The Icelandic Canadian - 01.06.1957, Side 25

THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
23
]OE KERR WALTER JOHNSON GORDON CROSBY
canoe on the shores of the Grassy
river.
“We’re better off than some,’’ Dick
Ellis encouraged. “We have equipment
at the river.”
On their arrival there, however, they
discovered a bear had ripped the tent
to shreds, torn a huge hole in their
canoe, and dumped the motor and
gasoline into the water.
Mending their canoe with pieces of
the tent glued on with spruce gum,
the partners returned to Herb Lake.
Without their hoped-for fortune, the
partners still had friends. With bor-
rowed train-fare Dick Ellis iourneyed
to The Pas, where “Uncle” Ben Detrn-
binsky, merchant, and present mayor
of that town, staked them to $300.
Purchasing traps and food supplies,
Ellis and Johnson travelled up the
Grassy River, through Setting Lake
to the Burntwood River, where they
found unoccupied trapping grounds in
the vicinity of Mystery Lake. Here
Johnson spent his winters until 1948.
first with Dick Ellis, who left for
Vancouver in 1935, and later with
Charlie Vance, presently a Snow Lake
merchant. Pie mastered the ways of the
wild, developing a careful conservation
of beaver and advocating registered
traplines, both of which were later
adopted by the Manitoba govern-
ment.
The summers were spent among his
rocks.
“Each fall we swore we had had
enough, but spring found us tramping
the bush again”, he recalls.
This determination to continue
prospecting in the face of apparent
failure brought his ultimate success,
for during these summer jaunts Mr.
Johnson covered a property whose
earlier showings were too low for com-
mercial value at the price of nickel
at the time, and had been abandoned.
In 1946 Johnson was in the Lynn Lake
nickel rush but without success. Two
years later the Jay Kay Syndicate was
formed, and the help of J. H. Johnson,
formerly of Thicket Portage, and
presently of Winnipeg, was enlisted to
sell units in the company.
With the company’s money the two
did extensive prospecting, uniting with
a Flin Flon prospector, Glen Rapson,
in an attempt to develop Snow Squall
Gold Mine, near Herb Lake.
But now the price of nickel was soar-
ing and it was in great demand.