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winters he'd come unannounced for supper, and later sit and talk about his forty years in the North" Lee writes in his unpublished memoir, The North Called Softly (1977).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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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.  

26 - John's Years as a Trapper

"I Was Not So Bad!"

John Albrecht arrived in Regina, Saskatchewan on June 1, 1929. As he could not speak English, he went to work for a German farmer near Bulyea, about 70 kilometres north of the Queen City. He worked there until the fall, helping with the harvest. When the threshing was over, the farmer said, "John, you know the wheat is going down in price. If I was in your shoes I would go north. North there is lumber, sawmills, there's fishing, and if you're really tough, go trapping." [As quoted in Berry Richards. Interview with John E. Albrecht, La Ronge, SK, July 14, 1975. Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, audio recording R-A873.] The farmer must have had a crystal ball. With the crash of the stock market in October of that year, wheat prices plummeted.

Laura and Adolph Studer, 1938. Source

John left the farm at Bulyea in mid-September and moved to the St. Walburg area. He worked for a year on the homestead of Adolph Studer, a farmer and trapper who spoke a little German. It was there that John first tried his hand at trapping. Studer encouraged John to trap and offered him a loan. "No," replied John. "I got enough money." He bought himself 100 to 120 small traps and, on Studer's advice, went trapping for weasels. 

 

Life as a Trapper

John left the St. Walburg area on October 1, 1930 to become a trapper in the Big River area (Dore River); he stayed there for four years. "I was not so bad," John told Berry Richards in a 1975 interview. "I made quite a few dollars with weasels; in the spring, rats [muskrats]."

It was while he was at Big River that John began to learn English. He ordered at least 20 books from mining people in Big River, receiving books on minerals and geology. These books not only helped him learn English, they also sparked his interest in prospecting. [Source: Berry Richard's interview with John, 1975.]

While at Big River, a trapper named Ragnar Jonsson from Wollaston Lake talked John into heading further north and west to Wollaston. In June of 1934, John headed to the Snake Lake-Souris River country. There he bought a canoe, more traps, and five sled-dog puppies from local Dene people at Pinehouse Lake. "The puppies were small, but they could run behind me," John recalled. "And there I went on a trip - I tell you!" John trekked through hundreds of kilometres of wilderness to Wollaston Lake, walking or portaging 50 kilometres (30 miles) along the way with close to 800 pounds on his back, including a canoe. 

This Google map shows the distance from Big River to Wollaston Lake via Pinehouse Lake using present-day roads. John got there by canoe and on foot.

He reached Wollaston Lake by the end of September 1934, only to discover that his friend Ragnar Jonsson had just left for Reindeer Lake and then further north to Nueltin Lake. "So I was alone there. Alone on Wollaston," John lamented to Richards. Clearly, it was a lonely time for him. 

The Chipewyan had a rough year and even they didn't come. So I was just clean alone there. There was nothing. That's the damnedest north, you know? It's one hell of a long stretch. And I tell you, no maps! I didn't even figure out where I could get maps. No maps, nothing!

John trapped in the Wollaston Lake region for three or four years. According to John's friend Dr. Klaus Lehnert-Thiel, John's cabin was located on what is now the site of the Rabbit Lake Mine near the western shore of Wollaston Lake. [Source: Author interview with Klaus Lehnert-Thiel, January 15, 2018.] He later moved his camp to Fiddler Bay on the east side of the lake.

Les Oystryk, a historian and retired conservation officer from Creighton, Saskatchewan, has done considerable research into the life and work of Jim Cumines, a fish and game warden stationed at Brochet on Reindeer Lake. Les and I have been emailing for several years, and he has generously shared information that he has culled from Cumines' reports relating to John Albrecht. 

Jim Cumines, game warden, on winter patrol by bombardier in 1942. Source

Cumines first met John in May of 1936 during a patrol of Wollaston Lake. John had been trapping under a license issued at Souris River using the name "John Gilbert." John told the warden that the license issuer had misspelled his name. Seven months later when Cumines encountered John again, he was still using the same license issued in the name of Gilbert. [Source: Email to author from Les Oystryk, March 28, 2018.]

Was John hiding his German ancestry? He had applied for, but not yet obtained his naturalization papers from the Canadian government and was considered an "alien." Trouble was brewing in Germany. According to Oystryk, Cumines eventually issued a non-resident trapping license to John so he could sell his furs.

In 1937, John moved up to Brochet on the northern end of Reindeer Lake. That summer, he served as the guide for P. G. Downes on a journey to Neultin Lake.

Hand-drawn map by RCMP Constable Marcel Chappuis in 1937-1938 of the Wollaston Lake/Reindeer Lake area that he covered by dogsled during his 1937-1938 winter patrol. John Albrecht's cabin on Fiddler Bay, Wollaston Lake is identified at top centre. Thanks to Les Oystryk for bringing this map to my attention.

By March of 1938, Cumines wrote that John was trapping out of his main camp at the narrows going into Fiddler Bay on Wollaston Lake. John had "a good cabin and seems to keep everything in order," Oystryk quotes Cumines."but complained that this winter he made no hunt at all." Foxes, wolves, caribou - all game was scarce. Cumines also reported that John had put up quite a lot of fish for his sled dogs, "but he claims the Indians helped themselves to his fish cache and now is very short of dog feed."

Illustration from "Memories of Deep River." Source

Two years later Cumines reported that he had seen John at the Swan River fur trading post on Reindeer Lake. He had 20 fox pelts of poor quality and a few mink and otter. By June of 1940, Cumines determined that John had gone by plane with two Swedish trappers to Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan. John had apparently left some debts behind at the HBC post at Swan River on Reindeer Lake. [Source: Email from Les Oystryk, March 28, 2018.] John formed a trapping partnership with one of the Swedes, Oscar Johnson, a man in his 70s. The two of them lived in a cabin at Selwyn Lake north of Stony Rapids and split their fur proceeds 50/50. The two also did some prospecting, finding some gold, nickel and copper, but the prospecting didn't work out. The trapping supplied the money for prospecting. "We made more than we needed," John told Berry Richards. "We had always money,"

Oscar Johnson decided to quit the north in 1945. After a few years trapping out of Selwyn Lake, the 75-year-old told John, "I can't take it anymore." So he "went out." (According to Klaus Lehnert-Theil, when a trapper, who spends most of the year in the bush, says he "went out" it means out into civilization.)

Three years later, John's life changed dramatically. He co-discovered a major uranium source and got a new partner - Nan Dorland - who shared the same cabin at Selwyn Lake that he had previously shared with Oscar Johnson.

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