Quebec province, on the Lower St. Lawrence, for hundreds of miles
north and east of the river is filled with myriads of lakes and
streams that are the haunts of the hunter and angler, and the
Government gets considerable revenue from the fishery rentals. As far
away as five hundred miles from Quebec, up in Labrador, is the
Natashquin River, and eight hundred miles down the St. Lawrence is the
Little Esquimau, these being the most distant fishery grounds. Among
the noted fishing streams are the grand Cascapedia, the Metapedia, the
Upsalquitch, the Patapedia, the Quatawamkedgewick (usually called, for
short, the "Tom Kedgewick"), and the Restigouche, on the southern side
of the Lower St. Lawrence, their waters being described as flowing out
to "the undulating and voluptuous Bay of Chaleurs, full of long folds,
of languishing contours, which the wind caresses with fan-like breath,
and whose softened shores receive the flooding of the waves without a
murmur." Around the great Lake St. John there is also a maze of lakes
and fishery streams. The most noted Canadian fishery organization is
the "Restigouche Salmon Club," having its club-house on the
Restigouche River, at its junction with the Metapedia, and controlling
a large territory. The guides in this region are usually Micmac
Indians, who have been described on account of their energy as the
"Scotch-Irish Indians." This tribe originally inhabited the whole of
Lower Canada south of the St. Lawrence, being found there by Cartier,
and the French named them the Sourequois or "Salt-Water Indians,"
because they lived on the seacoast. They were staunch allies of the
French, who converted them to Christianity from being sun-worshippers.
They have a reservation near Campbellton, on the Restigouche, and a
populous village surrounding a Catholic church. There are now about
seven thousand of them, all told, throughout the provinces. Glooscap
was the mythical chief of the Micmacs, whose power and genius were
shown throughout all the region from New England to Gaspé. He was of
unknown origin, and invincible, and he conquered the "great Beaver,
feared by beasts and men," on the river Kennebecasis, near St. John.
Glooscap's favorite home and beaver-pond was the Basin of Minas, in
Nova Scotia, where afterwards dwelt Longfellow's Evangeline. Micmac
traditions describe him as the "envoy of the Great Spirit," who lived
above in a great wigwam, and was always attended by an aged dame and
a beautiful youth. He had the form and habits of humanity, and taught
his tribe how to hunt and fish, to build wigwams and canoes, and to
heal diseases. He controlled the elements and overthrew all enemies of
his people; but the tradition adds that on the approach of the
English, the great Glooscap, "finding that the ways of beasts and men
waxed evil," turned his huge hunting-dogs into stone, and his huntsmen
into restless and wailing loons, and then he vanished.
The route to the angling waters of the great Lake St. John is by
railway northward from Quebec. It goes up the valley of St. Charles
River, past Lorette, where beautiful cascades turn the mill-wheels.
Here are gathered the scanty halfbreed remnant of the Hurons, once the
most powerful and ferocious tribe in Canada, who drove out the
Iroquois and compelled their migration down to New York State. These
Indians are said to have been Wyandots, but when the French saw them,
with their hair rising in bristling ridges above their painted
foreheads, the astonished beholders exclaimed, "Quelles hures!" (what
boars!) and hence the name of Huron came to them. The railroad goes
for two hundred miles past lakes and streams, and through the dense
forests of these remote Laurentian mountains, until it finally comes
out on the lake shore at the ancient mission town of "Our Lady of
Roberval," now become, through the popularity of the district, a
modern watering-place. This great Lake St. John, so much admired by
the Canadian and American anglers, was called by the Indians the
Picouagomi, or "Flat Lake," and it is in a region shaped much like a
saucer, lying in a hollow, with hills rising up into mountains in the
background all around. The lake is thirty miles long and about
twenty-five miles across, having no less than nineteen large rivers,
besides smaller ones flowing into it from the surrounding mountains,
the vast accumulation of waters being carried off by the Saguenay. The
immense flow of some of these rivers may be realized when it is known
that the Mistassini, coming down from the northward, is three hundred
miles long, and the Peribonka four hundred miles long, while the
Ouiatchouan from the south, just before reaching the lake, dashes down
a grand cascade, two hundred and eighty feet high, making an elongated
sheet of perfectly white foam.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, this wonderful lake and
its immense tributaries were scarcely known to white men, yet upon its
shores stood Notre Dame de Roberval and St. Louis Chambord, two of the
oldest Jesuit Indian missions in America. For more than two centuries,
until the angler and lumberman began going to this remote wilderness,
it was a buried paradise in the distant woods, without inhabitants,
excepting a few Montaignais and their priests, and a scattered post or
two of the Hudson Bay Company, whose occasional expeditions over to
Quebec for supplies were the only communication with the outer world.
The solid graystone church and convent stand in bold relief among the
neat little white French cottages at Roberval, there are an immense
sawmill and a modern hotel, while in front is the grand sweep of the
lake, like a vast inland sea, its opposite shore almost beyond vision,
excepting where a far-away mountain spur may loom just above the
horizon. Here lives the famous ouananiche of the salmon family, called
"land-locked," because it is believed he is unable to get out to other
waters. He is a gamey and magnificent fish, with dark-blue back and
silvery sides, mottled with olive spots, thus literally clothed in
purple and fine silver. He has enormous strength, making him the
champion finny warrior of the Canadian waters. The chief fishery
ground for him is in the swirling rapids of the Grand Discharge. The
native Montaignais, or "mountaineer" Indian of this region, is a most
expert angler, seducing the royal fish with an inartistic lump of fat
pork on the end of a line from his frail canoe among the rapids, and
hooking the game more effectively than the costliest rod and reel in
the hands of a "tenderfoot." These dusky, consumptive-looking,
copper-colored Indians spend the winters in the unexplored wilds of
the Mistassini, and wander through all the wilderness as far as Hudson
Bay. When the snows are gone, they bring in the pelts of the beaver,
otter, fox and bear, to trade at the Company posts, and living in
rude birch-bark huts on the bank of the lake, spend the summer in
fishing, and pick up a few dollars as boatmen and guides.