LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
"Afar from stir of streets,
The city's dust and din,
What healing silence meets
And greets us gliding in!
"The noisy strife
And bitter carpings cease.
Here is the lap of life,
Here are the lips of peace."
--_C.G.D. Roberts_.
For fresh woods and pastures new this Friday, June 26th! Our little
"bunch" breaks up. Mr. Brabant and Mrs. Harding, of the Hudson's Bay
Company contingent, go on in the _Grahame_ to Smith's Landing, and with
them the two detachments of the R.N.W.M.P. As we shake hands with the
police party, we wonder what Fate has in store for each of us. Breaking
off at Fort Resolution, Great Slave Lake, and trending eastward by canoe
over unchartered ways, will they reach salt water on Hudson Bay as they
hope?
For our two selves, great good fortune is ours. The Canadian Government
Indian Treaty party, consisting of Mr. Conroy in command, Mr. Laird as
secretary, Dr. Donald, and Mr. Mooney in charge of the commissariat,
with Constable Gairdner, R.N.W.M.P., as Escort, has just come down the
Peace. To-day they pay treaty in Chipewyan, and this afternoon start
for far Fond du Lac, at the eastern extremity of Lake Athabasca. The
little H.B. tug _Primrose_ will tow them and their outfit in a York-boat
and a scow, and the captain has been persuaded to allow us, too, to take
our blankets and come along, sleeping on the deck. The _Primrose_ from
stem to stern is not big enough to swing a cat in, but who wants to
swing a cat? It is blue Lake Athabasca that we long to see; no white
woman has yet traversed it to its eastern extremity and we would go if
we had to work our passage at the sweeps of the scow.
[Illustration: Lake Athabasca in Winter]
Athabasca Lake (whose name means "In Muskeg Abounding"), is two hundred
miles long, with thirty-five miles at its greatest width. It lies in a
general easterly and westerly direction. No survey has been made of the
lake; its height above ocean level is seven hundred feet, and it covers
perhaps three thousand square miles. Its chief feeder is the Athabasca
River, down which we have come from the south. This stream, assisted by
the Peace, is fast filling up with detritus the western portion of Lake
Athabasca. There is a marked contrast between the upper and lower coasts
of the lake. The north shore consists of Laurentian gneiss with a sparse
wood growth; the south bank for the most part is low, the formation
being a cretaceous sandstone. Ice holds fast this beautiful sheet for
six months every year. As we puff along the surface of its incomparable
blue it is hard to realise that, although the Peace and Athabasca Rivers
open their icy mouths about May-day, parts ot the lake are not free for
travel until mid-May. The lake freezes fast at Fort Chipewyan some time
in November. Lying on the deck of the tug, we look down and take
inventory of our odd tow. Just behind comes the scow. It holds wood for
the engine, a long sled, a canoe, a "skift," all this year's trading
supplies for Fond du Lac, and half a dozen chained husky dogs. Trailing
the scow is a York-boat carrying the treaty party and Mr. Harris.
It is late in the afternoon when we pull out from Chipewyan, but the sun
is still heaven-high, with the offshore air a tonic. At seven o'clock
Colin Fraser's boat passes us with Bishop Grouard standing upright at
the prow. This stately figure, clear-cut against the sky-line, may well
stand as the type of the pioneer Church of the Northland. On the little
deck we can use the camera with facility at ten in the evening, and the
typewriter all night. The light manifestation is a marvel and wooes us
from sleep. Have we not all the tame nights of the after-days for
slumber? Here we lose the moon and those friendly stars which at Pelican
Portage dipped almost to meet our hands. No more are we to see them
until the Arctic has been reached and we have turned southward many,
many hundreds of miles.
[Illustration: Bishop Grouard]
Hours since all the badinage was silenced in the York-boat behind us. On
board the _Primrose_ the mate sleeps, and Captain Prothero has the
wheel. I creep along the wobbly gunwale to sit out a four hours' watch
with him. "I never saw any one navigate as you do, captain, you seem to
have neither chart nor compass."
"No," assents he, biting hard on the little black pipe, "we just go by
the power o' man," and with the words a sharp turn of the wheel lurches
us out from the lee of a batture. The jolt jerks up its passengers in
the semidetached steerage. A growling of huskies, a kick, and a muttered
adjuration in Cree, and all is silent again.
By six o'clock every one is astir, and Saturday is a long glorious day.
At noon we stop to take aboard an Indian who hails us from the
scrub-pine, sore afraid that he will miss connection with his five
dollar treaty present from the Government. It is good to stretch out on
the grass after this somewhat restricted Primrose path of dalliance. In
front of us extends a long row of islands, in the hot haze suspended
midway between blue of lake and blue of sky. Their covering of
baby-willows suggests a face guilty of a three days' beard. We rest, so
far as the mosquitoes think it proper we should rest, on a bed of
reindeer moss (_cladonia rangiferina_?), the _tripe de roche_ of the
North. This constitutes almost the sole winter-food of the reindeer, its
gelatinous or starchy matter giving the nutritive property to the
odd-looking stuff. Reindeer-moss has saved the life of many an Indian
lost in these woods. We try it, and find the taste slightly pungent and
acrid; but when boiled it forms a jelly said to be nourishing and
tonic.
No orders are given when we land, and we study countenances and actions
to guess the time-limit of our tether. For twenty-four hours we have
wondered if there were trout in Lake Athabasca and if they would rise to
the fly. With a borrowed rod we take a canoe and off the shadow of a
cottonwood point try a cast at random. The gut carries three flies--a
brown hackle, a coachman, with a Jock Scott at the tail--a rainbow
aggregation. To the coachman we get a rise and it takes three of us to
land him. There are no scales; so his weight must forever be unrecorded,
but as we lay him out he measures just a trifle over twenty-three
inches, as beautiful a lake trout as ever sent thrill up and down a
sympathetic spine. Bye-and-bye this road we travel is going to be
listed on the sporting routes of the world, and tired souls from the
Seven Seas with rod and gun will here find Nepenthe.
[Illustration: The Modern Note-book]
Clutching our catch, we step gingerly along an outstretched oar and
climb on board. The orders of the captain to the mate are sporty and
suggest turf rather than surf. "Kick her up, Mac!" "Give her a kick
ahead!" "Who-o-oa!" On Sunday evening, June 28th, we reach Fond du Lac,
clinging close to the water-line on her beautiful stretch of sand. All
unregarded are the church-bells, and the Indians crowd to meet us,--bent
old crones, strong men, and black-eyed babies. For is not the coming of
the treaty party the one event of the Fond du Lac year?
Half way along the traverse of the lake we had crossed the
inter-Provincial boundary, and now find ourselves near the northern
limit of the Province of Saskatchewan, and in the latitude of Sweden's
Stockholm. There are but two people in Fond du Lac who speak
English,--Mr. Harris who trades fur with the Indians, and Father Beibler
who would fain shepherd their souls.
These Caribou-Eater Indians are true nomads who come into the post only
at treaty-payment time or to dispose of their hunt. In the
_moon-when-the-birds-cast-their-feathers_ (July) they will press back
east and north to the land of the caribou. September,
_the-moon-when-the-moose-loose-their-horns_, will find them camping on
the shore of some far unnamed lake, and by the time of the
_hour-frost-moon,_ or the _ice-moon,_ they will be laying lines of
traps.
We have learned to estimate the prosperity or otherwise of the Indians
by the condition of their dogs. Fond du Lac dogs are fat; each baby in
its moss-bag exudes oil from every pore. Peace and Plenty have crowned
the Caribou-Eaters during the winter that is past. The law of
Saskatchewan permits the taking of the beaver. Alberta for the present
has enacted restrictive legislation on this hunt, to which restriction,
by the way, among the Indians at the treaty-tent at Chipewyan, objection
had been loud and eloquent.
[Illustration: Tepee of a Caribou-Eater Indian]
We call upon Mr. Harris and his Chipewyan wife, a tall handsome woman
whom he addresses as "Josette." Their three girls are being educated in
the convent at Fort Chipewyan. The room in which we sit reflects the
grafting of red life on white. A rough bookcase of birchwood, with
thumbed copies of schoolboy classics, Carlyle, the Areopagitica, and the
latest Tractate on Radium, gives one a glimpse of the long, long winter
nights when all race and latitude limitations fade away and the mind of
the Master of Fond du Lac jumps the barrier of ice and snow to mix with
the great world of thought outside. "Stone walls do not a prison make
nor iron bars a cage." Fighting our way with the mosquitoes, under
birches somewhat dwarfed but beautiful, through a pungent bocage of
ground pine, wild roses, giant willow-herb, mints innumerable and
Labrador tea _(Ledum latifolium_), we reach the H.B. garden where the
potatoes are six or eight inches high. We wander into a little
graveyard, surely the most lonely God's acre in all Canada. The
inscriptions in syllabic Chipewyan show the patient devotion of Father
Beihler, who comes across us as we gaze at the graves. Eight long years
the priest has put in at Fond du Lac, sent here when but three months in
the priesthood. His English, acquired from Mr. Harris, is a bit
hesitating. His home was in Alsace-Lorraine; he tells us his mother was
out of her mind for three days when he was ordered here, and he himself
wept. White women are a _rara avis_. Father Beihler wants to know how
old we are and if we are Catholics and how much money we earn. Pointing
wisely to the Kid, he assures me, "They are not an-gell (angel) at that
age," and says, "I am not a woman-hater, and I am not a _woman
chercher_." The priest is as great a curiosity to us as we are to him,
and each is interested in studying a new kind of animal. One sympathy we
have in common,--the good Father knows every bird that flies over Fond
du Lac. Who can tell what they whisper to him of the sweet Alsace so
far away? We are treated to peeps into the nests of the orange-crowned
warbler, the hermit thrush, and that shy wader, the spotted sandpiper.
[Illustration: A Bit of Fond du Lac]
These ultimate woods fascinate us, with their worn north trails of the
trapper beaten as hard as asphalt with the moccasins of generations. The
father of the Chipewyan down at the tents receiving his treaty money
to-day and his grandfather before him trod these same trails and served
The Company. Dusky feet trod these paths when good Queen Anne ruled in
England, men made toilsome portages up these waterways, and here
Crowfoot and Running Rabbit and Gaston Lamousette kept undisturbed the
tenour of their way and matched wits with Carcajou the wolverine.
To the student who would read at first hand the story of fur, more
interesting than dark otters, Hudson Bay sables, or silver-fox, one form
silhouettes on the white canvas of the North. It is the figure of the
Trapper. Here, as elsewhere, the man who mixes brains with his bait and
makes a scientific art of a rude craft is the man who succeeds. It is a
contest of wit worthy the cleverest. The animals, as the years pass,
become more rather than less wary, and the days of the magenta string
tying a chunk of fat to a nice new shiny trap are long past. The man who
used to "make fur" in that way is, like Fenimore Cooper's Indians, the
extinct product of a past race that never existed.
The Chipewyan trapper eats at once, or dries for the future, every ounce
of flesh he traps, from the scant flesh-covering over the animal's skull
to the feet and the entrails. As soon as the skins of beaver and
musquash are removed, the bodies, so many skinned cats, are impaled on
sticks of jack-pine and set sizzling before the fire. In the woods as in
the camp, the laborious work falls to the woman. Lordly man kills the
animal and that is all. With her babies on her back or toddling by her
side, the wife trails the game home on hand-sled, and afterwards in camp
she must dress the meat and preserve the skin.
The band of Fond du Lac Indians is the largest in the whole North, and
they are perhaps the least unspoiled of "civilisation," as their range
is removed from the north-and-south route afforded by the Mackenzie.
To-morrow the treaty party will leave, the skin tepees will be pulled
down, and in those beautiful birchbark canoes whole families will be on
the move. These people are essentially meat-eaters. Their hearts have
not learned to hunger for those soggy bannocks, unventilated shacks, and
sheet-iron stoves which are luring their tribal cousins on the
germ-strewn way to higher culture with convenient stopping-places in
the graves by the wayside.
[Illustration: Birch-barks at Fond du Lac]
Starting from Fond du Lac in July, a Chipewyan family sets out in two
canoes, the big communal one, and the little hunting-canoe, the dogs
following along shore. It is paddle and portage for days and weary
weeks, inland and ever inland. In October the frost crisps into silence
the running water and the lake lip. Snow begins to fall, and the grind
of forming ice warns the Chipewyan it is time to change birchbark for
moccasin and snow-shoe. Canoes are _cached_, and the trail strikes into
the banksian pine and birchwood. The door of the forest is lonely and
eerie. It no longer seems incongruous that, although Big Partridge
wears a scapular on his burnt-umber breast and carries with him on his
journey the blessing of Father Beihler, he also murmurs the hunting
incantation of the Chipewyans and hangs the finest furs of his traps
flapping in the top of the jack-pine, a sop to the Cerberus of Mitchie
Manitou, the feared Spirit of the Wood.
Winter sees Indian families, each little group a vignette in the heart
of the wider panorama, flitting over lake surfaces to ancestral
fur-preserves. In the early snow they pitch tepee, family fires are
lighted, and from this centre the trapper radiates. The man sets his
traps, and if the couple is childless his wife makes an independent line
of snares. Each individual traps for miles and days alone, and an
accident in the woods means a death as lonely and agonising as that of
the animal he snares. With blanket, bait, and bacon on a small
hand-sled, silently the trapper trudges forward. The Northern Lights
come down o' nights, and it is cold; but cold makes finer fur. Down far
trails in gloomy forests, across the breasts of silent streams, the
Chipewyan trudges from trap to trap; if he finds fifty dollars worth of
fur along the whole line he is content. It is not this lonely man who
gets the high price, madame, for your marten stole or opera-cloak of
ermine.
On the trail the hunter may go hungry for two days and no word of
complaint, just a tightening of the lips and L'Assumption belt, and a
firm set to the jaw; but when a moose is killed life is one long supper.
A jolly priest whispers of this confession from a son of the Church, a
recent brand from the burning, "O Father, I know that Christianity is
true, the great, the strong religion. When I was a heathen Chipewyan and
trapped with my mother's tribe I ate ten rabbits a day. But now I am a
Christian, a good Catholic, seven rabbits are enough for me--I will eat
no more!"
In the early days the H.B. Company allowed its men _en voyage_ five
pounds of meat a day, and each kiddie three pounds. In British Columbia
and the Yukon the ration was one salmon; up here on the Athabasca one
wild goose or three big whitefish; on the Arctic foreshore two fish and
three pounds of reindeer meat. This was the scheduled fare, but the
grimness of the joke appears in the fact that each man had to run his
breakfast to earth before he ate it.
Forty miles a day from trap to trap is a hard tramp on snowshoes when
the wind sweeps down from the Arctic and the silence can be felt. The
whole thing is a Louisiana lottery. The very next trap may hold a
silver-fox that spells kudos for a year round the winter camp-fires and
a trade valuation of one hundred dollars from the tempting stores of Mr.
Harris. As long as the red fox brings forth her cubs to play in the
starlight and marten and musquash increase after their kind, just so
long will there be trappers and sons of trappers setting out from Fond
du Lac. In October or November these Chipewyans will meet the migrating
caribou on the northern side of Athabasca Lake. Caribou skins are in
prime condition then to make coats and robes, and caribou venison, fresh
or dried, is the daily bread which Providence sends to these far folk.
About Christmas time, if they find themselves at a convenient distance
from the post, the Indians come in to Fond du Lac to trade their furs
with Mr. Harris and to get from Father Beihler the blessing of Mother
Church. Out they go again and make their spring hunt of otter, bear,
and beaver, whose skins they bring in when they come for their treaty
money and annual reunion in July.
Interesting indeed is the life-history of the Barren Ground caribou
(_rangifer articus_), whose migrant hordes to-day rival in number the
bands of the dead and gone buffalo. Caribou go north in spring and south
in autumn, as the birds do; and, unlike the seals, the female caribou
form the advance line. They drop their young far out toward the seacoast
in June, by which month the ground is showing up through melting snow.
The male caribou never reach the coast, but join their wives and make
the acquaintance of their babies at the end of July. From this time they
stay together till the rutting season is over late in October. Then the
great herds of caribou,--"la foule,"--gather on the edge of the woods
and start on their southern migrations toward the shelter and food
afforded by the country of the larger pine trees. A month later the
females and males separate, the cows with their intent fixed on the
uttermost edge of things beginning to work their way north toward the
end of February and reaching the edge of the woods by April.
This is the general rule. Broadly speaking, the north shore of Athabasca
Lake to-day forms the southern limit of the caribou range, while the
Mackenzie River makes a natural dividing-line between eastward and
westward branches of the caribou family. But the trend of this mighty
migration will not be pent between mathematical lines of limitation, and
the direction of prevailing winds may turn the numberless hosts and
divert them from their line of march. Individuals and scattered bands,
indeed, have been known not to migrate at all. Fifteen years ago in the
last days of July, in latitude 62° 15' North, the Tyrrell Brothers saw a
herd of caribou which they estimate contained over one hundred thousand
individuals. In 1877 a line of caribou crossed Great Slave Lake near
Fort Rae on the ice. It took them two weeks to pass that point, and, in
the words of an eye-witness, "daylight could not be seen through the
column."
A priest, on the winter trail between Fond du Lac and Fort Chipewyan a
few winters ago, was travelling without fire-arms and, as his trail
crossed that of the moving caribou, he had to delay his journey till
they deigned to give him the right of way. It was impossible to pass
through their ranks, and he hadn't even the satisfaction of making a fat
bull pay tribute to his Mother Hubbard cupboard.
Mr. Hislop, a fur-trader of Great Slave Lake, said to the writer, "At
Fort Rae the caribou are and always have been very plentiful, I don't
think they will ever die out." Rae was the old meat-station for the Far
North, and the records show that after supplying local needs three
thousand tongues were often exported in one season. If one intercepts a
caribou-band in a little lake he may with patience kill them all without
any trouble, as they run round and round on the ice, mystified by the
wood-echoes and the reverberation of the shots.
When the Chipewyan filters into southern latitudes and weakens with pink
teas the virility that should go with red blood, aping the elect he will
cast round for a suitable coat-of-arms. The proper caper for him would
be the caribou rampant with a whitefish flotsam. The whitefish
(_coregonus clupeiformis_) is gregarious, reaching shallow water to
spawn. Wherever you see Indian tepee-poles by the side of Northern
waters you may guess that to be a good fishing spot. The poles are
always hospitably left for the next comer, the Indian merely carrying
with him the skin or canvas cover of his tepee. The location of the
Hudson's Bay forts was in the beginning determined by the good
fishing-grounds, although now there is but indifferent fishing near some
of the posts. It would almost seem that the whitefish have in their
chilly veins as variable blood as any vagrant horde of caribou. The
whitefish contains all elements necessary for human nourishment, and it
is a happy fact that it does, for men and dogs in the North often live
for solid months on nothing else. It is a rich fat fish and the usual
mode of cooking it is by boiling. Northern people tell you that it is
the only fish whose taste will never produce satiety, as it becomes
daily more agreeable to the palate. I can't say that it worked on our
sensibilities in just that way. But it is the old story of _de
gustibus_, etc. We see the Fond du Lac people this evening roasting upon
the coals, as choice tit-bits, the stomachs of the whitefish. Scraping
the dirt and ashes from the blackened morsel, they offer it to us as one
would pass the olives in those lands so far below us where people wear
dress-suits and railroads run. It is all a matter of latitude, after
all, for when a bottle of olives was salved from the wrecked scow we had
overheard this dialogue between two boatmen, as surreptitiously they
broached cargo. "Do you like these?" "Yes." "You're a liar!" On the
Athabasca trail, too, we had seen an untried soul struggling with his
first olive. It was Shorty, the lightning-stricken heir of the house of
Kennedy. He coveted one of the "plums" from our lunch-basket, and was
much surprised when we suggested that it was an olive. "What are them?"
"Olives," we elucidated; "they come from Southern Europe by steamer."
"Do they?" (slightingly). "The one I et must have come steerage."
We are to make the acquaintance of other Northern
delicacies,--beaver-tails, moose-nose, rabbits' kidneys,
caribou-tongues, and the liver of the loche, an ugly-looking fish of
these waters. But the whitefish remains the staple; the fish-harvest
here is as important a season as Harvest Home elsewhere. At the fishery,
whitefish are hung upon sticks across a permanent staging to dry and
freeze; an inch-thick stick is pierced through the tail, and the fish
hang head downwards in groups of ten. This process makes the flesh
firmer if the days continue cool, but if the weather turns mild as the
fish are hanging they acquire both a flavour and a smell exceedingly
gamy. This is the "Fall Fishery." Winter fishing is done through holes
in the ice, the net being spread by means of a long thin pole. The
handling of net and fish is terrible work in the bitter cold.
As a whole, Canadian Indians are more independent than those of the
United States, and certainly they have been more fairly dealt with in
Canada than in the sister Republic. There is in the Dominion to-day an
Indian population of 110,000. The amount expended last year by Canada
from the Consolidated Revenue Fund for her Indian Department was
$1,358,254. The Canadian Government has sedulously kept faith with its
Indians and has refrained from pauperizing them by pap-feeding or
ration-folly; very largely to-day the Canadian Indian plays the game
off his own bat.
Into the sturdy and intelligent faces of the Fond du Lac Indian we look,
seeking in vain any trace of "the wild Red Man." The _raison d'être_ of
these annual "treaty-payment parties" is merely the acknowledgment on
one side and the recognition on the other that the Northern Indian is a
British subject protected by and amenable to British law. In addition to
the present of five dollars per head each year, the Canadian Government
sends in by the Indian Agent presents of fishing twine and ammunition,
with eleemosynary bacon for the indigent and old. The chiefs strut
around in official coats enriched with yellow braid, wearing medals as
big as dinner-plates.
From Edmonton northward to Fort Chipewyan the Indians are all Crees. At
Fort Chipewyan the northern limit of the Crees impinges on the southern
limit of the Chipewyan, but here at Fond du Lac the Indians are all true
Chipewyans. The Chipewyan wife is the New Red Woman. We see in her the
essential head of the household. No fur is sold to the trader, no yard
or pound of goods bought, without her expressed consent. Indeed, the
traders refuse to make a bargain of any kind with a Chipewyan man
without the active approbation of the wife. When a Chipewyan family
moves camp, it is Mrs. Chipewyan who directs the line of march. How did
she happen to break away from the bonds that limit and restrain most Red
brides? This is the question that has troubled ethnologists since the
North was first invaded by the, scientific. We think we have found the
answer. Along the shores of Fond du Lac we descry a long-legged wader,
the phalarope. This is the militant suffragette of all bird-dom. Madame
Phalarope lays her own eggs (this depository act could scarcely be done
by proxy), but in this culminates and terminates all her
responsibilities connubial and maternal,--"this, no more." Father
Phalarope builds the house, the one hen-pecked husband of all feathered
families who does. He alone incubates the eggs, and when the little
Phalaropes are ushered into the vale, it is Papa who tucks their bibs
under their chins and teaches them to peep their morning grace and to
eat nicely. Mamma, meanwhile, contrary to all laws of the game, wears
the brilliant plumage. When evening shadows fall where rolls the
Athabasca, she struts long-leggedly with other female phalaropes, and
together they discuss the upward struggles toward freedom of their
unfeathered prototypes.