Frank Beaton and
W W I
In the early ‘60s I worked on a couple of ranches on the south side of the Peace River and one of those I worked with was a man named Frances Beaton Jr. better known as Frank. He was the son of a long-time Hudson’s Bay Company Factor at Fort St. John. Frances Beaton Sr. was a Scott and his wife and Frank’s mother was a Dane-zaa, better known to we pale-face as Beaver Indians – probably because the HBC could usually depend on them delivering high quality pelts.
Dane-zaa group near Fort St. John 1914
Dane-zaa men near Fort St. John about 1910
Frank had many stories to tell about his up-bringing and because of a couple of those stories I gave him and his
father a cameo appearance in “The Making of Jake McTavish.”
One of the stories he told was about
he and several other young native men meeting in Grande Prairie, Alberta and
signing up for service with the Royal Canadian Army in World War I. As I recall
he said he thought he was the oldest of the lot and he would have been 21 or 22
when they took this eventful trip.
I thought at the time that it must
have been a monstrous cultural shock for these young men. Subsequent statements
and responses to questions by Frank affirmed my suspicion but he was certainly
not known for his talkative nature.
I was thinking of it again recently
and wrote the following rhyme, gave it to Karen and she took some of the bumps
out of it.
Native Sons in World War One
By D.M. McGowan
and K.L. McGowan
© 2019
Seventeen native
boys left the Upper Peace
The only land
they’d known, all in their teens.
They’d all grown
up wild out among the trees.
Knew where to
find pelts, beaver ponds or streams.
They hunted for
their supper, trap or single shot
And only their mothers
gave safety a fleeting thought
After two hundred
years of Scott and Fleur de Lis
They knew some
other talk, sometimes two or three,
English, French
and German were spoken in the land,
And whatever
tongue was spoken by their particular band
Some of them
could read and write more than just their name
But the army
didn’t care, green privates all the same
An amazing great
adventure for young trapper men
From freedom of
the wild to a Canadian Army pen
Across the land
in trains, something never seen.
Mistreated by a
Sergeant, but still bright and keen.
Dropped off in
camps and marched around a square
“Dig some dirt
from here and put it over there.”
On the trains
again east to Canada’s Maritimes
March down to the
docks in perfect double lines
Then up a
gangplank to a big steel canoe
Then told to put
their kit where you couldn’t fit a shoe
A dozen ships in
convoy from the Bedford shore
But count on
German U boats sinking two or more.
More camp time in
England, weeks without the sun
Then finally sent
to France to show them how it’s done
Trenches that
collapse from rains that never end
Bodies on the
wire or sprawled out in no man’s land.
All caked in mud,
“Are they ours? Are they theirs?”
Days and weeks of
boredom, then terror and despair.
Vimy Ridge, the
Somme or maybe Regina Trench
Maybe English on
the left other times the French
High Wood or
Kitchener’s, Avion as well
With the Aussies
at Gallipoli, some lived to tell
Passchendaele,
Arras, knowing each the end
If not for the
war, surely for the men
Metis, Cree and
Dane a total of Seventeen
On a great
adventure, young, naive and keen
But the Great War
wasn’t a great place to learn
For seventeen go
but only two returned.
