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."
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.
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°, and which lies east and west between the meridians of 109° and 117°. 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.
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.
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 Père 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.
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 attaché 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.
Dogs Cultivating Potatoes
The mean July temperature at Hay River is 60° Fahrenheit, and the monthly mean for January, 18° 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!
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'.'"