Wilful Desertion
Early in 1946 Nan's
marriage to Richard Morenus was over. According to their divorce decree of June 1947
(see next post), Nan had "wilfully deserted and absented herself" from
Richard "without any reasonable cause and without fault on his part" since the day of
February 22, 1946. To obtain a divorce in the State of Illinois in those years, one of the grounds was "willful desertion without reasonable cause for over a year." Other legal grounds included adultery, bigamy, habitual drunkenness, extreme cruelty, attempt to murder a spouse, or infection of spouse by venereal disease. Nan and Richard went for the least humiliating grounds for divorce - wilful desertion. To achieve that, they had to live apart for over a year. In addition, one year’s residence
in the state of Illinois was required by husband and/or wife before a divorce petition could be filed. Richard moved to Chicago.
On September 26, 1946, Richard, living in Chicago, sold his interest in their beloved
island on Abram Lake, Ontario to Nan for a dollar. This was likely done
as a property settlement in preparation for their divorce. Ironically,
Richard's Maclean's article "From Broadway to Bush," in which he
praises Nan's virtues as an outdoors woman, had been published only 25
days earlier.
 |
| Land transfer from Richard to Nan, #38363 dated September 26, 1946. Source: Ontario Land Titles Office, Kenora, Ontario. |
On March 24, 1947, Nan sold the island to Ernest and Marion Linton of Chicago for $7500. Richard had sold his interest in the island to Nan for one dollar just six months earlier, so she made a tidy profit on the land sale. It is likely that Richard facilitated this sale as a way of ensuring Nan was looked after financially after their divorce.
After this land sale, Nan lived - for a short time, at least - in Sioux Lookout. Perhaps the Lintons allowed Nan to keep a place on the island for her own use. Perhaps she stayed in one of the 32 resident rooms at the Sioux Lookout YWCA. Testimony from the witness in the Morenus' divorce, recorded on June 6, 1947, states that Nan had been residing in Sioux Lookout "on the last occasion I saw her which was about a month ago." That timeline does not jive well with what I do know about Nan's whereabouts. Unless her piece "The Woman's Bushed!" for Maclean's magazine is pure fiction, in the spring of 1947 Nan was away for several weeks on a prospecting expedition.
Nan is Hospitalized Again
Nan continued to live in northern Ontario on her own throughout 1946 and at least part of 1947. On February 21, 1947, she was admitted to Sioux Lookout Hospital (now called the Meno Ya Win Health Centre) for eight days. The hospital's Health Records Department was only able to locate her admission record which indicates that her physician was Dr. Bell. Her patient chart was not located, or else the hospital decided not to tell me about it.
It is possible that Nan had undergone further treatments for her chronic
abdominal problems - perhaps even another emergency surgery for a
perforated ulcer. In her
article in Maclean's called "The Woman's Bushed" (August 15,
1947), she mentions her long convalescence
after "months of fever, pain and the smothering confinement of
sickness." I asked Nan's friend, 94-year-old Dorothy Maskerine, if she knew why Nan was hospitalized in 1947. "I can't tell you that," Dorothy quickly replied. I got the feeling Dorothy knows, or at least she knows what the rumour mill in Sioux Lookout said. [Source: Telephone call to Dorothy Maskerine, Dryden, Ontario, June 18, 2021.]
In his book Crazy White Man, Richard writes that, at some point prior to 1947, he went into the hospital at Sioux Lookout for surgery to repair a torn peritoneum. He was also under the care of Dr. Bell whom he called "the bush doctor." I checked but there is no record of Richard ever having been admitted to the Sioux Lookout Hospital.
Richard describes the 16-bed hospital as a frame building about the size of a large, two-story house that had two wards on the first floor - one for white male patients and the other for Indians. (Nan writes in her Maclean's article about Jim Chief that a "makeshift ward to handle Indian cases was set up on a winterized porch" of the hospital.) The second floor held the operating rooms, wards for female white patients including a maternity ward, and two private rooms, one of which Richard allegedly stayed in.
Alarmingly by today's standards, Dr. Bell told Richard that his experiences with the Indian patients, segregated in a separate ward, did not include maternity cases. “During the twenty odd years I’ve been here in the bush, I guess I’ve delivered about five thousand babies and not a single one of them an Indian,” Dr Bell told him. “The squaw just goes into the woods and has a baby and, with that perfectly normal function accomplished, goes back to her work.”
A Big Adventure
About
a month or so after Nan was released from hospital - perhaps April - and while she was
still recovering from her illness, Nan embarked on a major adventure
with a man she refers to only as "Joe." (I asked Dorothy Maskerine if she knew who Joe was. "Everyone knew Joe," she replied in our phone conversation of June 18, 2021. "He just kind of turned up in Sioux Lookout and hung out at the Hudson's Bay Company store." Dorothy is going to try and find out Joe's last name for me.)
The twosome took a 240-kilometre, 20-portage canoe trip in search of high-grade ore. It was summer and she was excited to get back into the bush and do some prospecting, her latest passion. They did not find the high-grade vein they were prospecting for, and when the excursion was over Nan was reluctant to return to Abram Lake. "I had caught prospecting fever," Nan writes in her article "The Woman's Bushed!" for Maclean's magazine (August 15, 1947). "The stern, inhospitable region fascinated me and some day I meant to return." [See post Nan the Writer, Part 2: "The Woman's Bushed" HERE]
Nan had another reason for not wanting to return to Abram Lake. Her marriage to Richard was over. He was living in Chicago - and by the summer of 1947 he was with another woman. Nan was living - possibly alone - in Sioux Lookout.
NEXT: The Morenus Marriage Ends - Click HERE
PREVIOUS: Tension in the Bush - Click HERE
INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE
©Joan Champ. All rights reserved.
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