About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size. One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is "just like a town." Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered the fringed gentian (Gentiana crinata) with its lance-shaped leaves, delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63°. Purple asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and purple columbines already forming seed.
Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche Trempe-l'eau or "The Rock by the Riverside," an outcrop of Devonian limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above the river. We come into view of the "boucans" or beds of lignite coal which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in 1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back, for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of "small white buffalo" which they hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the Sass-sei-yeuneh or "Foolish Bear" of the Slavis.
Indians at Fort Norman
It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.
The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water, probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.
March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre of the lake freezes over.
When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle "Boyne Water." The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the "Nest of the Wind" of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that the Great Spirit, "in the beginning," spread out there to dry. We find Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning, the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library, and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas, beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and pink-teas.