Peggy ( Bell) Lee is the widow of Sam Lee who trapped for furs out of Joe Rich. She is a small trim woman now in her late 80s and living in Fernbrae Manor in Rutland.

She tells her story as follows:

I was born in 1915 not far from Glasgow in Scotland. My father had been a policeman, but when World War I began he joined up. I was born after he left. He spent most of the war as a prisoner in Mesopatamia. When he came home walking down our street, I was five. I ran into the house to tell my mother that a strange soldier was coming.

With help from the Soldiers Settlement Program my father decided we should move to Canada, and so when I was 13 we ended up in Rutland living on Fitzpatrick Road. He bought 10 acres of orchard and rented another 10. Not long after we arrived, my mother was found to have cancer when she was pregnant with my youngest sister. She died the next year and I had to quit school to look after my father and the other 5 children.

When I was 21, I married Sam Lee. Neither of us had been able to get much education and we had very little money, but we were healthy and could work hard. Sam had been born on the prairie. His mother had died when he was 13 and he had been on his own from shortly after that. He had worked a team of mules for threshing, but he was a good bush man too. In 1937, just after our marriage, Sam bought Mr. Bening’s trap line in the Greystokes. As he began to collect the things that he would need to go trapping, I realized that he was only packing for himself and that he wasn’t planning to take me. I asked him why and he told me that too many things could go wrong in the bush so it was better for me to stay home. I told him that I hadn’t gotten married to stay at home while he went off alone and so he finally agreed that we could go together.

We packed a large pack for Sam with traps, a rifle, a long-barrelled 22 calibre pistol, an axe and some basic food. I had a smaller pack with clothes and blankets. We were living at Reed’s Corner in Rutland so in the early winter we drove up to Joe Rich and spent the night at our friend’s the Smiths. The next morning, we walked back across the Mission Creek Bridge, up Three Forks Road and on up into the Greystokes. I had no bush experience, just a lot of determination to stay with Sam and to learn to survive. Sam had lots of experience and he was strong. Early in the afternoon, he shot a deer, skinned it and cut up the meat to carry. By this time we were in 8 inches of snow. By the end of the afternoon as it was growing dusk, we came to a little creek. I was exhausted, so Sam suggested that I sit by the creek while he continued on to the sheep herder’s cabin, left his load and come back to get me. We had one flashlight and he needed it. When he left, I was all alone in the darkness and I heard strange noises everywhere. I was scared. After a few minutes rest, I got up and followed Sam’s tracks in the snow. When he arrived at the cabin, he dropped his things and came back for me, but he only had to go a few hundred yards, because I was just behind him.

The cabin was a mess. Pack rats were living in it and their nests were everywhere. The smell was terrible. We lit a candle, started a fire and cleaned the place up. Sam got me to hold the flashlight while he chopped some fresh bows for us to spread on the wooden bed frame. We laid canvas over the bows and I made our bed. Sam set two traps for the rats. We blew out the light and climbed into bed. I could hear the rats everywhere. Then one of the traps went off. Sam had caught a rat in a length of unused stove pipe. A little later, he caught another. Those two rats were the only two we ever caught in the cabin. The rest left. Sam showed me how to chink the spaces between the logs to make the cabin warmer. From then on the cabin was liveable, but it always smelt bad when we came back after being away for a while. When we’d been back a few minutes, we never noticed the smell anymore.

There was no outhouse, so I told Sam I needed one. He went around behind the cabin and returned after a while to tell me that now I had a toilet. I went back to where he’d been working and found that he had dug a little hole and set up a log above it. Some branches made a sort of roof to keep the snow off. There were no walls. It wasn’t very civilized, but I learned to use it and not complain.

The next day Sam decided it was time to set the line of traps. The snow was deep so he fitted my snowshoes on and we started out. Walking on snowshoes was hard. Before long my legs were very tired and I was far behind. I was sure that I could do better without the snowshoes so I took one off. My leg went down to my thigh in the snow. I took off the other, but it was impossible to walk without snowshoes. I put them back on and trudged after Sam.

Sam placed his traps and staked them down or tied them to a log. He was careful to cover his scent. He caught a lot of lynx, mink, martin and weasel. If they were still alive when he found them in the trap, he would shoot them with his long-barrelled 22 pistol, skin them and carry the skin back to the cabin. At the cabin, he would cut and scrape the meat and fat off, turn the hide inside out and stretch it onto a rack. When it was almost dry, he would turn it back right side out and put it back on the stretcher.

I quickly learned to live in the bush and to keep up with Sam, but there were many new experiences for me. Once I carried out a lynx skin and got fleas from it. They never bothered Sam, but they bit me all over. Sam told me not to worry, because they would die in a few days and he was right.

Later, we bought trap lines in the Belgo Dam area and up to Lumby. We usually went up to start trapping at the beginning of November and came out about March 30 th. We walked long distances all winter, all the way from the Greystokes to Belgo Dam and up to Lumby. Sam had a great sense of direction, but he always carried a compass just in case. When the snow was deep, we’d take turns breaking trail. We continued to start out from Smith’s place in Joe Rich. If we left there at 7 AM, we were usually at the sheep herder’s cabin by 3 PM. One winter, we decided we would like to spend Christmas in our house at Reed’s Corner, so we walked one day from Belgo Dam to Reed’s Corner. Sam was proud of the way I could walk. He used to tell his friends that I could walk farther and faster than most men.

We tried to get back to the cabin to sleep there, but sometimes we had to sleep out. We would stop about five times a day to light a little fire and brew a can of tea. We got very good at fishing through the ice on the lakes and so often had fresh fish for supper. Sam also shot deer so we had venison. Sometimes we got a foolhen.

At the end of the first winter, Sam packed his best dried furs in a large suitcase and we went to Vancouver. We went around to all the fur dealers. At one place, they took me into their show room and showed me an expensive fur coat. They wanted us to give them our furs as a down payment on the coat, but we weren’t interested in that nonsense. We kept hunting until we found the dealer we liked best. He was Mr. Whittacker and from then on for the next 20 years, we only sold to him. He used to say that Sam’s furs were the best that anyone ever brought to him. Sam was meticulous.

Cougars were a problem for cattle ranchers, so the government paid $20 for each one Sam could shoot. He got a lot of them. Once Cliff Serwa and Doug Mervyn who were then in their early 20s, decided that they would like to shoot a cougar. They got Sam to take them out with a cougar dog. All four of us started out in the snow and followed the cougar and the dog all day. Late in the afternoon, Sam told Cliff and Doug that if we continued on, we’d have to stay out the night. The boys wanted to keep going so we did. When it was dark, we finally came to where the dog had the cougar treed. I stayed back a bit and took off my snowshoes. They scared the cougar out of the tree and it ran right for me. I wondered whether I should club it with my snowshoe, because I had no gun, but it ran right past me and climbed another tree. Sam and the boys shot it, but as it fell it got caught up in the tree and they had to chop the tree down to get it. We huddled around a fire for the rest of the night and ate some army rations and soup Sam had and a few chocolate bars and raisins that Doug had. Our fronts stayed warm, but our backs were very cold. Cliff’s snowshoes got burned a little, but I managed to rescue them. About two years later, when we were out one evening, Cliff brought some visiting big wigs from Vancouver over to where I was sitting and said, ”This is the lady I was telling you about”. They all seemed very impressed. I guess Cliff had been telling them about our hunt. Cliff and Doug went off to Australia to hunt kangaroos that had become a problem there.

Once Sam caught a live wolverine in one of his traps. He looked like a giant weasel. The trap was anchored to a log and the wolverine had dragged it off through the bush until the log got stuck between trees. Sam brought him home and tried to sell him to a zoo. Meanwhile, he lived in a cage in our house. He hated Sam and would go crazy even when he heard him approaching the house. No zoo would buy the wolverine, so we finally had to shoot him and sell his pelt.

After five years of trapping with Sam, I had to spend less time in the bush when our daughter, Jenny was born in 1941. I still pulled her up to the Greystokes on a toboggan when she was 1½. Later, when Trish was born in 1945 and Dorothy in 1946, I didn’t go back to the bush to work. When Sam had the contract for measuring snow about 1955, we fitted the girls out with snowshoes and all walked up to the Greystokes once.

For the first few years we made good money trapping, but later the prices dropped. Sam got a contract trapping muskrats in Glenmore and another contract for measuring snow depth and water content in the Greystokes. Eventually, he went into the sawmill business in Rutland with several partners one of whom was Chuck Reed. He did some logging too and for a while I even set chokers. Ron Philpott hauled logs for him. In the 1970s, Sam finally sold his trap lines and stayed in the lumbar business.

Bert Chichester came up to the Greystokes with us once and took a lot of pictures, but he got very sick before he could give them to us. When he died they were put outside and all got spoiled. As I think back to our trapping days and the winters in the bush what I remember most clearly is how beautiful it was, the clean snow, the ice crystals on the trees, the moon reflecting off the snow, and all the stars.