South Cariboo residents are fortunate to live and prosper amidst countless lakes, breathtaking countryside and with a wide array of business and social services at their doorstep.
If not for the early pioneers and cowboys, who laid down permanent stakes, tamed the land into productivity and connected with others to form communities, it may have been a very different picture.
That’s part of the reason why March 3-10, 2013 has been newly designated as British Columbia Cowboy Heritage Week.
One of the many early ranching families that contributed to the development of the region is the Bridge Lake pioneer clan headed by Norwegian couple, Hilda and Ole Larson.
Following, are excerpts from a story published in the 1970 Cariboo Calling, written by local author Sherry Stewart (Berger), following an interview with Hilda, or Granny Larson, as she was commonly known.
The story begins with Hilda’s arrival in Ashcroft and her journey north in May 1912, to meet up with Ole, who had come to the South Cariboo area ahead of her to scout for a homestead location.
“We set up our tent at the 105 Mile Ranch. We cut poles and branches for a bed, and I remember I filled up gunny sacks with hay for a mattress. It wasn’t long before we met a fellow who said that Bridge Lake was a great country, and that there was a new road coming in from Little Fort to the Cariboo Highway.
“It was the fifth of August, 1912 when we started out from 70 Mile House for Bridge Lake. You see, in those days, there were no other roads like there are now, so we had to go from the 105 to the 70 Mile, and then go in from there.”
Hilda and Ole settled for the winter on the east end of Bridge Lake. Come spring, Ole picked a spot near Roe Lake, the little family set up their tent, and work began in earnest.
Often, Ole was gone and Hilda had to hold the fort under frightening conditions.
Hilda did what any pioneer woman had to do. She milked the cow.
“An old cow that had never been milked. A real outlaw that we bought for $150.”
She made butter, baked bread and dried meat.
“There were no jars back then so we couldn’t can meat. We had to smoke it, or dry it, or pickle it.”
She kept house and that included all sorts of chores women wouldn’t recognize today, like dampening down dirt floors twice a day so they wouldn’t get dusty, keeping coal oil lamps filled, splitting wood for the stove, and much more.
She spun her own wool and knitted the mitts and scarves and jackets and toques necessary to keep her family warm in winter. Often Ole was away on his trap line and she had to drive the team four miles or more, sometimes in below zero (Fahrenheit, -18 Celsius) weather, to get hay for the livestock. Being the resourceful kind of pioneer woman she was, Hilda started a trap line along the route to where the hay was kept.
“We had the first sawmill in our area, and I sure know how to whipsaw. We made everything ourselves, of course.
“When it came time to put a roof on a building, first we’d lay boards across the log rafters, then we would put lots of hay on top of the boards, and then we’d plow up sod with a walkin’ plow. I drove the horses and Ole would hold the plow and make squares of sod. We turned them upside-down on that roof, packed real tight together, and it never rained through.”
Hilda learned to cope with everything from the deadly threat of a cabin on fire to the depressing reality of a frost-killed garden in July. But the worst experience of all came in the late winter of 1918.
“It was during the First World War, and the Spanish flu was so bad, we didn’t know what to do. Down in Kamloops and those towns, they couldn’t bury them fast enough. My husband had to be gone on the trap line, and he told me, ‘Now Mum, don’t you go anywhere and you won’t catch the flu,’ but it travelled through the mails, and I got it, and didn’t I get it good.
“I don’t know what would have happened if Mr. Holland hadn’t come by and seen the little ones sitting outside, quite dirty.”
Neighbour, Mr. Holland, summoned his wife to nurse Hilda and another neighbour, Ed Higgins, was sent to inform Ole of Hilda’s illness.
“On the way home, Ed killed a coyote, and that was a lucky thing because by then, Mrs. Nels Sandberg had come, and she wanted some kind of wild animal fat. So, she cut up some fat and rendered it out in a pan and mixed in some turpentine. Then she took one of my husband’s heavy wool undershirts and cut strips of wool and soaked them in the fat. They kept that fat warm on the stove and kept changing cloths whenever they cooled off.
“They had me propped up all night, with my legs hung over the bed and my feet in strong mustard water, and they kept that hot. I’ll tell you, if it wasn’t for Mrs. Sandberg, I never would have made it.”
Hilda made it, and then some. She and Ole raised seven children and built a fine ranch, catered to hunters and fishermen, with one of the first resorts in the area. She, in turn, was midwife for many of the local women, and in the early thirties, she opened a grocery store on the ranch. Goods were brought in by the mailman, and the store became a local meeting place until she closed it in the early 1950s.
“No one ever died of hard work,” she told Berger.
Hilda lived to be more than 80 years old and many of her descendants remain in the South Cariboo.
