Menberton, who is said to have been a devout Christian in the early days of Acadie, was duly instructed in the Lord’s Prayer; at a certain portion of the prayer he was wont to append a request that “fish and moose meat” might also be added to his daily bread. And previous to his death, which occurred many years after his conversion, he is said to have stoutly demanded that the savage rites of sepulture should be bestowed upon his body, in order that he might be well prepared to make vigorous war upon his enemies in the next world. This is of the past; yet it is not many years since a high dignitary of the Church was not a little horrified by a request made by some recently converted Dog-Rib Chiefs that the rite of Baptism should be bestowed upon three flaming red flannel shirts, of which they had for the first time in their lives become the joint possessors.
But all this is too long to enter upon here; enough that to me at least the Indian character is worth the trouble of close examination. If those, whose dealings religious and political with the red man are numerous, would only take a leaf from Goldsmith’s experience when he first essayed to become a teacher of English in France, (“for I found,” he writes, “that it was necessary I should previously learn French before I could teach them English,”) very much of the ill success which had attended labours projected by benevolence, and prosecuted with zeal and devotion, might perhaps be avoided.
Long before ever a white man touched the American shore a misty idea floated through the red man’s brain that from far-off lands a stranger would come as the messenger of peace and plenty, where both were so frequently unknown. In Florida, in Norembega, in Canada, the right hand of fellowship was the first proffered to the new comer; and when Cartier entered the palisaded village where now the stately capital of Canada spreads out along the base of the steep ridge, which he named Royal after that master whose “honour” had long been lost ere on Pavia’s field he yielded up all else, the dusky denizens of Hochelaga brought forth their sick and stricken comrades “as though a God had come among them.”
Three centuries and a half have passed since then; war, pestilence and famine have followed the white man’s track. Whole tribes have vanished even in name from the continent, yet still that strange tradition of a white stranger, kind and beneficent, has outlived the unnumbered cruelties of ages; and to-day the starving camp and the shivering bivouac hears again the hopeful yet hopeless story of “a good time coming.”
Besides our Indians we were favoured with but few visitors, silence reigned around our residence; a magpie or a whisky-jack sometimes hopped or chattered about our meat stage; in the morning the sharp-tailed grouse croaked in birch or spruce tree, and at dusk, when every other sound was hushed, the small grey owl hooted his lonely cry. Pleasant was it at night when returning after a long day on snow shoes, or a dog trip to the nearest fort, to reach the crest of the steep ridge that surrounded our valley, and see below the firelight gleaming through the little window of our hut, and the red sparks flying upward from the chimney like fire-flies amidst the dark pine-trees; nor was it less pleasant when as the night wore on the home letter was penned, or the book read, while the pine-log fire burnt brightly and the dogs slept stretched before it, and the light glared on rifle-barrel or axe-head and showed the skin-hung rafters of our lonely home.
As January drew towards a close, it became necessary to make preparations for a long journey. Hitherto I had limited my wanderings to the prairie region of the Saskatchewan, but these wanderings had only been a preliminary to further travel into the great northern wilds.
To pierce the forest region lying north of the Saskatchewan valley, to see the great lakes of the Athabasca and that vast extent of country which pours its waters into the Frozen Ocean, had long been my desire; and when four months earlier I had left the banks of the Red River and turned away from the last limit of civilization, it was with the hope that ere the winter snow had passed from plain and forest my wanderings would have led me at least 2000 miles into that vast wilderness of the north.
But many preparations had to be made against cold and distance. Dogs had to be fattened, leather clothing got ready, harness and sleds looked to, baggage reduced to the very smallest limit, and some one found willing to engage to drive the second dog sled, and to face the vicissitudes of the long northern road. The distance itself was enough to make a man hesitate ere for hire he embarked on such a journey. The first great stage was 750 miles, the second was as many more, and when 1500 miles had been traversed there still must remain half as much again before, on the river systems of the North Pacific, we could emerge into semi-civilized ways of travel.
Many were the routes which my brain sketched out during the months of autumn, but finally my choice rested between two rivers, the Mackenzie rolling its waters into the Frozen Ocean, the Peace River piercing the great defiles of the Rocky Mountains through the cañons and stupendous gorges of Northern British Columbia. A chance meeting decided my course.
One day at the end of October I had camped during a snow-storm for dinner in the Touchwood Hills. Suddenly through the drift a horseman came in sight. He proved to be an officer of the Hudson’s Bay Company from the distant post of Dunvegan on the Peace River: of all men he was the one I most wished to see. Ninety days earlier he had left his station; it was far away, but still with dogs over the ice of frozen rivers and lakes, through the snow of long leagues of forest and muskey and prairie, I might hope to reach that post on Upper Peace River in sixty days; twenty days more might carry me through the defiles of the Rocky Mountains to waters which flow south into the Pacific. “Good-bye, bon voyage,” and we went our different ways; he towards Red River, I for Athabasca and the Peace River.