“When we freighted up the river, my dad was running the Hudson’s Bay store at Hudson’s Hope, and the only way they could take the freight up there is by boat. The freight boat would probably be about three hundred [?] feet long and about thirty feet wide, and we had quite a time to go through with it in places, swift streams, and what not. And it was drawn by men, with quite a bit of load on it, and taken up there every fall. And come down in the scows in the spring, after all the furs had been taken in around the middle of June, until we come down in a great big scow you couldn’t hardly land them, unless you were behind the big island where the water wasn’t so swift. That’s the way we used to come down, and that’s one thing I did remember that, because I pretty near fell through a hole and drowned one time, I was caught by the head and the hair and pulled out. That’s how I remember that so well.”
Interviewer: “Thank you very much Mrs. Yaeger. I’m sure there isn’t anyone who could tell us a story such as that.”
MR. WES YAEGER
Interviewer: “Now ladies and gentlemen we are at a fair in Dawson Creek, and we have with us a person who has always been very, very interested in the stampede part of all these performances, in fact, we might call him a stampede Prince at least, if not King. His older brother was the one who managed the first stampede that was ever held in this country. Now I am going to ask Mr. Wes Yaeger to tell us about those first stampedes.”
“Our first stampede was held around 1917. My brother started it in Rolla. We used to have roping and riding and racing, little things like that, and roping big animals, instead of calves in those days. Until they busted some of the horns and they stopped it, made us use calves, as it was cruelty to the animals they believed. From then on we started to use calves.
And then a bunch of us started the Dawson Creek Fair. In fact I have followed stampedes all my life, ever since I was sixteen.”
Interviewer: “Thank you very much. How many people would take part in those very first stampeded?”
“Oh that’s pretty hard for me to judge. I guess there wouldn’t be over four hundred or something like that. A small crowd. We had lots of animals, hundreds of them on the range. We used to go out and fetch in as many as we wanted, and let the rest go.”
Interviewer: “Thank you very much. Now there is another subject I would like to talk to you about. You people had one of the very first threshing machines in the northern part of the prairie. And I believe it was different from the modern threshing machines. I would like for you to tell as much as you can remember of that machine and how it operated.”
“Well, we were pretty well known all over the Prairie here. We had one of the first threshing machines, it was an old horse-power one. The horses, I used to drive them every fall, for three or four months. They went around in a circle, six teams, circled around, that’s how I got the power, stepping over a rod that led to the separator. The separator was fed by hand, two band cutters — it took about fourteen men to run the outfit, and twelve horses on the power, and the same on stock wagon. It was a twenty-eight machine and we used to use six teams on the wagon, beside six teams on the power. We done that for about seven years. We used to thresh even up here on Bear Mountain, all over Kilkerran, everywhere. Well known, was that old horse-power.”
Interviewer: “Thank you so much Wes. Now who were some of the people who worked on that besides you.”
“Well the main workers were my brothers Dick and John, and Les Grayson, he was with us all the time. For about seven or eight years straight we thrashed all over with the old machine. Finally it fell apart one day and I walked away. So John he was going to carry on, and he went about two weeks, and he broke it all to pieces. So the next thing I knew, he came up and asked me if I would come back and help him to get a steam engine, a portable one, down at Tremblay’s. So I went down and hauled the steam engine up, and then I went back threshing again. I was the water boy then.”
Interviewer: “Now what year would that be.”
“That would be around 1922 or ‘23. The next was our freighting. We used to freight north, all over this north. We were up the Nelson River in 1925 and 1926, when we never saw a house for three weeks to a month. We used to have to shovel snow to tie up our horse. Oh I had lots of experiences in the north.”
Interviewer: “Fine. I just wish we had time that you could tell us all about these experiences. Thank you very much for coming and telling us these.”