Olive Frederickson, as incredible a woman who ever lived, came to my attention through this blog. I posted about the unique individuals who choose to live in the most remote parts of the Subarctic, and I got a comment telling me about Olive—and her book, The Silence of the North.
In the summer of 1910, Olive’s dad left the family in a small village near Edmonton to explore the Slave Lake country far to the north. Nine-year-old Olive’s mother passed away in December and it took five months to get the message to Dad.
When Dad got home in May he packed up Olive and the rest of the family and headed back north.
And so it began…
Alaska Counterpart, Mary Hanson
From their months long trip north, “…we camped beside one of the worst mudholes we had ever seen… The sorry remains of wagons were sticking out of the mud… the skeletons of horses and oxen were scattered along the tracks.”
Olive grew up on Tomato Creek. And she met Walter Reamer. She fell in love with Walter Reamer and he with her. And they eloped; travelled further into the wild in 1920.
In 1922, with a new baby in her arms, Olive followed Walter ever further into the wild. Lake Athabasca in May, 19 miles of open water full of breaking ice. “The wind was churning Lake Athabasca into terribly high seas, and off to the east we could see a white line of ice drifting slowly inexorably toward us. That was no place to be, on a scow pushed by a motorboat… We heard boards break, and water started to seep through.”
The couple survived and produced two more children in the deep wilderness. Restless Walter traveled without them into deeper wilderness. And then, in 1927, his canoe capsized in a cold lake and he drowned.
Olive and her three kids found a homestead. And she raised them alone. “I was twenty-six, a homesteader-trapper’s widow with three little children, one hundred sixty acres of brush-grown land, almost none of it cleared, a small log house, an old .30-30 Winchester—and precious little else.
Olive killed wolves, hunted moose, made a buck whenever and however she could. And she raised the kids.
I don’t need to tell the whole story. Olive and Ben East, a reporter for Outdoor Life magazine, did that back in 1972.
