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Story of the McWhirters
Of Pincher Creek, Alberta
My father’s grandparents came from
Scotland to the Bay of Schelur in Quebec. They could speak Gallic and
perfect French as well as English. My father’s family later moved to
Redwing, Ontario where my father was born. My father’s name was James Logan
McWhirter. He was born in 1881 and was the youngest of 8 children. He was
born when his mother was 51 years old, and he was 10 years younger than the
next youngest, Ed.
When my father, called Logie by his
friends, was 17, he came out for the fall harvest in Saskatchewan on the
“harvest train”. The year was 1898. He worked there for the harvest, then
went back east and worked in the bush till the next year. Then he came back
out and worked on the harvest that fall, then he went down to Montana and
worked there for a sheep rancher for a year. By then he had accumulated a
horse. He told them he was going up to Canada with his wages from the sheep
farm. In 1900 at the age of 19, he rode out with a pack saddle on his
horse, as he couldn’t afford a regular saddle. Everything he owned was with
him on his horse. One of the things he had was his violin, as he was a very
good musician. The place that he worked was in the Judith Basin, east of
Great Falls, Montana. He headed northwest, and when he got up someplace
close to Canada. He was headed for the Northwest Territories, as there was
no province of Albert at that time. One night he met someone on the trail
and he asked someone how he could get to Macleod or Pincher Creek. The man
told him to get closer to the mountains, then to follow that range up to
Pincher Creek. On his travels from the Judith Basin to Pincher Creek
Alberta he had to open two gates. He came across some homesteaders up
there, and went to work for Dick Stuckey as a carpenter. He liked it out
south of Pincher Creek, so he homesteaded a farm – at that time you got a ¼
section – 160 acres. In order to homestead you had to stake your homestead,
file papers and then improve the land a certain amount each year. The legal
description of his land was:
Part NE Section 6 Township 5
Range 29 Meridian W4.
He met a friend named Harley Dyer
about that time. Harley and Logie were both very good baseball players, and
Logie was also popular because of his violin playing. Harley was a catcher,
Logie was a pitcher – there is a picture on this website of the two of them
taken in 1904, which he sent back home to his mother. Logie never went home
again after he left at 18, and his parents never came to visit. He never
saw them again till the day they died.
Logie was going out with a woman
named Mary Upton and he had given her a ring. Then he was introduced to
Harley’s sister, Ina Dyer. Ina came up from Athol, Idaho. Her brother
Harley and another person had a horse ranch and they wanted Ina to come up
and cook for them. When she came up to cook for them in the harvest of
1904, she met Logie. They were married on June 28th, 1905, the
next year, in Athol, Idaho.
The Dyers
The Dyer family was originally from
Indiana, then they traveled through the Indian Territory and stayed in
Oklahoma for a year on the way up to Idaho. They ended up in Athol, Idaho.
Ina’s mother was Sarah Elizabeth Neil (it was O’Neill but they dropped the
“O” after they came out west.) Sarah’s uncle was Stonewall Jackson. Ina’s
father was Henry Dyer. Grandma Dyer was a very good shot. Grandpa Dyer was
the only boy from a large family of girls, and when he got married he
thought his wife should wait on him.
This made it very hard on Grandma
Dyer because he wanted fresh bread every day. He often went on fishing and
hunting trips, leaving the family to fend for itself. We have a letter from
one of his trips that he wrote when he was up near Bonner’s Ferry.
Their children were:
Jim, Harley, Ross, Essie, Ina.
Alberta, Edward,
Ina Amanda was born in 1886.
One of them, Ross, was killed by
lightning on his ninth birthday. There was a thunderstorm at Rathdrum,
Idaho and Ross and Grandpa Dyer and a friend of the family went into the
lodge hall to get away from the storm. Ross and the friend were leaning
against a wall. Grandpa just started to walk across the floor when the
lightning struck the building. Ross and the friend were killed and the
building caught on fire. Grandpa Dyer carried both Ross and the other
friend out of the building before it burnt down, only to find that they were
dead.
Later on the oldest boy, Jim was on
his way home from California to see his wife and newborn daughter in Idaho,
who had just returned from Dodge City. His wife wanted to come back from
Dodge City before the birth, so the baby could be born in Idaho. He came to
a horse camp filled with outlaws. One guy was beating up on a kid that was
there with a halter. Jim told him to leave the kid alone and Jim took the
halter away and beat the tar out of the guy with the halter. They had
supper and when Jim was leaving to go on to Idaho, the guy grabbed a rifle
and shot Jim in the back and killed him. They buried Jim where he had
died. It was several months before they found out what happened to Jim.
Harley spent months searching for his brother Jim before he finally ran
across someone that told him about what had happened to Jim that night. Jim
never got to see his infant daughter before he was killed.
Harley, Ed and Albert homesteaded in
Montana and got “dried out” prior to the 1930’s. Harley went out to the
coast and lived on a small farm at Bellingham till he died. Albert lived in
Big Sandy Montana till he died. Ed and his wife Edna moved to California
during the 2nd World War where he and his son Edward started a
chrome plating plant. They ended up being millionaires. Ed and Edna both
died in California. Essie married Charlie Truitt. She worked in a cedar
shingle mill near Bellingham and got cedar dust in her lungs. Essie died of
consumption (tuberculosis). She and Charlie are buried in Bellingham,
Washington. I was named after my Aunt Essie.
McWhirter/Dyer
Ina and Logie McWhirter lived on
the land he’d homesteaded south of Pincher Creek, Alberta in an area called
Dry Fork. They had six children, Ed, Jim, Margie, Bill, Essie and Jean,
all born at home, except Margie who was born in Athol, Idaho.
Logie was a great baseball player - if he had been born
a few decades later, he might have had a baseball career. On April 28, 1903,
Logie was playing baseball in the small town of Frank in the Crowsnest Pass.
After the game, he was invited to bed down on the baseball diamond with some
of the other players for the night. He declined and went home that
night to his homestead south of Pincher Creek. In the early hours of
April 29, 1903, the town of Frank was obliterated by the collapse of Turtle
Mountain. The field, and the baseball players, were buried under
thousands of tons of rock. Logie was awakened many miles away in
Pincher Creek by the roar of the mountain's collapse.
The forces of nature brought another
turning point for the young family in May of 1922. Elsie Stewart
(Gold) and Essie shared the same birthday, on May 26, ten years apart, Elsie
being 10 years older than Essie. George Stewart, Elsie’s father, had walked
about 8 miles from their place to the McWhirters to invite everyone over to
Stewart’s for a birthday dinner the next day, May 26th, ..
Elsie would turn 15 that day, and Essie would turn 5. After he left, Essie
and Logie went in the car to the school to get Bill. There was a lightning
storm, and those can be very bad in southern Alberta. It was the 25th
of May, 1922.
Essie and Logie were at the
neighbours. They gave Logie a box of fresh vegetables. Then Essie and
Logie stopped at the school with the car to pick Bill. Bill would be seven
at that point. When they reached home, Ina was at the chicken house with an
apron full of eggs. She was 8 months pregnant with Jean, her youngest
child. Bill and Essie ran ahead to the house, while Ina and Logie stopped
at the well. Logie picked up a bucket of water in one hand, and he had the
box of vegetables on his right shoulder. Ina was a couple of steps ahead of
Logie as they walked toward the house. Lightning hit Logie directly, going
through his upraised arm, down through his body, and blowing his shoe off
his left foot. The force of the lightning hit Ina indirectly, knocking her
to the ground.
Ed, the oldest, was 15. He ran
down and picked up Ina, carrying her to the house where he set her down in
the rocking chair. He ruptured himself when he picked her up. When she hit
the ground, she knocked out her two front teeth, and the fall broke the two
dozen eggs she’d been carrying in her apron.
Ed went back down and he couldn’t
pick Logie up, so he got hold of him under the arms and dragged him up to
the porch. Logie’s burnt shoe was pulled off in the process.
Ina came to, and told the kids to
rub Logie to keep his circulation going while Ina cut off his clothes. The
skin on his chest and his foot came away with the clothing Nobody would
answer the phone when the lightning was bad, because you could get
electrocuted by the phone in those days. Finally Carrie Neuman, the
neighbour came over and helped get Logie onto the bed. Two doctors came out
from Pincher Creek. They dressed all the burns, then they went back to town
and told everybody that he wouldn’t live till morning. He did recover, but
it took him a long time. He had major problems with the sciatic nerve in
one leg for a long time, and would try to do the work around the house by
leaning on crutches and having Essie hold his bad leg up from behind.
Ed and Jim both quite school that year to help out on the farm. Jim had a
weak heart, which was a problem all his life. Jean was born without
problem, but two year later Ina came down with rheumatic fever. She
contracted it again in 1943 and it left her with a badly damaged heart,
which ultimately led to her early death at the age of 69, in 1955.
As children, they would all go up
by the sheep shed when there was a strong wind, and hold their coats open so
that the wind would catch them and make them take huge long steps along the
hill. They said it was the closest thing they could do to flying across the
prairie.
Ina and Logie lived on the farm
until 1950. They moved to Marysville, B.C. and built a house next to what
would become the Legion Hall. Ina had raised six children on the farm,
without electricity or running water. The “Rural Electrification Project”
brought electricity to their farm the next year after they left Alberta.
They moved to Marysville, B.C.
because Jim and Bill were already living there. Eventually Ed also moved to
Marysville, and for a time Bill & Jim worked for CM&S. Logie continued to
work as a carpenter and a saw filer when the fertilizer plant was built. He
worked till he was 70 years old. Till Logie died in 1965, his backyard
contained rows of raspberry bushes and a chicken coop.
Ina died in 1954, and Logie
remarried in 1957. He married his former girlfriend from his early days in
Pincher Creek, Mary Upton (now widow Mary Lucas). Mary developed Alzheimers
and died in 1960. Logie died in 1965. Ina and Logie are both buried in
Marysville, B.C. Mary is buried in Pincher Creek, Alberta beside her first
husband, Phil Lucas and her son Charlie Lucas. Charlie had committed
suicide after he returned home from the second world war with a brain
injury. His wife and infant son moved back to England and lived in
London.
When Bill was 12 years old, he was
pounding on the anvil, and a piece of steel flew in his eye. The steel was
stuck in his eye for several years and the doctors thought it would
eventually dissolve. He was blind in that eye and eventually he had to have
the eye removed, and for the rest of his life he had a glass eye. Bill
suffered a serious back injury when he got bucked off a steer, landing on a
large knot on a corral pole. From that time on he had back problems. Bill
worked at the dairy in Marysville for many years, then worked as a carpenter
for CM&S. He later developed mercury poisoning after working for the CM&S
and received a pension.
Ed was also pretty much blind in one
eye. He was swinging a piece of wire around to throw it away when the end
hit him in the eye and destroyed his sight in the eye.
Ed married Edith Davis. They had
two daughters, the youngest one died at birth. They also had three sons.
Jim - died of stomach and esophagal cancer in Trail,
B.C.
Elsie
Bob
Steve
Unnamed girl
Ed worked as a carpenter on
construction for many years. He developed emphysema toward the end of his
life, and moved to Creston, B.C.after he and Edith divorced. Ed died and is
buried in Creston, B.C. Edith died in Cranbrook, B.C.
Jim married Frances Dennis. They
had two daughters
Joanne
Pam
They lived in a heritage house in
Cranbrook, B.C. for many years. Jim had heart problems all his life, and he
died following heart surgery in Victoria, B.C. Joanne died of a lung
disease in California. Frances lives in Victoria near Pam
Bill married Frances (Reviere)
Cox. Frances had previously been married to Melvin Cox, Orville’s younger
brother. She had three daughters with Melvin – Frances May, Nelly,
Margareta. Frances and Bill later had a daughter, Marlene.
Bill died and is buried in
Marysville, B.C. Frances lives next door to Marlene, just down the street
from Margareta.
Margie married Malcolm (Mac) McLeod
from Peace River, and lived for many years on a homestead in the Peace River
country. They had two children, Malcolm and Betty. Later they moved to Yahk,
B.C. where Mac and Margie both died.
Mac’s ashes were scattered in the
Peace River country. Margie’s ashes are buried between her parents in the
Marysville cemetery.
Essie married Orville Cox on
December 23, 1941, at High River, Alberta. Orville joined the army in
active service on September 4, 1942. He later went into the oilfields
as a truck driver, and eventually became a carpenter, working on many of the
hydro electric projects and mines in B.C. In later life he had a small dairy
and raised corn in Creston, B.C.
Their first child, John Logan, was
born in Calgary, Alberta on November 30, 1942 in the Holy Cross Hospital.
Gary (Orville Gary) was born in
Pincher Creek Hospital in Pincher Creek, Alberta on July 8, 1945
Trudy was born at the Miseracordia
Hospital in Edmonton on March 7, 1953.
Orville and Essie lived in
Marysville from 1953 to 1966. They then moved to Creston where they lived
till Orville’s death in 1998. Essie moved to Langley, B.C. with Trudy.
Jean married Norman Lawrence in
1942, They have lived in Edmonton, Alberta since then. They had four
children.
Stewart
Bob
Bill
Kathy. |
