A primitive and interesting race are the French Canadians of these coasts. Many of their villages, and churches—the latter with very steep roofs, generally painted red—have a quaint, antiquated air, and some of the settlements hereabouts are really of very remote date. Wind-bound for a couple of days at one of the oldest and queerest of these villages, on a forlorn little bay, not far from the Saguenay, I went ashore to observe the manners and customs of the place. By the threshold of every house there lay two or three pair of huge wooden clogs, looking almost like "dug-out" canoes, and into these the people popped their feet when the roads were muddy, and their occupations obliged them to go out of doors. A large wooden crucifix stood by the roadside near the entrance of the village, with a small space around it enclosed by a wooden railing. Young girls in wide-brimmed straw hats were kneeling at the foot of it, and I noticed that they had left their clogs outside the railing. Presently an old woman came along, and she too deposited her dug-outs reverently outside the little sanctuary before she entered. These roadside crosses are to be met with everywhere in the French Canadian settlements, many of them curiously fitted up as shrines, and decorated with votive offerings. The valley in which this little village stood had a pastoral appearance, but the hills to the north of it were of a wild and dreary character, suggesting endless tracts of wilderness beyond their dark ridges.
At this place, near the margin of the little bay, there stood a frame house of better appearance than the ordinary dwellings of the village. It had a weird and weather-stained look, nevertheless, which was in keeping with the clump of stunted and sea-blighted pines by which it was partially sheltered. The garden belonging to it appeared to have been once well stocked, but it had run much to weeds and tangle now, and the fence had rotted away in places, and left it open to the road. From this house there came, as I strolled past, an old man, whose appearance was at once so singular, and so different from, that of the ordinary inhabitants of the place, that my curiosity impelled me to stop and speak to him as he saluted me in passing. He was tall and very thin, and, though apparently between seventy and eighty years of age, walked with an erect carriage, leaning but slightly upon the cane he carried. His face, which was remarkably small, looked like shrivelled parchment, and his iron-gray hair hung straight down to his shoulders, like that of an Indian. He was dressed, not in the gray cloth of the country, but in an old-fashioned suit, which might once have been black, but was now faded to a dingy greenish hue, and there was about him a decided air of tarnished gentility very much out of character with the place and its inhabitants. Speaking excellent English, he invited me to accompany him to his house; and as dinner was nearly ready when we entered, he pressed me to remain and partake of it. The table was spread by an old lady quite as faded and decayed as himself. She was his sister, he told me; adding that she was very deaf, and so nervous that he hoped I would excuse her for not joining us at the repast. And so we two sat down quite companionably together to a dinner consisting of boiled pork and excellent potatoes and milk, with wild strawberries for a dessert.
The record of this old man's life was a strange one. He was born at Quebec, of Swiss parents, who took him with them, while he was yet a child, to Switzerland, in which country and in France he received his education and passed the earlier years of his life. Returning to Canada when a grown-up young man, he became a trader among the Indians, and was for some time in charge of a frontier post hard by where the city of Detroit now stands. After various ups and downs in life, he joined his brothers at this old settlement, where they had a mill and a country store. That was nearly fifty years before, and he had never been out of the place since. His brothers were all dead, and the sister to whom I have referred was the only one of the family besides himself now left. Another sister had died only two months previously, and this accounted for the bit of black crape twisted round the old gentleman's little gallipot-shaped glazed hat, which he had lifted so politely when I met him on the road. One of his brothers was drowned by accident, and another had committed suicide,—a fact which he communicated to me in a hollow whisper, as we sat there in the dim old room. Fourteen members of his family were buried, he told me, under the shade of the pine-trees near the house. Two more graves must have been added to the row long since; and that is the end of a family which evidently had once enjoyed good social position, judging from the cultivated manners and conversation of the strange old man, who had been fossilizing for nearly half a century in this remote place.
Among the reminiscences imparted to me by the old man of the bay, I have note of the following.
While he was at the frontier post near Detroit, engaged in commerce with the savage tribes and pioneering trappers, there was a gathering of warriors at the place,—a sort of carnival in celebration of some event interesting to the red men. One day the Indians got drunker than usual, and, having exhausted their stock of liquor, a deputation of them entered the store of the trader, and demanded a fresh supply on credit, which was refused. Upon this the savages became insolent and abusive, and the trader's partner, a man of great determination and personal strength, struck down the leader of them with an axe-handle, just as the tomahawks began to gleam. The savages were now leaping forward to cut down the white man, who had intrenched himself among some barrels, when a fiendish yell rang through the building, seeming to paralyze them like an electric shock, and a short, thickset Indian, of very dark complexion, suddenly made his appearance in the midst of them. Raising his tomahawk aloft, and uttering a few words in his native tongue, the dark-faced warrior pointed to the door, through which the cowed savages filed sullenly away and sought their wigwams. This was the renowned Tecumseh, and such was the influence he exercised over his people, even when they were maddened by drink.
From the rough and sterile nature of the country through which many of these north-shore Canadian rivers run, it seems unlikely that their solitudes will ever be converted into fields for the permanent civilization that agriculture alone can establish. Lumbering operations and the fisheries constitute their only inducements for settlers, and these branches of industry are chiefly carried on by a nomadic population, nearly as wild in their ways of life as the aborigines of the region. Sportsmen will be glad to know, however, that of late years the facilities for reaching these rivers have been much improved. Steamers now ply regularly upon the St. Lawrence, at least as far down as the Saguenay. Landing-piers have been built at many points where it was necessary, not many years ago, for passengers to wade ashore from their boats; and the roads over the capes and highlands—where any roads have yet been made—are of a less impracticable and aggravating character than formerly. The right of leasing the rivers for fly-fishing is vested in the government, from whose Superintendent of Fisheries at Quebec all desired information on the subject can be obtained.
It is from Upper Canada that the curious old-time features of the country are passing rapidly away with the grand old woods. Within the present century the celebrated Joseph Brant, called Thayendenegea by the red men, held his half-barbaric court, as Chief of the Six Nations, at the very spot on the Grand River where the thriving town of Brantford now stands. Brant had seen European civilization, and was the friend and companion of English statesmen; and he curiously grafted that civilization upon the Six Nations' manners and customs when he returned to his strong-hold on the Grand River. Old men in Upper Canada yet spin yarns about the entertainments given by this chief at his hospitable mansion, where the guests were waited on by negro servants dressed in liveries of green and gold, and a gigantic Indian with a barrel-organ used to be stationed in the hall, to enhance the pleasures of the banquet with sweet music. This condition of things can never exist again, for which people have reason to be thankful, perhaps; but away into the past with the Indian and his gauds are vanishing the deer, and the wild-turkeys, and the creatures that men covet for their fur. Many of the deep, cold brooks, in which the speckled trout used to abound, are evaporating to mere threads as the country is cleared. Others have been poisoned by manufactures or choked up with the débris of saw-mills, to the extinction of the fish; and Upper Canada, on the whole, offers but a cheerless prospect now to the blighted young man of leisure who would forswear society and seek to live primitively in backwoods solitudes on the produce of his rod and gun.