Our family’s three-generation ties, beginning in the 1960s, with northern Ontario's
Algoma District reach back to a land baron none of us ever met. Bill Weston, a Michigander who likely
acquired over 100,000 acres of prime Ontario timberland during the 1930s and
40s, had seen to the cutting of access roads into the
bush along Lake Superior's northeastern coast during that time still within easy recall of the pioneer era. More than now, private road-making
on wild land was subject to praise from sundry people who considered it a useful variant of public works. With the 4,860-mile-long TransCanada Highway under construction, Mr. Weston believed that local government in all its capability should assume the maintenance of his new roads.
Ranting in the faces of public officials whom he sought out in their offices
did not further his cause, so Weston, rumored to carry a two-bitted axe in his
car, became his own road patrolman. A mighty figure with a booming voice, he
would order hunters or hikers off whichever of his roads he met them on. Any repeat encounter was
dramatized with the axe, which according to legend he could twirl overhead and hurl like a
tomahawk, or with a loaded rifle.
Offsetting his talent for confrontations, Bill Weston was
credited with considerable charm in business dealings and generosity in hosting visitors
at the rockbound point of land on the northeastern shore of Lake Superior where
he and his wife Ellen had a several-room log cabin with outbuildings. The
guests came partly out of curiosity about Bill and Ellen, but otherwise with an appetite for her
sumptuous Sunday dinners of chicken, roast beef and wild game. Lounging around later on with their overloaded stomachs, diners would listen while Bill Weston reeled off a patchwork of favorite hunting and lumbering yarns.
During World War II, demand grew for spruce and birch wood to be used in military aircraft, notable examples the British de Havilland Mosquito
and the Hawker Hurricane. Birch plywood was used in the Mosquito, one of the
fastest-flying, most utilized planes of the British Royal Air Force. Spruce
spars and ribs were particularly wanted for training aircraft, with at least
fourteen Canadian manufacturers such as Montreal’s Canadian Car and Foundry
Company, MacDonald Brothers Aircraft Company in Winnipeg, Fleet Aircraft of
Fort Erie, Ontario and U.S. factories in at least seventeen states. Weston set
to work in the all-too-typical manner of a tycoon who stands to make a fortune off an abundant resource from the earth. He stripped sections of his
forest of their trees, never tolerating any worker who stood up to him to challenge
his practices. He became a millionaire.
A small amount of archived correspondence with Abitibi
Power and Paper Ltd. from the early 1950s shows William J. Weston and Son doing
business in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario from a post office box. A return address
for William Weston is a room at the Windsor Hotel in the Sault. Pulpwood by this
time is the topic, especially spruce and balsam fir, in a Truck Purchase
Agreement, indicating a truckload of logs, from 1951. One letter dated March
1954 shows the public, take-charge aspect of Bill Weston as he expresses his
concern for a number of unemployed men near Lake Superior’s Batchawana Bay,
whose yield of cut logs lies stacked along the Pancake River. The response from
Abitibi expressed regret that Weston’s letter hadn’t come two or three months
earlier, explaining that the company was already in danger of exceeding its
assignment to local timber cutters. This exchange would seem to presage the
Westons’ subsequent sell-off of lands his crews had already exhausted of their tree cover.
Celebratory living that included trips to Florida at the
height of the tourist season along with the war’s end had cut severely into his
wealth by the 1950s and 60s. He was driven into selling off parcels of land at
hardly more than $15 an acre. Notorious fits of temper increased as his
wealth, influence and bodily strength eroded. Weston’s son in his twenties was
reportedly found murdered by a bullet from the rear out on the land. Rumors divided
the blame between offended Weston and Son employees and Bill Weston himself.
I remember the Weston cabin in the mid-1970s. It
lay about five kilometers from Pancake Bay, Ontario, log walls painted a
golden-sand color, the boarded-up window frames cherry-red. An iron dinner bell
stood on a post near the lake-facing entrance above decorous, rock-bordered
pathways. The yard was a meadow of daisies, fireweed and the escaped carnation that Ellen Weston called Sweet Williams. I even found a pink form of turtlehead there, a member of the figwort plant family native to the southern
United States—did Ellen or even Bill choose to plant it for the likeness to a reptile or fish-face which is the form of the corolla?
From this cabin Bill Weston wandered forth on a night of
lashing rain, thunder, and gale-driven surf, according to legend. He may have been sleep-walking
or visiting the privy, but one of his slippers was found far along the
twisting, one-lane Weston Road. He had forced his way between soggy evergreen
boughs, over logs and onto lakeside cliffs, where searchers found his body in
remnants of pajamas by daylight, not balled up in hypothermia but stretched out
with a reaching arm, posed like a fallen mythic hero or tyrant or a blend of each.
From Michigan Ellen Weston had written a kindly response
to my parents, uncle and aunt when, in about 1969, they mailed her an inquiry
about selling her property to them, explaining that too many years of happy
memories tied her to the place forever so she could never bring herself to sell
it. The following year my elders purchased thirteen acres further along Weston
Road from a subsequent U.S.-based landowner who had given in to Bill Weston’s
charms in a prior year, buying those acres of regenerated spruce, fir, cedar,
maple and yellow birch for a late-life retreat, against his wife’s wishes.
A photo of Bill and Ellen Weston, the caption dating it
from about 1957, is tucked in a recent directory of Weston Road landowners. Bill
appears massive in the trunk and the hands, one arm tucked around Ellen, his
demeanor potentially affable, potentially a little testy. Ellen in her
period-looking floral print dress and pearl earrings looks pleased and pert. I
prefer to guess that a scrap of bygone gossip about Ellen in later years
sleeping with a butcher knife under her pillow for protection against Bill is
a lie or an exaggeration based on Mr. Weston’s observable decline.
In fall 2009 the meadowy former Weston yard bristled with
pathless forest when I walked in on a visit. Cabin and sheds had been burned by the subsequent landowner or
moved off for other use. The stone foundation of a forgotten pumphouse could be
stumbled upon under cover of salmonberry shoots. I traced our way back to
Weston Road via a lingering colonnade of balsam firs that used to line the
driveway since the driveway itself, along with its wooden gate, had vanished. Given
space, nutrients and adequate moisture, the forest still re-stakes itself
inside of one human generation, a new tree succession over-writing the marks of times before. When buildings fall and the chunks are swallowed by decay it's up to us to remember the best and worst about who led us to those places or tutored us in local custom.
Here were some lines of a poem about the dead that I wrote in memory of my dad, Werner W. Beyer, who discovered the ragged Algoma District of Ontario with its entangled cedars and spruce, fir and birch and enabled our childhood and legacy there:
"but where--but anywhere?--do they still occupy, entire?
Isn't it true that some we thought dispersed repair, re-focus
for some use, but mostly scatter, taught in their extreme fragility
to shun the thrashing embattlement of limbs, the opportunism
of rootlets forcing their whims in thrall to self?
And so our call, our merest sibilance of leaves: this hypnotic forest..."
The excerpt is from a longer poem titled 'Graduation' and is included in the above card whose photo was shot in October along Weston's old road, now deep in forest belonging mainly to private owners. Research and consultation surrounding this present writing clued me in that in the heyday of Weston's lumbering operation a lot of the Pancake Bay region may have featured stumps rotting in vast clearings. What we encountered in the late 1960s and early 70s, unbeknownst to us three awed kids or even, probably, our parents, was second-growth given the absence of giant pines which signify primeval forest in the region north of Lake Superior. The largest pines that I found when I was young near cliffs along that lake shore may have been hold-overs from before the 1930s, too hemmed-in by rock for that era's loggers to get at, or too small, and left to clothe the coastline in their maturity.
Every era and every career within it is a part of natural succession, or the haphazard replacement of generation by next generation, or soil layer by new soil layer, where, in the words of my own poem 'God Surfaces and Bares Rejoinders:'
There's writing in these woods
since we tore up the moss that hoods it.
Some corresponds to other writing
just come to light on rock, in camp, while
some, a jot, is left without reply
apparent anywhere.
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