THE NEW NORTH
_Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic_
BY AGNES DEANS CAMERON
_WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE AUTHOR_
_Published November, 1909_
[Illustration: A Magnificent Trophy]
TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
JESSIE ANDERSON CAMERON
AND
TO ALL THOSE WHO TRY TO LIVE OUT HER SIMPLE RULE "WE MUST JUST TRY TO DO
THE VERY BEST WE CAN"
PREFACE
It is customary to write a preface. Mine shall be short. Out of a full
heart, I wish to thank all the splendid people of the North who, by
giving me so freely information and photographs, and chapters out of
their own lives, have facilitated the writing of this story. For their
spontaneous kindness to me and mine no acknowledgment that I can here
make is adequate. What we feel most strongly we cannot put into words.
AGNES DEANS CAMERON.
August, 1909.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
The Mendicants leave Chicago--The invisible parallel of 49 where the
eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver--Union Jack floats on
an ox-cart--A holy baggage-room--Winnipeg, the Buckle of the
Wheat-Belt--The trapper and the doctor--Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks--Boy
Makers of Empire--The vespers of St. Boniface
CHAPTER II
WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
The 1,000-mile wheat-field--Calgary-in-the-Foothills--Edmonton, the end
of steel--The Brains of a Trans-Continental--Browning on the
Saskatchewan--East Londoners in tents--Our outfit--A Waldorf-Astoria in
the wilderness--The lonely cross of the Galician--Height of
Land--Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., the sleuth of Lesser Slave
CHAPTER III
ATHABASCA LANDING
Athabasca Landing, the Gateway of the North--English gives place to
Cree--Limit of the Dry Martini--Will the rabbits run?--The woman
printer--Hymn-books by hand in the Cree syllabic--Baseball even
here--Rain and reminiscences--The World's Oldest Trust
CHAPTER IV
DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
"Farewell, Nistow!"--The rainy deck of a "sturgeon head" under a
tarpaulin--Drifting by starlight--The wild geese overhead--Forty-foot
gas-spout at the Pelican--The mosquito makes us blood-brothers--Four
days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling
Athabasca--Nomenclature of the North--Sentinels of the Silence
CHAPTER V
NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
The _Go-Quick-Her_ takes the bit in her mouth--Mallards on the
half-shell--We set the Athabascan Thames afire--Sturgeon-head breaks her
back on the Big Cascade--Fort McMurray--A stranded argosy, wreckage on
the beach--Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader--A land flowing with
coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime
CHAPTER VI
FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
Old Fort Chipewyan--In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John
Franklin--Sir John turns parson--Grey Nuns and brown babies--Where grew
the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial--Militant missionaries
fight each other for souls--The strong man Loutit--Wyllie at the
forge--An electric watch-maker--Where the Gambel sparrow builds--"Out of
old books"
CHAPTER VII
LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
Farewell to the Mounted Police--Our blankets on the deck--Fern odours by
untravelled ways--Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of
daylight--Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man--A 23-inch
trout--First white women at Fond du Lac--Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a
Fond du Lac library--The hermit padre and the hermit thrush--Worn north
trails of the trapper--Caribou by the hundred thousands--The phalarope
and the suffragette
CHAPTER VIII
FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
World's records beaten on the Athabasca--Down the Slave to Smith's
Landing--Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned--The Mosquito
Portage--Fort Smith, the new headquarters--Lady-slippers and
night-hawks--Steamer built in the wilderness--Last stand of the wood
bison--The grey wolf persists--Fur-trade and the silver-fox--Breeding
pelicans.
CHAPTER IX
SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
"Red lemol-lade" kiddies--Tons of crystal salt--Great Slave Lake and its
fertile shores--Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh
Edward--Hay River and its annual mail--Ploughing with dogs--Bill
balked--The Alexandra Falls--Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputations
while you wait.
CHAPTER X
PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
Drowning of De-deed--Fort Simpson, the old headquarters--A mouldy
museum--The shrew-mice that were not preserved in rum--The farthest
north library--Gold-seekers and grub-staked brides--Bishop Bompas, the
Apostle of the North--Owindia, the Weeping One--Fort Simpson in the
first year of Victoria the Good.
CHAPTER XI
FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
Tenny Gouley tells us things--Mackenzie River, past and present--The
fringed gentian at Fort Wrigley--The fires Mackenzie saw--The weathered
knob of Bear Rock--Great Bear Lake--Orangeman's Day at Norman--The
Ramparts of the Mackenzie--Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
Circle--Mignonette and Old World courtesy--We meet Hagar once
more--Potatoes on the Circle--The Little Church of the Open Door
CHAPTER XII
ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
Arctic Red River--Wilfrid Laurier, the merger--Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko, the
danseuse--Marriage as the Oo-vai-oo-aks see it--Orange-blossoms at
Su-pi-di-do's--Trading tryst at Barter Island--Floating fathers--By-o
Baby Bunting--Wild roses and tame Eskimo--Midnight football with walrus
bladder and enthusiasm--Education that makes for manliness
CHAPTER XIII
FORT MACPHERSON FOLK
Sir John Franklin's lobsticks at Point Separation--We reach Fort
Macpherson on the Peel--Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., eulogizes the
Eskimo--An Eskimo wife must make boots that are waterproof--She ariseth
also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her
household--Cribbage-boards the link between Dick Swiveller and the
Eskimo--Linked sweetness long drawn out--Chauncey Depew of the
Kogmollycs
CHAPTER XIV
MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
The Midnight Sun--Our friend the heathen--"We want to go to
hell"--Catching fish by prayer--The Eskimo and the Flood--Pink tea at
the Pole--Always a balance in the Eskimo Bank--Marriage for better and
not for worse--Christmas carols even here
CHAPTER XV
MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
Jurisprudence on ice--The generous Innuit--Emmie-ray, the Delineator
pattern--Weak races are pressed south--Roxi, a re-incarnation of Sir
Philip Sidney--Blubbery bon vivants--Eskimo knew the Elephant--We write
the last chapter of the story of McClure, the navigator--Cannibalism at
the Circle
CHAPTER XVI
THE TALE OF A WHALE
Circumpolar Bowhead makes his last stand--Whales here and elsewhere--The
Yankee peddler at Canada's back-door--Thirteen and a half million in
whale values--Wind-swept Herschel, the Isle of Whales--One wife for a
thousand years--Baleen, Spermaceti, and Ambergris--Save the Whale
CHAPTER XVII
SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
Lives lost for the sake of a white bead--The stars come back--The Keele
party from the Dollarless Divide--"Here and there a grayling"--Across
Great Slave Lake--The first white women at Fort Rae--Land of the
musk-ox--Tales of 76 below--Two Thursdays in one week--Rabbits on ice
CHAPTER XVIII
TO MC MURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
The nuptials of 'Norine--Ladies round gents and gents don't go--The
fossil-gatherers--I give my name to a Cree kiddie--A solid mile of red
raspberries--The typewriter an uncanny medicine--The Beetle Fleet leaves
for Outside--Shipwrecked on a batture
CHAPTER XIX
UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
Ho! for the Peace--One break in 900 miles of navigation--A grey
wolf--Bear-meat and the Se-weep-i-gons--Ninety-foot spruces--Tom Kerr
and his bairns--The fish-seine that never fails--Our lobsticks by Red
River--The Chutes of the Peace
CHAPTER XX
VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
The farthest north flour-mill--The man who made Vermilion--Wheat at
$1.25 a bushel--An Experimental Farm in latitude 58° 30'--An unoccupied
kingdom as large as Belgium--Where the steamer _Peace River_ was
built--The hospitable home of the Wilsons--Vermilion a Land of Promise
Fulfilled--Culture and the Cloister--Thomas of Canterbury on the Stump
CHAPTER XXI
FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
Se-li-nah of the happy heart--My premier moose--The rare and resourceful
boatmen of the North--Alexander Mackenzie's last camp
CHAPTER XXII
PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
Pleasant prairies of the Peace--We tramp a hundred miles--The Angelus at
Lesser Slave--Poole coats and Norfolk shooting-jackets--Roast duck
galore--Alec Kennedy of the Nile--Louise the Wetigo, she ate nineteen
CHAPTER XXIII
LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
Jim wins: Allie Brick can't run--100,000,000 acres of
wheat-land--Jilly-Loo bird still lacks a rib--100 moose in one
month--Peripatetic judges but no prisoners--The best-tattooed man in the
Province of Alberta--The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps
CHAPTER XXIV
HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
Edmonton again--Wyllie goes out on the Long Journey--Donaldson killed by
a walrus--Two drowned in the Athabasca--Steel kings and iron
horses--Wheat-plains the melting-pot of a New Nation
ROUTES OF TRAVEL
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A magnificent trophy
Map showing the Author's Route
Sir Wilfred Laurier
Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada
Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt
The Canadian Women's Press Club
A section of Edmonton
The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan
Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta
A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge
Athabasca Landing
Necessity knows no law at Athabasca
The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians
C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.
A "sturgeon-head" on the Athabasca
"Farewell, Nistow!"
Grand Rapids, on the Athabasca River
Portage at Grand Rapids Island
Our transport at Grand Rapids Island
Cheese-shaped nodules, Grand Rapids Island
Scouts of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police
Towing the wrecked barge ashore
The scow breaks her back and fills
Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray trader
The steamer _Grahame_
An oil derrick on the Athabasca
Tar banks on the Athabasca
Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca
Three of a kind
Woman's work of the Far North
Lake Athabasca in winter
Bishop Grouard
The modern note-book
Tepee of a Caribou-eater Indian
A bit of Fond du Lac
Birch-barks at Fond du Lac
Fond du Lac
Father Beibler carrying water to a dying Indian
Smith's Landing
A transport between Fort Smith and Smith's Landing
Lord Strathcona, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company
The world's last buffalo
Tracking a scow across mountain portage
The "red lemol-lade" boys
Salt beds
Unloading at Fort Resolution
Coming to "take Treaty" on Great Slave Lake
On the Slave
Dogs cultivating potatoes
David Villeneuve
Hudson's Bay House, Fort Simpson
A Slavi family at Fort Simpson
A Slavi type from Fort Simpson
Interior of St. David's Cathedral
Fort Simpson by the light of the Aurora
Indians at Fort Norman
Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman
The ramparts of the Mackenzie
Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie mouth
A Kogmollye family
Roxi and the Oo-vai-oo-ak family
Farthest North football
Two spectators at the game
An Eskimo exhibit
Constable Walker and Sergeant Fitzgerald in Eskimo togs
Two wise ones
A Nunatalmute Eskimo family
Cribbage-boards of walrus tusks
Useful articles made by the Eskimo
Home of Mrs. Macdonald
Eskimo kayaks at the Arctic edge
A wise man of the Dog-Ribs
A study in expression
We tell the tale of a whale
Two little ones at Herschel Island
Breeding grounds of the seal
The Keele party on the Gravel River
The first typewriter on Great Slave Lake
The bell at Fort Rae mission
The musk-ox
A meadow at McMurray
Starting up the Athabasca
On the Clearwater
Evening on the Peace
Our lobsticks on the Peace
The chutes of the Peace
Pulling out the _Mee-wah-sin_
The flour mill at Vermilion-on-the-Peace
Articles made by Indians
The Hudson's Bay Store
Papillon, a Beaver brave
Going to school in winter
My premier moose
Beaver camp, on Paddle River
The site of old Fort McLeod
Jean Baptiste, pilot on the Peace
Fort Dunvegan on the Peace
Fort St. John on the Peace
Where King was arrested
Alec Kennedy with his two sons
Cannibal Louise, her little girl and Miss Cameron
A Peace River Pioneer
Three generations
A family at the Lesser Slave
A one-night stand
A rye field in Brandon, Manitoba
Charles M. Hays, President of the Grand Trunk Railway
William Mackenzie, President of the Canadian Northern Railway
Donald D. Maun, Vice-president of the Canadian Northern Railway
William Whyte, Second Vice-president of the Canadian Pacific Railway
In the wheat fields
Hon. Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior
Threshing grain
Doukhobors threshing flax
Sir William Van Horne, first President of the Canadian Pacific Railway
[Illustration: Map of the Author's Route]
THE NEW NORTH
CHAPTER I
THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
"We are as mendicants who wait
Along the roadside in the sun.
Tatters of yesterday and shreds
Of morrow clothe us every one.
"And some are dotards, who believe
And glory in the days of old;
While some are dreamers, harping still
Upon an unknown age of gold.
"O foolish ones, put by your care!
Where wants are many, joys are few;
And at the wilding springs of peace,
God keeps an open house for you.
"But there be others, happier few,
The vagabondish sons of God,
Who know the by-ways and the flowers,
And care not how the world may plod."
Isn't it Riley who says, "Ef you want something, an' jest dead set
a-longin' fer it with both eyes wet, and tears won't bring it, why, you
try sweat"? Well, we had tried sweat and longing for two years, with
planning and hoping and the saving of nickels, and now we are off!
Shakespeare makes his man say, "I will run as far as God has any
ground," and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on
going till we strike the Arctic,--straight up through Canada. Most
writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and
travel west by the C.P.R., following the line of least resistance till
they reach the Pacific. Then they go back to dear old England and tell
the world all about Canada, their idea of the half-continent being
Euclid's conception of a straight line, "length without breadth."
[Illustration: Sir Wilfred Laurier]
But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt
of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary
and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves
after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to
follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from
Dan to Beersheba to say "All is barren," but to come near to the people,
our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than
Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of
Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting
that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.
We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of
all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend
of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward,--till
you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our
ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St.
Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of
the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong
hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on
the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.
There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage
was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered
Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool.
But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last
unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out,
pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a
dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.
Kipling speaks of "a route unspoiled of Cook's," and we have found it.
Going to the office of Thos. Cook & Son, in Chicago, with a friend who
had planned a Mediterranean tour, I gently said, "I wonder if you can
give me information about a trip I am anxious to take this summer." The
young man smiled and his tone was that which we accord to an indulged
child, "I guess we can. Cook & Son give information on _most_ places."
"Very well," I said, "I want to go from Chicago to the Arctic by the
Mackenzie River, returning home by the Peace and the Lesser Slave. Can
you tell me how long it will take, what it will cost, and how I make my
connections?" He was game; he didn't move an eyebrow, but went off to
the secret recesses in the back office to consult "the main guy," "the
chief squeeze," "the head push," "the big noise." Back they came
together with a frank laugh, "Well, Miss Cameron, I guess you've got us.
Cook's have no schedule to the Arctic that way." They were able,
however, to give accurate information as to how one should reach Hudson
Bay, with modes of travel, dates, and approximate cost. But this journey
for another day.
Leaving Chicago one sizzling Sunday in mid-May, we (my niece and I) stop
for a day to revel in bird and blossoms at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota,
then silently in the night cross the invisible parallel of 49° where the
eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver.
With the Polar Ocean as ultimate goal, we cannot help thinking how
during the last generation the Arctic Circle has been pushed steadily
farther north. Forty years ago Minneapolis and St. Paul were struggling
trading-posts, and all America north of them was the range of the
buffalo and the Indian. Then Fort Garry (Winnipeg) became Farthest
North. Before starting, I had dug out from the Public Library the record
of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago,
deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their
minutes) that "Our Northern tier of States is too far north to
successfully grow wheat." For years Winnipeg was considered the northern
limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of
limitation was pushed farther back until it is
Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared "Farthest North." To-day
we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due
north of Edmonton!
In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh
beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all
interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach
Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These
were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. "But," the old chap
says, "the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the
Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it
stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal
to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin'
red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set
on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and
what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart,
poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the
old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at
sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all
wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife." This incident was
not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known
to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his
way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the
war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured
clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing
this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by
the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.
[Illustration: Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada]
What Cook & Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg
furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for
two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when
the Second Charles ruled in England,--an age when men said not "How
cheap?" but "How good?", not "How easy?" but "How well?" The Hudson's
Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the
Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can
travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except
under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for
you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and
sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot.
Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be
transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats,
guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort
Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between
Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull
whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.
For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the
Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the
benefit of employés, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here
they are as we copied them down:
Let all things be done decently and in order.
1 Cor. xiv, 40.
Be punctual, be regular, be clean.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
Be obliging and kind one to another.
Let no angry word be heard among you
Be not fond of change. (Sic.)
Be clothed with humility, not finery.
Take all things by the smooth handle.
Be civil to all, but familiar with few.
As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American,--
"Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let
go your overcoat. Thieves are around,"
the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our
shoulders, "Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!"
A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a
transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, "What makes
Winnipeg?" Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it
out. "This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our
nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches
going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty
stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the
remittance man from England, sorr," with a quizzical look at the checked
suit of his interlocutor, "shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies
up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them!" As Mulcahey winks
the other eye, we drift out into this "Buckle of the Wheat-Belt."
What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her
a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of
her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an
increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one
hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the
world's history.
Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and
bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has
had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now
counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the
British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway
tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million
dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings
in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801;
and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without
Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade
filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a
day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed
a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western
Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures--the lure of the
land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is
estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one
thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth
of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring
the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in
figures--the "power of the man."
[Illustration: Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt]
Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City
of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation
of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg
sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages--Armenian, Arabic,
Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu,
Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that
some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast
the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would
Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the _London
Times_, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out
from among the flotsam in the kelp.
Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we
cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred
steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate
that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the
six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This
will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold
by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for
breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the
list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics
of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that
these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do.
"But they are all good pay," the implement-man says. Looking at the red
ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history.
The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out
into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these
ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of
faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and
formative!
We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we
reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A.
Stewart says to us, "Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has
fallen by the way." We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a
cot. "Tell him that you are going into the land of fur," whispers the
doctor, "he has been a trapper all his life."
Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and
his snow-shoes pinned him fast. When dragged out he had suffered so with
the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to
the hospital. Hard luck? Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with
mercy. Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice
of life,--a doctor with a man's brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the
heart of a little child. The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has
one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of
motion remaining in the other leg. His vocal cords are so affected that
the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the
mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man. Between patient and
doctor, a third man entered the drama,--Mr. Grey, a convalescent.
Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother
studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel,
to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.
Who is this patient? A man without friends or influence, not attractive
in appearance, more than distressing to listen to,--just one more worker
thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life. The
consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not
even arrest the creeping death. Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner
of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked.
Dr. Stewart had two men's work to do. He worked all day and was busy
well into the night. A doctor's natural tendency is to see in each man
that he ministers to merely "a case," a manifestation of some disease to
be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages. But in the
Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young
men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.
The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper
was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke
by twilight. We are happiest when we create. So he said to Carlton, "Did
you ever write a story?" The head shook answer. "Well, why don't you
try? You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody
else knows. Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here."
The outcome was disappointing. The uncouth sounds, translated by Grey,
were bald, bare, and stiff. Soon the stiffness worked off. With
half-shut eyes Carlton lived again in the woods. He lifted the dewy
branch of a tree and surprised the mother deer making the toilet of her
fawn, saw the beaver busied with his home of mud and wattles, heard the
coyote scream across the prairie edge. Easily the thought flowed, and
the stuff that Grey handed in was a live story that breathed. In that
brave heart the joy of the creator stirred, and with it that feeling
which makes all endeavour worth while--the thought that somebody cares.
A close observer at this stage of the game may read, too, on the face of
Grey the kindly look that comes when we forget ourselves long enough to
take the trouble to reach out for another man's viewpoint.
Carlton's short stories, submitted to a publisher, were pronounced
good, were accepted, and brought a cash return. They struck a new note
among the squabblings of the nature-fakers. Favourable comment came from
those who read them, who, reading, knew naught of their three authors.
Before this Carlton had never written a line for publication; but he had
been a true observer. He had felt, and was able to project himself into
the minds of those living things he had seen and hunted.
I leave the hospital cot with a strange lump forming in my throat,
although every one around me, and the patient most of all, is gay and
blithe. I say to Carlton, "I wish I could take your knowledge and your
eyes with me into the North, there is so much I will miss because of my
lack of knowledge." With Grey's kindly interpretation I get my answer,
"You must take your own mind, your own eyes; you must see for yourself."
During the last day in Winnipeg, while the Kid (like faithful
Ariovistus) is looking after the impedimenta, I snatch half an hour to
look in at the Royal Alexandra upon the reception which the Women's
Canadian Club is tendering to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Rain-bespattered,
short-skirted, and anchored with disreputable rubbers gluey with
Winnipeg mud, I sit on the fringe of things, fairly intoxicated with the
idea that we are off and this North trip no dream. Mrs. Sanford Evans
presides with her usual _savoir faire_ and ushers in the guest of the
day, beautifully-gowned and gracious.
Like a bolt from the blue came the summons from the president, and I,
all muddy, am called to the seats of the mighty. I have never seen a
more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg
Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face
them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of
mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my
unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success
of my journey. Mrs. Humphry Ward calls attention to the lack of
playgrounds in England. She wants to bring more fresh air and space to
the crowded people of the Old World. I submit that my wish is the
mathematical converse to hers. My great desire is to call attention to
the great unoccupied lands of Canada, to induce people from the crowded
centres of the Old World to use the fresh air of the New.
[Illustration: The Canadian Women's Press Club]
To those who bid us good-bye at the train, the Kid and I yell
exultantly, "All aboard for the Arctic Ocean and way ports!"
A group of Galicians sitting by the curb, two mothers and seven small
children, one a baby at the breast, make the last picture we see as the
train pulls out. It was the end of their first day in Winnipeg. The
fathers of the flock evidently were seeking work and had left their
families gazing through the portals of the strange new land. In the
half-sad, altogether-brave lines on the young mothers' faces and their
tender looks bent on the little ones we read the motive responsible for
all migrations--"Better conditions for the babies." In the little
fellows of seven or eight with their ill-fitting clothes and their
dogged looks of determination one sees the makers of empire. Before a
decade is past they will be active wheat-growers in their own right,
making two grains grow where one grew before and so "deserving better of
mankind than the whole race of politicians put together." I think it was
President Garfield who said, "I always feel more respect for a boy than
for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that
ragged jacket?" It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A
young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg
students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic
world--the Rhodes scholarship.
We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers
from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral,
has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of
forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures
its every thought in bushels and bullion.
The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg
just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of
David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here
and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted
some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony
performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding.
One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, "I wudna
have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a
properly-ordained meenister." And he was coming. Even now he was
floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having
reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks
before.
When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton
phrase, "they do not teem with conversational grace." Straight from
Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the
Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago.
In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and
in his simplicity thought himself "the first that ever burst into that
silent sea." When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled
sound, he was in doubt how to place it.
"Is it the clang of wild-geese?
Is it the Indian's yell,
That lends to the voice of the North-wind
The tones of a far-off bell?"
The Indian boatmen _said_ nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's
parrot.
"The voyageur smiles as he listens
To the sound that grows apace;
Well he knows the vesper ringing
Of the bells of St. Boniface."
Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in
the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness
"The bells of the Roman Mission,
That call from their turrets twain
To the boatmen on the river,
To the hunter on the plain."
That friend was a fellow-townsman of the "Quaker Poet." The story was
told to Whittier and inspired the lines of _The Red River Voyageur_.