PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
"A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky,
The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,
And the wild geese sailing high,—
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod.
Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God."
—W.H. Carruth.
At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons, which weigh over ten pounds each.
To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and the Pouce Coupé. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been damaged by frost.
Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their cattle longer than six weeks each winter.
Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace
The Pouce Coupé would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September. Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in, tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn, and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that tickle his palate,—blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries, willow-berries, and saskatoons.
Fort Dunvegan on the Peace
On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56° N. I pluck a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.
Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer civilisation,—the "civilisation" of Chicago! A strong desire possesses us to about-face and back to the woods again.
It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,—men, women, children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the south,—one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty picture,—the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. "It is the Man with the Hoe," I murmur. "Yes," assents the Kid, "and The Angelus at Lesser Slave."
We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey. Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the "horse latitudes"—though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page. The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs. Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole, this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses' mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the act making possible the writing of this "immortal work"!
Fort St. John on the Peace
Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year. To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.
Where King Was Arrested
There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and, driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.
Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons
By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,—tall, straight, fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum, he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy. It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this Scots-Sioux,—strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who, too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile, of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, "Do not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?"
Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young fellow of the H.B. Co. says, "It's beastly bad form to ask any man who comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a wilful-missing, that's his privilege." However, fate has thrown in our way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs. Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.
Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron
Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little brothers and cousins, en famille, they pitched off from Little Red River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it, and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless, they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.
How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out, thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas. The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then the sister died. How she died God and the watching stars alone know. Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.
Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony undergone by these poor creatures—women and children with affections like our own—shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel camp of death!
Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a recluse, shunned of all Indians as a "Wetigo" or "Cannibal." A friend was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been born.
As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is "even as you and me."