Human Interest Human interest Morris Bates: the journey back to Williams Lake
Morris Bates: the journey back to Williams Lake
| Human interest |
By LeRae Haynes
Williams Lake 2012 Honourary Stampede Parade Marshall Morris Bates said that coming back to Williams Lake is both nostalgic and exciting. “I brought my mom to the Stampede last year,” he said. “She was 85 years old: the same age as the Stampede.”
(Morris Bates)
He explained that two years ago, he was in Williams Lake to do a local release for his book, ‘Morris as Elvis: Take a Chance on Life,’ doing book signings at the Stampede and the Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin.
“I haven’t spent a lot of time here since I was young—only in the last two years,” he said. “We lived on a ranch near 150 Mile House and I went to the 150 Mile House School--it’s exciting now to drive into Williams Lake.”
Morris’s young mother left him outside the Ranch Hotel during the 1950 Williams Lake Stampede, and never came back. An aunt and uncle took him in and gave him a wonderful home, according to his book, and his first home was a small rural cabin on remote ranchland near Horsefly Lake.
To avoid Morris being taken to a residential school, his uncle took a job on a ranch in Loomis, Washington where the RCMP had no jurisdiction and couldn’t take the kids away.
After the family moved back to BC, Morris played basketball in high school. He played dances on the Sugarcane reserve from 11:00pm to 8:00am, and when the church bell rang, they’d walk around the dance hall and go to church.
He said he would walk five miles to see an Elvis movie.
Morris said that it was in high school when he started to notice a resemblance between himself and Elvis Presley, adding that a turning point came when he watched a TV special on Elvis’s comeback in 1968. A singer and bass player, he studied Elvis and worked to become an entertainer.
He ended up playing all over western Canada and when Elvis died, Morris was asked to come to Vegas to do his Elvis tribute show. He did the show for 15 years—10 of them in Vegas.
Morris said that when he comes home for a visit, he notices a thousand percent improvement in Sugarcane from when he was a kid. “One change that Morris noted is water. “When I grew up we did not have indoor toilets. In the 50s and 60s there was one single spigot in the middle of the reserve.”
The homes are better, roads are paved and it’s starting to look like a residential district,” he noted. “Back then the government gave you $5,000 to build a home and you couldn’t get a mortgage. The government built little cabins without insulation.
“There was no use putting money into them---you could not sell them because you didn’t own the land under them. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed,” he added. “Young people living on the reserve have so little chance to get ahead. They need to get the land claims figured out so they own the land and own a home.”
He said that when his performing career came to an end, he tried to bring the same energy and commitment to his work as a Native youth counselor on the streets of downtown East Vancouver.
“Elvis was a poor truck driver who recorded some songs for his mom and got on the radio,” Morris says in his book. “I was inspired by Elvis to take a chance on life.”
Morris Bates’ book is available at the Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin.
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