Crazy-White-Man (Sha-ga-na-she Wa-du-kee)

By Richard Morenus

The author was a businessman from New York who got tired of the “Big City” life and was unhappy for some time. He decided to move as far away from that environment. Taking only his dog, some gear, and an open heart he travelled to Canada. During this trip, he found an island of epic beauty and decided to purchase it. His story tells of his difficulty trying to adapt to such the harsh environment. The local population were Native Americans who gave him the name “Crazy White Man” for making the changes that he did.

Dick Morenus, New York radio and magazine writer, took to the Ontario bush country to shed his ulcers. After writing this hilarious account of his six-year transition from tenderfoot to woodsman-guide, he returned to city life to teach, write, and lecture,

CHICAGO TRIBUNE — “As a story of the indomitable spirit of men and women pitted against the overwhelming forces of nature, ‘Crazy-White-Man’ is an inspiring one; as a tale of pure adventure, it will be hard to put down ... a book that is a little classic of the rugged life.”

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR — “ ... one of the best tales of escape from city pressures ... It is a vivid close-up of the Ontario bush—written down with the vividness and gaiety of a man who knew he was free.”

NEW YORK TIMES — “Respect for Mr. Morenus’ courage and hardihood grows with every page we read . . . it emerges as a valuable addition to the small number of books about the Canadian bush.”

COLORADO SPRINGS FREE PRESS — “Anyone from young to old who has wanted to toss the soft life of today into the discard and live as our ancestors did will enjoy this book. To those who have lived under frontier conditions it will be equally refreshing—and that cannot be said for many of this type.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786254443

Richard Morenus

Richard Cable Morenus (1894-1968) was an American writer and friend of Slim Williams. He was born on September 5, 1894 in Walton, New York, the son of Howard Mailey Morenus and Martha Strong Cable, and grew up in Indiana, where he attended Dartmouth College. He married Nora T. Smith in International Falls, Minnesota in 1949, and had one son, Richard Cable (Morenus) Franklin, born in 1919, from his first marriage to Catherine Louise Sagar. In 1940, when he was a successful radio script writer in New York City, he decided to quit the tempo of city life, get out into the open, and live simply and quietly. He had spent several summers camping in Canada, and decided to spend six years on an island on a lake in northern Ontario, the story of which he told in his book Crazy-White-Man (1952). He was also the author of Northland Adventures (1954), Frozen Trails (1956), The Hudson’s Bay Company (1956) and Dew Line: Distant Early Warning, The Miracle of America’s First Line of Defense (1957). Morenus taught writing for the University of Michigan Extension Service in upper Michigan, lectured widely, and wrote several magazine articles on his experiences in the North. He died in Chicago, Illinois on February 10, 1968, aged 73.

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Text originally published in 1952 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2015, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

CRAZY-WHITE-MAN

(Sha-ga-na-she Wa-du-kee)

BY

RICHARD MORENUS

Illustrated by

WILLIAM LACKEY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

DEDICATION 6

FROM BROADWAY TO THE BUSH 7

CONFUSION IN THE PINES 22

FRIGID AIR 30

THE DEEP FREEZE 34

DEFROSTED 51

HONEST LIARS 55

HOT DOGS ON ICE 62

NICHIES 71

RAINBOW’S END 85

THE SOURDOUGH 94

WINDIGO 105

DESTINATION: WILDERNESS 114

R: LYNX CLAWS AND DRIED BONES 123

BUSH BRIDE 133

LODED 139

BUCHANAN’s DIARY 148

WA–BE–GO-SHEESH 156

BEAR FACTS 165

THE STORY OF ANNA OLSEN 172

MEG–WICH AND B’JOU 177

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 188

DEDICATION

To N.S.M.

FROM BROADWAY TO THE BUSH

THEY ALL SAID I was crazy. That is, everyone who knew of my plans for the future said so. They’d look at me, and shake their heads, and mutter, The guy’s just plain nuts.

When I finally began to agree with them, it was then too late for me to do anything about it. I was seated in a canoe, well past the last outpost of civilization, headed northward toward the bit of insular real estate I had bought, sight unseen, deep in the Canadian bush country. For the first time in months I had the opportunity to relax and do a bit of meditating, and I was in a perfect spot for it.

For a while I lolled back and enjoyed the ride tourist-fashion. The outboard motor on the big freight canoe putted contentedly, and mothering it was Bill, the young Canadian who had agreed to pilot me and practically everything I owned in the world including Nik, my cocker spaniel, to my future home. Bill stared at nothing about three feet above my head. One huge hand caressed the motor as if he loved it, and he steered the course as if from sheer instinct. I recognized the soul of a true bushman.

The water under a sky of spotless cerulean was as calm and peaceful as a baby’s first thoughts. There was nothing particularly unusual about the surroundings, for each summer for many years past I had spent vacations paddling along similar rock-rugged shore lines in various parts of Canada, and one part of the bush might well be the pattern for any other of its hundreds of thousands of square miles—trees, more trees, rocks, and water. But it was beautiful, and I loved it. As a tourist, that is. Each yearly two-week vacation had left me wanting more. Those two weeks that I used to look forward to each year! Those two wonderful weeks of vacation! Vacation? I snapped out of my dreaming with a start that rocked the canoe.

Those two weeks each year had been spent under the watchful eye and care of a most thoroughly efficient guide. Personally I’d had little else to do but catch fish and get a tan and plenty of rest. But the jolt that jarred me was the thought that now I was going into the bush to live! There’d be no guide this time. I was on my own. This was no vacation.

It had all started one day in a doctor’s office in New York.

There’s your answer, Dick. The doctor picked up a pencil, tapped the charted results of my examinations lying on the desk, and looked at me. This is the end of the line. It’s where you get off.

That sounds like a bit of very corny dialogue from one of my radio scripts, I said—and continued with something equally inane, so I’ll pick up the cue and take the next line. Let’s see.... after a suitable pause for dramatic effect I’d say, ‘My God, doctor—you mean—?’

He shook his head and sighed. You radio people are all alike, he said. You don’t take life seriously until you come to a point where we have to step in and do something about it for you. I don’t know whether you realize it or not, but radio has given us doctors a new field of occupational disorders to over-come. You people don’t eat right, you don’t sleep right, you don’t—and please, he said patiently, please stop looking at your watch! He looked at me with concern. That’s the thing that’s mainly responsible for the condition you’re in right now!

The glance at my watch, the badge of my profession that I constantly wore on my wrist, had been thoroughly unconscious. It was a stop watch, a cruelly clever instrument of inexorable time. I had been a slave to it in New York for more than ten years as a writer-director of network radio programs. The watch, like its oversized prototype on the studio wall, had a second hand, and I was accountable to it for every one of its measured minutes. The resultant cost was great in ruined digestion, a tired body, and nerves as taut as piano wires. Something had to stop. And a watch’s insides are made of steel.

The doctor looked at me steadily. Yes, he said, you’re through with radio and the tempo of metropolitan living. You’ll have to slow down. Oh, you’re apparently well enough physically, he added quickly, but I’m afraid your nerves won’t take any more. My advice is that you get out into the country for a while. How about a farm?

Oh, no, doc, please. Not a farm. I visited a farm once. For about a week. When I think of a farm, all I can see are bent backs, gnarled hands, and pictures by Grant Wood. Not that I have any objections to work, I hastened to add. I’ve worked pretty hard, but my living has been bound up in advertising and radio sponsors and set in concrete. If it depended on me to till the soil and wrest a living from the good earth, I’d die of slow starvation and be buried in mortgages. No, doc, the farm is out. I guess it’s physical hard work I’m allergic to.

I thought you liked the outdoors.

The outdoors? That’s different, I said. I’ll buy that. In fact, why not buy myself a chunk of the outdoors and live off the land? Romantic and practical, that’ll be it. How would it be if I’d hie myself to the utter serenity of some primitively peaceful surroundings? After a couple of years I’ll come back and lay before you the huskiest bunch of ganglia you ever analyzed.

The doctor stared at me, sighed, and slowly shook his head.

Well, what’s wrong with that? I took the defensive. I’ve done pretty well in pounding what the income-tax people call a living out of a typewriter for quite some years, so what’s so screwy about living off the land.... or the water? You suggested a farm yourself. What if I could find a log cabin along the shore of some lake in the wilderness? I’m not tied down. I can go anywhere I like. All I’ve got dependent on me is a pooch. It would be a cinch. I’d catch fish, shoot all the game I’d want, I’d have my typewriter and could turn out words of deathless prose. You see, doc, I’ll get very rich and there’ll be no work to do at all.

I was talking like a very bad piece of dialogue and I knew it. Besides, the doctor was quite obviously bored. So I left the office to con and pro the future on my own time, which was considerably less expensive than his.

It was a cinch the doctor was right. I was as jumpy as a flea at a dog show, and something had to be done. The more I thought about it, the more the idea of living out of doors appealed to me. Each year I’d taken leave for a couple of weeks of fishing and hunting in Canada’s bush country, and I was as familiar with it as any vacationist ever is. I’d traveled Canada from coast to coast. But for anyone as instinctively gregarious as myself, as dependent upon contacts with other human beings for livelihood, to cut loose to carve a year-round existence out of the wilderness presented certain basic problems.

I felt fairly sure of my ability to cope with the physical aspects. Nor did I worry too much about the lack of people. It would give me more time to write with fewer interruptions, and for company there would be the traders, and trappers, and Indians. There would be a difference, of course, but I was certainly intelligent enough to adjust to that. Then, too, no matter how luxuriantly my imagination flowered my future, I knew that somewhere along the line I would be called upon to buy something.

However sure I was of being able to feed myself, there would, nevertheless, be things I would need that would cost money. The only thing I would be taking with me that would have the slightest value in trade or barter was a vocabulary. I went home and cleaned and oiled my portable typewriter and viewed it with new respect, for the words I’d pound out of it would have to pay for whatever I bought.

So the doctor’s prescription called for quiet and seclusion, and he wanted me to get into the outdoors, did he? All right, then. I’d show him. I’d go to the last outpost I could find, and jump off!! But I should have a place to light. I got out my maps of Ontario.

I knew the general section of the country where I would like to settle. The bush country of northern Ontario. This bush, so-called, is a wilderness of trees, lakes, and barren lands extending northward from the line of the Canadian National Railway to Hudson Bay. It is bounded on the west by the Province of Manitoba and on the east by James Bay. In all it covers more than three hundred thousand square miles, and in it live less than five thousand people—and these predominantly Ojibway Indians. The tourist has but set his foot at the very edge of this fabulous and fascinating territory.

I studied my maps until I found a road running north and traced it until it stopped where it met the northernmost swing of the Canadian National Railroad at a pinprick of a town named Sioux Lookout. Here, then, was what I was looking for. No motor road to the north. No railroad to the north. Nothing to the north but those thousands of square miles of wilderness. The town would be a source of supply for food and such other things as I might require. And, since it was on a map, it undoubtedly had a post office for contact with the outside world. This would be a starting point.

There were also one or two other places which took my interest, and it was then I began writing letters. A Canadian National timetable furnished my mailing list. Starting at the Manitoba border, I worked eastward addressing each letter to the Chamber of Commerce. Most of the letters went unanswered, but I finally succeeded in locating a young man in Kenora, Ontario, who not only answered mail promptly, but who seemed thoroughly to enjoy his writing contact with an American. He particularly liked answering questions, and I was just the one who could ask them. By the time my correspondence folder was well filled, I had an Indian’s-eye picture of the land and water for miles around. Not only that, but this eager young man had located what proved to be my future home. An island. And this island was located in the bush to the north of Sioux Lookout.

There is certainly nothing unusual about finding an island in Canada. There are probably millions of islands in the bush country, equally beautiful and highly desirable. My energetic young informant, however, had accomplished a minor miracle. He had located an island with buildings on it. It was fourteen miles to the north from the nearest settlement. My front yard would be the trackless wilderness, and civilization would begin some two hundred miles south of the back door.

The reason for the buildings, I learned, was the reason why the island was for sale. The magic word tourist had permeated the bush, and an over-energetic young native, envisioning great riches from the buck that was far faster than anything that roamed the woods—the dollar of the American sportsman—had started to outfit a camp. In his zeal he had reckoned without one very important thing: that Mr. Average American Sportsman, however rugged his conversation, still wants his hunting and fishing served with just the right amount of service, comforts, and conveniences thrown in.

The camp this young Canadian had put together was just beyond the limits to be able to offer these things. It was literally too far in the bush for the tourist to reach easily. So the young Canadian who had built the place not only wanted to retrieve what he believed to be a bad investment, but he also wanted to get out of the bush. I wanted to get in. It was then that the weak arm of coincidence reached out and fingered me.

I prevailed upon my correspondent to visit the camp and send me a report. Soon I was given full and complete details and listing. By that time my caution and common sense were well submerged in enthusiasm. The descriptions I received were not of average backwoods log cabins; they were of castles in the wilderness. I looked straight at actual and quite commonplace facts and saw nothing but the gossamer substance of dreams. So it was that I bought the island, sight unseen, nine acres complete as to inventory with cabins, a storehouse, an icehouse, canoes, outboard motors, and all the equipment in between. From then on I was about on the anticipatory level of a kid outside a circus tent after the show has begun and he can’t find his ticket.

From the moment I transferred funds for the amount of the purchase price through a Canadian bank I knew that vague generalities must now give place to definite planning. I held a little private ceremony the day the registered deed arrived, and I found myself actually possessed of land duly granted by the King. That was when I started burning bridges.... the contacts with advertising agencies and recording and film companies for which I had worked. The most spectacular conflagration took place when I quit my job with the network, and I watched the security of a steady pay check go up in smoke. In the embers lay my years of active affiliation with radio. And almost too suddenly I was on my own, possessed of practically nothing in the world but an island and some overworked dreams.

I scraped among the ashes to determine what I actually had left. There was precious little. Living in New York came high. I was near enough broke that I knew I would have to buy with care, but I could sell at random. I began to get rid of everything I owned that I felt would be of no practical use in the land of coal-oil lamps and wood stoves. Before long I was down to practical fundamentals.

There were still several months before I would leave New York so I paid my way through the winter by writing and directing a few transcribed spot-commercial announcements which paid well but took little effort and left me with plenty of time to devote to my studies. I had gathered all the books I could find that would tell me anything about how to live in the north. I read books about Eskimos, a complete set of Jack London, stories by James Oliver Curwood, poems by Robert W. Service, fiction about the Northwest Mounted Police, and even a Manual for Boy Scouts. It was all most interesting reading, and it could well be recommended as pleasant pastime.

But I was looking for information, for facts, and I couldn’t find one single volume among all the thousands in the Public Library that contained enough fact ungilded by fiction to give me any sort of definite pattern for wilderness living. A book of Currier and Ives prints was amusing. At least the pictures looked Northern. One that gave me the biggest laugh showed some farmers cutting their winter ice from a frozen pond. They all seemed to be having such a good time about it, and it certainly appeared easy enough. The other pictures were of sleigh rides and such, and I knew a horse would be about the last thing I’d see in the bush.

I appealed to the Canadian government offices in Toronto. They were most courteous in their replies and a generous supply of booklets and folders filled with photographs of startling beauty, mouth-watering descriptions of Ontario scenery, and accommodations for the tourist. I looked at every page and read every word. Although there was no question as to the desirability of these places—they were beautiful.... and expensive—they were all for the tourist trade, and there was not one piece of advice to help me learn to live the way I wanted to live—like the people in back of the pictures, the natives. Some of the photographs, however, particularly the winter scenes, reminded me that I had best give some thought to my wardrobe.

Things I knew I would need and that I could get in New York were heavy socks, heavy pants, heavy underwear, heavy shirts, sweaters, mackinaws. Unfortunately, wherever I went to shop, I found no salesman who had ever been north of Albany, so I had to use my own judgment as to what the well-dressed bush native wears in the wintertime and to make my choices from stock bought by buyers with equally questionable judgment. The clothes I bought were heavy, bulky, colorful, and.... expensive!

On my last evening in town I was partied. I listened to the head-shaking commiseration of my friends. Without exception they were certain I was more than slightly daft, and most of them spoke in the awesomely hushed tones of those attending a funeral. To them I was doomed and gone forever. It was too bad, they said, I’d been a nice guy, but I was off my rocker. I was nuts.

There was no fanfare at my leaving. The next morning at daybreak, as I loaded suitcases, boxes, typewriter into my coupe, New York was just coming awake. One of the big trucks of the Sanitation Department was flushing the street, another was collecting the garbage from the tins lining the curbs. Across the street the little delicatessen man was sweeping off the sidewalk before his shop. I waved a feeble gesture of farewell to this totally unappreciative audience and got behind the wheel. Nik, the cocker, jumped in beside me and I headed west. I was leaving New York, but apparently New York neither knew nor cared. It was the first day of May.

As I drove westward, this, I thought, was Life. No radio deadlines to worry about, no job, and no.... well, just about enough money to pay expenses to my destination. New York had been a luxury. But I had paid for and owned a habitable island, and through the bush roamed more game than a man could shoot. There were fish under every riffle on the waters. I also had the satisfaction of knowing that I’d paid my bills and debts. So what if I was almost broke? That was no disgrace. I’d hunt, I’d fish, and I’d write, my typewriter turning out word after wonderful word in an ever increasing profitable flow. The song of the vagabonds, that was for me.... the wide, winding highway. Life! Thus I rode on a cloud of the identical delicious coral tint as the dreams of my future.

During the drive Nik and I talked over the whole affair in great detail. Nik, as I’ve mentioned, was a cocker spaniel, but not an ordinary one. Although to outward appearances he was just a black, average, Sixth Avenue pet-shop variety, somewhere in his ancestry there must have been a regal strain. Either that or he was definitely megalomaniac. There were moments when he was as condescending as a waiter at the Stork Club. All winter long he had been tolerantly patient with me during the selling and outfitting and preparations for moving, hurt, perhaps, because I hadn’t taken him more into my confidence, yet loyal and understanding that I would give him full coverage when I got ready to do so. When I told him where we were going, that we were going to live in a log cabin in the woods, he shook with anticipation. From then on he entered fully into the spirit of the thing, and we had many a chuckle as we told each other the great things we would achieve.

It had taken me over two years of living with Nik for him to teach me his language, but he was a patient soul and pains-taking. He learned my ways much more quickly than I did his. So we rode along talking things over as any two friends will talk, yet I’m afraid our conversation took too much the form of mutual ego-boosting. By the time we reached Chicago, which was a way mark, I think I swaggered a bit, I know he did. We were voyageurs, adventurers!

From Chicago the way was due north one thousand miles. Passing through Canadian Customs at the border point of Pigeon River was surprisingly less complicated than when I had been a mere tourist. I explained, rather proudly, that I was a landowner and had come to stay. My worldly possessions were casually inspected, and I was admitted and welcomed with all the privileges of a Canadian citizen except the right to vote, yet I maintained my United States citizenship. This type of entry is called a landing and permits the entrance of personal property into Canada for the purpose of use in residence. But no single thing may be sold or disposed of within a period of one year without declaration and payment of duty. This allows temporary living in Canada yet legally discourages the transportation of goods across the border for profit in violation of Customs.

After passing the border I was still riding the pink cloud, but the tires of the car were on the most intolerable highway I had ever driven. It was carved through rock and flanked on both sides by virgin timber. Rugged primeval instincts surged within me. I began to create a masterful mental picture of myself. I became a cross between Daniel Boone and the Rover boys, and from then on I wore, to myself, the mantle of a pioneer.

The road northward got progressively worse. The car bounced, squeaked, chattered, and groaned its protest. There had been no pavement since crossing into Canada more than two hundred miles behind, and the frost, several feet deep through the winter, was just coming out, heaving up great chunks of the road’s surface as it left the ground. Also, the farther we went, the colder it became. May 1 in New York had been a beautiful day, and across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana spring had unmistakably arrived. Farmers were in the fields, spring flowers were in bloom. But a thousand miles to the north, where I was, winter was hanging on with remnants of snowdrifts along the roadside and lakes held captive under slush ice.

Finally I came to a bridge under which the water was moving clear and fast. A roadside sign proclaimed this to be Frog Rapids. This little channel of fast water not over two hundred yards long connected two beautiful lakes. Hungry, and as tired and as anxious as I was to get where I was going, I couldn’t resist the view. I stopped the car and got out for a better look. Then I could see ahead of me what was more than a good-sized clearing. There were houses and streets. It was a town!

I hurried back to the car and got out my map. Nik, who up to that time had been in enough frenzy at the sight of so many trees, he being a Lexington Avenue stroller, stuck his nose into the middle of the map to see what I was so excited about. There it was. There was no doubt about it. There was Frog Rapids marked as plain as could be separating Abram and Pelican lakes. And there, just ahead on a bay of Pelican Lake, was the end of the road. Sioux Lookout! We had arrived!

"Allons, enfants!" I shouted, and scared Nik back up to where he rode on the shelf behind the seat. All this was becoming very silly to him, and he showed it.

Our actual entry into town caused just about as much excitement as did our departure from New York. I seemed to be the only person to whom it made the slightest bit of difference. To me it was epoch-making. At least I felt I had achieved a major accomplishment. The only people I saw were a few Indians and they just stared as I drove by.

My own map of the bush country.

Before I realized it, I was out of town and at the end of the road. So I turned around and drove back the one block that put me in the center of town and parked. It was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon and I was hungry. For the past six hours I had been bouncing along a road that had not so much as a roadside stand or a settlement that offered a purchasable meal. Through the side window of the car I saw a window sign in a store front that proclaimed food. I heaved a long sigh and got out. Over the doorway another sign said Hollywood Cafe.

Where I stood I was right in the middle of Sioux Lookout. I looked past the limits in each direction, five blocks east and west and three blocks north and south. At the far end of the street some sturdy settler was still carving building space from the forest with an ax. The business section was a block long, anchored at each end by brick evidences of the backbone of the Dominion, the Post Office and the Hudson’s Bay Company. In between were the usual one-story false-fronted stores of every frontier town.

Across from the Bay was the eminence of financial stability, the bank building. Directly behind the bank was a flagpole with Union Jack atop. This established the presence of law and order and indicated the entrance to the government offices of the Dominion Building. Frame houses and log shacks made up the rest of the town. There was no water system, and gems of architecture behind each dwelling attested that other conveniences and comforts were hopes for the future. A cement sidewalk had been laid along the store block. Paths served for the rest of the town. No streets were paved; they had just become streets by usage.

The only humans in sight were the group of Indians I had passed backed up against the side wall of the Bay. I looked at them; they stared back. I don’t know exactly what I thought at that moment. Perhaps the feeling in the pit of my stomach was just hunger, so I left Nik in the car and went in for lunch.

The restaurant was the usual booth affair. The place was empty except for two Indians loafing near the tobacco counter at the front. They paid no attention to me as I

Reviews for Crazy-White-Man (Sha-ga-na-she Wa-du-kee)

[alnerdo · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Funny and entertaining enough to read to the end. Also gives some insight into how people viewed First Nations people in the 50s. I think keeping in mind everything is written only from the author’s perspective you won’t be offended. Seems like useful reading for anyone who fantasizes about running away into the woods - it describes both pros and cons but leaves the reader to make his own conclusions about how best to live.