LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
"Afar from stir of streets,
The city's dust and din,
What healing silence meets
And greets us gliding in!
"The noisy strife
And bitter carpings cease.
Here is the lap of life,
Here are the lips of peace."
—C.G.D. Roberts.
For fresh woods and pastures new this Friday, June 26th! Our little "bunch" breaks up. Mr. Brabant and Mrs. Harding, of the Hudson's Bay Company contingent, go on in the Grahame to Smith's Landing, and with them the two detachments of the R.N.W.M.P. As we shake hands with the police party, we wonder what Fate has in store for each of us. Breaking off at Fort Resolution, Great Slave Lake, and trending eastward by canoe over unchartered ways, will they reach salt water on Hudson Bay as they hope?
For our two selves, great good fortune is ours. The Canadian Government Indian Treaty party, consisting of Mr. Conroy in command, Mr. Laird as secretary, Dr. Donald, and Mr. Mooney in charge of the commissariat, with Constable Gairdner, R.N.W.M.P., as Escort, has just come down the Peace. To-day they pay treaty in Chipewyan, and this afternoon start for far Fond du Lac, at the eastern extremity of Lake Athabasca. The little H.B. tug Primrose will tow them and their outfit in a York-boat and a scow, and the captain has been persuaded to allow us, too, to take our blankets and come along, sleeping on the deck. The Primrose from stem to stern is not big enough to swing a cat in, but who wants to swing a cat? It is blue Lake Athabasca that we long to see; no white woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity and we would go if we had to work our passage at the sweeps of the scow.
Lake Athabasca in Winter
Athabasca Lake (whose name means "In Muskeg Abounding"), is two hundred miles long, with thirty-five miles at its greatest width. It lies in a general easterly and westerly direction. No survey has been made of the lake; its height above ocean level is seven hundred feet, and it covers perhaps three thousand square miles. Its chief feeder is the Athabasca River, down which we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace and Athabasca Rivers open their icy mouths about May-day, parts ot the lake are not free for travel until mid-May. The lake freezes fast at Fort Chipewyan some time in November. Lying on the deck of the tug, we look down and take inventory of our odd tow. Just behind comes the scow. It holds wood for the engine, a long sled, a canoe, a "skift," all this year's trading supplies for Fond du Lac, and half a dozen chained husky dogs. Trailing the scow is a York-boat carrying the treaty party and Mr. Harris.
It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many, many hundreds of miles.
Bishop Grouard
Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On board the Primrose the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch with him. "I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to have neither chart nor compass."
"No," assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, "we just go by the power o' man," and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.
By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day. At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of reindeer moss (cladonia rangiferina?), the tripe de roche of the North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and tonic.
No orders are given when we land, and we study countenances and actions to guess the time-limit of our tether. For twenty-four hours we have wondered if there were trout in Lake Athabasca and if they would rise to the fly. With a borrowed rod we take a canoe and off the shadow of a cottonwood point try a cast at random. The gut carries three flies—a brown hackle, a coachman, with a Jock Scott at the tail—a rainbow aggregation. To the coachman we get a rise and it takes three of us to land him. There are no scales; so his weight must forever be unrecorded, but as we lay him out he measures just a trifle over twenty-three inches, as beautiful a lake trout as ever sent thrill up and down a sympathetic spine. Bye-and-bye this road we travel is going to be listed on the sporting routes of the world, and tired souls from the Seven Seas with rod and gun will here find Nepenthe.
The Modern Note-book
Clutching our catch, we step gingerly along an outstretched oar and climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and suggest turf rather than surf. "Kick her up, Mac!" "Give her a kick ahead!" "Who-o-oa!" On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac, clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet us,—bent old crones, strong men, and black-eyed babies. For is not the coming of the treaty party the one event of the Fond du Lac year?
Half way along the traverse of the lake we had crossed the inter-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak English,—Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler who would fain shepherd their souls.
These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers (July) they will press back east and north to the land of the caribou. September, the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns, will find them camping on the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the hour-frost-moon, or the ice-moon, they will be laying lines of traps.
We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction, by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection had been loud and eloquent.
Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian
We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman whom he addresses as "Josette." Their three girls are being educated in the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with the great world of thought outside. "Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage." Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and Labrador tea (Ledum latifolium), we reach the H.B. garden where the potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father Beihler, who comes across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself wept. White women are a rara avis. Father Beihler wants to know how old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing wisely to the Kid, he assures me, "They are not an-gell (angel) at that age," and says, "I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a woman chercher." The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him, and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we have in common,—the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.
A Bit of Fond du Lac
These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.
To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass, become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who used to "make fur" in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the extinct product of a past race that never existed.
The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the animal's skull to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.
The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and they are perhaps the least unspoiled of "civilisation," as their range is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie. To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in the graves by the wayside.
Birch-barks at Fond du Lac
Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are cached, and the trail strikes into the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.
Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent streams, the Chipewyan trudges from trap to trap; if he finds fifty dollars worth of fur along the whole line he is content. It is not this lonely man who gets the high price, madame, for your marten stole or opera-cloak of ermine.
On the trail the hunter may go hungry for two days and no word of complaint, just a tightening of the lips and L'Assumption belt, and a firm set to the jaw; but when a moose is killed life is one long supper. A jolly priest whispers of this confession from a son of the Church, a recent brand from the burning, "O Father, I know that Christianity is true, the great, the strong religion. When I was a heathen Chipewyan and trapped with my mother's tribe I ate ten rabbits a day. But now I am a Christian, a good Catholic, seven rabbits are enough for me—I will eat no more!"
In the early days the H.B. Company allowed its men en voyage five pounds of meat a day, and each kiddie three pounds. In British Columbia and the Yukon the ration was one salmon; up here on the Athabasca one wild goose or three big whitefish; on the Arctic foreshore two fish and three pounds of reindeer meat. This was the scheduled fare, but the grimness of the joke appears in the fact that each man had to run his breakfast to earth before he ate it.
Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt. The whole thing is a Louisiana lottery. The very next trap may hold a silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr. Harris. As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond du Lac. In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake. Caribou skins are in prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk. About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother Church. Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear, and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty money and annual reunion in July.
Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou (rangifer articus), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the bands of the dead and gone buffalo. Caribou go north in spring and south in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou form the advance line. They drop their young far out toward the seacoast in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow. The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July. From this time they stay together till the rutting season is over late in October. Then the great herds of caribou,—"la foule,"—gather on the edge of the woods and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food afforded by the country of the larger pine trees. A month later the females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.
This is the general rule. Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and westward branches of the caribou family. But the trend of this mighty migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and divert them from their line of march. Individuals and scattered bands, indeed, have been known not to migrate at all. Fifteen years ago in the last days of July, in latitude 62° 15' North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand individuals. In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near Fort Rae on the ice. It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in the words of an eye-witness, "daylight could not be seen through the column."
A priest, on the winter trail between Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.
Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, "At Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't think they will ever die out." Rae was the old meat-station for the Far North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.
When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish (coregonus clupeiformis) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of de gustibus, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they broached cargo. "Do you like these?" "Yes." "You're a liar!" On the Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of Kennedy. He coveted one of the "plums" from our lunch-basket, and was much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. "What are them?" "Olives," we elucidated; "they come from Southern Europe by steamer." "Do they?" (slightingly). "The one I et must have come steerage."
We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern delicacies,—beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys, caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery, whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly gamy. This is the "Fall Fishery." Winter fishing is done through holes in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.
As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was $1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game off his own bat.
Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look, seeking in vain any trace of "the wild Red Man." The raison d'être of these annual "treaty-payment parties" is merely the acknowledgment on one side and the recognition on the other that the Northern Indian is a British subject protected by and amenable to British law. In addition to the present of five dollars per head each year, the Canadian Government sends in by the Indian Agent presents of fishing twine and ammunition, with eleemosynary bacon for the indigent and old. The chiefs strut around in official coats enriched with yellow braid, wearing medals as big as dinner-plates.
From Edmonton northward to Fort Chipewyan the Indians are all Crees. At Fort Chipewyan the northern limit of the Crees impinges on the southern limit of the Chipewyan, but here at Fond du Lac the Indians are all true Chipewyans. The Chipewyan wife is the New Red Woman. We see in her the essential head of the household. No fur is sold to the trader, no yard or pound of goods bought, without her expressed consent. Indeed, the traders refuse to make a bargain of any kind with a Chipewyan man without the active approbation of the wife. When a Chipewyan family moves camp, it is Mrs. Chipewyan who directs the line of march. How did she happen to break away from the bonds that limit and restrain most Red brides? This is the question that has troubled ethnologists since the North was first invaded by the, scientific. We think we have found the answer. Along the shores of Fond du Lac we descry a long-legged wader, the phalarope. This is the militant suffragette of all bird-dom. Madame Phalarope lays her own eggs (this depository act could scarcely be done by proxy), but in this culminates and terminates all her responsibilities connubial and maternal,—"this, no more." Father Phalarope builds the house, the one hen-pecked husband of all feathered families who does. He alone incubates the eggs, and when the little Phalaropes are ushered into the vale, it is Papa who tucks their bibs under their chins and teaches them to peep their morning grace and to eat nicely. Mamma, meanwhile, contrary to all laws of the game, wears the brilliant plumage. When evening shadows fall where rolls the Athabasca, she struts long-leggedly with other female phalaropes, and together they discuss the upward struggles toward freedom of their unfeathered prototypes.