FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
"With souls grown clear
In this sweet atmosphere,
With influences serene,
Our blood and brain washed clean,
We've idled down the breast
Of broadening tides."
--_Chas. G.D. Roberts_.
About ten o'clock on the evening of July loth, in broad daylight, we
push out from Fort Simpson, with the whole population, white, red, and
parti-coloured, on the banks to bid us good-bye. We have seen
present-day Simpson and opened for a little way the volume of the past.
We try to imagine what it is like in winter-time, and a picture pushed
into our hands at parting gives us another viewpoint, showing the hamlet
photographed by the light of the Aurora. As we leave Fort Simpson, the
Mackenzie's channel is a mile wide and it increases in width as we
proceed. For about seventy-five miles the course of the river is due
northwest, running four miles an hour. The banks look low, but when the
pilot takes us close in to shore, we see that it is the size of the
river which has cheated our eyes, and the cliffs that seemed so
low-lying will measure two hundred feet or over. At the Great Bend we
impinge against two peaks, Mt. Camsell and Mt. Stand Alone, and here the
Nahanni joins the Mackenzie. The great river takes a due north course
for another thirty miles, and the Willow River flows in from the east.
[Illustration: Fort Simpson by the Light of the Aurora]
At this point the Mackenzie enters the Rockies, this great spinal
mountain-chain of North America breaking into parallel ranges to allow
the mighty flood to flow between. We feel, as the boatman did on Lake
Athabasca, that a day is as long as you can go without stopping. A
ladder takes us to a seat by the side of Tenny Gouley in the
pilot-house, who merely drops the window to give us an unobstructed
view, and says nothing. Tenny Gouley is one of the rare people who
understand. Talk of civilising these half-breeds of the North! They have
that gift of repose which we know nothing of, which we may hope to
attain after we have lived through automobiles and air-ships and when
many incarnations will have allayed the fever of that unrest which we so
blatantly dub "progress."
It is an ancient something, this unmapped Mackenzie into whose silence
we intrude. Before man was, these waters had cut for themselves a road
to the ocean. These banks were once marked by the mammoth. Previous to
the Glacial Age, prehistoric man here hunted prehistoric prey; eons
passed; and when the Ice Age went out, willows and aspens occupied the
silt, delicate flower-growth flourished, and birds sang in the branches.
Three thousand miles of waterway, forest-fringed and rampart-guarded,
and of its treasures the world knows naught! They await man's
development and acceptance--banks of pitch, wells of oil, outcroppings
of coal, great masses of unmined salt, mineral wealth uncounted and
unguessed. Silent forests have followed us from where we entered the
Athabasca, and these woods persist to where the great river divides into
its delta channels. Of the mineral wealth of the Liard, the Peace, the
Nahanni, and the half hundred other waterways tributary to the
Mackenzie, practically nothing is known. There remain in these streams
hundreds of miles unnavigated, and channels innumerable known only to
the _inconnu_ and the Indian.
It is one hundred and twenty years since Mackenzie descended this stream
to its mouth, "discovering" a river along whose shores centuries before
had smoked the watch-fires and risen the tepees of an anterior race,
wanderers from Asia, who here, guiltless alike of onlooker or
chronicler, lived and loved and worked out their drama of life. Age
follows age, a new generation is evolved in the new habitat, and in time
these once-migrants from Asia are dubbed "the red men" and "the American
Indian."
We watch out the night with Tenny Gouley. In the early morning, sharply
turning a corner, we flush a mixed family of water-fowl--gulls in great
variety, something that looks like a brant, and a loon with its uncanny
laughter. Snipe are on every batture, and sand-pipers, with kingfishers
and all the lesser waders. The boreal summer is short and if broods are
to be raised there is no time to waste. A riot of blossoms fringes the
banks--the uplifted magenta torches of the fireweed, tufts of vivid
golden-rod, the pink petals of the rose, and a clustering carpet of moss
dotted with the dead white of the dwarf cornel. Now and again a splash
breaks the silence, as great slices of the bank, gnawed under by the
swollen river, slip into the current, carrying each its cargo of
upstanding spruce. So the channel of the Mackenzie is ever being
modified, and no permanent chart of its course can be attempted.
Winter changes all this. With October the leaves fall and the waters
begin to crisp into ice, fishes and fowl part company, the birds fly
south to kinder skies, the _inconnu_ hurry northward seeking the sea.
Out of the sky comes the snow, the half-breed's "_Le convert du bon
Dieu_," silent, soft, and all-covering. The coat of fox and rabbit and
ptarmigan whitens, too. It is the coming of stern winter. Wandering
Dog-Rib, Slavi, and Loucheux, lone trapper, the people of each isolated
fur-post, must alike take warning. God pity man or beast who enters the
six months of a Mackenzie winter unfortified by caches of food or
unwitting of shelter.
According to Tenny Gouley there are but two seasons in this country: the
ice season and the mosquito season. He likes winter best. As he holds
the wheel in those clever hands of his, we fill and light his pipe for
him, and half a dozen of his illuminating phrases give us a clear-cut
etching of the winter story. From the lowest form of life to the highest
it is a struggle for existence. Sinuous as a serpent, the mink in his
man-envied coat winds among the willows on rapine bent, the marten preys
upon the field-mouse, the lynx hunts the hare, each form of life pursues
a lower while hiding from a higher, and all are the prey of the great
hunter, man.
In these high latitudes it is the wind that is feared rather than the
intense cold. Before the coming of the missionary, the Indian of the
Mackenzie basin heard in the winter wind no monition. The storm spoke
not to him of Divine wrath or an outraged Deity. The wind was the voice
of God, but it assured the heathen Slavi of protection and power--the
Gitchi Manitou coming out of the all-whiteness to talk with his
children.
Spring up here is but a flutter of invisible garments; even when one is
saying "Spring," full-blown summer is hot afoot. In high noon, in the
open places, pools of water form in the ice. With glee is hailed the
honk of the first wild goose, the coats of ptarmigan and rabbit thin and
darken. There is water on the trail of the kit-fox. The subsidiary
streams that feed the Mackenzie fill their banks and flush the rotting
ice. With a crash, the drift-logs, with pan-ice and floating islands and
all the gathered debris, roll headlong to the frozen ocean.
Do we wonder that Indians worship the great forces of Nature? Gloomy and
wide-reaching between her banks of tamarack and spruce, now opening into
a lake expansion, here narrowing between her stony ramparts, but ever
hurrying on and on and on to that far ocean of ice, the Mackenzie has
always been good to her own, the self-contained and silent people along
her banks. In this vast land men speak not of bread as the staff of
life; their unvoiced prayer is, "Give us our fish in due season." From
the waters of this river, since man was, have the Indians drawn and
dipped and seined their sustenance--inconnu, jack-fish, grayling,
white-fish, and loche. The wide bosom of the Mackenzie, in winter's ice
or summer's spate, forever has been the people's highway--a trail worn
smooth by sled-runner and moccasin in the ice-season, melting its breast
in the spring-time to open a way to the questing bow of the birch-bark.
Along these banks, forgotten tepee-poles, deserted fish-stage, and
lonely grave remain, a crumbling commentary of yesterday, a hint of
recurring to-morrows. Son succeeds father, race replaces race, but the
great Mackenzie flows on, and, as it flows, unwritten history along
these banks is ever in the making. Tragedy and triumph,
self-aggrandisement and self-obliteration, are here as well as in the
noisy world we have left. Lessons these are for us, too, if we bring the
keen eye and listening ear. Among Mackenzie tribes no Yellow-Knife,
Dog-Rib, or Slavi starved while another had meat, no thievish hand
despoiled the cache of another. A man's word was his bond, and a promise
was kept to the death. Not all the real things of life are taught to the
Cree by the Christian. Courage is better than culture, playing the game
of more importance than the surface niceties of civilisation, to be a
man now of more moment than to hope to be an angel hereafter.
About noon we reach Fort Wrigley, and are boarded by priests and
Indians all interested in the new steamer and impressed with its size.
One asks if it is a boat or an island, and another declares it is "just
like a town." Fort Wrigley is an inconspicuous post with a dreary enough
record of hunger and hardship. We find it rich in flowers and will
always remember it as the one place in the North in which we gathered
the fringed gentian (_Gentiana crinata_) with its lance-shaped leaves,
delicately-fringed corollas, and deep violet blue. The fringed gentian
is rapidly becoming a thing of the past in a great many localities, and
it gives us pleased surprise to find it far up in latitude 63°. Purple
asters are here, too, and the heart-shaped seed-pods of shepherd's-purse
or mother's-heart. Wrigley adds to our collection the green-penciled
flowers of the grass of Parnassus, with wild flax, and both pink and
purple columbines already forming seed.
Below Wrigley rugged ranges border both sides of the river at a distance
from the shore-line of ten or twelve miles, and we come to Roche
Trempe-l'eau or "The Rock by the Riverside," an outcrop of Devonian
limestone rising on the right bank a sheer fifteen hundred feet above
the river. We come into view of the "boucans" or beds of lignite coal
which have been continuously burning here since Mackenzie saw them in
1789 and mistook their smoke for tepee fires. At this point of his
journey, had Mackenzie been a timorous man, he would have turned back,
for natives came to meet him and told him with great empressment that it
would require several winters to get to the sea and that old age would
come upon him before the period of his return. He would also encounter
monsters of gigantic stature adorned with wings. They added that there
were two impossible falls in the river, and described the people of the
Arctic coast as possessing the extraordinary power of killing with their
eyes. These Indians told Mackenzie of "small white buffalo" which they
hunted to the westward. Perhaps they meant the mountain sheep, the
_Sass-sei-yeuneh_ or "Foolish Bear" of the Slavis.
[Illustration: Indians at Fort Norman]
It is midnight in the midst of a howling wind-storm when we come abreast
of Fort Norman where Bear River, the outlet of Great Bear Lake, makes
into the Mackenzie. It is not an easy thing to handle the big steamer in
a swift current and in the teeth of a storm like this, and we have been
in more comfortable places at midnight. However, after running with the
current, backing water, and clever finesse, we come safely to anchor
against the shore opposite the Fort, under the lee of Bear Rock. This is
a fourteen-hundred foot peak which starts up from the angle formed by
the junction of the Bear River with the Mackenzie.
The water of Bear River is clear and its current swift through the whole
of its hundred-mile course. Great Bear Lake, known chiefly to the
outside world from the fact that Sir John Franklin established
winter-quarters here at Fort Confidence, is an immense sheet of water,
probably 11,500 square miles in extent, and bigger even than Great Slave
Lake. Five arms meeting in a common centre give the lake an unusual
shape, the longest distance from shore to shore being one hundred and
fifty miles. The south and west banks are well wooded, and we are
surprised to learn that the lake remains open at the outlet until very
late in the autumn and sometimes throughout the whole winter.
March sees the greatest depth of snow at Great Bear Lake, probably three
feet. In mid-April the thaws begin, and by May-day arrive the earlier
water-fowl. By the end of May the herbaceous plants begin to leaf, frogs
are heard, and there is bright light at midnight. The end of July brings
blueberries, and at this time stars are visible at midnight. September
is ushered in by flurries of snow, and by the tenth of October the last
of the wild-fowl depart; but it is often Christmas Day before the centre
of the lake freezes over.
When we awake it is Sunday, July 12th, Orangeman's Day, with no one
going round with a chip on his shoulder, and nobody to whistle "Boyne
Water." The wind falling, the steamer is turned and we bear away across
the river to Fort Norman, leaving the shelter of Bear Rock, the "Nest of
the Wind" of the Indian. Tradition and superstition hang round this
great butte, with its heart of coloured gypsum several hundred feet in
thickness, and on its face we plainly see the three beaver-skins that
the Great Spirit, "in the beginning," spread out there to dry. We find
Fort Norman a beautiful place in the sunshine of this Sunday morning,
the souls of its scanty populace well looked after by Roman and
Protestant missionary. Bishop Breynat is expected on the mission boat
coming up the river, and all is excitement among the sheep belonging to
his particular flock. The parson of the other fold is in his library,
and, visiting him, we duly admire his neat garden of potatoes and peas,
beets and turnips. The reverend gentleman owns up to finding Norman
lonely in winter and recalls with appreciation his last charge in the
outports of Newfoundland, where the tedium was relieved by tennis and
pink-teas.
[Illustration: Roman Catholic Church at Fort Norman]
[Illustration: The Ramparts of the Mackenzie]
Seldom have we seen a more beautiful vista than the up-climbing path
leading from the shore to the Roman chapel at the head of the hill. It
is bordered by flaming fireweed and lined with the eager faces of
children dressed in their Sunday best, ready for morning mass and
awaiting the blessing of their Bishop. Wherever the willow-herb
flourishes there a Guadet is serving The Company. One was in charge at
lonely Wrigley, and we find his brother here.
Leaving Norman before church-time, we travel on, the glory of the
peerless day reflected in the face of every one on board. We float
between two spurs of the Rockies, and about eight in the evening pass
Roche Carcajou, looking in vain for the wolverine the name calls for.
The Indians would seem to be strangely inconsistent in this connection.
If there is one animal they fear it is the carcajou, and with him they
have an old, old pact: the Indian on his side promises never to shoot a
wolverine, and that cunning thief agrees to leave unmolested the cache
of the Red man. While this bargain still holds, since the day when
ammunition first came into the country no Indian has passed this rocky
replica of the carcajou without firing a shot at the face of the cliff.
It is an hour before midnight when we reach one of the two greatest
spectaculars of our whole six months' journeying,--the Ramparts. The
great river which has been running at a width of several miles, here
narrows to five hundred yards, and for a distance of five or six miles
forces its flow between perpendicular walls of limestone three hundred
feet high. Between the cliffs, scarped by Nature into turrets, towers,
and castellated summits, the great Mackenzie, "turned on edge," flows,
maintaining a steady rate of four or five miles an hour. The depth of
the water equals the visible height of the palisaded walls. In spring,
the ice jams the stupendous current. The dammed-up water once lifted a
skiff bodily, leaving it, when the flood subsided, a derelict on the
cliffs above.
As we pass in silence we can but look and feel. One day a Canadian
artist will travel north and paint the Ramparts, some poet, gifted with
the inevitable word, here write the Canadian Epic. Awed and uplifted,
our one wish is to be alone; the vision that is ours for one hour of
this Arctic night repays the whole summer's travel. The setting of the
picture is that ineffable light, clear yet mellow, which without dawn
and without twilight rises from flowing river to starless heavens, and
envelopes the earth as with a garment,--the light that never was on sea
or land. We could not have chosen a more impressive hour in which to
pass the portal into the Arctic World.
[Illustration: Rampart House on the Porcupine near the Mackenzie Mouth]
A hundred yards from the entrance to the Ramparts, a group of Indians
has found foothold at the base of the escarpment. They have been waiting
for three days to signal our arrival, and as they catch sight of the big
steamer they cry out their greeting and fire a volley from their
old-fashioned rifles. The sound reverberates from rock to rock,
ricochets, and is carried on to waiting Indians on the other side lower
down. They repeat the salute, and others take it up. Signals are flashed
from each little camp, the lights being repeated in the dancing river;
and so it is by salvos of musketry and answering watch-fires that, at
midnight in broad daylight, we reach Fort Good Hope under the Arctic
Circle.
The Arctic Circle! When we used to sit on uneasy school-benches and say
our "joggafy" lesson, what did that term spell for us? Icebergs, polar
bears, and the snows of eternal winter. Nine-tenths of the people in
America to-day share the same idea, and so far as they think of the
Arctic Circle at all, think of it as a forbidding place, a frozen
silence where human beings seldom penetrate. What did we find there?
Approaching the shore, we stand in the bow with the pilot and his
daughter, whose name suggests the Stone Age,--Mrs. Pierre la Hache.
Tenny wears his "other clothes" and a resplendent l'Assumption belt, for
this is his home. "It looks like a swan on the water," he says, when the
first white houses come into view. "You like it, do you not?" "Like it?
Good Hope is God's Country!" There is no place like home, even when it
is the Arctic Circle!
The populace look down upon us from the high bank, every wiggle of the
dogs' tails indicating the general impatience at the time it takes the
big boat to make a landing. Down the steps comes a stately figure, Mr.
C.P. Gaudet, the head and brains of Good Hope. Of the two thousand
servants of the Hudson's Bay Company, this is the man who has the
greatest number of years of active service to his credit. Mr. Gaudet has
continuously served The Company for fifty-seven years, and his ambition
is to put in three years more. The Company gives its employés a pension
after thirty years' service, and this veteran of Good Hope surely
deserves two pensions. The steps are almost precipitous, but the old
gentleman insists upon coming down to present in person his report to
his superior officer. Then the two climb up the bank together, the
younger man giving a strong arm to the older. We follow, and half-way up
the two figures stop, ostensibly for Mr. Gaudet to point out to Mr.
Brabant the view up river. We suspect the halt is to allow the Fort Hope
Factor to get breath, for the sky-line stairway is hard on asthma.
Reaching the top, we find the air heavy with the perfume of wild roses,
and we can scarcely make our way through the sea of welcoming Indians.
Old people grasp our hands as if we were life-time friends just back
from a far journey. Young men greet us as long-lost chums, the women
call to the children, and there seems to be a reception committee to
rout out the old beldames, little children, and the bed-ridden: it is
hand-shaking gone mad. We shake hands with every soul on the voting-list
of Good Hope, to say nothing of minors, suffragettes, and the
unfranchised proletariat, before at last we are rescued by smiling Miss
Gaudet and dragged in to one of the sweetest homes in all the wide
world.
We meet Mrs. Gaudet, a dear old lady with a black cap, the pinkest of
pink cheeks, and the kind of smile that brings a choky feeling into your
throat and makes you think of your mother. She gives us home-made wine
and _galettes_, and as we smell the mignonette flowering in the
window-ledge and look around the walls of the "homey" room we wonder if
this really can be the "Arctic Circle, 23-1/2° from the North Pole,
which marks the distance that the sun's rays," etc., etc., as the little
geographies so blithely used to state. On the walls are the Sunday
School tickets that the young Gaudets, now grey-haired men and women,
earned by reciting the Catechism when they were little boys and
girls--the same old tickets that flourish in the latitudes below. Here a
pink Prodigal feeds sky-blue swine in a saffron landscape, and off there
a little old lady in a basque leads a boy in gaiters and a bell-crowned
hat down a shiny road. They seem to be going on a picnic, and the legend
runs,--"Hagar and Ishmael her son into the desert led, with water in a
bottle and a little loaf of bread."
Thirty years ago when Miss Gaudet was a little girl she got her first
Scripture lesson from an R.C. Sister, the story of our old Mother in the
first garden. One Sunday was review day, and this question arose: "And
how did God punish Adam and Eve for their disobedience?" Quick came the
girlie's reply, "They had to leave The Company's service!"
Mrs. Gaudet thinks people rush very much nowadays. "We get a mail every
year without fail, and sometimes there is a second mail." This is to her
the height of modernism. That second mail is an interesting one. A
letter written in Montreal in winter and addressed to Fort Good Hope
crosses Canada by the C.P.R. to Vancouver, by coastwise steamer it
travels north and reaches the Yukon. Then some plucky constable of the
Mounted Police makes a winter patrol and takes the precious mail-bags by
dog-sled across an unmarked map to Fort Macpherson on Peel River. Thence
the Montreal-written letter is carried by Indian runner south to Good
Hope on the Arctic Circle.
We love to talk with Mrs. Gaudet, she is so dear. Mother-love and
devotion to The Company,--these are the two key-notes of her character.
Looking back through the years, she tells of a visit she made "outside"
to Montreal when she was a young mother--it was just fifty years
ago,--measles attacked her three babies and within a week they all died,
"_Le bon Dieu prit les tous, mes trois jolis enfants_!" Some years after
this at Macpherson an Eskimo woman stole another of her babies,
snatching it from a swing in the fort yard, and not yielding it up until
it was torn from her by force.
We wander out into the midnight daylight where with dogs and Indians the
whole settlement is still a stirred-up ant-hill. Splendid vegetable
gardens are in evidence here,--potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages.
Should we reach the North Pole itself we would expect there a Hudson's
Bay fort, its Old World courtesy and its potato-patch. As we pass the
store of the "free-trader," he says, "Yes, Mrs. Gaudet is a sweet woman,
kindly, and dear, but she doesn't approve of me. She makes a point of
not seeing me as she passes here twice a day on her way to church."
"Why?" we ask, much surprised.
"Oh," with a laugh, "you see, I sort of trade in opposition to the H.B.
Company, and a fellow who would do this comes mighty near having horns
and a tail!"
We step into the "Little Church of the Open Door," and sit down and
think. The quaint altar and pictures, the hand-carved chairs, and the
mural decorations all point to the patient work of priests. We see
across the lane the home of the R.C. clergy, looking like a
transplanted Swiss chalet and carrying on each door-lintel the name of a
saint,--St. Matthew, St. Bartholomew, St. John. From the shrubbery
outside wafts in the sweet old-world perfume of wild-roses. Our thoughts
will often drift back to this restful little sanctuary, "Our Lady of
Good Hope," the mission founded here in the year 1859 by M. Henri
Grollier, R.C. missionary priest of Montpelier.