A Candle in the Grub Box

'A Candle in the Grub Box' is the first volume in the Frank Jackson story. It relates how Frank Jackson left in 1904, left Southeastern England where he was born, [where he lived in a big country house and sang in the church choir] with his family, to go to Medicine Hat, Alberta. Here he made a deal with the School Inspector, opting out of school; he worked in a hardware store where he 'learned something new everyday' ; went to ride on the last of the big cattle round ups, before the range was fenced; and acquire his own herd of cattle. He looked after them and ran a dairy, until the drought and lack of pasture sent him trailing his cattle, for two hundred miles through Alberta's badlands to Red Deer Lake. A few years later, bad winter and lack of pasture sent him off again, this time with a young family in tow.

Several hundred miles on the train, a hundred miles or so on a paddle-steamer down the mighty Peace River, and a forty mile trail through the wilderness, brought them and their cattle to a small fur trading hamlet called Keg River, which was isolated from the rest of the world for much of the year. Here at Keg River they stayed to cope with calamity and disaster as a way of life, picking themselves up and struggling on, for, 'there was nothing else to do!'

There are many who have pioneered in the wilderness; not many however, who have rescued themselves from a painful accident in the bush fifty miles form help, and in the forty below weather with nothing else but shear guts, ingenuity, and a faithful dog team to pull them through. His survival was a near miracle and a remarkable feat of endurance.

We meet interesting characters such as Sheridan Lawrence, Allie Brick and John Brown, not to mention Baldy Red, Xavier Sowan, Moise Richards, Auguste Le Fleur, Magloire Mercredi, Pete Lizotte, L'Octave Ducharme, John Christian and a host of others. There are chuckles too, as for instance when Frank 'causes a scatteration of garbage cans' while subduing a strange horse behind the Peace Hotel, and the undertaker who got 'treed, on the rafters of the slaughterhouse by a mad steer.

This is not to mention log building, surveying, road building, fur trading, and endless freighting in conditions which would daunt the best of us. When I asked him one time if he hadn't been afraid that he wouldn't make it, he said "No, I knew I'd make it, I never give up!"