Freer, Willard Melvin

Excerpts from "Kechika Chronicler: Willard Freer's Northern BC & Yukon Diaries, 1942-1975" by Jay Sherwood (2023), pages 12-16:

Willard was born in Kamloops, British Columbia, on April 19, 1910, a few months after his parents had emigrated from the United States. Freer's ancestors had been farmers for many generations. The earliest documentation of the Freer family in North America is a ship record of Hugo Freer arriving in the city of New York in July 1675. The Freers were farmers in New York state for several generations. In the early 1830s, Jonas Elisha Freer moved to Michigan, which was still a territory, to farm. His grandson, Jonas Melville Freer, born in Michigan in 1855, continued westward to Dakota Territory in the early 1880s where his son, George Elisha Freer, was born in 1885. In early 1910, George and Edith Key left North Dakota to search for agricultural land in Canada, abetted by the fact that Edith was pregnant. On February 11, George and Edith were married in Miles City, Montana. Three days later, they entered Canada at the Coutts/Sweetgrass border crossing. They journeyed north to the Canadian Pacific Railway line and travelled by train to Kamloops where their first child, Willard Melvin, was born on April 19.

When Willard was three weeks old, his parents drove by wagon to Fort George (present day Prince George). In the 1911 census, George Freer was recorded as a rancher living on rented land near Cluculz Lake. This lake in the Central Interior region of British Columbia was near the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, which was being constructed across Northern BC at that time. By fall of that year, Freer had filed for a pre-emption along the Chilako River southwest of Fort George, and a second son, Merle, was born there in October. In addition to the farm, George probably worked on construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. A daughter, Ella, was born a year later, and in the fall of 1913, Freer received a Crown grant to the land along the Chilako River.

However, George and Edith believed that the land was "not open enough and the soil burned out," and they decided to go north to the Peace River district. Edith was pregnant again, so the family temporarily split. Edith took the three children and went back to her parents' home in Missouri where the fourth child, Harold, was born on June 19, 1914. Meanwhile, George and a companion spent the late fall and winter of 1913 and 1914 trapping in the Crooked River area north of Prince George. In early spring, the two men travelled down the Crooked and Parsnip Rivers to the Peace, then proceeded down this river valley to Hudson's Hope, where they sold their furs.

George continued down the Peace River valley toward the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) post at Fort St. John. Along the way he found land that he thought would be productive at a place called Bear Flat, which was located on the north side of the Peace River adjacent to Cache Creek. During the summer of 1914, he earned money cutting wood for the D.A. Thomas, a steamboat that plied the Peace River.

In the fall, George was reunited with his family. They spent the winter in northern Alberta, and George filed for his pre-emption at the land office in Grouard. At that time, governments did not consult with Indigenous peoples regarding their connection to their traditional territories. The Freers purchased supplies and livestock and, in late winter and early spring 1915, travelled to their homestead along the Peace. Willard wrote about the last section of the trip, from Fort St. John. "My next brother and I were put on a pack horse in two boxes and rode that way for 22 miles [35 kilometres] where the parents settled down."

Willard grew up at Bear Flat. Of the seven Freer children, he was the one most influenced by the remote wilderness to the north and west. When he was about twenty, he moved to Hudson's Hope, a small community farther upstream on the Peace River that was closer to the Rocky Mountain wilderness. Around 1936, Willard moved northwest, taking up a trapline in the Ingenika River valley. (The Ingenika flows into the Finlay River, one of the headwater rivers of the Peace.) In 1942, Willard ventured north into the remote Kechika River valley, which is less than a hundred kilometres from the Yukon boundary. He worked and lived at the ranch of the famous packer Skook Davidson for several years before building his own cabin farther north along the Kechika. There Willard lived for the rest of his life, with some intervals spent working at the Fireside Inn on the Alaska Highway (near the junction of the Kechika and Liard Rivers).
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Freer was involved in many important projects in northern BC and Yukon. He was a member of the famous 1934 Bedaux Expedition. Freer was a packer for BC and federal government survey crews for several summers; worked on the British Columbia-Yukon Boundary Survey for four years; was employed on Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) crews for several years; and spent three field seasons on the BC government's Forest Inventory program. Willard also packed for a couple of large mining exploration companies and was a hunting guide for Robin Dalziel and other guide outfitters.
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Willard Freer died in 1981.

2024 July: Created (KS).

• English

Sherwood, Jay, and Willard Freer. 2023. Kechika Chronicler : Willard Freer’s Northern BC and Yukon Diaries, 1942-1975. Qualicum Beach, BC: Caitlin Press Inc..