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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INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

 

 

©Joan Champ. All rights reserved.

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.

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.