12. The Big Move to Northern Ontario

Road Trip!

Border crossing between Minnesota and Ontario, c1940. This bridge was removed in 1963 when the new border crossing at Grand Portage was opened. Source

It took Nan and Richard and their little cocker spaniel Nik five days to travel from New York City to Sioux Lookout, Ontario via Chicago - across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana. They left their Manhattan home on May 1, 1941 and, according to a letter to Nan's father from Canada's Department of Citizenship and Immigration, were granted permanent entry into Canada at the Pigeon River border crossing on May 4.

Letter to Nan's father Ernest Danke from Canada Citizenship and Immigration courtesy of Martin W. Beerman.

Richard later wrote in his book Crazy White Man (1952) that passing through Canada Customs "was surprisingly less complicated than when I had been a mere tourist." He and Nan explained "rather proudly" that they were landowners and had come to stay. Their possessions were inspected and they were welcomed and admitted into Canada with all the privileges of a Canadian citizen except the right to vote. The Morenuses maintained their American citizenship.

Border crossing as it would have looked when Nan and Richard went through in May, 1941. Source

Map showing the old border road that once carried motorists across the Pigeon River border crossing. Source

Here is Richard's description from his book Crazy White Man,of the 410 kilometre trip from the border to Sioux Lookout:

After passing the border … the tires of the car were on the most intolerable highway I had ever driven. It was carved through rock and flanked on both side by virgin timber. … The road northward got progressively worse. The car bounced, squeaked, chattered, and groaned in protest. There had been no pavement since crossing into Canada more than two hundred miles behind, and the frost, several feet deep through the winter, was just coming out, heaving big chunks of the road’s surface as it left the ground. Also, the farther we went, the colder it became. ... But a thousand miles to the north, where I was, winter was hanging on with remnants of snowdrifts along the roadside and lakes held captive under slush ice.

Nan and Richard would have crossed the Frog Rapids Bridge just south of Sioux Lookout on Hwy 72. It was completed in 1938, replacing the multiple span wooden truss bridge to its left, which was demolished shortly afterwards. Photo: Ontario Ministry of Transportation, 1938.

Arrival at Sioux Lookout

Illustration by William Lackey showing Morenus' arrival in Sioux Lookout for Crazy White Man by Richard Morenus (1952). Nan is not shown in the car, as Richard completely omitted her from his book.

Nan and Richard arrived in Sioux Lookout at lunchtime on May 5, 1941. Their first stop was the Hollywood Cafe owned by Tom and Ken Lee where they ate lunch "under the questioning gaze of Indians and bushmen," Richard writes in his September 1, 1946 article for Maclean's magazine, "From Broadway to Bush." The license plate on their car was a tip-off. "We were obviously 'those crazy Americans' who had bought the island and were moving here to live." The Morenuses soon learned that everyone within a 100-mile radius knew about their land transaction, to the minutest detail. "That's something you'll have to get used to," Ken Lee is quoted as saying in Crazy White Man. "You're something of a curiosity. It isn't every day that an American, especially a New Yorker, comes to the bush to live."

Fifteen-year-old Bill Wilson (brother of Dorothy Maskerine) took the Morenuses over to the island in a square-stern canoe fitted with a motor.

Ten days after their arrival on their island, Nan and Richard were getting settled in. "We are slowly becoming acclimatized, and although the work is hard, and there is plenty of it, it is already having its good results," Richard wrote to his former NBC boss, Lewis Titterton, on May 25. "Nan is settling down as the excitement of travel leaves, and the even tenor of daily existence goes on." [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.]

NEXT: Life in the Wilderness - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: Preparing for the Move to the Bush - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

11. Preparing for the Move to the Bush

Burning Bridges, Buying Bush Clothes

Nan read this 1939 book before she and Richard moved to their island in 1941.

Two letters written to Nan were discovered tucked inside the pages a book by a woman in La Ronge, Saskatchewan. As I attempt to piece together Nan's fractured history, these shards of her memory are like gems to me. The first of the two letters is shown below. The second will be featured in an upcoming post.

The day the deed to their island in northern Ontario arrived in November 1940, Nan and Richard held a little celebratory ceremony. After that, they started "burning bridges -- the contacts with the advertising agencies, and recording companies, and the film companies with which we had worked," Richard recalls in his Maclean's article, "From Broadway to Bush" (Sept. 1, 1946). "The most spectacular conflagration took place when I quit my job as executive staff writer with NBC, and we watched the security of a steady pay cheque go up in smoke. In the embers lay my experience of over 10 years active affiliation with the [radio] networks, and the end of Nan's successful career as an actress."

In 1940, Nan and Richard were almost broke. The cost of living in New York was high. In addition, Nan's emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer in 1939 had set them back. As Richard explains in his Maclean's article, "Nan's fancy surgical needlework had been done by an expensive authority on such interior decorating." The couple spent their final days in New York getting rid of everything they owned - things "that would be of no practical use in a land of coal-oil lamps and wood stoves."

Nan was empowered with the necessary skills to live in the wilds of northern Ontario after reading this book, originally published in 1916.

In the months before they left New York, Nan and Richard did some research about how to live in the north. Richard read books by Jack London, Robert W. Service, fiction about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and even a Boy Scout manual. [Source: Richard Morenus, Crazy White Man, 1952.]

Two of the books Nan read were written by fellow New Yorker Kathrene Pinkerton: Woodcraft for Women (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1916, 1924) and Wilderness Wife (Carrick and Evans, 1939). Like Nan, Pinkerton’s husband Robert, a newspaperman, had been told by his doctor that he had to give up his work and lead an outdoor life. The Pinkertons packed up and headed for an area near Atikokan in northern Ontario where they built a log cabin. Kathrene’s book Wilderness Wife is an account of their five years in the bush country.

Outfitting and Preparations

Catalogue illustration from Von Lengerke & Antoine, 1939. Source

Pinkerton's book Woodcraft for Women covers all the practical knowledge and skills a woman would need in the wilderness, from clothing selection to canoeing to hunting and fishing:

On outdoor cooking: “If a woman attempts, over an open fire, the usual city food, cooked in the usual city manner, she invites hardships and disaster for herself.”
On clothing: “Never should the cotton shirt be too thin to afford protection from the sun’s rays and never should the flannel shirt be too heavy to rob violent exercise of its pleasure.”
On footwear: “To attempt a wilderness journey on high heels would be to invite a sprained ankle. … Moccasins made by Indians are the most satisfactory.”
On map reading: “One of the best methods of becoming ‘of the party’ and not ‘with it’ is to know the route and the general topographical features of the country.”
On paddling a canoe: “Because so large a part of the pleasure of a canoe trip lies in this individual endeavour, the woman who does not paddle loses the witchery of the canoe vacation.”
On portaging: “It would be well for every woman at least once to have packed a heavy load across a portage. In that way as in no other she can grasp the point of view of the man who has a long, heavy carry before him or who is straining under a big load down the last lap of a portage.”
On fishing: “The novice fisherwoman should never inflict her company upon a real fishing party unless she has a sincere desire to fish. To fish flippantly, to tire readily and then to demand an early return to camp is to make oneself a public nuisance, and the woman who cannot bait her own hook, rig her own tackle and care for her own equipment is no less annoying.”
On hunting: “The woman who has stalked a deer or a moose, approached and shot him, has earned him. To her will come a thrill of personal power.”

Fashionable outdoor clothing for American women in 1940 included jodhpurs (riding breeches) and high lace-up boots.

Arrow shirts ad, 1949. Source

Before heading to Canada in May of 1941, the Morenuses shopped for wilderness wear. "Unfortunately," Richard writes in Crazy White Man, "wherever I went to shop, I found no salesman who had ever been north of Albany [New York]. ... The clothes I bought were heavy, bulky, colourful, and expensive!" The items he purchased in a Lexington Avenue shop included a fleece-lined union suit (long underwear), a thick wool sweater, a lumberjack shirt, heavy-duty mackinaw pants, three pairs of heavy-ply socks "about the thickness of thin mattresses," and - to top it all off - a triple-thick, all-wood innerlined mackinaw parka "of a glaring crimson colour." It only took one winter in the north for Richard to regret these purchases. "I was undoubtedly the prettiest thing the north had ever seen," he writes, but after a short trek on the bush trail wearing these heavy items he nearly cooked to death!

Nan's task in buying bush clothes was even more challenging. As Pinkerton points out in Woodcraft for Woman, the woodswoman was at a disadvantage in the selection of outdoor clothing. "In few cities have her needs been met with the same generosity that has characterized the attitude of sportsmen outfitters toward men campers." The outdoors was considered to be male turf. Since the days of Daniel Boone, men did not take women with them into the wilderness. "Somehow, out of this neglect, arose the impression that wood joys were for men alone," Pinkerton writes. "Alone, isolated enthusiasts worked out their dress, camping, and equipment problems."

Pinkerton's First Letter to Nan

Kathrene Pinkerton's letter to Nan, Jan. 23, 1940. Source: Darlene Studor, La Ronge, Saskatchewan.

Nan began corresponding with Kathrene Pinkerton late in 1939, a year and a half before she and Richard moved to northern Ontario. On January 23, 1940, Pinkerton replied to thank Nan for her "very gracious letter" about Wilderness Wife. "I am always happy to have the book fall into the hands of people who love the woods, and now I am delighted to have it read by people who are contemplating a wilderness home," Pinkerton wrote. "This is just to tell you that you have my very best wishes for your venture and if you find the fun and the joy from a cabin that we did, you will agree that the hardships and the annoyances are a very minor part of the experience."

(I am grateful to Darlene Studor for sharing this and one other letter with me. I contacted the University of Oregon Archives where Pinkerton's papers are housed, but, to my great dismay, there were no letters from Nan to Kathrene in that collection.)

And They're Off

The night before they left New York, Nan and Richard partied with their head-shaking friends who were certain the couple was doomed and gone forever. The next morning without fanfare, they loaded their suitcases, boxes, a typewriter, and their cocker spaniel Nik into their coupe and headed north. It was May 1, 1941.

NEXT: The Big Move to Northern Ontario - Click HERE

PREVIOUS: Nan and Richard Buy an Island - Click HERE

INDEX TO BLOG SERIES: Click HERE

Discovering Nan Dorland