Far over to the northward, across the broad river, is ancient
Tadousac, enclosed by the guarding mountains at the entrance to the
Saguenay. The harbor and landing are within a small rounded bay,
having the Salmon Hatching House of the Dominion alongside the wharf,
a cascade pouring down the hillside behind, and a little white inn
prettily perched above on a shelf of rock. The village spreads over
irregular terraces, encircling three of these little rounded bays,
beyond which the narrow Saguenay chasm goes off westward through the
mountains into a savage wilderness. This place has been a trading-post
with the Indians for over three centuries, and the ancient buildings
of the Hudson Bay Company testify to the traffic in furs, once so
good, which has become almost obsolete. It was visited by Cartier in
1535, and afterwards was established as one of the earliest missions
of the Jesuits, who came here in 1599 and raised the cross among the
Nasquapees of the Saguenay--the "upright men," as they called
themselves,--and the Montaignais, both then powerful tribes, which
have since entirely disappeared from this region, having withdrawn to
its upper waters, around and beyond Lake St. John. The old chapel,
replacing the original Jesuit church--said to have been the first
erected in North America--stands down by the waterside, a diminutive,
peak-roofed, one-story building, kept as a memorial of the past, for
the people now worship in a fine new stone church farther up the
rounded hill-slope. These knoll-like rounded hills or mamelons named
the place, for they are numerous, and Tadousac, literally a "nipple,"
is the Indian word for them. The most valued possession of the church
is a figure of the child Jesus, originally sent to the mission by King
Louis XIV. This is the oldest settlement of the Lower St. Lawrence.
The stern and gloomy Saguenay, the largest tributary of the Lower St.
Lawrence, is one of the most remarkable rivers in the world. Its main
portion is a tremendous chasm cleft in a nearly straight line for
sixty miles in the Laurentian Mountains, through an almost unsettled
wilderness. These Laurentides make the northern shore of the St.
Lawrence for hundreds of miles below Quebec, rising into higher peaks
and ridges in the interior, and being the most ancient part of
America, the geologists telling us the waves of the Silurian Sea
washed against this range when only two small islands represented the
rest of the continent. Through this vast chasm the Saguenay brings
down the waters of Lake St. John and its many tributaries, some of
them rising in the remote north, almost up to Hudson Bay. This lower
portion of the river goes through an almost uninhabitable desert of
gloomy mountains, the tillable land being in the basin of the Upper
Saguenay and Lake St. John, the people of that valley living there in
almost complete isolation. Logs and huckleberries are the crops
produced on this savage river, the only things the sparse population
can depend upon for a living, and the fine blueberries bring them the
scant doles of ready money they ever see. The Saguenay's inky waters
have the smell of brine as they break in froth upon the shore, and
then the air-bubbles show the real color to be that of brandy. The
upper tributaries give this color as they flow out of forests of
spruce and hemlock and swamps filled with mosses and highly colored
roots and vegetable matter. Almost all the lakes and rivers of the
vast wilderness north of the St. Lawrence present a similar
appearance, their rapids and waterfalls, seen under the sunshine,
seeming like sheets of liquid amber.
The vast accumulations of waters gathered from the heart of the
Laurentides by the tributaries of Lake St. John flow down the rapids
below the lake in a stream rivalling those of Niagara. Thus the
Saguenay comes into being in the form of lusty twins--the Grand
Discharge and the Little Discharge--deep and narrow river channels
worn in the rocks. For some miles they run separately through rapids
and pools, finally joining at the foot of Alma Island, where begin
the Gervais Rapids, four miles long. The Grand Discharge is a
beautiful stream of rapids, the rippling and roaring currents flowing
through a maze of islands, while the Little Discharge is a condensed
stream, so powerful and unruly that it actually destroys the logs in
its boisterous cataracts, the government having made a "Slide," down
which the timber is run past the dangerous places. After passing
Gervais Rapids the Saguenay has a quiet reach of fifteen miles to the
Grand Ramous, the most furious cascade of all, and then a few more
miles of rapids and falls bring it to Chicoutimi, ending its wild
career where it meets the tide above Ha Ha Bay. The first bold
Frenchmen who ventured up through the stupendous and forbidding chasm
of the Lower Saguenay gave this bay its name, to show their delight at
having finally emerged from the gloomy region. At Ha Ha Bay the tide
often rises twenty-one feet, and below, the river forces its passage
with a broad channel through almost perpendicular cliffs out to the
St. Lawrence. Its great depth is noteworthy, showing what a fearful
chasm has been split open, there being in many places a mile to a mile
and a half depth, while the channel throughout averages eight hundred
feet depth. For most of the distance the river is a mile or more wide.
The original name given the river by the Montaignais was Chicoutimi,
or the "deep water," now given the village below the foot of the
rapids. The present name is a corruption of the Indian word
Saggishsékuss, meaning "a strait with precipitous banks." The sad
sublimity of the impressive chasm culminates at Eternity Bay, where on
either hand rise in stately grandeur to sixteen hundred feet elevation
above the water Cape Trinity, with its three summits, and Cape
Eternity. Ten miles above is Le Tableau, a cliff one thousand feet
high, its vast smooth front like an artist's canvas.
This sombre river, whose bed is much lower than that of the St.
Lawrence, is frozen for almost its whole course during half the year,
and snow lies on its bordering mountains until June. It makes a
saddening impression upon most visitors. Bayard Taylor compared the
Saguenay chasm to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley, describing
everything as "hard, naked, stern, silent; dark gray cliffs of
granitic gneiss rise from the pitch-black water; firs of gloomy green
are rooted in their crevices and fringe their summits; loftier ranges
of a dull indigo hue show themselves in the background, and over all
bends a pale, cold, northern sky." Another traveller calls it "a cold,
savage, inhuman river, fit to take rank with Styx and Acheron;" and
"Nature's sarcophagus," compared to which, "the Dead Sea is blooming;"
and so solitary, dreary and monotonous that it "seems to want
painting, blowing up or draining--anything, in short, to alter its
morose, quiet, eternal awe."