THE HERO PRIESTS OF THE NORTH
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear thro' life like a torch in flame,
And falling, fling to the host behind,
'Play up! Play up! and play the game!'--NEWBOLT.
"For long years," said a Toronto editor the other day, "this country
has produced few outstanding personalities except politicians."
Here spoke the little Canadian. By this country he meant the provinces
to the south of the Great Lakes. Think of that! Think of that!
Why, man dear, north of the lakes we have outstanding personalities to
burn--and we burn them. And, here and now, let me say that under the
northern lights, politicians must, perforce, take a third or even a
fourth estate, for always we have to reckon with the missionary priest,
the business man, and the real-estate agent, before we begin to
consider the politician. Even then, I am not so sure but the editor
and the railway boss take precedence of the politician. In this large,
airy land, politicians are truly but small fry from small
places--inconsequential ephemera, who age in a heart-beat and die.
If I had realized at the start this was to be a chapter on the
outstanding personalities among the missionary priests, I would have
begun differently. I would have said that the Anglo-Saxon hungers for
heroes, but that the heroes were rare--that this was why the raw,
ragged wolf-land lying about the Hudson Bay and along the stretches of
the Mackenzie River was of deep and peculiar interest, in that it had
the distinction of producing crops of heroes and that the breed never
seemed to run out.
I would have said that the story of the northern priest is the story of
a man with an ideal, or, if you will have it so, with a dream; that the
dream is one that disturbs his ease and leads him in perils often.
I would have gone further and shown this boy o' dreams to be at the
same time a supreme realist and, without question, one of the highest
types of human excellence in the last half-century; that he has the
dauntless spirit of the soldier, the enthusiasm of the explorer, the
enterprise of the merchant, and the patriotism of the statesman, and
all for the sole object of helping humanity. In a word, that he is a
special soul and must not be judged as general.
It is to be regretted I did not begin this way, but, to quote the Roman
governor who gave judgment concerning the Nazarene: "What I have
written, I have written."
... Among the missionary priests of the North there is, to-day, no
greater outstanding personality than Bishop Stringer of the diocese of
the Mackenzie River.
I used to know him years agone when he was Isaac Stringer, divinity
student, a lusty young fellow, lean and clean and strong of wind, who
could carry a ball down the field past all antagonists and send it
spinning through the goal. When I say he has grown stout since those
days, you must not make the deduction that he is under-worked and
overfed like other bishops of whom we have heard tell. On the contrary
part, north of 53 deg. it is our profligate custom to starve all
dignitaries. Indeed, it was only last winter that Bishop Stringer, on
his way across the divide from the Mackenzie River to the Yukon, nearly
lost his life from starvation. He and his companion, Charles F.
Johnson, were lost in a mountain fog and missed the trail. Southern
folk who sit in offices and parlours do not grasp the full meaning of
this, and I cannot very well explain except to say that Dante had an
exceedingly fine insight when he made the Inferno foggy.
For a week, in deep snow and deeper fog, they wandered in and out of
Fool's River, the irony of which could not fail to rub them sore.
Returning to the Fool's mouth, they spent three days making snow-shoes
and cutting up moccasins for webbing. From here they ascended the
height of land and crossed three divides before finding an east-flowing
river. But again the fog descended and now came the fight for life.
On and on they wandered, day after day, scarcely able to see a foot
ahead and more than once treading on the verge of a precipice.
They had been living on a daily ration of a spoonful of flour and rice
and the half of a red squirrel each. But even this gave out, and the
sorely beset men tried eating moccasin leather, and ended on muckalucks
or messinke boots. For the benefit of the uninitiated, I would explain
that muckalucks are contrived out of raw sealskin. Bishop Stringer has
since told me that when he had divided the food, his companion assigned
the portions, and _vice versa_. This is one of the trail's lessons.
At last, after eleven days of blind stumbling, they came out at an
Indian camp on the Peel River. Twenty miles further down, at the
Hudson's Bay Fort, the factor weighed the much-emaciated men and found
that each had lost fifty pounds.
In his letter to his wife, who was visiting in Kincardine, Ontario, the
Bishop says of his experiences: "The one thing that made us unhappy was
that you and the others might worry about us when we did not turn up.
But this feeling wore off when it meant a matter of life or death, and
day after day we wondered how long we would last--whether you would
ever hear from us. You can imagine we were much in prayer, and over
and over again reconsecrated ourselves to the Master's service."
This Bishop of Mackenzie River is surely an outstanding personality,
and reminds me of what Robert Louis Stevenson said of the late John
Chalmers, a missionary of New Guinea: "You can't weary me of that
fellow," he asserted; "he is as big as a house and far bigger than any
church."
Bishop Stringer's predecessor in the diocese was William Carpenter
Bompas, the Apostle of the North, the man who has been classified by
the Church Missionary Society as "indisputably the most
self-sacrificing bishop in the world."
His diocese, too, was the largest in the world, consisting of one
million square miles. It had the same peculiarity as Bobbie Burns's
"cauld, cauld kirk"---there were "in't but few."
William Bompas went North in 1865 and stayed there forty years, coming
out only twice. On the first of these occasions he returned to England
to be elevated to the episcopate.
The only medical training the Bishop had under gone was a short course
in the treatment of snowblindness, and this when he went to England for
his consecration. This is a form of blindness that causes great
suffering among the Indians, and the Bishop had himself been stricken
with it on several occasions. On one of these, stumbling painfully at
every step, he was led by an Eskimo boy for seventy-five miles.
Writing of his agonies, he says: "They are delights. The first
foot-prints on earth made by our risen Saviour were the nail-marks of
suffering, and for the spread of the gospel, too, am prepared to
suffer."
Like Stringer, Bompas also endured frequent starvation, but seldom
spoke of it as a personal happening, but rather as applying to
others--a virtue most hard and difficult to be practised. Writing
about it to a friend in England, he said: "Horses were killed for food
and furs eaten at several of the posts. The Indians had to eat a good
many of their beaver skins."
Another man who endured the privations of the pioneer in this district
is the present Bishop of Keewatin, Joseph Lofthouse.
The most interesting, and certainly the most romantic story of his
career, is that of his marriage. His sweetheart, a young English girl,
was due to arrive on the yearly vessel of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Lofthouse travelled several hundred miles to meet her, but found she
had not come, being unavoidably detained in England. The following
summer he made the same journey, but this time as the vessel pulled up
the harbour, he was able to single out the lassie's face on the deck.
Yes, sir! if you had lived among Eskimos and Indians all these years,
you, too, would tremble and choke in the throat at the ship's rope hit
the mooring-post.
But now the young couple found themselves in as trying a predicament as
the Israelites with the sea in front, Pharaoh's army behind, and
unscalable rocks on either side. In a word, there was no minister to
marry them. Things looked badly for them, and the lassie was thinking
of returning home, when it suddenly occurred to the captain that, on
the open sea, according to law, he was entitled to act as a magistrate.
It was not long till the good ship slipped her moorings and stood out
into the sweep of the Atlantic, where to a time-honoured form, the
minister and the girl plighted their troth, symbolized it by the gift
of a ring, and ratified it by the authority of the state, in the name
of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
This is a good enough story to end with, but there are other
outstanding personalities I must mention.
There is Bishop Holmes,[1] who resides at Athabasca Landing, and who
has had many interesting experiences among the redskins. Like all true
northmen, the Bishop speaks in a quiet, low tone, admirably adapted to
the art of narrative. Once for weeks, he took charge of a Weetigo or
Weendigo Indian, in order to protect him from relatives who sought to
take his life. The man believed himself to be a cannibal, for in some
strange way the idea had been suggested to him. After a time, the
hallucination passed away, and the man returned to the camp.
Until comparatively recent years, the untutored redmen believed that
people who were insane or in delirium were either obsessed or possessed
of an evil spirit, and that it was necessary to kill them in order to
prevent this spirit from entering into others. The plight of the
relatives in these cases was pitiable; they could not allow a violently
insane man or woman at large, and the killing was usually performed
with great grief. This custom has fallen into desuetude, for, since
the advent of the Mounted Police, the perpetrators are treated as
murderers and accordingly hanged. The most arduous duty of the police
is the bringing in of demented Indians or white prospectors from the
North. It is a task that has, in turn, driven a stalwart redcoat
insane. One's nerves are apt to snap when, for weeks, you sleep o'
nights in the snow roped to a maniac.
And there was Rev. Henry Irwin, better known as Father Pat. He was a
railroad priest on the Canadian Pacific, and, because of his unselfish
work among them, became the idol of men. There are some misguided folk
who think of a priest as a feeble, microcephalous body with a black
coat, a shovel hat, and a superb ignorance of the ways of the world.
There are, we own, some priests like this, but Father Pat was not one
of them. Indeed, his dress and deportment were such as to often cause
scandal to good church folk who were not so conversant with his noble
deeds and self-abnegation as were the railroad navvies and gold-miners.
Father Pat had only been married a year when his wife and baby died,
and, not so long after, he was found almost frozen to death in a
snow-bank, from the results of which he died. Here was an elementary
man fighting the elements. The North stands at salute.
Nor were the Roman Catholic missionaries less self-denying, or in any
way smaller men than their Protestant co-workers. There was Bishop
Breynat who froze his feet and amputated his toes with a penknife.
"Sirs, it's bitter beneath the Bear."
In 1869-70, at St. Albert, the ecclesiastical head-quarters of the
Catholic Church in Alberta, Father Leduc, a complete Christian, nursed
the Indians who were sick with the small-pox until he contracted it
himself. Then the other priests in turn fell in line as nurses until
every man was a victim of the disease.
It is a scene that reminds one of Sir Walter Scott's romance where the
clansman and his seven sons all fell for the chieftain, stepping forth
gladly into the gap and crying: "One more for Eachim."
While the priests lay ill an Indian came for one of them to administer
the last rites of the Church to his mother. What was done? You never
could guess unless you lived in the North, so I may as well tell you.
A young priest rolled his blankets closer about, gave orders to his
attendants to carry him to the waiting sleigh, and, in this condition,
made the painful journey. Mattress and all, he was borne into the
sick-room, where he administered the viaticum to the dying woman.
Father Lacombe, whose good grey head all men know, is the pioneer
missionary of Alberta. He is eighty-three years of age, and sixty-one
of these years have been spent in the service of the North. The story
of his life sounds like a new Acts of the Apostles. In the
science-ridden centuries to come, when these first white wanderers in
boreal regions will be almost mythical characters, tradition will love
to weave about them stories of romance and mystery--dramatic,
preternatural stories such as we frame to-day about SS. Patrick,
Augustine and Albanus.
Perhaps the most interesting event in Lord Strathcona's visit last year
to Alberta was his meeting again with Pere Lacombe. It was in the
Government House gardens at Edmonton, overlooking the Saskatchewan
River. All the guests fell back out of earshot while the aged men
clasped hands and talked over other days and of the boys who had long
since crossed the height of land to the ultimate sea.
At the present time Pere Lacombe is living at Midnapore, near Calgary,
in a home for poor old folk and children, the money to build which he
collected himself.
... And there is the story of Father Goiffon who was frozen near
Emerson on the eve of All Saints' Day, 1860. It was told to me by
Father Lestanc,[2] who, eighty years ago, was born at Brest in
Brittany. Father Lestanc has been fifty-five years in the West and
North, nineteen of which were spent at St. Boniface under Bishop Tache.
In spite of his extreme age, Lestanc has a hardy-moulded figure, and a
strong, clear voice. One cannot listen to him for long without being
impressed by his affectional force and broad reach of humanity. He is
not clear about things of yesterday, but take him back over the decades
and his memory rings true as a bell.
Goiffon had been at St. Paul, Minneapolis, making the yearly purchases
for his mission. Among other things he bought a city-bred horse to
carry him home. Fifty years ago St. Paul was seventeen days' journey
from Emerson, on the border-line, and folk travelled in caravans.
One day's journey from Emerson, Father Goiffon left the party that he
might push on the more rapidly and reach his mission post to say Mass
on All Saints' Day. To use a northern colloquialism, he travelled
light, carrying with him but one meal and no blanket. Neither had he
matches or an axe, for, bear in mind, he was only a young priest, and
he hoped to be in his shack by fall of night.
Soon after noonday there blew up a blinding snow-storm that made
progress impossible. A usurping, all-invading sheet of snow settled
down over the plains and turned the air into a white darkness. The man
tied his horse to a willow shrub and lay down in the snow. The hours
passed painfully on, but the youth kept his head buried in his saddle
that his face might not freeze. When at last he looked up, he found
his horse dead by his side. I told you a bit ago, it was a city-bred
horse and no trailer.
And now came the fight for life. The boy priest had no shelter but the
flaccid, unstrung body of his horse, already cold in death. I do not
know about the pain of the night, except that at the edge of day, one
foot and leg were frozen and the toes of the other, so that he could
not stand upright. I wonder if he heard the bell from his home in
France as he lay in the snow! They say men do. Something must have
been sounding in his ears, for he did not hear the caravan as it passed
him in the morning.
At midday he cut a piece of flesh off the horse and ate it.
"A crude diet, Mon Pere," I remark.
"Oui, oui," replies the old Breton. "What you Anglais call a
'sleepshod' dinnaire! What would you, Madame? One must browse where
he is tethered."
The rescue party from Emerson met a man and boy hauling in the stricken
priest on a sledge. They had heard him sobbing in the snow.
The Indians doctored him for six weeks until his limbs threatened to
drop off, and then sent a runner to St. Boniface to ask Father Lestanc
what they would do with him. This happened fifty years ago, but Father
Lestanc must walk to the window and look out into the garden for a
while before he can trust his voice.
For men and dogs it was a round run of one hundred and forty miles from
St. Boniface to Emerson, but in twenty-four hours Goiffon lay in Bishop
Tache's palace at St. Boniface, on the banks of the Red River. Dr.
Bunn, the physician at the Hudson's Bay post across at Fort Garry,
awaited his arrival and amputated the already putrefied members. The
next morning Goiffon was found to be bleeding to death; the stitches
would not hold and the veins were open. Nothing could be done but to
calmly await the end.
Father Lestanc broke the news to the household, whereupon the sorrowing
but withal practical sister in charge of the kitchen placed a caldron
of buffalo tallow on the stove, for, explains my narrator, "a priest's
wake requires many, many candles."
The little serving-maids under the sister, doubtless whispering over
the sad happenings upstairs, forgot to watch the pot, so that it
"swelled much, Madame," over the red-hot stove till all the house was
on fire.
Do not scold the girls, but wait till I tell you. Such a thing was
never heard of. It was really Le Bon Dieu who permitted the house and
cathedral to burn. There is no doubt of it, for, when the priest
carried the dying youth out and laid him on the snow, the frost
congealed the blood so that his veins ceased to empty themselves.
This was fifty years ago, and last summer, Father Goiffon came up from
Petit Canada, near St. Paul, to attend a cathedral service at Winnipeg,
on the site of Old Fort Garry.
"Oui, Madame, oui, I comprehend when you say _similia similibus
curcantur_. Literally, eet ees a frost kills, a frost cures. Eet ees
a well thing the body ees so adaptive."
... And once Bishop Grandin was lost in the snow. It was in 1863, near
Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.
With one Indian boy he was crossing the lake on the ice, following in
the wake of a party of Hudson's Bay Company men. The Bishop's dogs
were tired and fell behind. When a storm blew up he lost the trail.
The thermometer was at forty degrees below zero, and the storm was what
Father Lestanc calls a "poudrerie"--that is to say, a storm where the
snow blows up like fine powder. This does not sound unpleasant, but as
an actuality it is, in the extreme North, a sinister snow that bites
your face like driven needles.
The Bishop had no guide but the wind, and when a storm rises the wind
veers. He gave the dogs their head, but even their homing instinct
failed them in the storm and night, so that they crouched on the ice
and howled in unison with the little Indian boy.
At dawn the boy said he smelled smoke, for he was an Indian, and smoke
travels far in the clear, winnowed air of the North.
On looking to the west they sighted land, and after a painful journey
met a dog-train coming toward them with men--the boy's father and
uncle. The priest was celebrating a Mass for the repose of the
Bishop's soul when he arrived, for "Les sauvages," says my informant,
"had declared the Bishop would be frozen to the middle of hees heart.
Ah, leetle Madam! Whom Le Bon Dieu guards are well guarded."
I did not know about this Father Lestanc before. I thought he was
merely an old Oblate Brother passing from the sixth to the seventh
stage of man's little day. Now I know him for one of the outstanding
personalities of the North, and, as such, would do him honour, even I
who am of the world, worldly. I know things about him that happened
years and years ago when this was no man's land. I know how once he
nursed and buried a young man whose companions had abandoned him to die
at Rat Creek, near Portage la Prairie.
The man had gone into the Indian camps against the wishes of his
fellow-teamsters who were travelling from Fort Garry to Fort Charlton.
But he was a gamester, and he went. This was how he contracted
small-pox, and the reason his companions were forced to leave him to
fight death for himself with a little supply of pemmican and some
bannocks as his sole backers. You may not have noticed that the life
of a gamester and the race-horse are short ones in the north-west, but
it is, nevertheless, indubitably true, and this case was no exception
to the rule. His name? I do not know. One forgets names in the
oblivious West.
Father Lestanc rolled the loathsome body in a blanket and decently
buried it, for the buffalo hunters had learned that in cases of
small-pox the healthiest thing a traveller can do is to mind his own
special business.
"Did any one else catch the disease?" I ask.
"Non, non, no one else."
The old man muses a little, for he is growing tired, and this was fifty
years ago. Suddenly memory floods in on him and he shows distress:
"Pardon, Madam, pardon! I took eet. Oui, I took eet."
[1] Since deceased.
[2] Since deceased.