Seeds of Pine

by Emily F. Murphy

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.