Part Nine – Vacations of the Early 60’s to Western Canada and U.S.

          In the early 60’s we decided to take one of the kids on a holiday with us. The first trip was in 1961 and we took Paul with us to Winnipeg. We went by way of Chicago and visited the Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette. We had been to the Temple on a couple of previous occasions, once with Pat Boyd, who drove and got a speeding ticket somewhere in Michigan and the other time we took Evelyn McPherson with us. These were weekend trips.

          We often camped on these trips. Our first stop was in Wisconsin and then in Bemidji, Minn. There we visited the Paul Bunyan museum together with his blue ox Babe. We camped in a nearby park. In Winnipeg we stayed in a motel on the outskirts of the city. This was the first time I had been in Winnipeg since I stopped over a few days early in the war with Bob Wales and we rode the roller coaster in Assiniboine Park. Later I was to go there as a delegate to the National Convention.

          While in Winnipeg we took Paul to see the railway yards which are the largest in Canada and which fascinated him. We also had a tour of the Manitoba Parliament Bldgs. with Hart Bowsfield, a Baha’i we had met at an earlier National Convention in Toronto. We attended many Conventions when they were in Toronto; one time we took Don Thiers and another time we took George and Erica Lazi who of course were not Baha’is but we spent some time with them.

          On our way back from Winnipeg we came on the Canadian side. Some of our memories were the night we spent in a hotel in Jackfish, about 4 miles off the Trans Canada down a one lane winding road. The hotel was an old style one where all the guests ate around the main table. In the evening we saw some moose swimming in the lake out to an island. Jackfish is a point on the Canadian Pacific Railway where the train makes a big U-turn around the bay and if you were in the middle of the train you could see both ends of the train out the window.

          Also we had to stop in Wawa to visit a doctor when Joan received several bad black fly bites. Her face became quite swollen. The next night we camped in Fairbank Prov. Park, about 14 miles off the main highway. We didn’t think we’d ever get there. From there we went to Woodview near Lakefield, Ont. where I was to give a course at the Summer School. We were there for a week and one of the highlights was a series of evening talks on the Letters to the Kings by Firuz Khazemzadeh, Chairman of the U.S. National Assembly.

          Our next trip, 1962, we took a shorter trip, just the two of us. We crossed on the ferry to Manitoulin and went to Wawa. From there we went across Northern Ontario through Chaplesu & Foleget to Timmins. I remember stopping at Ivanhoe Lake for lunch. From Timmins we went north to Cochrane and camped overnight in Greenwater Provincial Park. On the way back we turned east and went to Kirkland Lake and Lunder Lake and into Quebec through Rougn-Noranda to Val d’Or. We came south through LaVerendrye Park and through the Gatineau Hills to Ottawa.

          Another year, 1963, we went out west. We crossed the Mackinack Bridge and stopped in Escanaba. We turned north at Duluth and crossed into Canada at International Falls and travelled up through Lake of the Woods to Kenora. We bypassed Winnipeg and stopped in Brandon. The next day we reached Regina where we spent a few days with Angus and Bobbie Cowan. Angus was an NSA member and he took us out to the Poorman Reserve in Saskatchewan. It was a poor reserve and I met and spoke to a group of the Indian Baha’is. They were very hospitable with what they had. When we left we stopped at a small prairie town near Swift Current and the following night at Fort McLead near Lethbridge. We spent the next day at the Peigan Reserve at Brocket. These are Blackfoot Indians and we had met Chief Samson Knowlton earlier when he came to Kettle Point. About 20 of the Baha’is came to Samson’s house where we had a fireside. He also took us out to see an isolated Baha’i but we were unable to cross the Oldman River after a lengthy walk.

          The next day we set off for the American border through Pincher Creek. We passed Chief Mountain, our first glimpse of the Rockies. We stayed overnight in Babb, Montana and the next day drove through Glacier National Park over the Highway to the Sun. Although it was August there was still some snow along the road. We drove down the other side and through the Flathead Indian Reserve to Butte where we spent the night. That night we attended a Feast with the local Baha’i community.

          The next day we drove south to Virginia City, and the Hebgen Lake earthquake area where a campground was destroyed, and into Yellowstone Park. In the park, we visited the hot spring area and the Old Faithful geyser, and saw some bears alongside the road. We stayed that night in Cody, Wyoming, after stopping at the Buffalo Bill dam. From there we travelled through the switchback road in the Shell Canyon in the Bighorn Mountains to the site of Gen. George Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn River.

          Our next stop was at Deadwood, South Dakota where we went to the bar where Wild Bill Hickok was shot and the cemetery where he and Calamity Jane are supposed to be buried in Boot Hill. Then we went up to Mount Rushmore to see the big figures carved in the rock. From there we went through the Badlands National Monument where the temperature was steaming, but the scenery spectacular.

          We crossed the Missouri at Mitchell, S.D., the corn capital of the United States. They have a corn palace built of many different kinds of corn. We stopped at Sioux City, Iowa for the night and called the local Baha’is but they didn’t seem to want to see us. We continued east through Illinois to Lafayette, Indiana. We visited the site of the Battle of Tippecanoe and visited the lone Baha’i on the campus of Purdue University. From there we returned home.

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