He was a familiar sight hiking along on Highway 129 with two white dogs, one of which, according to Sammy, could read, and it would pick out Sammy's mail from all the rest after the postman at Appleby Lake would dump the entire contents of the mail bag on the floor of the post office!

      Since Christmas he had been at Russell Flood's, in Wharncliffe, after being in hospitals in Thessalon and Blind River earlier in the winter.

      On Monday afternoon, January 25th, he had an extreme desire to go back to Axe Lake and insisted on doing so. Not being able to talk him out of it, the Floods drove him and the dogs up to the Axe Lake turn off around 3:30p.m. He had some things he wanted to check out, and one of the reasons for going in was to pick up some dog food, and the Floods were to pick him up again, at this spot, on the 27th.

      Apparently, after they left him, he found the going hard to handle. He had serious thoughts of the warm and hospitable haven he had left behind, and looking at the bleak and cold that would be his lot if he went on to the camp, he decided the whole thing was a mistake, so he turned and headed back home, 10 miles to the Flood's home, but he never made it.

      Harry Boudah found him dead on the side of the road at Beal's Lake at 7 p.m.

      He was born in July, 1910, in Arizona, and apparently lived there long enough to soak up enough heat to last him a life time. From there his father moved the family up into Canada to Dryden.

      Later on they moved to Holland Landing, in Southern Ontario, where his father and mother resided for the remainder of their lives.

      Sammy's first taste of Algoma life began when he landed at the Joe Walker farm, five miles east of Thessalon, in the early forties. It was a threshing day on a September morning, when the field pitchers came upon him snug inside a stook of grain where he had spent the night while hitch-hiking up from home in search of work.

      After a short introdcution he got right into the activities and a couple of good threshing meals under his belt made him decide this was a good place to have his hat.

      He stayed on for a year or so, cutting stove wood and helping with the work on the farm, and from there he gravitated to Wharncliffe, where he worked in the bush operations for Bill Seally, for quite some time.

      There was something about Wharncliffe that attracted him, and though he chose to move to a couple of spots, he lived out his remaining days in the area.

      He cut and sold pulpwood and also cut stove wood for sale.

      Sammy had a total disregard for his own personal comfort, wearing socks on the frigid days of winter was just meant for weaker souls, and he never wore anything on his head, relying on a more than generous crop of red hair to keep the frost out.

      He lived in a small tent one cold winter about twenty years ago with just a candle burning in an old jam tin for heat. On one of those cold mornings, he met a neighbour on the road, who said to him,"Was pretty frosty last night, eh?" and Sammy replied,"Oh not all that bad, I never lit my cande at all."

      He was a character that will be long remembered. Any time of the day or night, you could expect to run across him hiking down the road with his two white Samoyed huskies on ropes, tugging him along with his pack sack A'flapping. He might be heading into Thessalon or Little Rapids for supplies, or heading back home with a pack sack of groceries, a round trip which was approximately 56 miles.

      It was guaranteed to take your mind off your troubles, if rounded a curve and there Sammy, lightly clad, and covered with frost, like a walking snowman!

      Mr. and Mrs. Russell Flood of Wharncliffe sort of took him under their wing, although they found him very independent. He wouldn't accept anything that smacked of charity. They found him extremely honest, a fact attested by all who knew him. He was not a drinking man, which was a good thing for him, for he might have fallen down and froze to death.

      About twice a month, he would head into Thessalon, always walking, never allowing himself the luxury of a bicycle or snowmachine and usually he would pick the foulest weather old Mother Nature could dish out for these occasions. The days the visibility was zero, the schools were all closed down and the snow plows pulled off the road, Sammy would hear all these negative reports on the radio, and would step into his open-toed rubbers, gather up the dogs, and head down to Thessalon to get a first hand feel of the conditions the boys were making all the fuss about.

      On one of these rip snorter days, no doubt, some old guy in Thessalon might very well be calculating the odds of making it across the street to pick up mail from the post office and getting back home again without coming down with pneumonia. Lo and behold, he would run across Sammy and the dogs coming down from the high country knowing he had been travelling in the storm for more than six hours.

      After witnessing this exhibition of polar bear vitality, he might, after getting back home, take a long hard look at himself in the mirror to see just what had happened to his own constitution in the last few years.

      For some reason unknown to any but Sammy, he had to challenge old Mother Nature's wild quirks of adverse weather, by getting out on Highway 129 to test it. He probably got some satisfaction by proving to himself he could handle anything.

      It appears that that ribbon of highway his stage, a proving ground where he could spin out his life's thread, and whether it makes sense to most of us or not, it some how seems fitting that he should end his last minutes on earth on that familiar walk-way with his two white dogs to watch over him.

      I have often thought Sammy missed his calling. He should have been a mail man up in Sam Magee's country in the Yukon. There he would have been in his element, wrestling with a MAN'S winter. He might well by now have been a real legend, his antics projected by another budding Robert Service.