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G

eorge and Lucille Wheeler moved to St. Jovite from Chazy, New York in 1894 with their new baby in tow. George had acquired a large parcel of forestland the year before, and Lucille, determined to be with him, chose to forego a life of relative ease. Arriving in Montreal, even the conductor of the train expressed his surprise that George was taking that beautiful girl off into the woods. The passenger accommodations consisted of a wooden boxcar with seats down the side, a space heater at one end, and spittoons placed strategically along the aisle. Boistrous, tobacco-chewing lumberjacks made token efforts to hit the spittoons in the tight, putrid atmosphere for the eleven-hour transit from Montreal to St. Jovite.

George set Lucille and the baby up in the lumberjacks hotel. The building had no indoor plumbing and the vermin-infested room was a cold catch-all for the smells permeating from the tavern-like dining room below. The village consisted of a few French-Canadian families who made it clear that they didnt want any intruders, interlopers, in their community. Within a short time Lucille moved, setting up simple housekeeping at her husbands lumber camp.

They built themselves a house on the shore of Lac Ouimet, with a boathouse allowing them to cross the lake rather than having to walk around it. They soon had all of their possessions shipped up from Chazy, and Lucille soon gave birth to her daughter, Frances. In the meantime, Lucille found that she could develop very little social interchange with the French-Canadian women on the outlying farms. They married as young as 15, had many children, and their lifestyles were even less refined than George and Lucilles. Being a closed Roman Catholic community, Protestants such as the Wheelers were not welcome and had even been asked to leave. They knew that, should any hardship befall them, they could not assume that the Catholic community would rally to their cause. Luckily, two other Protestant families soon established themselves in St. Jovite.

One night their young daughter began to scream and they awoke to see flames belching out of the woodshed. George knew that he had time to get the family and some friends who were visiting out of the house, and he went back in to save some of their personal belongings. Lucille leaned a ladder against the upper window and pleaded with him to get out. When he did, the house roared into a blaze and everything inside was lost.

Lucille moved in with one of the Protestant families over the next period, while George refurbished the boathouse where the family lived in the single room through most of the winter.

The information that we have about the Wheelers during this time comes from Frances Wheelers book, The Awakening of the Laurentians. In it she describes not only the rough conditions in which her family lived, but also some of the neighbours, such as a domineering fellow nicknamed the man of a hundred bears. Aside from having killed many bears, he was also shaped like one, with short legs and a large upper body. He once offered George to trade his wife and a cow for Lucille. Frances also describes the wildlife, hearing the wolves howl in the night and the bears occasionally exploring the garbage and pawing the door. She even observes that people did not travel at night.

After George rebuilt their home, and life returned to normal with a third child, Ruth, the winter snows stopped co-operating. For two winters, there was not enough snow to skid lumber from the bush, and their livelihood was threatened. Their baby Ruth became ill with meningitis and passed away, and in 1898 both George and Lucille, who was pregnant, contracted typhoid. Of course, the family had to abandon their homestead and the two children went to live with other family members. The doctors advised the families to prepare for the worst, and they made plans for adoptive homes for Tom and Frances and sold off all of their property in the Laurentians.

When both patients recovered, and George Junior was born, they discovered that their property had been sold for a pittance. Like the mythical Sisyphus, the Greek who defied the gods and was condemned to an eternity of pushing a rock up a hill, they returned to Lac Ouimet and started over, again. They bought land and built a great new home that they called Gray Rocks. George contracted to build two homes for other Protestant families that had moved to the lake, and eventually they began to charge their guests, friends who had been coming for years, and to encourage others.

Although they had seven children, two more were lost over the ensuing years, George Junior, who was never well, and Roy who died in an accident. They were also visited again by fire, only this time it raged through the forest, jumping over their home and consuming everything in their view. It started on a spring afternoon, and George had the children carry wet blankets from the lake to soak the house and the cedar shake roof. At one point, he marshalled the family to wait in the cold lake, but thought better of it. Neighbours gave them up for lost, being incapable of getting through to help, but by morning the fire had moved on and the house was standing in a black world.

Despite these great hardships the Wheeler family established one of the most popular destinations in the Laurentians, adding a ski hill and golf course over time. Their son Tom started Canadas first airline on Lac Ouimet, a story in itself, and their granddaughter Lucille won Canadas first Olympic medal in skiing in 1956 and broke the European stranglehold on giant slalom and downhill skiing at the world ski championships in Austria in 1958.

Chemin Wheeler in Mont Tremblant was proclaimed in 1918 and most likely served to render official the name local residents gave to the road that went from the railroad station to the home of this intrepid pioneer family. Today, only a short stretch of the road running from the highway to the old Lac Ouimet Club still carries the name.

References The Awakening of the Laurentians, -Frances Wheeler; Mme M.L. Guilbeault, Service de la Greffe, Mont Tremblant; Canadian Encyclopedia; Wikipedia; Special thanks to Sheila Eskenazi

Joseph Graham has written a book that features a select number of stories of Laurentian places and how they got their names. To learn more, click here.

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This material may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the author. © Joseph Graham