CHAPTER XXII
THE HERO PRIESTS OF THE NORTH
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear thro' life like a torch in flame,
And falling, fling to the host behind,
'Play up! Play up! and play the game!'—NEWBOLT.
"For long years," said a Toronto editor the other day, "this country has produced few outstanding personalities except politicians."
Here spoke the little Canadian. By this country he meant the provinces to the south of the Great Lakes. Think of that! Think of that!
Why, man dear, north of the lakes we have outstanding personalities to burn—and we burn them. And, here and now, let me say that under the northern lights, politicians must, perforce, take a third or even a fourth estate, for always we have to reckon with the missionary priest, the business man, and the real-estate agent, before we begin to consider the politician. Even then, I am not so sure but the editor and the railway boss take precedence of the politician. In this large, airy land, politicians are truly but small fry from small places—inconsequential ephemera, who age in a heart-beat and die.
If I had realized at the start this was to be a chapter on the outstanding personalities among the missionary priests, I would have begun differently. I would have said that the Anglo-Saxon hungers for heroes, but that the heroes were rare—that this was why the raw, ragged wolf-land lying about the Hudson Bay and along the stretches of the Mackenzie River was of deep and peculiar interest, in that it had the distinction of producing crops of heroes and that the breed never seemed to run out.
I would have said that the story of the northern priest is the story of a man with an ideal, or, if you will have it so, with a dream; that the dream is one that disturbs his ease and leads him in perils often.
I would have gone further and shown this boy o' dreams to be at the same time a supreme realist and, without question, one of the highest types of human excellence in the last half-century; that he has the dauntless spirit of the soldier, the enthusiasm of the explorer, the enterprise of the merchant, and the patriotism of the statesman, and all for the sole object of helping humanity. In a word, that he is a special soul and must not be judged as general.
It is to be regretted I did not begin this way, but, to quote the Roman governor who gave judgment concerning the Nazarene: "What I have written, I have written."
... Among the missionary priests of the North there is, to-day, no greater outstanding personality than Bishop Stringer of the diocese of the Mackenzie River.
I used to know him years agone when he was Isaac Stringer, divinity student, a lusty young fellow, lean and clean and strong of wind, who could carry a ball down the field past all antagonists and send it spinning through the goal. When I say he has grown stout since those days, you must not make the deduction that he is under-worked and overfed like other bishops of whom we have heard tell. On the contrary part, north of 53° it is our profligate custom to starve all dignitaries. Indeed, it was only last winter that Bishop Stringer, on his way across the divide from the Mackenzie River to the Yukon, nearly lost his life from starvation. He and his companion, Charles F. Johnson, were lost in a mountain fog and missed the trail. Southern folk who sit in offices and parlours do not grasp the full meaning of this, and I cannot very well explain except to say that Dante had an exceedingly fine insight when he made the Inferno foggy.
For a week, in deep snow and deeper fog, they wandered in and out of Fool's River, the irony of which could not fail to rub them sore. Returning to the Fool's mouth, they spent three days making snow-shoes and cutting up moccasins for webbing. From here they ascended the height of land and crossed three divides before finding an east-flowing river. But again the fog descended and now came the fight for life. On and on they wandered, day after day, scarcely able to see a foot ahead and more than once treading on the verge of a precipice.
They had been living on a daily ration of a spoonful of flour and rice and the half of a red squirrel each. But even this gave out, and the sorely beset men tried eating moccasin leather, and ended on muckalucks or messinke boots. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I would explain that muckalucks are contrived out of raw sealskin. Bishop Stringer has since told me that when he had divided the food, his companion assigned the portions, and vice versa. This is one of the trail's lessons. At last, after eleven days of blind stumbling, they came out at an Indian camp on the Peel River. Twenty miles further down, at the Hudson's Bay Fort, the factor weighed the much-emaciated men and found that each had lost fifty pounds.
In his letter to his wife, who was visiting in Kincardine, Ontario, the Bishop says of his experiences: "The one thing that made us unhappy was that you and the others might worry about us when we did not turn up. But this feeling wore off when it meant a matter of life or death, and day after day we wondered how long we would last—whether you would ever hear from us. You can imagine we were much in prayer, and over and over again reconsecrated ourselves to the Master's service."
This Bishop of Mackenzie River is surely an outstanding personality, and reminds me of what Robert Louis Stevenson said of the late John Chalmers, a missionary of New Guinea: "You can't weary me of that fellow," he asserted; "he is as big as a house and far bigger than any church."
Bishop Stringer's predecessor in the diocese was William Carpenter Bompas, the Apostle of the North, the man who has been classified by the Church Missionary Society as "indisputably the most self-sacrificing bishop in the world."
His diocese, too, was the largest in the world, consisting of one million square miles. It had the same peculiarity as Bobbie Burns's "cauld, cauld kirk"—-there were "in't but few."
William Bompas went North in 1865 and stayed there forty years, coming out only twice. On the first of these occasions he returned to England to be elevated to the episcopate.
The only medical training the Bishop had under gone was a short course in the treatment of snowblindness, and this when he went to England for his consecration. This is a form of blindness that causes great suffering among the Indians, and the Bishop had himself been stricken with it on several occasions. On one of these, stumbling painfully at every step, he was led by an Eskimo boy for seventy-five miles. Writing of his agonies, he says: "They are delights. The first foot-prints on earth made by our risen Saviour were the nail-marks of suffering, and for the spread of the gospel, too, am prepared to suffer."
Like Stringer, Bompas also endured frequent starvation, but seldom spoke of it as a personal happening, but rather as applying to others—a virtue most hard and difficult to be practised. Writing about it to a friend in England, he said: "Horses were killed for food and furs eaten at several of the posts. The Indians had to eat a good many of their beaver skins."
Another man who endured the privations of the pioneer in this district is the present Bishop of Keewatin, Joseph Lofthouse.
The most interesting, and certainly the most romantic story of his career, is that of his marriage. His sweetheart, a young English girl, was due to arrive on the yearly vessel of the Hudson's Bay Company. Lofthouse travelled several hundred miles to meet her, but found she had not come, being unavoidably detained in England. The following summer he made the same journey, but this time as the vessel pulled up the harbour, he was able to single out the lassie's face on the deck. Yes, sir! if you had lived among Eskimos and Indians all these years, you, too, would tremble and choke in the throat at the ship's rope hit the mooring-post.
But now the young couple found themselves in as trying a predicament as the Israelites with the sea in front, Pharaoh's army behind, and unscalable rocks on either side. In a word, there was no minister to marry them. Things looked badly for them, and the lassie was thinking of returning home, when it suddenly occurred to the captain that, on the open sea, according to law, he was entitled to act as a magistrate. It was not long till the good ship slipped her moorings and stood out into the sweep of the Atlantic, where to a time-honoured form, the minister and the girl plighted their troth, symbolized it by the gift of a ring, and ratified it by the authority of the state, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
This is a good enough story to end with, but there are other outstanding personalities I must mention.
There is Bishop Holmes,[[1]] who resides at Athabasca Landing, and who has had many interesting experiences among the redskins. Like all true northmen, the Bishop speaks in a quiet, low tone, admirably adapted to the art of narrative. Once for weeks, he took charge of a Weetigo or Weendigo Indian, in order to protect him from relatives who sought to take his life. The man believed himself to be a cannibal, for in some strange way the idea had been suggested to him. After a time, the hallucination passed away, and the man returned to the camp.
Until comparatively recent years, the untutored redmen believed that people who were insane or in delirium were either obsessed or possessed of an evil spirit, and that it was necessary to kill them in order to prevent this spirit from entering into others. The plight of the relatives in these cases was pitiable; they could not allow a violently insane man or woman at large, and the killing was usually performed with great grief. This custom has fallen into desuetude, for, since the advent of the Mounted Police, the perpetrators are treated as murderers and accordingly hanged. The most arduous duty of the police is the bringing in of demented Indians or white prospectors from the North. It is a task that has, in turn, driven a stalwart redcoat insane. One's nerves are apt to snap when, for weeks, you sleep o' nights in the snow roped to a maniac.
And there was Rev. Henry Irwin, better known as Father Pat. He was a railroad priest on the Canadian Pacific, and, because of his unselfish work among them, became the idol of men. There are some misguided folk who think of a priest as a feeble, microcephalous body with a black coat, a shovel hat, and a superb ignorance of the ways of the world. There are, we own, some priests like this, but Father Pat was not one of them. Indeed, his dress and deportment were such as to often cause scandal to good church folk who were not so conversant with his noble deeds and self-abnegation as were the railroad navvies and gold-miners. Father Pat had only been married a year when his wife and baby died, and, not so long after, he was found almost frozen to death in a snow-bank, from the results of which he died. Here was an elementary man fighting the elements. The North stands at salute.
Nor were the Roman Catholic missionaries less self-denying, or in any way smaller men than their Protestant co-workers. There was Bishop Breynat who froze his feet and amputated his toes with a penknife. "Sirs, it's bitter beneath the Bear."
In 1869-70, at St. Albert, the ecclesiastical head-quarters of the Catholic Church in Alberta, Father Leduc, a complete Christian, nursed the Indians who were sick with the small-pox until he contracted it himself. Then the other priests in turn fell in line as nurses until every man was a victim of the disease.
It is a scene that reminds one of Sir Walter Scott's romance where the clansman and his seven sons all fell for the chieftain, stepping forth gladly into the gap and crying: "One more for Eachim."
While the priests lay ill an Indian came for one of them to administer the last rites of the Church to his mother. What was done? You never could guess unless you lived in the North, so I may as well tell you. A young priest rolled his blankets closer about, gave orders to his attendants to carry him to the waiting sleigh, and, in this condition, made the painful journey. Mattress and all, he was borne into the sick-room, where he administered the viaticum to the dying woman.
Father Lacombe, whose good grey head all men know, is the pioneer missionary of Alberta. He is eighty-three years of age, and sixty-one of these years have been spent in the service of the North. The story of his life sounds like a new Acts of the Apostles. In the science-ridden centuries to come, when these first white wanderers in boreal regions will be almost mythical characters, tradition will love to weave about them stories of romance and mystery—dramatic, preternatural stories such as we frame to-day about SS. Patrick, Augustine and Albanus.
Perhaps the most interesting event in Lord Strathcona's visit last year to Alberta was his meeting again with Père Lacombe. It was in the Government House gardens at Edmonton, overlooking the Saskatchewan River. All the guests fell back out of earshot while the aged men clasped hands and talked over other days and of the boys who had long since crossed the height of land to the ultimate sea.
At the present time Père Lacombe is living at Midnapore, near Calgary, in a home for poor old folk and children, the money to build which he collected himself.
... And there is the story of Father Goiffon who was frozen near Emerson on the eve of All Saints' Day, 1860. It was told to me by Father Lestanc,[[2]] who, eighty years ago, was born at Brest in Brittany. Father Lestanc has been fifty-five years in the West and North, nineteen of which were spent at St. Boniface under Bishop Taché. In spite of his extreme age, Lestanc has a hardy-moulded figure, and a strong, clear voice. One cannot listen to him for long without being impressed by his affectional force and broad reach of humanity. He is not clear about things of yesterday, but take him back over the decades and his memory rings true as a bell.
Goiffon had been at St. Paul, Minneapolis, making the yearly purchases for his mission. Among other things he bought a city-bred horse to carry him home. Fifty years ago St. Paul was seventeen days' journey from Emerson, on the border-line, and folk travelled in caravans.
One day's journey from Emerson, Father Goiffon left the party that he might push on the more rapidly and reach his mission post to say Mass on All Saints' Day. To use a northern colloquialism, he travelled light, carrying with him but one meal and no blanket. Neither had he matches or an axe, for, bear in mind, he was only a young priest, and he hoped to be in his shack by fall of night.
Soon after noonday there blew up a blinding snow-storm that made progress impossible. A usurping, all-invading sheet of snow settled down over the plains and turned the air into a white darkness. The man tied his horse to a willow shrub and lay down in the snow. The hours passed painfully on, but the youth kept his head buried in his saddle that his face might not freeze. When at last he looked up, he found his horse dead by his side. I told you a bit ago, it was a city-bred horse and no trailer.
And now came the fight for life. The boy priest had no shelter but the flaccid, unstrung body of his horse, already cold in death. I do not know about the pain of the night, except that at the edge of day, one foot and leg were frozen and the toes of the other, so that he could not stand upright. I wonder if he heard the bell from his home in France as he lay in the snow! They say men do. Something must have been sounding in his ears, for he did not hear the caravan as it passed him in the morning.
At midday he cut a piece of flesh off the horse and ate it.
"A crude diet, Mon Père," I remark.
"Oui, oui," replies the old Breton. "What you Anglais call a 'sleepshod' dinnaire! What would you, Madame? One must browse where he is tethered."
The rescue party from Emerson met a man and boy hauling in the stricken priest on a sledge. They had heard him sobbing in the snow.
The Indians doctored him for six weeks until his limbs threatened to drop off, and then sent a runner to St. Boniface to ask Father Lestanc what they would do with him. This happened fifty years ago, but Father Lestanc must walk to the window and look out into the garden for a while before he can trust his voice.
For men and dogs it was a round run of one hundred and forty miles from St. Boniface to Emerson, but in twenty-four hours Goiffon lay in Bishop Taché's palace at St. Boniface, on the banks of the Red River. Dr. Bunn, the physician at the Hudson's Bay post across at Fort Garry, awaited his arrival and amputated the already putrefied members. The next morning Goiffon was found to be bleeding to death; the stitches would not hold and the veins were open. Nothing could be done but to calmly await the end.
Father Lestanc broke the news to the household, whereupon the sorrowing but withal practical sister in charge of the kitchen placed a caldron of buffalo tallow on the stove, for, explains my narrator, "a priest's wake requires many, many candles."
The little serving-maids under the sister, doubtless whispering over the sad happenings upstairs, forgot to watch the pot, so that it "swelled much, Madame," over the red-hot stove till all the house was on fire.
Do not scold the girls, but wait till I tell you. Such a thing was never heard of. It was really Le Bon Dieu who permitted the house and cathedral to burn. There is no doubt of it, for, when the priest carried the dying youth out and laid him on the snow, the frost congealed the blood so that his veins ceased to empty themselves.
This was fifty years ago, and last summer, Father Goiffon came up from Petit Canada, near St. Paul, to attend a cathedral service at Winnipeg, on the site of Old Fort Garry.
"Oui, Madame, oui, I comprehend when you say similia similibus curcantur. Literally, eet ees a frost kills, a frost cures. Eet ees a well thing the body ees so adaptive."
... And once Bishop Grandin was lost in the snow. It was in 1863, near Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.
With one Indian boy he was crossing the lake on the ice, following in the wake of a party of Hudson's Bay Company men. The Bishop's dogs were tired and fell behind. When a storm blew up he lost the trail. The thermometer was at forty degrees below zero, and the storm was what Father Lestanc calls a "poudrerie"—that is to say, a storm where the snow blows up like fine powder. This does not sound unpleasant, but as an actuality it is, in the extreme North, a sinister snow that bites your face like driven needles.
The Bishop had no guide but the wind, and when a storm rises the wind veers. He gave the dogs their head, but even their homing instinct failed them in the storm and night, so that they crouched on the ice and howled in unison with the little Indian boy.
At dawn the boy said he smelled smoke, for he was an Indian, and smoke travels far in the clear, winnowed air of the North.
On looking to the west they sighted land, and after a painful journey met a dog-train coming toward them with men—the boy's father and uncle. The priest was celebrating a Mass for the repose of the Bishop's soul when he arrived, for "Les sauvages," says my informant, "had declared the Bishop would be frozen to the middle of hees heart. Ah, leetle Madam! Whom Le Bon Dieu guards are well guarded."
I did not know about this Father Lestanc before. I thought he was merely an old Oblate Brother passing from the sixth to the seventh stage of man's little day. Now I know him for one of the outstanding personalities of the North, and, as such, would do him honour, even I who am of the world, worldly. I know things about him that happened years and years ago when this was no man's land. I know how once he nursed and buried a young man whose companions had abandoned him to die at Rat Creek, near Portage la Prairie.
The man had gone into the Indian camps against the wishes of his fellow-teamsters who were travelling from Fort Garry to Fort Charlton. But he was a gamester, and he went. This was how he contracted small-pox, and the reason his companions were forced to leave him to fight death for himself with a little supply of pemmican and some bannocks as his sole backers. You may not have noticed that the life of a gamester and the race-horse are short ones in the north-west, but it is, nevertheless, indubitably true, and this case was no exception to the rule. His name? I do not know. One forgets names in the oblivious West.
Father Lestanc rolled the loathsome body in a blanket and decently buried it, for the buffalo hunters had learned that in cases of small-pox the healthiest thing a traveller can do is to mind his own special business.
"Did any one else catch the disease?" I ask.
"Non, non, no one else."
The old man muses a little, for he is growing tired, and this was fifty years ago. Suddenly memory floods in on him and he shows distress: "Pardon, Madam, pardon! I took eet. Oui, I took eet."
[[1]] Since deceased.
[[2]] Since deceased.