Salmon Tales -the Movie 1910 Canada

J.Searle Dawley at the camera (perhaps) on location in Western Canada 1910. The caption says “Taking Portraits of the Rockies.” He was hired by Edison to help promote Western Canada to Americans and Europeans (the Northern type, of course.)13 films were made, 10 of which were melodramas.

A scene from James Searle Dawley’s Frankenstein, also filmed in 1910.

It is said that anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker coined the word “Hollywood Dream Factory” in the 1950′s, but I found a 1910 article that describes motion pictures in the exact same way: A motion picture actor is being interviewed for Canada West, and he sure seems to have his ‘script’ down. Indeed, he ‘spins’ Addams’ negative view of motion picture entertainment into a positive one, using her term.

“Did you know that Jane Addams called the nickel show “the House of Dreams” asked the motion picture actor padding the sleeping pillow into place and leaning back in the corner of the section. (Editor: Jane Addams,Spirit of Youth and City Streets, 1909.)

“She hit it exactly right, too.” The Nickel Show is the house of dreams to East Side New York and West Side Chicago and most every town of three thousand all over North America. Sadie and Jim, Lena and Fred, don’t think much of the fried-potato reality they live in. There’s too much work and too little lark and not one Duchess or Indian in the landscape. Like everyone else, they have a notion of what things ought to be like to be fun, their dream. They’ve only got about a thousand words or so in their vocabulary, and not very much imagination, and they don’t know enough to spin dreams for themselves. So they go to the nickelodeon and see three or four different kinds of dreams, for five cents.

We’re the fellows who have to get out to hustle the dreams for Sadie and Jim. And it isn’t such easy work living in a dream as you think it might be.

(Then the actor goes on to say that he went into picture work because he was out of a job- that like other dramatic actors he ‘looked down on picture work.’ “I had a pretty good name as an actor as I was signed as part of the stock company. I still had my old contemptuous way of thinking “Nothing to do but pose into a camera. I learned my mistake.”

“We had been engaged by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, to go through the Dominion, taking motion pictures to be shown all over the US and Europe to advertise the country. We had a special train in charge of a railway official who made sure we didn’t miss any good bets on the good points, and we surely took them all in. We rode with those champions of the plains, the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. At Regina we assisted in the roundup of 5000 cattle at Brooks, where one girl in the company donned a ‘divided skirt’ and rode with the rest of the men. We had a fight with the Indians in Calgary and I carried a bruise given to me by one brave for a month. “Ugh, me Kill” he said which made my scalp rise and I got hold of a mounted police to make sure he understood it was only a ‘pretend’ kill.
At Banff, we charged the buffalo at the National Park and did some wonderful swimming feats in the big pools. At Logan, we outdid ourselves by climbing 8000 feet above sea level nearly killing our leading lady. None of us knew anything about mountain climbing: we were dressed as if for an afternoon stroll. Our Swiss guide took one look at the leading lady’s suede shoes and said something under his breath. At Vancouver we did some stunts on the Empress of Japan and in Victoria we made a salmon fishing film, where we went out at five in the morning to drop and raise the nets and then we got down with the slippery, slimy salmon at the bottom of the barge…

People are being forced into cheap amusements and the picture show fits the bill, these days when the average man can’t afford 2.00 for a good seat and won’t sit in the cheap seats at a first class theatre. An increasingly better class of actors is producing an increasingly better class of pictures..and in this day and age when we all demand novelty and an increasing amount of sensationalism, in both drama and literature, the motion picture actor has to possess, not only art, but also courage.

Getting down with the Salmon for one of the 3 documentaries made by Dawley. Is this a ‘still’ from the silent picture or one of the first publicity shots? Likely a publicity shot, like the one below, showing their train and cow-catcher.

Here’s the announcement of the effort in the New York Dramatic Mirror:

The kinetogram (the bi-monthly bulletin of the Edison Company) announces that the Edison Company recently made special arrangements with the Canadian Pacific Railroad Company to take an Edison crew of photographers and a selected stock company of players by special train to Vancouver, stops being made on the way to enact dramatic subjects in appropriate localities. The party left June 22 and are now at work.

Games with Google Earth

The house that Norman built, 1896. Tighsolas. House of Light in Gaelic.

I am born in 1954, one hunded years after Margaret Nicholson (my husband’s great grandmother, my son’s, well, you know.)

So, I am the same age today, as Margaret was in 1909-1910. Hmmm. I’m sitting in my living room, a few feet from a decorative elm table that once was in Tighsolas. It’s my favorite piece of furniture in the house. I am not wearing a corset, but brown sweat pants, mismatched socks, one neon orange, one white, a burgundy camisole and my husband’s grey fleece jacket, all purchased at Costco.

Like so many women before me, I am wondering what to make for supper. Chicken curry, I think. (I must download a new recipe.)And just like Margaret I am wondering how my children, at university, are doing. Exam time. (Yes, I could email them, or facebook them, or text message them, or call them on their cells but I try to intrude as little as possible on their lives. Ha. Just as I write this my husband picks up the ground line and leaves a message for my oldest, Andrew. We have this ESP thing going.)

I am writing this blog on my new laptop (because the three other computers in my home were too old ) and I am struggling a bit with it, as even the keyboard is different.

My husband tells me to use the battery until its depleted, then plug the laptop in and use it, then use battery again once it is charged. Why? I ask. Well, (my son tells me) batteries, even today, are not efficient. To think that Thomas Edison was fretting about the same problem in 1910. He had a special garage in N.J. to plug in his electric cars. Electric cars were being pitched at women, as they were smaller, less powerful and cleaner. No zoom, zoom, zoom.

In an earlier blog I mentioned how scandalized Margaret was when her neighbour, Mr. Montgomery, in 1910, said he was getting rid of his horse and buying a car. (This will be an episode in my story.) Margaret does not like cars, but I suspect this is partly because the Nicholsons can’t afford one and she doesn’t want her husband to feel like a loser, since all his neighbours are pretty prosperous.

I guess I am also of mixed mind when it comes to the new technologies. And yet, here I am, engaged in this massive history project, in large part thanks to new technologies and Internet archives. In the past, only a university professor with specialized tools, access to world libraries, and a band of underpaid researchers could flesh out the http://www.tighsolas.ca/ letters the way I am doing.

My husband is dyslexic and has little use for the Internet. He does like televisions, and he bought a big screen TV last year.

Well, then he made the mistake of hooking my old laptop up to it and I found I could use it to tour the world using Youtube and Google Earth.

I know London really well now (when I visited I barely registered anything) and I also go to Paris and other French cities and I am starting on Italy. There’s a delivery man in London who has a great camera, an intuitive understanding of editing, and takes people on tours of London neighbourhoods.. Scarletshaz I think is ‘his handle’ or whatever it’s called. There’s also London Landscape TV, which is another guy with a great camera. He works for Tesco.

My favorite game: to eat out at London or Paris restaurants by visiting them on street view, looking up their websites, downloading their menus and sometimes making a dish from the menu. (And, yes, I can buy all this organic yuppie food for half the price -or less- in Montreal!)

I also like looking at slideshows on Flickr. Sometimes I use Flickr slideshows to complement BBC Radio Four Broadcasts. A few weeks ago there was a discussion on Women’s Hour on Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, so I entered appropriate keywords into Flickr and saw her ‘writing desk’ and the garden where she entertained others in her Bloomsbury Group – all while I listened to the radio program.

I still want to visit these cities, well, even more. I intend to go to Europe in the Spring or Fall.

Technology changes us in ways we can’t predict. (My brother has lived in Denmark for 25 years and only last week I got skype and talked to him on a video feed. He’s been bugging me for years. )

Anyway, Margaret Nicholson, like so many of her clan, liked to travel. In 1902, when the Nicholsons were wealthy, she went to Union Hill, New Jersey to see her friend Mrs. Pray and visited the really big city, New York.

Just a few minutes ago I Googled the address I had for her. It appears Union Hill is now Hoboken, but I did find the address and it was a five story greystone. (Pray describes in a letter how hard it was to get her piano into her third story apartment.)

Of course, Richmond, Quebec is not on Google Streetview and the satellite image is very obscure. Gee, I can get close enough to see the shed in my brother’s farm in Denmark, but I can’t see Richmond. I wonder why?