The Great Lone Land / A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America

by Sir William Francis Butler

Fort-à-la-Corne lies some twenty miles below the point of junction of the rivers. Towards Fort-à-la-Corne I bent my steps with a strange anxiety, for at that point I was to intercept the "Winter Express" carrying from Red River its burden of news to the far-distant forts of the Mackenzie River. This winter packet had left Fort Garry in mid-December, and travelling by way of Lake Winnipeg, Norway House and Cumberland, was due at Fort-à-la-Corne about the 21st January. Anxiously then did I press on to the little fort, where I expected to get tidings of that strife whose echoes during the past month had been powerless to pierce the solitudes of this lone land. With tired dogs whose pace no whip or call could accelerate, we reached the fort at midday on the 21st. On the river, 'close by, an old Indian met us. Has the packet arrived? "Ask him if the packet has come," I said. He only stared blankly at me and shook his head. I had forgotten, what was the packet to him? the capture of a musk-rat was of more consequence than the capture of Metz. The packet had not come, I found when we reached the fort, but it was hourly expected, and I determined to await its arrival.

Two days passed away in wild storms of snow. The wind howled dismally through the pine woods, but within the logs crackled and flew, and the board of my host was always set with moose steaks and good things, although outside, and far down the river, starvation had laid his hand heavily upon the red man. It had fallen dark some hours on the evening of the 22nd January when there came a knock at the door of our house; the raised latch gave admittance to an old travel-worn Indian who held in his hand a small bundle of papers. He had cached the packet, he said, many miles down the river, for his dogs were utterly tired out and unable to move; he had come on himself with a few papers for the fort: the snow was very deep to Cumberland. He had been eight days in travelling 200 miles; he was tired and starving, and white with drift and storm. Such was his tale. I tore open the packet--it was a paper of mid-November. Metz had surrendered; Orleans been retaken; Paris, starving, still held out; for the rest, the Russians had torn to pieces the Treaty of Paris, and our millions and our priceless blood had been spilt and spent in vain on the Peninsula of the Black Sea--perhaps, after all, we would fight? So the night drew itself out, and the pine-tops began to jag the horizon before I ceased to read.

Early on the following morning, the express was hauled from its cache and brought to the fort; but it failed to throw much later light upon the meagre news of the previous evening. Old Adam was tried for verbal intelligence, but he too proved a failure. He had carried the packet from Norway House on Lake Winnipeg to Carlton for more than a score of winters, and, from the fact of his being the bearer of so much news in his lifetime, was looked upon by his compeers as a kind of condensed electric telegraph; but when the question of war was fairly put to him, he gravely replied that at the forts he had heard there was war, and "England," he added, "was gaining the day." This latter fact was too much for me, for I was but too well aware that had war been declared in November, an army organization based upon the Parliamentary system was not likely to have "gained the day" in the short space of three weeks.

To cross with celerity the 700 miles lying between me and Fort Garry Became now the chief object of my life. I lightened my baggage as much as possible, dispensing with many comforts of clothing and equipment, and on the morn ing of the 23rd January started for Cumberland. I will not dwell on the seven days that now ensued, or how from long before dawn to verge of evening we toiled down the great silent river. It was the close of January, the very depth of winter. With heads bent down to meet the crushing blast, we plodded on, oft times as silent as the river and the forest, from whose bosom no sound ever came, no ripple ever broke, no bird, no beast, no human face, but ever the same great forest-fringed river whose majestic turns bent always to the north-east. To tell, day after day, the extreme of cold that now seldom varied would be to inflict on the reader a tiresome record; and, in truth, there would be no use in attempting it; 40 below zero means so many things impossible to picture or to describe, that it would be a hopeless task to enter upon its delineation. After one has gone through the list of all those things that freeze; after one has spoken of the knife which burns the hand that would touch its blade, the tea that freezes while it is being dlrunk, there still remains a sense of having said nothing; a sense which may perhaps be better understood by saying that 40 degrees below zero means just one thing more than all these items--it means death, in a period whose duration would expire in the hours of a winter's daylight, if there was no fire or means of making it on the track.

Conversation round a camp-fire in the North-west is limited to one Subject--dogs and dog-driving. To be a good driver of dogs, and to be able to run fifty miles in a day with ease, is to be a great man. The fame of a noted dog-driver spreads far and wide. Night after night would I listen to the prodigies of running performed by some Ba'tiste or Angus, doughty champions of the rival races. If Ba'tiste dwelt at Cumberland, I Would begin to hear his name mentioned 200 miles from that place, and his fame would still be talked of 200 miles beyond it. With delight would I hear the name of this celebrity dying gradually away in distance, for by the disappearance of some oft-heard name and the rising of some new constellation of dog-driver, one could mark a stage of many hundred miles on the long road upon which I was travelling.

On the 29th January we reached the shore of Pine Island Lake, and saw in our track the birch lodge of an Indian. It was before sunrise, and we stopped the dogs to warm our fingers over the fire of the wigwam. Within sat a very old Indian and two or three women and children. The old man was singing to himself a low monotonous chant; beside him some reeds, marked by the impress of a human form, were spread upon the ground; the fire burned brightly in the centre of the lodge, while the smoke escaped and the light entered through the same round aperture in the top of the conical roof. When we had entered and seated ourselves, the old man still continued his song. "What is he saying?" I asked, although the Indian etiquette forbids abrupt questioning. "He is singing for his son," a man answered, "who died yesterday, and whose body they have taken to the fort last night." It was even so. A French Canadian who had dwelt in Indian fashion for some years, marrying the daughter of the old man, had died from the effects of over-exertion in running down a silver fox, and the men from Cumberland had taken away the body a few hours before. Thus the old man mourned, while his daughter the widow, and a child sat moodily looking at the flames. "He hunted for us; he fed us," the old man said. "I am too old to hunt; I can scarce see the light; I would like to die too." Those old words which the presence of the great mystery forces from our lips-those words of consolation which some one says are "chaff well meant for grain"--were changed into their Cree equivalents and duly rendered to him, but he he only shook his head, as though the change of language had not altered the value of the commodity. But the name of the dead hunter was a curious anomaly-Joe Miller. What a strange antithesis appeared this name beside the presence of the childless father, the fatherless child, and the mateless woman! One service the death of poor Joe Miller conferred on me--the dog-sled that had carried his body had made a track over the snow-covered lake, and we quickly glided along it to the Fort of Cumberland.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Cumberland---We bury poor Joe--A good Train of Dogs--The great Marsh--Mutiny--Chicag the Sturgeon-fisher--A Night with a Medicine-man-- Lakes Winnipegoosis and Manitoba--Muskeymote eats his Boots--We reach the Settlement--From the Saskatchewan to the Seine.

CUMBERLAND HOUSE, the oldest post of the Company in the interior, stands on the south shore of Pine Island Lake; the waters of which seek the Saskatchewan by two channels--Tearing River and Big-stone River. These two rivers form, together with the Saskatchewan and the lake, a large island, upon which stands Cumberland. Time moves slowly at such places as Cumberland, and change is almost unknown. To-day it is the same as it was 100 years ago. An old list of goods sent to Cumberland, from England in 1783 had precisely the same items as one of 1870. Strouds, cotton, beads, and trading-guns are still the wants of the Indian, and are still traded for marten and musquash. In its day Cumberland has had distinguished visitors. Franklin; in 1819, wintered at the fort, and a sun-dial still stands in rear of the house, a gift from the great explorer. We buried Joe Miller in the pine-shadowed graveyard near the fort. Hard work it was with pick and crowbar to prise up the ice-locked earth and to get poor Joe that depth which the frozen clay would seem to grudge him. It was long after dark when his bed was ready, and by the light of a couple of lanterns we laid him down in the great rest. The graveyard and the funeral had few of those accessories of the modern mortuary which are supposed to be the characteristics of civilized sorrow. There was no mute, no crape, no parade--nothing of that imposing array of hat-bands and horses by which man, even` in the face of the mighty mystery, seeks still to glorify the miserable conceits of life; but the silent snow-laden pine-trees, the few words of prayer read in the flickering light of the lantern, the hush of nature and of night, made accessions full as fitting, as all the muffled music and craped sorrow of church and city.