THE GRAND AND GLOOMY SAGUENAY.
Far over to the northward, across the broad river, is ancient Tadousac, enclosed by the guarding mountains at the entrance to the Saguenay. The harbor and landing are within a small rounded bay, having the Salmon Hatching House of the Dominion alongside the wharf, a cascade pouring down the hillside behind, and a little white inn prettily perched above on a shelf of rock. The village spreads over irregular terraces, encircling three of these little rounded bays, beyond which the narrow Saguenay chasm goes off westward through the mountains into a savage wilderness. This place has been a trading-post with the Indians for over three centuries, and the ancient buildings of the Hudson Bay Company testify to the traffic in furs, once so good, which has become almost obsolete. It was visited by Cartier in 1535, and afterwards was established as one of the earliest missions of the Jesuits, who came here in 1599 and raised the cross among the Nasquapees of the Saguenay—the "upright men," as they called themselves,—and the Montaignais, both then powerful tribes, which have since entirely disappeared from this region, having withdrawn to its upper waters, around and beyond Lake St. John. The old chapel, replacing the original Jesuit church—said to have been the first erected in North America—stands down by the waterside, a diminutive, peak-roofed, one-story building, kept as a memorial of the past, for the people now worship in a fine new stone church farther up the rounded hill-slope. These knoll-like rounded hills or mamelons named the place, for they are numerous, and Tadousac, literally a "nipple," is the Indian word for them. The most valued possession of the church is a figure of the child Jesus, originally sent to the mission by King Louis XIV. This is the oldest settlement of the Lower St. Lawrence.
The stern and gloomy Saguenay, the largest tributary of the Lower St. Lawrence, is one of the most remarkable rivers in the world. Its main portion is a tremendous chasm cleft in a nearly straight line for sixty miles in the Laurentian Mountains, through an almost unsettled wilderness. These Laurentides make the northern shore of the St. Lawrence for hundreds of miles below Quebec, rising into higher peaks and ridges in the interior, and being the most ancient part of America, the geologists telling us the waves of the Silurian Sea washed against this range when only two small islands represented the rest of the continent. Through this vast chasm the Saguenay brings down the waters of Lake St. John and its many tributaries, some of them rising in the remote north, almost up to Hudson Bay. This lower portion of the river goes through an almost uninhabitable desert of gloomy mountains, the tillable land being in the basin of the Upper Saguenay and Lake St. John, the people of that valley living there in almost complete isolation. Logs and huckleberries are the crops produced on this savage river, the only things the sparse population can depend upon for a living, and the fine blueberries bring them the scant doles of ready money they ever see. The Saguenay's inky waters have the smell of brine as they break in froth upon the shore, and then the air-bubbles show the real color to be that of brandy. The upper tributaries give this color as they flow out of forests of spruce and hemlock and swamps filled with mosses and highly colored roots and vegetable matter. Almost all the lakes and rivers of the vast wilderness north of the St. Lawrence present a similar appearance, their rapids and waterfalls, seen under the sunshine, seeming like sheets of liquid amber.
The vast accumulations of waters gathered from the heart of the Laurentides by the tributaries of Lake St. John flow down the rapids below the lake in a stream rivalling those of Niagara. Thus the Saguenay comes into being in the form of lusty twins—the Grand Discharge and the Little Discharge—deep and narrow river channels worn in the rocks. For some miles they run separately through rapids and pools, finally joining at the foot of Alma Island, where begin the Gervais Rapids, four miles long. The Grand Discharge is a beautiful stream of rapids, the rippling and roaring currents flowing through a maze of islands, while the Little Discharge is a condensed stream, so powerful and unruly that it actually destroys the logs in its boisterous cataracts, the government having made a "Slide," down which the timber is run past the dangerous places. After passing Gervais Rapids the Saguenay has a quiet reach of fifteen miles to the Grand Ramous, the most furious cascade of all, and then a few more miles of rapids and falls bring it to Chicoutimi, ending its wild career where it meets the tide above Ha Ha Bay. The first bold Frenchmen who ventured up through the stupendous and forbidding chasm of the Lower Saguenay gave this bay its name, to show their delight at having finally emerged from the gloomy region. At Ha Ha Bay the tide often rises twenty-one feet, and below, the river forces its passage with a broad channel through almost perpendicular cliffs out to the St. Lawrence. Its great depth is noteworthy, showing what a fearful chasm has been split open, there being in many places a mile to a mile and a half depth, while the channel throughout averages eight hundred feet depth. For most of the distance the river is a mile or more wide. The original name given the river by the Montaignais was Chicoutimi, or the "deep water," now given the village below the foot of the rapids. The present name is a corruption of the Indian word Saggishsékuss, meaning "a strait with precipitous banks." The sad sublimity of the impressive chasm culminates at Eternity Bay, where on either hand rise in stately grandeur to sixteen hundred feet elevation above the water Cape Trinity, with its three summits, and Cape Eternity. Ten miles above is Le Tableau, a cliff one thousand feet high, its vast smooth front like an artist's canvas.
This sombre river, whose bed is much lower than that of the St. Lawrence, is frozen for almost its whole course during half the year, and snow lies on its bordering mountains until June. It makes a saddening impression upon most visitors. Bayard Taylor compared the Saguenay chasm to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley, describing everything as "hard, naked, stern, silent; dark gray cliffs of granitic gneiss rise from the pitch-black water; firs of gloomy green are rooted in their crevices and fringe their summits; loftier ranges of a dull indigo hue show themselves in the background, and over all bends a pale, cold, northern sky." Another traveller calls it "a cold, savage, inhuman river, fit to take rank with Styx and Acheron;" and "Nature's sarcophagus," compared to which, "the Dead Sea is blooming;" and so solitary, dreary and monotonous that it "seems to want painting, blowing up or draining—anything, in short, to alter its morose, quiet, eternal awe."
EXPLORING THE SAGUENAY CHASM.
Ha Ha Bay, where the exploring Frenchmen found such relief for their oppressed feelings, is a long strait thrust through the mountains southwest from the Saguenay for several miles, broadening at the head into an oval bay, practically a basin among the crags, with two or three French villages around it, named after various saints. The modest one-story huts of the habitans fringe the lower slopes near the water's edge along the valleys of several small streams, each cluster having its church with the tall spire. The basin is two or three miles across, enclosed by bold cliffs and rounded hills, the wide beaches of sand and pebble showing the great rise and fall of the tide. There is a sawmill or two, and lumber and huckleberries are the products of the district. Chicoutimi village is above the chasm, at a point where the intervale broadens, the savage mountains retiring, leaving a space for gentle tree-clad slopes and cultivated fields. Standing high on the western bank are the magnificent Cathedral, the Seminary, a Sailors' Hospital, and the Convent of the Good Shepherd, and not far away a tributary stream pours fifty feet down the Chicoutimi Falls in a rushing cascade of foam. There are extensive sawmills, and timber ships come in the summer for cargoes for Europe, and the place has railway connections with Lake St. John and thence southward to Quebec. There is a population of about three thousand. The universal little one-story, peak-roofed, whitewashed French cottages abound, some having a casing of squared pieces of birch-bark to protect them from the weather, making them look much like stone houses, and peeping inside it is found that the inhabitants usually utilize their old newspapers for wall-paper.
From Chicoutimi down to Tadousac the region of the Saguenay chasm is practically without habitation. There are two or three small villages, chiefly abodes of timber-cutters, but it is otherwise uninhabited; nor do the precipitous cliffs usually leave any place near the river for a dwelling to be put. As the visitor goes along on the steamboat it is a steady and monotonous panorama of dark, dreary, round-topped crags, with stunted firs sparsely clinging to their sides and tops where crevices will let them, while the faces of the cliffs are white, gray, brown and black, as their granites change in color. A few frothy but attenuated cascades pour down narrow fissures. The scene, while sublime, is forbidding, and soon becomes so monotonous as to be tiresome. This gaunt and savage landscape culminates in Eternity Bay. Ponderous buttresses here guard the narrow gulf on the southern shore, formed by the outflow of a little river. The western portal, Cape Trinity, as the steamboat approaches from above, appears as a series of huge steps, each five hundred feet high, and the faithful missionaries have climbed up and placed a tall white statue of the Virgin on one of the steps, about seven hundred feet above the river, and a large cross on the next higher step, both being seen from afar. Passing around into the bay, the gaunt eastern face of this enormous promontory is found to be a perpendicular wall of the rawest granite, standing sixteen hundred feet straight up from the water. At the top it grandly rises on the bay side into three huge crown-like domes, which, upon being seen by the original French explorers when they came up the river, made them appropriately name it the Trinity. This is one of the most awe-inspiring promontories human eyes ever beheld, as it rises sheer out of water over half a mile deep. Across the narrow bay, the eastern portal, Cape Eternity, similarly rises in solemn grandeur, with solid unbroken sides and a wooded top fully as high. The entire Saguenay River is of much the same character, repeating these crags and promontories in myriad forms. While not always as high, yet the enclosing mountains elsewhere are almost as impressive and fully as dismal. The steamboat, aided by the swift tide, moves rapidly through the deep canyon, one rounded peak and long ridge being much like the others, with the same monotonous dreariness everywhere, and every rift disclosing only more distant sombre mountains. The chasm throughout its length has no beacons for navigation, the shores being so steep and the waters so deep they are unnecessary. A sense of relief is felt when the open waters at Tadousac and the St. Lawrence are reached, for the journey makes everyone feel much like a writer in the London Times, who said of it: "Unlike Niagara and all other of God's great works in nature, one does not wish for silence or solitude here. Companionship becomes doubly necessary in an awful solitude like this."
THE ANGLING GROUNDS OF LOWER CANADA.
Quebec province, on the Lower St. Lawrence, for hundreds of miles north and east of the river is filled with myriads of lakes and streams that are the haunts of the hunter and angler, and the Government gets considerable revenue from the fishery rentals. As far away as five hundred miles from Quebec, up in Labrador, is the Natashquin River, and eight hundred miles down the St. Lawrence is the Little Esquimau, these being the most distant fishery grounds. Among the noted fishing streams are the grand Cascapedia, the Metapedia, the Upsalquitch, the Patapedia, the Quatawamkedgewick (usually called, for short, the "Tom Kedgewick"), and the Restigouche, on the southern side of the Lower St. Lawrence, their waters being described as flowing out to "the undulating and voluptuous Bay of Chaleurs, full of long folds, of languishing contours, which the wind caresses with fan-like breath, and whose softened shores receive the flooding of the waves without a murmur." Around the great Lake St. John there is also a maze of lakes and fishery streams. The most noted Canadian fishery organization is the "Restigouche Salmon Club," having its club-house on the Restigouche River, at its junction with the Metapedia, and controlling a large territory. The guides in this region are usually Micmac Indians, who have been described on account of their energy as the "Scotch-Irish Indians." This tribe originally inhabited the whole of Lower Canada south of the St. Lawrence, being found there by Cartier, and the French named them the Sourequois or "Salt-Water Indians," because they lived on the seacoast. They were staunch allies of the French, who converted them to Christianity from being sun-worshippers. They have a reservation near Campbellton, on the Restigouche, and a populous village surrounding a Catholic church. There are now about seven thousand of them, all told, throughout the provinces. Glooscap was the mythical chief of the Micmacs, whose power and genius were shown throughout all the region from New England to Gaspé. He was of unknown origin, and invincible, and he conquered the "great Beaver, feared by beasts and men," on the river Kennebecasis, near St. John. Glooscap's favorite home and beaver-pond was the Basin of Minas, in Nova Scotia, where afterwards dwelt Longfellow's Evangeline. Micmac traditions describe him as the "envoy of the Great Spirit," who lived above in a great wigwam, and was always attended by an aged dame and a beautiful youth. He had the form and habits of humanity, and taught his tribe how to hunt and fish, to build wigwams and canoes, and to heal diseases. He controlled the elements and overthrew all enemies of his people; but the tradition adds that on the approach of the English, the great Glooscap, "finding that the ways of beasts and men waxed evil," turned his huge hunting-dogs into stone, and his huntsmen into restless and wailing loons, and then he vanished.