Afterword

This story is an account of what did happen mixed with what might have happened. For what did happen—Bill Eppler and Joe Mulholland flying above the falls with Dalziel to trap one of his lines and the investigation of their disappearance—I have simplified complicated scenarios and dropped minor characters. But I stayed faithful to the main facts about my main characters—their names, what they looked like, how they acted, what they said and where they were at specific times.

What else could I do, my characters being real? In this I was like Shakespeare in his histories—an accurate analogy, I think, despite its ludicrous connotations. Shakespeare’s real characters were and are better known than mine so my descriptions had to be longer.

There aren’t many Nahanni buffs around as yet, and most of them are river rats—an odd bunch, stubbornly idealistic, not to say mildly deranged, like their hero Faille. Mainly, they are possessed by the river itself, and the area it drains, but also they ponder the books written by the area’s pioneers: The Dangerous River by R. M. Patterson (also a river rat), Nahanni by Dick Turner and Nahanni Revisited by Al C. Lewis. Nahanni buffs have a website, whereon they take virtual tours of the river and Faille’s cabin. They have an award-winning movie about Albert Faille, produced by the National Film Board. The more bookish and persistent among the river rats have gone from these sources into Nahanni National Park’s Historical Resources Inventory, a package of taped and transcribed interviews with those who lived and worked in the area from the 1920s to the 1970s. These are the sources of Nahanni history.

Following, for those who have become intrigued by my characters and my story, are the biographies of my main characters, gleaned from the sources listed above and in order of their appearance in my book.

Bill Eppler was born in 1904 in Winnipeg. He stood trial for murder in the U.S. around 1920. He seems to have come to Fort Simpson around the mid- to late 1920s, probably with Jack Mulholland, with whom he’d teamed up in 1921 (according to Kraus). Clark, always careful in his statements, mentions him and Mulholland in 1929, “trapping up the Liard, right almost at the mouth of [later Clark says across from] Flett Creek.” Daisy Mulholland, Clark says, came into the country later. This would probably have been in the early 1930s, when Eppler and Mulholland shifted their trapping to the area around Nahanni Butte. In July 1930, Eppler walked into Whittington’s café in Fort Simpson and encountered two new arrivals to the area, Stan and Dick Turner. They asked him some questions about the Liard River, but according to Turner, Eppler didn’t get a chance to say much as others were too busy talking. He did tell them that most trappers now used outboards on their scows and canoes—the Turners had paddled and lined their way to Fort Simpson. Eppler was involved in the pseudo gold rush in McLeod Creek in January 1934 and a follow-up trip the following May with Faille, Dick Turner and someone named “Old Ole.” Eppler started the trading post with Jack Mulholland in 1935. Eppler ran their trapline by himself, and Jack ran the trading post with Daisy and Joe. Eppler and Joe were lost in the Nahanni area in 1936. The RCMP reports about this incident are hard on Eppler, who is sometimes “Espler” and sometimes trapping at Bennet Creek rather than Glacier Lake, sometimes in 1932 rather than 1936. Division File No. T 517-5 says “Mulholland was a greenhorn and Espler was reckless and foolhardy.” It’s hard to say where this information about Eppler came from; all of his trapping and prospecting colleagues referred to him with respect. Even Turner, who ran afoul of Eppler on the follow-up trip of May 1935, and who seems to have believed that he killed Joe Mulholland, spoke highly of him: “a man of good character, truthful, honest and intelligent (and an excellent bridge player), a gentleman and a true friend.”

Albert Faille was born—“maybe in Bohemia”—in 1886, came to the U.S. at two years of age, lost his parents somehow and ended up in foster care in Pennsylvania. He ran off from there when he was eight years old and rode the freights. A hobo taught him how to trap. In World War I he joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and went to France. When he got back he married Marion Carlson, and they had a child. Loving life in the bush, Faille drifted away from Marion into Canada, where he heard the McLeod story and headed for the Nahanni. On his first trip upriver, in July 1927, he met R. M. Patterson, who hitched his canoe to Faille’s motor-powered scow. Faille taught Patterson how to line and track his canoe, and took him the final lap up to Virginia Falls. With Patterson’s help, Faille built a cabin at the mouth of the Flat, but later found more lucrative territory up the Flat and built more cabins. These are visited by contemporary river trippers who light incense, offer up sacrificial paddles, mutter incantations and scrounge for souvenirs. Enshrined in rec rooms all over Canada are rusted tobacco tins, chewed-up moccasins and pieces of dried bark from Faille’s cabins. In 1934, Faille spent the summer with Clark and Kraus sluicing for gold around McMillan Lake, testing the McLeod story. Faille quit trapping in 1943 to captain and maintain Truesdell’s boat and serve as the doctor’s handyman/mechanic. He needed a cabin in Fort Simpson then, so the doctor let him drag off the kitchen wing of his house. When Truesdell retired in 1950, Faille returned to his winter trapping and summer prospecting until sometime in the 1960s, when he retired as a trapper. He continued his summer prospecting trips above the falls. At about 85 years of age, he died in his outhouse sometime on New Year’s Eve or Day 1973-74, and is buried in the Anglican cemetery at the centre of Fort Simpson.

Gus Kraus was born in Chicago in 1898 and came to the Nahanni area in 1934. Next to Faille, he was the grand old man of the Nahanni, a talkative, friendly, generous and imaginative person who seemed to take part in just about every event that happened on the Nahanni until his death in 1992. Gus’s best move was to marry, in 1942, a Dene woman named Mary, née Denya, who could speak English, French and South Slavey fluently. For a time, the two resided and trapped at the hotsprings below First Canyon (now Kraus Hotsprings), spending their summers at Nahanni Butte. They made their living trapping (Mary, mainly), gardening (Gus) and, through the 1950s and 1960s, cooking (both of them) for oil-exploration crews. Gus also guided wildlife officials and police through the area. Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, on his canoe trip from Rabbitkettle to Nahanni Butte, stopped to pay his respects to Gus and Mary Kraus at Kraus Hotsprings. Trudeau was followed by Jean Chrétien and Gordon Lightfoot. Mary and Gus retired to Little Doctor Lake, where Gus passed away at 94 years of age. There is a memorial to him at the lake. As of February 2007, Mary was still alive in Fort Simpson.

Harry Vandaele was born in 1908 in Spruce View, Alberta, to parents who had come from the U.S. in 1903 to homestead. In 1927, he went to Calgary and worked in a service station. He invested money in stocks and accumulated what his friend Al Lewis called “a small fortune,” which he lost in the crash in 1929. In 1934, he and his fellow garage worker, Milt Campbell, heard about the McLeod Mine and decided to go for a look. They looked for two years and then gave up, turning to trapping. Vandaele engaged, with Dal, in what Lewis called “a conspiracy against the police,” flying in on a search for evidence as to the fates of Eppler and Mulholland, a search that wasn’t carried out. Instead, Dal trained Vandaele in trapping, and then flew out alone. Vandaele trapped through the winter of 1936-37, with the help of Lewis, who had been contacted by Dal. Dal’s plane was “out of commission,” so Lewis flew in with Mackenzie Air Services. The two friends rafted out on the Nahanni in June, losing most of their pelts and equipment in the process but becoming the only men known to have rafted out on the river at high water. In the late fall of 1938, Vandaele was forced to leave the north permanently because of back pain. He had a successful operation on his back, probably in 1942, at which time he was running his own mink ranch south of Calgary. In 1956, at the age of 48, he died of leukemia.

Milt Campbell seems to have left the Nahanni in 1937. According to Bill Clark, who kept in touch with him, he worked as the airport manager at Fort Simpson during the war, and ended up in the 1970s running a Texaco Station in Airdrie, north of Calgary.

George Campbell Ford Dalziel, known throughout the north as Dal, was born in Winnipeg and raised in North Vancouver, where he went to private school. He learned trapping in Boy Scouts and went north after graduating, ending up in Dease Lake, where he met Nazar Zenchuk. Dal and Zenchuk trapped and explored in the Yukon and NWT, ultimately attaching their own and other names to many geographical features: Zenchuk Creek, Sunblood Mountain, Hole-in-the-Wall Creek, etc. After a trek from the Liard River to the Mackenzie, Dal competed in a shooting contest with the famed pilot Wop May and won a trip to Edmonton, where he trained under Moss Burbidge as a pilot. He became Canada’s flying trapper. After being legislated out of business by the Canadian government, he established a prosperous flying service in Watson Lake. Travellers on the Alaska Highway can see his log house there, directly across from the log hotel near the Alaska Highway signposts. During the war, Dal worked as a civilian pilot for the U.S. Army, training pilots and assisting in the construction of the Alaska Highway. In the late 1950s he sold his flying service and went into guiding and outfitting. He built another log house in Dease Lake as the base for his enterprise, which he called (unambiguously) Dalziel Hunting Ltd. He wrote on the fuselage of his plane, “Eat moose. Ten thousand wolves can’t be wrong.” He had exclusive hunting and guiding rights to the largest designated area in BC. Except for numerous run-ins with game officials, he conducted an operation that was praised by customers, none of whom died after being abandoned in the bush. In the early 1970s, Dal’s youngest child and second daughter, Sherry, also a pilot, took over this business and Dal retired to Fulford Harbour, on Saltspring Island, BC. June died soon afterwards, and Dal did not respond well to this or to old age in general. As the judge who handled some family controversy over Dal’s will put it, “He was not well; he was drinking too much; he was brooding because his pilot’s licence had been revoked for health reasons; and he was getting old.” He died, at 74 years of age, on December 26, 1982, and is still unmentioned in any official account of the Nahanni. Even the monument commemorating the bush pilots of Canada, placed in 1967 on Dome Rock in Yellowknife, omits Dalziel. Dalziel himself never talked much, and for obvious reasons was shy of publicity, which may explain his being forgotten. But he did, privately, document his activities. He carried a camera and kept a journal; the album and the journal are in Sherry’s possession. In the journal, Dal describes taking Mulholland and Eppler to Glacier Lake, says that he advised them against occupying the cabin there and describes Eppler’s jerry-rigged stove that started a fire the very first time the men tried to make tea. Of the subsequent investigation into the men’s deaths, Dalziel writes, “Police believed I’d abandoned them.”

Wallace A. M. Truesdell came to Fort Simpson in 1932 after service as Deputy Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott’s best field officer in the Department of Indian Affairs. Truesdell prospered in Fort Simpson for almost 20 years, gaining the confidence of most members of the community, though there were constant complaints. An early one, in July 1932, had the whole town, including Andy Whittington, Tiny Gifford and a host of officials (the agents for Northern Traders and the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Anglican minister and Catholic priest, the soldier who ran the radio station and the RCMP officer), petitioning the authorities about Truesdell’s sleeping habits: “The Doctor does not rise until about 3 p.m., and is generally available at the Hospital or his residence after 4 p.m. His hour for retiring is about 4 a.m.” Later, Truesdell had a Model-T Ford shipped to the island, for which he had a road built so he could commute the quarter-mile from his house to Whittington’s bar. He ran a farm and shipped vegetables to communities along the Mackenzie River; a type of soil in the area is named after him. Anyone responsible for mediating between whites and Indians in Canada’s north is bound to be an object of controversy, but over the years, the people of Fort Simpson learned to appreciate Truesdell. Both Faille and Dick Turner became his fast friends. One thing that made Truesdell especially popular was that he presided over the birth of every child born in Fort Simpson. The island in the mouth of the Liard River is named after him.

Corporal Regis Newton came to Fort Simpson in the spring of 1936, with his pregnant wife. That summer he made a patrol with a special constable to continue the investigation of the Mulholland-Eppler disappearance. The only surviving result of this patrol is a map, dated December 30, 1936, of the country from the mouth of the Flat River up the Flat and Nahanni to Irvine Creek and Glacier Lake. It shows a route up Irvine Creek, over to Hole-in-the-Wall Creek, across the Rabbitkettle River a few miles above the hotsprings and up to Glacier Lake. The map indicates the campfire remains (thought to be Mulholland and Eppler’s) at the mouth of the Flat, Faille’s cabin on the Flat near Irvine, the remains of the burned cabin on Glacier Lake and a spot on the Nahanni above the mouth of the Rabbitkettle River “where traps, tarp etc was [sic] found on sandbar.” One of Newton’s sons thinks that his father and the special constable went right up the river, around the falls and to Glacier Lake, so maybe some of this map indicates the results of Newton’s own investigations. Most assume that Newton never made it above the falls and all the information on the map was provided by Faille. Newton seems to have been in Fort Simpson for only two years. He died in 1971.

Nazar Zenchuk, after his experiences in the Nahanni area, went to Watson Lake with Dal and trapped in that area for many years. He married and had children, but his family life was erratic. So were his off-the-trapline habits. There’s a persistent rumour that in the summer of 1948, Zenchuk arranged to meet a man named John Shebbach at the Caribou River camp. They probably intended to prospect—in 1938, the entire Nahanni watershed was closed to white trapping, and remained closed until 1953. In Patterson’s version of the story, Shebbach walked in from Watson Lake. In Kraus’s version, Dal flew him in. Months went by and finally someone inquired about him or (in Kraus’s version) Dal mentioned him to the RCMP. Kraus guided the RCMP up to the mouth of the Caribou and found Shebbach dead, his body torn apart and scattered by animals. His journal was found—a record of 42 days of starvation. Right into his old age, Zenchuk seems to have enjoyed talking to others about gold up the Flat River, and offering to guide people into the area. He was a popular figure in the bars of Watson Lake—he was especially noticeable later in life because he had no fingers and held his beer glass between the palms of his hands. He introduced himself by asking people to stick a cigarette in his mouth and light it. He lost his fingers not on the trapline, but on the Alaska Highway, making his way home one night after the bar closed. He died in Whitehorse in a seniors’ home.

Harry Snyder was born in 1882 in McArthur, Ohio. He sold casualty insurance in Kansas in the first decade of the 20th century, was a property developer in Texas and New Mexico (1911-15), sold life insurance (1916-19), then in 1920, in Chicago, started Snyder & Hay, a company specializing in corporate reorganization and income-tax problems. In 1932 he merged five failing oil companies in Montreal and incorporated and was chairman of the board of Champlain Oil, later a subsidiary of Imperial Oil. Pierre Trudeau’s father was one of his vice-presidents. Between 1936 and 1939 he financed the expansion of the Eldorado radium mine on Great Bear Lake, but his arrangements collapsed with the start of World War II, and he was removed from the company’s board of directors when it was discovered that he actually owned no Eldorado stock. He also started the first North American radium refinery at Port Hope, which provided uranium used to develop the atomic bomb. It seems that, due to his contribution to the war effort, he was given an honorary colonelcy in Canada’s Black Watch Regiment. In 1937, Snyder led and funded an American-museum hunting expedition into Glacier Lake, despite warnings from various people that two trappers had recently died mysteriously in the vicinity. This was Snyder’s third Canadian expedition—all were focused on collecting trophies for museum display. Snyder took time out from this expedition to host the Governor General, Lord Tweedsmuir, on his Arctic tour, meeting him on August 6, 1937, at Eldorado. Snyder flew Tweedsmuir to the Coppermine River and fed him steak during a picnic lunch in the Barrens. The tour lasted three days. Tweedsmuir was a popular novelist, publishing under the pseudonym John Buchan; Snyder’s chatter may have inspired Sick Heart River, published in 1941, which describes a trip into a mysterious subarctic river that flows through a temperate valley and spreads a strange accidie or depression in men and animals. Snyder in fact suffered from some such illness, which he suspected he’d picked up in a hunt in Africa. There he wrote two books on hunting. Snyder’s Book of Big Game Hunting, published in 1950, contains anecdotes of hunts in various parts of the world, including the Nahanni. In the book, a letter from Snyder to a young relative advises, “If you have any creative ambitions, whether as a tootler on the cornet or a business organizer, then take a minimum of six weeks every year hunting in the wilderness. You will return with your batteries recharged, and your views on men and opportunities in sharp focus.” Sometime in this period, his wife Ida and daughter Dorothy disappear from his life, and a new wife, the nurse who came to Sundre to cure him, turns up. Though he was ill, he made a last trip into Glacier Lake in 1952. The ranch, and Snyder’s vast trophy collection and library of documents about the Nahanni, burned to the ground in 1955, and Snyder moved to Calgary. Shortly after that he went to Tucson, Arizona, where he died in March 1972.

Bill Clark was born in Banffshire, Scotland, in 1901, studied engineering at Aberdeen University and came to Canada in 1923 to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company at Port Simpson, north of Prince Rupert on the BC coast. He was shipped by mistake to Fort Simpson, where the company set him to bookkeeping. When he was on a 1924 trip to Fort Wrigley to help out at the post there, his Indian guide told him the McLeod story and described the Nahanni River. He quit the HBC in 1929 and went up the Nahanni to prospect, ultimately, in 1933, focussing on McLeod Creek. In the winter of 1934-35, Kraus flew in to stake claims, and the two became partners; their explorations continued until 1939. Then Clark left the Nahanni to work on the Canol pipeline until 1945 and for Imperial Oil at Hay River until 1955. He prospected around Great Slave Lake and retired to the town of Enterprise, across the Liard River from Fort Simpson.