The boy slowly took a step, carefully placing his foot on the concrete block. He kept his head up, arms extended for balance, feeling for placement of his next step. He could not sense where to put his foot. Forced to look down, his fear made him dizzy. He lost his balance and fell from the forty foot silo. Fortunately for him, though not his pride, a manure pile broke his fall and saved his life. He had taken a dare that he could not walk around the top of the open silo. That was Uncle Edward Durand, born in 1912, one larger than life.
He was a young trapper along the Cannon River. The teacher had to send him home one day after an unfortunate meeting with a skunk. His initials, “EHD”, are carved in a blackboard at Pleasant Valley School – no surprise there.
On another dare Ed attempted to walk across the Cannon River though he could not swim. He went in over his head and would have drowned if not for John Gunning, brother of Agnes (Mom’s best friend) and her sister Mable. John was tall and lanky, and strolled into the water – with hat on his head – to pull the short Frenchman to safety.
I only remember meeting Uncle Ed once when I was in high school, and don’t know nearly as much as I wish. There is a short article about his return to Faribault, Minnesota from French Guiana. This was a French colony and home of the infamous penal colony of Devil’s Island (check out the movie ‘Papillon’ with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman). Ed was an engineer there around World War II. Whether any connection to the conflict I don’t know. He did travel up the Amazon and returned with gifts for his sisters of feathered earrings and other Amazonian artifacts. Mom had a number of these for many years after. He contracted malaria, from which he suffered the rest of his life.
As a young man he had worked with his uncle Henry in Alaska. Uncles Wilfred and Ernest had worked for Henry briefly as well, but it was Ed who was taken with a life of adventure.
Uncles Ernest, Ed and Wilfred – dapper young Frenchmen.
Ed, along with Aunt Eva and her husband Archie Stadler, went to work on the Alcan highway around 1943. This road is rugged even today. These hardy relatives were builders of it. Mom told a story of Ed as a young man wanting a job on construction. Ed watched the bulldozer operator for about 15 minutes, then went to the foreman for a job, holding himself out as a competent operator.
He settled in Alaska as one of the last gold miners. Fairbanks was his home until his death, October 1, 1976. He would go to the remote ‘bush’ to mine when the weather permitted, moving heavy equipment across frozen rivers. He shot one or two nuisance Grizzly bears each year, once when one was coming into his cabin. He wanted Dad and Mom to join him, as Dad was familiar with farming heavy equipment. I was in high school and would have jumped at the chance, but Mom would have no part of it. There was one story of a bar brawl that resulted in $1,500 in damage – a large sum for the ‘50s. Ed would return to Minnesota no more often than every five years. In the early days he would dogsled from Alaska to Canada, then catch the railroad to Minnesota. Those stories evoked for me tales of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” and others. That was not a trip for faint of heart. I remember he had quart mason jars full of gold nuggets the size of large agates. Gold was fixed at $35 an ounce during his lifetime. Imagine the value of one of those jars today!
It is a great regret not to have heard more of his tales of adventure. He is one of a line of Durand adventurers, beginning with Jean’s immigration from France to Canada, the travels of Louis, Jean’s son, from the St. Lawrence to the Missouri River, and the next story – that of Henry Durand.