













































































































A Story 
cross 
““we’\ just as anxious to get home as you are, 
but no would 
tempt me to 
It’s got too 
money 
Mitchell’s Lake in this storm 
many drownings to it’s credit as it is. We're 
from the walk 
The best thing we can do is 
den, and spend the 
can’t 
eight good miles mines if we 
round the shore. 
to put for Mary Crusher’s 
can’t and we 
night there. We freeze, 
starve there.” 
He 
camp 
woods we were leaving. For 
The sleet cut our 
friend. 
and 
I had implicit confidence in my 
knew every logging road, stillwater 
in the maze of 
half an, hour we plodded on. 
faces, and the snow clogged our snowshoes until 
we could hardly walk. Just as night fell we 
halted before a huge pile of boulders. My 
friend kicked off his snowshoes, pulled away 
some ‘brush and a screen made out of old sacks, 
and a hole just 
large enough for a man to crawl 

into was revealed. 
We threw off our loads, my friend went first, 
and I followed him. 
of cave, possibly eight by eight feet, and six 
I found myself in a sort 
feet high. The stump of a candle remained in 
a candlestick, extemporized by boring a hole in 
a log with an auger. The of the 
was. brushed with boughs, a 
diminutive sheet iron stove with a pipe hardly 
bigger than the barrel of a: duck gun stood close 
to the “door,” and 
upper part 
“den” balsam 
a pile of pine knots, chips 
and small birch cut into very short pieces com- 
pleted the furniture of the place. 
“Mary Crusher made this her half way house 
when she was going out to the mines to beg 
in the winter, or when she was sacking in a 
heavy load,” remarked my friend as he blocked 
the door with the canvas screen, after ascertain- 
ing that the stove pipe 
“Many and many’s the night she’s 
but it was more open then, and she 
instead of a stove. I followed her 
day, and came on the place. After she died I 
took lJambkill sods’ and sodded the top. all 
over. It’s as tight as a bottle’ now, and that 
was clear of snow. 
slept here, 
had a fire 
tracks one 


The Recluse of Mitchell’s Lake 


of the Barrens and the Mines 
By EDMUND F. L. JENNER 
little stove will keep us as warm as a furnace.” 
After we had finished our supper we lay back 
on the bed of balsam boughs and smoked our 
pipes while the blizzard raged overhead, and 
the pent up air, under the ice in Mitchell’s Lake, 
roared like a heavy battery in action. 
“Ves, Mary Crusher was a queer concern,” 
said my friend in answer to my inquiry as to 
who she might be. “She came to these parts 
the year Nelson Nickerson found the first gold. 
My mother says she was a good looking woman 
then. She came to town on a schooner, walked 
out to the mines, and she was the first white 
woman to sleep in Goldenville. I was born two 
years after the mines broke out, and I can re- 
when I was little how scared we all 
She had good learning, and wrote 
member 
were of her. 
as well as any schoolm’am; she could read print 
or writing as fast as she could talk, and she 
could take a pencil and paper and draw any 
living thing you asked her to. 
‘In those days all this country was heavy 
woods. Beech, birch, rock maple and spruce, 
with here and there a white pine as big and 
round as a puncheon. Those were the times 
when they built the wooden ships. Every creek 
had one or more vessels on the: stocks; any man 
who could chop or drive a spike or hew a log 
had a job waiting for him. There were 
a thousand working in Goldenville then. 
The records will show you that there were six- 
teen crushers going there at one time. 
“When Mary had been in the mines about a 
year she foregathered with old man McCormick. 
Some say they never were married, but at any 
rate they left the mines, bought one of Uncle 
MclIntosh’s old lumber camps for ten dollars and 
started in to clear up the land round it. The 
camp stood on a good hardwood knoll, and the 
soil was clear of rock. They made a fair living 
for several years. Produce of all sorts was high 
in the mines, and everything they brought in 
sold for spot cash. McCormick trapped a good 
deal of fur and killed quite a bit of game. In 
near 
men 
those days they weren’t so particular as they ai] 
now. | 
“There was quite a settlement at the hea| 
of this lake. Besides McCormick and Mai! 
there were Jerry Carty, Joe Demingues ar| 
Sandy McGreggor, all of them with famili)| 
except the McCormicks. They were chopper 
cutting wood for the mines. They di@in’t far: 
any. Then old man Mitchell came along FE) 
worked as cook in a lumber camp on the we 
side of the lake. When the camp closed dow 
in the spring he took it and fifty acres of grour 
round it in part payment of his wages. He gi 
some sort of a deed to it, for it lay just ou 
side the gold district. The others hadn't 
scratch of a pen for anything. 
“Mitchell was an arbitrary old chap. He| 
been mate on a deep sea vessel. He never pulle 
with the other settlers at the head of the lak; 
He and McCormick had words over the buil 
ing of a little dam on Sucker Brook. Mitche| 
wanted to raft some logs down the brook ar 
McCormick said the dam would drown a litt| 
neadow of wild hay he had there. They wrai| 
gled over it for quite a while; then one day 
crowd from the mines went in, cut the log 
and hauled them off to make cribwood in tl| 
old Dewar pit. Then Mitchell lost a good hout| 
n one of McCormick’s fox snares. It was ¢| 
accident which might happen to any dog in| 
snariag country. He didn’t see it that wa} 
though, and blamed McCormick for it as if tl) 
snare had been set on purpose. There was wi}: 
between them from that out. The women we} 
into it as well as the men, and one day Ma} 
and Mrs. Mitchell met on the road to the min 
and fought like two tomceats. Mary wen, f) 
she was as strong as a bear. They had a lay 
suit over it, but the magistrates put them bo 
under bonds, and they had to pay the costs b 
tween them. They gave the whole outfit a gre 
talking to, and threatened them with ti 
Supreme Court if they made any more trout} 
at the head of the lake. This kept them qui! 






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