100 Mile House's friendly, social & entertaining online news source!

By Sage Birchwater

During the thirty years I worked as a journalist covering the news and happenings in the Chilcotin and Bella Coola Valley, there wasn’t a more colourful character in the region than former Anahim Lake store owner, Darcy Christensen. The front of his general store was emblazoned with a multicoloured mural of galloping horses, and above it were the words: “If we don’t have it; then you don’t need it.” Darcy was known far and wide as the “Flying Fur Buyer”, and if you were feeling lucky you could step inside the store and flip double or nothing with Darcy for anything in the store.

In March, 2010, I got a phone call from Darcy asking for my help. He had long retired from the retail store business after selling out in 2000 to a distant relative, Norm McLean, and was now living in Williams Lake. He told me he was writing his memoirs and asked if I’d help him put it together. It didn’t take much convincing to get Caitlin Press publisher, Vici Johnstone, on side. She immediately recognized the potential for another regional best seller. The rest is history. Double or Nothing: The Flying Fur Buyer of Anahim Lake, published by Caitlin Press, hit the book stands in early November.

When I first met Darcy in the late 1970s, I owned a trapline in the Chilcotin south of Tatla Lake. I occasionally sold fur to him. During the winter months he was often away flying his bush plane equipped with skis buying fur and delivering groceries to people living in remote locations in a three hundred kilometre radius of Anahim Lake. Darcy was a legend then. “Anyone who’d wave a mink skin at me, I’d land and buy their fur,” he says.

When he wasn’t flying, Darcy amused himself in the store with his coin toss antics where a customer could pay double or nothing for anything from a chocolate bar worth $1.48, to a whole grocery order worth several hundred dollars. One day I got a call from the Vancouver Sun to drive up from Tatlayoko Valley to take a picture of Darcy flipping double or nothing for a beaver pelt with a customer in his store. The photo was published in the June 30, 1986 edition of the Sun, accompanied by a story by business columnist, Mike Grenby, who stated: “This store owner likes doing business by flipping a coin. He’ll play any game you can name for any amount you can count.”

Darcy told me later that wasn’t quite true. He said he was always careful not to gamble for any amount he could not afford to lose, and to scrutinize the character of those he entered into these games of chance with.

When he sold the store in 2000, Darcy said his business had been in his family for over 100 years. His grandfather, Adolph Christensen, founded A.C. Christensen Ltd. in Bella Coola in 1898, shortly after he and his bride, Maret, arrived with the Norwegian colonists in 1894 via a circuitous route from Norway to Minnesota, then finally to British Columbia.

Darcy’s dad, Andy Christensen, bought the store from Adolph in the 1920s. A few years later Andy and his wife, Dorothy Christensen, purchased the Cless Pocket Ranch near Anahim Lake, and opened a branch of the store there as well. In those days there was no road connecting Bella Coola Valley to the Chilcotin Plateau. In fact there was no road linking Anahim Lake to provincial highway grid either. Andy transported all the goods for his store by steamship to Bella Coola, then by truck up the valley to the end of the road near Stuie, and used packhorses to ship the goods the rest of the way up the Precipice Trail to Anahim Lake.

Darcy grew up in the saddle making these overland journeys back and forth between Bella Coola and the Chilcotin Plateau with his family. During the winters he attended school in Bella Coola, and spent the summers on the family ranch near Anahim Lake.

On his mother’s side, Darcy’s maternal grandfather, John Clayton, was also an entrepreneur. He was the last Hudson’s Bay Factor in Bella Coola. When the historic fur trading company pulled up stakes on the Central Coast in the 1880s, John Clayton bought up the HBC assets and was the major landholder in the valley when the Norwegians arrived in 1894. So Darcy’s roots go back to the earliest of colonial times in Bella Coola, and to the earliest European settlement of the West Chilcotin around Anahim Lake.

Penning his stories, Darcy scratched into the far reaches of his memory to dig up tales of notable characters he shared that isolated landscape with. Lestor and Mickey Dorsey, Pan Phillips, Fred Engebretson, Maddy Jack, Jane Lehman, Tommy Holte, Alfred Bryant and Thomas Squinas, were all legends in their own right. They were also personal friends with whom Darcy milled lumber, ranched, trapped, gambled, and served in his store.

He says a strong motivation for writing his book was to preserve the unique stories, sayings and memories of the people he shared his life with in this rustic outpost region of British Columbia.

The cover photo of the book depicting six-year-old Darcy duded up with chaps, cowboy boots and hat, with a cigarette in his mouth, is bound to create some controversy. He says the cigarette was his mother’s idea to make the picture interesting. An avowed anti-smoker, Darcy makes a statement to that effect on the back cover.

Darcy Christensen will be at Nuthatch Books in 100 Mile House on Wednesday Dec. 15 to sign copies of his new book from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. And yes he will flip double or nothing for the $24.95 book. So far he says, he’s breaking about even.