NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
"On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,
De win' she blow, blow, blow,
An' de crew of de wood scow '
Julie Plante
'
Got scar't an' run below—
For de win' she blow lak hurricane
Bimeby she blow some more,
An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre
Wan arpent from de shore."
—
Dr. Drummond
.
This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive laundry. At dusk we had seen an empty scow floating down river, adrift from Athabasca Landing. In the middle of Grand Rapids she broke amidships, but held together until in the darkness she floated beyond our ken.
Trouble of our own awaits us. With no one noting, an adventurous scow, with all her precious cargo, has pulled loose from her moorings. By the time the Cree watchman discovers that the "Go-Quick-Her" has taken the bit in her teeth, the runaway with tail-sweep set has turned the next corner of the Athabasca. Great excitement! Billy Loutit and Emile Fosseneuve borrow the Police canoe and go in chase. It is such a rough bit of water that we hold our breaths, for a false stroke means death to both; but that false stroke does not come. Billy Loutit knows this river as we know the borders and shrubs in our garden-bed.
Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore
This accident causes everyone to look grave. The Edmonton value of the cargo is over two thousand dollars, but it is a loss that cannot be measured in dollars and cents. These wrecked goods, gaily sailing down the Athabasca, cannot be duplicated at some convenient grocery around the corner.
We have learned that any untoward happening means a half day's delay. Philip Atkinson calls me to one side to suggest that it would be a "clear waste" to leave behind the eggs of "that duck's nest I showed you the day we came." Atkinson is a half-breed with a Hercules-build who looks forty-five and owns up to sixty. He and I chatted over the mallard eggs and my collection of wild flowers, he respecting the preservative art and I in full awe of that art gastronomic of his which gulps the Mallards-in-embryo, sans fourchette, sans salt, sans ceremony.
They are an interesting study, these half-breeds; it means much to each on which side of the English Channel his father had birth. When a Frenchman marries an Indian woman he reverts to her scale of civilization; when a Scot takes a native to wife he draws her up to his. Our crew live at Lac la Biche and were engaged last winter for their season's work at from twenty to forty dollars a month, with board and moccasins. They walked a hundred miles to Athabasca Landing to connect with their summer's job, and the absolute certainty of regular meals just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic term "the law of heredity" works out with these people, cut off from the lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the pre-civilization Indian.
Philip, duck-stuffed but untroubled by "that full feeling after eating," lights his pipe and looks back through the years. "My father belonged to The Company, my mother was an Ojibway from the Lake of the Woods country. My father went back to the Old Country when I was seven, leaving me to an uncle to be educated, and I don't know 'B' from a bull's foot. He put me to work on the woodpile from morning till night. When my father came back after twelve years and found me ignorant, he cried like a baby. I have no education, but," with a contemplative puff, "I have friends wherever I go." Philip is good to look at and he is a linguist, speaking Cree, French, and excellent English with a delightful Scotch accent. He is an ardent admirer of the H.B. Company. "They always kept their word with a man, and when they had done with him, returned him without cost to his old home." Philip and his two sons were the first to shoot the Grand Rapids, and he tells us that this stretch of the Athabasca River has been used only twenty years. Before that time people from the North reached Winnipeg by the Clearwater. Philip is a Loyalist. During the half-breed rebellion of 1885 he carried dispatches to Middleton and Otter, going seventy-five miles one day on foot. He had his horse, "a draught-horse as black as a crow," taken from him twice, got through the lines and stole another, and tells proudly how for his deed of valor he was presented with an Assomption belt.
At last we are off, keeping sharp look-out for the lost scow. Buffalo River, where we pull up for the night, is a recognized camping-place. The men know where to put their hands on old-time tent-poles, the boys dig out shin-bones of the moose,—the relics of some former feast,—which they gnaw as a puppy mumbles an old bone.
Another manifestation of gas is here. It bubbles up on the shore and through the water at the boat's bow, and as we strike a match the whole surface flames like the brandy on a Christmas plum-pudding. On the opposite side of the river are "lobsticks," a new word to us and a new thing. To stand as a living totem-pole, the Indians select on a striking promontory a tall spruce and from a section of the trunk lop all the branches except two, which are left as wings. If the lobstick is to stand a monument to a certain man or party, the names of those to be honored are written in Cree on an attached slab. We were to notice lobsticks from point to point along the rest of our journey, some of them indicating good hunting-grounds or fishing-places back from the shore, but most of them memorials of happenings on the river.
The Little Buffalo carries to the Athabasca its noisy current between two high escarpments, and on the shelf leading back from the banks of the main stream is a far-reaching plateau of splendidly-fertile land. In the scow next us the two young Crees who are preparing the food for our evening "meat-su" carry on a religious controversy as they slice the sow-belly. We gather that one has been taken into the Protestant fold and that the other follows the priests. Duncan Tremblé comes down and cuffs them both soundly, putting an end to the argument with, "It's all the same as the other, just like the Hudson's Bay Company and the free trader. Each one tells you his goods is the best and the other is nee-moy-yuh mee-wah-sin (no good). It's that way with the God-goods of the white men. Each church tells you that his is the best, but they all come down to us in the same scow, both the priest and the missionary."
Next morning we are all keyed-up for the rapids, and about six miles down we encounter the Brulé, the first one, and take it square in mid-channel. We ship a little water, but pass through it all too soon, for the compelling grandeur of the Brulé grips one. The river here is held between vertical walls of the reddest of red sandstone against which the lush greenery makes a striking contrast. Twenty miles below is the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but because the boiler of the steamer Wrigley was lost here and still remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes the Long Rapid (Kawkinwalk Abowstick), which we run close to its right bank.
From the distance sounds the ominous roar of the Big Cascade. At quarter past four we reach the head of the swirling fall. The underlying cause of the Big Cascade is a limestone ledge which cuts the channel diagonally and makes ugly-looking water. We plan to run the rapid one boat at a time. The crews are doubled. Our steersman is alert, expectant, and as agile as a cat, his black hair switching in the wind. Sitting in the centre of the scow, as we do, the sensation is very different to that which one experiences in running rapids in a canoe. Then it is all swiftness and dexterity, for your craft is light, and, in expert hands, easily dirigible with one clever turn of the wrist. With a ten-ton scow the conditions change and you feel correspondingly more helpless.
The great rapid stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer. With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a water-fence. For all we own in the world we wouldn't be anywhere but just where we sit. If it is going to be our last minute, well, Kismet! let it come. At least it will not be a tame way of going out. For the life of me I cannot forbear a cry of exultation. Then there is the feeling below one's feet which you experienced when you were a kiddie lying flat on your stomach coasting down a side-hill and your little red sled struck a stone. We, too, have struck something, but do not stop to ask what the obstruction is.
The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills
At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr. Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.
The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Tremblé, the pilot, dances in the sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The Inspector says, "Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste." The native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis, "After you, Inspector." Then Pelletier says, sharply, "Jump, I tell you, jump; there's no time for—Gaston-and-Alphonse business here."
As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on the bank,—five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three minutes!
A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.
The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in; so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.
Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr. Brabant says, "Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?" "Never mind," says Bob, "I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?"
It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation. Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her "special orders" are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes. Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting, and, turning it over, says bravely, "I think it will dry." Mathematical and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and Hudson's Bay blankets!
In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly Sand-boys "all in one delicious gravy." The Doctor is dazed, and offers to white and brown alike a tin box with "Have a pastile, do." He wanders among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially appreciates,—something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. "Here are some authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I shall never be able to tell which it is." One by one the Doctor digs out from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,—a presentation "Life of the Countess of Munster," also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be "as old as the Conqueror." There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under a side of bacon, is a print of "my great-grandfather who discovered a cure for scurvy." A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.
Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader
Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their migrations and tribal feasts. We question, "Are you not lonely, especially in the winter?" But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as heroic. "Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians are always coming and going, and they are full of interest."
We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral alpacas, all of us,—something between a sheep and a goat. But no less are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.
As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home. The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss Gordon translates. "I am delighted that ladies have come such a long distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water, the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children," and the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. "Be glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it." It is the advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the Winnipeg Hospital.
We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle—merely for effect, for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store to go across and dress this wound.
When a schoolboy takes to his bosom a fidus Achates, the first thing he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces us to her find,—nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.
During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as they had "made little fur," entertaining them as courteously as you would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden, bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just about three days.
A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,—the reading of the rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said, "Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn medicine so that I could help these poor creatures." Her tone of unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden, radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.
Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for—a Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of growing things.
The Steamer Grahame
Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay Company's steamer Grahame meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats, weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The Grahame has its advantages,—clean beds, white men's meals served in real dishes, and best of all, a bath!
On the Grahame we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it. Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr. Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see only the surface and have to guess the depths.
As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56° 40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, "where we are at." In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and the lone Pribilof, "where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and the seals they breed for themselves." Crossing the junction of the Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789 traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in latitude 58° 36' North.
An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca
In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank, out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein, building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while "punching" one of his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine, poplar, and spruce.
Tar Banks on the Athabasca
At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.
Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed through the sands.
Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said, "Smells are surer than sounds or sights."
We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the coming of the railroad can bring to light.