18. Road to Divorce

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. 

The Sioux Lookout General Hospital was built in 1922 and operated until 1951 when a new hospital was built.

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.

17. Tension in the Bush

The Problem of Being Alone Together

 

Division of labour in the wilderness: Kathrene Pinkerton prepares a meal while her husband Robert writes at their desk. Source: Kathrene Pinkerton, A Home in the Wilds (formerly Wilderness Wife). New York: Tanlinger Publishing Co., [1939], 1967.

“The problem, simply, is that of being alone together. ... Isolation is a special pitfall to the couples in the wilderness. Key to the domestic economy, as crucial as loading firewood, are measures the couple take to avoid crowding each other, rubbing up against each other to the point of irritation."  - Randall Roorda [Source: "Wilderness Wives: Domestic Economy and Women's Participation in Nature," in This Elusive Land: Women and the Canadian Environment. Melody Hessing, Rebecca Raglon, and Catriona Sandilands, eds. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005, p. 46.]

Kathrene Pinkerton and her husband Robert, who, like Nan and Richard Morenus, had moved from New York City to live in a one-room cabin in northern Ontario, recognized that they each needed their own space. Pinkerton wrote the following in her 1939 book Wilderness Wife which Nan had read:

Our winter days fell naturally into a schedule. Robert wrote every morning ... while I inspected the trap line. In the afternoon he was busy out-of-doors cutting wood or doing odd jobs and I had the cabin. This arrangement was not the result of a treaty. It had worked out naturally and was an unconscious recognition of the fact that two people cannot always be together. They must escape from each other occasionally if only to be demagnetized. And everyone must have his own domain. Without separate outlets into the world around us, a one-room cabin life would have permitted no individual privacies. The divergence in our interests gave us supper-time conversation.

Rugged Interdependence

The Morenus' first year at their cabin on the island near Sioux Lookout was spent in what Roorda calls a state of "rugged interdependence" - repairing the cabin, clearing windfall and brush, patching mattresses and bedding, fixing up canoes, and generally putting their camp into shape. There was little time for squabbles. “Less important than what wife or husband can do is what the couple does together," Roorda writes.

In addition, Nan and Richard had a shared interest in writing. "After the first year the typewriter was unlimbered, a certain number of hours each day had to be put in on the keyboard," Richard writes in his Maclean's article "From Broadway to Bush" (September 1, 1946). "Long experience of writing in the States had made our radio contacts not too difficult to maintain, and after convincing our markets that our mail service could meet their deadlines we turned our thoughts script-wise once again." 

Nan and Richard Morenus in northern Ontario. Source

 

Friction

“There’s an odd chemicalization that takes place in the wilderness,” Richard wrote in Crazy White Man (1952). He had noticed while acting as a guide for American sportsmen that, “however good friends two men may be, put them together for any period of time beyond the normal processes of society, and their nerves begin to react. It is almost as though the tempo of living in a city for fifty weeks out of the year acted as a drug, the removal of which caused a drastic mental reaction. By the fifth or sixth day they [start] to argue between themselves. About little things. Their laughter, at first so spontaneous, becomes strained and forced at each other’s attempts at humour.” Had this same “chemicalization” occurred between Richard and Nan?

Richard acknowledges in his Maclean's article that there had been some tough times during their five years on the island. "We have suffered discouragement and ofttimes heartbreaking disappointments," he writes. "There will always be these so long as we live in the bush." He also refers to Nan's independent nature. "Nan will get her own deer, and skin it herself," he says. "Her canoe needs a patch before being stored for the winter. This she’ll want to see to herself."

As the years went by, Nan had found many activities to occupy her time while Richard wrote. She learned how to set snares, how to bake bannock and bread, how to drive a dog team, how to fish through the ice, and how to hunt and butcher venison. She also took her turns at the typewriter.

Was there competition between Nan and Richard as they navigated wilderness living? Was Nan's striving toward self-reliance and expertise in the outdoors a source of irritation for Richard? Did he resent Nan's growing proficiency at tasks one would expect a man to perform - tasks like looking after their dog team? As her strength and skills developed, did Nan chafe against her husband's expectations of domesticity and dependency?

Whatever the causes of the Morenus' tension in the wilds of northern Ontario, their marriage did not survive the strain.

 

NEXT: Road to Divorce - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: Nan the Writer - Part 1: "Jim Chief" - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

 

©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.

 

15. Nan Buys More Land

 Lakeshore Property

 

Nan's property was on the shore of Abram Lake directly across from the island (now Winoga Island) she shared with Richard Morenus. Google Earth, 2020.

For some reason Nan decided to buy more land in northern Ontario. Perhaps she bought it as an investment. Perhaps she wanted a place of her own, separate from the cabin she shared with her husband Richard Morenus, where she could write. Whatever her reasons, on July 7, 1943, Nan took possession of a four-acre piece of land on the shore of Abram Lake near Sioux Lookout, Ontario, directly across from the island she shared with Richard. At the time, there was no road into the property; it was only accessible from the lake. She paid $100 to Reverend Peter Gordon McPherson and his wife Nettie for the land, Parcel 10836, Lot 11, Concession 1. The transfer of this parcel of land was registered September 13, 1943.

Plan showing Nan's shoreline property, Crown Patent PA7842, April 23, 1932. Source: Ontario Land Titles, Kenora District.

The McPhersons had acquired the property in 1932 as the site for their summer home. They had lived in Sioux Lookout for decades, raising four children - a daughter and three sons - in the small Ontario town. Rev. McPherson, a United Church minister, had arrived in Sioux Lookout in 1916 and moved with his family to Leduc, Alberta in 1928. [The Lookout Post, May 22, 1952, p. 2.] 

 

Nan's Land Changes Hands

If Nan saw this land as an investment, she did not live to see the fruits of her purchase. When she died on September 3, 1950 from complications after giving birth to her only child, she did not have a will. As a result, the dispersal of her estate took years. The administration of Nan's estate, and ownership of her land, was turned over to the Crown Trust Company. It took Nan's second husband John Albrecht more than five years of negotiations to have the land transferred to him, "made in consideration of $200." 

Apparently there was some confusion on the part of the Crown Trust Company's Estates Officer Cyril Melville Corneil about Nan's name and marital status. He needed to ensure that Evangeline [Nan] Albrecht was the same person as Nan D. Morenus - the name on the land title. Also, because her divorce from Richard Morenus took place outside Canada, more paperwork was required. 

Cyril Melville Corneil's affidavit, October 3, 1955, Page 1 of 3. Source: Office of Land Titles, Kenora, Ontario.

During the course of these investigations, mistakes were made. In his Statement of Oath, October 3, 1955, Corneil wrote, "Due to an oversight, the property was not conveyed to the said John Erdmann Albrecht nor was a Caution registered under the provisions of Section 12 of the Devolution of Estates Act within three years after the death of the said deceased." An Administrator's Caution was not issued until November 5, 1955. It was not until January 31, 1956 that Land Transfer 53987 was issued, allowing Albrecht to buy his deceased wife's property for $200 before the disposition of the rest of Nan's estate. 

Disclosure document from John Albrecht's probate records. Source: British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum.

John Albrecht held onto Parcel 10836 near Sioux Lookout until his death on September 10, 1991 at age 92. In his last will and testament he bequeathed all his property to his niece, Margret Johanna Gumbolt of Maple Ridge, BC. By then, the land was valued at $5000. I have attempted several times to contact Margret Gumbolt without success, so I have no idea whether or not she ever visited the land she owned in northern Ontario - thanks to Nan and John.

John and Nan’s son John A. Danke, who lived in California, was the rightful heir of his father’s estate but the will was never contested.

Margret Gumbolt sold the lakeshore property in about 2010. The current owners Mat and Bev Lelonde built a home on the property and live there year 'round. Before they bought the land, it was only accessible by water or by ice road in the winter. A number of years ago, a one-lane road was constructed to provide access to the Lelonde property and about 18 other properties on Abram Lake. [Source: Email message from Dick MacKenzie, Sioux Lookout.]

 

NEXT: Nan the Writer, Part 1 - "Jim Chief" - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: Getting Around in Winter - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

  

©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.