By Greg Nesteroff
Of the many places that victims of the Empress of Ireland disaster came from, one of the most obscure was Comaplix, a sawmill town on the northeast arm of Upper Arrow Lake in the West Kootenay.
Freda Evans (nee Johnson) ran the Lardeau Hotel there with her husband Russell.
Freda, 27, booked passage from Nelson aboard the Empress to return to her native Sweden and visit her parents. She didn’t survive the catastrophe, but her body was recovered, leading to some gruesome speculation.
As Eugene Leveque related in a 1965 interview held by the BC Archives: “She had some beautiful rings. I heard that they found her on the beach and her fingers had been cut off to take the rings.”
Leveque’s grandson Milt Parent explained in his 1997 book Silent Shores and Sunken Ships that rescuers actually removed Freda’s rings and found her fingers bled, suggesting she was still alive, but “failed to respond to the limited assistance then available.”
Freda’s husband headed east to identify her body, and brought it back to BC for burial. Although there was a cemetery at Comaplix, Freda is interred at Revelstoke, where she had once lived. If her grave was ever marked, it is no longer, although the plot number is known.
In addition to her husband and parents, Freda was survived by two sisters in Leduc, Alta., and other sisters in Sweden. She had no children.
According to Parent, “embittered by the loss and apparent irresponsibility of the CPR,” Russ Evans decided to sue over his wife’s death, but to no avail. For years, he kept pictures of the Empress and the ship it collided with close at hand, “which represented a sad memory of a fatal night that would change his life forever.”
In the aftermath of his wife’s death, Russ leased out the Lardeau Hotel and bought a farm near Stettler, Alta., although he soon returned to BC. Another blow came on October 29, 1914, when a suspicious fire destroyed both the hotel and sawmill at Comaplix. The sawmill was rebuilt, only to burn again in April 1915, spelling the town’s end.
Russ then bought a ranch across the lake at Beaton. In June 1916, he married his wife’s niece, Evelyn Holstrom. Evelyn, who was about 20 years younger than Russ, had reportedly come to Comaplix to help at the hotel following Freda’s death. Russ and Evelyn went on to have nine children together.
Russ died in 1939, age 64, and Evelyn in 1950, age 53.
Had Comaplix survived as a community, it would have been drowned out in the 1960s by the construction of the Hugh Keenleyside Dam. Today it’s a very remote spot, accessible only by boat. All that remains is its cemetery, whose few burials include two young siblings claimed by scarlet fever and a brothel keeper who was murdered. That’s a whole other story.
Greg Nesteroff is the former editor of the Nelson Star, former news director of the Vista Radio stations in the West Kootenay, and the co-author of Lost Kootenays: A History in Photographs. He runs “The Kütne Reader,” a blog about local history.
Related:
© All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all blog content copyright Eve Lazarus.
That’s a sad story 😞
[…] Greg Nesteroff wrote about Robert Crellin, the hero from Silverton, BC who saved his godchild, eight-year-old Florence “Florrie” Barbour from the wreck. According to his research, a newsreel was shown around the world in the months after the shipwreck and never resurfaced. […]