Question for Silver

[Soapweed]

Back in the late 1980's, I subscribed to the Outdoor Life book club. One of the books was entitled "DANGER! Explosive True Adventures of the Great Outdoors" by Ben East, with Drawings by Tom Beecham, copyright 1970. One of the stories was called "A Hell of a Way to Move," and it told of an epic 300 mile journey with saddle horses and pack horses.

In 1953, a ranch couple by the name of Hersch and Eunice Neighbor, along with their 16-year-old son, Norris, and 13-year-old daughter, Sandy, decided to pull up stakes from their home at Tete Jaune Cache, seventy miles west of Jasper, British Columbia. They picked out a new location to live in the Halfway River area north of the Peace. At that time, it was still possible to homestead on government land, so they filed for 320 acres on Cypress Creek. This was about a hundred miles north of Fort St. John, to Mile 147, then 25 miles west. They traveled by train when they picked out the new place to live, but decided to take pack animals to make the actual move of 300 miles.

The family of four, plus two other men (Art Mintz, a neighbor, and Jim Scott, a hunter client from Oswego, Montana) started out with 22 horses and provisions for a month on the trail. They began their epic journey on August 26, 1954. Anyway, the trip took several days longer than what they had food for. They were traveling through wild unmapped country. Their problems included having one of their tents burn up, straying a hundred miles off course, getting horses bogged down in muskeg, and going hungry for several days. All in all, it was quite a story, and I am wondering if you have ever heard of any of these people, Silver. Also, Oldtimer, you may have known Jim Scott, from Oswego, Montana.

The whole escapade made for good reading. I did get in touch with Art Mintz, and a few years ago we met him and his wife, Elva. They have led very interesting lives, and were hunting outfitters in the Yukon for seventeen years, from 1967-1984.

 

[Silver]

I have heard others talk about them, but I didn't realize there was a book. I'll have to line up a copy. It should make interesting reading, as their homestead is only about 25 miles cross country from ours.
Thankyou for bringing it up, you have definetly aroused my curiosity.

 

[Soapweed]

The publisher was Outdoor Life Books.

According to Art Mintz, it seems that Eunice Neighbor kind of went off the deep end later on, and tried to knife her husband, Hersh. She may have been committed to some institution.

Here are a couple paragraphs from the book that always grabbed my attention:

"The second day involved a stiff climb of 3,000 feet, up from the wild boiling Whitehorn River, past Emperor Falls and across a sheer and treacherous rock face at a place that's still called the Flying Trestle, from an ingenious but hair-raising structure that was built there years ago by outfitters packing into the mountains. Nobody who rode the Flying Trestle ever forgot it.

"The men who built it drilled holes into the rock face, set long heavy logs in the holes, braced them and used them as the foundation for a log shelf, six feet wide and 100 feet long, with a pole railing on the outside. To top things off, it climbed steeply. It was safe enough, but it was no place for the faint of heart, for as you rode across it you could look over the edge or between the logs of the floor straight down into the churning, rock-strewn Emperor River 1,500 feet below!"

 

[Big Muddy rancher]

Soapweed do you think you could get Saddletramp on the Flying Tressle?

 

[Murgen]

Soapweed, when you mentioned Tete Jaune Cache, I remebered another good book on the area where these folks came from.

"Crazy Man's Creek", by Jack Boudreau. A great read about the "mountain men" in that area!