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Rapids in 1948, seeking an interview with a trapper which would be the basis of her next story," Lee writes in his unpublished memoirs, The North Called Softly (1977).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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©Joan Champ. All rights reserved.

22. Richard Writes a Book - Part 2

Wolves, Forest Fires, Romance, and the Ojibway 

 

Book cover from first printing in 1952.

“Particularly in the second half of the book we wish that he would forego the easy work of telling us about the evil spirits known as wendigos, philosophical French Canadians, remittance men, and similar stock characters of the fake bush, and given us more of the keen observation and sensitivity which he shows in his earlier descriptions.” 

    - Robertson Davies, “A Bushman by Choice,” review of Crazy White Man for the New York Times, October 26, 1952.

  

Richard Morenus filled dozens of pocket-sized notebooks with stories he had heard about life in the northern Ontario bush. Once he ran out of material about his own adventures, he turned to those notebooks to fill approximately half of his book, Crazy White Man (1952). 

 

 

Illustration by William Lackey

 

Richard writes some disturbingly exaggerated things about wolves which he calls “the bush’s most cunningly treacherous killers” that will kill “solely to satisfy their lust for murder.” He tells the story of the brave Anna Olsen who, in the 1920s or 1930s, saved herself and her two babies from certain death in a forest fire while her husband Ed was away working. “Her one chance was the lake. But Ed had taken the canoe, their sole craft. Again she looked at the axe in her hands and then at the pile of logs by the shore. The logs. The lake. The axe.” He tells the story of a romance between trapper Charlie Blaine, “one of the lonesomest men I have ever seen,” and Pearl, a Winnipeg bakery worker who, on the “wildest impulse,” had inserted her name and address into a box of saltine crackers that ended up at the trapper’s shack. And, he wrote in a condescending and racist manner about the region’s Indigenous peoples.

 

About a week after Richard and Nan arrived at their island home, Richard wrote a long letter to his former boss Lewis Titterton, manager of NBC’s Script Division. In that letter he describes his first impressions of the Ojibway people of northern Ontario:

 

Canoes filled with Indians are passing the island every day. They are busy now trading in their furs for their supplies for the summer. When these give out (the supplies) they’ll go hungry until the next fur season. I went up the other day to one of the little trading posts some miles up the river and watched the Indians do their buying. They are utterly shiftless and thoroughly impractical. They were buying great quantities of cheap candy, bright colored cloth, and things they would never possibly use. The candy they’d eat before they got back to their camp, and the other goods would be kicked around in the filth of their teepees until it is past all usage. Thus is the sturdy race of the aborigine. – Letter from Richard Morenus to Lewis Titterton, May 15, 1941. (Source: Wisconsin Historical Society, National Broadcasting Company Records, 1921-1976: Central Files, 1921-1976, Subseries: Correspondence, 1921-1942, Box 85, Folder 35, Richard Morenus, script writer.)

 

Over the course of the next six years, during which he spent a great deal of time among the Ojibway, trading with them, learning their language, Richard’s opinion of the Indigenous people evolved. Throughout his book Crazy White Man he leaves no doubt that, while he continued to believe that Indigenous peoples were inferior to white men, his understanding of them had grown. 

 

Richard was initially uncomfortable around the Ojibway. When he was a child he had read stories in which, he recalls, “the villainous red man was portrayed as a liar, a cheat, a thief, and a killer.” The people paddling by the island in their canoes, however, did not look particularly bloodthirsty. Still, he found himself imagining that the Ojibway people he encountered on his trips to Sioux Lookout were staring at him and talking about him in “uncomplimentary terms.” He decided to overcome his paranoia by learning more about the Indians themselves, including their language.

 

Illustration by William Lackey

In Crazy White Man, Richard uses terminology commonly used in the 1940s and 1950s that is jarring to today’s readers – words like “squaw” and “buck” and “savage.” One can, however, discern a softening of Morenus’ views of his Indigenous neighbours. His relationship with the old Ojibway chief Wa-she-ga or Jim Chief, the man who Nan wrote about in her article for Maclean’s [Click HERE], likely facilitated his change of attitude. He (and Nan) eventually befriended the old chief and his wife, visiting them in their wigwam on at least one occasion. “Over the years that I knew them I became very fond of the old Wa-she-ga and his tiny squaw,” Morenus writes in his book. “I hoped I might be able to express [in his writing] the sincerity of my respect for this fascinating yet pitiful old reprobate and his indestructible wife.”

Morenus’ portrayal of the Ojibway people remains racist and patronizing throughout the book. On intermarriage he writes, “No, the lone white man living on an equal basis will not raise the squaw to his level, but the squaw, with passive aboriginal certainty, will inevitably reduce him to hers.” He did research into the traditions of the Ojibway which he called superstitions, saying these were being combated through the “process of evangelizing” in residential schools under the joint control of church and government. He attempted to acquire some understanding of their language which he called a “confusing collection of grunts, groans, wails, and hisses.” 

 

Richard concludes: “In a sense it is the utter simplicity of the Indian that makes him difficult for the white man to understand. The white man, dealing with his own kind, looks for complexities in thought and reasoning. I found none of this existing in the Indian. He is of single thought and purpose. There is nothing involved about his mental processes. Whatever has been acquired by him of this nature he has certainly learned from the white man. On his own, deep in the bush, the Indian is simplicity itself.”  

 

 

NEXT: Richard Writes a Book - Part 3: What is Missing - Click HERE

 

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©Joan Champ. All rights reserved.

21. Richard Writes a Book - Part 1

A Best Seller... And Nan's Not Included

Original cover illustration by William Lackey

“Why don’t you write a book?” Richard Morenus’ American friends urged in their letters. His correspondents had often commented on their interest in what he had written about the bush in his letters to them, saying that most of the things he told them were things they had not known about before. “I knew without question that sometime I wanted to do some serious writing about the north,” Richard explains in Crazy White Man, “and I was just as certain that, as long as I stayed in the bush, I should never find time to do it.”

A shelf in the cabin he shared with Nan held dozens of pocket-sized notebooks. Every time Richard heard a story about northern Ontario bush life, he took out one of his notebooks and began writing in it. “I kept jotting in my notebooks with the thought that the future would somehow provide the time for me to write more than the short pieces and radio scripts which still furnished me with at least an adequate income,” he recalls in his book. I would like to locate Richard’s notebooks, but so far, I have had no luck in my search.

After Richard’s split with Nan in 1946, he moved back to the United States and settled down in Chicago – and later Escanaba, Michigan – to write his first book. On July 27, 1947, the Escanaba Daily News reported that Richard and his “wife” Nora (they were married a year later) were spending the summer at the Cove, a summer cottage near Munising, Michigan owned by Mrs. William McKeever in Hiawatha State Forest where he was writing a book on his experiences in Canada. His task was less than straightforward, however, as he chose to leave his wife Nan, his partner during six years of wilderness life, completely out of his account.

"Richard Morenus, well known writer, and his wife are spending the summer at the McKeever cottage." The woman in the photos is Nora Smith, whom Richard would marry a year later. Escanaba Daily Press, August 26, 1947.

 

Good Reviews

Escanaba Daily Press, October 9, 1954. By this time, Richard had written a second book for children.

Richard's book received many positive reviews. The Chicago Tribune praised it as "a little classic of the rugged life" (October 19, 1952), while the Christian Science Monitor called it "one of the best escapes from city pressures." [Argus Leader, June 13, 1954] "Respect for Mr. Morenus’ courage and hardihood grows with every page we read," Canadian writer Robertson Davies effused in his October 26, 1952 review of Crazy White Man in the New York Times.

Publicity photo of Morenus at "50 below zero" for his Crazy White Man book tour. This is a reenactment of his time in northern Ontario, likely taken in Michigan. Photo courtesy of Kim Clark and Michael Mansfield.*

Advertisement in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota newspaper, The Argus Leader, October 5, 1952.

Crazy White Man continues to be popular with readers worldwide. Here, for example, are just a few positive reviews of the book  posted in 2019 on Amazon.UK:

• “This is one of the few books I’ve read in 66 years that I simply could not put down. Well written, incredibly well written. Did I note it is well written?” – Joel, June 12, 2019.        
•  “I had no idea Canada had an area referred to as ‘the bush.’ This was a fascinating look into surviving in a very unfriendly environment by a man with little knowledge of how to even go about surviving.” – Ruby Chaney, August 1, 2019 
•  “A fascinating story of a time before cell phones and computers when humans communicated face to face! … A wonderful escape from the insanity of today!” – Luckyguy, May 25, 2019 
• “Have read this book at least 100 times. Gave a copy to each of my kids and now on Kindle. Written in early 50s so interesting on how it was then versus now. I read it the first time as a child and it lit the fuse on my love of the Canadian bush.” – Jim Bitz, September 1, 2019

There are a few negative reviews. A Kindle customer, for example, wrote on June 4, 2019 that while the subject matter is interesting, 

I was not a fan of the writer’s biases against the Indigenous people (“Indians”) of Canada, or his treatment of his sled dogs (beatings – even if they are deemed necessary to get the dogs to submit to the author’s will). Additionally, the book lacked descriptions of mundane (yet informative) things like what type of bed he slept on, or some pictures of the subjects/locations/people that he described. In other words, the details were overlooked. Overall, though, it was decent and worth a read if you’re interested in living ‘off the grid’ for a few years.”

In March 2020, Arcadia Press issued a new edition of Crazy White Man.

Book Signings and Speaking Tours

Richard travelled extensively to promote his book both before and after it was published. He appeared on radio and television programs and was a popular speaker at society dinners and club meetings across the country for years. He became known as a gifted teller of entertaining tales of his solo adventure in the wilds of northern Canada. "Morenus is one of those author rarities who is a gifted speaker," the Eau Claire Leader Telegram enthused on October 11, 1955. "Audiences like his amusing tales of personal adventure, they chuckle as he directs his humorous barbs at himself and they learn new things about the Canadian bush with its Indians and trappers."

Richard speaking at a meeting of the Maytag Management Club, no location, no date. Courtesy Kin Clark and Richard Mansfield.*

A speech he gave to the Society of Midland Authors in Chicago in October 1956, was also well-received. "Dick Morenus' account of his mishaps during those six years was hilarious,' Fanny Butcher wrote in her Chicago Tribune column "The Literary Spotlight" on October 7, 1956, "though they must have been grim at the time. As he ended, he declared that his whole name in Ojibway is 'Crazy White Man That Talks Too Much,' but his audience plainly hated to have him stop." 

Bookstore window displays promoting Richard's book. Photos courtesy Kim Clark and Richard Mansfield.*

When asked by a reporter if he would repeat the experience of living on a remote island in northern Ontario for six years, Morenus replied that he would and that he "not only learned more but got more quietude and got closer to God than I could have hoped to anywhere else." [Source: The Lexington Herald, March 11, 1959.]

Bookstore window displays promoting Richard's book. Photos courtesy Kim Clark and Richard Mansfield.*

 

 

 

 

In June of 1953, with Crazy White Man in its third printing, Morenus went to work on a sequel tentatively called “Bush Doctor” about Dr. Bell in Sioux Lookout. [Sources: Argus-Leader, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, June 28, 1953.] (He had written a radio script in 1943 by the same name.) If he ever completed and submitted the manuscript, it was never published. He did go on to publish five more books, however. 

Other Books by Richard Morenus

 

Northland Adventure. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1954. (Children’s book)

Alaska Sourdough, The Story of Slim Williams. Rand McNally and Co., 1956.

The Hudson’s Bay Company. New York: Random House, 1956

.

Frozen Trails. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1956. (Children’s book)

Dew Line: Distant Early Warning, The Miracle of America’s First Line of Defense. New York: Rand McNally and Co., 1957.

*Kim Clark and Richard Mansfield are the owners of Winoga Lodge Island near Sioux Lookout, Ontario - the island that Nan and Richard Morenus lived on for six years in the 1940s. This photo was in a box sent to them by Randolph Trumbull, whose mother was Richard's first cousin. The Trumbull family came into possession of this box of photos after Nora Morenus, Richard's sixth wife, passed away in 1981. 

 

NEXT: Richard Writes a Book - Part 2: Wolves, Forest Fires, Romance, and the Ojibway - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: Nan the Writer, Part 2: "The Woman's Bushed!" - Click HERE

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©Joan Champ. All rights reserved