Joe McWilliams
Lakeside Leader
It seemed Charlie Jackson would keep on going forever. But nobody does, and he died last week at the age of 94.
Charlie told his life story to The Leader in 2017. This is a slightly amended version of it.
Charlie Jackson has so many stories about living and working around Slave Lake he could go on all day. In fact he warns you beforehand that’s what could happen.
Charlie was born to Archibald ‘Shorty’ Jackson, a railway employee and Sophie Cardinal, in 1928. The Cardinal family lived on the Lesser Slave River. Shorty Jackson needed a cook for his camp at the Mitsue siding and heard there might be someone to hire over there. He hired Sophie to cook and later married her.
Charlie and his siblings grew up speaking Cree first. Their dad was always working, he says. He’d be home for supper, though, and although he never learned to speak Cree, he knew enough to understand when his kids asked him to ‘pass the sugar,’ or something like that.
“We lived in Mitsue until the kids (the older ones) were ready for school,” says Charlie. “Then we moved to Old Town Slave Lake.”
Next came a move to Kinuso, where Shorty continued to work for the railway. He transferred back to Slave Lake after the big flood in the middle of the 1930s, to the new town site.
“I started school in 1939,” Charlie says. He would have been 11 years old. His younger twin brothers started the same year. All three of them show up in a photo of the students and teachers from that year, which appears on Page 118 of the local history book ‘Pioneers of the Lakeland.’
“We lived happily in the new town,” Charlie recalls. “Whatever we did we had to do ourselves.”
Charlie quit school at age 15 and tried to join the military. With his father and two brothers serving in the Second World War, “I wanted to go,” he says. “I felt very bad.”
Unlike some other kids he knew, he was rejected.
“They told me to go back to school. It seemed to depend how big you were.”
Instead, he went to work for Swanson Lumber, loading green lumber off of trucks in from the bush mills onto flat cars at the Slave Lake siding. That was the job that cost him four fingers on his left hand.
“I worked with Barney Ghostkeeper for 10 years,” he says. “And Louis Ghostkeeper.”
It was through Louis’s wife Veronica that Charlie met Agnes Anderson of Wabasca.
Charlie and Agnes were married in 1949 and had seven children: Dennis, Jim, Joe, Clarisse, Robert, Marcel and Raymond. By now they also have a lot of grandchildren and great-grandchildren – many of them arrayed on a wall in their home.
“Those two are doctors!” says Charlie proudly, pointing out two of the granddaughters. “He’s an engineer,” – indicating a grandson.
Getting back to Charlie’s working career, it was a night of loading flat cars in 1952 that cost him his thumb and three fingers. A cable had slipped out of a pulley on the loading rig. He climbed up a boom and re-set it, and was swinging down on the sling when its cable got caught in a pulley, pulling his hand in and ripping off the digits.
“What a terrible night!” he said, in story that appeared in the book ‘Voices in the Forest.’
There was no getting the fingers re-attached, as might happen nowadays.
“One they found frozen on the cable the next morning,” he says.
It could have been worse though; Nurse Laura Attrux treated the wounds and gave him a shot for the pain and sent him by train to the hospital in High Prairie. There, a Dr. Tredger fixed him up as well as he could.
Being left-handed and a hunter, Charlie was particularly concerned about what was left of his index finger.
“I wonder if you could make my finger so I can pull the trigger?” he asked the doctor. “So he did.”
Several years later, Charlie was still working for Swanson’s and making 40 cents an hour when oil was discovered in the area, by a company called Standard Oil of California (Chevron).
“I knew the head man,” he says. “He said, ‘You should buy a steam-cleaning unit.’ I did very good with that.”
Two years in the oilfield and the Jacksons had enough money to buy a bulldozer, a D-8 Cat he picked up in Edmonton for $16,000. Thus started a road-building career, which lasted, on and off, for two or three decades. He and his buddy Henry Sinclair, who also purchased a dozer, got work all over – on the road to Red Earth Creek, the highway to Wabasca and on Hwy. 2. On the Hwy. 43 project between Valleyview and Whitecourt, working for Mannix Construction.
Henry and I became ‘finishers’” on that job, he says.
Roadbuilding was seasonal work. Charlie also bought a sawmill in 1967 and spent 10 years or so sawing lumber in the bush. It started with a bang, with the big 1968 fire south of Slave Lake leaving huge amounts of black timber, much of which Swanson’s decided it didn’t want.
“I bought three million board feet of black timber,” he says, “and it took me one winter and one summer.”
Other locations followed for the mill – Driftpile, Virginia Hills, Kinuso. But the one he liked the most was up north in Red Earth country.
“We really enjoyed that job,” he says. “I had the whole family working there.”
It wasn’t all that successful in other respects.
“I was so far in the hole you couldn’t feed me with a slingshot,” he says.
Other ventures were more lucrative.
Charlie’s last regular job was from 1980 to 1993, as a grade (road) foreman with Alberta Transportation and Utilities, building roads and subdivisions.
“I retired, but I didn’t quit,” he says.
Instead, he set up a sawmill at the place on the river and ran it with his son and grandson, mostly sawing lumber for the oilpatch.
Purchasing the land his mother grew up on was a nice touch. He and Agnes lived there for many years together in their retirement. They celebrated their 73rd wedding anniversary just a few weeks ago.
