.
As the days warmed the air became filled
with the scents of pine and cedar, sweet wild flowers, and the intertwined
fragrances of the bush. Colours sprang up, from pink roses, white dogwood and
hazelnuts, and purple and yellow flowers, to the bright green of the ferns.
Butterflies flitted throughout the clearing and there was the buzz of flies and
mosquitoes and the drone of bees. The few rainy days were humid and the clouds
never stayed long. Sometimes the moon at night lit up the clearing and we sat
by the camp fire in the soft light.
With the rains and spring run-off over,
the river level began dropping. I sat on my favourite rock and watched the
slower, shallower water flow by. The roar was gone. In the peace and
tranquillity I was able to think about death. As best I could, I acknowledged
that many of the people I loved would probably die before me, though I found it
harder to actually accept the fact.
Mike and I spent time digging dirt from
around rocks in the water and working it in the pan. We found enough small
flakes to keep us trying.
But soon our adventure was over and by
summer’s end we were back in the real world. We never did find much gold but
then, for me, it really wasn’t about the gold.
I based my mystery novel, Gold Fever, on this experience. My historical novel, Romancing the Klondike is about looking for gold in the Yukon before the Klondike Gold Rush.
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