Schefferville

Schefferville is presented as a remote northern settlement at the far end of an air link built to support railway construction and mining. Its importance in the narrative lies both in that working connection to the wider region and in the flight that vanished while carrying supplies there, leaving Alcide’s family with years of unanswered questions.

A northern railway destination

In the early 1950s, the Iron Ore Company of Canada was building a railway through northern Quebec and Labrador to exploit a major iron-ore deposit. The line was intended to connect Sept-Îles and Schefferville, passing through Labrador City. Before the railway could carry everything the project needed, a day-and-night air bridge already connected Sept-Îles and Schefferville, making the settlement a destination in an immense and difficult transport operation.

The air route and Alcide’s work

Alcide had gone to Mont-Joli in autumn 1951 to offer his services as a mechanic to the Iron Ore Company of Canada. Because he was also an experienced pilot, he was soon assigned to the air service operated by Hollinger Ungava Transport, known as HUT. The route gave him long stretches of work over the northern landscape after his domestic life had been shattered, though the account presents work as an escape amid drinking, grief, and a sense of personal decline rather than as a cure for them.

In February 1953, HUT dispatcher Johnny Parent sent Alcide on a supply run to Schefferville because another pilot was ill. Alcide took off from Sept-Îles in a DC-3 with a copilot. The plane was loaded to capacity with cement bags, mechanical parts, and food provisions. Some bad weather was expected near Schefferville; the plan was to make the outward journey by day and return at night, a five-hour trip in all.

The disappearance and its aftermath

The aircraft never returned to Sept-Îles. Radio contact was lost, apparently after the plane strayed into a storm. After several weeks of searching, the company reported that it had disappeared in the frozen expanses of the North, perhaps crashing into a remote lake or even the ocean. It provided a generous pension for Alcide’s children, which helped, among other things, to pay for Loïc’s education.

The loss remained unresolved for more than twenty years. In the 1970s, during the search for the Titanic wreck off Newfoundland, the aircraft’s remains were located on an isolated Labrador peak near the ocean; scattered human remains belonging to Alcide and his copilot were also found. Schefferville thus anchors a journey whose intended destination was known from the start, while the aircraft’s actual resting place—and Alcide’s fate—remained hidden for decades.