| Find a Writer | Reading Room | Who We Are | Join PWAC | Main Menu |

Wild West Women: Travellers, Adventurers and Rebels

by Rosemary Neering  © 2000

---

Travellers, adventurers and rebels--the women of the wild west lived unusual, determined and sometimes raucous lives. Two excerpts from the book, published by Whitecap Books, Vancouver, 2000. Double-shortlisted, B.C. Book Prizes, 2001. Winner, VanCity Book Prize, 2001.

---

Not to be reprinted or reused
in any way without permission.

"Water!" I gasped. "Lots and lots of water!":
An unusual job for a woman

In a room in Victoria, a slight woman in her thirties sat on a plate placed on the seat of a chair. Each leg of the chair stood on a plate as well, on top of a rubber car mat. A rubber bathing cap covered her head, rubber boots her feet. Yet another rubber mat was wrapped around her chest. A third mat had been placed under the table at which she sat, its legs, too, standing on dinner plates. With such precautions, there could be no "interference" in this experiment from electrical fields.

The witnesses put a map on the table in front of the woman. Without hesitation, she marked one area, then another, then another. To the annoyance of her skeptical audience, each mark correctly designated an area where minerals had been found.

---

Evelyn Penrose loved to confound skeptics. Beginning as a water diviner who used the conventional forked hazel stick to discover underground sources of water, she soon progressed to using just her hands to lead her to water. As her skills grew, she wrote in her autobiography, she was able to divine the location of oil, gas, precious metals, illness in the human body, and criminals--though she chose not to seek the latter, for that would be too dangerous.

She divined all over the world, from her birthplace in Cornwall, England, to British Columbia to Australia to South Africa to Jamaica to Chile. For several years in the 1930s, she brought her talents to the Okanagan, the Cariboo and Peace River country as the region's official water diviner. Like other women who chose work as photographers, fishers, lighthouse keepers and airplane pilots, she had, for the times, an unusual job for a woman.

But then, Penrose was an unusual woman; she tells us so herself. Most of what we know about Penrose comes from her writings. According to her own accounts, her life was ever one of drama where she always played the beleaguered but ultimately triumphant heroine. She was the most important--and certainly the most flamboyant--of three diviners employed by the British Columbia government to help deal with the effects of a drought that afflicted the west in the early 1930s.

---

Evelyn Penrose was born the daughter of a water diviner who inherited his gift from his mother, who walked about her Cornish town with a divining rod. This shocked the locals, who considered such actions most unladylike. As a young girl, Penrose was in constant disgrace for her tomboyish activities and her refusal to behave as a normal child was expected to. After her father died, her unsympathetic mother dragged her off to continental Europe over her emotional protests. As a teenager, she was expelled from one school for questioning the literal truth of creation, and almost expelled from another for flirting with the young gentleman who was intended as a beau for the daughter of the schoolmistress.

Always, through all her torments, she was a diviner. She remembered her father impressing visiting dignitaries with his gift, strolling about the grounds of their manor with a fresh-cut, forked hazel or willow stick. "I have seen the rod skin the bark off itself and sometimes twist itself into a sort of rope in his hands, but nothing in the world stopped it from turning," she wrote. Of her own skills, she noted, "I never had to learn how to divine and I looked on it as a natural thing like riding a pony, and when I was older, finding north with a compass."

After her mother died, presumably when Evelyn was in her early twenties, she went to California to visit the American widow of her uncle. There, she travelled to oil fields and found she had a gift for divining the location of oil. As she walked around one location, she experienced a reaction far more powerful than she had ever felt for water, stronger even than the effect experienced when divining for tin or copper. Jumping, twisting and jerking, she was told that she was near natural gas deposits. Fighting nausea and a headache, she noted that she "still had to learn that oil-divining has a very severe and exhausting effect on the diviner."

She headed for Honolulu on what she thought was a paid contract to find wells for agriculture, only to discover after she had done her work that she had been bilked.

Returning to the west coast, she set out north for British Columbia. There, she went almost immediately to the Okanagan Valley, where the main topic of conversation was the drought, then in its seventh year, that was destroying many an orchard. Hearing that she could divine water, several orchardists asked her to a meeting. She told them that she could find water for them, but that it would probably be deep in the ground. Could they, she asked, afford to drill for it?

They could not. She talked to the provincial minister of finance, suggesting that she be hired as the official water diviner for the region and that the government hire a driller to follow her around. Somewhat surprisingly, she was hired as the government's first official water diviner, thus becoming the centre of a controversy, first over whether water divining worked, and second, if it did, whether a woman could be a successful water diviner.

Penrose never had any doubts about her own abilities. One of her visits was to a large and dying orchard. Barely had she begun to speak to the orchardist when she was nearly thrown off her feet by a powerful force. "I grabbed his arm to steady myself. 'Water!' I gasped. 'Lots and lots of water!' He looked at me in amazement, obviously thinking it was impossible that there could be any water in a spot that he knew so well, and over which he walked every day of his life. I followed this powerful underground stream with my divining rod to a little wood by the side of the lane. Here I found the intersection of two underground streams which made the reactions stronger than ever."

The water she had found was just six to twelve feet (two to four metres) below the surface of the land, and able to supply 108,000 gallons (almost 500,000 litres) of water a day. After this find, Penrose told her readers modestly, people called her The Divine Lady.

She went on to other farms and orchards. Some men were kind and considerate; others were not. Some made sure she had time to rest; others worked her savagely hard. The head agriculturalist complained to the minister of finance, who had hired Penrose. "She is like a terrier after a rat when she's after water. She never looks where she is going, nor has any idea where she is. She feels or, in some peculiar way 'senses' the water and off she goes, straight into the forest like a shot from a gun. If I take my eyes off her for a minute, she is gone. There are plenty of bears about there too. I'd like to tie a cow-bell round her bloody neck. But, for all that, I've got to admit she does bring home the goods and the people in the valley are crazy about the whole set-up." A note from a less-involved source suggested that she did not exaggerate her achievements. The minister of finance was quoted as saying she had had considerable success, and that the government was well pleased with her work.

Sometimes she was happy with the people she worked for, but on other occasions she had harsh words for them. On one very rainy day, she visited a woman who lived on a far distant farm. The woman spoke rudely, telling Penrose that she was going to build a dairy at one precise location, and that she wanted her water there, and not too deep. "What you want," replied Penrose tartly, "is Moses. He is the only person who could possibly help you."

When she finished her tasks in the Okanagan, she moved northwest to Kamloops and divined at a long list of properties in that region. At one, a cowboy asked her if she could divine for gold. She could try: when an epidemic of chicken pox prevented her from going on to the next town on her list, she went off to the cowboy's Cariboo mining property near Quesnel. Despite heat, mosquitoes and a surprising snowfall, she was more than willing to divine for gold--but she determined that the site had been cursed by "Red Indians," of whom she was very afraid.

Bad things did indeed begin to happen. When she was hiking with a man who knew the area well, they got frighteningly lost "in the terrible forest" where the trees became enemies. An accident happened at the mine; a mine tunnel collapsed. Though everything seemed to have been fine before she arrived, she decided the mishaps were the result of the curse and fled back to Victoria, where she became very ill. A professor of anthropology whom she met somehow relieved her of the curse, though the cure took many weeks, many curious ceremonies and much earnest prayer.

After her recovery, she was summoned to the Peace River block, northeast of the Rockies, to divine for both water and oil. Once more she found herself "cursed" by a native man, but she also came to feel great empathy for the people on one reserve that she visited.

"That one race of human beings," she raged, "could compel another to life in a barren waterless area, fit only for rattlesnakes and carrion crows, seems too cruel to be believed. Perhaps the fact that I have seen some of the lovely spots where the Indians lived before the white man came and turned them out . . . added to my disgust. No wonder the Redskins hated the white man."

Though she could locate only one very limited source of water on the reserve, the native women gave her a caribou skin coat to thank her for her efforts.

Missionary Monica Storrs encountered Penrose in the Peace. Penrose was introduced in awed tones as "the Government Waterfinder." "Miss Penrose was another Englishwoman, dressed most beautifully in smart English breeches and riding boots, but in her belt were stuck her hazel rod and various lengths and twists of wire so we knew she meant business and got rather excited," Storrs wrote.

Storrs overcame her diffidence and asked Penrose to seek out a spring. "I must say it was perfectly thrilling. First she walked vaguely about with her hands outstretched a little, as if blindfold. Then, she suddenly stopped and took one of the wire coils from her belt. She walked in a curiously meandering path and suddenly made straight for the patch of bush directly behind the house. Before reaching it she stopped and called out, 'I must have a man with an axe.' Karl rushed forward and cleared a path for her with such enthusiasm that I thought my poor little bush would soon be all cut down. But at last she came to a little black poplar, commanded him to cut her a path all around it, circled round several times, and made endless strange bowings to it with a long heavy wire, then straightened up and said, 'Exactly under the middle of that tree you will find all the water you need for domestic purposes.'"

Penrose said that fifty gallons (225 litres) would gush forth a day, causing Storrs and her friend to laugh like imbeciles at the prospect of so much water. But the key question, as always, was how deep the water lay. It was too deep; with no money for drilling and no one to drill in any case, they could not tap the reservoir.

At the same time, Penrose was developing her ability to find oil fields, divining without stick or wire. "I stand quite still, stretch out my arm and turn my hand so that the palm and finger tips point upwards and act as a radio receiver. I keep my hand gently moving sideways and backwards and forwards, and turn slowly round. When my hand gets into line with the oil, water or mineral, I immediately feel as if I had a little thread coming out of each finger, connecting me with the deposit. This little thread becomes a string and then a rope and, unless I break the contact by running my left hand down over my arms and fingers, my arm will nearly be pulled out of its socket."

Such physical divining was not without its hazards. One day, she wrote, she felt a pull from two different directions, She used one hand to find each field--and could not break either pull. She threw herself to the ground, dug her hands into the dirt and was somehow saved, though thoroughly sick afterwards.

Penrose returned to Victoria that winter and learned that she could divine mineral deposits from maps, without any necessity to travel to the area concerned. Thence came the plan of her friends, who were convinced she must be under the influence of some kind of electrical current. But all the rubber boots and mats and dinner plates in the world could not stop Penrose, and she emerged triumphant.

She left British Columbia and travelled on to France and England for international divining meets, to Rhodesia, Australia, South Africa, Australia, Jamaica, and Chile. In Australia, she said, she found people's illnesses by pointing her finger at various places on their bodies. When her pendulum began to swing, she knew she had found the body's troubled spots. The police asked her to help them find criminals, but she declined because that would put her in too much danger.

She finished her career, then wrote her book, which was published in 1958. She ended it with these words: "[I] feel that I can look back over the years of my life and say from the bottom of my heart I thank God that I haven't just existed--I've really lived!" thus completing the story of her life as she began it, with italics and exclamation marks.

. . .

Every ounce of shock and drama:
Words from the hinterland

One September day in 1927, Else Lübcke descended from the train that had brought her from Montreal to Vancouver, the last leg of her long journey from Berlin. She crossed the street to the St. Francis Hotel, went to the room reserved for her, and began to unpack. A knock sounded on the door. She opened it to meet George Seel, a Bavarian immigrant of fifteen years standing, a trapper and prospector from north-central British Columbia.

They had never met before, exchanging just a few letters between Berlin and Ootsa Lake. But George was a ruggedly handsome man with a life that Europeans thought romantic, and for Else, adventure and romance were aphrodisiac enough. They smiled, they went to buy George a tie, they walked between the small wooden houses to the beach. They talked and ate dinner. The next day, they got married. A few days later, they took the steamer north, bound for George's small cabin in the lakes country between Prince Rupert and Prince George.

Seel's tale might have been lost in the wilderness, just one more story of a mail-order bride and hardship in tough times, except for one thing. Else Lübcke Seel was a writer, part of the literary set in Berlin. In the British Columbia north, she continued her literary life, devouring every publication that was sent to her, lining her cabin walls with books by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and writing a diary, poems, short stories, songs and articles for German periodicals.

For ten years after World War II, she corresponded with Ezra Pound, becoming his guide to German culture and establishing a unique connection between an unknown immigrant writer in the Canadian wilderness and a famed and disgraced American poet locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.

Else was born in 1894 in Pomerania, an area now part of Poland. The family was well off, but her father died when she was seven, and World War I and its aftermath impoverished them. She moved with her mother and aunt to Berlin, where she supported the trio by clipping foreign newspapers for a bank. A strong, independent and lively woman, she wrote short stories and articles and became part of the thriving Berlin literary scene--a scene Seel's translator, Rodney Symington, describes as "a cultural effervescence in which movements, tendencies, and individuals alike were able to flourish in an atmosphere of freedom that bordered on licence."

That atmosphere allowed her temporary escape from the bonds imposed on her by living with two elderly female relatives, but she could not make up her mind to a more permanent escape, and possibly a more permanent captivity, through marriage. Then, in her late twenties, she fell desperately in love with a visiting Danish writer. "Europe lies at his feet," she wrote of her lover, "and he lies at my feet." But not for long. Predictably, he treated her badly and returned to his wife in Denmark.

The rejection intensified Else's belief that old-world Europe was crowded, regimented, tired, and sullied by petty betrayals. In comparison, the Canadian wilderness must have seemed new, fresh, clean, and open. We can only guess at the combined excitement and trepidation she must have felt when she read in one of her papers an advertisement from a prospector and trapper--those most romantic of occupations--who lived in the western Canadian wilderness--that most romantic of locations. She replied immediately. Not long after, in a fine symbolic gesture, she cut off her long hair and laid it and a ticket to Canada on the table in front of her mother.

A few months later, the Seels stood by the rail of a steamer headed north, he tall, powerfully built, with brown wavy hair and an intelligent cheerful face, she slight, more vivacious than beautiful, dressed in stylish European clothes. At Prince Rupert they took the train east, to an area opened up for settlement just a decade earlier with the completion of the railway from Prince George to Prince Rupert. From Burns Lake they headed south by truck and boat into a region where long, finger-like lakes stretched between rolling hills towards the mountains and the forests.

Else found Ootsa Lake a "particularly Canadian vista," with its huge expanse of water, evergreen forests and snow-covered mountains. At their destination, George lifted her out of the boat and carried her through the doorway of his raw and unfinished two-room cabin. She unpacked her fine linen, china and glass, but George declared them too fancy for Ootsa. She kept out only her Pomeranian feather bedding, the few necessaries, and her beloved books. She scrubbed her first laundry on a washboard, bringing forth from George the comment, "Here for the first time since the earth was born hangs the wash."

A week after they arrived at Ootsa, Else was alone. With George away for two months trapping and hunting, she began to learn the reality of life in the wilderness. She did not know how to light a fire, make biscuits or bake bread. The simplest domestic skills were unknown to her. She listened to coyotes howl, she got her water in a pail from the lake, and she ran from her cabin to the distant neighbours when native people arrived on the shore. The neighbours made light of her fears, but "unfortunately," she noted, "I had read too many horror stories of their supposed activities."

George returned from his trip with mink, marten, ermine and lynx skins. The money from his catch bought staples to see them through the winter and gas for their outboard motor. The temperature dropped to minus forty. Else's life settled into a settler's routine, broken by George's comings and goings and by the occasional concert or dance in the community hall, where she delighted in the flirtatious attention paid to her, and, it would seem, in the disapproval of other women at the dance. She made friends with others in the region, though her poor English and intellectualism made her feel deeply isolated from her neighbours.

She read avidly anything that came her way: Canadian newspapers, American magazines, English-language books, German publications sent to her by friends in Germany. She wrote poems, prose, diary entries and articles for German newspapers, such as one defending women of the Canadian north against disparaging remarks made by a travelling German journalist.

She had no wish to return to the softer life of the more civilized continent she had fled. Her loneliness when he was gone made her all the more eager for the love and company of her adventuresome husband. When George came home for the second time, they had a "splendid merry-go-round" of love-making, cooking meals and talking. The wild geese flew over the lake and Seel was one with them in spirit: "It's always the same; being locked up corrupts everything that is powerful, fresh and happy. In the far distance, I see thousands trotting to work in the morning. Once I belonged to them; today I've lost that kind of submission; here will I stay, live and die."

Pregnant, she took the train to Prince Rupert, followed by a little tourist trip up the coast and over to the Queen Charlotte Islands, taking notes all the while for articles she would write. Back home, George declared that he had found great prospects for a silver mine, and a mining engineer came north to start work. When the mine closed for the winter, the engineer wrote big cheques for everyone involved. In November, she travelled to Hazelton to have her baby in the hospital there, the doctor in Burns Lake having decamped because the local people were too poor to pay him.

The baby made no difference to George's wanderings, but the wanderings made no difference to Else's feeling for the land, which deepened as time went on. "Gradually," she wrote, "I get into a strange mood. Everything seems absurd to me. The newspaper I read, the letters from Europe, my mother's descriptions of her visits, the Steiglitz park with its flowerbeds, all become a boundless nothing. Here I walk across our land, wildflowers and weeds cover it; fallen, fossilized tree trunks, whose roots still rear up into the air, young poplars and willows, tall fir trees and bushes, and in the highest tree an eagle's eyrie . . . I love this piece of earth, every stone, every wave, rain and sun, ducks and moon."

In 1929, George Seel sold half his share in the mine and presented Else with $1,000 so she and their baby son could go back to Germany for a visit. The money and the mine marked the high point of their life at Ootsa. When she returned, everything had changed. The depression had hit northern British Columbia, the mine had closed, wheat was worth little and furs even less. While she was gone, George had lent out much of his money; it would never be seen again. Then George was badly burned in an accident miles from home.

Else, pregnant again, contemplated what seemed to be her inevitable fate. "I, too, once dreamed of fame, but I have renounced this dream, my life has become small, the life of all, without importance, and I have chosen the vocation of all women: bearing children. Yet I remain unperturbed, for I wanted this life, the small life, since one must be called to a big one . . . [I am] not better or cleverer than other women," she wrote, though once she had believed she was.

Somehow, they scraped the money together for another trip to the Hazelton hospital, and a daughter was born. Ever tied to her past intellectual life, Seel read a biography of King Charles the 12th of Sweden as she waited for the birth.

The Seels tried to start a beaver farm, but the enterprise--which took much hard work--was doomed. "I toiled to feed the beavers," she wrote, "sank above my thighs in the snow, shoveled the door free and a path to the beaver-lodges, and dragged poplar trees over to the beaver-tank, sweat broke out all over me because of the effort, and tears ran down my cheeks, but they froze in the bitter cold. That made me realize clearly how senseless it was to cry."

She realized now the meaning of marriage, the staying together through thick and thin. Yet her belief in George was fraying. Now that she must experience its effects, she saw the downside of the wandering wilderness life that Germans had romanticized. He was a dreamer, she thought, always on the move, always seeking that elusive gold or silver mine, never giving thought to what his restlessness meant to his family. He was not demonstrative; she treasured each all-too-rare sign of his love. She managed to extract a few scarce dollars from her German savings account, but George packed up most of the fat, flour and gasoline that the money bought and disappeared on yet another prospecting trip.

"Is he a fool or am I? Oh God we are two toilsome and burdened people, and have to pull at one string. Sometimes it becomes so hard that I cry, like today, but no one sees it."

In 1932, George earned a total of $69.50. Proud and unbending, he refused to go on relief and go to work at a camp as did many other men in the district. A friend, a man from Berlin who lived in the neighbourhood, killed himself. Too late, Else realized he had wanted to talk to her, a fellow German and a person who might understand, about his homosexual urges. Yet her children delighted her, and when George finally took her on her first wilderness trip in 1935, all the old magic surged again. She wrote long poetic descriptions of this domain of the trapper and a sadly descriptive saga of the now-failed mine.

The 1930s rolled on. Once the children went to school, Seel grew fond of her solitude, thinking and writing alone in her cabin, having long bilingual conversations with herself, reading history, making friends with the poets and philosophers who lived in her books. And then the war came.

Battered by the anti-German propaganda that poured from the radio, Seel soon sensed a cooling of some of the friendships that had sustained her. "The neighbours will turn against us," she predicted, "and antagonize me with bitter accusations and I am powerless to answer back."

One evening, as she walked home with her daughter, Gloria, a shot sounded and a bullet whistled by her cheek--and then another. Gloria threw herself down on the ground, but Seel was too furious to be afraid. She ran through the bush towards the culprits, shouting that they were cowards and demanding that they show themselves. They did not, but she knew who they were: sons and nephews of the man who had been her first friend at Ootsa.

The sadnesses mounted up. Her brother was killed in the war. The son of a close friend died at Stalingrad. A close friend and neighbour, a ceaseless complainer, killed herself. "Ootsa blew into your eyes, drove you to excess," wrote Seel. "Poor woman, she was superficial and indifferent; she did not wish to be responsible for anything; this lonely life was beyond her strength." But it was not beyond Else Seel's strength.

Towards the end of the war, news arrived from Germany that the invading Russians and Poles had hacked her old writing desk to pieces and burned the books, papers and pictures she had left behind. Ill, Seel took to her bed, where she read and wrote, surrounded by her precious books. But the war and its aftermath brought prosperity back to Ootsa. Tourists came to stay in cabins the Seels built, and both George and son Rupert had steady work.

In a magazine that came by mail, Seel read of Ezra Pound. The ground-breaking American poet had cast his lot on the wrong side, creating and broadcasting Fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda from Italy. To save the embarrassment of a trial for treason, the American courts had committed him to an insane asylum.

Seel wrote to him, sending him news and a pair of moccasins. The correspondence continued for many years, as Seel interpreted German culture for Pound, and Pound, in terse notes, asked her for ever more information and made suggestions for her own research and writing.

Then more bad news arrived. To provide power for the new aluminum plant at Kitimat on the coast, engineers planned to turn the waters of the finger lakes around, funneling them towards a new power plant. The flood waters from the dam would back up over half their land, inundating their cabin, their barn, their garden and their neighbours' property.

"Nothing would remain of our life and work--nothing." She and George decided they would not stay to see the devastation: they would move to the nearby Nadina River and start a cattle ranch.

The winter of 1950 was a terrible one for George; prospecting for a mining company, he lived at -49°F (-45°C) in miserable conditions and returned little more than a skeleton. Late in March, he died without warning of a heart attack. Devastated, Seel sold the cows, leased the meadows that would not be flooded, and fled to Victoria, where her daughter was attending teachers' college. She came back once more, to finish her business with Ootsa. As she left for the last time, it began to snow. "Did the sky," she asked, ". . . wish to cover our wounds with snow?"

In 1952, she wrote once more to Pound. What shall I do, she asked. "Can I sit here and drink tea from dainty little dishes and tables for the rest of my life?" And in another letter, "All at once everything falls away, everything is gone--no husband, no children, no nothing . . . What shall I do? Blow myself to the winds, vanish vamoose? I cannot take a map of the world again like 25 years ago and go to another continent. There is only the intellectual life to fall back on. I learned a lot, have strong impulses, many emotions, and my roots are in the soil and not in hollow, shallow words. I have to come to an end here soon, very soon. Put a match to the house and wish I could burn myself with it like the phoenix--but nix, nix."

By 1954 she had grown annoyed with Ezra Pound, convinced she had been just an amusement for him, a slave to his need for entertainment and contact with those outside his prison, and worried that he had too great an influence over her and her writing. She stopped writing to him in 1956, two years before he was released from the asylum.

She travelled to see her daughter, who had married and moved to England, and also went back to continental Europe. She lived out her life in Vancouver, continuing her writing for most of the rest of her life. In 1964, her edited Canadian Diary was published in Germany, slightly sensationalized to meet the German hunger for romantic and dramatic accounts of Canadian wilderness life. She died in Vancouver in 1973, a year after Ezra Pound.

Rosemary Neering
| Author Profile | More Writing Samples |

| Visitor Survey | PWAC Victoria Contacts | Credits & Thanks | Webmaster |
| All written material copyright © PWAC Victoria or its individual members |

Last updated: April 23, 2002     http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/neergr02.html