A Life in the Woods: Jack Spiers

Ian Fraser: So your cordwood customers ... did you have a regular clientele?

Jack Spiers: They'd phone up and say' we need a load of wood," and [I'd say] 'yeah, I'd give it to you in such-and-such a time'. But after that, it'd have to be sawn up, and in those days there was no skillsaws or chainsaws or anything else in those days - you got busy on a saw.

Ian Fraser: So you didn't provide them with 16-inch lengths, everyone did that on their own? You provided them with 16-foot lengths?

Jack Spiers: Twelve-foot.

Ian Fraser: When you were young here in Kaslo, I imagine the basic growth was such that there was a lot of construction going on?

Jack Spiers: It was going down [declining] in those days, because the mining boom had petered out. There was a few of the mines going, but, uh ... the Whitewater went for years after that, and so did the Cork Province, but the rest of them - outside of Sandon, and I don't know very much about Sandon - but the Lucky Jim, they went for a good many years. But there were the three mines around the District that was very active.

Ian Fraser: So, for most of your working time in Kaslo, you were working with horses, whether it was ploughing, or doing cordwood, or...?

Jack Spiers: Oh, I've always been around that work, doing whatever. Just bullwork, no brains.

Ian Fraser: No, I wouldn't say that.

Jack Spiers: Oh, I would, I would, [both laugh]

Ian Fraser: Well, wasn't that what most people did in those days? I mean a job was a job right? There was always lots of work for someone who was a good worker in those days.

Jack Spiers: 'Bull Strength and Awkwardness' is what they used to call us. But we took an interest in our work, and we enjoyed it. And it had to be done.

Ian Fraser: And your Dad's name?

Jack Spiers: Fred Spiers.

Ian Fraser: When did he come to Kaslo, Jack?

Jack Spiers: When he was a boy. He went to school here.

Ian Fraser: When do you figure that was?

Jack Spiers: He was 21 years old when he was married, and about ten months later I arrived on the scene, and I was born in '07.

Ian Fraser: So he'd have been about 22 years old when you were born. And he came here as a boy, so he was a very, very early resident ... probably the 1880s.

Ian Fraser: So your earliest recollections were of Kaslo?

Jack Spiers: No, my earliest recollections were of Argenta. My dad rented a farm up there.

Ian Fraser: So he was farming the land, as well as doing woodlot work?

Jack Spiers: No, I don't imagine he was doing any hauling in those days. He had cattle up there.

Ian Fraser: When your dad left Argenta and you came to Kaslo, he went into the cordwood business right away?

Jack Spiers: I don't know. His dad had given him a team and a wagon for a wedding present. And I know he was working around town with a team when our house burned down. And, uh, I can just barely remember that one of the neighbours picked me up and took me over to her place in the morning. My sister couldn't speak yet - that was the third one in the family - but she took Mother by the skirt and showed her the fire starting upstairs. Everybody got out of the house, but the house was a write-off. I don't suppose there was any insurance, I don't imagine he [father] owned the house, so it was somebody else's house.

I can remember them hauling the first school house ... up there and putting it where our former house was, hauling it up there with four horses, on skids.

Ian Fraser: So by the time you started working with your dad, you were probably, what, nine?

Jack Spiers: Oh, I quit school - I was kicked out of school - when I was about 14 or 15.

Ian Fraser: So the team was basically your dad's livelihood then?

Jack Spiers: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Ian Fraser: And it was used not only for cordwood, but also for supplies to and from the mining camps?

Jack Spiers: Any heavy [hauling]. He hauled a lot of ore from the Cork Province with four horses. In those wagons in those days, they would sit up, oh, eight, ten feet above the road and they would have to be strapped in, because one foot'd be on the brake, and the other foot would be bracing. And, it would be strapped into the seat, and it was a seat that bolted so that you couldn't slip out of it. He had four lines in his hands, and you had to be good at what you were doing.

Ian Fraser: Seat-belted right in?

Jack Spiers: Seat belted right in, just with one leg, of course.

Ian Fraser: The wagons, they were basically just wooden wheeled, or was there any hard rubber on the outside?

Jack Spiers; All steel wheels. And in the slippery times, they would have big brake blocks, but they would have a steel insert to put into the brake blocks, so it would be steel] against steel, and they could skid their wheels any old time. They had that much power. But that'd only be on the rear wheels, of course. There'd be five and six ton [of load] on a wagon. But it had to be very well braced. They'd have steel on the reach and this sort of thing.

Ian Fraser: You mentioned something once about your dad having worked on the new hospital, or providing wood?

Jack Spiers: No that was my grandfather. James A. Andrew.

Ian Fraser: Your dad was sort of second-generation livery man, I guess, was what they called them?

Jack Spiers: "Livery" was more delivery around town. I suppose "livery" meant you'd rent out horses and wagons and things like that. I remember the last of the pack trains that came through here. They were coming down from South Fork someplace, and I can remember them coming into town, maybe ten or fifteen head of horses, one [man] in front and the other bringing up the rear. I can remember the one in the rear whistling and everything stopped right there, and they went back one of the packs had slipped a little bit and they straightened that out, and away they went again. Pretty well organized.

Now it was very difficult sometimes to be sleighing out there in the woods because there'd be no traffic, and there'd be wheels around town [Kaslo]. And so you'd have to transfer a load - keep the sleighs out there, and bring the rest of the load in here [to town]. And sometimes even around town here the wheels'd be sinking, oh, six inches into the snow, and it'd be pretty hard wheeling.

Ian Fraser: And what kind of wheels, you mean horse-drawn wagons?

Jack Spiers: Yeah, yeah.

Ian Fraser: Was it mainly firewood, or was it wood going to Buchanan's mill, or ...?

Jack Spiers: No, no. That was after my time. I can just remember the sawmill there, I can remember hearing it, but I was never around there. But I can remember a great big stack of oak, just a few slabs I suppose, built up there so the barges could come in and load there. There's no sign of that any more, it's all disappeared - rotted out, I suppose.

Ian Fraser: And the wood that you ...?

Jack Spiers: We just peddled it around town.

Ian Fraser: Okay. So when you were going out to do the firewood, you'd go out by the airstrip there?

Jack Spiers: We turned down left at the airstrip, and we had a woodlot there.

Ian Fraser: Up Bjerkness Creek, probably?

Jack Spiers: No, it was right down level. I don't imagine the road would be there any more. I know someone took poles out of there at one time, because we found one - it was just blue, it was so hard. The bark had been stripped off of it and it was up off the ground. Oh, it was hard. It was lovely tamarack. I just remember that.

Ian Fraser: And your dad, and yourself, and a brother, or ... how many were there when you'd go out?

Jack Spiers: I was the oldest one, so I was always selected for any bull work. Some of the rest of them had more brains [laughs], and they went to school, but...

Ian Fraser: So you'd go out there and you'd take a sled with how many horses?

Jack Spiers: Oh, just a team.

Ian Fraser: Just a team, a pair.

Jack Spiers: But you'd bring in a cord a trip, two cords a day. Ten dollars a cord, which'd pay for a man and a team. Uh, I guess it was pretty good money, because a man and a team would draw ten dollars a day.

Ian Fraser: So the price might even have been as low as five dollars a cord?

Jack Spiers: Yeah, that's right. I remember bringing in one load, in those days it filled the bunks. It was one log. We brought it in for a cord of wood! It was 16 feet long, and it would make a cord of wood. To us it seemed to be a tremendous log, but with trucks and the high-speed equipment that they have now, why it'd be just nothing to it.

Ian Fraser: Of course, you'd be looking for mostly larch/tamarack, standing dead ... or was it mixed wood you were going for?

Jack Spiers: No, we wouldn't bring anything in but the fir and tamarack. Maybe birch, but very, very seldom would we bring any birch in.

Ian Fraser: How were the woodlots administered?

Jack Spiers: I think he [father] bought it for a limited length of time. But Halleran and Walsh came in here, and they were big shots. They were going to raise hell and put a chip under it! They went in big, and I think they had the first big heavy-duty trucks. They, Halleran and Walsh had a big storage area on the flats there at South Fork, and they were just where they were hauling the logs out from one place to another. They were very inefficient. They had about a million board feet of logs the other side of Grieg's, halfway down to Mirror Lake, off to the left. And because of lawsuit, it all rotted and people from Kaslo they went out there and got firewood for years and years, until it all rotted. They had vast woodlots right up the South Fork right past the True Blue [mountain] .

Ian Fraser: And were they mainly looking for pine, or?

Jack Spiers: Sawlogs. Sawlogs.

Ian Fraser: They were supplying mills across the Lake, were they?

Jack Spiers: I think most of it was going across the line [U.S. border].

Ian Fraser: So there'd be people making up the booms and taking the logs straight across?

Jack Spiers: Yes. But in those days - my wife, Topsy, speaks of being able to get their winter wood just from the sawlogs that would bounce out of the booms, and you'd get them up on the beach, and then they would haul them up and cut them up for their own wood. They [unofficial salvagers] didn't have to take any of their own wood. Some of these were first-class logs, too, you know.

Ian Fraser: How old were you when you first left Kaslo?

Jack Spiers: [Asks wife:] How old was I when I first went to work for your dad, Topsy?

Topsy Spiers: You were twenty-three then.

Jack Spiers: I had been over to Trail and I worked there for nine months, seven months or something like that. I had worked around, did quite a bit of work here, and then the Depression hit and the Cork Province closed down about that time. So I was thrown on my own, and I went up prospecting for the Cominco in the North with Henry Giegerich, and he had a crew working with him. And from there I went over doing assessment work in northern B.C. Then I had a job in northern Saskatchewan, working in the shaft. I did all kinds of jobs for there, running diesels - I had spent a winter out at the Coast taking a course in diesels, so I got a chance to run diesels and maintain them.