Fry - The Ranch on the Cariboo

The Felker familys ranchlands along Highway 97 near 118 Mile House on Lac la Hache are being restored as a Cariboo heritage site.

Alan Fry was born on the family ranch near Lac la Hache. At age twelve, he started working every school break on the ranch or, occasionally, in the sawmill. By sixteen he had earned his keep on various ranches in the Kamloops area.

Alan left ranching to complete a year at the University of Briitsh Columbia, and then joined the Canadian Army Active Force. While at Camp Borden, Ontario, he met and married Sylvia Thomson of Toronto. He returned to ranching in 1952, but two years later joined the Department of Indian Affairs.

He spent twenty years with Indian Affairs, and served as district superintendent in Kamloops, Vernon, Cranbrook, Hazelton, Prince Rupert, Whitehorse, Alert Bay, and Campbell River. He and Sylvia had two daughters, Margery and Lydia, before Sylvia died at age 39 in 1970. Alan left Indian Affairs and settled in the Yukon in 1974.

In 1980, he married Eileen Frankish. Alan and Eileen share eight grandchildren and divide their time between their home in Whitehorse and a cottage at Lake Leberge.

Alan is the author of seven books, including How a People Die (1970), Come a Long Journey (1971), The Revenge of Annie Charlie (1973) and The Burden of Adrian Knowle (1974). The Ranch on the Cariboo was first published in 1962.

It was the summer I was twelve and had to become a man. Halfway around the world the labour force of the nation fought an alien war, the few men behind went into heavy industry, and mainly children gathered the harvest for the countrys larder.

It was Gussy Hallers job to teach me. The son of a Pennsylvania Dutchman of gold-rush days and a Fraser River Native woman, Gussy was a fine man, raised in hard days, and hed had a pitchfork in and out of his hands for fifty years. Life itself to him was hay and horses and hard, unrelenting work in broiling heat or bitter cold. I could have no better master.

His wife, Maggie, cooked for the crew, while Maize, fifteen, and Marvin, thirteen, worked in the field. Verne, too young to hay, helped his mother about camp. Roger, my brother, also thirteen, and Johnny Hamilton, another old-timer like Gussy, made up the rest of the Old Mans crew.

It was the beginning of the haying season and we were at the Milk Ranch, in the Cariboo country of central British Columbia, the home place of the Old Mans cow outfit. We had no truck with milch cows the name lay in history. When one Isaac Ogden, son of a Hudsons Bay Company factor, ran a store and fur trading business on the Cariboo road around the turn of the century and before, he found there was a market for milk products, mostly butter, in the stagecoach trade. He owned these fields and here he kept an ill-bred bunch of cows from which, somehow, he extracted milk. The Old Man had bought from Isaacs son, Percy, who still owned the store and traded for fur but had no use for milkers.