The New North

by Agnes Deans Cameron

Three of a Kind

Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their protégés, that the sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.

We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot, with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. "What in the world do you do after six?" I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not content to rest in idle laps. "Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to give us light." Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their candles like Alfred of old.

Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations. At the Church of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from the leg of an injured Indian. Afterward we learn that the peripatetic patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome. Poor chap, he died in the process! But while he lived he stimulated trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale. If there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably fore-ordained.

An interesting family lives next to the English Mission—the Loutits. The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company, and "for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a rabbit-track." There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old journals reach. The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day's generation is a family of striking young people—the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding the strong men's records of the North.

George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids. His brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in three days—a distance of two hundred miles at least. Once, when the river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling upward in the night. The rivermen tell of George Loutit's quarreling with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his adversary out of the window. When he heard him slump, George immediately thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away. He arrived there in time for noon luncheon next day.

At the H.B. Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge. A French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is peltries and not souls that Pierre is after. His forebears were Irish McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs it.

Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such entries as these:—"Wyllie at the forge," "Wyllie making nails," "Wyllie straightening the fowling-pieces," "Wyllie making sled-runners," "This day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian." We step into the old man's smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a "Good mornin'," in richest Doric. The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan. He was born in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World. Coming out to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without seeing a city in America. Torontonians think the hub of the universe is their capital on Lake Ontario. A smart young man from Toronto filtered in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, "Came from the Old Country, didn't you? What did you think of Toronto?" "Naething, I didna see the place."

Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone. In the forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north, Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west. To him these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into luxuriousness with all its weakening influence. "It was much better in the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil. Nowadays, when we have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are coming out!"