The Atlantic Salmon Federation

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The Atlantic Salmon Journal - Winter, 1997 - Vol.46(4)

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THE

GRAND

OLD MAN OF

THE

CASCAPÉDIA

Angler, warden, camp manager, blacksmith and conservationist,Warren Gilker has given back as much as he has taken out of the rivers he loves.

By Robert Stewart

STAND CHATTING WITH Warren Gilker in his leafy back yard and you can hear the Grande Cascapédia flowing. It is the river that has run through his richly eventful 74-year life.

And if anglers on that fabled stream have lately been enjoying the best Atlantic salmon fishing in years, it is largely because Gilker has given back to the river as much as he ever took out of it. For without his efforts and unique personality, the Cascapédia might now be yielding very few of what are arguably the world's most valuable fish.

Warren Gilker's ties to the Cascapédia are in his blood, as you learn when he ushers you into the summer kitchen of his gracious 19th-century, white frame home in the village of Grande Cascapédia, Que., where his ancestors settled in 1784 as Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution. He takes a small picture down from the wall. "That's Princess Louise's sketch of my great-great-grandfather sitting there with an umbrella in front of the old house."

He is talking about his great-great-grandfather on his mother's side, Joshua Woodman, and the house that accommodated one of the first parties ever to fish for sport on the Cascapédia. It was headed by the Marquis of Lorne, governor-general of Canada from 1878 to 1883. Lorne brought along his wife, Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's daughter. She was an accomplished amateur artist as well as a keen fisherwoman hence the sketch.

In a bright living room decorated with salmon-fishing memorabilia, including a portrait of himself by noted outdoor artist Peter Corbin, Warren Gilker runs through his story while his wife, Evelyn, serves tea and delectable home-made lemon squares. He illustrates it with photos from albums spread out on the coffee table amid a clutter of books.

"There's my first salmon," he says, producing a black-and-white snapshot worthy of George Eastman, the founder of Kodak and one of many legendary tycoons who once fished the Cascapédia. "I was nine then. My father took me out. I hooked up on the second cast. Eighteen pounds."

Warren's father, Sandy, was a blacksmith like his father before him. "My grandfather had a shop next to the [Maria] Indian reserve, and that's how I learned Micmac, talking to the Indians," Warren says. "I speak English, some Micmac and French. And now I'm getting old and stupid and I mix 'em up. You should hear me sometimes."

Sandy Gilker closed his smithy during the Second World War when fewer and fewer horses came to be used in farming and logging. He turned to guiding the wealthy American fishermen who by then owned the rights to the entire river. "Of course, my father had been on the river all his life," Warren explains. "That salmon above the door is one he caught, a 45-pounder."
Warren too became a guide when he was not cutting timber, driving logs down river, or working on prospecting parties in the bush alongside the famous convicted murderer, Wilbert Coffin. Early pictures of him show a Hollywood image of the rugged woodsman: tall, handsome, muscular and sharp-eyed with a loose, shy grin.

The lodge he worked at, Camp Chaleur, eventually came under the ownership of Charles Englehard, president of Englehard Minerals and Chemicals Co. of Newark, New Jersey. Gilker had a job grading lumber at a local sawmill from which he took a leave of absence during the fishing season. He was about to return to it in 1957 when, as he recounts, Englehard said: "No, I got more money than them mill people, and you're staying."

Englehard could well afford it. His vast precious metals empire was said to have controlled, among other things, the world supply of platinum. But his passion in life was salmon fishing, especially on the Cascapédia, where he kept three lodges for his family and guests: Chaleur, New Dereen and Lorne Cottage. Gilker became full-time manager of Camp Chaleur, which was reserved for Englehard's favorite guests.

Among them were Harry Oppenheimer, the South African diamond king; Robert Oppenheimer (no relation), chief builder of the atomic bomb; Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond; and band leader Benny Goodman. Warren knew them all, plus a succession of other celebrities and chief executive officers of some of the world's largest corporations. He was a particularly close friend of "the good old musician from New York," as he calls the late Benny Goodman. Bobby Orr, who is almost as good a fisherman as he was a hockey player, remains a personal pal.

He became a cherished friend of the Englehard family, frequently visiting their grand estate in Fair Hill, New Jersey, on business and social occasions. There he met the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and John and Jacqueline Kennedy. He once drew giggles from a serving maid in the family mansion when he looked over a table setting of crisp white linen and a confusing array of cutlery and announced: "Don't laugh if I make a mistake. I'm a lumberjack from Canada. I'm used to eating on logs."

Life was good, but the fishing was bad. In 1960, Charles Englehard caught one salmon all season. There were two reasons why the Cascapédia, which has all the natural advantages of a great salmon river, was so bereft of fish. One was that the company that drove pulp logs down to its mill, Consolidated Bathurst, had placed a boom at the mouth of the river that blocked off access to returning salmon. The other was that poaching was running amock.

The local attitude was that "those goddamn rich Americans" had no moral right to every salmon that came upstream, so it was okay to take all you could get illegally. Poachers used nets, dynamite and weighted hooks designed to jig fish.
In 1963, Englehard asked Warren if he would replace the head warden, who was in failing health, on the condition that Warren would return to his job as camp manager when called for. He took up the challenge and launched an all-out anti-poaching campaign.

One night in the summer of 1968, he was chasing a gang of poachers at high speed when his car hit a bridge and careened into the river. The impact was such that his head and hand went through the windshield. The car sank in 20 feet of water, and he pushed so hard on the door in his struggle to get out that the handle went through his shoulder blade. He swam ashore with a broken neck, nine broken ribs and a thumb that later had to be sewn back on his hand.

"I also lost a brand new shoe I had bought that day," he says with characteristic dry humor. "People said that being a Scot, I went back to look for the shoe and that's how I almost drowned."

Warren was left with a permanently numb right hand as a neurological result of breaking the vertebrae in his neck but he had drastically cut down on poaching during his stint as the Elliot Ness of the salmon stream. After his recovery, he returned to work for the Englehard family at the Lorne Cottage camp, a fine old property once owned by the Marquis of Lorne and Princess Louise. He was replaced as chief warden by a now-famous figure on the river, ex-Toronto detective and Grande Cascapédia native Elmo Geraghty.

Gilker's success as chief warden added to the great respect he already enjoyed among all concerned in the salmon fishing community. His prestige had come in handy in a successful campaign by a local committee in 1960 to persuade Consolidated Bathurst to unplug its log boom at the river mouth on the Baie de Chaleur to allow breeding fish upstream.

The fishing had improved considerably by the late 1970s, but two new threats to the health of the river had emerged:
First, the Micmacs claimed the right to net unlimited numbers of salmon in the Baie de Chaleur and sell them commercially, a move which was to result in 1981 in an ugly confrontation between natives and Quebec provincial police on the nearby Restigouche Reserve.

Second, the Quebec government had adopted a policy of opening up private angling waters to the public, which portended reckless overfishing. It looked as if the days of the private lodges on the Cascapédia were coming to an end while the fishing would be ruined.

In 1979, Gilker and his distant cousin, well-known merchant J.A. "Buddy" Campbell, formed a committee to preserve the private waters. But they soon found that they were swimming against the tide of opinion in Quebec, not only in the government but among the public at large.

Meanwhile, the threat from native fishing grew. Micmacs from the Maria Reserve had placed nearly 200 gill nets along the coast leading to the mouth of the Cascapédia, taking a heavy toll on breeding stock. The mood of militancy that was sweeping over natives everywhere in Canada was not conducive to talking them into letting up.

"When we saw we were beaten on the public fishing thing, I spoke to the Mic-Macs and we took the Indians in with us," Gilker recalls. He could, of course, speak to them up to a point in their native tongue, and he had many close friends among them, notably Bernard Jerome, who was chief of the Maria band at the time.

A committee including Gilker, Campbell, a popular local doctor and the mayors of Grande Cascapédia and neighboring Saint Jules hammered out a deal with the natives. They were promised employment in, and hefty revenues from, the sports fishery in return for curtailing their netting to a level that would ensure a good supply of fish could be taken with rod and reel.
On the issue of opening the river to the public, the committee came up with an ingenious plan: Time on the pools would be shared between the private lodges and the members of the public who would fish under the aegis of a well-managed, conservation-minded organization.

The task remained of convincing the Quebec government to make an exception to its public angling policy. Gilker organized "field trips" so that ministers and officials could see the situation for themselves, putting them up at the comfortable Lorne Cottage. The fact that they got in a lot of good salmon fishing probably helped to win their endorsements of the scheme that saved the private lodges.

In 1981, La Societe Gestation General de la Grande Riviere Cascapédia (commonly called "the Society" in that English-speaking enclave on the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec) was formed to handle the public share of the fishing. The Society committed itself to making half of its jobs available to natives, many of whom became guides and support staff. Six members of the 12-person board of directors headed by prominent local citizen Jean-Marie Bujold were from the Maria Reserve and six from the local community; the private lodges were not represented. Fifteen years later, the Society has proved a success for all concerned.

"Many others deserve credit, but without Warren's vision and quiet determined powers of negotiation, the peace accord [with the Micmacs] would never have become a reality," wrote environmentalist and ASF director Nathaniel Pryor Reed. And without the natives in on the enterprise, the Quebec government certainly would never have gone along with the compromise that allowed the private lodges to continue to operate.

Warren and Buddy Campbell shared the Atlantic Salmon Federation's T.B. "Happy" Fraser Award for conservation in recognition of this achievement in 1988, but Warren was not a man to rest on his laurels. He had already embarked on a new career.

Throughout his years as a camp manager, he had made a hobby of blacksmithing, keeping a workshop in which pride of place was given to his grandfather's forge. He fashioned things like iron door hinges and andirons for fireplaces. He was also quite an artist at woodcarving, a hobby he had practised since he started whittling as a boy.

In 1980, Mrs. Englehard approached him to make a weathervane for Lorne Cottage in the shape of a 45-pound salmon her late husband had caught, commenting that if it turned out well, he could probably sell many more like it. Sure enough, anglers who saw the weathervane came to Gilker to commemorate their own catches. He has since made hundreds of them. His clients have included noted sportsman Jack Hemingway (author Ernest's son), former Canadian cabinet minister John Crosby and Bobby Orr.
Gilker's weathervanes have been auctioned for as much as $2,400 at federation dinners. The roof of the American Flyfisher Museum in Manchester, Vt., boasts the biggest of his productions, a replica of a 53-pound salmon caught by Governor-General Lord Stanley in 1892.

He has also found markets for weathervanes in the shape of various birds and animals ranging from roosters to elephants, and for his decorative ironwork and wood carvings. His whimsical style came to full flower in the weathervane he did of himself as a blacksmith that adorns his gloriously messy workshop across the road from his home.

His avocation has kept him busy in his retirement years, which began in 1993. Another hobby collecting books, art and artifacts associated with fishing on the Cascapédia occupies his time when he is not in the workshop.

As for getting out on the river of his life, well, a heart attack a few years that which left him with a pacemaker in his chest put a slight crimp on his outdoor activities. "I could go whenever I like," he explains, "but I don't do much fishing. I talk about it more than I do it these days."

Robert Stewart is a Montreal freelancer, writer of Royal Bank Letter for more than a dozen years and a fly fisherman for more than two decades. He is an occasional contributor to the Atlantic Salmon Journal.

Painting "Warren Gilker" by Peter Corbin

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