ATHABASCA LANDING
"I am the land that listens, I am the land that broods;
Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods;
I wait for the men who will win me--and I will not be won in a day;
And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and mild,
But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple faith of a child."
--_Robert Service_
[Illustration: Athabasca Landing]
Athabasca Landing, a funnel through which percolates the whole trade
between the wheat-belt and the Arctic, is the true gateway of the North.
Seeing our baggage tucked away in the bar-room of the Grand Union
Hotel, and snatching a hasty supper, we walk down to the river, its
edges still encrusted with fragments of winter ice. It is an
incomparable sunset, the light a veritable spilt spectrum, spreading
itself with prodigality over the swift river.
The Athabasca, after dipping to the south, here takes a sudden northward
bend. Its source is in the crest of the continent far back in the
Committee's Punch-Bowl of the Rockies, the general trend of the river
being northeasterly. It is the most southerly of the three great
tributaries of the mighty Mackenzie, and from its source in Rockies to
embouchure in Athabasca Lake it is about seven hundred and seventy-five
miles long; through a wooded valley two miles wide it runs with perhaps
an average width of two hundred and fifty yards.
We are in latitude 55° North, and between us and the Arctic lies an
unknown country, which supports but a few hundred Indian trappers and
the fur-traders of the Ancient Company in their little posts, clinging
like swallows' nests to the river banks. The wheat-plains to the south
of us are so fertile and accessible that the tide of immigration has
stopped south of where we stand. But that there stretches beyond us a
country rich in possibilities we know, and one day this land, unknown
and dubbed "barren" because unknown, will support its teeming millions.
Chimerical? Why so?
Parallels of latitude are great illuminators. When we run this line of
55° westward what do we strike in Asia? The southern boundary of the
Russian Province of Tobolsk. Superimpose a map of that Province on a map
of Canada and we find that the great Mackenzie waterway which we are to
follow cuts Tobolsk almost directly through the centre. In the year
1900, Russian Tobolsk produced twenty-one million bushels of grain,
grazed two and a half million head of live stock, exported one and a
half million dollars' worth of butter, and supported a population of one
and a half million souls. There is not one climatic condition obtaining
in the Asiatic Province that this similar section of Canada which we are
about to enter does not enjoy.
Off a little jetty some lads are fishing. There is a camaraderie felt by
all fishermen, and soon I have a rod and access to the chunk of
moose-meat which is the community bait. Within half an hour, rejoicing
in a string of seventeen chub and grayling, we wend our way back to the
little village. The elements that compose it? Here we have a large
establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company, an Anglican and a Roman
Mission, a little public school, a barracks of the Northwest Mounted
Police, a post office, a dozen stores, a reading-room, two hotels, and a
blacksmith shop, and for population a few whites leavening a host of
Cree-Scots half-breeds.
Athabasca Landing is part of the British Empire. But English is at a
discount here; Cree and French and a mixture of these are spoken on all
sides. The swart boatmen are the most interesting feature of the
place,--tall, silent, moccasined men, followed at the heel by ghostlike
dogs. From this point north dogs are the beasts of burden; the camel may
be the ship of the desert, but the dog is the automobile of the
silences. The wise missionary translates his Bible stories into the
language of the latitude. As Count von Hammerstein says, "What means a
camel to a Cree? I tell him it is a moose that cannot go through a
needle's eye." The Scriptural sheep and goats become caribou and
coyotes, and the celestial Lamb is typified by the baby seal with its
coat of shimmering whiteness. Into the prohibition territory that
stretches north of this no liquor can be taken except by a permit signed
by an Attorney-General of Canada, and then only "for medicinal
purposes." By an easy transferring of epithets, the term "permit" has
come to signify the revivifying juice itself.
[Illustration: Necessity Knows No Law at Athabasca]
One illusion vanishes here. We had expected to find the people of the
North intensely interested in the affairs of the world outside, but as a
rule they are not. There is no discussion of American banks and equally
no mention of the wheat crop. The one conjecture round the bar and in
the home is, "When will the rabbits run this year?" The rabbits in the
North are the food of the lynx; cheap little bunny keeps the vital spark
aglow in the bodies of those animals with richer fur who feed upon him.
Every seven years an epidemic attacks the wild rabbits, and that year
means a scarcity of all kinds of fur. As surely as wheat stands for
bullion in the grain-belt, little Molly Cottontail is the currency of
the North.
It is at this point we join the Fur-Brigade of the Hudson's Bay Company
making its annual transport to the posts of the Far North, taking in
supplies for trading material and bringing back the peltries obtained in
barter during the previous winter. The big open scows, or
"sturgeon-heads," which are to form our convoy have been built, the
freight is all at The Landing, but for three days the half-breed boatmen
drag along the process of loading, and we get our introduction to the
word which is the keynote of the Cree character,--"Kee-am," freely
translated, "Never mind," "Don't get excited," "There's plenty of time,"
"It's all right," "It will all come out in the wash."
When the present Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company entered office
he determined to reduce chaos to a methodical exactness, and framed a
time-table covering every movement in the northward traffic. When it was
shown by the local representative to the Cree boatmen at The Landing,
old Duncan Tremblé, a river-dog on the Athabasca for forty years, looked
admiringly at the printed slip and said, "Aye, aye; the Commissioner he
makes laws, but the river he boss." It is only when ice is out and
current serves that the brigade moves forward. Old Duncan knows seven
languages,--English, French, Cree, Chipewyan, Beaver, Chinook,
Montagnais,--he speaks seven languages, thinks in Cree, and
prevaricates in them all.
[Illustration: The Missionary Hymnal for the Indians]
At the foot of the hill we visit the English parsonage, with its
old-time sun-dial at the garden-gate. Within, we find what must surely
be the farthest north printing-press. Here two devoted women have spent
years of their lives printing in Cree on a hand-press syllabic hymns and
portions of the Gospel for the enlightenment of the Indians. We wander
into the school where a young teacher is explaining to his uneasy
disciples the intricacies of Present Worth and Compound Interest. Idly
we wonder to what use these bare-footed half-Cree urchins will put their
exact banking knowledge.
Everywhere around us the wild flowers are a great joy; we hail with the
gladness of released children the posies that sweetened childhood
meadows--the dwarf cornel (Cornel Canadensis), dandelions, strawberry
blossoms, wild roses, the pale wood-violet on its long stem, and amid
these familiars the saskatoon or service-berry bushes, with blueberry
vines, and viburnums of many kinds. On the street the natty uniforms of
the Mounted Police are in evidence, and baseball has penetrated as far
north as this. In the post office we read,
"It is decided to hold sports on the first day of July. The Committee
promises a splendid programme,--horse-races, foot-races, football match,
baseball game. There will also be prizes for the best piece of Indian
fancy-work. Dancing will be in full swing in the evening. All welcome."
Opposite the hotel is a reading-room built by a Methodist parson who
also made the furniture with his own hands; magazines, books,
writing-material, games are available to all. This practical work of one
man who accepted the responsibility of being his brother's keeper
appealed to us. In a store near the hotel we see a Cree boatman
purchasing a farewell present for his sweetheart. As he turns over the
fancy articles, we have bad form enough to observe his choice. He
selects a fine-tooth comb, for which he pays fifty cents, or as he calls
it, "two skins," and asks, as he tucks it into his jerkin, if he can
change it "if she doesn't like it."
In the evening it rains, and the room assigned us becomes a living
illustration of the new word we have just learned,--"muskeg," a swamp.
Putting the precious cameras on top of the bureau, we let the rest of
the things swim at their pleasure. Starting with the rest of the
unattached community of Athabasca Landing to go down to the pool-room,
we catch sight of Dr. Sussex and the Cree priest, who have found a
little oasis of their own around a big stove in the upper hall and, with
chairs tilted back, are enjoying some portable hospitality from below.
The doctor arises to escort us through the flood, and when I rally him
about his liquid refreshment, he says, "Oh, I had lemonade."
"I see. And the priest?"
"He had--what he liked."
If local colour and local smell is what we have come north for, we find
it here. Mr. Brabant comes up with "I wonder if that bunch of nuns is
going to get here in time to take scows with us," and we pass into the
billiard-room and watch the game. The players gliding round in moccasins
are all half-breeds. The exclamations are for the most part in Cree or
bad French, and as I crowd in looking for some local terms all that I
hear intelligible is, "That is damn close, I think me."
For thirty-six hours on end it rains. That roof was full of surprises;
you never knew where it would spring a fresh leak. One room is a little
better than the rest, and we all gather there and make the best of
it,--smoking, writing, telling yarns. A bumping noise from across the
hall and the cry of a child startles us. It proves to be Sergeant
Anderson's baby whose cradle has started afloat, and there is a general
rush to rescue Moses from his bulrushes. Everybody is in good humour.
As we calm the baby, South Dakota says "It reminds me of the Englishman
and his musical bath." We demand the story. "Well, a rich American took
a great liking to an Englishman he had been travelling with, and sent
him for a birthday present a Yankee invention to set up in his
country-house--a musical bath. As you turned on the spigot, the thing
played a tune while you were washing, and sort of relieved the tee-deum.
The two gents met next Christmas in New York, and the Yankee he sez,
'And how did you like the bath?' 'Oh, thank you very much, it was kind
of you indeed, but I found it a little irksome standing all the time,
you know.' 'Standing, what the blazes do you mean?' asked the Yankee.
'Well,' says the Britisher, 'the tune you furnished, you know, with the
bawth, was _God Save the King_, and as soon as it began, you know, I had
to stand, and it's rather tiresome taking your bawth standing, you
know."
Sergeant Joyce tells how at a Mounted Police dinner at Fort Saskatchewan
a parson, who was a guest, in proposing a toast, facetiously advised his
entertainers to have nothing to do with either a doctor or a lawyer. It
was interesting to watch the parson's face when there arose to reply a
lawyer and a doctor, each a constable in the rank and file.
Mrs. Leslie Wood of Athabasca Landing adds her quota to the Tales of a
Wayside Inn. We could have listened to her for a week and regretted
neither the rain nor the waiting scows. As a girl she remembers being
shocked at seeing men hold tin cups to the throats of newly-slaughtered
buffalo, drinking with gusto the warm blood.
"What are the two greatest things on earth?" Mrs. Wood, as a young girl,
asked the dusky disciples of her Sunday School class. "The Queen and The
Company," was the ready response. "And of these, which is the greater?"
Little Marten-Tail rubbed one moccasin over the other, and the answer
came thoughtfully in Cree, "The Company. The Queen sometimes dies, but
The Company never dies."
"The Company," of which the little girl spoke, "The Governor and Company
of Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay," deriving its charter in 1670
from the Second Charles of England, is the oldest chartered concern in
the world, with a present-day sphere of influence as large as Great
Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined. From lone Labrador to the
Pacific littoral and from Winnipeg to the Frozen Ocean are scattered the
two hundred and fifty fur-trading forts of this concern in charge of its
two thousand strong silent servants. Last year it paid to its
stockholders a profit of forty-five per cent on the invested capital,
and for two hundred and thirty-nine consecutive years it has been
declaring dividends. The motto of the Company, _Pro Pelle Cutein_, is
prominently displayed at Athabasca Landing. Literally translated, the
phrase means "Skin for skin"; but why the promoters should have chosen
as war-cry the words which Satan used when fighting with the Lord for
the soul of Job, is not so apparent.
As we watch the trading goods being carried in the rain from warehouse
to scows, we think how, weaving its cross-Atlantic way through the
centuries and joining the periwigged days of the Stuarts to this day,
the one man-made thing that has persisted is this commerce-shuttle of
the H.B. Co.
In the days when The Company had its birth, the blind Milton was
dictating his message and the liberated Bunyan preached the spoken word,
the iniquitous Cabal Ministry was forming in England, and Panama was
sacked by Morgan the buccaneer. New York merchants of Manhattan met
every Friday at noon on the bridge over the Broad Street Canal for
barter, South Carolina was settled on the Ashley River, Virginia enacted
that "all servants not being Christians, imported into this country by
shipping shall be slaves," and her Governor, Sir William Berkeley, was
inspired to exclaim piously, "I hope we shall have neither free schools
nor printing these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience
and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them. God
keep us from both!" It was not until two years later that Addison was
born, and that Marquette and Joliet sailed down the Mississippi, even as
we now are essaying the Athabasca.
Unique in commercial annals is the Royal Charter which gave, with power
of life and death, to the Company of Gentlemen Adventurers, less than
twenty in number, "forever hereafter" possession and jurisdiction over a
country as large as Europe. Liberty here for utter despotism, the widest
of excesses. We marvel that from the first Prince Rupert of the Rhine to
the latest Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, the Governors of the
Ancient Company have, with Duncan-like demeanour, borne themselves so
meek in their great office.
It has been fashionable to paint the H.B. Co. as an agrarian oligarchy.
Organized for the purpose of "making fur" before the time of the Habeas
Corpus, two decades ahead of the Bank of England, sixty-two years before
Benjamin Franklin began publishing "Poor Richard's Almanac," and a
century in advance of Watt's steam-engine, it is true that The Company,
throughout the years, devoted itself to peltries and not to platting
town sites. This was its business. From the beginning it has
consistently kept faith with the Indians; the word of The Company has,
for reward or for punishment, ever been worth its full face value. It
was not an H.B. Scot who exclaimed feelingly, "Honesty _is_ the best
policy, I've tried baith."
The feeling of devotion to The Company is as strong today as it ever
was. When the present Commissioner took office he penetrated the North
on a tour of inspection. At Athabasca Landing, since it was not known
just when the Head would arrive, the local official charged all his
clerks and minions to be ready at the sound of a whistle to salute and
fall into line for inspection. The call to arms came on Sunday morning
during divine service. Every attaché of The Company with one exception
obeyed the signal. Young Tom Helly, the paid organist, stuck to his
post; and next day he was called on the carpet. "It was a special
service; I was in the middle of the anthem, sir, and didn't like to
leave the House of God." "Couldn't you show some respect?" roared the
local officer. Man was near in Athabasca Landing and God far away. Down
in the big office at Winnipeg is a Doomsday Book where the life-record
of every servant of The Company is kept, for no man who has ever served
The Company is lost sight of. When there is a good fur-winter, every
employé of The Company is handed an envelope which contains a
bonus-cheque,--ten per cent of his yearly salary.
[Illustration: C.C. Chipman, Commissioner of the H.B. Co.]
The Commissioner of the Hudson's Bay Company and the head of one of
Canada's big department stores were dining together at a Toronto Club.
"After six o'clock I don't want to see or hear of an employé--he doesn't
exist for me until eight o'clock next morning," said the head of the
department store. "Well, I'm more curious than you," smiled the
Commissioner of the H.B. Co., "I want to be reasonably assured of what
every man-Jack of my people is doing all the time. I want to know what
he reads, and if he treats his wife well, and how his last baby is
getting along--you see, he's a working-partner of mine."
There came out of Northern British Columbia last year the Indian wife
and half-breed daughters of an H.B. Co. Factor. They were bound for
Montreal and it was their first trip "outside." The Commissioner at
Winnipeg contradicts the old saw, and surely has "a soul above a
beaver-skin"; like Mulvaney, too, he "has bowels." Quickly went forward
a letter to a tactful woman in the border-town through which the
visiting ladies must pass--"Meet them, and see that they get the proper
things to wear in society circles in Montreal. I don't want them to feel
ill at ease when they get there." Stories like these give us glimpses of
the kind of paternalism exercised by the Ancient Company, the one trust
that has never ground the faces of the poor, and in whose people to-day
appears the "constant service of the Old World."
The big books of The Company a year or two ago in unmistakable
round-hand declared that one Running Rabbit, lawful widow of Blueskin,
was entitled to draw from the coffers clear-side bacon and a modicum of
flour. But one quarterly paysheet, returned to Winnipeg from Fort
Churchill, showed that Running Rabbit in addition to her food allowance
had been handed out forty cents' worth of cotton. Stern enquiry, backed
by red-tape and The Company's seal as big as a saucer, was sent up to
the Churchill Factor. Why had the allowance of Mrs. Blueskin (née
Running Rabbit) been exceeded? By "return mail" nine months later the
Factor reported,
"The widow's gone,
Her tent's forsaken,
No more she comes
For flour and bacon.
N.B. The cotton was used for her shroud."
The Ancient Company was penny-wise, but in spite of the copybook line,
not pound-foolish, as its dividend paysheets conclusively prove.
There is no desire to show forth these silent ones of the North as
infallible men and immaculate. They make many mistakes; they were and
are delightfully human, and we couldn't picture one of them with a
saintly aureole. But in the past, as in the present, they were large
men; they honoured their word, and you couldn't buy them. Men of action,
whether inside fort walls, bartering in the tepee of the Indian, or off
on silent trails alone,--it has been given to each of them to live life
at firsthand. In every undertaking the determining factor of success is
men, and not money or monopoly. And because the North still breeds men
of the H.B. type, the eye of The Great Company is not dimmed, its force
not abated.
We spoke with no fewer than three men at The Landing who came into the
North in the year of the Klondike rush, that is, just ten years ago.
Into the human warp and woof of the Great Lone Land of Northern Canada
the Klondike gold-rush intruded a new strand. The news of the strike on
Yukon fields flashed round the world on wires invisible and visible,
passed by word of mouth from chum to chum, and by moccasin telegraph was
carried to remotest corners of the continent. Gold-fever is a disease
without diagnosis or doctor--infectious, contagious, and hereditary; if
its germ once stirs in a man's blood, till the day of his death he is
not immune from an attack. The discovery of gold-dust in Dawson sent
swarming through the waterways of sub-Arctic Canada a heterogeneous
horde,--gamblers of a hundred hells, old-time miners from quiet
firesides, beardless boys from their books, human parasites of two
continents, and dreamers from the Seven Seas.
Coastwise they sought the North by steamers from 'Frisco, Seattle, and
Vancouver Island, and of the numbers of these the shipping offices have
some records. But of that vast army who from the east and from the south
travelled inland waterways towards the golden goal no tabulation has
ever been made. Singly they went, in groups, and by partnerships of two
and three. There was no route marked out by which they were to reach the
glittering streams of which they dreamed; the general direction of north
and west was all that guided them. Athabasca Landing was the portal
through which they passed, and by every northward stream they
travelled,--down the Athabasca toward the Mackenzie and up the Athabasca
to the Peace, leaving stranded men and stranded boats on every shore. By
raft and dug-out, scow and canoe, men essayed to travel rapid waterways
who had never handled craft before, and the Indians still point out to
you near Grand Rapids on the Athabasca the site of the Mounted Police
Station where Sergeant Anderson rescued a dozen tenderfoots from
drowning.
To the Indians of this vast country the unwonted inundation of the
whites was a revelation. Before this, their knowledge of Europeans had
been limited to men of the Hudson's Bay posts and the few black-robed
Fathers of the missions. The priests had told the Indians that in the
outside world French was the accepted language of the white man and that
only the degraded and debased spoke English. Most of the Northern
Indians who speak English will tell you that they got their first
lessons from the Klondike miners.
And what of the men who followed the gleam? Some reached Dawson. These
were few. Those who gained fortunes, were fewer still. In the old books
of the H.B. Co. a favourite phrase of the Factor is "a band of Indians
_cast up_ from the east," "the Express from the North _cast up_ at a
late hour last night." On the way to Dawson, and filtering backward from
that point, hundreds of gold-miners are "cast up" on every interior
shore. Acting as attachés to Hudson's Bay posts, engaging as free
traders, manipulating missionary boats for Protestant and Roman Catholic
seekers for souls, trapping off their own bat, and, in one instance at
least, marrying the missionary, they were constantly passing us. Round
the home hearths wives wonder about them, and the old bent mother still
prays for her absent son. A silence like this once entered upon is hard
to break, and the wanderer in the silence wraps tighter about him the
garment of the recluse. Outcropping from the strata in striking
individuality, they belong to a different race to the plodding people of
the Hudson's Bay posts, and are interesting men wherever you meet them.
Keen of vision, slow of speech, and with that dreamy look which only
those acquire who have seen Nature at her secrets in the quiet
places,--they are like boulders, brought down by the glacial drift and
dropped here and there over the white map of the North.