PWAC Victoria: Rosemary Neering, Writing Sample

The Reading Room

Building Fences in the Kispiox

by Rosemary Neering © 1998

This story takes the traveller to a little-known valley in northwestern British Columbia, where a fierce independence underlies both history and the present. Published in Beautiful British Columbia, Summer 1998.

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

Dan Lewis tucks Happy's leg under his arm and trims the horse's ragged hoof. Then he pulls a rough and glowing U-shape from his portable forge and hammers it into a custom horseshoe. Between hammer strokes, he considers the nature of the Kispiox valley.

"There's a lot of independent, even eccentric, people up here," he muses, choosing his words carefully. "But people in the Kispiox will put up with a lot of eccentricity if you can build a good fence."

The ability to build a fence is Dan's metaphor for the kind of self-reliance--some might call it sheer cussedness--you find in many a resident of this mountain-surrounded valley northeast of Terrace, northwest of Smithers. Tell them what to do and they'll tell you where to go in language you may not care for. Leave them alone, and they'll go about their business of surviving and thriving in a region where straight economics might dictate they should pack up and leave for the nine-to-five life of the city.

Lewis is a prime example of his own description. A refugee from California in the '60s, he headed north to the town of Telegraph Creek. He saw no way of making a living there, so went visiting in the Kispiox. "I came down to the valley," he recalls, "saw it, and that was that." He built an octagonal log house on the west bank of the river, and went out for a while to train as a farrier, a choice of occupation some might think quixotic in an age of bush planes and four-wheel drive trucks.

But time proved Dan right: there are more horses in North America now than there were at mid-nineteenth century, including some poking curious noses over the fences of every Kispiox field. He has all the work he can handle, and he's shoeing the grand-offspring of horses he handled 20 years ago. And he conducts his business with barely a nod to the supposed necessities of the '90s. He refuses to have a telephone installed, relying instead on word-of-mouth and the message book at the fishing lodge in the valley.

Compared to the larger and lustier northwest rivers--the Skeena, the Nass, the Stikine--the Kispiox is not impressive. It rises where fast-running creeks tumble down from the Skeena Mountains into the Nass Basin, then bisects a wide valley for less than a hundred kilometres to its junction with the Skeena. Yet its reputation belies its size.

It's a favourite of almost every writer who visits British Columbia's north; as Edward Hoagland records in his classic book Notes from the Century Before: "It's odd how superabundantly I exalted on the Stikine, yet how flatly my preferences are here."

Part of this reputation stems from the legendary Kispiox steelhead, a seagoing trout that grows substantially larger in the Kispiox River than anywhere else in the world, and that attracts anglers from North America, Europe, and Japan. Part derives from the sheer and unexpected beauty of the valley, the river flanked by farm fields and golden poplars in a region where most of the landscape is vertical, the valley surrounded by mountain ranges where clouds gather and shift, and where a single day can hold fierce rain, bright rainbows, hot sun and river mist.

But much comes from the determined independence demonstrated by those who dwell in the Kispiox. It's an independence bred in the soil of the valley. The village of Ans'pa yaxw, in the "V" where the Kispiox meets the Skeena, was the home of celebrated outlaw Gunanoot, who eluded authorities from 1906 to 1919 after he was charged with shooting two men. Gunanoot turned himself in after 13 years roaming the wilderness north of here, evading--with the tacit help of valley dwellers white and native--the posses sent to catch him, fathering children, and trading for goods to support himself and his family. When he finally went on trial, he was acquitted, partly because of the legend built by his years of freedom.

The Kispiox people, part of the Gitxsan nation, have a long-standing reputation for firmly refusing to do what they were told. Years back, it is said, the government dubbed them the Kispiox, Gitxsan for "loud talkers," for their refusal to accept the reserve system and other gifts the newcomers offered.

Bruce Hutchison, later to become the dean of Canadian journalists, visited the valley in 1931. "Its people seem to belong to the wilderness," he wrote, "yet seem somehow to have held themselves aloof from their old enemies and from the settlements of the white men. Kispiox does not seek visitors. It is not a tourist attraction and its people are not tourist Indians who sell their history . . . [They] are friendly, but you feel they would be best pleased if you left them alone."

In his Ans'pa yaxw house, Jim Angus, a Kispiox chief and school administrator, talks about his life and that of the band. He recalls a day in the 1950s when, like many native children of his generation, he was told he must go to a white-run residential school, in his case to Edmonton, many miles and a way of life away from home.

"Another boy and I were at the New Hazelton train station, standing there waiting for the train to Edmonton. Then we said to each other, 'Why should we go?' And we gathered all our bags and we turned around and we came home. We were the first from this community to go to school in (nearby) Hazelton."

Jim and his wife Doreen, a teacher at the Kispiox elementary school, are firmly wedded to the valley. "It's very different from the European view, how they shift around from place to place. One of the politicians said, well, if there's no work here, move to somewhere else. That just reflects no understanding of who we are and how we relate to the land . . . This is our country."

Jim was born in a logging camp about 15 kilometres from the village. As he grew up, he recognized the connection of his people to the land. In summer, he went with the berry pickers, hitting a pan with a stick to scare away the bears. In fall, he fished for salmon and steelhead in the river. In winter, he went tracking and trapping, for marten and squirrels. Though he lives a fairly urban life now, he's convinced the modern destiny of the Kispiox is welded to this place. "We need to be like a bird: one wing is our culture; the other wing is education."

The road winds north through bush and past farm fields. In the Sportsman's Kispiox Lodge, the only year-round tourist accommodation and the social centre of the valley, Margaret Clay drinks coffee and muses on the 20 years she has spent as manager or owner of the lodge.

City dwellers sometimes like to think of those who live in remote, rural areas as yokels and despoilers of nature. Even hint at that to Margaret and she'll bring out the topo maps and environmental plans that have been part of residents' 20-year fight to save the headwaters of the Kispiox from logging by large companies with no roots in the region. For, though the northwest often teeters on the brink of financial disaster, Kispiox residents won't sacrifice the headwaters to the mantra of "jobs."

She well remembers an evening a few years ago, when logging company spokesmen, loggers, ranchers, tourist operators, native people, and fishing guides gathered in the lounge to discuss the issue. Margaret is still incensed that logging company representatives--having seen much of the valley itself logged--could speak seriously about "sharing" what was left, logging an area where the gorges gouged by retreating glacial ice look like a grizzly has drawn his claws through the rock, where the subalpine rises to the mountain, a unique region where the coastal biogeoclimatic zone meets the interior, and both touch the north.

"You don't generate money in an area like that," she says, fiercely. "You generate a way of life. People living here realize that this is the last there is; you don't have real wilderness elsewhere in B.C. You can't carve something out of it; you can't make money out of it." What you can and must do is leave it, untouched and virtually inaccessible, and just be glad it's there.

Part of the headwaters area is now protected as Swan Lake Provincial Park; the battle goes on to protect the rest.

The valley breeds--or attracts--strong women. One of the strongest in the battle group is Helen Campbell, long a stalwart of the Farmers' Institute and a valley pioneer. In her home on the west side of the river, she looks back at her long years here, after she and her husband and family arrived from California in 1928.

"We got this Canada bug. We loaded up the Hudson sedan and came up in the spring, three kids, a dog, a goat, and not much else." They were headed for the Nass, but the dotted line on the map turned out to be a road only in the cartographer's imagination, and they settled instead in the Kispiox.

"Nobody had any money in the '30s, but we all had a good time. We had dances in the schoolhouse--we passed the hat for money so the band could buy gas and come back another time." During the war, Helen ran the ranch and raised the kids herself, while husband Ted worked in the Prince Rupert shipyards.

She remembers a day after the war when Ted and the area predator hunter considered how to handle a wolf that was bothering her small flock of sheep. The men had a drink or two or three and talked long into the night about if it really was a wolf, and if it was, where they should seek it, and whether they should trap it or shoot it.

In the morning, they nursed their hangovers and continued the discussion. Helen grabbed her rifle and headed up the mountainside to her sheep pasture. There, she saw a big grey shape disappear over a rise, followed it, shot it, and headed back to the house. "If you want to know about that animal," she told the men, "go outside and see it," and went back to work.

Yet farther up the road, artist Caril Chasens is working on a wood sculpture in her funky, many-angled log cabin. Why does she like the valley? "It's the water; it makes you crazy," she says, straight-faced. "You come to need the mosquito bites, to like the slugs that eat your garden." The real attraction, other than the valley's beauty and isolation, is the independence and interdependence of a sparsely populated area where people can create their own lives.

On the other side of the river, Josie and Rollie Steinbach agree. They led wandering lives through B.C. and the Yukon before they got together and moved here 20 years ago, buying into the Kispiox "subdivision," where the smallest lot is four hectares, and when you talk about your neighbour, you mean the people across the river or three kilometres down the road.

"The year after we got here," says Josie, "the shed burned down. The next week, there were 20 people here to build a new shed. They knew we were having a tough time, that we didn't have much money, so one man brought roofing materials, and told us to pay him whenever we could.

"Not long ago, Rollie got hurt and I had to ask people to clear the party line so I could get help. Five minutes later, the guy next door was here to see if he could help. People here help you when you need it, but they're not on your doorstep all the time."

Up along the road, Jeff Holland is getting ready to go back to Victoria. Next week, he and his family are moving here for good, to the property they have lived on or visited over a decade and more.

"I was driving through on the highway and found a wallet belonging to someone in Kitwancool," on Highway 37 north, "and drove through the Kispiox on my way to return it. This is the only place I have ever really felt at home," this from someone who has lived in Victoria, Ottawa, Africa. "There's a real sense of community here I have never felt anywhere else."

His daughter is so happy to be coming back to the valley and to the high school she considers her real school that she joined the wrestling team in Victoria so she could be part of the highly successful Hazelton team.

But what about the winters, when snow can last from October to April, and the school bus driver has to use a tiger torch, propane-fired, to thaw out the school bus on chilly mornings? "I'm here because of the winter," says Jeff. "Here, you know you are going to get snow and not rain in the middle of winter."

George Byrnes is a name to conjure with in the valley, a pioneer packer and rancher who worked the telegraph trail that came through the Kispiox. When he died, Dorothy and Marty Allen bought his property. Guests are barely through the door of Dorothy's farm kitchen before she has the big old table almost covered with Nanaimo bars, pineapple cake, homemade rolls and jam, brownies, pots of tea and coffee. Though she's pushing 80, she doesn't stop working: at Kispiox rodeo time, half the visiting cowboys chow down at the Allens', she still puts up quarts and quarts of home-grown tomatoes and beans, and she'll feed any visitor who sticks his head in the door.

She's the daughter of some of the earliest non-native Kispiox dwellers. The best part of her growing up was playing softball: "I just loved to play. There weren't enough boys for a team, so my sister and I played with the boys. We never lost a game."

Dorothy went off to work in Trail, then came home and married Marty. "I never stopped working in the summer," she recalls. "We'd be cutting hay down by the river, and I'd have a five-pound pail under the seat. When the team stopped to rest, I'd go pick raspberries. We'd come in at 11 at night, and I'd be up till 2 cleaning the raspberries, and up again at 5."

The hard work she still does doesn't bother her, but she's angered by government interference and increasing fees and taxes. "The restrictions now are making it awful hard to farm, and I get so tired of doing paperwork."

The Allens' son, Gene, comes by to unload horses he's brought from pasture near Smithers. A rodeo cowboy for many years, Gene has turned to raising bucking horses that he trucks from Kispiox to distant rodeos in British Columbia, Alberta, Texas, Las Vegas. To some, that might seem impractical, and for a while, Gene was beginning to agree. "I was thinking maybe I would move. Then I came back one time from Alberta with the horses, and I saw the mountains again, and I knew I was staying."

Take a good look at that bucking horse the next time you watch rodeo. She may have something of Simon in her.

Simon is Gene Allen's star sire, one of the best in North America. Between them, Simon and Allen have made the Kispiox the unlikely location of a highly successful bucking-horse breeding operation.

A bucking horse--mare, stallion or gelding--bursts from the gate with a cowboy aboard, then goes into his act: jackknifing in the air while the cowboy tries to stay aboard for the regulation eight seconds. He performs twice a day, 16 seconds in all, then heads back to the barns.

For some reason, Allen's horses are star buckers, and much in demand. "Maybe the Americans just bred the cayuse right out of their horses," says Allen. "People ask me what I do to get my horses to buck. I don't do anything. They just love to buck."

Simon is the son of Allen's mare Gunanoot, named for the famed Kispiox outlaw. He was born in the rodeo ring at Kispiox, after the day's events were done. Also named for Gunanoot, he has sired every one of Allen's bucking horses.

"If it works," smiles Allen, "it's called line breeding. If it doesn't, it's called inbreeding."

Born and raised in the valley, Gene values the independent life he leads. "Most of the guys I went to school with in town, they plan to work till they're 65, then buy a motor home and go fishing. Nothing wrong with that. But there's nothing wrong with fishing when you're 45," which he is, "or 25, or 15, or 5."

The road crosses the river, angling northwest towards Highway 37. A few kilometres along, a narrow bumpy track leads to Bear Scat Ranch, the part-time home of Jack Wertz, who spends the other part of his time near Smithers. Real estate appraiser, fishing guide, river drifter, refugee from California smog and speediness, Wertz came up this way years ago to sell a property for a friend, and never looked back.

A few days ago, Jack and Margaret Clay were up at Bear Scat, and took the ATV down to a little fishing lake they know. Halfway along, they crossed a meadow where the grass was up to their shoulders--except in the middle, where it was battered down like a dozen grizzlies had been having a picnic. And they had: the air was rank with bear smell. But Kispiox people rarely turn back. Margaret sang opera at the top of her voice all through the meadow and back again, just in case a bear or two had fallen asleep at the scene of their carousings.

Down at the river, seven people climb aboard two rubber rafts to drift back down towards the lodge. The water is beginning to drop as spring rain and snowmelt end, shifting subtly from muddy brown to silky turquoise. A beaver has gnawed almost through a huge old cottonwood on the bank; Jack expects that by the time he brings steelhead fishers down in the fall, the tree will lie in the water.

No jet skis here or roaring engines, for the river is off limits to motorboats. No huge rapids or waterfalls either: this is river drifting, not thrill-a-minute river rafting.

Several times, the boats stop so the fishers in the party can wet a fly. Fly fishing is big on the river, and even Japanese honeymooners who learned their skills on bleachers in Japanese gymnasiums come here in steelhead season. One couple, he the teacher, she the obedient pupil, arrived last year and, of course, she outfished him. He managed to land a steelhead on their last day, and honour was saved.

Yet for these fishers, catching a fish is secondary to the experience of just being on the river. Some fish; some laze in the sun; some practise river rescues and tying nautical knots. And some think about the freedom to be eccentric and the possibilities of learning to build a good fence.

. . .

IF YOU GO: The Kispiox lies north of Yellowhead Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George. To reach the valley, turn north at New Hazelton, then onto the Kispiox River road just above Hazelton.

July and August are the best months for family vacations in the Kispiox. Spring can be rainy and mosquito-plagued. Snowfall in winter is relatively heavy. If you want to visit anytime after the middle of August, when steelhead fishers pour in from around the world, reservations are an absolute must. The steelhead fishery is catch-and-release, as conservationists attempt to preserve the famed Kispiox steelhead stock.

Must-sees are the totem poles at Ans'pa yaxw, on the banks of the Skeena. Check at the band office (250-842-5248) for native activities and guides to the valley. There are several art galleries in the village, and the recreated village of 'Ksan at Hazelton provides an excellent introduction to the life and arts of the Gitxsan.

Tourist accommodation in the valley is limited; there is one year-round lodge and a number of smaller resorts and campgrounds open in the summer and fall. Accommodation is also available in New Hazelton. Check the B.C. Accommodations Guide for area listings.

For guiding, fishing, and general valley information, write to the Hazelton Infocentre, Box 340, New Hazelton, B.C. V0J 2J0 or the Sportsman's Kispiox Lodge, Kispiox Road, RR1, Site M, Box 2, Hazelton, B.C. V0J 1Y0.

Rosemary Neering
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Last updated: April 23, 2002 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/neergr03.html