NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
"On wan dark night on Lac St. Pierre,
De win' she blow, blow, blow,
An' de crew of de wood scow '_Julie Plante_'
Got scar't an' run below--
For de win' she blow lak hurricane
Bimeby she blow some more,
An' de scow bus' up on Lac St. Pierre
Wan arpent from de shore."
--_Dr. Drummond_.
This morning we are to leave the Island; it is June 12th and Friday. The
daylight lengthens from day to day and last night at half past ten
underneath the mosquito-bar within the tent, it was light enough to
thread a needle. We have mending to do each night, and dragging clothes
behind the boat makes a satisfactory kind of progressive laundry. At
dusk we had seen an empty scow floating down river, adrift from
Athabasca Landing. In the middle of Grand Rapids she broke amidships,
but held together until in the darkness she floated beyond our ken.
Trouble of our own awaits us. With no one noting, an adventurous scow,
with all her precious cargo, has pulled loose from her moorings. By the
time the Cree watchman discovers that the "_Go-Quick-Her_" has taken the
bit in her teeth, the runaway with tail-sweep set has turned the next
corner of the Athabasca. Great excitement! Billy Loutit and Emile
Fosseneuve borrow the Police canoe and go in chase. It is such a rough
bit of water that we hold our breaths, for a false stroke means death to
both; but that false stroke does not come. Billy Loutit knows this river
as we know the borders and shrubs in our garden-bed.
[Illustration: Towing the Wrecked Barge Ashore]
This accident causes everyone to look grave. The Edmonton value of the
cargo is over two thousand dollars, but it is a loss that cannot be
measured in dollars and cents. These wrecked goods, gaily sailing down
the Athabasca, cannot be duplicated at some convenient grocery around
the corner.
We have learned that any untoward happening means a half day's delay.
Philip Atkinson calls me to one side to suggest that it would be a
"clear waste" to leave behind the eggs of "that duck's nest I showed you
the day we came." Atkinson is a half-breed with a Hercules-build who
looks forty-five and owns up to sixty. He and I chatted over the mallard
eggs and my collection of wild flowers, he respecting the preservative
art and I in full awe of that art gastronomic of his which gulps the
Mallards-in-embryo, sans fourchette, sans salt, sans ceremony.
They are an interesting study, these half-breeds; it means much to each
on which side of the English Channel his father had birth. When a
Frenchman marries an Indian woman he reverts to her scale of
civilization; when a Scot takes a native to wife he draws her up to his.
Our crew live at Lac la Biche and were engaged last winter for their
season's work at from twenty to forty dollars a month, with board and
moccasins. They walked a hundred miles to Athabasca Landing to connect
with their summer's job, and the absolute certainty of regular meals
just now appeals. They get three meals a day going with the current, and
four while tracking back, with meals thrown in when anything unusual
happens or a moose is killed. One cannot help wondering how that elastic
term "the law of heredity" works out with these people, cut off from the
lives their fathers led and from the free woods-life of the
pre-civilization Indian.
Philip, duck-stuffed but untroubled by "that full feeling after eating,"
lights his pipe and looks back through the years. "My father belonged to
The Company, my mother was an Ojibway from the Lake of the Woods
country. My father went back to the Old Country when I was seven,
leaving me to an uncle to be educated, and I don't know 'B' from a
bull's foot. He put me to work on the woodpile from morning till night.
When my father came back after twelve years and found me ignorant, he
cried like a baby. I have no education, but," with a contemplative
puff, "I have friends wherever I go." Philip is good to look at and he
is a linguist, speaking Cree, French, and excellent English with a
delightful Scotch accent. He is an ardent admirer of the H.B. Company.
"They always kept their word with a man, and when they had done with
him, returned him without cost to his old home." Philip and his two sons
were the first to shoot the Grand Rapids, and he tells us that this
stretch of the Athabasca River has been used only twenty years. Before
that time people from the North reached Winnipeg by the Clearwater.
Philip is a Loyalist. During the half-breed rebellion of 1885 he carried
dispatches to Middleton and Otter, going seventy-five miles one day on
foot. He had his horse, "a draught-horse as black as a crow," taken from
him twice, got through the lines and stole another, and tells proudly
how for his deed of valor he was presented with an Assomption belt.
At last we are off, keeping sharp look-out for the lost scow. Buffalo
River, where we pull up for the night, is a recognized camping-place.
The men know where to put their hands on old-time tent-poles, the boys
dig out shin-bones of the moose,--the relics of some former
feast,--which they gnaw as a puppy mumbles an old bone.
Another manifestation of gas is here. It bubbles up on the shore and
through the water at the boat's bow, and as we strike a match the whole
surface flames like the brandy on a Christmas plum-pudding. On the
opposite side of the river are "lobsticks," a new word to us and a new
thing. To stand as a living totem-pole, the Indians select on a striking
promontory a tall spruce and from a section of the trunk lop all the
branches except two, which are left as wings. If the lobstick is to
stand a monument to a certain man or party, the names of those to be
honored are written in Cree on an attached slab. We were to notice
lobsticks from point to point along the rest of our journey, some of
them indicating good hunting-grounds or fishing-places back from the
shore, but most of them memorials of happenings on the river.
The Little Buffalo carries to the Athabasca its noisy current between
two high escarpments, and on the shelf leading back from the banks of
the main stream is a far-reaching plateau of splendidly-fertile land. In
the scow next us the two young Crees who are preparing the food for our
evening "meat-su" carry on a religious controversy as they slice the
sow-belly. We gather that one has been taken into the Protestant fold
and that the other follows the priests. Duncan Tremblé comes down and
cuffs them both soundly, putting an end to the argument with, "It's all
the same as the other, just like the Hudson's Bay Company and the free
trader. Each one tells you his goods is the best and the other is
_nee-moy-yuh mee-wah-sin_ (no good). It's that way with the God-goods of
the white men. Each church tells you that his is the best, but they all
come down to us in the same scow, both the priest and the missionary."
Next morning we are all keyed-up for the rapids, and about six miles
down we encounter the Brulé, the first one, and take it square in
mid-channel. We ship a little water, but pass through it all too soon,
for the compelling grandeur of the Brulé grips one. The river here is
held between vertical walls of the reddest of red sandstone against
which the lush greenery makes a striking contrast. Twenty miles below is
the Boiler Rapid. It got its name not from its churning water but
because the boiler of the steamer _Wrigley_ was lost here and still
remains at the bottom of the basin. The walls of this rapid are as
clear-cut as if wrought into smoothness by mallet and chisel. The
tar-soaked sands appear off and on all the way to McMurray. Next comes
the Long Rapid _(Kawkinwalk Abowstick_), which we run close to its right
bank.
From the distance sounds the ominous roar of the Big Cascade. At quarter
past four we reach the head of the swirling fall. The underlying cause
of the Big Cascade is a limestone ledge which cuts the channel
diagonally and makes ugly-looking water. We plan to run the rapid one
boat at a time. The crews are doubled. Our steersman is alert,
expectant, and as agile as a cat, his black hair switching in the wind.
Sitting in the centre of the scow, as we do, the sensation is very
different to that which one experiences in running rapids in a canoe.
Then it is all swiftness and dexterity, for your craft is light, and, in
expert hands, easily dirigible with one clever turn of the wrist. With a
ten-ton scow the conditions change and you feel correspondingly more
helpless.
The great rapid stretches from shore to shore and the drop is sheer.
With much excitement, the bowsman points out the channel that seems to
him the safe one. No one speaks, and the big awkward craft is brought up
for the jump. It is an elephant drawing his feet together to take a
water-fence. For all we own in the world we wouldn't be anywhere but
just where we sit. If it is going to be our last minute, well, Kismet!
let it come. At least it will not be a tame way of going out. For the
life of me I cannot forbear a cry of exultation. Then there is the
feeling below one's feet which you experienced when you were a kiddie
lying flat on your stomach coasting down a side-hill and your little red
sled struck a stone. We, too, have struck something, but do not stop to
ask what the obstruction is.
[Illustration: The Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills]
At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to
photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good
vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just
time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr.
Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as
we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it
was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.
The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Tremblé, the pilot, dances in the
sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the
top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the
men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way
through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The
Inspector says, "Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste." The
native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis,
"After you, Inspector." Then Pelletier says, sharply, "Jump, I tell you,
jump; there's no time for--Gaston-and-Alphonse business here."
As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly
things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows
discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged
goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has
been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on
the bank,--five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three
minutes!
A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward
McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an
hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden
alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening
swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along
the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before
we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the
enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.
The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks
into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded
island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in;
so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back
forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and
Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful
site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of
Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.
Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would
expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their
world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of
the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition
of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr.
Brabant says, "Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for
you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?" "Never mind,"
says Bob, "I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?"
It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the
water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation.
Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her "special
orders" are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North
not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of
the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for
hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes.
Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of
the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting,
and, turning it over, says bravely, "I think it will dry." Mathematical
and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic
edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are
miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and
Hudson's Bay blankets!
In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the
Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding
to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put
up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little
pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of
effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted
together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly
Sand-boys "all in one delicious gravy." The Doctor is dazed, and offers
to white and brown alike a tin box with "Have a pastile, do." He wanders
among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they
accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially
appreciates,--something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the
Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on
each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. "Here are some
authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and
I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian
Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I
shall never be able to tell which it is." One by one the Doctor digs out
from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,--a presentation "Life of the
Countess of Munster," also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved
holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be "as old as the
Conqueror." There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which
carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows
the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under
a side of bacon, is a print of "my great-grandfather who discovered a
cure for scurvy." A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in
Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead
along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.
[Illustration: Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader]
Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad
one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort
McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and
a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition
to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a
five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years
with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their
migrations and tribal feasts. We question, "Are you not lonely,
especially in the winter?" But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as
heroic. "Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians
are always coming and going, and they are full of interest."
We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees
when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness
consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is
divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the
black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox
would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but
varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral
alpacas, all of us,--something between a sheep and a goat. But no less
are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of
his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the
self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.
As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home.
The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind
Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow
from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that
she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and
depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an
assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due
to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss
Gordon translates. "I am delighted that ladies have come such a long
distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all
white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to
old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water,
the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children," and
the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. "Be
glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it." It is the
advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the
Winnipeg Hospital.
We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair
of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle--merely for effect,
for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In
one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church
to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the
hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured
hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that
twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store
to go across and dress this wound.
When a schoolboy takes to his bosom a _fidus Achates_, the first thing
he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces
us to her find,--nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of
a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.
During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as
they had "made little fur," entertaining them as courteously as you
would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink
thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden,
bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman
passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a
Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just
about three days.
A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,--the reading of the
rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a
peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the
latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern
contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full
fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the
future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort
McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the
mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said,
"Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn
medicine so that I could help these poor creatures." Her tone of
unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the
scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden,
radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.
Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of
pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for--a
Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any
one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of
the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another
guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a
stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the
potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally
an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the
wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of
growing things.
[Illustration: The Steamer _Grahame_]
Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay
Company's steamer _Grahame_ meets us, bringing her tale of outward-going
passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort
McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the
easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers
are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats,
weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen
scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden
craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written
word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out
to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. The _Grahame_
has its advantages,--clean beds, white men's meals served in real
dishes, and best of all, a bath!
On the _Grahame_ we meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus
far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it.
Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of
Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have
ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to
rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole
chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a
resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as
faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr.
Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to
shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see
only the surface and have to guess the depths.
As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56°
40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, "where we
are at." In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far
north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and
the lone Pribilof, "where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and
the seals they breed for themselves." Crossing the junction of the
Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of
Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789
traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its
confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters
of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat
contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in
latitude 58° 36' North.
[Illustration: An Oil Derrick on the Athabasca]
In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that
upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of
fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank,
out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein,
building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much
time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those
ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and
determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant
derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may
reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of
striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while "punching" one of
his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of
limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine,
poplar, and spruce.
[Illustration: Tar Banks on the Athabasca]
At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is
exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for
blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these
banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while
extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the
river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are
medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.
Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at
every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a
twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically
may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is
a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of
over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a
section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and
twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed
through the sands.
Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two
miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles
up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable
odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said,
"Smells are surer than sounds or sights."
We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down
this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the
coming of the railroad can bring to light.