The wild animals of the Peace River.--Indian method of hunting
the moose.--Twa-poos.--The beaver.--The bear.--Bear’s
butter.--A bear’s hug and how it ended.--Fort St. John.--
The river awakes.--A rose without a thorn.--Nigger Dan.--
A threatening letter.--I issue a Judicial Memorandum.--
Its effect is all that could be desired.--Working up the
Peace River.
Three animals have made their homes on the shores of the Peace River
and its tributaries. They are the bear, the moose, and the beaver. All
are valuable to the Indian for their flesh, fur, or skin; all come to
as great perfection here as in any part of the American continent.
The first and last named go to sleep in the long winter months, but the
moose still roams the woods and willow banks, feeding with his flesh
the forts and the Indians along the entire river. About 100 full-grown
moose had been consumed during the winter months at the four posts
we have lately passed, in fresh meat alone. He is a huge animal; his
carcase will weigh from three to six hundred pounds; yet an ordinary
half-breed will devour him in little more than a month.
Between four and five hundred moose are annually eaten at the forts of
the Peace River; four times that number are consumed by the Indians,
but the range of the animal is vast, the hunters are comparatively few,
and to-day there are probably as many moose in Peace River as there
were fifty years ago.
Athabasca trades to-day the skins of nearly 2000 moose in a single
year. Few animals are more unshapely than this giant deer. His neck
slopes down from the shoulder, ending in a head as large as a horse--a
head which ends in a nose curled like a camel’s--a nose delicious to
the taste, but hideous to the eye. The ears are of enormous length.
Yet, ugly as are the nose and ears of the moose, they are his chief
means of protection against his enemy, and in that great ungainly head
there lurks a brain of marvellous cunning. It is through nose and ears
that this cunning brain is duly prompted to escape danger.
_No man save the Indian, or the half-Indian_, can hunt the moose with
chance of success.
I am aware that a host of Englishmen and Canadians will exclaim
against this, but nevertheless it is perfectly true. Hunting the moose
in summer and winter is one thing--killing him in a snow-yard, or
running him down in deep snow is another. The two methods are as widely
different as killing a salmon which another man has hooked for you is
different from rising, hooking, playing, and gaffing one yourself.
To hunt the moose requires years of study. Here is the little game
which his instinct teaches him. When the early morning has come, he
begins to think of lying down for the day. He has been feeding on the
grey and golden willow-tops as he walked leisurely along. His track is
marked in the snow or soft clay; he carefully retraces his footsteps,
and, breaking off suddenly to the leeward side, lies down a gunshot
from his feeding-track. He knows he must get the wind of any one
following his trail.
In the morning “Twa-poos,” or the Three Thumbs, sets forth to look
for a moose; he hits the trail and follows it; every now and again he
examines the broken willow-tops or the hoof-marks, when experience
tells him that the moose has been feeding here during the early night.
Twa-poos quits the trail, bending away in a deep circle to leeward;
stealthily he returns to the trail, and as stealthily bends away again
from it. He makes as it were the semicircles of the letter B, supposing
the perpendicular line to indicate the trail of the moose; at each
return to it he examines attentively the willows, and judges his
proximity to the game.
At last he is so near that he knows for an absolute certainty that
the moose is lying in a thicket a little distance ahead. Now comes
the moment of caution. He divests himself of every article of
clothing which might cause the slightest noise in the forest; even
his moccassins are laid aside; and then, on a pointed toe which a
ballet-girl might envy, he goes forward for the last stalk. Every
bush is now scrutinized, every thicket examined. See! he stops all at
once! You who follow him look, and look in vain; you can see nothing.
He laughs to himself, and points to yon willow covert. No, there is
nothing there. He noiselessly cocks his gun. You look again and again,
but can see nothing; then Twa-poos suddenly stretches out his hand and
breaks a little dry twig from an overhanging branch. In an instant,
right in front, thirty or forty yards away, an immense dark-haired
animal rises up from the willows. He gives one look in your direction,
and that look is his _last_. Twa-poos has fired, and the moose is
either dead in his thicket or within a few hundred yards of it.
One word now about this sense of hearing possessed by the moose. The
most favourable day for hunting is in wild windy weather, when the dry
branches of the forest crack in the gale. Nevertheless, Indians have
assured me that, on such days, when they have sighted a moose, they
have broken a dry stick; and although many branches were waving and
cracking in the woods, the animal started at the sound--distinguishing
it from the natural noises of the forest.
But although the moose are still as numerous on Peace River as they
were in days far removed from the present, there is another animal
which has almost wholly disappeared.
The giant form of the wood-buffalo no longer darkens the steep lofty
shores. When first Mackenzie beheld the long reaches of the river,
the “gentle lawns” which alternated with “abrupt precipices” were
“enlivened” by vast herds of buffaloes. This was in 1793. Thirty-three
years later, Sir George Simpson also ascended the river with his
matchless Iroquois crew. Yet no buffalo darkened the lofty shores.
What destroyed them in that short interval? The answer is not difficult
to seek--deep snow. The buffalo grazes on the grass, the moose browses
on the tall willows. During one winter of exceptionally deep snow,
eighty buffaloes were killed in a single day in the vicinity of
Dunvegan. The Indians ran them into the snowdrifts, and then despatched
them with knives.
It is still a matter of dispute whether the wood-buffalo is the
same species as his namesake of the southern plains; but it is
generally believed by the Indians that he is of a kindred race. He is
nevertheless larger, darker, and wilder; and although the northern
land, in which he is still found, abounds in open prairies and small
plains, he nevertheless seeks in preference the thickest woods. Whether
he be of the plain race or not, one thing is certain--his habits vary
much from his southern cousin. The range of the wood-buffalo is much
farther north than is generally believed. There are scattered herds
even now on the banks of the Liard River as far as sixty-one degrees of
north latitude.
The earth had never elsewhere such an accumulation of animal life as
this northern continent must have exhibited some five or six centuries
ago, when, from the Great Slave Lake to the Gulf of Florida, millions
upon millions of bisons roamed the wilderness.
Have we said enough of animals, or can we spare a few words to the
bears and the beavers? Of all the animals which the New World gave
to man the beaver was the most extraordinary. His cunning surpassed
that of the fox; his skill was greater than that of the honey-bee; his
patience was more enduring than the spider’s; his labour could turn
the waters of a mighty river, and change the face of an entire country.
He could cut down forests, and build bridges; he dwelt in a house
with rooms, a common hall and a neat doorway in it. He could fell a
forest tree in any direction he pleased, or carry it on his back when
his sharp teeth had lopped its branches. He worked in companies, with
a master beaver at the head of each--companies from whose ranks an
idle or a lazy beaver was ignominiously expelled. He dwelt along the
shores of quiet lakes, or by the margins of rushing streams, and silent
majestic rivers, far in the heart of the solitude.
But there came a time when men deemed his soft, dark skin a fitting
covering for their heads; and wild men hunted him out in his lonely
home. They trapped him from Texas to the Great Bear Lake; they hunted
him in the wildest recesses of the Rocky Mountains; rival companies
went in pursuit of him. In endeavouring to cover the heads of others,
hundreds of trappers lost their own head-covering; the beaver brought
many a white man’s scalp to the red man’s lodge-pole; and many a red
man’s life went out with the beaver’s. In the West he became well-nigh
extinct, in the nearer North he became scarce; yet here in Peace River
he held his own against all comers. Nigh 30,000 beavers die annually
along its shores, and when spring opens its waters the night is ever
broken by the dull plunge of countless beavers in the pools and eddies
of the great river.
Along the lofty shores of the Peace River the Saskootum berry grows in
vast quantities. In August its fruit is ripe, and the bears come forth
to enjoy it; black, brown, and grizzly, stalk along the shores and
hill-sides browsing on this luscious berry. On such food Bruin grows
fat and unwieldy; he becomes “sleek-headed” and “sleeps of nights,”
thus falling an easy prey to his hunter.
While he was alive he loved the “poire” berries, and now when he is
dead the red man continues the connexion, and his daintiest morsel is
the bear’s fat and Saskootum berries mixed with powdered moose-meat.
It is the dessert of a Peace River feast; the fat, white as cream,
is eaten in large quantities, and although at first a little of it
suffices, yet after a while one learns to like it, and the dried
Saskootum and “bear’s butter” becomes a luxury.
But fat or lean, the grizzly bear is a formidable antagonist. Few
Indians will follow him alone to his lair; his strength is enormous, he
can kill and carry a buffalo-bull; were he as active as he is strong
it is probable that he would stand as the most dangerous animal on
the earth. But his movements are comparatively slow, and his huge form
is upraised upon its hind legs before he grapples his adversary. Woe
to that adversary should those great fore-paws ever encircle him. Once
only have I known a man live to tell the tale of that embrace: his
story was a queer one. He had been attacked from behind, he had only
time to fire his gun into the bear’s chest when the monster grasped
him. The Indian never lost his power of thought; he plunged his left
arm into the brute’s throat, and caught firm hold of the tongue; with
his right hand he drove his hunting-knife into ribs and side; his arm
and hand were mangled, his sides were gashed and torn, but the grizzly
lay dead before him.
The fort of St. John, on the Upper Peace River, is a very tumble-down
old place; it stands on the south shore of the river, some thirty feet
above high-water level; close behind its ruined buildings the ridges
rise 1000 feet, steep and pine-clad; on the opposite shore bare grassy
hills lift their thicket-fringed faces nearly to the same elevation;
the river, in fact, runs at the bottom of a very large V-shaped trough
900 feet below the prairie-plateau. Between the base of the hill and
the bank of the river lies a tract of wooded and sheltered land, from
whose groves of birch, poplar, and pines the loud “drumming” of
innumerable partridges now gave token of the coming spring. Yes, we
had travelled into the spring--our steps and these never-tiring dogs
had carried us farther and quicker than time. It was only the second
week in April, and already the earth began to soften; the forest smelt
of last year’s leaves and of this year’s buds; the rills spoke, and
the wild duck winged along the river channels. During the whole of
the second week of April the days were soft and warm; rain fell in
occasional showers; at daybreak my thermometer showed only 3° or 4°
of frost, and in the afternoon stood at 50° to 60° in the shade. From
the 15th to the 20th the river, which had hitherto held aloof from
all advances of the spring, began to show many symptoms of yielding
to her soft entreaties. Big tears rose at times upon his iron face
and flowed down his frosted cheeks; his great heart seemed to swell
within him, and ominous groans broke from his long-silent bosom. At
night he recovered himself a little, and looked grim and rigid in
the early morning; but, at last, spring, and shower, and sun, and
stream were too much for him--all his children were already awake, and
prattling, and purling, and pulling at him, and shaking him to open his
long-closed eyelids, to look once more at the blue and golden summer.
It was the 20th of April. But the rose of spring had its thorn too
(what rose has not?), and with bud, and sun, and shower came the first
mosquito on this same 20th of April. He was a feeble insect, and hummed
around in a mournful sort of manner, not at all in keeping with the
glowing prospect before him. He had a whole long summer of stinging in
prospective; “the winter of his discontent” was over, and yet there was
nothing hilarious in his hum. I have made a slight error in repeating
the old saying, that “no rose is without its thorn,” for there is just
one--it is the primrose. But there were other thorns than mosquitoes in
store for the denizens of this isolated spot, called St. John’s, in the
wilderness.
On the north shore of the river, directly facing the tumble-down fort,
a new log-house was in course of erection by the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Work moves slowly in the North, and this log-house lay long unfinished.
One fine day a canoe came floating down the lonely river; it held a
solitary negro--pioneer, cook, trapper, vagrant, idler, or squatter, as
chance suited him. This time the black paddler determined to squat by
the half-finished log-house of the Company. Four years earlier he had
dwelt for a season on this same spot. There were dark rumours afloat
about him; he had killed his man it was averred; nay, he had repeated
the pastime, and killed two men. He had robbed several mining shanties,
and had to shift his residence more than once beyond the mountains on
account of his mode of life. Altogether Nigger Dan, as he was called,
bore an indifferent reputation among the solitary white man and his
half-breed helpers at the post of St. John’s. By the Indians he was
regarded as something between a beaver and an American bear, and, had
his head been tradeable as a matter of fur, I believe they would have
trapped him to a certainty. But despite the hostile feelings of the
entire community, Nigger Dan held stout possession of his shanty, and
claimed, in addition to his hut, all the land adjoining it, as well as
the Hudson’s Bay Fort in course of erection. From his lair he issued
manifestoes of a very violent nature. He planted stakes in the ground
along the river-bank, upon which he painted in red ochre hieroglyphics
of a menacing character. At night he could be heard across the silent
river indulging in loud and uncalled-for curses, and at times he varied
this employment by reciting portions of the Bible in a pitch of voice
and accent peculiar to gentlemen of colour. On the 12th of April, four
days after my arrival at St. John’s, my young host was the recipient of
the following ultimatum. I copy it verbatim:--
_April 12._
KENEDY I hear by
Worne you that Com and Gett your
persnol property if eny you
have Got of my prmeeis In 24 hours And then keep away
from me because I shal Not betrubbld Nor trod on
only by her most Noble
Majesty
Government
(Sgd) D. T. WILLIAMS.
On the back appeared,--
I have wated longe A-day for an ancer from that Notis you toer
Down and now It is my turn to tore down ---- ----
Although the spirit of loyalty which breathed through the latter
portion of this document was most admirable, it is nevertheless matter
for regret that Dan’s views of the subject of “persnol property”
were not those of a law-abiding citizen; unfortunately for me, both
the Hudson’s Bay claimant and the negro occupant appealed to me in
support of their rival rights. What was to be done? It is true that
by virtue of a commission conferred upon me some years earlier I had
been elevated to the lofty title of justice of the peace for Rupert’s
Land and the North-West Territories, my brother justices consisting,
I believe, of two Hudson Bay officials and three half-breed buffalo
runners, whose collective wisdom was deemed amply sufficient to
dispense justice over something like two million square miles.
Nevertheless, it occurred to me that this matter of disputed ownership
was one outside even the wide limits of my jurisdiction. To admit such
want of jurisdiction would never have answered. “Rupert’s Land and
the North-West” carried with them a sense of vast indefinite power,
that if it were once shaken by an admission of non-competency, two
million square miles, containing a population of one twenty-fourth of
a wild man to each square mile, might have instantly become a prey to
chaotic crime. Feeling the inutility of my lofty office to deal with
the matters in question, I decided upon adopting a middle course, one
which I have every reason to believe upheld the full majesty of the law
in the eyes of the eight representatives of the Canadian, African, and
American races of man, now assembled around me. I therefore issued a
document which ran thus:--
JUDICIAL MEMORANDUM.
Various circumstances having occurred in the neighbourhood
of the Hudson’s Bay Fort, known as St. John’s, on the Peace
River, of a nature to lead to the assumption that a breach of
the peace is liable to arise out of the question of disputed
ownership, in a plot of land on the north shore of the river,
on which the Hudson’s Bay Company have erected buildings to
serve as their future place of business, and on which it is
asserted one Daniel Williams, a person of colour, formerly
lived, this is to notify all persons concerned in this
question, that no belief of ownership, no former or present
possession, will be held in any way to excuse or palliate the
slightest infringement of the law, or to sanction any act of
violence being committed, or to occasion any threats being made
use of by any of the said parties which might lead to a breach
of the peace.
Executed by me, as Justice of the Peace for Rupert’s Land and
the North-West, this 22nd day of April, 1873.
Signed, &c., &c.
I claim for this memorandum or manifesto some slight degree of praise.
It bears, I think, a striking analogy to diplomatic documents, for
which of late years the British Government has been conspicuous in
times of grave foreign complications; but in one important respect
my judicial memorandum was very much more successful than any of the
political papers upon which it was framed; for whereas they had been
received by the respective belligerents to whom they had been addressed
in a manner not at all flattering to our national dignity, my very
lucid statement that, diplomatically speaking, two and two made four,
had a marked impression on the minds of my audience.
On the one hand, I clearly pointed out that murder, arson, and robbery
were not singly or collectively in unison with the true interpretation
of British law; and on the other, I carefully abstained from giving any
indication of what would result from the infringement of that law in
the persons of any of the belligerents.
I have reason to believe that the negro Bismarck was deeply impressed
by the general tenour of the document; and that a lengthened perusal of
the word “executed,” in the last sentence, carried with it a sense of
profound strangulation under which he long laboured.
And now it was time to think of moving again towards the setting sun.
Many months of travel had carried me across the great plateau of the
North to this spot, where from the pine-clad plain arose the white
ridges of the Rocky Mountains. Before me lay a land of alps, a realm of
mountain peaks and gloomy cañons, where in countless valleys, unseen by
the eye of man, this great Peace River had its distant source. In snow
that lasts the live-long year these mountain summits rest; but their
sides early feel the influence of the summer sun, and from the thousand
valleys crystal streams rush forth to swell the majestic current of the
great river, and to send it foaming in mighty volume to the distant
Athabasca.
At such a time it is glorious work for the _voyageur_ to launch his
cotton-wood canoe on the rushing water and glance down the broad bosom
of the river. His paddle lies idle in the water, or is used only to
steer the swift-flying craft; and when evening darkens over the lofty
shores, he lights his camp-fire full half a hundred miles from his
starting-point of the morning.
But if it be idle, easy work to run down the river at its summer level,
what arduous toil it is to ascend it during the same season! Bit by
bit, little by little, the upward way must be won; with paddle, with
pole, with line dragged along shore and pulled round tree-stump or
projecting boulder; until evening finds the toiler often not three
river reaches from his starting-point.
When the river finally breaks up, and the ice has all passed away,
there is a short period when the waters stand at a low level; the sun
is not yet strong enough to melt the snow quickly, and the frosts at
night are still sharp in the mountain valleys. The river then stands
ten feet below its level of mid-June; this period is a short one, and
not an hour must be lost by the _voyageur_ who would gain the benefit
of the low water in the earlier days of May.
Seventy miles higher up the Peace River stands a solitary house called
Hudson’s Hope. It marks the spot where the river first emerges from the
cañon of the Rocky Mountains, and enters the plain country. A trail,
passable for horses, leads along the north shore of the river to this
last trading-post of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the verge of the
mountains. Along this trail I now determined to continue my journey,
so as to gain the west side of the Great Cañon before the ice had left
the river, and thus reap the advantage of the low water in ascending
still farther into the mountains.
It is no easy matter to place an exact picture of the topography of a
country before a reader: we must, however, endeavour to do so.
Some fifty miles west of St. John, the Peace River issues from the
cañon through which it passes the outer range of the Rocky Mountains.
No boat, canoe, or craft of any kind has ever run the gauntlet of this
huge chasm; for five-and-thirty miles it lies deep sunken through the
mountains; while from its depths there ever rises the hoarse roar of
the angry waters as they dash furiously against their rocky prison. A
trail of ten miles leads across this portage, and at the western end
of this trail the river is reached close to where it makes its first
plunge into the rock-hewn chasm. At this point the traveller stands
within the outer range of the mountains, and he has before him a broad
river, stretching far into a region of lofty peaks, a river with strong
but even current, flowing between banks 200 to 300 yards apart. Around
great mountains lift up their heads dazzling with the glare of snow,
10,000 feet above the water which carries his frail canoe.
It was through this pass that I now proposed to journey westward
towards the country which lies between the Pacific Ocean, Alaska, and
the multitudinous mountains of Central British Columbia, a land but
little known; a vast alpine region, where, amidst lakes and mountains
nature reigns in loneliness and cloud.