33 - John's Life After Nan

The “Golden Eve” of a Long and Adventurous Life

John Albrecht on the doorstep of his home in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, c1967. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

John Albrecht survived his wife Nan by four decades. After her death in September 1950, John initially continued to live between Stony Rapids and his cabin at Selwyn Lake, tending to his trap lines and doing some prospecting. Duane Studer, a prospector from La Ronge, Saskatchewan, recalls staying at John's cabin on Selwyn Lake when he worked there in 1974. "I constantly saw evidence that his 'trapper' was really a prospector at heart," Studer later commented on the La Ronge History group's Facebook page. "[Albrecht] funded several people to work (stake) ground for him."

During the 1950s, Albrecht visited his son John in California once a year (read story here). He was also involved in a six year legal battle to acquire ownership of his deceased wife's land near Sioux Lookout, Ontario. (read story here)

In the late 1950s or early 1960s, John settled in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. He lived in a 16' by 20' house at the end of a boardwalk on Boardman Street not far from the lake shore, across from the present-day Conexus Credit Union. John made many good friends in La Ronge. Among those friends was Dr. Klaus Lehnert-Thiel and his wife Sigrid. "Many of us will remember John forever for his natural gift to tell stories in his thick German accent, his humour and his ability to teach children about things important to survival in the north," Lehnert-Thiel wrote in his obituary / tribute to John in The Northerner on October 16, 1991. Albrecht helped Lehnert-Thiel build  his log house in La Ronge, and became a surrogate grandfather to the Lehnert-Theil's teenaged sons. "The many outings we had with John and other friends during the winters and summers will be forever etched in our minds. He, John, lived his 'golden eve' of his long and adventurous life and he shared his experiences with all of us."

1967 - Prospecting with Bob Lee

S. E. (Bob) Lee, Manager of Northern Co-op Trading Services Ltd. in La Ronge from 1964 to 1967, was also good friends with John Albrecht. "At least three nights a week, during the long cold winters he'd come unannounced for supper, and later sit and talk about his forty years in the North" Lee writes in his unpublished memoir, The North Called Softly (1977). "His small brown eyes behind his black horn-rimmed glasses would light up in his long, lean face as he unraveled stories of hardship and glory, conquest and defeat, happiness and despair."

In John's small home in La Ronge, Lee reports seeing Nan's scrapbook from her radio days, and a few yellowed copies of Chatelaine magazine in which Nan's articles appeared. (It was likely MacLean's magazine that Lee saw, as I have not been able to locate any articles published by Nan in Chatelaine.) Lee also writes that a large, framed black and white portrait of Nan, with a black veil partly covering her face, hung on the north wall of John's house. (I have not yet seen a photo of Nan in a black veil.) I would love to see all of these items, but so far my requests to family members who may now possess them have been unsuccessful.

In his manuscript, Lee provides a good description of John's physical appearance. "Ahead of me I could see John's wide back and broad shoulders, even for a man that was quite short – about five feet seven inches. His long arms and large hands swung at his side, and his parted, well-groomed hair on his hatless small head was dark with not a grey hair – in spite of his sixty-nine years! The North had preserved him well. …His small brown eyes behind his black horn-rimmed glasses would light up in his long-lean face…"

Ottawa Citizen, April 25, 1946

In the summer of 1967, John and Bob Lee headed out prospecting after securing a grubstake of $10,000 from a company in Vancouver, BC. They packed a rock drill, John's 9' x 10' tent, a 30-30, a 22 rifle, a flat tin stove, compasses, fishing  rods, aerial photos, maps, and insect repellent. They had both ordered foam mattresses and camp cots. John said, "I've slept on spruce twigs long enough!" Lee writes that he'd never forget John's light plywood grub box. "It was bruised and chipped in many place, and the brown-coloured varnish was almost gone," Lee recalls. "Proudly it wore the wounds from many portages, many canoe trips, and many flights throughout the north. In it was all the cooking utensils and his beloved Presto Cooker [shown at left] - a must for fast cooking in the bush." [See a photo of John's grub box, aka "northern ice box," hanging outside on his cabin wall at Selwyn Lake here.] "John was truly an expert with the pressure cooker," Lee later wrote. "and I marveled many times that summer at the tender, gourmet meals he produced from that hissing, homely utensil."

On April 30, 1967, John and Bob chartered a La Ronge Aviation Services Beaver aircraft, piloted by Sid Nelson, and headed north to an island on the Harriott River, about ten miles southeast of Deep Bay on Reindeer Lake. From there, the twosome prospected along the Reindeer River.

John Albrecht on left with supplies dropped off for his prospecting expedition with Bob Lee, spring 1967. The man in white coveralls is likely the pilot for La Ronge Aviation Services Ltd. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

On the island, Albrecht and Lee constructed a platform for their tent as well as shelves for groceries and dishes, a table, and a wash stand. John was a stickler about personal hygeine. "If you don't wash, you'll sink into your own dirt in the North," he told Lee. A full dish of water, soap and a clean towel were always ready in the tent after visiting the outhouse, and once a week they would each take a sponge bath in the tent while the other went for a walk. 

John washing up on a lakeshore, 1967. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

John had also rigged up a clothes washer using a tin can with holes in the bottom attached to a peeled, one-inch stick. "When used with a plunging action, it was a very effective washing machine," Lee observes. "On the downward plunge, water was forced through the clothes up into the can. Just another of John's northern inventions."

Near the end of July, 1967, John and Bob moved their base camp to Dumont Lake. There they staked a large claim on land containing molybdenite - "molly" for short. They recorded their find with the provincial Department of Mineral Resources and sent samples to their financial backers in Vancouver. Unfortunately, the Vancouver firm did not honour their agreement over the molly claim, so the two partners engaged the services of Morris Schumiacher of Regina who got them their property back. In the end, however, they were never able to sell the Dumont Lake property.

In 1973, Lee writes, Albrecht went prospecting again, this time with Tom Hamilton and Jim Olsen in the Northwest Territories. There they found a rich copper-zinc showing at Snowbird Lake which they quickly optioned to a major mining company. Later, another big mining company bought an interest in the property for $500,000. John and his partners' option payments rolled in. [Source: S. E. "Bob" Lee. The North Called Softly, unpublished manuscript, 1977. Bill Smiley Historical Archives, Prince Albert Heritage Museum.]

1968 - Reunited with Sister Anna and Niece Margaret

Circumstances of two world wars separated John from his family for decades, yet the family ties remained strong – strong enough to miraculously bring them back together after almost 40 years of unimaginable challenges. This reunion was brought about in the mid-1960s thanks to the efforts of a Prince Albert resident, Bob Lee, and the German embassy in Toronto.

Bob Lee brought this incredible story to the attention of the Prince Albert Daily Herald back in 1968. An account of John Albrecht’s reunion with his sister, Mrs. Anna Gumboldt (or Gumpolt), was published on April 16, along with a photograph of the two siblings, Anna’s daughter Margaret, and Bob Lee. The newspaper devoted almost a full page to the stories of the brother’s and sister’s lives. Both siblings experienced adventure and adversity, yet their experiences could not have been more different. 

John Albrecht reunited with his niece Margaret Gumbolt (on left) and his sister Anna Gumbolt (on right) in 1968. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

John’s sister Anna escaped death several times during the Second World War. She and her four daughters endured 13 years in a Russian forced labor camp. Anna told the Herald reporter that her children suffered the most. Starvation was always with them. Her daughter Margaret was hit in the head by a Russian rifle butt, leaving her with a permanent scar. Her daughter Sigrid lost some of her toes to frostbite. With the children of other families in the camp dying one after another, Anna refused to give up. “I’d steal, beg and do almost anything to get something for the children to eat,” she recalled. “If I had been caught, it would probably have been Siberia.” Anna returned home from the fields one evening to discover that her mother and two of her daughters, 4-year-old Margarete and 5-year-old Bridget had been taken away on a forced march to Poland. That night, Anna and her two remaining daughters slipped away from the camp and began what became a six-month search. When she found them, her mother had died and neither of her daughters could walk. Carrying the young girls on their backs, Anna and her older daughters travelled back to the family home in Lithuania. By the time they got home, two of the girls required stomach surgery due to the horrors they had endured. 

Fast forward to 1968, when Anna Gumboldt, along with her daughter Margaret, reunited with her brother, John Albrecht in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. “It’s a miracle we ever found John,” Anna said to the Herald reporter. “We all thought he had died in the wilderness of northern Saskatchewan where we got our last letters from him.”  “Yes, you thought I was dead,” John replied, “and I thought you were all dead in the war. Now we find that almost the whole family is still living.” 

Family reunion at the Lee home in Prince Albert, 1968. L to R: Margaret Gumbolt, Connie Lee, Eva Lee, Anna Gumboldt, John Albrecht, Curtis Lee. Photo by Bob Lee, courtesy of Curtis Lee.

Margaret eventually moved to Canada to live with her uncle, first in La Ronge, and later in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. John moved to Maple Ridge in 1977 to live with his niece and passed away there in 1991 at the age of 93. To date, Margaret has not responded to my requests for an interview.

Conclusion

This blog has revealed a few things about Nan Dorland – the actress-turned-writer-turned-prospector from New York City. We learned how she embraced life in northern Canada – first on Winoga Island near Sioux Lookout, and later in Saskatchewan. We learned that her first husband Richard Morenus misrepresented his six years on Winoga Island in his book, Crazy White Man (1952), writing falsely that he was there alone when in fact he had been there with Nan. And we learned that Nan’s short, second marriage to Saskatchewan prospector John Albrecht produced a son who lived until 2015. 

But, I am still trying to find the answers to many other questions. For example:

- Where is Nan’s writing? Nan published two articles in MacLean’s magazine during the 1940s which I have located. Any of her other writings have disappeared or remain to be uncovered.

- Who was “Joe,” the man who accompanied Nan on her canoe expedition north of Sioux Lookout during the summer of 1948? I asked 94-year-old Dorothy Maskerine, who had known Nan in the northern Ontario town, if she knew who Joe was. “Oh, everyone knew Joe,” she replied in our phone conversation in June 2021. “He just kind of turned up in Sioux Lookout and hung out at the Hudson’s Bay Company store with his dog.”

- Where did Nan go after she left Sioux Lookout in 1948? I have not yet been able to determine her whereabouts from August of 1947 until she turned up in northern Saskatchewan in the autumn of 1948. Dorothy Maskarine told me that she heard Nan went to Edmonton, Alberta, possibly with the man named Joe. Another source, Bob Lee, wrote that Nan had gone to Squamish, BC.

With the passing of time, so much of Nan’s life story has gone missing. My journey in writing her life story ended up being a complex stitching together of fragments of her life, constructing a portrait both from what remains and what is missing. 

Portrait of Nan Dorland, c. 1935. Courtesy of Rabeea Shhadeh.

Thank you for reading Discovering Nan Dorland! I hope that by publishing Nan’s story, more information about her will come to light. If you have any photos or documents about Nan or Richard Morenus or John Albrecht that you are willing to share, please contact me at: joanchamp@shaw.ca 

 

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PART TWO: 24. Nan and John - Partners in Prospecting

"An Enormous Amount of Fun"

"I see no reason why girls can't take their places beside the men in the field. Mind you, they must expect to pull their weight and not be crybabies when things don't go too well - when it rains and the fire goes out, or when the black flies make life miserable." - Viola MacMillan, President of the Prospectors and Developers Association, radio broadcast, 1948. Source

 

John and Nan prospecting for uranium at Robins Lake in northern Saskatchewan, 1949. Nan - identified as "Nan Di Leo" in this government photo - is holding a Geiger counter. Photo: Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, R-A9325

 

 

 

 

"Uranium was the cause of the Morenus-Albrecht partnership," the reporter for the Prince Albert Daily Herald wrote in March 1950. Nan had likely heard about John's important uranium discovery, along with Leroy (Roy) Tobey, on Black Lake near Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan in August 1948. Because of her interest in prospecting, I think she decided to track him down in the fall of 1948 to ask him to help her stake claims in the same area that he had found uranium earlier that year. 

Another possible reason that Nan Dorland came to northern Saskatchewan is provided by John Albrecht's friend, Bob Lee. "She had just come from Squamish [British Columbia] when she arrived in Stony Rapids in 1948, seeking an interview with a trapper which would be the basis of her next story," Lee writes in his unpublished memoirs, The North Called Softly (1977). "The Hudson Bay Company manager was quick to suggest John Albrecht as a suitable candidate." [I have not been able to verify that Nan had been in Squamish, BC.]

Nan Arrives in La Ronge

In late summer of 1948, Nan Dorland Morenus arrived in La Ronge, Saskatchewan, reportedly to take a prospector’s course. She may have stayed with a couple named De Lea (or De Leo or Di Lea or Di Leo]. Nan eventually took the surname De Lea. Natalie Thompson, an employee at the La Ronge Precambrian Geological Laboratory, informed me that Nan's first year of claims and prospecting work were submitted to the provincial government under the name De Lea. Thompson's theory is that Nan's hostess in La Ronge, a Mrs. De Lea, had taken the prospector's course which was a requirement for getting financial assistance under the Prospectors' Assistance Plan. Nan had applied for assistance under that plan, but because she had not yet taken the prospector's course the government gave her a time limit to get it done. Instead, according to Thompson, she took the name of the woman who had already taken the course. [Due to COVID-19 restrictions I have not been able to verify this. I plan to visit both La Ronge facility and the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan once things open up.]

At some point that fall, Floyd Glass, a Prince Albert pilot, flew Nan and an unknown man up to an area west of Stony Rapids. The mystery man may have been "Joe" - the man Nan had gone prospecting with in northern Ontario in the summer of 1947 (see story HERE). He was not her former husband, Richard Morenus; they were divorced in 1947. I am guessing that Glass flew the couple either to Goldfields or to Fond du Lac. Goldfields, a gold-mining town during the 1930s, saw new life in 1948, serving as a base for the exploration of the new gold: uranium. Goldfields' population surged as hundreds of prospectors, almost entirely male, poured in looking to discover their own finds. Source. Fond du Lac, one of the oldest, most northern remote communities in Saskatchewan, is the home of the Denesuliné First Nation.

Source: Google Maps

Glass provides an account of Nan’s time in Saskatchewan in “A Northern Romance,” his contribution to the book, Gold and Other Stories [W. O. Kupsch and Stan Hanson, eds. Regina: Saskatchewan Mining Association, 1986]. He recalls that when he flew in a few months later to see if the couple was ready to come out, Nan's mystery man ran down to the plane. “He was going out,” Glass recounts. “He said as far as he was concerned he didn’t know what she was going to do, but he thought she was staying.” When Glass went up to talk to Nan, he discovered that “there was no way she was going out. She was up there to find a uranium mine. That’s all there was to it.”

Nan gave Glass some money to pick up a dog team and sleigh for her. He brought her six dogs as well as a net so she could catch fish for the dogs. He thought Nan didn’t know what she was in for, but “she thought everything was fine.” Glass had no way of knowing it, but Nan was by then an accomplished dogsledder. See story HERE.

Nan arrived at Stony Rapids in the first week of December 1948 by dog team. "They [the dogs] were tired. And she was tired," Glass writes. "They had come over thin ice in places where the RCMP told me they didn't know how she ever stayed on top." If she had come from Goldfields, she had traveled about 150 kilometres (100 miles); if she had started out from Fond du Lac, she had traveled 77 kilometres (48 miles). 

It was at Stony Rapids that 37-year-old Nan met 50-year-old John Albrecht. Within a short time, Floyd Glass flew the two of them up to John's camp on Selwyn Lake near the border of the Northwest Territories and was told to come back in the spring. 

John Albrecht outside the cabin he shared with Nan at the south end of Selwyn Lake, SK. Dog houses in the background, with dogsled harnesses hanging from the eaves on the left. The box above the cabin's window is a "northern ice box." According to Dr. Klaus Lehnert-Theil, in addition to keeping things cold, the box kept things out of reach of the dogs. "When John returned from his trapping rounds he most likely stored the catch (mink, fox, fisher, marten, etc.) in this box until he felt like taking it into the cabin to unthaw and skin it." Source: Dr. Klaus Lehnert-Thiel.

Prospecting

The couple spent a year and a half together in northern Saskatchewan dividing their time between Selwyn Lake and Stony Rapids. In May of 1948, the Government of Saskatchewan lifted the ban on private uranium prospecting. Uranium was the essential ingredient in the development of the atomic bomb. With that in mind, six parties were selected to participate in the province's Prospector Assistance Plan for the 1949 season, including John Albrecht and Nan "Di Lea." All six parties elected to prospect in the Black Lake area where John and his former partner, Roy Tobey, had discovered uranium in 1948.

According to a document titled "Prospectors Assistant Plan, Season 1949" (see above) sent to me by Natalie Thompson of the La Ronge Precambrian Geological Laboratory, Nan "Di Lea" and John "Albricht" were Party #4 of the six parties. The text states that PAP No. 4 "made several uranium bearing discoveries in biotite and biotite-hornblende gneiss of granitized texture" at Robins Lake, 50 miles from John's Nisto find of 1948. According to the table on page 3, however, Party No. 4 did not make any claims in 1949. I have not yet discovered whether, during the course of their partnership, Nan and John staked any of claims together. 

Nan told the Herald she “finds Northern Saskatchewan a ‘wonderful place’ and her chosen work ‘just an enormous amount of fun’.” In response to the reporter’s question about who did the housework, Albrecht replied tersely, “Whoever gets back first gets supper ready.”

 

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