TRANSCRIPT

Lloyd Johnstone: As far as the hot springs is concerned, I think I'll go back a little bit. One of the reasons why the original hot springs was developed--my father developed it--was because at that time the railway in place of going to Prince Rupert was going through to Kitimat and they actually worked on the railway for, oh three, four, five years before it was actually dropped and it ended up going from Rupert through. In those days it was always not capital it was commandment. It's hard to believe that some of the rock bluffs in Rupert on Kaien Island sold for $40,000 in 1906, 7, 5, in there, if it was strictly a political deal.

Kitimat, they had a better harbor than Kitimat but it was an awful lot--in those days--harder to build a railway to Rupert than it was to Kitimat. Anyway, my father took up the hot springs and because of the railway being built to Kitimat and they thought it was going to go there, they subdivided all the property from Kitimat right through to the Nass, all divided up into acreage blocks. Usually they are quarter acre--or quarter sections--half sections or full sections. Similar to the prairie homesteads, it was a way to get people into the country to try to develop.

My father came in in 1905 and he and George Little, the founder of Terrace, arrived the same year and they got together that year. They had a camp up where the old cemetery is in Terrace today and they worked out of there and they looked at all the land and the feasibility all the way from Kitimat right through to the Nass. George Little decided on Terrace, my dad decided on the hot springs because he thought that was where the railway was going to go. He had the pre-emption on his own but after a year or a year and a half, he sold a half interest in it and there was 320 acres and the hot springs water rights. He sold it to a friend of his for $175 for a half interest. That's how much faith of course he had in that country in the day but anyway, he needed a partner.

This fellow's name was Boss and he was a lineman. He used to have a telegraph line through from down the Skeena all the way and it went east through there and they had--they had these linemen who looked after riverboats and so on on the Skeena. There was one at what they call Eby's Landing which was down near the mouth of Kalum River and then they had one at Telegraph Point and so on all the way down. This fellow had to be up here and his--not many of you or anybody probably knows but his wife was the sister of a fellow named Wiggs O'Neill, who did quite a bit of writing on the Skeena. He was an old riverboat person. But this Boss and my dad decided, and they built the original old log building. I don't know if you have seen it on the pictures on the wall down at the hot springs.

It was actually built more as a road house for railway construction workers and of course when the railway was dropped, he was stuck with the pre-emption and so he stuck it out and turned it into I would say a bit of a spa in those days. In those days there was a lot more interest in spas than today for pneumatics and of course having been growing up there as a little kid, I saw some of the cures and it was unbelievable some of them that I have seen.

I remember one fellow that they brought in--I'm kind of getting a little ahead of myself here.

He ended up building a bath house and it had a flume come down and run and it was very primitive. It was a great big old wooden tub about maybe six feet by eight feet and the water came in in an open flume from the hot springs about three-hundred yards from the hot springs on the grade. There was no pumps running just so that it would fill the tub and my dad was a hard-nosed type. People would come in there--he used to tell them well, you persevere, you'll get better. If you don't, you might as well pack your bag and go. I mean that was his attitude.

I can remember the one fellow that came in particularly because it was the worst case we had ever saw and he came in there on a stretcher and he had just came from the Mayo Clinic and they'd given him about six months to live because he was all drawn up and he had lumps all over him. He came from the gold fields up in the Yukon. My dad--I remember my dad, I was just a kid but I could remember him telling me--said, "You had better go see a doctor before coming here." And he said, "I already have; this is my last resort."

There was thirteen hot springs in that bunch up there. Two, three, four of them that are utilized. The rest are just small ones. They all have a pretty good flow of water out of them but the two big ones supply enough water for what they were using up to there at that time.

But anyway, in order to do something for this fellow, they decided that they would try it anyway. They went up beside the second little pool, that's where the round house is. I don't know: he's got it all concreted in there now. That pool--that was a big pool before he concreted it in. And they dug it. There's a blue clay that's all, I presume, is a kind of a glacial clay and it's very, very fine texture, just exactly the same as the clay that you buy in the drug store for beauty clay. And they dug a hole beside the hot spring and boarded it in and they filled it with this hot blue clay. It's just about the consistency of maple syrup when you mix it up with water. They used to set that fellow in it with just his head sticking out in this hot mud and then they had the water running over top of it.

He did that for about two weeks and at the end of two weeks his legs started to straighten. His legs started to straighten and he stayed there and went through that hot. He was in the mud twice a day up to his neck as long as he could stand it and as hot as he could stand it. Then they'd take him out, wash him off and they'd roll him up in a big Hudson Bay blanket and he would perspire and at the same time he would drink about two gallons of hot water out of the hot springs every day. In three months that fellow got a set of snowshoes and he snowshoed out. You know, that was the worst case I ever saw from there. They called it rheumatism in those days but I presume it was arthritis of some type. So that's a little bit of a history.

Prince Rupert of course was the halibut capital of the world in those days for fish. Today, of course, fishing has gone down the drain like everything else. The fishing season used to start the end of April and it would go right through continuous until about the end of September. My dad had a lot of trade from the fishermen that would come up. They'd be out on the boats all summer and then come up. The hotel would be filled up from about September until about the time that he closed up the the fall. The people that came up had rheumatism and arthritis and so on.

And then in later years, in the summer months, the fishing here of course was extremely good in those days. Having a railway close, a lot of people used to come by rail. In the summer time the hotel would be filled up with people just for the fishing.

Audience: How big was the hotel?

LJ: About twelve rooms and I shouldn't give my father all the credit because if it wasn't for my mother . . . I mean, she was the slave. She did the cooking and washing and everything and it was all done the hard way, and as a matter of fact it ruined her health in the end.

Then about 1928 we had a little bit of a surprise there late in the fall of the year. You've probably heard this story but I might as well tell it again. They were just about getting ready to close up. My dad and mother used to move into Terrace in the wintertime and he would probably work in the sawmill--at some sort of work of that type during the winter months.

At that time the road ended at the north end of the lake so they had to come all the way down the lake to where there was a boardwalk that went up to the hot springs. Anyway, this particular day it was around some time in October. I wouldn't want to say exactly when. He got a phone call. We used to have a one-line phone from the north end down. It was a single line and he used to crank the old phone in order to get the signal through. Anyway, he got this phone call that there were four people up at the north end of the lake that wanted to come down so he got in the boat--he had a little gas launch--and he went up a way.

It was four Catholic priests and all they has was their satchels--just nothing else but satchels. Couldn't figure it out for the life of me. But, anyways, they came to the hot springs and they were quite jovial type of people. My dad wanted to get the bishop to come out from Prince Rupert but the Catholic priests said, 'oh no we don't want any--we're just here on a holiday.' I can remember as a kid they seemed kind of odd to me. First thing they did was they got there and they ordered a case of Scotch whiskey to come out [Audience laughter].

They stayed for two weeks. All they had was the clothes on their backs and these little satchels. One of them I remember slipped and fell and my mother had to wash his clothes. He had to sit in his bed and wait while she washed his pants for him. But anyway, they stayed two weeks and they got on the train and away they went.

We didn't know until about three years later when we read it in the old Saturday Evening Post. It was Al Capone and three of his henchmen. Things got too hot for them in Chicago and they used to go across into Saskatchewan and they got on the train--they didn't know where they were going and they got to Terrace and it was only another hundred miles to the end of the road. Somebody said there was a hotel out at the hot springs so they got off and they came out here.

Audience: With the satchels.

LJ: Yeah, just the satchels and the clothes they had on their backs, but I can always remember as a kid. I was I think about twelve years old at the time. When they left they gave me a ten-dollar tip and I'm telling you that was a lot of money in 1928. I said I think I'm going to join a Catholic church if they're that generous [Audience laughter]. But anyway, that's a little bit of the history of the early days of hot springs.

In 1929, my dad decided that because of the remoteness of the area that the place to have the hotel and the hot water and everything was on the lake there. Where Olli's place is on the corner down there--we call it Olli's still. That's right where the pavement ends and you go down. My dad built a hotel there in 1929 and then he built a bath house in 1930. He piped the line from the water from the hot springs down to the bath house in a pipe that was about six or eight inches in diameter. It was a wooden round pipe. He put it together and it was very, very successful in 1929 and '30. But of course, in '29 the Depression came and October of '29 was the beginning of the ten years of the worst Depression I guess the world ever saw, but it worked out very well.

He was busy about fourteen weeks at the hotel and about six or seven on the bath house. And he bought big enamel bath tubs. He had them specially made. They were about seven feet in length and were big square tubs and the water that came from the hot springs came just in eighty feet--less than a mile. It was 5200 feet, the pipeline from the hot springs, but it didn't really have enough fall. There was only about a seventeen-foot fall from the hot springs to the lakeshore to pour. It was run on gravity in those days, of course; there was no pumps or electricity running like that.

So I spent one summer in 1930 and we planked in around the hot springs all the way around. We drove in planks all the way around it to raise the water to get more flow down to the lake and I've got some old pictures of the planking that we did. Had a little bit of a winch and we had a hammer on it. We used to wind the winch up and then click it and drop the hammer to drive the planks in. I spent the summer out there. It was pretty warm on the hot springs. The temperature of the water was 186 degrees.

But it worked out quite well but in 1930 when he put in the pipeline . . . An American came from Chicago and stayed, and then he bought a piece of property and he built a home here. He loaned my dad $8000 to put the pipeline in from the hot springs and he took a mortgage on the property where the building was. My dad at the same time owned the property where the Furlong Bay campsite is. That was 160 acres in that piece, plus the hot springs and to make a long story short, in 1935 this fellow was living out here.

He and his Chinese man. He was a millionaire. He had a gallstone attack and he died, actually, out here at the lake. He was separated from his wife who lived in Chicago and she wasn't interested in living up in Northern British Columbia. She was only interested in one thing and that was getting the estate cleaned up. And to make a long story short, my dad pulled $8000. He lost the parks--160 acres--he lost the hotels, he lost the pipeline, he lost the whole thing for an $8000 mortgage. So it was in the middle of the thirties and it was harder to raise a hundred dollars then as it was one hundred thousand today.

So that kind of ended the hot springs from then until after the Second World War. That was '36 it closed up. The depression of course didn't end until the war started in '39, and during war time there was a lot of soldiers in Terrace. Roughly about 5000, as a matter of fact, and another 3000 or 4000 airmen at the airport. They rolled around the country and the old hotels were there. They shot the windows out of them; they shot the doors out of them. It was just a mess by the time the war was over. But it stayed stagnant until 1958--well, actually a little before that.

In 1948 or '49 I decided I would try to put the pieces back together. My dad was still alive and I was in business at the time in Terrace. So I bought it up. When they repossessed the property they turned around and sold it and people bought it just for the timber that was on the property here and there. Anyway, in the end, I bought back the hot springs property in pieces. There was three different houses that stood on it by this time. My dad was alive and I did it more or less to--you know it was kind of his pride and joy; he spent his whole lifetime on it.

He died in 1955 and I was in the equipment business in Terrace. I had a fire and my shop burnt down and I needed money, so I sold the hot springs to Ray and Marie Skoglund. Some of you older timers may remember Ray Skoglund. He had the equipment and everything to develop it because it had gone down to where it was nil. He didn't get the property on the lakeshore, he did his development right up by the hot springs. By that time they were building the highway to Kitimat so the road went right by the back door but up until that time you had to come down a plank walk, go up the lake all the way to the north end and then go from there and up on over the [mumbles].

So that's pretty much the history of it. Skoglund developed it from there. He did a very nice job and then he in turn sold it to originally a fellow by the name of Grauer who was the head of--before BC Hydro it was BC Electric. This fellow Grauer was very interested in the hot springs. Yeah, the Skoglund Hot Springs.

Audience: I didn't realize that Dal Grauer had a part in it.

LJ: Yeah, well they bought it. You see and that was--oh what was the name of their finance company? Uh, I did business with them when I was in the equipment business but anyway they--they were a big company. They were actually owned and operated out of Montreal--uh, BC Electric. And Grauer was very interested and he bought the thing from Skoglund after the thing and about a year afterwards Grauer died and of course then the people in Montreal that owned the company that owned the hot springs, they weren't interested and they sold to somebody in Calgary, the Holiday Inns I believe it was, and from there it went downhill until the government of all things took it over and gave them some concessions because they owed the company--I don't know just how it worked out but anyway there was a--.

And from there, of all things, Skoglund had a really nice setup. I mean he had a forty-room motel. He had a nice indoor pool that was in--was the hot pool, then he had the big outdoor pool and you could walk out the door of the rooms and jump into the big pool if you had a downstairs room and it was really good. So what happened, the government took it over and they decided through I don't know whose brain power it was but the first thing we do is to strip it down, tear everything, and they sold his motel off which was only, not more than ten years old and it was a brand new building and all that needed to do was to have the insides cleaned out, new furniture put in and you would have had a really nice set up. Then he had a real nice dance hall, you remember the dance hall? And he did a really nice job. Well, the government stripped it. They put it right to the ground and then they put it up for bid. You know the only thing that was left is what's there now is the swimming pool. That was part of Skoglund's--that was his outdoor pool for the residents of Terrace. The other was for the--

Audience: The guests.

LJ: The guests, yeah. So you pretty well know the history of that part of it. And then from there they put it up for bid and Bert Orleans from Kitimat bought it and he started to develop it and to this day where it is now. He was--had fantastic ideas of what he was going to do with it but it's kind of--kind of sorry that if he had developed a nice motel he could have had a nice business, but he seemed to build everything but what makes money--I don't know. He's more interested in farming than he is in--. I shouldn't be a critic thought because I--but I would have like to have seen given--.

Audience: It had so much potential.
LJ: I think so, yeah. That's pretty much the history of the hot springs. My mother and dad spent their lifetime there.

Audience: Yeah, lots of hard work.

LJ: Yeah, lots of hard work.

Audience: Now you, um did you ever consider buying it back--possibly buying it off of Skoglund?

LJ: No. I wasn't in a position, to be honest with you. By that time, it had gone into--it was going to take a lot of money to develop it and particularly equipment is where Skoglund shone. He had back hoes, he had cats he had--and what was a fairly major job and he went down to nothing. All it was was a hole in the ground where the hot water comes out of it, basically.

Audience: Do you um--Do you ever talk to Mr. Orleans about his future plans, does he have a vision for any--?

LJ: Well, he did have one when he started, but I think his age had caught up with him and his health isn't that good and really to be truthful--I shouldn't say this because I'm not--I like the fellow personally but he--he's not oriented to that type of business I don't think.

Audience: So what did he see? What did he have a vision for then?

LJ: He did have. He had one when he first started and he spent, I would say--he told me this the one time that he put--it cost him three million dollars for his infrastructure, like the piping and the water and putting in dams for cold water supply and fixing up the spring and whatnot, but he never did get around to building any hotel type thing which he really needed to make the place go, I thought. That's what the history--yes.

Audience: What was the cement structure [...]? Who built that?

LJ: Skoglund. Yeah he built that--and built the canal--he dug out that canal where you used to be able to go up the canal almost to the hot springs with a boat and he built the canal down there. It never worked to his satisfaction, I think mainly because there wasn't enough flow.