PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
"A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite tender sky,
The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,
And the wild geese sailing high,--
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod.
Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God."
--_W.H. Carruth_.
At Peace River Crossing we say good-bye to the Gaudets, whose home is
here. While they have been making a little summer jaunt to Fort Good
Hope under the Arctic Circle the garden-seeds they sowed before they
left have not been idle. Mr. Gaudet shows us a pumpkin which weighs
twenty-five pounds, a squash of the same weight, and citron melons,
which weigh over ten pounds each.
To those who continue up the Peace from here, three great open prairies
present themselves: the Spirit River Prairie, the Grande Prairie, and
the Pouce Coupé. The Spirit River Prairie spreads over a thousand square
miles of splendid soil, sandy loam on a subsoil of clay. Wood and water
are plentiful, horses winter in the open, and crops here have never been
damaged by frost.
Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande
Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River. Grande
Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square
miles of black-loam country. Settlers in this section never feed their
cattle longer than six weeks each winter.
[Illustration: Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace]
The Pouce Coupé would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace
River Prairies. The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves
the soil exceedingly rich. Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in
mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September.
Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give
abundant water. Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in,
tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and
pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the
naturally-cured grasses. They drive the animals in at the end of autumn,
and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work. This
is a paradise for wild animals. Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and
the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that
tickle his palate,--blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries,
willow-berries, and saskatoons.
[Illustration: Fort Dunvegan on the Peace]
On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles
south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake. This stands out in
our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand
miles that we travelled. With the cool mornings and evenings and the
suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost
all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times
and waiting for them again when it is time to camp. The trail leads us
through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open
glades. At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us
bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this
land. The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail
is a painter's palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and
tawny russets. Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are
fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the
very berry we are popping into our mouths. Spring lingers late in this
Land of Promise. Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling
amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56° N. I pluck
a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.
Next evening's tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser
Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer
civilisation,--the "civilisation" of Chicago! A strong desire possesses
us to about-face and back to the woods again.
It is upon all the excitement of the Lesser Slave potato-harvest that we
intrude. Every one is busy piling potatoes in heaps, putting them into
sacks, wheel-barrowing the bags into winter storage,--men, women,
children, cassocked priests, and nuns surrounded by their chattering
flocks. A noise in the upper air causes everyone to stop work. We look
up, to count a flock of high-sailing cranes floating far to the
south,--one hundred and fifty-three of them. The observers make a pretty
picture,--the rigid figures and uplifted faces of the monks, the nuns
with their up-kilted skirts, the happy children. "It is the _Man with
the Hoe_," I murmur. "Yes," assents the Kid, "and _The Angelus at Lesser
Slave_."
We are the guests at Hudson's Bay House of Mr. and Mrs. George Harvey.
Mrs. Harvey is one of the best horsewomen in the North, and it is clear
delight, with her as pilot, to find ourselves once more in the "horse
latitudes"--though, indeed, it is no belt of cairns where Mrs. Harvey
leads. The only real accident of the summer writes itself on this page.
The day after our arrival we were incontinently spilled from a democrat
and dragged half a mile through the muskeg, being saved only by Mrs.
Harvey's splendid pluck and presence of mind. Climbing along the pole,
this cool-nerved lady gathered up the lost lines, sawed the horses'
mouths, and pulled our craft into the desired haven, incidentally in the
act making possible the writing of this "immortal work"!
[Illustration: Fort St. John on the Peace]
Things are more on the move here than elsewhere we have been. Everybody
rides, from grandmothers to two years' babies, and everybody handles a
gun. Duck-shooting is at its height, for the wild-fowl linger to feed
on their way south at Lesser Slave as they do at Chipewyan. Mr. Harvey
and his assistants, Old Country boys, some of whom have seen service in
Britain's foreign wars, are all wing-shots, and there is friendly
rivalry among them regarding the season's scores. The ducks are shot at
dusk. After office hours we watch each little group, equipped with the
latest capers in London and Dublin sporting-irons, hie off to the
vantage-points in the marshes. On the walls of the office each resultant
bag is verified and recorded, the figures being kept from year to year.
To make good at Lesser Slave, if you are a man you must ride well, shoot
straight, honour The Company, and otherwise play the game. This is the
healthy standard Mr. Harvey sets and follows himself.
[Illustration: Where King Was Arrested]
There is much to tempt the camera here. We see the identical shack in
which Sergeant Anderson made his arrest of the murderer King, and,
driving along a mile to the garden of the R.C. Mission, we photograph
giant cabbages, one of which weighs full forty pounds.
[Illustration: Alec Kennedy with His Two Sons]
By special good luck we run across Alec Kennedy,--tall, straight,
fifty-seven or thereabouts, with a face that shows the mixing of Scotch
blood with Sioux. On his coat shine two African Service medals, one
granted him by the British and one by the Egyptian government. His
grandfather was one of those Selkirk Scots who colonised the Red River a
century ago, but, in Kennedy, Indian blood far outweighs the white. He
married a full-blood and has several splendid-looking children. At the
time of Riel's first half-breed rising, Kennedy's services attracted the
notice of Sir Garnet Wolseley. When, in 1844, Wolseley was detailed to
lead an expedition for the relief of Chinese Gordon, then at Khartoum,
he had to think of the details of river-transportation, and the
flat-boats of the Nile recalled the Canadian batteaux and Alec Kennedy.
It is a far call from the Lesser Slave to the Nile, but men who can
navigate boats and manage crews are rare, and the outcome was that this
Scots-Sioux,--strong, silent, faithful, was ordered to collect a party
of Canadian voyageurs and report to the Commander-in-Chief. Reaching
Egypt, Kennedy was at once attached to a young officer, Kitchener, who,
too, was later to win his spurs. Round the camp-fire we induce Alec
Kennedy, between puffs from a black pipe, to tell in short ruminating
sentences of the hansoms slurring over London mud, of the yellow Nile,
of Africa's big game, of the camel that takes the place of the moose, of
the swart Arabs and Egyptians. But of his own deeds of derring-do Alec
has little to say. It was of men such as Kennedy that Kipling warns, "Do
not expect him to speak, has he not done the deed?"
Lesser Slave holds many a person with a history behind him. As a young
fellow of the H.B. Co. says, "It's beastly bad form to ask any man who
comes in here anything about his former history. If he wants to be a
wilful-missing, that's his privilege." However, fate has thrown in our
way one person whom we will interview, bad form or not. From Chipewyan
up the Peace we have traced the story of Louise the Wetigo, taking down
at different posts, from the lips of nineteen different people, more or
less garbled chapters of it. As great good luck will have it, Louise
herself has to-day come in to within six miles of Lesser Slave. We soon
make connection with her and at the same time with Archdeacon and Mrs.
Scott, who are closely identified with the weird story.
[Illustration: Cannibal Louise, Her Little Girl, and Miss Cameron]
Stripped of the horrible details, these are the related facts. Twenty
years ago Louise was a bride of seventeen. With her sister, aged
eighteen, their respective husbands, father, mother, sisters, little
brothers and cousins, _en famille_, they pitched off from Little Red
River to make winter camp in the woods. The camp made, all the younger
men set off to hunt meat for the others. Neither moose nor caribou was
seen, and on and on they went. They shot one small beaver and ate it,
and the white earth afforded no further food. Starving and hopeless,
they stumbled on, finally to fall into a camp of stranger Indians, who
nursed them back slowly through the winter to sane strength.
How about their families, the camp of waiting ones left behind in the
woods? With no one to hunt for them, gaunt Famine held these in her
clutch. Grandmothers' faces grew weary, the sharpened eyes of the little
children peered daily across the snow waiting, watching, for the hunters
who were to bring food. The fires were made in readiness, but no meat
came to those hanging kettles. Old and feeble, young and helpless, alike
became weaker as they watched. One by one they died. The survivors ate
of the dead bodies. At last, of the nineteen souls, Louise and her
sister alone lived. Wild-eyed and starving, holding one old musket
between them, these two sisters stumbled off together to try to make
Little Red River, leaving behind them in the woods the most awful
experience that two human beings could share. At the nightly camps each
feared the other and neither dared to sleep. The third night out,
thinking that Louise slept, the sister levelled the gun at her stooping
companion, but Louise was watching through burnt holes in the canvas.
The next day brought no food, and the nightly watch was repeated. Then
the sister died. _How_ she died God and the watching stars alone know.
Some say that Louise carried with her a piece of her sister's flesh as
food when at last she staggered into Red River. This Louise denies, but
admits freely the cannibalism of the winter's camp.
Cannibalism! As we use this term we regret the paucity of a language
which forces us, in describing the extremity of Louise, to use the same
word which we apply to those inhuman monsters who, of their own
volition, choose the flesh of man for food. It is an awful story. Human
imagination and sympathy utterly fail to give a conception of the agony
undergone by these poor creatures--women and children with affections
like our own--shut for the greater part of a winter within that cruel
camp of death!
Coming back to the world of men and women, Louise was for years a
recluse, shunned of all Indians as a "Wetigo" or "Cannibal." A friend
was raised up to her in the person of Mrs. Scott, the wife of Archdeacon
Scott, who took her in and made her a member of their household. Years
passed, and Louise married a man whose Cree name is
The-Man-Who-Looks-Like-Silver. To this marriage a little child has been
born.
As we arrange the little group for a photograph, the mother tenderly
caresses the child and the father smiles kindly upon both. Louise the
Cannibal! When we look on our joint picture, it might be somewhat
difficult to distinguish the writer from the Indian woman. She is "even
as you and me."