FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
"'Tis a summer such as broods
O'er enchanted solitudes,
Where the hands of Fancy lead us through voluptuary moods,
And with lavish love outpours
All the wealth of out-of-doors."
--_James Whitcomb Riley_.
[Illustration: Going to School in Winter]
On September 15th we leave Vermilion, leave, too, on the beach the
little _Mee-wah-sin,_ and in the tiny tug _Messenger_ of the H.B.
Company pass on up the Peace. By night we tent on the banks, by day we
puff along between painted banks of gold and crimson, while all around
us the air is a pungent tonic, and overhead the southward-passing
cranes are flying.
Little Se-li-nah, the sturdiest of travelling companions through months
of wandering over portage and up river, has won our unbounded respect
and created for herself a warm place in every heart. Se-li-nah, though,
makes it impossible for us to pose as brave endurers of hardships. Each
night and morning she carries her little pack on and off shore, takes
her share of pot-luck at _meat-su,_ and is never cross. Bless the
kiddie! If ablutions seem to her a work of supererogation and our daily
play of toothbrush furnishes all the fascination of the unknown, still
hers is the right stuff for pioneer lands and she has lessons to teach
us in pluck and endurance.
The first night out from Vermilion we made camp after dark and, on
waking, found that in our blankets we had lain directly across four new
bear-tracks. Moose-tracks are plentiful at every stopping-place, so we
see to it that both guns and camera are primed. At eight next morning we
pass Not-in-a-gu Seepee. Some Indians hail us, asking for tea, and from
these we learn that ten families who made this their winter camp last
season bagged eighty moose among them.
At half-past two our chance came. To get away from the noise of the
engine, the Kid and I had moved our work directly after breakfast to a
flour-laden scow that we had in tow, and I was dictating this story to
the machine when the sharp eyes of Showan in the distance spied a moose.
He was on the shore cropping willows. It had been generously agreed that
if opportunity offered at a moose the shot was to be mine, so in excited
whispers the news is telegraphed to our end of the scow and my rifle is
handed up. The fireman slows up on the engine, but still its throbbing
sounds distressingly loud as we creep up on the feeding moose and scan
the lay of the land, calculating his chances of escape. The banks are
high,--perhaps one hundred and fifty feet--and sheer, but there are two
gullies which afford runway to the bench above. What an ungainly
creature he looks as we draw in nearer, all legs and clumsy head,--a
regular grasshopper on stilts! He reminds me of nothing so much as those
animals we make for the baby by sticking four matches into a sweet
biscuit. And now at last he sees us. I fire, and the shot just grazes
his spine. Will he take to a gully? No, he plunges into the river
instead and we follow him up in the little tug. One more shot is
effective, and I have killed my premier moose. "Cruel!" you say. Well,
just you live from mid-May to mid-September without fresh meat, as, with
the exception of Vermilion's flesh-pots, we have done, and then find out
if you would fly in the face of Providence when the Red Gods send you a
young moose! To illuminate the problem I transcribe the menu of one
sample week of the summer.
[Illustration: My Premier Moose]
This is the literal "dope sheet" of the camp cook:
_Monday_:--Dried caribou and rice.
_Tuesday_:--Salt fish and prunes.
_Wednesday_:--Mess-pork and dried peaches.
_Thursday_:--Salt horse and macaroni.
_Friday_:--Sow-belly and bannock.
_Saturday_:--Blue-fish and beans.
_Sunday_:--Repeat.
Dragged ashore, the moose proved to be a male of two prongs, about
eighteen months old, and weighed perhaps four or five hundred pounds. A
full-grown moose of this country will sometimes dress half a ton. We are
to learn that there are many viewpoints from which to approach a moose.
The Kid wants its photograph, Chiboo and Mrs. Gaudet each eloquently
argue for the skin, the rest of us are gross enough to want to eat it,
and Se-li-nah, looking demurely off into the pines, murmurs gently in
Cree, "_Marrow_ is nice." Poor young stripling of the Royal House of
Moose, you could not have fallen into more appreciative hands!
The first thing Baptiste does is to plunge his penknife into the back to
see how deep the fat is. We had noticed this testing process before. A
bunch of feathers is always plucked off the new-killed bird that one can
immediately gauge the gastronomic niche at which to set one's waiting
stomach. No more voyaging to-night. The moose is cleaned and skinned.
Mrs. Gaudet draws the skin. I claim the head. A little Indian boy, who
with his mother had been added to our ship's crew at Carcajou Point,
appropriates the kidneys, which he proceeds to roast in the ashes.
Ten-year-old Bill evidently likes his devilled kidneys rare, for within
three minutes we see him prancing round the camp, nibbling his dripping
dainty from the point of an impaling stick.
[Illustration: Beaver Camp, on Paddle River]
Having sat round the barbecue half the night, we pull out late the next
morning. And now, apprised by moccasin telegraph, we are all on the _qui
vive_ to catch sight of a floating bride. A fur-trader attached to "The
French Company" at Vermilion has been out on six months' leave and is
bringing in a bride from Paris. We are to expect them to cross our
course on a raft, floating in with the current of the Peace as we make
our way upstream. We see the raft. All is excitement. We direct the
steersman to draw close in, and the men prime their rifles for a salute.
She is not visible,--floating brides on the Peace shrink evidently from
being the cynosure of passing eyes. Our men fire their salute, the
steersman on the raft looks puzzled when we, smiling our sympathy, peer
over the edge of his craft, and see, instead of the Parisian bride,--a
load of Poland pigs for Vermilion! It is the wrong raft. The real bride
passes us in the gloaming ten hours later, when it is too dark to get a
satisfactory photograph!
On the evening of September 22nd we arrive at Peace River Crossing, or
Peace River Landing, just a week out from Vermilion. Our course from
there has been almost due south. We turn the little _Messenger_ back
here and regretfully bid good-bye to our staunch and friendly boatmen.
No people in the world could be pleasanter to travel with than these
splendid men of the North. Indefatigable and ready for any emergency,
they know their business and are always master of the situation;
moreover, nature has dowered them with an intuitive delicacy as rare as
it is pleasing. Through all these weeks, intensely interested as they
are in everything that is new, never for a moment have they intruded
upon us or our doings. At night there is not a man of them who will not
walk a quarter of a mile through the woods rather than pass between our
occupied tent and the camp fire. But let us offer to show them pictures
or to explain the workings of the camera or the typewriter and it is a
different story, for then every man Jack drops his oar or tump-line and
rushes to our side like an excited schoolboy.
Peace River Crossing is in latitude 56° N. and longitude 117° 20' W.
From that far-off day in spring when we first touched the Clearwater we
have been following in the historic footprints of Sir Alexander
Mackenzie. We now take a day off, with the object of locating
Mackenzie's last camp on the Peace, which he reached in 1792 and from
which, in the spring of 1793, he started west across the map seeking an
unknown route to the Pacific Ocean. We find the remains of that camp. It
is in the corner of a potato-field a little way beyond Peace River
Crossing and on the opposite side of the river. Only the foundations of
the walls are left and the crumbling bricks of two old chimneys.
Mackenzie was the first man to cross the continent from sea to sea north
of the latitude of Mexico, and it was from this point where we stand
that he launched his ambitious canoe. There is no more historic spot on
the continent than that on which we stand this September day, and as yet
it is all unmarked of commemorative stone or recording tablet. The lost
camp had never been photographed until we brought our inquisitive camera
to bear upon it.
I stoop and pluck from where it nods behind the old chimney a wild
larkspur, and as I half-mechanically count its forty-two seed-pods, I
try hard to throw back my thoughts to the year 1792,--one hundred and
sixteen years. It is a far call! Canada is tardy in her recognition of
her early builders of Empire. Our cousins to the south would appear to
be more appreciative. In song and story and by a memorial World's Fair
the people of the United States have honoured the discoveries of Lewis
and Clark, but Mackenzie crossed the continent a full dozen years in
advance of these explorers.
[Illustration: The Site of old Fort McLeod]
Our mind feels back across the centuries to little-known Montreal where,
amid the bales of peltries and the trading-trinkets of the Fur Company,
a hidden voice is speaking and a young man listens. That young man is
Alexander Mackenzie, a self-taught Scot, a Canadian bourgeois. In the
noisy midday clatter of the fort he hears the voice, in the waking hours
of dawn and "when evening shuts the deed off, calls the glory from the
grey." He cannot get away from that haunting challenge, he would not if
he could. There are interminable changes rung on the everlasting
whisper, but its burden is ever the same.
"Something lost behind the Ranges,
Lost and waiting for you: Go!"
No more might it satisfy him to out-do his competitors and carry back to
Grand Portage canoes overflowing with furs. We have seen how the doughty
and determined Scot followed to the Arctic the river which now bears his
name. It gives us the measure of the man to know that the thought
uppermost in the mind of Mackenzie returning from the Arctic was not
pride in the deed accomplished but a realization of his limitations in
astronomical knowledge. He would go back to Britain and study stars for
a time instead of skins, planets for peltries. And back he went in 1791.
His first achievement had but whetted his ambition. It was of a Western
Sea that he had greatly dreamed among the bearskins and beavers of
Montreal, and to that ocean which split its waves "somewhere" far beyond
the snow crests of the Rockies he would go. With this strong
determination he returned from Scotland, made toilsome way to Fort
Chipewyan and pressed up the Peace to make the camp among whose ruins we
stand. The breaking of the spring ice of 1793 sent him forth on the
quest of that Northwest Passage by Land.
"O Young Mariner,
Down to the harbor call your companions,
Launch your vessel, and crowd your canvas,
And, ere it vanishes over the margin,
After it. Follow it. Follow the Gleam!"
We have not time to recount the chapters of the story, to name the
streams ascended, the boiling gorges passed, the discontent allayed, the
encouragement given, the lonely night-watches when the leader himself
looked for comfort to his new-found stars. The Fraser was discovered,
traced for a while; and then, striking westward, Mackenzie heard the
beat of the surf upon the rocks, and came out from among the pines to
the silver Pacific sparkling in the sun. It was a sweet day in summer's
prime, and as the gulls cried overhead and the sun mixed scent of
seaweed with balsam breath from in-shore, we can imagine but not divine
the feelings of that brave man who had thrown himself face-downward on
the sand and from whose presence the awed companions stole silently
away. We remember the words of another builder of Empire,--
"Anybody might have found it,
But God's whisper came to me."