Strange Visitors.--At-tistighat the Philosopher.--Indian
Converts.--A Domestic Scene.--The Winter Packet.--Adam
and his Dogs.
December passed away, the new year came, the cold became more intense.
The snow deepened and the broad rivers lay hushed under their sparkling
covering; wide roadways for our dog sleighs. At times there came a
day of beautiful clearness, the sun shone brightly, the sky was of
the deepest blue, and the earth sparkled in its spotless covering. At
night the moon hung over the snow-wrapt river and silent pines with
the brilliancy of a fairy scene; but many a day and night of storm and
bitter tempest passed, and not unfrequently the thermometer placed
against the hut wall marked full 70 degrees of frost.
Towards the end of the year four of our horses died, from the depth
and hardness of the snow. The others would have soon followed if left
to find their own sustenance, but a timely removal to the Fort à la
Corne, twenty miles lower down the river, saved them.
When the year was drawing to its close two Indians pitched their
lodge on the opposite side of the North River, and finding our stage
pretty well stocked with food they began to starve immediately. In
other words, it was easier to come to us for buffalo meat than to hunt
deer for themselves: at all hours of the day they were with us, and
frequently the whole family, two men, two squaws, and three children,
would form a doleful procession to our hut for food. An Indian never
knocks at a door; he lifts the latch, enters quietly, shakes hands with
every one, and seats himself, without a word, upon the floor. You may
be at breakfast, at dinner, or in bed, it doesn’t matter. If food be
not offered to him, he will wait until the meal is finished, and then
say that he has not eaten for so many hours, as the case may be. Our
stock of food was not over sufficient, but it was impossible to refuse
it to them even though they would not hunt for themselves; and when
the three children were paraded--all pretty little things from four to
seven years of age--the argument of course became irresistible.
It was useless to tell them that the winter was long, that no more
buffalo could be obtained; they seemed to regard starvation as an
ordinary event to be calculated upon, that as long as any food was
to be obtained it was to be eaten at all times, and that when it was
gone--well then the best thing was to do without it.
January drew to a close in very violent storms accompanied by great
cold. Early one morning “At-tistighat,” or as we called him Bourgout
No. 1, arrived with news that his brother had gone away two days
before, that he had no blanket, no food; and that, as it had not
been his intention to stay out, he concluded that he had perished.
“At-tistighat” was a great scoundrel, but nevertheless, as the night
had been one of terrible storm, we felt anxious for the safety of his
brother, who was really a good Indian. “Go,” we said to him, “look for
your brother; here is pemmican to feed you during your search.” He took
the food, but coolly asserted that in all probability his brother had
shot himself, and that consequently there was no use whatever in going
to look for him; “or,” he said, “he is dead of cold, in which case it
is useless to find him.”
While he spoke a footstep outside announced an arrival, the door
opened, and the lost Bourgout No. 2 entered, bearing on his back a
heavy load of venison.
At-tistighat’s line of argument was quite in keeping with the Indian
character, and was laughable in its selfish logic. If the man was
alive, he would find his own way home; if dead, there was nothing
more to be done in the matter: but in any case pemmican was not to be
despised.
But despite their habits of begging, and their frequently unseasonable
visits, our Cree neighbours afforded us not a little food for amusement
in the long winter evenings. Indian character is worth the study,
if we will only take the trouble to divest ourselves of the notion
that all men should be like ourselves. There is so much of simplicity
and cunning, so much of close reasoning and child-like suspicion;
so much natural quickness, sense of humour, credulousness, power of
observation, faith and fun and selfishness, mixed up together in the
Red man’s mental composition; that the person who will find nothing in
Indian character worth studying will be likely to start from a base of
nullity in his own brain system.
In nearly all the dealings of the white man with the red, except
perhaps in those of the fur trade, as conducted by the great fur
companies, the mistake of judging and treating Indians by European
standards has been made. From the earliest ages of American discovery,
down to the present moment, this error has been manifest; and it is
this error which has rendered the whole missionary labour, the vast
machinery set on foot by the charity and benevolence of the various
religious bodies during so many centuries, a practical failure to-day.
When that Christian King Francis the First commissioned Cartier to
convert the Indians, they were described in the royal edict as “men
without knowledge of God, or use of reason;” and as the speediest mode
of giving them one, and bringing them to the other, the Quebec chief
savage was at once kidnapped, carried to France, baptized, and within
six months was a dead man. We may wonder if his wild subjects had
imbibed sufficient “reason” during the absence of the ship to realize
during the following season the truth of what they were doubtless told,
that it was better to be a dead Christian than a live savage; but no
doubt, under the circumstances, they might be excused if they “didn’t
quite see it.” Those who would imagine that the case of Menberton could
not now occur in missionary enterprise are deceived.
Menberton, who is said to have been a devout Christian in the early
days of Acadie, was duly instructed in the Lord’s Prayer; at a certain
portion of the prayer he was wont to append a request that “fish and
moose meat” might also be added to his daily bread. And previous to
his death, which occurred many years after his conversion, he is said
to have stoutly demanded that the savage rites of sepulture should be
bestowed upon his body, in order that he might be well prepared to make
vigorous war upon his enemies in the next world. This is of the past;
yet it is not many years since a high dignitary of the Church was not a
little horrified by a request made by some recently converted Dog-Rib
Chiefs that the rite of Baptism should be bestowed upon three flaming
red flannel shirts, of which they had for the first time in their lives
become the joint possessors.
But all this is too long to enter upon here; enough that to me at
least the Indian character is worth the trouble of close examination.
If those, whose dealings religious and political with the red man are
numerous, would only take a leaf from Goldsmith’s experience when he
first essayed to become a teacher of English in France, (“for I found,”
he writes, “that it was necessary I should previously learn French
before I could teach them English,”) very much of the ill success which
had attended labours projected by benevolence, and prosecuted with zeal
and devotion, might perhaps be avoided.
Long before ever a white man touched the American shore a misty idea
floated through the red man’s brain that from far-off lands a stranger
would come as the messenger of peace and plenty, where both were so
frequently unknown. In Florida, in Norembega, in Canada, the right hand
of fellowship was the _first_ proffered to the new comer; and when
Cartier entered the palisaded village where now the stately capital
of Canada spreads out along the base of the steep ridge, which he
named Royal after that master whose “honour” had long been lost ere on
Pavia’s field he yielded up all else, the dusky denizens of Hochelaga
brought forth their sick and stricken comrades “as though a God had
come among them.”
Three centuries and a half have passed since then; war, pestilence and
famine have followed the white man’s track. Whole tribes have vanished
even in name from the continent, yet still that strange tradition of
a white stranger, kind and beneficent, has outlived the unnumbered
cruelties of ages; and to-day the starving camp and the shivering
bivouac hears again the hopeful yet hopeless story of “a good time
coming.”
Besides our Indians we were favoured with but few visitors, silence
reigned around our residence; a magpie or a whisky-jack sometimes
hopped or chattered about our meat stage; in the morning the
sharp-tailed grouse croaked in birch or spruce tree, and at dusk, when
every other sound was hushed, the small grey owl hooted his lonely
cry. Pleasant was it at night when returning after a long day on
snow shoes, or a dog trip to the nearest fort, to reach the crest
of the steep ridge that surrounded our valley, and see below the
firelight gleaming through the little window of our hut, and the red
sparks flying upward from the chimney like fire-flies amidst the dark
pine-trees; nor was it less pleasant when as the night wore on the home
letter was penned, or the book read, while the pine-log fire burnt
brightly and the dogs slept stretched before it, and the light glared
on rifle-barrel or axe-head and showed the skin-hung rafters of our
lonely home.
As January drew towards a close, it became necessary to make
preparations for a long journey. Hitherto I had limited my wanderings
to the prairie region of the Saskatchewan, but these wanderings had
only been a preliminary to further travel into the great northern wilds.
To pierce the forest region lying north of the Saskatchewan valley, to
see the great lakes of the Athabasca and that vast extent of country
which pours its waters into the Frozen Ocean, had long been my desire;
and when four months earlier I had left the banks of the Red River and
turned away from the last limit of civilization, it was with the hope
that ere the winter snow had passed from plain and forest my wanderings
would have led me at least 2000 miles into that vast wilderness of the
north.
But many preparations had to be made against cold and distance. Dogs
had to be fattened, leather clothing got ready, harness and sleds
looked to, baggage reduced to the very smallest limit, and some one
found willing to engage to drive the second dog sled, and to face the
vicissitudes of the long northern road. The distance itself was enough
to make a man hesitate ere for hire he embarked on such a journey.
The first great stage was 750 miles, the second was as many more, and
when 1500 miles had been traversed there still must remain half as
much again before, on the river systems of the North Pacific, we could
emerge into semi-civilized ways of travel.
Many were the routes which my brain sketched out during the months of
autumn, but finally my choice rested between two rivers, the Mackenzie
rolling its waters into the Frozen Ocean, the Peace River piercing the
great defiles of the Rocky Mountains through the cañons and stupendous
gorges of Northern British Columbia. A chance meeting decided my course.
One day at the end of October I had camped during a snow-storm for
dinner in the Touchwood Hills. Suddenly through the drift a horseman
came in sight. He proved to be an officer of the Hudson’s Bay Company
from the distant post of Dunvegan on the Peace River: of all men he
was the one I most wished to see. Ninety days earlier he had left his
station; it was far away, but still with dogs over the ice of frozen
rivers and lakes, through the snow of long leagues of forest and muskey
and prairie, I might hope to reach that post on Upper Peace River in
sixty days; twenty days more might carry me through the defiles of the
Rocky Mountains to waters which flow south into the Pacific. “Good-bye,
_bon voyage_,” and we went our different ways; he towards Red River, I
for Athabasca and the Peace River.
And now, as I have said, the end of January had come, and it was
time to start; all my preparations were completed, Cerf-vola and his
companions were fat, strong, and hearty. Dog shoes, copper kettles,
a buffalo robe, a thermometer, some three or four dozen rounds of
ammunition, a little tobacco and pain-killer, a dial compass, a
pedometer, snow shoes, about fifteen pounds of baggage, tea, sugar,
a little flour, and lastly, the inevitable pemmican; all were put
together, and I only waited the arrival of the winter packet from the
south to set out.
Let me see if I can convey to the reader’s mind a notion of this winter
packet.
Towards the middle of the month of December there is unusual bustle
in the office of the Hudson’s Bay Company at Fort Garry on the Red
River; the winter packet is being made ready. Two oblong boxes are
filled with letters and papers addressed to nine different districts
of the northern continent. The limited term district is a singularly
unappropriate one: a single instance will suffice. From the post of the
Forks of the Athabasca and Clear Water Rivers to the Rocky Mountain
Portage is fully 900 miles as a man can travel, yet all that distance
lies within the limits of the single Athabasca district; and there are
others larger still. From the Fort Resolution on the Slave River to the
ramparts on the Upper Yukon, 1100 miles lay their lengths within the
limits of the Mackenzie River district.
Just as the days are at their shortest, a dog sled bearing the winter
packet starts from Fort Garry; a man walks behind it, another man some
distance in advance of the dogs. It holds its way down the Red River
to Lake Winnipeg; in about nine days’ travel it crosses that lake to
the north shore at Norway House; from thence, lessened of its packet of
letters for the Bay of Hudson and the distant Churchill, it journeys in
twenty days’ travel up the Great Saskatchewan River to Carlton House.
Here it undergoes a complete readjustment; the Saskatchewan and Lesser
Slave Lake letters are detached from it, and about the 1st of February
it starts on its long journey to the north.
During the succeeding months it holds steadily along its northern way,
sending off at long, long intervals branch dog packets to right and
left; finally, just as the sunshine of mid-May is beginning to carry a
faint whisper of the coming spring to the valleys of the Upper Yukon,
the dog train, last of many, drags the packet, now but a tiny bundle,
into the enclosure of La Pierre’s House. It has travelled nearly 3000
miles; a score of different dog teams have hauled it, and it has camped
for more than a hundred nights in the great northern forest.
The end of January had come, but contrary to the experience of several
years had brought no packet from Fort Garry, and many were the surmises
afloat as to the cause of this delay. The old Swampy Indian Adam who,
for more than a score of years had driven the dog packet, had tumbled
into a water-hole in the ice, and his dogs had literally exemplified
one portion of the popular saying of following their leader through
fire and water; and the packet, Adam, and the dogs, lay at the bottom
of the Saskatchewan River. Such was one anticipated cause of this
non-appearance.
To many persons the delay was very vexatious, but to me it was
something more. Time was a precious article: it is true a northern
winter is a long one, but so also was the route I was about to follow,
and I hoped to reach the upper regions of the Rocky Mountains while
winter yet held with icy grasp the waters of the Peace River Cañon.
The beginning of February came, and I could wait no longer for the
missing packet. On the 3rd, at mid-day, I set out on my journey. The
day was bright and beautiful, the dogs climbed defiantly the steep
high point, and we paused a moment on the summit; beneath lay hut and
pine wood and precipitous bank, all sparkling with snow and sunshine;
and beyond, standing motionless and silent, rose the Great Sub-Arctic
Forest.