SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
"The old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue.
They're God's own guides on the Long Trail—
The trail that is always new."
Kipling
.
A tax on tea caused the revolt of the thirteen Colonies, a taunting load of tennis-balls lost France to the Dauphin. Eighty years ago on this Arctic edge, white beads, or the lack of them, lost a lucrative fur-trade, alienated the Loucheux and caused the death of whites. "Trifles make the sum of human things."
The old records tell the story. John Bell from Fort Good Hope, under date of August 14th, 1827, writes to the Factor at Fort Simpson:
"The beads sent in for the Loucheux trade are not sufficiently large to please them. I request you will endeavour to send in the largest size for the trade of the ensuing year. A specimen of the kind wanted I send enclosed."
The Factor at Fort Simpson, under date of November 22nd of the same year, writes to the Governor and Chief Factors at Montreal:
"I now forward a specimen of the common white beads wanted for the trade with the Loucheux Indians. It is their request and I hope it will be attended to. I would not venture to make the demand, were it not from conviction that without this favourite article these Indians look with indifference on the best of our goods. No other ornamental article is ever asked for or wanted by these natives."
The same official on March 15th, 1828, pleads with Montreal:
"The white beads demanded for the Loucheux trade I hope will be sent, and of the size according to sample enclosed. May I use the freedom of representing the importance of getting this article to the liking of the Indians, to come up by the Montreal canoes and be ready for outfit 1829? Three kegs will contain the quantity required, 200 to 250 pounds."
Again on the 29th of November, 1829, he writes Montreal:
"The White Beads asked for the trade with the Loucheux are not according to the order sent, 15 pounds only of the quantity received (200 pounds) are of the proper size, the remainder being the same as those in outfit 1825 so much complained of. They will not be satisfactory to the Indians. We request you will be pleased to make a strong representation to their Honours at Home that this article be sent according to order and sample. We now conceive to say anything further would be tiresome."
The Fort Simpson Factor on March 19th, 1830, reports to Montreal:
"The goods came. The white beads was too small and not according to order or sample asked for. The Indians would not take them and left the Fort dissatisfied."
The Trader at Fort Good Hope augments the story by recording that the Indians would be better pleased in trade with two small kegs of the special beads they wanted than with half a ton of any other trade goods which London could manufacture and send out. The sequel of the story is that, disappointed time and again in not getting their favourite beads, the Loucheux Indians failed to bring in the autumn supply of meat to Fort Good Hope and in consequence, before the snows of the winter of 1831 had melted, many of the white men attached to that post died of starvation.
The Keele Party on the Gravel River
We had gone North with the birds in spring and now, as we turn our faces homeward, the first migrants with strong wing are beginning their southward flight. Our travel is against current now, for we make slower time than we did coming in and consequently see more of the passing shore-line. The last specimens we gather within the Arctic Circle are the blue blossoms of the flax. In them we see the earnest of many a cultivated farm of the future. The days are getting perceptibly shorter and one by one the old familiar constellations come back in the heavens. We find it a relief to have once more a twilight and a succeeding period of dusk. Yet are we loath to leave this fascinating North with its sure future, its quaint to-days, and all the glamour of its rich past.
We had just passed Fort Norman when the sharp eyes of an Indian deck-hand saw three figures on the beach ahead. Pulling in at the point where the Gravel River joins the Mackenzie, we find a regular Robinson Crusoe group,—Mr. J. Keele, of the Dominion Government Survey, and his two associates. Going in on the Yukon side, Mr. Keele's task has been to cross the Divide between the Yukon and the Mackenzie, mapping the rocks. The only white man they had seen in sixteen months was a French priest who had passed yesterday, and whose knowledge of current events in Canada and Europe was scanty. They were glad to see us. A moose-skin boat showed how they had run the rough Gravel; the meat of two moose smoked over the camp-fire; their dogs were fat. These are men who know the woods—no hard-luck story here. It needs only Friday's funny fat umbrella to complete the picture, with the goat scampering in the middle distance.
Coming on board, the surveyors are greedy for newspapers, and we in return learn somewhat of that great slice of land which they are the first to traverse. The Gravel River is two hundred and fifty-five miles long, with "white water" all the way. The force of the current may be appreciated from the fact that it is forty-four hundred feet above the sea-level at the Height-of-Land, and only four hundred feet here where it enters the Mackenzie. All along the banks of the Gravel are moose, mountain sheep, and caribou. The winter cabin of the party was built on the Ross River and there, during the past winter, they experienced a temperature of 54° below. A party of this kind must be to a large extent self-supporting, as it would be impossible to carry from the outside food for such a long sojourn. Speaking with Mr. Keele, one is forcibly struck with the fact that what the technical schools teach their students forms but a small part of the equipment of the man who would do field work in Northern Canada—packing, tracking, hunting, and breaking trail,—each man must do his share of these.
The Keele party on the great watershed, as they travelled east, crossed two families of Mackenzie River Indians going westward to hunt, on the west side of the ridge, the marten and the beaver. It was 32° below, and cold. The whole families were on the march, a little baby tucked in the curve of the sled, and tottering on foot an old, old woman, bent and wrinkled and scarcely able to move. As the Indians were on their return journey toward the Mackenzie in spring, the Keele party saw them again. But the old woman was not there. Under some lonely mound where snow falls in winter and the leaves of birch and cottonwood flutter down in the shrieking winds of autumn rest the bones of the old woman, her many journeys ended. The wearer of a costly fur coat in the glittering capitals of the Old World seldom stops to conjecture how much of hardship, patient suffering, and loneliness go to the making of that luxurious garment. In order that one might be warmly clad, many have gone cold, more than one sad, tired, old head has lain down for the last time by the lonely camp-fire.
Sad is the lot of the Indian woman of the North. Fated always to play a secondary part in the family drama, it is hard to see what of pleasure life holds for her. The birth of a girl baby is not attended with joy or thankfulness. From the beginning the little one is pushed into the background. The boy babies, even the dogs, have the choicer bed at night, and to them are given the best pieces of the meat. The little girl is made to feel that she has come into a world that has no welcome for her and her whole life seems to be an apology. You read it in the face of every Indian girl or woman you meet, from the shrinking pathetic little figure in the camp to the bent old crone, whose upturned face with its sadly acceptive look gives you the flicker of a smile.
Storm-stayed at Wrigley Harbour at the entrance to Great Slave Lake, we have some splendid fishing,—jackfish, whitefish, loche, inconnu, "and here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling." Within an hour I get fifteen graylings to my own rod. Collectively they weigh just a little over thirty pounds. Swimming against the current, they take the fly eagerly; and one cannot hope to land a more gaudy or more gamy fish. Its big dorsal fin is rainbow-tinct, the tail an iridescent blue, and the scales pure mother-of-pearl. Mr. Keele has had "The Complete Angler" for two years with him in the fastnesses, and as he helps us prepare the catch for our evening meal over the coals, quotes blithely that the grayling is eating fit only for "anglers and other honest men."
The traverse of Great Slave Lake in the teeth of a wind is not without its interest, for the new steamer has yet to be tried in the waters of what practically amounts to an open sea. She behaves well, and brings us dry-shod into Fort Rae.
The First Type-writer on Great Slave Lake
We are the first white women who have penetrated to Fort Rae, and we afford as much interest to the Indians as they afford us. Lone Fort Rae, clinging to the Northern Arm of Great Slave Lake, was noted in the past as a "meat-post." It supplied the Mackenzie District with dried caribou-meat, and formed an outfitting point for the few big game hunters who trended east from here into the Barren Grounds seeking the musk-ox. Its foundation dates back to some time before the year 1820. We cross a bridge of clever Indian construction and sit for a while to muse on a flat boulder of primal rock. This stands as bell-tower to a quaint bell cast in Rome and bears an inscription to some dead and gone Pope. The missionary priest over half a century ago paddled in here bringing the Gospel to the Dog-Ribs.
The Bell at Fort Rae Mission
The musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) is a gregarious animal which would appear to be a Creator's after-thought,—something between an ox and a sheep. The long hair hanging down from the body foreshortens the appearance of the legs and gives a quaint look to the moving herd. The present range of the musk-ox is from Fort Rae north to the Arctic and between the meridians of 86° and 125°. As it is the most inaccessible game in the world, there would seem to be no immediate fear of its being hunted to extinction. Toothed like a sheep, footed like an ox, tailed like a bear, and maned like a horse, the musk-ox does not circle up wind as the moose and caribou do, but travels in any direction he sees fit. Each little herd of ten or fifteen bunches up, tails to the middle and horns outside, to meet a common danger. The robe of the musk-ox is a rich, dark brown streaked with grey, the hair all over the body being very long, with a coat of mouse-coloured wool at its base. According to the Indians, the single young of the musk-ox is born in April. The mother buries the calf in the snow as soon as it is born, selecting a sheltered place for the cradle. Three days after its post-natal burial it is able to frisk with its dam and begin to take up the musk-calf's burden.
The Musk-ox
We are all day and all night crossing Great Slave Lake from Fort Rae to Fort Resolution. Food values and the outgoing cargo of fur are the topics of conversation. Years ago a delicate baby at Rae required milk, and with trouble and expense a cow was evolved from somewhere and deposited at the front door of the H.B. Co. Factor there—a cow but no cow-food. All animals must learn to be adaptable in the North. She was fed on fish and dried meat, lived happily, and produced milk after her kind. One of Mr. Keele's men tells of a horse on the Yukon side which ate bacon-rinds with a relish. The dogs at Smith eat raspberries, climb trees for a succulent moss, and when times are really hard become burglars, burgling bacon in the night season, and even being ghoulish enough to visit Indian cemeteries to pick a bone with the dead. A dog in the North Country is surely qualifying for some canine heaven in the asphodel meadows. I know of no created being who is undergoing a sterner probation than this creature forced by man and the exigencies of Fate to work like a horse in winter and live on air in summer.
From Great Slave Lake to Chipewyan the days are enlivened with stories from the outgoing traders. We learn that when the church was still young, some priests on the Mackenzie hungered after flesh-pots in the wilderness and wrote to the Pope, asking him whether beaver-tails were to be considered fish, or flesh. Rome evidently was not "long" on North American mammals and put itself into the class of Nature fakers forever by declaring said tails "fish" and not flesh. This is why you can discuss beaver-tails on top of the world on Fridays to this present and commit no sin.
The stories give us some idea of the difference between winter and summer travel across Great Slave Lake. Captain Mills tells of two Indian women, one old enough to have a daughter of forty, who drove a dogsled one hundred and forty-eight miles from Providence to Rae, in four days. The older one walked ahead of the dogs and made the trail while the other drove. Coming back, it took them five days, and the old woman explained, "We didn't make such good time, as we had a man with us." It was her son-in-law whom she brought back with her.
A striking picture is given us of a woman who walked alone from Hay River to Province on snowshoes, taking thirteen days to do it. She had no matches, and carried her fire with her, keeping it alight in a little copper kettle. This, of course, necessitated her guarding it very closely and stopping to renew the fire from time to time; for if the burning wood was once permitted to die down, her life in that intense cold would go out with it.
How cold does it get? Mr. Campbell Young, of our little group, says that he has been out when a thermometer—one obtained from the U.S. Meteorological Station—registered seventy-six degrees below zero, and has worked in weather like that. "I've been trapping in that temperature, when of course the weather was absolutely still, and I tell you I'd rather be out in seventy-six below than to cross Smith Portage with the mosquitoes." Mr. Christie, of the Keele Survey Party, says, "Last winter I had to go out and get a moose for the camp, and on the second day I met the Mounted Police boys who told me it had been seventy-five below. I had started out when it was quite mild, only forty-five below. You know when it is below fifty, for then your breath begins to crackle, and that's a sure sign." Mr. John Gaudet says, "I was driving last winter on Lesser Slave Lake when it was sixty-four below. Yes, it was quite cold."
At Resolution we see once more our old friend Dr. Sussex, happy and busied among his Indians. It is just hail and farewell. The little "red lemonade" kiddies are the first to greet us as we come into Fort Smith, and here everybody goes visiting. Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald tells us that her grandfather had two wives, and was the father of twenty-two children. She says she and her brother are glad of this, as it gives them so many friends in all parts of the country; and we notice that at every port where we stop Mrs. MacDonald has friends to visit—a cousin here, and an auntie there. The fancy bag in which you carry your calling cards and little friendly gifts up here is a "musky-moot"; the more formidable receptacle, which gives your friends warning that you may stay a day or two, is a "skin-ichi-mun." Visiting a little on our own account, we note that we have penetrated to a latitude into which the gaudy calendars of the advertiser have not yet made their way. Each man, foolish enough here to want a calendar, marks out his own on pencilled paper. We come across an H.B. Journal of the vintage of 1826 where the reckless scribe introduces two Thursdays into one week, acknowledging his error in a footnote with the remark, "It is not likely that the eye of man will ever read this record."
At Fort Smith we leave the steamer Mackenzie River to take passage in the Grahame from Smith's Landing, and once more essay the Mosquito Portage. We find our winged friends in fine fettle. Their eyes are not dimmed, their strength not abated. For miles we notice blackened and dead stems of young spruce, cut off as if by machinery, at a uniform height of two and a half feet from the ground. The top of the dead stem shows the depth of the snow when the rabbits, running along the surface, had nibbled off and eaten the growing spruce. A fur-trader at our side says, "While at Fort Macpherson I noticed that the ice always melted in the spring in Peel's River before it did in the Mackenzie. It would break up in the Peel about the Queen's Birthday and begin to go out. Reaching the Mackenzie, it came up against a solid mass of unbroken ice which sent it back to flood the whole country. It was a curious experience to paddle round in a canoe for miles and miles where one had set rabbit snares but a few weeks before. The poor rabbits themselves were at a loss, for no kind monition apprised them of the coming flood. We could see whole colonies of them,—each a shipwrecked sailor on his own little raft of bark, buffeted here and there with the stream and peering out across the swollen waters, like Noah's dove, seeking some green thing."