The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
As other boys heard tales of bread lines and war at their grandfather's knee, Scott Gilmore learned about the rich history of the Flin Flon region. Both of his grandfathers, Watson Gilmore and Raymond Beauchamp, imparted on him a sense of wonder that lives on decades later. 'It created for me a mythic landscape,' says the younger Gilmore, now 41 and living in Ottawa. 'When I would paddle around Lake Athapap or down Mistik Creek, the islands and the points all had stories to them, which made the place seem much more vocative and really made it come alive for me.' Now Gilmore is working to ensure those stories, and many others, survive and thrive within future generations. He is putting the final touches on an illustrated canoe map of the Flin Flon-Cranberry Portage area. Spliced in with the numerous lakes, creeks and portages are handwritten-style facts of both a historical and contemporary nature. Beside Schieders Bay, off of Little Athapap, the map notes: 'This bay was named after Frank Schieder, a merchant who sold work clothes in Channing.' Near Schist Creek, the map explains: 'Before the railroad was built, ore barges traveled down Schist Creek from Flin Flon to The Pas.' Other tidbits point out that one lake is 'stocked with rainbow trout' and a creek is 'choked with beaver dams, difficult to navigate by canoe.' At Cranberry Portage, the map tells of the community's devastating forest fire of 1929. Hearing of the blaze from his grandfathers left a deep impression on Gilmore, influencing how he came to view Cranberry Portage. 'It destroyed every building in town, save two, and people survived by getting on barges and canoes and going out in the middle of the lake,' says Gilmore. 'So when I would go fishing and I'd be down on that arm of Athapap, I wouldn't just see the modern town of Cranberry Portage, I would see this evocative image of this forest fire, like the wrath of God wiping clean this little outpost of civilization while the people huddled out on the lake.' See 'Seeking' on pg. Continued from pg. Visiting the Flin Flon Public Library on Tuesday, Gilmore displayed a draft copy of the table-topping map and sought additional anecdotes from those stopping by to see him. He was still hoping to learn more about the so-called Bakers Narrows Bandit, who broke into cabins in the 1960s, and of the man who went missing on Lake Athapap only to resurface 20 years later in B.C. Gilmore was also very interested in a trapper from Alabama, named Holt, who allegedly kept a pet wolf and a pet lynx in this area back in the 1920s. Much of the info on the Gilmore map derives from newspapers as well as the archives and Northern Lights magazine of Hudbay. But some of it is plain old oral history that Gilmore realizes may not be 100 per cent gospel. 'That's been a challenge,' he says. '(But) you know, frankly I'm not that worried about it. What I'm trying to capture is the mythology. This isn't meant to be a definitive history. It's to tell the story about what a remarkable place this is, (how) it's unique in the world.' Though Gilmore was raised in Edmonton, he was born _ and has always spent his summers in _ Flin Flon. He considers this his home. After realizing last summer that his own children were missing out on the fascinating history his grandfathers advanced, he set out to produce the map. As a labour of love with no grant money or funding of any kind, Gilmore dove into the undertaking last October, teaching himself how to use mapmaking software. He conducted extensive research, including interviews with oldtimers. He also pored over decades-old maps of this area, produced back when people moved by canoe, not car or plane. 'Gradually, piece by piece, this map came together,' Gilmore says. 'It covers everything from some of the early Cree families that settled in Bakers Narrows at the turn of the century to the fact that it's the the 250th anniversary this year, coincidentally, of the first recorded visit of a European to this area.' Geographically, the map covers, as Gilmore puts it, any point to which you can canoe in two days from Bakers Narrows. That's as far north as Trout Lake, as far south as Cranberry Portage, as far east as Flin Flon and as far west as Naosap Lake. Gilmore expects the final version of the map to be available this September or October. He will provide free copies to schools, museums and the library, and hopes to sell other copies at a not-for-profit price. Other than a mapmaker, Gilmore is also an accomplished social entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Building Markets, formerly Peace Dividend Trust, a non-profit that develops and implements new ideas in peacekeeping and aid to improve lives in poor and war-torn nations. Gilmore invites anyone with stories and facts for his map to e-mail him at gilmore.scott@gmail. com.
