Not long after Mita joined her husband in Alberta, their second child (their first son) was on the way. George Evanoff was born on March 19, 1932. Soon after arriving in Canada, Louis Evanoff also had a store in Bickerdike,2 a small settlement thirteen kilometres west of Edson where the railway forked west and south.3 In their historic book, The North-West Passage By Land, Viscount Milton and Dr. W.B. Cheadle discussed what they called “The Great Coal-fields”4 during their June 1863 travels through the area. Milton and Cheadle’s best-selling account of the prospective riches of the Canadian Prairies and British Columbia helped to encourage the creation of Canada as a nation that extended from sea to sea, and the migration of large numbers of settlers to the western regions.
Almost seventy years later, when George Evanoff was born first son of the most recent immigrants to the northeast corner of the Coal Branch, it comprised small mining communities such as Coalspur, Mercoal, Cadomin, Lovett, and the 1,830-metre-high town of Mountain Park.5 The McLeod River rises in the Rocky Mountains near Mountain Park and Cadomin, and wanders through the Coal Branch area to pass just south of Edson, where it was the scene of some of the young George Evanoff’s earliest adventures.6
George Evanoff grew up in Edson, Alberta, which is situated on a major highway, railway, and the scenic McLeod River, roughly halfway between Edmonton and Jasper.
Bob Evanoff remembers his Uncle Louis’s store in Bickerdike as “a tiny little thing the size of a kitchen.” In the 1930s, there were no highways and places like Bickerdike had few residences and few people. The only way to get to the coal branch was by railway, and Louis’s store was conveniently located at the branch point. As well as labouring on the railway, Louis also ran a business buying and selling furs. “You had to know what you were doing,” said Bob Evanoff, “because it was give and take, with the best man coming out on top, and it was a fluctuating business.”
Louis Evanoff didn’t do any trapping, and unlike his brother, Vasil, and later, his eldest son George, he never owned a gun. Perhaps Louis had an aversion to guns dating back to his military service in Bulgaria, east of Macedonia. Bob remembered that Louis showed the kids “the scar of a bullet that went through his leg and hit the bone,” said Bob. Instead, Louis bought furs from trappers, farmers, and in the case of squirrel furs, from kids like Bob and George. “He would call me into the back of his store,” Bob said, “and I’d bring maybe twenty squirrels, and he’d say the price was ten cents. But hardly anything would qualify for a ten-cent squirrel. It was down to eight cents, simply because he had to buy low or he’d lose his pants on it at the Edmonton fur auction. I don’t know how long George’s dad stayed in that sideline, but you could make good if you knew what you were doing; it was just like the Chicago stock market running in a two-bit town.”
Cousin Bob
At the time of George Evanoff’s death, George’s older sister, Luby, and both of his parents had predeceased him. Bob Evanoff did not come into the picture until George was of school age; therefore, apart from the family background just described, the first five years of George Evanoff’s life are nearly blank. Bob Evanoff was slightly younger than Luby, and the cousins started school together in the same grade. Bob’s first recollection of his younger cousin was when his father, Vasil, transferred their first residence, situated a mile east of Edson, to George’s dad, and Bob’s family moved to a house four blocks down the road. Bob, who was nearly five years older than George, recalled that they really got to know each other when George started school, and for the next several years they were inseparable.
As Bob talked about his early relationship with his cousin, the genesis of George’s lifelong passion for skiing became clear: “Being older, I would take George out all the time. I was a nut for skiing, and going through the snow, trapping, and everything else outdoors. They were hard times. We tried to make skis out of boards but we had no way of turning the points up. George’s first real skis were made from yellow pine, with a leather strap.” Bob was the first person to ski with George, and as events turned out, I would be the last.
Bob described the first ski jump that they made: “I don’t know how old George was, he was just a little kid, and I preached no fear into him. I said ‘George, do not hesitate. Don’t look too long at the ramp down the hill.’” George soon found that others were afraid to go down; “George couldn’t go fast enough, so he built another scaffold to launch from, and he was already doing a terrific speed when he hit the hill, before going off the jump.” George Evanoff’s skiing career had begun.
Bob influenced George in other ways, introducing him to hunting and staying out overnight in the bush. Bob again talked about what he called “the fear aspect.” Many times he told George, “Don’t hesitate — the longer you think, it gets worse.” Later, during my own twenty-year friendship with George Evanoff, I saw a man who had matured into a thoughtful leader and careful planner. But once he had determined a course of action in the outdoors, I never saw him hesitate. Bob’s lesson stayed with George throughout his life.
In his later years, one of George’s many outdoor interests was canoeing, usually taking long river trips with his wife and friends. Again, it was Bob who first introduced George to canoeing, using a leaky skiff that the two of them built together:
We just loved working the [McLeod River]. I made a pirogue — a style of boat where you just bend the boards, pointed at both ends and bottom nailed, and we could paddle that thing like a canoe. Down the bank, about three miles outside of Edson, there’s a big rapid, and we would shoot the rapid and then we’d be into white water. And we would take the canoe, pull it back up, and we’d shoot the rapid again. It leaked, but not fast enough before we were through the rapid, and could empty it and drag it back up again.
Bob related an incident with their pirogue that must have had an impact on the young George Evanoff — and that came close to taking his life: “The danger was the roller, and I told George, never turn a canoe sideways in a rapid, it’s the worst thing you can do.” As he told the story sixty years later, Bob’s voice was laden with emotion: “Oh, man alive it really scared me, and I’m telling George not to fear. We thought we’d take a dive right over a boulder, but this time we made a mistake, and suddenly the boat plunged in and took a lot of water, and the next roll foundered it.” The river was high and dangerous.7 Bob explained the thoughts that ran through his mind: “I thought: I don’t want to drown George because I’ll have to answer to his mother. I told George to drape himself over the canoe and just slightly kick his feet to keep himself stable on there, and we’ll drift to the shore.”
Having done what he could for George, Bob concentrated on his own predicament: “I’m doing all I can, now, to save my own neck, and I barely made it. The river was in near flood, because that’s when it’s most exciting — the rollers were really roaring … I had to pull myself up with the roots and the branches because I was waterlogged with my clothes and boots on. I looked way down the bend and I thought I saw him. I had to run with sodden rubber boots and clothing through the bush, and I caught George on that bend.” His brush with death did not deter the young George Evanoff’s adventurous spirit, and in the best tradition of blood brothers, he and Bob kept the incident to themselves. “I don’t think the family knew what happened, because we never said a thing,” Bob recalled.
Bob explained that the water of the McLeod River was clear when they fished it as kids, and that it remains that way today. Bob and George continued to fish together after they had both completed their schooling and George had moved to Edmonton. Bob introduced George to his friend Paul Kindiak, who was equally keen on fishing and hunting. As time went on, Paul and George would fish together in the Edson area, with Bob joining them occasionally. The area by the McLeod River where George fished in the summer and learned to ski in the winter, is now a municipal park called Willmore Park.8 Edson’s Willmore Park offers a summer boat launch and camping facilities, and winter tobogganing