The New North

by Agnes Deans Cameron

UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION

"What lies ahead no human mind can know,

To-morrow may bring happiness or woe.

We cannot carry charts, save the hope that's in our hearts

As along the unknown trail we blithely go."

When we leave Chipewyan August 17th, the fall hunt of waveys has already begun. We learn afterwards that the Loutit boys alone made a bag of sixteen hundred of these birds which, salted down, form a considerable part of the winter food of the old Fort. Mrs. William Johnson comes down to see us embark. She has overwhelmed us with generous kindness at our every visit to Chipewyan, kindness we cannot soon forget. It is a small group which now starts out in the little tug on the bosom of the mighty Peace,—Major Routledge, R.N.W.M.P., Mr. and Mrs. John Gaudet with their two olive-branches "Char-lee" and "Se-li-nah," now returning to Lesser Slave Lake from a visit to Fort Good Hope, Miss Brown and myself.

This part of the journey we are to enjoy more keenly than all that has gone before. Rising on the western side of the Rocky Mountains, the Peace River is the largest affluent of the Mackenzie, being already a splendid stream when it cuts through that range. With but one break, the Peace River affords a nine hundred mile stretch of navigation, and we can justly describe the country through which it flows as a plateau in which the river has made for itself a somewhat deep valley. Extensive grassy plains border it on both sides, and north of Fort Vermilion country of this character extends to the valley of the Hay River. Crossing the Quatre Fourches, an offshoot of the Peace at the Lake Athabasca edge, we turn our faces due west to a land of promise. The Mackenzie River and the banks of the Great Slave may some day afford homes to a busy and prosperous populace, but there are many fertile and more accessible lands to be settled first. With the Peace River Country there is no conjecture, for it is merely a question of the coming of the railway. Given a connection with the world to the south, the district watered by the Peace will at once support a vast agrarian population. The advance riders are already on the ground.

It is not our intent to go to the expense of using a steamer for our whole journey up the Peace. Scows will allow us to proceed more leisurely and to see more as we go, so the second day we turn the steamer back and transfer ourselves and our belongings into a little open craft or model-boat The Mee-wah-sin. We have a crew of five men, one on the steering-sweep and four to track, and in this wise we make our way for three hundred miles up the great river to Fort Vermilion. One day we improvise a sail and so make fifty miles in a favourable wind, but, with this exception, every other mile of the journey is by patient towing.

Incidents are many. The first morning after we turned back the little tug, the Kid and I left the slow trackers behind and were glad to stretch ourselves in a long forenoon's tramp along the sandy beach. The mosquitoes were practically gone and for the first time all summer one could really enjoy the woods, where a tang of autumn in the air made every breath a tonic draught. Exulting in the fact that we were alive, we turned a sharp corner and came suddenly face to face with a grey wolf, loping along at a swinging pace at the water's edge, muzzle close to the ground! To make the story worth telling, one should have something to say of "yawning jaws" and "bloodshot eyes" and "haunches trembling for a spring." But this grey wolf simply refused to play that part. He took one look at us, evidently didn't approve, and turned up from his tracks quietly into the cottonwoods above. As we on our side had brought neither gun nor camera from the Mee-wah-sin, we are unable to punctuate the story by either pelt or picture. Sic transit lupus!

A week out from Chipewyan, where the Swan River makes into the Peace, we came one glorious afternoon upon a camp of Crees, the family of the Se-weep-i-gons. They had just killed two bears. We bought the skins and a large portion of meat from them, and Mrs. Se-weep-i-gon very kindly added to the feast of fat things some high-bush cranberries "in a present." As an excuse for listening to their soft voices, before we left the camp we asked the name of every member of the little group, scratching the list down on a piece of birchbark. The Crees evidently considered this an official ceremony, for after we had paid our score and shaken hands with everybody from Grandpa to the latest baby and were well out in mid-stream, Mrs. Se-weep-i-gon came running down to the bank to call us back. Rowing to the shore we found that she had remembered one more child whose name she wanted to add to the list. She assured us that this one too had a little brass cross hanging round his neck, so we will be sure to know him if we meet him in the woods.

We lived for the next two days on bear-meat and cranberries.

Evening on the Peace

So one wonderful day follows another as our little boat is towed first against one bank then another of this majestic stream. The forest growth is a marvel. We measure one morning three of the spruce trees to which our tent-ropes are tied, and get for base measurement six feet eight inches, five feet two inches, and five feet respectively. The trees averaged ninety feet in height and would give perhaps one thousand feet to each tree. The autumn tints on the willows and alders of the high river-banks are indescribably beautiful. We pass through one hundred miles of a veritable field of the cloth of gold. We look out of our tent-flaps at night on this living glory, and wake up to it again with each new morning sun.

One Sunday evening at dusk we slip into the Hudson's Bay post where the Little Red River makes into the Peace, the dear home of Tom Kerr, his Scottish wife, and their four bairns. Let me try to give the picture. Tom had been off all day cutting meadowgrass, and now wended his way home with a load of it in a little Old Country cart drawn by a wall-eyed mare. At her side frisked a foal, and two great stag-hounds ran back and forward between the master and his home by the riverside. Three children bounded out to greet their father. "Oh! Daddy, Daddy, the red coo broke away from the byre and is far awa on the ither side o' the burn!" Here, in a nutshell, you have the difference between the Mackenzie River of to-day and the Peace River. On the Mackenzie, swarthy forms are in evidence, Cree and French is spoken on all sides, there are no great fields of waving grain, and the dog is the only domestic animal. On the Peace is an essentially white race, cows, chickens, trustworthy old nags, porridge for breakfast, "the tongue that Shakespeare spake," rendered in an accent born far ayont the Tweed. Right across the mouth of the Little Red River, Tom Kerr has a fishing scine. We go down with him to lift it, after the cows have been brought back to the narrow path. The net yields seven fish and they are of five different species,—trout, ling, sucker, jack-fish, and something else that Tom calls a "Maria." Daily this net is set, and for three hundred and sixty-five days every year it furnishes food for the family, in summer in the flowing water, and in winter under the ice. You couldn't starve at Little Red River if you wanted to. This is one of the most beautiful spots in the whole North Countree. Long after Tom and we and Mrs. Tom are under the gowans, and the little Kerrs possess the land, there will be populous cities along the Peace, and millionaires will plant their summer villas on the beauteous spot where we now stand.

Our Lobsticks on the Peace

Bidding the bairns good-bye, we press onward on our way, Tom Kerr accompanying us. A great honour awaits us round the next corner, when the boatmen announce that they are going to make us each a lobstick. We land, as pleased as Punch over the suggestion. We now know what it feels like when the philanthropist of a village takes his after-dinner walk through the square and sees the sparrows drinking from the memorial fountain surmounted with his own bust, done in copper, life-size. It takes fully two hours to trim the trees into significant shape, but the beauty of this particular kind of Cook's Tour is that you go down when you like and stop when you want to. The lobsticks furnished, the men form a circle and discharge their muskets in salute, and on we go. We learn that the ethics of lobsticks is that each of these men, should Fate take him past this point again, will salute the lobstick just made and send a strong thought across the spruce-tops to us. There is a reverse to the shield. Should we, at any time before this journey ends, fail to make good, the men on the return voyage will cut the lobstick down. We are going to make no impertinent enquiries regarding the ulterior fate of these family trees. Is it not sufficient glory to say, "On the Peace River we had a lobstick"?

The Chutes of the Peace! These will live forever with the Ramparts of the Mackenzie as the two most majestic visions which the whole North Land gave us. We had not been prepared for that wonderful spectacle which met us as we turned a sharp point in the river. The torrent roars for four or five hundred yards of rapid riverway before coming to its great drop. The rock-reef over which the cataract falls extends quite across the mighty Peace, here a river of immense width. Measured in feet and inches, the Chutes of the Peace must take second place to Niagara, yet they impress us as Niagara never did. The awesome silence of this land so pregnant with possibilities, a land which, though it echo now only the quiet foot of the Cree, is so unmistakably a White Man's Country, intensifies the sense of majesty and power which here takes possession of us. The men talk of the water-power furnished by the great falls, and hazard guesses of the future economic purposes to which it will be put. For our own part, our one wish is to get away from the noise of even these subdued voices and in silence feast our very souls on this manifestation of the power of God. The thoughts that we feel cannot be put into words. Why attempt the impossible?

The Chutes of the Peace

Our way lies beyond this, and the Chutes have to be overcome. These half-breeds know exactly what to do in every emergency which arises. Only one of the men has traversed this river before, and he gives orders. We strip our little Mee-wah-sin of her temporary masts and canvas awning and take out all our belongings. Everybody works. A purchase is obtained by throwing a pulley and rope over a nearby jack-pine, and the boat is pulled out bodily from the water. Then the crew drag her along the shore well beyond the head of the rapid, and we make camp.

Pulling out the Mee-wah-sin

These delicious nights within the tent are memories that will remain through all the years to come. It is cool and silent and productive of thought. We are selfishly glad that fifty people went out by Athabasca ways, leaving to us all the mighty reaches and pleasant pastures of the Peace. The midnight is flooded by a glorious moon, and the thoughts born this afternoon of that stupendous fall have driven sleep far away. Opening the tent-flap, I slip through the camp of sleeping Indians to the edge of the fast-flowing stream. The feeling is insistent here which has been ever-present since we entered this valley of the Peace—here is the home prepared and held in waiting for the people who are to follow.

"Listening there, I heard all tremulously

Footfalls of Autumn passing on her way,

And in the mellow silence every tree

Whispered and crooned of hours that are to be.

Then a soft wind like some small thing astray

Comes sighing soothingly."

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