(written by Eric Green, staff reporter of The Kamloops Sentinel, November 3, 1960)
Pioneer's Life Could Inspire A Novel on Trek Westward
(written by Eric Green, staff reporter of The Kamloops Sentinel, November 3, 1960)
James Stewart McKechnie of Kamloops (BC) is one of the men who helped make our country.
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"Mr. McKechnie was born 2 years after Confederation in a Scottish settlement
20 miles west of Hamilton, Ontario called 'Scotch Block'.
His life, like Canada's history after his birth, might have inspired,
and someday may inspire a book that could be called Exodus West.
At the age of 91, Mr. McKechnie lives with his daughter Jean at 605 Dominion
and speaks with only a ghost of the expected Scottish burr.
A wonderful sense of humor, an agility that had him out prospecting in the summer of 1959,
and an understanding character that speaks of love of mankind and inherent optimism,
are impressions of this man who says his philosophy of life amounts to
'if you can't do a man any good, leave him alone.'
Mr. McKechnie's philosophy has grown and taken on new scopes since the days of Scotch Block,
when he sat at the feet of the old men of the village
and heard them speak of the Battle of Waterloo,
'whether or not it was strictly true.'
A God-fearing man, Mr. McKechnie has always taken an active part in church affairs,
now exemplified by his position as an elder of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church.
Ideas are progressive and he decries those old phonies who speak of the good old days.
Those were hard times he recalls.
"Some years you never saw one dollar in cash for a whole year.
The good old days were not so good."
Well remembered by Mr. McKechnie is the day he took the first of many steps,
answering the call of 'Go west, young man! Go west!' with his brother,
which led fatefully to Brandon Manitoba.
"We landed in Brandon, my brother and I, on the 12th day of April 1891.
Believe me, that wasn't yesterday," Mr. McKechnie said of his young adulthood.
But this step was a prelude to tragedy.
"My brother contracted pneumonia on the train and the doctor didn't know what it was.
Two weeks later, my brother died," he said.
The young man, recently of Scotch Block, recently bereft of a brother,
stayed in Brandon one summer and then turned his eyes westward.
On his way west he passed through Winnipeg, a frontier town with a few hundred people.
In those days there was a prairie today, and tomorrow a street and a town, he says.
Winnipeg jutted from the prairies like a newly erected flagpole.
"The stormes and saloons were all false-fronted," said Mr. McKechnie.
RED DEER Alberta is the point of origin for the next chapter ...
the largest...of Mr. McKechnie's life.
He worked for 2 years for a Scottish sawmill owner.
The man paid $20. per month and board and room ... but ...
all his employees had to buy lumber with half their pay.
Then the owner fixed the prices of the lumber so the men received no pay at month's end.
Adding insult to injury, he fixed the clock in the morning and evening
so the men worked an extra hour each day!
Mr. McKechnie left the job after an argument with the boss,
taking $5.00 pay with him.
The men had to take this because there was no other work, he explains.
When he left, he jokingly said he'd own the sawmill in 2 years.
Two years later he and a friend bought the sawmill,
raising the money to buy it by selling the homestead he had built.
The homestead was the scene of a story
that could take priority in any sports magazine for humorous near-tragedy.
The house on the quarter-section homestead was a log cabin,
with dirt piled to the sills of the windows.
Mr. McKechnie was building a new house with lumber from his sawmill job
and had taken the windows from the old house and boarded them up.
"A hog used to lay up on the dirt bank and kept me from sleeping.
I went to bed one night and heard this snuffling outside the window.
After awhile I went out.
The axe was in the woodyard and all I had was an old broom.
I could see the thing and
I still thought it was a pig,
so I gave it a couple of wallops and then it stood straight up.
It was a bear!"
"I sort of tripped and fell and when I got up to run,
the bear was between me and the house," Mr. McKechnie says.
When he got to the house he slammed down a bar on the inside.
The bear hit the door less than inches away.
"He wasn't two feet behind when I slammed the door," Mr. McKechnie remembers.
In the last years of the 19th century, says James McKechnie,
the only place you could work for cash
was in the High River country,
where you could get employment as a cowboy on cattle drives.
They'd give the greenest greenhorn an old plug and let him drive cattle.
The old-timers then used to give the young fellows exactly the same kind of razzing
that they often get these days --
older parallels to the left-handed monkey wrench and striped paint.
James McKechnie saw the development of western Canada,
and took an integral part in the first years of development,
making a living from the land
without the aid of modern machinery and tools,
like many other pioneers of the west.
He can list and recount much of the significant history of Canada after Confederation.
He once spoke to a man he called 'an amicable sort of man, a man easy to talk to,'
and one of the
greatest men and brightest minds that Canada has ever produced --
Sir Wilfred Laurier
Sir Wilfred was on his way to Edmonton by train, and stopped at Red Deer for dinner.
Mr. McKechnie just happened to go over to the railroad station that day.
He had never seen Sir Wilfred before except in newspaper pictures.
In the station, he fell into discussion with the 'bright man'
who later became Canada's prime minister.
Laurier asked James McKechnie all about himself.
Mr. McKechnie came to BC in 1896 and shortly met a pair of Norwegians
who planned
to wash gold on the Columbia, at the mouth of the Canoe.
They built two 32-foot bateaux.
None of the three knew where the Canoe River was or how far it was.
"You'd better come along with us, kid",
one of the Norwegians advised the young James McKechnie, and he did.
After a considerable trip,
the trio discovered they were getting into something that made a lot of noise.
It was Death Rapids.
Few people ever rode the rapids in those days and lived to tell about it.
"I could see small 10 and 12 foot logs turning end over end ahead of us.
I wanted to get out but that would have been fatal.
My companion was an excellent boatman, and we made it through.
But when we were going through we looked back for our companion
in the second boat and he wasn't there.
We waited for a couple of days on the other side of the rapids,
but we never saw him again."
Mr. McKechnie came to Kamloops via Revelstoke.
When he arrived here, he heard that a man could make $3. per day in Trail
so he packed his gear and went there.
He discovered he had to be a miner to make that kind of money.
So, he got a job as a mechanic's helper in the Leroy mine and
first day on the job he had to go down the mine.
"I got down to about the 1,200 foot level and looked up to see a little spot of sky.
I went right out of there and got cussed out by a big Irishman up top," Mr. McKechnie said.
James McKechnie next returned to Alberta.
In 1902 he and a friend, Pat Burns, bought a horse ranch from the Earl of Carlyle,
when the earl became old enough to take his seat in the House of Lords in England.
The pair bought the ranch for $3,000. thinking they were really going to make it,
because horses were just getting to be worth something.
But it started to rain in 1899 and rained till the spring of 1904!
"It was wet all the time," Mr. McKechnie said.
All of the partners' 1,400 horses died of pneumonia except 30.
Veterinarians were stumped.
The prescribed treatment for humans was 10 drops
of a mixture of belladona, digitalis and aconite.
The veterinarian prescribed 10 drops for the horses.
"He just couldn't seem to see the differences
in the size of a horse and a human", Mr. McKechnie says.
Later Mr. McKechnie went into the sawmill business again,
operating at Red Deer and Rocky Mountain House until 1928,
when he moved to Fernie.
His sawmill at Fernie was a very successful operation.
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Mr. McKechnie's father-in-law grew 100 acres of wheat.
"It sure was a beautiful-looking sight", Mr. McKechnie remembers.
Listening to him, you can appreciate the significance of the crop,
one of the very first successfully harvested because of the scarcity of machinery.
Mr. McKechnie remembers the peopling of the west,
saying that government land concessions early in this century
was the biggest factor
in the creation of Western Canada,
and that the railroad was an absolute necessity,
travelling illogically through hundreds of miles of country with nothing to support it.
Many families in the States sent their sons to Canada
to take up 200 acres of land for $2. per acre,
and they had 25 years to pay.
It was quite an enticement.
When James McKechnie came to BC the second time, he stayed.
This year he made a trip back east and he says he didn't much like the changes.
He only met one person he knew in Red Deer -- the town that he and his lumber helped build.
A humanitarian, Mr. McKechnie has had a life which is a great testimonial to the 'good life'.
He reads a lot, especially historical novels.
His life would make an excellent subject for one.
Dominion Street's James McKechnie repeats one sentence several times --
"If I was a young man, I'd go North."
~ James Stewart McKechnie was my Grandfather ~
Return to My McKECHNIE Direct Ancestor Line
Return to My STEWART Direct Ancestor Line
James & Arabella's Marriage Announcement
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Jannet (Janet) Stewart McKECHNIE |
| Arabella May JAMIESON ~ Wife of James Stewart McKechnie |
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Jannet (Jean) Stewart McKechnie DAVIDSON |
| A Real, Genuine, Canadian Christmas Tree ~ Story written by James & Arabella's son, set in the Navy 1945 |
William Gilbert McKECHNIE~ James' brother / Blind Presbyterian Missionary |
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