60-year-old letters between trapper John Tetso and unlikely pen pal donated to N.W.T. library

Librarian Valerie Grenier gingerly lifts photos and papers from a trove of letters between Dehcho Dene trapper John Tetso, and a woman named Clare V. Molson.

“It’s amazing, I’m still blown away,” said Grenier, handling the photographs, handwritten letters and rough sketches.

In the photos, Tetso poses in front of his cabin, works a saw horse, and travels by boat and dog team.

A letter attached to the package from Molson reads, “John Tetso was a man ahead of his time and merits recognition.”

Molson, who comes from the prominent Molson business family, recently donated years of personal correspondence to the John Tetso Memorial Library in Fort Simpson, N.W.T.

These original letters are the source materials for Tetso's 1964 book Trapping is My Life, one of the earliest autobiographies documenting Indigenous life on the land in the Northwest Territories. The book includes letters, sketches and photographs exchanged 60 years ago between Tetso and Molson.

The donated items will be preserved for the future and presented in a memorial exhibit so that more people can learn about Tetso's life and legacy, with input from his descendants.

“From what I’ve learned, he’s a pretty amazing man,” said Grenier.

Tetso committed to bush life, believed in education

Tetso was committed to bush life, and believed strongly in Indigenous education.

“John saw a lot of the issues that Indigenous people faced,” said Grenier, describing how people who grew up in the bush would be encouraged to sign agreements they couldn’t read, and to sign their name with an X.

“You look back at the signings … it was all word of mouth or they were told [a treaty or agreement] was one thing and then it wasn't. Now we’re forced to reclaim the original agreements, which is difficult.”

Tetso believed the written word would help Indigenous people protect themselves, and encouraged community members to improve their literacy, said Grenier.

A chance meeting on the river

Tetso's letters to Molson began after August 1962, when Molson travelled down the Deh Cho (Mackenzie River) by boat. She encountered Tetso’s camp with two log cabins, his dogs and a tent.

From that moment, a friendship grew between Tetso, a trapper committed to a modest life, and Molson, a woman from one of Canada's wealthiest families.

The two exchanged stories of his perilous trips on the land, and mailed each other gifts that could only be acquired in the bush or the city.

Tetso made Molson a pair of snowshoes and sent them in the post during resupply runs in Fort Simpson. She sent him records and analogue film to capture photographs of his family.

The original letters, written in cursive, are a heavy volume. At times Tetso's communications are matter-of-fact and documentary style. At others, they are more personal or existential.

The published prose the world has been able to see so far contains meditations on bush life, which Tetso writes is neither idle nor boring.

Some people come into this world and want to make a name for themselves, “but look, we do not all come here to be big,” Tetso muses in his book.

Some of us are here to leave a few good impressions, without any intention of conquering the world, he wrote.

'Life in the bush is not easy'

Tetso chronicles the ingenuity required to survive in the bush, sharing a story about having to forge a replacement rifle part with two axes and fire.

He tells Molson about an injury from the brunt force of a felled tree, unexpectedly falling into the river with all of his gear, losing a dog to a rushing river, and pesky wolves on the trapline.

“Life in the bush is not easy, but nothing in life is easy … I have the scorched pants to prove it,” he writes.

“Accidents like these always happen when you don’t expect them … the best medicine is to stay cool headed."

In one letter, Tetso describes how a bear, presumed dead but still alive, must be finished off with an axe.

He talks about enjoying the fruits of his labor, retrieving a frozen beaver from a trap, and cooking the liver and tail.

This meal is “far better and tastier than those hundred-dollar plates you hear about in a big political convention,” he writes.

Tetso recounts Christmases past, travelling all day in the brief daylight shouldering the winter solstice, and snapshots of life, sent off to a pen pal thousands of kilometers away, about the belly laughs that shake the table at Christmas dinner.

“Yes, this was Christmas 1938, right on the trapline, under the stars and northern lights,” he writes.

On Sept. 23, 1964, Tetso’s son Ernest wrote to Molson to let her know that the letters had stopped because his father had passed. When Tetso died, he was in the midst of making Molson a violin.

In one of his last dispatches, Tetso writes that he has shared his treasured memories with Molson, “memories that time alone shall not erase from my mind.”