Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game. He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without moving an eye-brow.
At Fort Smith we enjoyed a close study of the American White Pelican _(Pelecanus crythrorhynchos)_ which in the Mountain Rapids of the Slave finds its farthest north nesting-place. It, too, has the saving grace of continuance exhibited by the grey wolf. Mackenzie, a century ago, came across the birds here, and they have persisted ever since, although in the direct line of the river-transit of the fur-traders. A wooded island in the swirl of the rapids is their wild breeding-place, and while we were there the young birds were very much in evidence. We found something fascinating about this bird, so famed in song and story. The plumage is white, relieved with rose and yellow. The pelican nests are slight depressions in the sand, some of them softened with an algoid matting. The eggs are white, rough-shelled, and equal-ended, with, so far as we could see, only one to three in a nest. One by one the illusions of childhood vanish. Some wretched historian proves without shadow of doubt that Sir John Moore at Corunna met decent daylight sepulture and was not “darkly buried at dead of night, the sod with our bayonets turning.” There arises one Ferrero who demonstrates with conclusive exactness that Antony was attracted by Cleopatra’s money and his breast was not stirred by the divine passion. A French scientist robs Benjamin Franklin of the kudos of his lightning-rod. I myself on Vancouver Island have happened to be in at the death of two swans, and neither gurgled a musical note but yielded the ghost in dignified silence. And now candour compels me to report that the Slave River pelican feeds her nestlings on prosaic fish without the slightest attempt to “open to her young her tender breast.” It is rank libel for Byron to state
“Her beak unlocks her bosom’s stream
To still her famished nestling’s scream.”
And, when Keats states so sententiously in _Endymion_, “We are nurtured like a pelican brood,” he merely calls the world at large, fish-eaters.
CHAPTER IX
SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
“Wild for the hunter’s roving, and the use Of trappers in its dark and trackless vales, Wild with the trampling of the giant moose, And the weird magic of old Indian tales.”
–_Archibald Lampman_.
A double cabin is assigned us on _The Mackenzie River_ and the nightmare that haunted us on the scows of wet negatives and spoiled films vanishes. On Tuesday, July 7th, the new steamer takes the water. Although, as we have said, we are in the latitude of St. Petersburg, still twelve hundred miles in an almost due northwest direction stretches between us and that far point where the Mackenzie disembogues into the Polar Ocean. The Union Jack dips and all Fort Smith is on the bank to see us off. On the Fourth of July we had improvised a program of sports for the Dog-Rib and Slavi boys, introducing them to the fascinations of sack-races, hop-step-and-jump, and the three-legged race. The thing had taken so that the fathers came out and participated, and, surreptitiously behind the tepees, the mothers began to hop. Having no popcorn, fizz, or Coney-Island red-hots to distribute, we did the next best thing,–became barkers and gave the calls that go with festivities. So now, as the boat swings out from the soft bank, it is a gay company of urchins who wave their caps and yell, “R-r-r-red lemol-lade, everybody drinks it!”
There is only one Fort Smith! Established for three decades, it has as yet seen no wells dug. The people still climb that steep bank, carrying in pendant buckets from wooden shoulder-yokes water for the daily drinking and ablutions. At four o’clock in the afternoon, should you visit Fort Smith forty years from now, you will see the same daily procession of women and kiddies bearing buckets,–the Aquarius sign of the Fort Smith zodiac. A scoffer at my elbow grins, “Why should they bother to dig wells? It’s cheaper to bring out Orkney-men in sail-boats from Scotland to tote their water up the banks.”
[Illustration: The “Red Lemol-lade” Boys]
At noon we reach the Salt River, twenty-two miles up, which is one of the most marvellous salt deposits in the world. The Salt River winds in crescent curves through a valley wooded with aspen and spruce, and the Salt Plains six miles in extent stretch at the base of hills six or seven hundred feet high. The salt lies all over the ground in beautiful cubes,–pure crystal salt. It is anybody’s salt plain; you can come here when you will and scoop up all you want. These plains have supplied the North country with salt since first white men penetrated the country. At the mouth of the Salt River are the shacks of the present representatives of the Beaulieus,–a family which has acted as guides for all the great men who ever trended northward. They have been interesting characters always, and as we look in upon them to-day neither Beaulieu nor salt has lost his savour.
[Illustration: Salt Beds]
The Slave River from where it leaves Fort Smith to its embouchure in Great Slave Lake is about two hundred miles long, with an average width of half a mile, except where it expands in its course to enclose islands. The big boat behaves beautifully in the water, and on we slip with no excitement until about five o’clock, when a moose and her calf are espied, well out of range. Each in his narrow cell, we sleep the sleep of the just and wake to find ourselves tied to the bank. The captain fears a storm is brooding on Great Slave Lake; so, tethered at the marge of the reedy lagoon, we wait all the forenoon. A corner of Great Slave Lake has to be traversed in order to reach Fort Resolution.
To Samuel Hearne, the Mungo Park of Canada, belongs the double honour of tracing the Coppermine River and discovering Great Slave Lake. Just one hundred and thirty-seven years ago on Christmas Eve, Hearne got his first glimpse of this magnificent inland sea which is cut through the centre by the parallel of 62 deg., and which lies east and west between the meridians of 109 deg. and 117 deg.. No survey of Great Slave Lake has been made, but it is estimated to have a superficial area of 10,500 square miles–just one-third the size of troubled Ireland, and as great as Delaware, Connecticut, and Rhode Island combined.
Great Slave Lake, lying wholly within the forested region, is three hundred miles long, and its width at one point exceeds sixty miles. At every place on its banks where the fur-traders have their stations ordinary farm-crops are grown. Barley sown at Fort Resolution in mid-May reaches maturity in a hundred days; potatoes planted at the same time are dug in mid-September. The gardens of Fort Rae on the North Arm of the Lake produce beets, peas, cabbages, onions, carrots, and turnips. As Fort Rae is built on a rocky island with a bleak exposure, this would seem to promise in some future day generous harvests for the more favoured lands on the south and west.
The names given by the old fur-traders to their posts make the traveller think that in these North lands he, a second Christian, is essaying a new Pilgrim’s Progress. At the south entry to the Lake we are at Resolution; when we cross it we arrive at Providence; away off at the eastern extremity is Reliance; Confidence takes us to Great Bear Lake; and Good Hope stretches far ahead down the lower reaches of the Mackenzie. Fort Resolution on the south side of Great Slave Lake, a little west of the mouth of the Slave, lies back of an island-sheltered entrance.
[Illustration: Unloading at Fort Resolution]
The striking feature as we enter is an immense Roman Catholic Mission school in process of construction, to supplement the existing church and school of that faith. There is neither station of the Mounted Police nor Church of England here; their places are taken by two independent fur-trading concerns operating in opposition to the Ancient Company.
We had been told that the children down North had the kiddies at Fort Smith and Chipewyan “all skinned” for politeness, and we find it even so. The good nuns are trying to make reputable citizens of the young scions of the Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife nations and are succeeding admirably as far as surface indications go. We approach a group of smiling boys arrayed in their Sunday clothes, awaiting a visit of the Bishop. With one accord come off their Glengarry bonnets, smoking caps, and Christie stiffs, and a row of brown hands is extended to greet us. Very trim the laddies look in their convent-made cadet-uniforms, as, standing at “‘Shun!” they answered our every question with, “Yes, missus,” “No, missus.” When we ask their names, without tittering or looking silly they render up the whole list of saintly cognomens. Here they have once more their white brothers “skinned”; no civilised man, woman, or child ever stood up in public and announced his full baptismal name in an audible tone without feeling a fool. I have seen grizzled judges from the bench, when called upon to give evidence as witnesses, squirm like schoolboys in acknowledging that their godfathers had dubbed them “Archer Martin” or “Peter Secord” or whatever it might be.
It is certainly Old Worldish. We speak with Father Laity who, all unconscious of the commotion around him, marches up and down the trail and reads his breviary. He tells us he is a Breton and that in an age that is past he served as a drummer-boy in the Prussian war. The Father came to this shut-in land forty-one years ago.
Great Slave Lake, which presents a formidable barrier to the passage of the smaller land birds, is a breeding station of the sea-swallow. The Arctic tern hatches on its shores, laying its eggs in the beach gravel. The bird, with its slender body, deeply-forked tail, and shrilly-querulous voice, is everywhere in evidence. Does the whole family of lake birds show any more exquisite colour-scheme than the pearly plumage, small coral feet, carmine bill, and black cap of this tern? In a dell carpeted with silverweed and wild mustard, we come across a nest of our persisting friend, the chipping sparrow. Afterward we wander down to the shore and make the acquaintance of Pilot Julien Passepartout, whose calling as Mackenzie River navigator allows him to live out the largeness of his title, though I like best to think of him by the cradle-name his mother gave him, Tenny Gouley, which means “_A man born_.”
Down at the Treaty tent, Dog-Rib and Yellow-Knife are being handed the five one dollar bills which remind each that he is a loyal subject of His Imperial Majesty Edward the Seventh. The Yellow-Knives were so named by Mackenzie far back in 1789 when he first saw them and their weapons of native copper. Each head of a family is issued an identification-ticket which he presents and has punched from year to year. A father “draws treaty” for his olive-skinned branches until each marries and erects a tepee for himself. Government Agent Conroy, big bodied and big hearted, sits on a nail-keg, represents the King, and gives out largesse; and Mr. Laird presides over the Doomsday book. Inside the tent we take up a sheltered position and watch the fun. There are marked zones of names as well as of vegetation. The _Fiddler Anns, Waggon-box Julias_, and _Mrs. Turkeylegs_ of the Plains country are absent here, in the Land of the Yellow-Knife, where neither waggon-boxes nor turkeys flourish.
[Illustration: Coming to “Take Treaty” on Great Slave Lake]
_Mary Catholic_ comes along hand-in-hand with _Samuel the Worm_. Full of animal spirits is a group of four–_Antoine Gullsmouth, Tongue-of-the-Jackfish, Baptiste Wolftail,_ and _The Cat’s Son_. A little chap who announces himself as _T’tum_ turns out to be _Petite Homme_, the squat mate of _The Beloved_. It would be interesting to know just how each of the next couple acquired his name, for neither _Trois-Pouces_ and _Owl-Plucked-Out-His-Eye_ bears evidence of abnormal conditions. On a whole the names are more striking than our John Smiths; Richard Roes, and Tom Browns, as for instance the next three–_Le Pere des Carriboux, Geroux the Eldest, Alixi To-rong-jo. The-man-who-stands-still_ is evidently a stand-patter, while one wonders if it would be right to call _The-Man-Who-Walks-With-The-Red-Hair,_ a Crimson Rambler.
_Carry-the-Kettle_ appears with _Star Blanket_ and _The Mosquito,_ and the next man in line, who has the tongs from a bon-bon box stuck in the band of his hat, rejoices in the name of _Strike-Him-on-the-Back,_ which somehow suggests the match-box in the hotel hall-way. As the dignified father, _Having-Passed-Many-Birthdays,_ claims five dollars each for his four daughters, _Smiling Martin, My-Wigwam-is-White,_ and the twins _Make-Daylight-Appear_ and _Red-Sky-of-the-Morning,_ we acknowledge that here again, in the art of naming, the Yellow-Knife has his white brother “skinned.”
Birth, dowry, divorce, death, each must be noted on the treaty ticket, with a corresponding adjustment of the number of dollar-bills to be drawn from the coffer. If a man between treaty-paying and treaty-paying marries a widow with a family, he draws five dollars each for the new people he has annexed. If there is an exchange of wives (a not-infrequent thing), the babies have to be newly parcelled out. Through all the family intricacies Mr. Conroy follows the interpreter with infinite patience and bonhomie. To the listener it sounds startling as the interpreter, presenting two tickets says, “He married these three people–this fellow.” “O, he give dat baby away to Charles.” When we hear in a dazed way that “_Mary Catholic’s_ son married his dead woman’s sister who was the widow of _Anton Larucom_ and the mother of two boys,” we take a long breath and murmur, “If the angle ACB is not equal to the angle ABC, then how can the angle DEF be equal to the angle DFE?” A young couple, looking neither of them more than sixteen or seventeen, return with a shake of the head five of the fifteen dollars proffered them, and the interpreter explains, “Their little boy died–there’s only two of them.”
Gregory Daniels in a Scottish voice, which cannot quite hide its triumphant ring, pushes back his five dollars and demands forty-five. “I got a wife and siven since last year, she’s a Cree wumman.” Another half-breed asks anxiously if he would be allowed to send for a “permit” like a white man if he refused to take treaty.
One man with long black hair and a cheese-cutter cap creates consternation at the tent-door by claiming treaty for two wives and seventeen children. Mr. Conroy, scenting an attempt to stuff the ballot-box, produces seventeen matches, lays them at my feet on the tent-floor and asks _The-Lean-Man_ to name them. He starts in all right. We hear, “_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish, Birdtail, Little Bone, Sweet Grass, Ermine Skin_,” and then in a monotone he begins over again, “_Long Lodge, Little Pine, Blue Fish_,” and finally gives it up, eagerly asking the interpreter to wait “a-little-sun.” The drama of paying and recording has gone on for half an hour and we have quite forgotten _The-Lean-Man_, when back he comes with _Mrs. Lean-Man, Sr._, and _Mrs. Lean-Man, Jr_. Each spouse leads her own progeny. Seeing is believing, and off _Lean-Man_ goes with a fat wallet. We wander into the stores to see what purchases the Indians will make. One young blade is looking at a box of stogies, and the clerk says, “He can afford to blow in his wad on perfumes and cigars, that chap, he got a silver-fox last winter.” They tell the story of how old Maurice, Chief of the Chipewyans, put his first treaty money in a cassette and kept it there all the year because he had heard one white man tell another that money grows, and he wanted to see if a white man lies when he talks to another white man.
Sometimes, though, the Indian scores one on the white. This was markedly the case when the first treaty payments were made at Lesser Slave. Two young Jews had followed the treaty party all the way in from Edmonton with an Old Aunt Sally stand where you throw wooden balls at stuffed figures at ten shies for a quarter. “Every time you hit ’em, you get a see-gar!” They thought they were going to clear out the Indians, but it took a bunch of Lesser Slave braves just an hour and a quarter to break the bank at Monte Carlo. As an appreciative onlooker reported, “Them chaps pinked them dolls every time.”
As we leave Resolution in the evening through an open door, we get a glimpse of a woman placing her hands in blessing on a boy’s head. It is the mother of one of our boatmen, Baptiste Bouvier, or “De-deed.” The lad in turn puts a hand on each of his mother’s shoulders and kisses her gaily on both cheeks, grabs the camera, and helps us down the bank. The whistle toots impatiently. We both turn and wave our hands to the mother at the open door.
Travelling all night, we do not go to bed, but merely throw ourselves down for an hour’s rest about midnight, for we must not lose the light effects on this great silent lake. As the captain finds, amid shifting sandbars, a fairway for his vessel, there comes offshore the subdued night-noises of the small wild things that populate the wilderness. Here a heavy tree, its footway eaten out by the lake-swirl round a high point, slumps into the water, and joins the fleet of arboreal derelicts. The raucous voice of a night-fowl cries alarm. Then there descends over all a measureless silence. At three o’clock in the morning we haul into the Hay River Mission, where the familiar mosquito-smudge greets us at the landing.
[Illustration: On the Slave]
This was by far the most attractive English Church Mission in the whole North–although comparisons are odorous and yet illuminating. All Hay River had been up over night, anticipating their yearly mail. Red girls and boys of every tribe in the North are housed in this Mission, learning how to play the white man’s game–jolly and clean little bodies they are. It looks like Christmas time. Parcels are being done up, there is much whispering and running to and fro, and the sparkling of black eyes. Would you like to see the letters that _The Teaser, The Twin, Johnny Little Hunter_, and _Mary Blue Quill_ are sending out to their parents? For the most part the missives consist of cakes of pink scented soap tightly wrapped round with cotton cloth, on which the teachers are writing in ink the syllabic characters that stand for each father’s and mother’s name. The soap has been bought with the children’s pennies earned by quill-work and wood-carving done in the long winter nights. The parcels will be passed from one trapper’s jerkin to another, and when, months afterwards, they reach their destination in far tepee or lodge of the deerskin, _Mrs. Woman-of-the-Bright-Foam_ and _Mr. Kee-noo-shay-o_, or _The Fish_, will know their boys and girls “still remember.”
One of the Hay River teachers is married to a Chicagoan who started ten years ago for the Klondike, knew when he had found pure gold, ceased his quest here, and lived happily ever after. Their children are the most fascinating little people we have seen for many months. Life is quaint at the Hay River Mission. The impression we carry away is of earnest and sweet-hearted women bringing mother-love to the waifs of the wilderness, letting their light shine where few there are to see it. We discover the moccasin-flower in bloom, see old Indian women bringing in evergreen boughs for their summer bedding–a delightful Ostermoor mattress of their own devising. Dogs cultivate potatoes at Hay River in summer, and in the winter they haul hay. The hay causes our enquiry, and we learn that this Mission boasts one old ox, deposited here no doubt by some glacial drift of the long ago. And thereby hangs a tale. Charlie, an attache of the school-force, drove this old ox afield day by day. As man and beast returned wearily in the evening, the teachers asked, “Well, what happened to-day, Charlie?” “Bill balked,” was the laconic reply. Tuesday’s question would bring the same response, “Bill balked.” And “Bill balked,” on Wednesday. Thursday it is–“Bill didn’t balk”; and so the days divided themselves into days of blueness and red-letter days.
[Illustration: Dogs Cultivating Potatoes]
The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60 deg. Fahrenheit, and the monthly mean for January, 18 deg. below zero. Vegetables of their own growing, with whitefish from the lake, furnish almost the entire food supply of this thrifty Mission, one season’s harvest giving them a thousand bushels of potatoes, fifteen of turnips, and five each of beets, carrots, and parsnips, with two hundred cabbages and over ten thousand whitefish.
Hay River has never been explored. It is supposed to head near the source of the Nelson and to flow northeast for three hundred miles before emptying, as we see it, into Great Slave Lake. This river marks the limit of those grassy plains which extend at intervals all the way from Mexico northward. Bishop Bompas, years ago, descended a long stretch of the river, discovering not far back from where we stand a majestic cataract, which he named the “Alexandra Falls” after the then Princess of Wales. He describes it as a perpendicular fall one hundred feet high, five hundred feet wide, and of surpassing beauty. “The amber colour of the falling water gives the appearance of golden tresses twined with pearls.”
Crossing Great Slave Lake, we think of Chant-la, Chief of the Slavis at Hay River. Bishop Reeves was anxious to convert him to the Christian faith, but had great difficulty in giving Chant-la a proper conception of the Trinity. The old man would not say he believed or understood what was inexplicable to him. Setting out once on a long journey, the cleric adjured the Chief to struggle with the problem during his absence. The Bishop returning, Chant-la came out in his canoe to meet him, eagerly reporting that all now was clear. “It is like Great Slave Lake,” said the old man. “It is all water now, just like the Father. When winter comes it will be frozen over, but Great Slave Lake just the same; that is like the Son. In the spring when the ice breaks and the rain makes the snow into slush, it is still Great Slave Lake; and that is like the Holy Ghost.”
Beyond Great Slave Lake, forty-five miles down the Mackenzie, we reach Fort Providence, as strongly French in its atmosphere as Hay River is British. Our coming is a gala day. The hamlet flies three flags, the free trader sports his own initials “H.N.,” the Hudson’s Bay Company loyally runs the Union Jack to the masthead, over the convent floats the tri-colour of France. Fort Providence is hot. We walk to the convent and are hospitably received by the nuns. They call their Red flock together for us to inspect and show us marvellous handwork of silk embroidery on white deerskin. The daintiest of dainty slippers calls forth the question, “Where are you going to find the Cinderella for these?” A blank look is my answer, for no one in Providence Convent has ever heard of Cinderella! But then, convents are not supposed to be the repositories of man-knowledge (although a half-breed, on our passage across the lake, did whisper a romantic story of a Klondiker who assailed this very fortress and tried to carry off the prettiest nun of the north). The garden of the Sisters is a bower of all the old-fashioned flowers–hollyhocks, wall-flower, Canterbury bells, and sweet-William–and down in the corner a young girl of the Dog-Ribs discovers to us a nest of fledgling chipping sparrows.
As we landed from the boat, Tenny Gouley dressed in his Sunday best had beamed, “Nice day–go veesit.” And “veesit” we did. Mrs. Herron, of the H.B. Company, has spent many years at Old Fort Rae, and her thoughts hark back to one severe winter spent there. She turns to the wife of our good Captain with, “Hard living, Mrs. Mills, dry suckers.” It is a short speech, but fraught with meaning. I honestly think a dry sucker (well sanded) the least succulent of all the impossible fish-dishes of the North. There are many young Herrons all as neat as new pins, the last–no, the latest, enshrined in a moss-bag. Tradition tells that once, when they were fewer in number, the father took the flock out to Winnipeg to school. The children cried so at the parting that Mr. Herron turned and brought them all back with him to the Mackenzie!
[Illustration: David Villeneuve]
The most interesting man in all Fort Providence is David Villeneuve, one of the Company’s Old Guard. He was anxious to be “tooken” with his wife and grandchild, and over the camera we chatted. David goes through life on one leg–fishes through the ice in winter, traps, mends nets, drives dogs, and does it all with the dexterity and cheerfulness of a young strong man. He tells of his accident. “I was young fellow, me, when a fish-stage fell on me. I didn’t pay no notice to my leg until it began to go bad, den I take it to the English Church to Bishop Bompas. He tole me de leg must come off, an’ ax me to get a letter from de priest (I’m Cat-o-lic, me) telling it was all right to cut him. I get de letter and bring my leg to Bompas. He cut ‘im off wid meat-saw. No, I tak’ not’in’, me. I chew tobacco and tak’ one big drink of Pain-killer. Yas, it hurt wen he strike de marrow.”
“Heavens! Didn’t you faint with the awful pain?”
“What? Faint, me? No. I say, ‘Get me my fire-bag, I want to have a smok’.'”
CHAPTER X
PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
“Never the Spirit was born: the Spirit shall cease to be never. Never was time, it was not; end and beginning are dreams. Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the Spirit, Death hath not touched it at all, though dead the house of it seems.”
We have just finished supper and are sitting reading on the upper deck about seven o’clock, when a cry comes from below, followed by the rushing back and forth of moccasined feet. In a flash Bunny Langford, one of the engineers, has grabbed a lifebuoy, runs past us to the stern, and throws it well out toward a floating figure.
It is De-deed, De-deed who had smilingly helped us aboard at Resolution just twenty-four hours before. Finishing his turn at stoking, he had gone to draw a bucket of water, leaned over too far, and fallen, carrying the hatch with him. At first we think nothing of the incident, as he is a good swimmer and the current is with him. As soon as the startled people realise what has happened the steamer’s engines are reversed and a boat is lowered. We call out to De-deed to swim to the buoy, but he doesn’t see it or doesn’t understand. The black head gets smaller in the distance; it disappears, and comes up again. Down it goes for the second time. A strange, constricted feeling comes into our throats as we cry out, “Swim, De-deed, the boat is coming! They are almost up to you!” The boat, pulling hard against the current, seems but a dozen yards away. Will he hold up? As we look, the head sinks, _and it does not come up_. Within a few feet of buoy and boat, the body of De-deed disappears for the last time. We search for an hour or more with grappling irons, but he is never seen again. A strange silence settles down above and below deck, and all night long two faces flit before us–the grave face of the mother calling down blessings on her boy, the rallying smile of De-deed bidding her good-by and telling her all is well. It is a brave and happy spirit which, in the “Little Lake” of the Mackenzie, goes out with the current.
The Mackenzie River, “La Grande Riviere en Bas,” as the people of Resolution call it, on whose waters we are now fairly embarked, is the greatest water-way in the British Empire, and of earth’s great rivers the one least traversed by man. Counting back from the headwaters of either its more northerly tributary the Peace or its southern feeder the Athabasca, the length of the river is three thousand miles. At Little Lake, where it issues out of Great Slave Lake, the Mackenzie is eight miles wide, and its delta a thousand miles below here has an expansion of fifty miles. The average width of the stream, as we traverse it from source to mouth, is a mile and a half, widening out often in its sweep to two and a half to three miles.
From Little Lake the current is somewhat sluggish, the river bank seldom exceeding one hundred feet in height until we reach what is known as “The Head of the Line.” Before the advent of steam on the Mackenzie, when the patient voyager made his way up south from the ocean, it was at this point that the tracking-line was exchanged for oars. The plains bordering the river here are forested with white spruce and broken with muskeg and lakes. The statistician on board works out that the volume of water the Mackenzie carries to the sea is half a million feet a second. No one is wise enough to challenge his calculation, and we merely hazard a wonder if this most magnificent water-power will ever be used for commercial and economic purposes. There is surely enough “white coal” rushing by us to turn the wheels of the factories of a continent. The Mackenzie is the only river whose basin is cut by a thousand mile range. The sources of the Peace and the Liard lie on the west side of the Rockies, from where these giant feeders bring their tribute to the main river through passes in that range.
At intervals all the way down the river to Fort Simpson we are treated on our right hand to views of the Horn Mountains, which slope away on their north side but show a steep face to the south. Along our course the bluish Devonian shales are capped by yellow boulder-clay.
We awaken on Friday, July 10th, to find ourselves at Rabbitskin River and everybody busy carrying on wood for fuel. By ten o’clock we are at Fort Simpson in latitude 62 deg., the old metropolis of the North. Fort Simpson is built on an island where the Liard River joins the Mackenzie, the river being a mile and a half wide at this point. The foundation of the fort dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was known in fur annals as “The Forks of the Mackenzie.”
Simpson is essentially a has-been. We look upon the warehouses of its quadrangle with their slanting walls and dipping moss-covered roofs and try to conjure up the time long past when all was smart and imposing. In those days when the Indians brought in their precious peltries they were received and sent out again with military precision and all that goes with red tape and gold braid. Surely the musty archives of Simpson hold stories well worth the reading! We would fain linger and dream in front of this sun-dial across whose dulled face the suns of twenty lustrums have cast their shadows, but we begrudge every moment not spent in fossicking round the old buildings. We seek for threads which shall unite this mid-summer day to all the days of glamour that are gone. In a rambling building, forming the back of a hollow square, we come across the mouldy remains of a once splendid museum of natural history, the life work of one Captain Bell of the Old Company. It gives us a sorry feeling to look at these specimens, now dropping their glass eyes and exposing their cotton-batting vitals to the careless on-looker, while the skeleton ribs of that canoe with which Dr. Richardson made history so long ago add their share to the general desolation. In a journal of the vintage of 1842 we read an appeal for natural history exhibits sent to Fort Simpson by an official of the British Museum. He writes,
[Illustration: Hudson’s Bay House, Fort Simpson]
“I may observe that in addition to the specimens asked for, any mice, bats, shrew-mice, moles, lizards, snakes or other small quadrupeds or reptiles would be acceptable. They may either be skinned or placed in rum or strong spirits of any kind, a cut being first made in the side of the body to admit the spirits to the intestines.”
Of all the rare humour disclosed in the old records, this entry most tickles my fancy.
I think of the little group that we had forgathered with at Chipewyan, driven even in this year of grace to lavender-water and red ink, when permits run dry. One turns back the clock to the time of the Chartists and the year of the nuptials of the young Queen in England. We see up here on the fringe of things the dour and canny but exceedingly humorous Adam McBeaths, John Lee Lewises, and George Simpsons, the outer vedette of the British Empire; and, seeing them, get some half-way adequate conception of what a modicum of rum or “strong spirits of any kind” meant in the way of cheer at old Fort Simpson in those days. When we try to get a picture of one of these Hudson’s Bay men gravely opening a shrew-mouse, mole, or “other small quadruped,” while his chum pours in the _aqua vitae_ or precious conversation water, we declare that science asks too much.
An outer stairway leading to the second story of a big building invites us. Opening the door, we find ourselves in the midst of an old library, and moth and rust, too, here corrupt. We close the door softly behind us and try to realise what it meant to bring a library from England to Fort Simpson a generation ago. First, there arose the desire in the mind of some man for something beyond dried meat and bales of fur. He had to persuade the authorities in England to send out the books. Leather-covered books cost something six or seven decades ago, and the London shareholders liked better to get money than to spend it. We see the precious volumes finally coming across the Atlantic in wooden sailing-ships to Hudson Bay, follow them on the long portages, watch them shoot rapids and make journeys by winter dog-sled, to reach Simpson at last on the backs of men. The old journals reveal stories of the discussion evoked by the reading of these books afterward as, along with the dried fish, deer-meat, and other inter-fort courtesies, they passed from post to post. Was never a circulating library like this one. And now the old books, broken-backed and disembowelled, lie under foot, and none so poor to do them reverence. Everything is so old in this North that there is no veneration for old things.
It is but a few years since the founder of this library died, and his son now sits in his saddle at Fort Simpson. If you were to wander across the court, as I did to-day, and look into the Sales Shop, you would see the presentation sword of this last-generation Carnegie, ignobly slicing bacon for an Indian customer. _Sic transit gloria mundi_!
What are the books which this sub-Arctic library sent out? We get down on the floor and gently touch the historic old things. Isn’t it Johnson who says, “I love to browse in a library”? Judging by the dust and cobwebs, there hasn’t been much browsing done among these volumes for years. Present-day Simpson has seldom “fed on the dainties that are bred in a book.” Here is a first edition of _The Spectator_, and next it a _Life of Garrick_, with copies of _Virgil_, and all _Voltaire_ and _Corneille_ in the original. A set of Shakespeare with exquisite line drawings by Howard shows signs of hard reading, and so does the _Apology for the Life of Mr. Colly Cibber_. One wonders how a man embedded in Fort Simpson, as a fly in amber, would ever think of sending to the _Grand Pays_ for _Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy_, yet we find it here, cheek by jowl with _The Philosophy of Living or the Way to Enjoy Life and Its Comforts. The Annual Register of History, Politics, and Literature of the Year 1764_ looks plummy, but we have to forego it. The lengthy titles of the books of this vintage, as for instance, _Death-Bed Triumphs of Eminent Christians, Exemplifying the Power of Religion in a Dying Hour_, bring to mind the small boy’s definition of porridge–“fillin’, but not satis-fyin’.” Two more little books with big titles are _Actors’ Budget of Wit and Merriment, Consisting of Monologues, Prologues and Epilogues_, and _The London Prisons, with an Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in Them_.
But the book that most tempts our cupidity is _Memoirs of Miss A—- n, Who Was Educated For a Nun, with Many Interesting Particulars_. We want that book, we want to take it on with us and read it when we reach the Land of the Eskimo, where the Mackenzie slips into the Arctic by all its silver mouths. We lift the volume up, and put it down again, and we hunger to steal it. Jekyll struggles with Hyde. At last the Shorter Catechism and the Westminster Confession of Faith triumph; we put it down and softly close the door behind us. And ever since we have regretted our Presbyterian training.
At Fort Simpson, it is like walking across a churchyard or through an old cathedral. Here men lived and wrought and hoped, cut off from their kind, and did it all with no thought of being heroic. We walk along the shore to watch Indian women busied in making a birchbark canoe and in washing clothes with washboards–the old order and the new. A little dive into the mosquito-ridden woods discloses a wonderful patch of Pyrola and a nest of Traills’ flycatcher, and makes us wish that the minutes were longer and the mosquitoes fewer. What a beautiful tiling this Pyrola is, with its inverted anthers and the cobwebby margins of its capsule! Its bracted, nodding flowers run through all shades of white, pale yellow, and dark yellow.
Down on the beach we chat with a prospector and his son, a lad of fifteen, who are building a skiff in which to ascend the Liard, hunting gold. Yesterday a Mr. and Mrs. Carl and a Mr. and Mrs. Hall passed us on the river. Outfitted for two years, they will prospect for gold in the Nahanni Mountains and toward the headwaters of the Liard. One of the couples has just come out from Glasgow and this is their honeymoon. We half envy them their journey. Can anything compare with the dear delights of travelling when you do not know and nobody knows just what lies round the next corner?
[Illustration: A Slavi Family at Fort Simpson]
The dogs at Simpson are “wicked.” Picking our way among them, I particularly approve this term of the natives, attributing as it does a human conception and malice aforethought to these long-legged wraiths. The first articulate sound an Indian child of the Mackenzie learns to make is “Mash!” an evident corruption of the French “_Marche_.” This is what Shakespeare meant when he speaks of “a word to throw at a dog.” A brown baby just emerged from the cocoon stage of the moss-bag toddles with uplifted pole into a bunch of these hungry mongrels and disperses them with a whack of the stick and the lordly “Mash!” of the superior animal. For our own part we are “scared stiff,” but follow along in the wake of our infant protector to a wee wooden church which staggers under the official title, “The Cathedral of St. David.”
[Illustration: A Slavi Type from Fort Simpson]
We have had occasion to speak of the splendid service rendered to Northern and Western Canada by the Hudson’s Bay Company and by the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. A third factor through the years has been building Empire with these. Are we not as a people too prone to minimise the great nation-building work performed by the scattered missionaries in the lone lands beyond the railway? Ostensibly engaged in the work of saving souls, Canadian missionaries, both Roman and English, have opened the gates of commerce, prosecuted geographical discovery, tried to correct social evils, and added materially to our store of exact science. Through their influence, orphanages have been founded, schools established, and hospitals opened. Creeds take a secondary place to deeds in this land, and when you discuss a man, be he cleric or layman, the last thing you ask is, “To what church does he belong?” Incidentally, it does seem rather odd that with Scottish blood running through the veins of nine-tenths of the people of this North as yet no Presbyterian missionary has penetrated beyond the latitude of Edmonton. The great Churches of England and Rome, north of the Athabasca, divide the field between them.
The records of the whole missionary world show no more striking figure than that of Bishop Bompas of the Anglican Church. We have already had two glimpses of this young Cockney curate; once, hoisting his homemade Union Jack on the ox-cart at St. Cloud, and, again, passing north as the wild-fowl flew south in October, 1865, chronicled by the Chipewyan scribe merely as “a Protestant missionary coming in a canoe from the Portage.” In the forty years of missionary life which intervened between his coming into the North and his death in the Yukon just two years ago, only twice did the Bishop emerge from these Northern fastnesses. It is literal truth to state that no one on any part of the world’s map has ever made so many long and toilsome journeys as did this man. With his sheep scattered over a country a million square miles in extent, we might compare a parochial visit of this parson to a barge-journey from London to Constantinople, replacing the European capitals by Hudson’s Bay forts, and substituting for Europe’s vineyards and pleasant vales an unbroken line of jack-pine and muskeg.
We are told that Bishop Bompas’s father was Dicken’s prototype for Sergeant Buzfuz. A new vista would open up to the counsel for Mrs. Bardell could he turn from his chops and tomato-sauce to follow the forty-years’ wandering in the wilderness of this splendid man of God, who succeeded, if ever man succeeds, in following Paul’s advice of keeping his body under.
Bishops Bompas was one of the greatest linguists the Mother Country ever produced. Steeped in Hebrew and the classics when he entered the Northland, he immediately set himself to studying the various native languages, becoming thoroughly master of the Slavi, Beaver, Dog-Rib, and Tukudk dialects. When Mrs. Bompas sent him a Syriac testament and lexicon, he threw himself with characteristic energy into the study of that tongue. There is something in the picture of this devoted man writing Gospels in Slavi, primers in Dog-Rib, and a Prayer Book in syllabic Chipewyan, which brings to mind the figure of Caxton bending his silvered head over the blocks of the first printing-press in the old Almonry so many years before. What were the “libraries” in which this Arctic Apostle did his work? The floor of a scow on the Peace, a hole in the snow, a fetid corner of an Eskimo hut. His “Bishop’s Palace,” when he was not afloat, consisted of a bare room twelve feet by eight, in which he studied, cooked, slept, and taught the Indians.
They tell you stories up here of seeing the good Bishop come back from a distant journey to some isolated tribe, followed at heel by a dozen little Indian babies, his disciples for the days to come. Bishop Bompas lived in one continent, but manifested in two, keeping himself closely in touch with the religious and Church growth of the Old World. When the British press had been given over to any particular religious-controversial subject, and the savants had finally disposed of the matter to their own satisfaction, travelling out by summer traverse or winter dog-sled would come a convincing pamphlet by Bishop Bompas, to upset altogether the conclusions of the wranglers.
There is one tale of this man which only those can appreciate who travel his trail. An Indian lad confides to us, “Yes, my name is William Carpenter–Bishop Bompas gave me my name, he was a good man. He wouldn’t hurt anybody, he never hit a dog, he wouldn’t kill a mosquito. He had not much hair on his head, and when it was _meetsu_, when the Bishop eat his fish, he shoo that mosquito away and he say, ‘Room for you, my little friend, and room for me, but this is not your place: go.'”
We call upon the present incumbents of the little church of St. David. They are young people, the Rev. and Mrs. Day, putting in their first year in this Northern charge. Their home with its spotless floors and walls papered with old copies of _The Graphic_ and _Illustrated London News_ is restful and attractive. The garden of the parsonage shows an amount of patient work on the part of some one. Potatoes eighteen inches high and peas twice the height of this, with turnips and cabbages and cauliflower are good to look at. There are records to show that, years ago, Fort Simpson produced tomatoes and decent crops of barley.
[Illustration: Interior of St. David’s Cathedral]
Entering the little church we see the neat font sent here by Mrs. Bompas, “In dear memory of Lucy May Owindia, baptised in this Church, January, 1879.” Owindia was one of the many red waifs that the good Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took into their big hearts. Her story is a sad one. Along the beach at Simpson, _Friday_, an Indian, in a burst of ungovernable temper murdered his wife and fled, leaving their one baby to perish. It was not until next day that the little one was found, unconscious and dying. The Bishop and Mrs. Bompas took the child into their loving care. To the name Owindia, which means _The Weeping One_, was added the modern Lucy May, and the little girlie twined herself closely round the hearts of her protectors. When the time seemed ripe, Owindia was taken back to England to school, but the wee red plant would not flourish in that soil. She sickened and died. Hence the memorial and the inscription we read this July day. Much history of militant energy, much of endurance, and countless chapters of benevolence did the good Bishop write into the history of the North before, off on the Yukon side in 1906, “God’s finger touched him and he slept.”
Missionaries of the present day are not without their troubles. Mrs. Day tells of potato-whiskey making in some illicit still back in the mosquito-woods, the results of which she fears; and, even as we speak, an Indian lunatic pokes his head through the palings of the potato-patch. From far back in Fort Nelson, British Columbia, and from Fort Liard, the Hudson’s Bay men have come to make their reports to Mr. Brabant at Simpson. They brought their wives and babies with them, brought also a quantity of beautiful porcupine-quill work, Fort Liard being one of the few places in the North where this art flourishes. Tomorrow they will start back, tacking against the stream, as the imported brides are doing before them.
To dive into the journals of the past, of which the loft above the offices here at Simpson is full, is even more interesting than talking with the people of the present. We take 1837, the year which saw the accession in England of the young and well-beloved Queen, and from these musty books unearth a running commentary of what is doing in Fort Simpson in that year.
“_1837, January 1_. The people were brought into the Hall, and enjoyed their meal with great appetites, being also treated to a glass of wine and a fathom of tobacco and a pipe. Wind East.”
“_1837, February 11_. Rabbits are numerous, but the ladies of the Establishment make no great effort in snaring them.”
“_1837, February 14_. Late last night arrived a woman, _Thawyase_, and a boy, the family of the late _Thoesty_. They have all come to take refuge here as they are starving. The woman at dusk decoyed old Jack away to camp in the woods–and the old fellow has found a mate.”
One wonders if either _Thawyase_, the decoyed Jack, or the old chronicler was conscious of the fact that this was St. Valentine’s Day.
“_1837, March 27_. Two geese have been seen to-day, the first this season.”
“_1837, May 2_. _Marcel_ sowed some oats. Mosquitoes begin to become annoying.”
“_1837, May 5_. Wild fowl are beginning to frequent the small lakes of the neighbourhood. The willows and young trees are now budding forth beautifully.”
“_1837, May 18_. _Hope_ began to plough this morning with the bull, but as this is the first time he has been yoked, the day’s work is found to be but poor.”
“_1837, May 19_. Felix and Roderick McLeod made twelve bags of pemmican to-day.”
_1837, May 21_. The Mackenzie River broke up to-day, and continued drifting pretty thick till evening.”
“_1837, June 18_. Some of the Indians killed a bear before the door and it supplied us with a little fresh meat.”
“_1837, June 19_. Flies so numerous that we are under the necessity of putting our cattle into the stable, otherwise they will fall victims to the cruel insects.”
“_1837, June 20_. Weather very suffocating, thermometer 85 above at three p.m., not as much as a cloud to be seen in the firmament and not the least air to afford any refreshment; this along with the solitude of the time is enough to make people dull. No Indian from any quarter: well supplied with ammunition last spring, they forget us when they can get their own mouths satisfied. Ashley grinding barley in the steel mill.”
“_1837, June 21_. _Le Mari_ has just brought in some fish and a little bearskin in order to get a chemise, he says he is not able to hunt without a chemise, as there are so many flies just now. I have taken it upon myself to give him the shirt on credit.”
Here a new hand writes the records, untrammelled by any orthographic rules.
“_1837, June 24_. Flys very numerus and trublsome to the Cattel.”
“_1837, July 11_. Starvan Indians going and coming ourly.”
“_1837, July 13_. Six squas arrived with plenty Bearrys–that’s all they subsist on in this part of the River.”
“_1837, July 26_. Barley is getting ripe. But small birds nip off the ends of the stalks as fast as it ripens.”
“_1837, August 23_. Last night the bull broke into one of the gardens where oats was sown and eat the whole up.”
“_1837, September 18_. An Express arrived from Fort Norman with despatches from the Gentlemen of the Arctic Discovery Expedition, and it is most satisfying to learn that the first object of the Expedition was successfully accomplished: on the 4th August the Company’s flag was planted on Point Barrow.”
“_1837, September 19th_. _Louson_ put parchment in the window-frames.”
“_1837, October 11_. Ice is forming since yesterday along the beach.”
“_1837, November 1_. This being the holiday for All Saints, the men though no saints celebrated it off duty. The weather cold but fine.”
“_1837, November 2_. I have been these two days occupied with the blacksmith in making an oven, and this evening it being finished we give it a fair trial by placing a large trout in it for supper and it is found to answer most excellently.”
“_1837, November 3_. Strong northwest wind with drift and cold. About one o’clock of last night the Aurora had a most unusual appearance, seemingly black in place of the white commonly observed and forming an arch from east to west, consisting of five streaks, here and there broken off.”
“_1827, November 5_. Blacksmith making iron runners for our traineaux from old gun-barrels.”
“_1837, November 30_. This being the anniversary of the Tutelar Saint of Scotland, we had in addition to our usual dinner a roasted swan and a moose-nose, a rice pudding, a cranberry tart, and a glass of wine.”
“_1837, December 1_. I was obliged to give four pounds of dried meat to the dogs for there are some that are almost dead and they et all the windows of the Forge.”
“_1837, December 2_. Three of the Fort women fell into a fit of insanity and kept all of the men at the Fort to hold them and prevent them devouring themselves.”
_December 25_. Thermometer 35 below the cypher this morning, this being Christmas no labour done. Wind N.W.”
“_1838, January 1_. The morning was ushered in by a salute fired by our people at the windows and doors, after which they came to wish us a Happy New Year–and in return, in conformity to the custom of the country they were treated, the men with half a glass of brandy each, and the women with a kiss, and the whole of them with as many cakes as they choose to take and some raisins. One of our gentlemen who had a bottle of shrub treated them to a glass, and after some chit-chat conversation they retired, firing a salute on going out. In the evening they played at Blind-man’s-buff, concluding the fete by a supper in the Hall. I also gave each of the men a fathom of twist tobacco and a clay pipe.”
CHAPTER XI
FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
“With souls grown clear
In this sweet atmosphere,
With influences serene,
Our blood and brain washed clean,
We’ve idled down the breast
Of broadening tides.”
–_Chas. G.D. Roberts_.
About ten o’clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past. We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the Mackenzie’s channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.
[Illustration: Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora]
At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so blatantly dub “progress.”
It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.
Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded, and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man’s development and acceptance–banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to the _inconnu_ and the Indian.
It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream to its mouth, “discovering” a river along whose shores centuries before had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race, wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed “the red men” and “the American Indian.”
We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl–gulls in great variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the banks–the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.
Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly south to kinder skies, the _inconnu_ hurry northward seeking the sea. Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed’s “_Le convert du bon Dieu_,” silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or unwitting of shelter.
According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great hunter, man.
In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power–the Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his children.
Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is saying “Spring,” full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.
Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of life; their unvoiced prayer is, “Give us our fish in due season.” From the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and dipped and seined their sustenance–inconnu, jack-fish, grayling, white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter’s ice or summer’s spate, forever has been the people’s highway–a trail worn smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.
Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph, self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife, Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand despoiled the cache of another. A man’s word was his bond, and a promise was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.
About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size. One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is “just like a town.” Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered the fringed gentian (_Gentiana crinata_) with its lance-shaped leaves, delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63 deg.. Purple asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd’s-purse or mother’s-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and purple columbines already forming seed.
Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche Trempe-l’eau or “The Rock by the Riverside,” an outcrop of Devonian limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above the river. We come into view of the “boucans” or beds of lignite coal which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in 1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back, for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of “small white buffalo” which they hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the _Sass-sei-yeuneh_ or “Foolish Bear” of the Slavis.
[Illustration: Indians at Fort Norman]
It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.
The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water, probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.
March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre of the lake freezes over.
When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman’s Day, with no one going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle “Boyne Water.” The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the “Nest of the Wind” of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that the Great Spirit, “in the beginning,” spread out there to dry. We find Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning, the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library, and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas, beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and pink-teas.
[Illustration: Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman]
[Illustration: The Ramparts of the Mackenzie]
Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.
Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for. The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection. If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.
It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest spectaculars of our whole six months’ journeying,–the Ramparts. The great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers, and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, “turned on edge,” flows, maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring, the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the cliffs above.
As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted, our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of this Arctic night repays the whole summer’s travel. The setting of the picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and envelopes the earth as with a garment,–the light that never was on sea or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to pass the portal into the Arctic World.
[Illustration: Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth]
A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock, ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river; and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.
The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say our “joggafy” lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there? Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,–Mrs. Pierre la Hache. Tenny wears his “other clothes” and a resplendent l’Assumption belt, for this is his home. “It looks like a swan on the water,” he says, when the first white houses come into view. “You like it, do you not?” “Like it? Good Hope is God’s Country!” There is no place like home, even when it is the Arctic Circle!
The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the dogs’ tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr. C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, this is the man who has the greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employes a pension after thirty years’ service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr. Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.
Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses, and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians. Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide world.
We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine and _galettes_, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the window-ledge and look around the walls of the “homey” room we wonder if this really can be the “Arctic Circle, 23-1/2 deg. from the North Pole, which marks the distance that the sun’s rays,” etc., etc., as the little geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women, earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and girls–the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend runs,–“Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a bottle and a little loaf of bread.”
Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: “And how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?” Quick came the girlie’s reply, “They had to leave The Company’s service!”
Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. “We get a mail every year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail.” This is to her the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good Hope on the Arctic Circle.
We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and devotion to The Company,–these are the two key-notes of her character. Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made “outside” to Montreal when she was a young mother–it was just fifty years ago,–measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died, “_Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants_!” Some years after this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies, snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until it was torn from her by force.
We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable gardens are in evidence here,–potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages. Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson’s Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the store of the “free-trader,” he says, “Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman, kindly, and dear, but she doesn’t approve of me. She makes a point of not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church.”
“Why?” we ask, much surprised.
“Oh,” with a laugh, “you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B. Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns and a tail!”
We step into the “Little Church of the Open Door,” and sit down and think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a saint,–St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, “Our Lady of Good Hope,” the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.
CHAPTER XII
ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
“Behold, I sing a pagan song of old,
And out of my full heart,
Hold forth my hands that so I would enfold The Infinite thou art.
What matter all the creeds that come and go, The many gods of men?
My blood outcasts them from its joyous flow.”
–_A Pagan Hymn_.
“The Eskimo is a short, squat, dirty man who lives on blubber,” said text-books we had been weaned on, and this was the man we looked for. We didn’t find him.
It was at Arctic Red River, one hundred and ninety miles of river-travel since we cut the Polar Circle, that we came upon our first Eskimo, the true class-conscious Socialist of Karl Marx, the one man without a master on the American continent. A little band of Kogmollycs they were, men, women, and kiddies, who had come in to trade silver-fox skins for tobacco and tea at the Post of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
On the rocks they sat, waiting for the new steamer to make her landing, and much excited were they over the iron bowels of this puffing kayak of the white men. An Eskimo generally lets you know what he thinks, and this is a basic difference between him and the Indian. An Indian is always trying to impress you with his importance; he thinks about his dignity all day and dreams of it at night. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is a man who commands your respect the moment you look at him, and yet he is withal the frankest of mortals, affable, joyous, fairly effervescing with good-humour. His attitude toward the world is that of a little half-Swiss, half-Chinese baby friend of mine who, in an ecstacy of good-will when she saw her first Christmas-tree, clutched me tightly round the neck with, “Everybody are my friend.”
One of the Kogmollycs, rejoicing in the name of Wilfrid Laurier, strode on deck with the swing of a cavalryman and signified his willingness to trade. Loading down my hunting-coat with pictures, pipes, tobacco, looking-glasses, needles, files, knives, I climbed over the cliffs with him to his hut. Down on the floor we sat. Wilfrid put his treasures between his knees before him, I sat opposite, and the barter began. “What for this fellow, huh?” and he held up a piece of carved ivory, a little triangular mincing-knife, a fur mat that his wife had made, or the skin of a baby-seal. The first thing he asked for was scented soap, the ring that I was wearing, and my porcupine-quill hat-band which looked good to him; every exchange was accompanied with smiles, each bargain sealed with a handshake.
Wilfrid Laurier is doing his part toward bridging the old chasm of animosity existing between the Eskimo and their next-door neighbours, the Loucheux Indians to the South. Wilfrid, in taking to himself a Loucheux woman to wife, has done what the Seventh Henry of England did when he married Elizabeth of York. Wilfrid’s son and heir holds the same place in Northern history as did Henry VIII, who united in himself the claims of the rival Roses of York and Lancaster.
[Illustration: A Kogmollye Family]
Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko asked us into her hut, where we reclined on fur mats while the whole family, wreathed in smiles, tumbled over themselves to do us honour. One by one they danced for us, stopping to tell their names and to ask ours. “Major Jabussy,” “Missa Blown,” they got the names all right but applied them promiscuously, and then went into roars of laughter at their blunder. The merriment was infectious. Let no one waste further sympathy over the poor benighted Eskimo of this Canadian North. The Mackenzie River Eskimo is, with perhaps the one exception of an Arab I fraternized with in Chicago at the World’s Fair, the most splendid specimen of physical manhood I have ever seen; in physique he stood out in splendid contrast to the Europeans and Americans who were investigating him and his. Arrow-straight and six feet tall, mark him as he swings along the strand. His is the carriage and bearing of the high-bred Tartar. This man has “arrived”; he has an air of assuredness that in the drawing-rooms “Outside” you seldom see.
The Eskimo of the Arctic foreshore are of two tribes: the Kogmollycs to the east of the Mackenzie mouth, the Nunatalmutes, Dwellers in the Hills, or Deermen, originally from the interior to the West, but now for the great part making their home at Herschel Island, eighty miles from the Mackenzie delta, attracted there by the opportunity of working for the American whalers.
One of the striking figures of the North is Oo-vai-oo-ak, headman of the Kogmollycs, living in dignified happiness with his children and his two wives. This second wife was the cause of much comment among us. How did she happen? It was this way. Mr. Oo-vai-oo-ak married Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder when they were both young. Children were born to them, the big seal was plenty, succulent beluga-steaks graced the board, and the years followed one another as smoothly as glacial drift or the strip of walrus-blubber that the last baby drops down its red gullet as a plummet sinks in a well.
One day after a big hunt, as Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak placed before her lord the matutinal mess of whale-skin boiled to that particular rubber-boot consistency which was his taste, she said, “I’m not as young as I was, you entertain much, the household cares are heavy, I’d like you to get another wife to help me with the work.” Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak chewed upon the whale-skin and the suggestion of his spouse. Out in his kayak, dodging the icebergs, he turned it over in his mind for half a day; and as the outcome of his cogitations Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Younger, a rollicking and comely maiden, joined the family circle.
How does it work out? For ten days I sat round their hospitable fire trying hard for the viewpoint of each member of this Farthest North family of fellow-Canadians. I have lived under many roof-trees, but never have I seen a more harmonious family, nor a menage of nicer adjustment. Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak the Elder, full of the mellow juice of life, waggish and keen, “quick at the uptak’,” as the Scotch say, presides over her household with dignity, never for a moment relaxing her hold on the situation. Chief Oo-vai-oo-ak wisely leaves the interior economy of the household in the hands of the women. He is the quiet, dignified gentleman with an easy manner that courtiers and plenipotentiaries extraordinary might envy. His six feet two inches of height, magnificent physique and superb carriage would mark him out as a man of distinction at any race-course, polo-meet, or political reception where men of the world forgather.
Observing the small, strong, exquisitely-formed hands and feet of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, the almost-white complexions dashed with ruddy scarlet, the easy grace that even the children have, and, above all, the simple dignity which compels respect, one recognizes here an ancestry harking back to Old World culture and distinction.
[Illustration: Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak Family]
How does the young wife fit in? No suffragette need break a lance for her, demanding a ballot, dower-rights, and the rest of it. She is happy and busy. All day long she sings and laughs as she prepares the family fish and feast of fat things, she pays deference to her co-wife, romps with the children, and expands like an anemone under the ardent smile of her lord. When the grave question was under discussion regarding the exchange of her pendant bead-and-shell ear-rings for a pair we had brought from the shops of the white men, the two spouses discussed the matter in all its phases earnestly together, as chummy as two school-girls.
The Oo-vai-oo-ak family was a puzzle to the on-lookers, who sought in vain for some one of the three contracting parties to pity. They were all so abundantly happy, each in his or her own way, that Walking Delegate could find no crack here for the opening wedge of discord. If no one is to be pitied, then surely for this new departure in matrimony there must be some one for the virtuous to blame. But why?
Kipling declares, “There’s never a law of God or man runs north of fifty-three.” The Eskimo has worked out his life-problem independent quite from the so-called civilisations evolved to the south of him. He is his own man.
In the rest of America and in Europe we have formulated a rule of “One man, One wife,” allowing an elasticity of the rule in Chicago and elsewhere, so that it may read, “One man, one wife at a time.” Are we so sure of results that we are in a position to force our rule upon the Eskimo?
Following the animals that God has ordained shall be their daily bread, in little communal bands they thread the silent places of the North. On the Arctic foreshore we have a people different to all other peoples; here is no inherited wealth, no accumulation of property. A man’s skill as a hunter determines his ability to support others, the pursuit of seal is the pursuit of happiness; life and liberty belong to all. In many of the little wandering groups or septs or clans the women outnumber the men. A mighty hunter is able to kill seals at will and provide blubber enough for two or even three wives. The Canadian Eskimo is the direct antithesis of the French-Canadian in the matter of large families; seldom are more than three children born to one mother. Now, the crux of the matter is this: is it better for one man to marry and provide for one wife and three children, leaving on the community a floating sisterhood of unattached females, or is it more sane and generous for the Northland Nimrod to marry as many wives as he can comfortably support, and raise up olive-branches to save from extermination the men of the Kogmollycs, the honourable people of the Nunatalmutes?
The fact that the women prefer a vulgar-fraction of a man, an Eskimo equity in connubial bliss, to spearing walrus on their own account is a significant factor in the problem. And before we piously condemn either the lord or the lady in the case, it is well that we adjust our judgment to the latitude of 68 deg. North and take cognizance of the fact that no seductive “Want Columns” in the daily press here offer a niche whereby unappropriated spinsters may become self-supporting wage-earners as chaste typewriters, school-teachers, Marcel-wavers, or manicurists. To keep the vital spark aglow you must kill walrus and seal in your own proper person or by proxy, for no other talent of body or grace of mind is convertible into that sustaining meat and heating blubber which all must have in order to live.
Economically, then, a woman must herself hunt or have a man or part of a man to hunt for her. Ethically, it works out beautifully, for each partner to the hymeneal bargain is fat and full of content, happiness fairly oozing out of every oily pore. And is not happiness the goal of human endeavour, whether a man seeks it amid the electric lights, subtle perfumes, and dreamy waltz-music of a New York ballroom, or finds it seated with his community wives on a hummock of ice under the Aurora?
I wouldn’t like to picture our cousin the Eskimo woman as being always content with a circulating decimal of a husband instead of a whole unit, nor would such presentment be just. The shield, like most shields, has a reverse. Last winter, at the Mackenzie Delta, one Eskimo bride of seventeen took her fourth consecutive husband. She is dark but comely, but truth will not carry the analogy further. I have yet to see the Eskimo who is like a bunch of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi. Three winters ago, at Baillie Island, the three-times-widowed one had both her feet amputated as the result of exposure to cold.
In the latest wedding, the one that came under our notice (we hesitate to call it the last), the much-sought one was given away by her brother-in-law Su-pi-di-do, or Sour Potatoes. The wedding breakfast consisted of seal-meat, frozen rotten fish, and muktuk (whale-meat). The ceremony took place at the igloo of Su-pi-di-do, with fifty guests present, and as the size of Su-pi-di-do’s bungalow is ten by twelve, one needs only suggest what the old hymn speaks of as “odours of Edom and offerings Divine.”
The festivities began to warm up about midnight. An old chap, with a retrospective look in his left eye peering back through eighty midnight suns and noonday nights, set the ball a-rolling by raising his hands above his head and hopping about in the middle-distance. His wife, a gay old girl of twice his age, lilted a song, and the guests joined in the chorus; line by line in a minor key the wedding song was sung, the air being confined to three notes. After each line came the chorus twice repeated,
“Ai, yea, yae! Yae, yae, ya–yae!”
Dancing was kept up to an early hour. Overcome by the air, respiratory and vocal, we made our adieus to the crippled but captivating bride, pushing our way through the ghostly dogs and sleeping babies at two a.m.
By natural gifts and temperament the Eskimo is probably the most admirable, certainly the most interesting, and by circumstances the most misunderstood and misrepresented of all the native races of America. The Eskimo of any one group would seem within historic times to have known but little of other bands than his own. Yet sometimes they met. There is an island, called Barter Island, in the Arctic at the dividing line between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon Territory, one hundred and fifty miles west of Herschel. For years this was a trading rendezvous for four peoples: the Kogmollycs or Mackenzie Delta Eskimo, the Alaska Eskimo, and the Indians and Nunatalmute Eskimo whose habitat lay due south of Barter Island. To this point the Cape Barrow Eskimo in the old days brought their most precious medium of exchange,–a peculiar blue jade, one bead of which was worth six or seven fox-skins. And thereby hangs a tale. Mineralogists assure us there is no true jade in North America, so the blue labret ornamenting the lip of Roxi must have come as Roxi’s ancestors came, by a long chain of exchanges from Siberia or from China.
This trading tryst at Barter Island was made an occasion of joy and merriment. In imagination we see the chiefs in their kayaks, the old men, the women, and the babies in the slower and more commodious oomiaks, making their way across the lonely ocean to exchange gifts and courtesies with their half-known kin. The barter consummated, these Northland voyageurs had their yearly dance and sing-song and orgy of delight. No shooting the chutes, no pop-corn, no pink lemonade, no red-hots nor “fr-resh Virginia peanuts, l-large sacks and well-f-filled and f-five a bag!”, but the Arctic concomitants of these,–boiled beluga-skin, luscious strips of walrus-blubber, and frozen fish that smells to high heaven. Joy is the same, gastronomic and aesthetic, in the latitude of Boston and the latitude of Barter Island. It is only the counters that are different.
Meagre are the bits of knowledge of the Eskimo that have floated down into our ken through the ages; on the icy edge of things this unique and fascinating people worked out their drama, the world unknowing by the world forgot. The white men who reached the Eskimo land from the south were discoverers following to the sea the three great rivers that disembogue into the Polar Sea: the Mackenzie, Coppermine, Back or Great Fish. The first of these explorers was Samuel Hearne who, in 1771, followed the Coppermine to the Frozen Ocean. For the northern natives their first contact with white explorers was a disastrous one, for at Bloody Falls on the Coppermine Hearne’s Indians set upon the only band of Eskimo they saw and almost exterminated them. Sir John Franklin in 1820 was more happy. He says, “The Eskimo danced and tossed their hands in the air to signify their desire for peace; they exhibited no hostile intention; our men saluted them by taking off their hats and making bows.” Back, who explored the Back or Great Fish River in 1834, has this tribute of respect and appreciation. He says, “I called out ‘_Tima_’ (Peace), and putting their hands on their breasts they also called out ‘_Tima_.’ I adopted the John Bull fashion of shaking them each heartily by the hand; patting their breasts, I conveyed to them that the white man and the Eskimo were very good friends. They were good natured, and they understood the rights of property, for one of them having picked up a small piece of pemmican repeatedly asked my permission before he would eat it.”
Through all these years, if we except the noble devotion of the Moravian missionaries on the northeast of Canada and the splendid Christianity of such men as Bishop Bompas who sought them from the south, no one visited the Eskimo from the outside with the purpose of doing him good, but rather with the idea of exploiting him. Yet, from the days of Sir John Franklin and Sir Alexander Mackenzie to the recent voyage of Amundsen, the spontaneous tribute of every man who has met them, talked with them, and received their hospitality is the same. The Eskimo is generous, and his word is worth its full face value. What we have done for the Eskimo is a minus quantity; what he has done for us is to point a splendid moral of integrity, manliness, and intrepid courage.
Indians beg and boast, the Eskimo does neither. With no formulated religion or set creed, he has a code of ethics which forbids him to turn the necessity of another to his own advantage. Amundsen’s farewell to his Eskimo friends sets the thoughtful of us thinking, “Goodbye, my dear, dear friends. My best wish for you is that civilisation may never reach you.”
The trite saying is that the Loucheux Indians forced the Eskimo north, “keeping them with patient faces turned toward the Pole.” But the Eskimo has a better country than the Loucheux has, for it is less rigorous and it produces more food stuffs. The Loucheux at Fort Macpherson knows what it is to experience a temperature of 60 below Fahr., while at the coast it doesn’t drop below 55.
The Eskimo has two fields in which to hunt food,–the land and the sea, with fish the great staple; and both fresh and salt-water fish are his, that in the mouths of the great rivers being better than what the Loucheux gets higher up. If the Eskimo wrote copy-book lines, the most insistent one would be, “Lose your matches, throw away your guns, but hang on to your fish-net.”
Through the years there was bad blood and mutual distrust between Eskimo and Loucheux. The last pitched battle occurred in the 60’s, when of the contestants only two Loucheux escaped and not one Eskimo was killed. The Hudson’s Bay Company officer at the close of the fight called together the relatives of the slain Loucheux, upon whom rested the duty of revenge, and out of The Company’s stores paid in trade-goods the blood-price of the slain. Since then both peoples have traded at Forts Macpherson and Arctic Red River, maintaining a sort of armed peace, but with no deeds of violence. The Loucheux Indian, his wives, his babies, and his slab-sided dogs suffer from starvation almost every winter. In the whole history of the Eskimo there is not an authenticated story of one of this people having starved to death. Once more we protest against misapplied sympathy. However it may have been in the past, the Eskimo stays on the coast to-day because it is to him “God’s country” and not because any hostile Loucheux sends him there.
For the past twenty years the men on the American ships have employed the Eskimo to aid them in the whaling industry, picking up different bands all the way from Bering Sea eastward as they sail in from the Pacific, and depositing each group at their individual beaches as the ships take out their rich spoils of baleen and oil at the close of the season. The Eskimo has proven a valued aid to this industry; how has the intrusion of the whites into his ancestral sea-domain affected the Eskimo?
Within two decades the European population of this Mackenzie River delta region has been cut down from two thousand to probably one-fourth of that number. The causes? White men’s diseases: scarlet fever, consumption, measles, syphilis must account for most of the startling decrease. Scarletina has killed many, consumption some, though consumption is not nearly so fatal with the Eskimo as with the Indian, measles perhaps more than all. Measles among the Eskimo is more fatal than the Bubonic plague among Europeans.
What other changes is the yearly presence of American whalers among them making in Eskimo evolution? Who shall say? It is so easy to be dogmatic, so hard to be just. This intrusion of the whites has changed the whole horizon here; we can scarcely call it the coming of civilisation, but call it rather the coming of commerce. The whalers have taught palates once satisfied with rotten fish and blubber to want coffee and tea and molasses, yeast-bread, whiskey, and canned peaches. To the credit side of the account, we must fairly state that the ships have brought the Eskimo whale-boats, good guns, and ammunition.
The Eskimo population of the Mackenzie delta is becoming mixed by marriages between the different tribes brought together to work on the whaling-ships. Each of these intertribal alliances brings about its changed culture characteristics. But as a more far-reaching result of the coming of the whalers there is springing up on the edge of the Arctic a unique colony of half-caste Eskimo children, having Eskimo mothers, and, for “floating fathers,” marking their escutcheon with every nationality under the sun,–American, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Italian, Portuguese, Lascar. This state of things startles one, as all miscegenation does, and this particular European-Eskimo alliance is different from all others. In the hinterland of the Arctic, when a Frenchman or a Scot took a dusky bride from the tepee of Cree or Chipewyan it was with an idea of making the marriage a permanent one. There is no intent on the part of the whalers to take their Eskimo “wives” outside with them, nor does the wife so-called look for this. One or two cases are on record where the half-breed child has been taken “outside” by his father to school, and through the years perhaps six or eight half-Eskimo kiddies have percolated the interior waterways south to some mission-school, Anglican or Roman. As a rule, the marriage-contract is “good for this season only,” and the wife and children bid their quondam husband and father farewell, smiling at him with neither animosity nor reproach as the boats go out.
What is then the ice-widow’s condition? Is she an outcast among her people? No, you must remember that neither the matrimonial standard of Pall-Mall nor Washington, D.C, obtains here. The trade-ticker of the erstwhile wife of the whaler ticks skyward in the hymeneal Lloyd’s; she is much sought of her own people. Has she not gained in both kudos and capital? The knowledge which she must have acquired from the white man of whalers’ ways of trading is supposed to be of monetary use to her second lord. Moreover, the tent, utensils, and cooking-kit which she shared with her spouse from the ships makes a substantial dower when she again essays Hymen’s lottery.
Eskimo women are neither petulant nor morose. With the men they share that calm-bearing of distinction, combined with the spontaneity of a child which makes such a rare and winning mixture. In moving among the half-caste Eskimo children up here on the edge of things, fairness forces us to admit that neither in stature nor physique do they fall below the standard of the thorough-bred natives. About the morals, the ethical, or mental standards, we venture no comparison, for heredity plays such strange tricks. The whole condition is formative, for the blending of races has been going on scarcely long enough for one to see and tabulate results. The influence of the mother will be longer applied and its results more lasting than that of the evanescent father, and in this is their hope. For years we have been repeating the trite, “The sins of the father are visited upon the children to the third and fourth generation;” it remained for Charles Dickens to ask, in his own inimitable way, if the virtues of the mothers do not occasionally descend in direct line.
We respect the Eskimo for many things: for his physical courage as he approaches the bear in single combat, for his uncomplaining endurance of hardships, for his unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft, his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But, most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children. “A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure,” is a pretty theory, but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe air of assuredness that so distinguishes his father and mother.
The Eskimo child accepts himself as the equal of any created thing, but there is nothing blatant about him, nor is his independence obtrusive. He is born hardy, and lives hardy, trudging along on the march in his place beside the grown-ups. Each Eskimo man and woman is an independent entity, free to go where he pleases. There is no law, no tribunal, no power to limit or command him, but instinctively he observes the rule of doing as he would be done by, and he teaches his child the same Golden Rule. A boy or girl is never considered an encumbrance and is readily even eagerly adopted if his own parents die. The Eskimo child is ushered into the earthly arena with no flourish of trumpets, for his coming is but an incident of the journey if Fate has decreed that he should be born when the family is on the march. The hour’s stop for the mid-day meal often sees a new little valiant soldier added to the ranks of the clan and starting his traverse of Arctic trails. If the baby is born while the family is in camp, mother and babe separate themselves from the rest of the family for a month, no one being allowed to look at, much less fuss over, the little stranger.
Naming an Eskimo baby is fraught with significance. If the last grown man who died in the band was one revered, one whose footsteps are worthy to be followed, the name of the departed clansman is given to the newborn child. The belief is that the spirit of the dead man hovers around the community and immediately upon the birth of the child takes possession, a re-incarnation in the baby-body. Withdrawing itself in twelve months’ time, the spirit of the ghostly god-father lingers by to influence the character and destiny of the growing child.
We trace a well-known nursery rhyme to the igloo of the Eskimo. The summer-born baby dispenses with clothing for the first six months of its earthly pilgrimage, cuddling its little bare body close to its mother’s back under her _artikki_, or upper garment, which has been made voluminous to accommodate him. But the husky babe who comes when King Wenceslaus looks out on the Feast of Stephen has his limbs popped into a bag of feathers before his mother takes him pick-a-back, or else he is wrapped in a robe of rabbit-skin. So we see that it was an Eskimo mother who first crooned in love and literalness,
“By-o, Baby Bunting,
Daddy’s gone a-hunting,
To get a little rabbit-skin,
To wrap his Baby Bunting in.”
Mother-love is a platform upon which even ancestral enemies can meet. While I sat cross-legged (and, like cotton, absorbent) last summer enjoying the hospitality of the Oo-vai-oo-aks, to us entered a beautiful-faced Loucheux Indian mother with a pair of twins pendant,–rollicking chaps. The younger Mrs. Oo-vai-oo-ak dropped on the floor her lord’s boot which she had been dutifully biting into shape and jumped up to greet her visitor. There was no mistaking that smile of hospitality. Snatching from the visitor one of her baby boys, the young hostess kissed and cried out to it with an abandon of maternal joy, the culminating point of which was feeding it from her own breast. Thus, in one instance at least, has the ancient feud of Loucheux and Eskimo died.
A baby Eskimo is nursed until it is two years old or older, and learns to smoke and to walk about the same time. The family pipe is laid upon the couch, and papa, mamma, and the children take a solacing whiff as the spirit moves them. These pipes are identical with those used by the Chinese, and hold but half a thimbleful of tobacco, the smoke being inhaled and swallowed with dreamy joy.
The hardihood of Eskimo children is scarcely believable. It is not unusual for children of six years to trudge uncomplainingly for twenty-five miles by the side of their elders; and we came to know a little seven-year old chap who was quite a duck-hunter, and who went out every day alone and seldom came back without at least two brace. At eleven years, with his watertight boots, spear in hand, and coil of line on his back, he takes up the Innuit man’s burden, and does it with an air both determined and debonair. If you ask a mother if she does not think this a somewhat tender age for her boy to essay to keep up with the men on the hunt, she merely smiles as she sews her waterproof seam, and says, “The First Innuits [Eskimo] did so.”
These fur-clad philosophers are perhaps seen at their best in their play, for there is always harmony in the crystal nursery of the North, as these little people have no bad names nor threatening terms in their vocabulary Yet the play is often very rough, and your Eskimo lad is no molly-coddle. The writer watched five small boys playing football with a walrus-bladder among the roses on the edge of the Arctic. The game was neither Rugby nor “Soccer,” but there seemed to be a good deal of tackling in it. Four of them got the fifth one, who hugged the ball, down, and were sitting on him and digging their skin boots into the soft parts of his anatomy. “You’re angry, now,” said a Major of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police who was looking on. “No, sir,” said the under dog, with difficulty protruding his head, “I never get mad when I play.”
The boys have a sort of duel which they have copied from their elders. It is customary for the grown men of the tribe to settle accumulated difficulties by standing a selected number of contestants, say four on each side, facing each other. Each man is allowed to strike his adversary a number of blows, the recipient of the buffeting being bound by the laws of the game to stand quiescent and take what is coming to him. Then striker and strikee change places and reverse the courtesy. All sorts of feelings come into your throat to choke you, as you watch a row of “heathen” Eskimo lads carry out an ungentle joust of this kind, for the blows are no child’s play. Think of what this self-inflicted discipline means in the way of character-building, then think of the ignoble tactics that obtain on some of our race-courses, baseball diamonds, and “sport” carnivals, and then do some more thinking. A line of Tennyson came persistently to my mind last summer as I walked in and out among the camps of the Eskimo,–“Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control.”
[Illustration: Farthest North Football]
What of the little girls? They have dolls made of reindeer skins, rude imitations of their elders. And they play “house,” and “ladies,” and “visiting,” just as their cousins do on every shore of the Seven Seas; but no little Eskimo girl has ever yet had the pleasure of dressing up in her mother’s long dresses.
[Illustration: Two Spectators at the Game]
When the ptarmigan gets dark in feather and the sun begins to return in spring after the long six months’ night, it is the pleased prerogative of the children to blow out the lamp in the snow-house. All the time that the sun is travelling south, clever combinations of cat’s-cradle are played by the mothers and the children to entangle the sun in the meshes and so prevent its being entirely lost by continuing south and south and forgetting entirely to turn back to the land of the anxiously-waiting Eskimo. The boys, by playing a cup-and-ball game, help, too, to hasten its return. When the sun forgets you for six months, you become fearful lest you have lost his loving care forever. The spring is an anxious time in more ways than one, for if there is any suffering from hunger it is felt now, when the winter supplies are finished and the new hunts not yet begun. “I’ll eat my hat” is an empty threat in the south, but many an Eskimo kiddie has satisfied the gnawing pains of spring hunger by chewing his little skin boots.
At the Mackenzie delta last year, Roxi the Eskimo came in and told me this sad story. Six weeks before, a party of Eskimo had left Baillie Island with dogs for Kopuk. On their way they found a dead whale and cooked and ate of it; the next day they found another and again indulged. After travelling twenty-five miles, the whole party was taken violently ill, and six adults and two children died, leaving only one little girl alive. There for three days and four nights she remained, alone in the camp of the dead, until by the merest chance a young Eskimo, attending his line of traps from Toker Point, stumbled into the silent camp.
One can faintly glimpse at, but must utterly fail to grasp, what that little girlie suffered mentally. We picture her sleeping, sobbing, waiting in that snow-hut in the silences, surrounded by the still bodies of every one she loved on earth. The sequel of the story is as sad as its first chapter. The band of Eskimo to which the rescuer belonged went in their turn and ate of this stranded whale, with the result that A-von-tul and Ita-chi-uk, two youths of twenty or twenty-one, died, too, and with them a little four-year-old girl. The drift whale must have been poisoned either by ptomaine or by the remnants of the highly compressed tonite, the explosive used by the whale-hunters.
[Illustration: An Eskimo Exhibit
A–Eskimo woman’s head-dress of reindeer skin.
B–Skin of the baby seal, its shimmering whiteness used by the missionaries to typify the Lamb of God, the word “Lamb” having no meaning to an Eskimo.
C–Ornamental skin mat, the work of an Eskimo woman.
D–Quiver of arrows used by Eskimo boys.
E–Model of Eskimo paddle.
F–Skin model of the _Oomiak_ or Eskimo woman’s boat.
G and H–Eskimo pipes of true Oriental type, the bowl holding only half a thimbleful of tobacco.]
As we visit in friendly wise the Eskimo and their children, a feeling of loving admiration and appreciation tightens round our hearts. We had never heard a harsh word bestowed upon a child, no impatient or angry admonition. If a boy gives way to bursts of temper, and this is rare, he is gently taken to task, reproved, and reasoned with _after_ the fit of passion is over. Certainly, without churches or teachers or schools, with no educational journals, and no Conventions of Teachers, with their wise papers on the training of “the child,” the Eskimo children we saw were better behaved, more independent, gentler, and in the literal sense of the word, more truly “educated” than many of our children are. Instinctively you feel that here are boys and girls being trained admirably for the duties of life, a life that must be lived out in stern conditions.
Perchance, floating down on the Aurora, has come to the Eskimo a glint of the truth that has passed us by, the truth that God’s own plan is the family plan, that there are life lessons to learn which, by the very nature of things, the parents alone can impart. Teaching children in the mass has its advantages, but it is the family after all and not the fifty children in a school grade which forms the unit of national greatness.
CHAPTER XIII
FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
“I have drunk the Sea’s good wine,
Was ever step so light as mine,
Was ever heart so gay?
O, thanks to thee, great Mother, thanks to thee, For this old joy renewed,
For tightened sinew and clear blood imbued With sunlight and with sea.”
–_A Pagan Hymn_.
On July 14th, shortly after we leave Arctic Red River, an open scow passes us, floating northward with the stream. It comes in close to the steamer, and we look down and see that every one of its seven occupants is sound asleep. In traversing the Mackenzie, there is no danger of running into ferry-boats or river-locks, if you strike the soft alluvial banks here the current will soon free you and on you go. The voyagers in the scow may sleep in peace.
At Point Separation, 67 deg. 37′ N., the Mackenzie delta begins. Where the east and west branches diverge, the width of the river is fifty miles, the channel becoming one maze of islands, battures, and half-hidden sand-bars. The archipelago at the Arctic edge extends a full hundred miles east and west.
The two lob-sticks at Point Separation are full of historic interest. It was here, on the evening of July 3rd, 1826, that Sir John Franklin and Dr. Richardson parted, Franklin to trend west and Richardson east, in their mission of Arctic coastal exploration. Twenty-two years later, Richardson, this time concerned with the _Plover_ Relief Expedition of the lost Franklin, again visited Point Separation. He records,
“July 30th, 1848, Point Separation. In compliance with my instructions, a case of pemmican was buried at this place. We dug a pit at a distance of ten feet from the best grown tree on the Point, and placed in it, along with the pemmican, a bottle containing a memorandum of the