Part of that afternoon I spent at home with mother, and during part of it hunted up our horses, and finding them, corralled them for the night. I noted the new house was finished and that mother was comfortably settled once more in a substantial home. True, it was without any furniture or stoves, but Larsen was hard at work at the former, and time and money would eventually bring the latter. (Mother, of all women I know, is most strongly possessed of patience and sublime resignation to the lot of the wife of a pioneer missionary.) I saw, also, that the stockade around the mission-house was finished; that another field had been fenced, broken and planted; that the prospect of a garden crop was good, and that our chance of barley for soup next winter was largely within the possibilities. I saw, too, a number of garden patches that the Indians had fenced in, hoed and planted with the small share of seeds the mission could give them. With most of these aborigines, this was the very first effort to till the land. In short, I saw that those at home had been at work, and that things were beginning to look like permanent occupancy.
I missed the genial, kindly presence of my old friend, Mr. Woolsey. He had returned to Ontario, following the route down the river in one of the Hudson's Bay Company's boats, and thus I had failed to meet him. Nine years on the Saskatchewan, from 1855 to 1864, in Hudson's Bay fort, in Indian lodge, beside many a camp-fire, he had preached the living gospel of a loving Saviour. In doing this work he had undergone untold hardships, always and everywhere handicapped by physical infirmities. Transplanted from the city of London, Eng., into the wildness and wilderness of the far west; having had no experience or knowledge of the conditions of frontier life in a new country; with no knowledge of the language of the Indians—indeed, I venture to say he had seldom seen an Indian—in the presence of the physical difficulties which were as legion everywhere around him in his new field, he was altogether dependent on those around him. This, too, in a country where the horseman and the hunter, and the man ready in resource under every or all of the exigencies of real pioneer life on the frontier, were tried to the utmost. If upon such men as these there was the constant strain and burden of difficulty and great hardship, what must have been the experience of Mr. Woolsey, arriving there fresh from the comforts of English life.
For nearly a decade this devoted servant of God had journeyed incessantly up and down through the length and breadth of the Upper Saskatchewan and among the foot-hills of the Rockies. He had alternately shivered and sweltered, starved and feasted. When freezing he was given a camp-fire in the frozen snow and colder air to thaw him. When scalding in the burning heat of the long midsummer day on the treeless plains, he had to refresh him a cup of tepid swamp water, in which any ordinary sight might behold extraordinary life. When starving, even he, notwithstanding his strong Sabbatarianism, was forced to travel on in quest of food.
REV. THOMAS WOOLSEY.
(From a photograph taken soon after his return from the North-West.)
One cold winter day, he and his French half-breed guide and dog-driver were within a hard day's travel of the Rocky Mountain Fort. It was Sunday. They had food neither for dogs nor men. Mr. Woolsey would fain have kept the Sabbath, and gone hungry in so doing, but his materialistic guide and driver hitched up his dogs, and making ready, said: "Well, Mr. Woolsey, you stop here and pray; I will go to the Fort and eat." Mr. Woolsey then allowed himself to be wrapped in the cariole and taken to the Fort, where he could both eat and pray.
When he feasted, he might sup and dine and breakfast for days on fish, another time on rabbits, another period on eggs, in all the various stages of incubation; for change he would pass from eggs to moulting ducks, and for days these would be his diet. Then would come the longer intervals of buffalo diet. Tongues and marrow-bones, and back fats and bosses both little and big, and dried meat and pemmican, either straight or disguised in rush-o or rab-aboo, just as you please. Ah! then he was feasting indeed when he had buffalo meat. It is true at times there would come to him the strong craving of a true Englishman for slices of bread and butter, or chunks of plum pudding, or even a potato; but what was the use, my friend would heroically away with such longings, and content himself with his hard grease pemmican.
He mastered the Syllabic system so that he could read and write in it, and also teach to others the use of this wonderful invention which God gave to James Evans. It was curious to listen to him reading a chapter in the Cree Testament to a group of Indians, himself not understanding ten words in the chapter, while his hearers were intelligently grasping every word. Scores are now in heaven whom he taught to read the words of the blessed Master. Under a blanket-covered tripod on the plains, at the foot of a tree in the woods, in the shade of a skin lodge, by the glare of a camp-fire, or in his little room at a Hudson's Bay Company's Fort, he held school, and the graduates in syllabic learning of his travelling college are scattered all through this western country to-day.
He gained a smattering of the Cree, so as to make himself understood at a pinch. For instance, he and Susa, Samson's brother, were once camped in the woods near Pigeon Lake. When retiring for the night, Mr. Woolsey wanted to arrange an early start next morning, and spoke thus: "Susa, ke-yah ne-yah wa-buh-ke we-butch a-wass," (You me to-morrow soon get out); and Susa understood, and acted accordingly.