Lake Athabasca.--Northern Lights.--Chipewyan.--The real Workers
of the World.
Athabasca, or more correctly “Arabascow,” “The Meeting-place of many
Waters,” is a large lake. At this fort of Chipewyan we stand near its
western end. Two hundred miles away to the east, its lonely waters
still lave against the granite rocks.
Whatever may be the work to which he turns hand or brain, an Indian
seldom errs. If he names a lake or fashions a piece of bark to sail its
waters, both will fit the work for which they were intended.
“The meeting-place of many waters” tells the story of Athabasca. In its
bosom many rivers unite their currents; and from its north-western rim
pours the Slave River, the true Mackenzie. Its first English discoverer
called it the “Lake of the Hills;” a more appropriate title would have
been “The Lake of the Winds,” for fierce and wild the storms sweep over
its waves.
Over the Lake Athabasca the Northern Lights hold their highest revels.
They flash, and dance, and stream, and intermingle, and wave together
their many colours like the shapes and hues of a kaleidoscope.
Sometimes the long columns of light seem to rest upon the silent,
frozen shores, stretching out their rose-tipped tops to touch the
zenith; again the lines of light traverse the sky from east to west as
a hand might sweep the chords of some vast harp, and from its touch
would flow light instead of music. So quickly run the colours along
these shafts, that the ear listens instinctively for sound in the deep
stillness of the frozen solitude; but sound I have never heard. Many a
time I have listened breathless to catch the faintest whisper of these
wondrous lightnings; they were mute as the waste that lay around me.
Figures convey but a poor idea of cold, yet they are the only means
we have, and by a comparison of figures some persons, at least, will
understand the cold of an Athabascan winter. The citadel of Quebec has
the reputation of being a cold winter residence; its mean temperature
for the month of January is 11° 7´ Fahr. The mean temperature of the
month of January, 1844, at Fort Chipewyan, was 22° 74´, or nearly 30°
colder, and during the preceding month of December the wind blew with
a total pressure of one thousand one hundred and sixty pounds to the
square foot.
It is perhaps needless to say more about the rigour of an Athabascan
winter.
As it is the “meeting-place of many waters” so also is it the
meeting-place of many systems. Silurian and Devonian approach it from
the west. Laurentian still holds five-sixths of its waters in the same
grasp as when what is now Athabasca lay a deep fiord along the ancient
ocean shore. The old rock caught it to his rough heart then, and when
in later ages the fickle waves which so long had kissed his lips left
him stern and lonely, he still held the clear, cold lake to his iron
bosom.
Athabasca may be said to mark also the limits of some great divisions
of the animal kingdom. The reindeer and that most curious relic of an
older time, the musk ox, come down near its north-eastern shores, for
there that bleak region known as the “Barren Grounds” is but a few
miles distant. These animals never pass to the southern end of the
lake; the Cariboo, or reindeer of the woods, being a distinct species
from that which inhabits the treeless waste. The wood buffalo and the
moose are yet numerous on the north-west and south-west shores: but of
these things we shall have more to say anon.
All through the summer, from early May to mid-October, the shores of
the lake swarm with wild geese, and the twilight midsummer midnight is
filled with the harsh sounds of the cries of the snow goose, or the
“wavy” flying low over their favourite waters.
In early days Chipewyan was an important centre of the fur trade, and
in later times it has been made the starting-point of many of the
exploratory parties to the northern coast. From Old Fort Chipewyan
Mackenzie set forth to explore the great northern river, and to the
same place he returned when first of all men north of the 40th parallel
he had crossed in the summers of 1792–93 the continent to the Pacific
Ocean.
It was from New Fort Chipewyan that Simpson set out to trace the
coast-line of the Arctic Ocean; and earlier than either, it was from
Fond du Lac, at the eastern end of Fort Athabasca, that Samuel Hearne
wandered forth to reach the Arctic Sea.
To-day it is useful to recall these stray items of adventure from the
past in which they lie buried. It has been said by some one that a
“nation cannot be saved by a calculation;” neither can she be made by
one.
If to-day we are what we are, it is because a thousand men in bygone
times did not stop to count the cost. The decline of a nation differs
from that of an individual in the first symptoms of its decay. The
heart of the nation goes first, the extremities still remain vigorous.
France, with many a gallant soul striking hard for her in the Carnatic
or in Canada, sickens in the pomp and luxury of Versailles, and has
nothing to offer to her heroes but forgetfulness, debt, or the rack.
Her colonial history was one long tissue of ingratitude.
Biencourt, De Chastes, Varrene de la Verendrie, or Lally might fight
and toil and die, what cared the selfish heart of old France? The
order of St. Louis long denied, and 40,000 livres of debt rewarded the
discovery of the Rocky Mountains. Frenchmen gave to France a continent.
France thought little of the gift, and fate took it back again. History
sometimes repeats itself. There is a younger if not a greater Britain
waiting quietly to reap the harvest of her mother’s mistakes.
But to Chipewyan. It is emphatically a lonely spot; in summer the cry
of the wild bird keeps time to the lapping of the wave on the rocky
shore, or the pine islands rustle in the western breeze; nothing else
moves over these 8000 square miles of crystal water. Now and again at
long intervals the beautiful canoe of a Chipewyan glides along the
bay-indented shores, or crosses some traverse in the open lake.
When Samuel Hearne first looked upon the “Arabascow,” buffalo were
very numerous along its southern shore, to-day they are scarce; all
else rests as then in untamed desolation. At times this west end of
the lake has been the scene of strange excitements. Men came from
afar and pitched their tents awhile on these granite shores, ere they
struck deeper into the heart of the great north. Mackenzie, Franklin,
Back, Richardson, Simpson, Rae, rested here; ere piercing further into
unknown wilds, they flew the red-cross flag o’er seas and isles upon
whose shores no human foot had pressed a sand-print.
Eight hundred thousand pounds sunk in the Arctic Sea! will exclaim my
calculating friend behind the national counter; nearly a million gone
for ever! No, head cash-keeper, you are wrong. That million of money
will bear interest higher than all your little speculations in times
not far remote, and in times lying deep in the misty future. In hours
when life and honour lie at different sides of the “to do” or “not to
do,” men will go back to times when other men battling with nature or
with man, cast their vote on the side of honour, and by the white light
thrown into the future from the great dead Past, they will read their
roads where many paths commingle.