THE DOMAIN OF THE NORTH
I
Canada does not like any reference to her fur trade as a national
occupation. Of course, it is no longer a national occupation. It
occupies, perhaps, two thousand whites and it may be twenty or thirty
thousand Indians. More Indians in Canada earn their living farming the
reserves than catching fur, but the Indians north of Athabasca and
Churchill and in Labrador must always earn their living fur hunting.
Of them there is no census, but they hardly exceed thirty thousand all
told. The treaty Indians on reserves now number a hundred thousand.
Yet, though only two thousand whites are fur-trading in Canada, no
interpretation of Canadian life is complete without reference to that
far domain of the North, where the hunter roams in loneliness, and the
night lights whip unearthly through still frosty air, and no sound
breaks leagueless silence but the rifle shot, crackle of frost or the
call of the wolf pack. It will be recalled that Canada's first
settlers came in two main currents from two idealistic motives. The
French came to convert the Indians, not to found empire, and the
English Loyalists came from the promptings of their convictions. Both
streams of settlers came from idealistic motives, but both had to live,
and they did it at first by fur hunting. Jean Ba'tiste, the Frenchman,
who might have been a courtier when he came, promptly doffed court
trappings and donned moccasins and exchanged a soldier's saber for a
camp frying-pan and kept pointing his canoe up the St. Lawrence till he
had threaded every river and lake from Tadousac to Hudson Bay and the
Rockies. It was the pursuit of the little beaver that paid the piper
for all the discovering and exploring of Canada. When John Bull
came--also in pursuit of ideals--he, too, in a more prosperous way
promptly exchanged the pursuit of ideals for the pursuit of the little
beaver. It was the little beaver that led the way for Radisson, for La
Salle, for La Verandryé, for MacKenzie, for Fraser, for Peter Skene
Ogden, from the St. Lawrence to the Columbia, from the Athabasca to the
Sacramento.
While all this is of the past, the heritage of a fur-hunting ancestry
has entered into the very blood and brawn and brain of Canada in a kind
of iron dauntlessness that makes for manhood. Some of her greatest
leaders--like Strathcona and MacKenzie--have been known as "Men of the
North"; and whether they have fur-traded or not, nearly all those "Men
of the North" who have made their mark have had the iron dauntlessness
of the hunter in their blood. It is a sort of tonic from the
out-of-doors, like the ozone you breathe, which fills body and soul
with zest. Canada is sensitive to any reference to her fur trade for
fear the world regard her as a perpetual fur domain. Her northern
zones are a perpetual fur domain--we may as well acknowledge that--they
can never be anything else; and Canada should serve notice on the
softer races of the world that she does not want them. They can stand
up neither to her climate nor to her measure of a man, but far from
cause of regret, this is a thing for gratulation. Canada can never be
an overcrowded land, where soft races crowd for room, like slugs under
a board. She will always have her spacious domain of the North--a
perpetual fur preserve, a perpetual hunting ground, where dauntless
spirits will venture to match themselves against the powers of death;
and from that North will ever emerge the type of man who masters life.
II
The last chapter of the fur trade has not been written--as many assert.
The oldest industry of mankind, the most heroic and protective against
the elements--against Fenris and Loki and all those Spirits of Evil
with which northern myth has personified Cold--fur hunting,
fur-trading, will last long as man lasts. We are entering, not on the
extermination of fur, but on a new cycle of smaller furs. In the days
when mink went begging at eighty cents, mink was not fashionable. Mink
is fashionable to-day; hence the absurd and fabulous prices. Long ago,
when ermine as miniver--the garb of nobility--was fashionable and
exclusive, it commanded fabulous prices. Radicalism abolished the
exclusive garb of royalty, and ermine fell to four cents a pelt,
advanced to twenty-five cents and has sold at one dollar. To-day, mink
is the fashion, and the little mink is pursued; but to-morrow fashion
will veer with the caprices of the wind. Some other fur will come into
favor, and the little mink will have a chance to multiply as the ermine
has multiplied.
In spite of the cry of the end of fur, more furs are marketed in the
world than ever before in the history of the race--forty million
dollars' worth; twenty millions of which are handled in New York and
Chicago and St. Louis and St. Paul; some five millions passing through
Edmonton and Winnipeg and Montreal and Quebec; three millions for home
consumption, two millions plus for export. Some years ago I went
through all the Minutes of the Hudson's Bay Company in London from 1670
to 1824 and have transcripts of those Minutes now in my library. In
not a single year did the fur record exceed half a million dollars'
worth. Compare that to the American traffic to-day of twenty millions,
or to the three and four hundred thousand dollar cargoes that each of
the Hudson's Bay Company and Revillons' ships bears to Europe from
Canada yearly.
"How much can a good Indian hunter make in a season?" I asked a
fur-trader of the Northwest, because in nearly all accounts written
about furs, you read a wail of reproach at milady for wearing furs when
trapping entails such hardship and poverty on the part of the hunter.
"A good hunter easily earns six hundred dollars or seven hundred
dollars a winter if he will go out and not hang around the minute he
gets a little ahead. It takes from three thousand dollars to four
thousand dollars to outfit a small free-trader to go up North on his
own account. This stock he will turn over three or four times at a
profit of one hundred per cent. on the supplies. For example, ten
dollars cash will buy a good black otter up North. In trade, it will
cost from twelve dollars to fifteen dollars. On the articles of trade,
the profit will be fifty per cent. The otter will sell down at
Edmonton for from twenty dollars to thirty dollars. It's the same of
muskrat. At the beginning of the season when the kits are plentiful
and small, the trader pays nine cents for them up North. Down at the
fur market he will get from twenty-five to sixty cents for them,
according to size. There were one hundred and thirty-two thousand
muskrat came to one firm of traders alone in Edmonton one year, which
they will sell at an advance of fifty per cent."
"How much fur comes yearly to Edmonton?" I asked an Edmonton trader.
If you look at the map you will see that Edmonton is the jumping off
place to three of the greatest fur fields of North America--down
MacKenzie River to the Arctic, up Peace River to the mountain
hinterland between the Columbia and the Yukon, east through Athabasca
Lake to the wild barren land inland from Churchill and Hudson Bay.
"Well, we can easily calculate that. I know about how much is brought
in to each of the traders there."
I took pencil while he gave me the names. It totaled up to six hundred
thousand dollars' worth for 1908. When you consider that in its
palmiest old days of exclusive monopoly the Hudson's Bay Company never
sold more than half a million dollars' worth of furs a year, this total
for Edmonton alone does not sound like a scarcity of furs.
III
The question may be asked, do not these large figures presage the
hunting to extinction of fur-bearing animals? I do not think so.
Take a map of the northern fur country. Take a good look at it--not
just a Pullman car glance. The Canadian government has again and again
advertised thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of square miles
of free land. Latitudinally, that is perfectly true. Wheat-wise, it
isn't. When you go one hundred miles north of Saskatchewan River
(barring Peace River in sections) you are in a climate that will grow
wheat all right--splendid wheat, the hardest and finest in the world.
That is, twenty hours of sunlight--not daylight but sunlight--force
growth rapidly enough to escape late spring and early fall frosts; but
the plain fact of the matter is, wheat land does not exist far north of
the Saskatchewan except in sections along Peace River. What does
exist? Cataracts countless--Churchill River is one succession of
cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by
which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once
lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs--areas of amber stagnant water full
of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and
sand overgrown with coarse goose grass and "the reed that grows like a
tree," muskrat reed, a tasseled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet
high--areas of such muskeg mile upon mile. I traversed one such region
above Cumberland Lake seventy miles wide by three hundred long where
you could not find solid camping ground the size of your foot. What
did we do? That is where the uses of a really expert guide came in; we
moored our canoe among the willows, cut willows enough to keep feet
from sinking, spread oilcloth and rugs over this, erected the tents
over all, tying the guy ropes to the canoe thwarts and willows, as the
ground would not hold the tent pegs.
It doesn't sound as if such regions would ever be overrun by
settlement--does it? Now look at your map, seventy miles north of
Saskatchewan! From the northwest corner up by Klondike to the
southeast corner down in Labrador is a distance of more than three
thousand miles. From the south to north is a distance of almost two
thousand miles. I once asked a guide with a truly city air--it might
almost have been a Harvard air--if these distances were "as the crow
flies." He gave me a look that I would not like to have a guide give me
too often--he might maroon a fool on one of those swamp areas.
"There ain't no distances as the crow flies in this country," he
answered. "You got to travel 'cording as the waters collect or the ice
goes out."
Well, here is your country, three thousand by two thousand miles, a
great fur preserve. What exists in it? Very little wood, and that
small. Undoubtedly some minerals. What else exists? A very sparse
population of Indians, whose census no man knows, for it has never been
taken; but it is a pretty safe guess to say there are not thirty
thousand Indians all told in the north fur country. I put this guess
tentatively and should be glad of information from any one in a
position to guess closer. I have asked the Hudson's Bay Company and I
have asked Revillons how many white hunters and traders they think are
in the fur country of the North. I have never met any one who placed
the number in the North at more than two thousand. Spread two thousand
white hunters with ten thousand Indians--for of the total Indian
population two-thirds are women and children--over an area the size of
two-thirds of Europe--I ask you frankly, do you think they are going to
exterminate the game very fast? Remember the climate of the North
takes care of her own. White men can stand only so many years of that
lonely cold, and then they have "to come out" or they dwarf mentally
and degenerate.
Take a single section of this great northern fur preserve--Labrador,
which I visited some years ago. In area Labrador is 530,000 square
miles, two and a half times the size of France, twice the size of
Germany, twice the size of Austria-Hungary. Statistical books set the
population down at four thousand; but the Moravian missionaries there
told me that including the Eskimo who come down the coast in summer and
the fishermen who come up the coast in summer the total population was
probably seventeen thousand. Now Labrador is one of the finest game
preserves in the world. On its rocky hills and watery upper barrens
where settlement can never come are to be found silver fox--the finest
in the world, so fine that the Revillons have established a
fur-breeding post for silver fox on one of the islands--cross fox
almost as fine as silver, black and red fox, the best otter in the
world, the finest marten in America, bear, very fine Norway lynx, fine
ermine, rabbit or hare galore, very fine wolverine, fisher, muskrat,
coarse harp seal, wolf, caribou, beaver, a few mink. Is it common
sense to think the population of a few thousands can hunt out a fur
empire here the size of two Germanies? Remember it was not the hunter
who exterminated the buffalo and the beaver and the seal and the otter!
The poacher destroyed one group of sea furs; the railway and the farm
supplanted the other. West of Mackenzie River and north of British
Columbia is a game region almost similar to Labrador in its furred
habitat, with the exception that the western preserve is warmer and
more wooded. Northward from Ontario is another hinterland which from
its very nature must always be a great hunting ground. Minerals
exist--as the old French traders well knew and the latter-day
discoveries of Cobalt prove--and there is also heavy timber; but north
of the Great Clay Belt, between the Clay Belt and the Bay, lies the
impenetrable and--I think--indestructible game ground. Swamp and rock
will prevent agricultural settlement but will provide an ideal fur
preserve similar in climate to Labrador.
Traveling with Indian guides, it is always a matter of marvel and
admiration to me how the fur companies have bred into the very blood
for generations the careful nurture of all game. At one place canoeing
on Saskatchewan we heard of a huge black bear that had been molesting
some new ranches. "No take now," said the Indian. "Him fur no good
now." Though we might camp on bare rocks and the fire lay dead ash, it
was the extra Indian paddler who invariably went back to spatter it
out. You know the white's innate love for a roaring log fire in front
of the camp at night? The Indian calls that
"a-no-good-whitemen-fire-scare-away-game."
Now take another look at the map. Where the Saskatchewan makes a great
bend three hundred miles northeast of Prince Albert, it is no longer a
river--it is a vast muskeg of countless still amber water channels not
twice the width of your canoe and quaking silt islands of sand and
goose grass--ideal, hidden and almost impenetrable for small game.
Always muskeg marks the limit of big game and the beginning of the
ground of the little fellows--waupoos, the rabbit; and musquash, the
muskrat; and sakwasew, the mink; and nukik, the otter; and wuchak or
pekan, the fisher. It is a safe wager that the profits on the millions
upon millions of little pelts--hundreds of thousands of muskrat are
taken out of this muskeg alone--exceed by a hundredfold the profits on
the larger furs of beaver and silver fox and bear and wolf and cross
fox and marten.
Look at the map again! North of Cumberland Lake to the next fur post
is a trifling run of two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles by
dog-train to Lac du Brochet or Reindeer Lake--more muskeg cut by
limestone and granite ridges. Here you can measure four hundred miles
east or west and not get out of the muskeg till you reach Athabasca on
the west and Hudson's Bay on the east. North of Lac du Brochet is a
straight stretch of one thousand miles--nothing but rocks and cataracts
and stunted woods, "little sticks" the Indians call them--and
sky-colored waters in links and chains and lakes with the quaking
muskeg goose grass and muskrat reed, cut and chiseled and trenched by
the amber water ways.
IV
If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the
muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south
end of this field.
We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you
could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran.
Where the high banks dropped suddenly to such a dank tangle of reeds,
brush wood, windfall and timbers drifted fifteen hundred miles down
from the forests of the Rocky Mountains--such a tangle as I have never
seen in any swamp of the South--the skeleton of a moose, come to its
death by a jump among the windfall, marked the eastern limit of big
game; and presently the river was lost--not in a lake--but in a swamp.
A red fox came scurrying through the goose grass, sniffed the air,
looked at us and ran along abreast of our canoe for about a mile,
evidently scenting the bacon of the tin "grub box." Muskrats feed on
the bulb of the tufted "reed like a tree," sixteen feet high on each
side, and again and again little kits came out and swam in the ripple
of our canoe. Once an old duck performed the acrobatic feat over which
the nature and anti-nature writers have been giving each other the lie.
We had come out of one long amber channel to be confronted by three
openings exactly alike, not much wider than the length of our Klondike
canoe, all lined by the high tufted reed. MacKenzie, the half-breed
rapids man, had been telling us the endless Cree legends of
Wa-sa-kee-chaulk, the Cree Hiawatha, and his Indian lore of stagnant
waters now lured him into steering us to one of the side channels. We
were not expected. An old mother duck was directly across our path
teaching some twenty-two little black hobbling downy babies how to
swim. With a cry that shrieked "Leg it--leg it" plain as a quack could
speak and which sent the little fellows scuttling, half swim, half run,
the old mother flung herself over on her back not a paddle's length
ahead of us, dipped, dived, came up again just at our bow and flopped
broken-winged over the water ahead of us near enough almost to be
caught by hand; but when you stretched out your hand, the crafty lady
dipped and dived and came up broken-winged again.
"You old fool," said our head man, "your wing is no more broken than
mine is. We're not going to hurt your babies. Shut up there and stop
that lying."
Spite of which the old duck kept up her pantomime of deceit for more
than a mile; when she suddenly sailed up over our heads back to her
hidden babies, a very Boadicea of an old duck girl. When we drew in
for nooning, wild geese honked over our heads near enough to be hit by
the butt of a gun. Drift chips, lodged in the goose grass, kindled
fire for kettle, but oilcloth had to be spread before you could get
footing ashore. I began to wonder what happened as to repairs when
canoes ripped over a snag in this kind of region, and that brought up
the story of a furtrader's wife in another muskeg region north of Lac
La Ronge up toward Churchill River, who was in a canoe that ripped a
hole clean the size of a man's fist. Quick as a flash, the head man
was into the tin grub box and had planked on a cake of butter. The
cold water hardened it, and that repair carried them along to the first
birch tree affording a new strip of bark.
Where an occasional ridge of limestone cut the swamp we could hear the
laughter and the glee of the Indian children playing "wild goose" among
the trembling black poplars and whispering birches, and where we landed
at the Indian camps we found the missionaries out with the hunters. In
fact, even the nuns go haying and moose hunting with the Indian
families to prevent lapses to barbarism.
Again and again we passed cached canoes, provisions stuck up on sticks
above the reach of animal marauders--testimony to the honesty of the
passing Indian hunters, which the best policed civilized eastern city
can not boast of its denizens.
"I've gone to the Rockies by way of Peace River dozens of times,"
declared the head of one of the big fur companies, "and left five
hundred dollars' worth of provisions cached in trees to feed us on our
way out, and when we came that same way six months afterward we never
found one pound stolen, though I remember one winter when the Indians
who were passing and repassing under the food in those trees were
starving owing to the rabbit famine."
In winter this region is traversed by dog-train along the ice--a matter
of five hundred miles to Lac du Brochet and back, or six hundred to
Prince Albert and back. "Oh, no, we're not far," said a lonely-faced
Cambridge graduate fur-trader to me. "When my little boy took sick
last winter, I had to go only fifty-five miles. There happened to be a
doctor in the lumber camp back on the Ridge."
But even winter travel is not all easy in a fifty-below-zero climate
where you can't find sticks any larger than your finger to kindle night
fire, I know the story of one fur-trader who was running along behind
his dog sleigh in this section. He had become overheated running and
had thrown his coat and cap across the sleigh, wearing only flannel
shirt, fur gauntlets, corduroy trousers and moccasins. At a bend in
the iced channel he came on a pack of mangy coyotes. Before he had
thought he had sicked the dogs on them. With a yell they were off out
of sight amid the goose grass and reeds with the sleigh and his
garments. Those reeds, remember, are sixteen feet high, stiff as broom
corn and hard on moccasins as stubble would be on bare feet. To make
matters worse, a heavy snowstorm came on. The wind was against the
direction the dogs had taken and the man hallooed himself hoarse
without an answering sound. It was two o'clock in the morning before
the wind sank and the trader found his dogs, and by that time between
sweat and cold his shirt had frozen to a board.
Such a thing as an out and out pagan hardly exists among the Indians of
the North. They are all more or less Christian with a curious mingling
of pagan superstition with the new faith. The Indian voyageurs may
laugh but they all do it--make offerings of tobacco to the Granny
Goddess of the River before setting out. In vain we threw biscuit and
orange peel and nuts to the perverse-tempered deity supposed to preside
at the bottom of those amber waters. The winds were contrary, the
waters slack, sluggish, dead, no responsive gurgle and flap of laughter
and life to the slow keel.
One channel but opened on another. Even the limestone ridges had
vanished far to rear, and the stillness of night fell with such a flood
of sunset light as Turner never dreamed in his wildest color
intoxications. There would be the wedge-shaped line of the wild geese
against a flaming sky--a far honk--then stillness. Then the flackering
quacking call of a covey of ducks with a hum of wings right over our
shoulders; then no sound but the dip of our paddles and the drip and
ripple of the dead waters among the reeds. Suddenly there lifted
against the lonely red sunset sky--a lob stick--a dark evergreen
stripped below the tip to mark some Indian camping place, or vow, or
sacred memory. We steered for it. A little flutter of leaves like a
clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we
rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch
canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba'tiste Buck--eighty years old he
was--squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to
nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than
an emperor--the first living being we had seen for a week in the
muskegs. We camped together that night on the sandbars--trading Sam
Ba'tiste flour and matches for a couple of ducks. He had been
storm-stead camping in the goose grass for three days. Do you think he
was to be pitied? Don't! Three days' hunting will lay up enough meat
for Sam for the winter. In the winter he will snare some small game,
while mink and otter and muskrat skins will provide him flour and
clothes from the fur-trader. Each of Sam's sons is earning seven
hundred dollars a year hunting big game on the rock ridge farther
north--more than illiterate, unskilled men earn in eastern lands. Then
in spring Sam will emerge from his cabin, build another birch canoe and
be off to the duck and wild geese haunts. When we paddled away in the
morning, Sam still camped on the sand bank. He sat squat whittling
away at kin-a-kin-ic, or the bark of the red willow, the hunter's free
tobacco. In town Sam would be poverty-stricken, hungry, a beggar.
Here he is a lord of his lonely watery domain, more independent and
care-free than you are--peace to his aged bones!
Another night coming through the muskegs we lost ourselves. We had
left our Indian at the fur post and trusted to follow southwest two
hundred miles to the next fur post by the sun, but there was no sun,
only heavy lead-colored clouds with a rolling wind that whipped the
amber waters to froth and flooded the sand banks. If there was any
current, it was reversed by the wind. We should have thwarted the main
muskeg by a long narrow channel, but mistook our way thinking to follow
the main river by taking the broadest opening. It led us into a lake
seven miles across; not deep, for every paddle stroke tangled into the
long water weed known as mermaid's hair but deep enough for trouble
when you consider the width of the lake, the lack of dry footing the
width of one's hand, and the fact that you can't offer the gun'l of a
canoe to the broadside of a big wave. We scattered our dunnage and all
three squatted in the bottom to prevent the rocking of the big canoe.
Then we thwarted and tacked and quartered to the billows for a half day.
Nightfall found us back in the channel again scudding before thunder
and a hurricane wind looking for a camping place. It had been a
back-breaking pace all day. We had tried to find relief by the
Indian's choppy strokes changing every third dip from side to side; we
had tried the white man's deep long pulling strokes; and by seven in
the evening with the thunder rolling behind and not a spot of dry land
visible the size of one's foot, backs began to feel as if they might
break in the middle. Our canoe and dunnage weighed close on seven
hundred pounds. Suddenly we shot out of the amber channel into a
shallow lagoon lined on each side by the high tufted reeds, but the
reeds were so thin we could see through them to lakes on each side. A
whirr above our heads and a flock of teal almost touched us with their
wings. Simultaneously all three dropped paddles--all three were
speechless. The air was full of voices. You could not hear yourself
think. We lapped the canoe close in hiding to the thin lining of
reeds. I asked, "Have those little sticks drifted down fifteen hundred
miles to this lagoon of dead water?"
"Sticks," my guide repeated, "it isn't sticks--it isn't drift--it's
birds--it's duck and geese--I have never seen anything like it--I have
lived west more than twenty years and I never heard tell of
anything--of anything like it."
Anything like it? I had lived all my life in the West and I had never
heard or dreamed any oldest timer tell anything like it! For seven
miles, you could not have laid your paddle on the water without
disturbing coveys of geese and duck, geese and duck of such variety as
I have never seen classified or named in any book on birds. We sat
very still behind the hiding of reed and watched and watched. We
couldn't talk. We had lost ourselves in one of the secluded breeding
places of wild fowl in the North. I counted dozens and dozens of moult
nests where the duck had congregated before their long flight south.
That was the night we could find camping ground only by building a
foundation of reeds and willows, then spreading oilcloth on top; and
all night our big tent rocked to the wind; for we had roped it to the
thwarts of the canoe. Next day when we reached the fur post, the chief
trader told us any good hunter could fill his canoe--the big, white
banded, gray canoe of the company, not the little, seven banded, birch
craft--with birds to the gun'l in two hours' shooting on that lake.
That muskeg is only one of thousands, when you go seventy miles north
of the Saskatchewan, sixty miles east of Athabasca Lake. That muskeg
and its like, covering an area two-thirds of all Europe, is the home of
all the little furs, mink and muskrat and fisher and otter and rabbit
and ermine, the furs that clothe--not princes and millionaire, who buy
silver fox and sea otter--but you and me and the rest of us whose
object is to keep warm, not to show how much we can spend. Out of that
one muskeg hundreds of thousands of little pelts have been taken since
1754 when Anthony Hendry, the smuggler, came the first of the
fur-traders inland from the Bay. And the game--save in the year of the
unexplained rabbit pest--shows no sign of diminishing.
Does it sound very much to you like a region where the settler would
ultimately drive out the fur trade? What would he settle on? That is
the point. Nature has taken good care that climate and swamp shall
erect an everlasting barrier to encroachment on her game preserves.
To be sure, if you ask a fur-trader, "How are furs?" he will answer,
"Poor--poorer every year." So would you if you were a fur-trader and
wanted to keep out rivals. I have never known a fur-trader who did not
make that answer.
To be sure, seal and sea otter, beaver and buffalo have been almost
exterminated; but even to-day if the governments of the world,
especially Canada and the United States, would pass and enforce laws
prohibiting the killing of a single buffalo or beaver, seal or sea
otter for fifty years, these species would replenish themselves.
"The last chapter of the fur trade has been written?" Never! The
oldest industry of mankind will last as long as mankind lasts.
V
I read also that "the last chapter of the fur romance has been
written." That is the point of view of the man who spends fifty weeks
in town and two weeks in the wilds. It is not the point of view of the
man who spends two weeks in town and fifty in the wilds; of the man who
goes out beyond the reach of law into strange realms the size of Russia
with no law but his own right arm, no defense but his own wit. Though
I have written history of the Hudson's Bay Company straight from their
own Minutes in Hudson's Bay House, London, I could write more of the
romance of the fur trade right in the present year than has ever been
penned of the company since it was established away back in the year
1670.
Space permits only two examples. You recall the Cambridge man who
thought it a short distance to go only fifty-five miles by dog-train
for a doctor. A more cultured, scholarly, perfect gentleman I have
never met in London or New York. Yet when I met his wife, I found her
a shy little, part-Indian girl, who had almost to be dragged in to meet
us. That spiritual face--such a face as you might see among the
preachers of Westminster or Oxford--and the little shy Indian girl-wife
and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not
to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the
story of heartache and tragedy--I asked myself, as we stood in our tent
door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under
a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their
beauty and their splendor? How often he must have stood beneath those
northern lights thinking out the heartbreak that has no end.
I did not learn the story till I had come on down to civilization and
town again. That Cambridge man had come out from England flush with
the zeal of the saint to work among the Indians. In the Indian school
where he taught he had met his Fate--the thing he probably
scouted--that fragile type of Indian beauty almost fawn-like in its
elusiveness, pure spirit from the very prosaic fact that the seeds of
mortal disease are already snapping the ties to life. It is a type you
never see near the fur posts. You have to go to the far outer
encampments, where white vices have not polluted the very air. He fell
in love. What was he to do? If he left her to her fate, she would go
back to the inclement roughness of tepee life mated to some Indian
hunter, or fall victim to the brutal admiration of some of those white
sots who ever seek hiding in the very wilderness. He married her and
had of course to resign his position as teacher in the school. He took
a position with the company and lived no doubt in such happiness as
only such a spiritual nature could know; but the seeds of the disease
which gave her such unearthly beauty ripened. She died. What was to
become of the children? If he sent them back to England, they would be
wretched and their presence would be misunderstood. If he left them
with her relatives, they would grow up Indians. If he kept them he
must have a mother for them, so he married another trader's
daughter--the little half-breed girl--and chained himself to his rock
of Fate as fast as ever martyr was bound in Grecian myth; and there he
lives to-day. The mail comes in only once in three months in summer;
only once in six in winter. He is the only white man on a watery
island two hundred miles from anywhere except when the lumbermen come
to the Ridge, or the Indian agent arrives with the treaty money once a
year.
And "the last chapter of the fur romance has been written"?
"The last chapter of the fur romance" will not have been written as
long as frost and muskeg provide a habitat for furtive game, and strong
men set forth to traverse lone places with no defense but their own
valiant spirit.
The other example is of a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and
Chicago and St. Paul--Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the
Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own
words--in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid
the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing
and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening
counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around
his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in
British Columbia--a sort of American Trossachs on a colossal scale. He
had been sent eastward with a party to bring some furs across from
MacLeod Lake in the most heavily wooded mountains. It was mid-winter.
Fort MacLeod was short of provisions. On their way back travel proved
very heavy and slow. Snow buried the beaten trail, and travel off it
plunged men and horses through snow crust into a criss-cross tangle of
underbrush and windfall. The party ran out of food. It was thought if
Hall, the youngest and lightest, could push ahead on snowshoes to
Stuart Lake, he could bring out a rescue party with food.
He set off without horse or gun and with only a lump of tallow in his
pocket as food. The distance was seventy-five miles. At first he ran
on winged feet--feet winged with hunger; but it began to snow heavily
with a wind that beat in his face and blew great gusts of snow pack
down from the evergreen branches overhead; and even feet winged with
hunger and snowshoes clog from soft snow and catch derelict branches
sticking up through the drifts. By the time you have run half a day
beating against the wind, reversing your own tracks to find the chipped
mark on the bark of the trees to keep you on the blazed trail--you are
hungry. Hall began to nibble at his tallow as he ran and to snatch
handfuls of snow to quench his thirst. At night he kindled a roaring
big white-man fire against the wolves, dried out the thawed snow from
his back and front, dozed between times, sang to keep the loneliness
off, heard the muffled echo come back to him in smothered voice, and at
first streak of dawn ran on, and on, and on.
By the second night Hall had eaten all his tallow. He had also reefed
in his belt so that his stomach and spine seemed to be camping
together. The snow continued to fall. The trees swam past him as he
ran. And the snowdrifts lifted and fell as he jogged heavily forward.
Of course, he declared to himself, he was not dizzy. It was the snow
blindness or the drifts. He was well aware the second night that if he
would have let himself he would have dug a sleeping hole in the snow
and wrapped himself in a snow blanket and slept and slept; but he
thrashed himself awake, and set out again, dead heavy with sleep, weak
from fatigue, staggering from hunger; and the wings on his feet had
become weighted with lead.
He knew it was all up with him when he fell. He knew if he could get
only a half hour's sleep, it would freshen him up so he could go on.
Lots of winter travelers have known that in the North; and they have
taken the half hour's sleep; and another half hour's; and have never
wakened. Anyway, something wakened Hall. He heard the crackle of a
branch. That was nothing. Branches break to every storm, but this was
like branches breaking under a moccasin. It was unbelievable; there
was not the slightest odor of smoke, unless the dream odor of his own
delirious hunger; but not twenty paces ahead crackled an Indian fire,
surrounded by buckskin tepees, Indians warming themselves by the fire.
With an unspeakable revulsion of hope and hunger, Hall flung to his
feet and dashed into the middle of the encampment. Then a tingling
went over his body like the wakening from death, of frost to
life--blind stabbing terror obsessed his body and soul; for the fire
was smokeless, the figures were speechless, transparent, unaware of his
presence, very terribly still. His first thought was that he had come
on some camp hopeless from the disaster of massacre or starvation.
Then he knew this was no earthly camp. He could not tell how the
figures were clothed or what they were. Only he knew they were not
men. He did not even think of ghosts. All he knew was it was a death
fire, a death silence, death tepees, death figures. He fled through
the woods knowing only death was behind him--running and running, and
never stopping till he dropped exhausted across the fort doorstep at
two in the morning. He blurted out why he had come. Then he lapsed
unconscious. They filled him with rum. It was twenty-four hours
before he could speak.
"I don't know these modern theories about hallucination and delusions
and things," concluded Mr. Hall, gazing reflectively on the memories of
that night. "I'm not much on romance and that kind of thing! I don't
believe in ghosts. I don't know what it was. All I know is it scared
me so it saved my life, and it saved the lives of the rest, too; for
the relief party got out in time, though they didn't see a sign of any
Indian camp. I don't know what to make of it, unless years ago some
Indian camp had been starved or massacred there, and owing to my
unusual condition I got into some clairvoyant connection with that
past. However, there it is; and it would take a pretty strong argument
to persuade me I didn't see anything. All the other things I thought I
saw on that trip certainly existed, and it would be a queer thing if
the one thing which saved my life did not exist. That's all I know,
and you can make anything you like of it."
So while Canada resents being regarded as a fur land, her domain of the
North sends down something more than roaring winds--though winds are
good things to shake dead leaves off the soul as well as off trees.
Her domain of the North rears more than fur-bearing animals. It rears
a race with hardihood, with dauntlessness, with quiet dogged unspeaking
courage; and that is something to go into the blood of a nation. A man
who will run on snowshoes eighteen hundred miles behind a dog-train as
a Senator I know did in his youth, and a woman of middle life, who will
"come out"--as they say in the North--and study medicine at her own
expense that she may minister to the Indians where she lives--are not
types of a race to lie down whipped under Fate. Canada will do things
in the world of nations shortly. She may do them rough-handed; but
what she does will depend on the national ideals she nurtures to-day;
and into those ideals has entered the spirit of the Domain of the North.