Agnes Deans Cameron

The New North

Published by Good Press, 2019

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4057664616234

Table of Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER I

THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG

CHAPTER II

WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING

CHAPTER III

ATHABASCA LANDING

CHAPTER IV

DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS

CHAPTER V

NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS

CHAPTER VI

FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT

CHAPTER VII

LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC

CHAPTER VIII

FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH

CHAPTER IX

SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE

CHAPTER X

PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE

CHAPTER IX

FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE

CHAPTER XII

ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO

CHAPTER XIII

FORT MACPHERSON FOLK

CHAPTER XIV

MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN

CHAPTER XV

MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD

CHAPTER XVI

THE TALE OF A WHALE

CHAPTER XVII

SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN

CHAPTER XVIII

TO MCMURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE

CHAPTER XIX

UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION

CHAPTER XX

VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE

CHAPTER XXI

FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE

CHAPTER XXII

PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE

CHAPTER XXIII

LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON

CHAPTER XXIV

HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT

ROUTES OF TRAVEL

ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO THE ARCTIC VIA THE ATHABASCA AND MACKENZIE RIVER SYSTEMS.

ROUTE FROM EDMONTON TO PEACE RIVER, VIA THE ATHABASCA RIVER (UP STREAM) , LESSER SLAVE RIVER AND LESSER SLAVE LAKE.

PEACE RIVER ROUTES:—(1) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING UP TO HUDSON'S HOPE. (2) FROM PEACE RIVER CROSSING DOWN TO FORT CHIPEWYAN.

PREFACE

Table of Contents

It is customary to write a preface. Mine shall be short. Out of a full heart, I wish to thank all the splendid people of the North who, by giving me so freely information and photographs, and chapters out of their own lives, have facilitated the writing of this story. For their spontaneous kindness to me and mine no acknowledgment that I can here make is adequate. What we feel most strongly we cannot put into words.

AGNES DEANS CAMERON.

August, 1909.

CHAPTER I

Table of Contents

THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG

Table of Contents

"We are as mendicants who wait

Along the roadside in the sun.

Tatters of yesterday and shreds

Of morrow clothe us every one.

"And some are dotards, who believe

And glory in the days of old;

While some are dreamers, harping still

Upon an unknown age of gold.

"O foolish ones, put by your care!

Where wants are many, joys are few;

And at the wilding springs of peace,

God keeps an open house for you.

"But there be others, happier few,

The vagabondish sons of God,

Who know the by-ways and the flowers,

And care not how the world may plod."

Isn't it Riley who says, Ef you want something, an' jest dead set a-longin' fer it with both eyes wet, and tears won't bring it, why, you try sweat? Well, we had tried sweat and longing for two years, with planning and hoping and the saving of nickels, and now we are off!

Shakespeare makes his man say, I will run as far as God has any ground, and that is our ambition. We are to travel north and keep on going till we strike the Arctic—straight up through Canada. Most writers who traverse The Dominion enter it at the Eastern portal and travel west by the C.P.R., following the line of least resistance till they reach the Pacific. Then they go back to dear old England and tell the world all about Canada, their idea of the half-continent being Euclid's conception of a straight line, length without breadth.

Sir Wilfred Laurier

But Canada has a third dimension, a diameter that cuts through the Belt of Wheat and Belt of Fur, beginning south at the international boundary and ending where in his winter-igloo the Arctic Eskimo lives and loves after his kind and works out his own destiny. This diameter we are to follow. To what end? Not, we hope, to come back like him who went from Dan to Beersheba to say All is barren, but to come near to the people, our fellow-Britons, in this transverse section of a country bigger than Europe. We want to see what they are doing, these Trail-Blazers of Commerce, who, a last vedette, are holding the silent places, awaiting that multitude whose coming footsteps it takes no prophet to hear.

We will take the great waterways, our general direction being that of all the world-migrations. Colonization in America has followed the trend of the great rivers, and it has ever been northward and westward—till you and I have to look southward and eastward for the graves of our ancestors. The sons and grandsons of those who conquered the St. Lawrence and built on the Mississippi have since occupied the shores of the Red, the Assiniboine, and the Saskatchewan. They are laying strong hands upon the Peace, and within a decade will be platting townships on the Athabasca, the Mackenzie, and the Slave.

There has always been a West. For the Greeks there was Sicily; Carthage was the western outpost of Tyre; and young Roman patricians conquered Gaul and speculated in real estate on the sites of London and Liverpool. But the West that we are entering upon is the Last West, the last unoccupied frontier under a white man's sky. When this is staked out, pioneering shall be no more, or Amundsen must find for us a dream-continent in Beaufort Sea.

Kipling speaks of a route unspoiled of Cook's, and we have found it. Going to the office of Thos. Cook & Son, in Chicago, with a friend who had planned a Mediterranean tour, I gently said, I wonder if you can give me information about a trip I am anxious to take this summer. The young man smiled and his tone was that which we accord to an indulged child, "I guess we can. Cook & Son give information on most places. Very well, I said, I want to go from Chicago to the Arctic by the Mackenzie River, returning home by the Peace and the Lesser Slave. Can you tell me how long it will take, what it will cost, and how I make my connections? He was game; he didn't move an eyebrow, but went off to the secret recesses in the back office to consult the main guy, the chief squeeze, the head push, the big noise. Back they came together with a frank laugh, Well, Miss Cameron, I guess you've got us. Cook's have no schedule to the Arctic that way." They were able, however, to give accurate information as to how one should reach Hudson Bay, with modes of travel, dates, and approximate cost. But this journey for another day.

Leaving Chicago one sizzling Sunday in mid-May, we (my niece and I) stop for a day to revel in bird and blossoms at Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota, then silently in the night cross the invisible parallel of 49° where the eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver.

With the Polar Ocean as ultimate goal, we cannot help thinking how during the last generation the Arctic Circle has been pushed steadily farther north. Forty years ago Minneapolis and St. Paul were struggling trading-posts, and all America north of them was the range of the buffalo and the Indian. Then Fort Garry (Winnipeg) became Farthest North. Before starting, I had dug out from the Public Library the record of a Convention of Wheat-Growers who, fifteen years ago in Chicago, deliberately came to the conclusion (and had the same engrossed on their minutes) that Our Northern tier of States is too far north to successfully grow wheat. For years Winnipeg was considered the northern limit of wheat-growth, the Arctic Circle of endeavour. Then that line of limitation was pushed farther back until it is Edmonton-on-the-Saskatchewan that is declared Farthest North. To-day we are embarking on a journey which is to reach two thousand miles due north of Edmonton!

In the train between Minneapolis and Winnipeg an old man with a be-gosh beard looks worth while. We tell him where we are going, and he is all interest. He remembers the time when Montreal merchants wishing to reach Fort Garry had to bend down by way of St. Paul to gain their goal. These were the days of Indian raids and bloody treachery. But, the old chap says, the Hudson's Bay people always played fa'r and squar' with the Injuns. Even in them days the Injun knowed that crossed flag and what it stood for. I mind one Englishman and his wife who had come from Montreal to St. Paul in an ox-cart. The whole plains was covered with sneakin' red cusses on the war-path. But that darned Britisher was stubborn-set on pullin' out that night for Fort Garry, with his wife and kid, and what did the cuss do but nail a blame little Union Jack on his cart, poke the goad in his ox, and hit the trail! My God, I kin still see the old ox with that bit of the British Empire, wiggling out of St. Paul at sundown. And the cuss got there all right, too, though we was all wearing crape beforehand for his sweet-faced wife. This incident was not unique. In the early '60's an English curate, afterwards to be known to the world as Bishop Bompas, passed north through St. Cloud on his way from England to the Arctic. When the Sioux were reported on the war-path, Mr. Bompas improvised a Union Jack with bits of coloured clothing and fastened it on the first ox-cart of his cavalcade. Seeing this, the hostile Sioux turned bridle and rode away; and, protected by the flag of the clustered crosses, the Gospel-cart passed on.

Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada

What Cook & Son failed to supply, the Hudson's Bay Company in Winnipeg furnished. This concern has been foster-mother to Canada's Northland for two hundred and thirty-nine years. Its foundation reaches back to when the Second Charles ruled in England—an age when men said not How cheap? but How good?, not How easy? but How well? The Hudson's Bay Company is to-day the Cook's Tourist Company of the North, the Coutts' Banking concern, and the freshwater Lloyd's. No man or woman can travel with any degree of comfort throughout Northwest America except under the kindly aegis of the Old Company. They plan your journey for you, give you introductions to their factors at the different posts, and sell you an outfit guiltless of the earmarks of the tenderfoot. Moreover, they will furnish you with a letter of credit which can be transmuted into bacon and beans and blankets, sturgeon-head boats, guides' services, and succulent sow-belly, at any point between Fort Chimo on Ungava Bay and Hudson's Hope-on-the-Peace, between Winnipeg-on-the-Red and that point in the Arctic where the seagull whistles over the whaling-ships at Herschel.

For a railroad station, the wall-notices in the baggage room of the Canadian Northern at Winnipeg are unique. Evidently inspired for the benefit of employés, they give the incoming traveller a surprise. Here they are as we copied them down:

Let all things be done decently and in order.

1 Cor. xiv, 40.

Be punctual, be regular, be clean.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Be obliging and kind one to another.

Let no angry word be heard among you

Be not fond of change. (Sic.)

Be clothed with humility, not finery.

Take all things by the smooth handle.

Be civil to all, but familiar with few.

As we smile over this Canadian substitute for the American—

"Hang on to your hand-baggage. Don't let

go your overcoat. Thieves are around,"

the baggage-master with a strong Scottish accent says over our shoulders, Guid maxims, and we live up t' them!

A big Irish policeman is talking to a traveller who has stepped off a transcontinental train, and who asks with a drawl, What makes Winnipeg? Scraping a lump of mud from his boot-heel, the Bobby holds it out. This is the sordid dhross and filthy lucre which keeps our nineteen chartered banks and their one and twenty suburban branches going. Just beyant is one hundred million acres of it, and the dhirty stuff grows forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Don't be like the remittance man from England, sorr, with a quizzical look at the checked suit of his interlocutor, shure they turn the bottom of their trowsies up so high that divil of the dhross sticks to them! As Mulcahey winks the other eye, we drift out into this Buckle of the Wheat-Belt.

What has the policeman's hard wheat done for Winnipeg? Well, it gave her a building expansion, a year ago, greater than that of any other city of her population in America. One year has seen in Western Canada an increase in crop area under the one cereal of winter wheat of over one hundred and fifty per cent, a development absolutely unique in the world's history.

Winnipeg, having acquired the growing habit, expands by leaps and bounds. No city on the continent within the last thirty-three years has had such phenomenal growth. In 1876 the population was 6,000; it now counts 150,000 souls. This city is the greatest grain-market in the British Empire, and from it radiate twenty-two distinct pairs of railway tracks. Architects have in preparation plans for fifteen million dollars' worth of buildings during the coming year. The bank clearings in 1903 were $246,108,000; last year they had increased to $618,111,801; and a Winnipeg bank has never failed. Western Canada cannot grow without Winnipeg's reaping a benefit, for most of the inward and outward trade filters through here. During the spring months three hundred people a day cross the border from the United States. Before the year has closed a hundred thousand of them will have merged themselves into Western Canada's melting-pot, drawn by that strongest of lures—the lure of the land. And these hundred thousand people do not come empty-handed. It is estimated that they bring with them in settlers' effects and cash one thousand dollars each, thus adding in portable property to the wealth of Western Canada one hundred million dollars. In addition they bring the personal producing-factor, an asset which cannot be measured in figures—the power of the man.

Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt

Not only from the United States do Winnipeg's citizens come. This City of the Plains is a human mosaic to which finished pattern every nation of the Old World furnishes its patine. The Bible Society of Winnipeg sells Bibles printed in fifty-one different languages—Armenian, Arabic, Burmese, Cree, Esth, Korean, Persian, Sanscrit, Slavonic, Tinne, Urdu, Yiddish, and nine and thirty other tongues. It is to be supposed that some buy their Bible not because it is the Bible but in order to feast the eye on the familiar characters of the home tongue. So would Robinson Crusoe have glutted his sight with a copy of the London Times, could the goat have committed the anachronism of digging one out from among the flotsam in the kelp.

Going into a hardware store to get a hatchet and a copper kettle, we cajole the proprietor into talking shop. He has orders for six hundred steam-ploughs to be delivered to farmers the coming season. We estimate that each of these will break at least fifteen hundred acres during the six months that must elapse before we hope to return to Winnipeg. This will make nearly a million acres to be broken by the steam-ploughs sold by this one concern, and practically the whole number will be used for breaking wild land. A peep into the ledger of this merchant shows in the list of his plough-buyers Russian names and unpronounceable patronymics of the Finn, the Doukhobor, and the Buckowinian. It is to be hoped that these will drive furrows that look straighter than their signatures do. But they are all good pay, the implement-man says. Looking at the red ploughs, we see in each a new chapter to be written in Canada's history. The page of the book is the prairie, as yet inviolate, and running out into flowers to the skyline. The tools to do the writing are these ploughs and mowers and threshers, the stout arms of men and of faith-possessed women. It is all new and splendid and hopeful and formative!

We get in Winnipeg another picture, one that will remain with us till we reach the last Great Divide. At the Winnipeg General Hospital, Dr. D.A. Stewart says to us, Come, I want to show you a brave chap, one who has fallen by the way. We find this man, Alvin Carlton, stretched on a cot. Tell him that you are going into the land of fur, whispers the doctor, he has been a trapper all his life.

Crossing soft ice on the Lake of the Woods, Carlton broke through, and his snow-shoes pinned him fast. When dragged out he had suffered so with the intense cold that he became partially paralysed and was sent here to the hospital. Hard luck? Yes, but the misfortune was tempered with mercy. Within these walls Carlton met a doctor full of the mellow juice of life—a doctor with a man's brain, the sympathy of a woman, and the heart of a little child. The trapper, as we are introduced to him, has one leg and both hands paralysed, with just a perceptible sense of motion remaining in the other leg. His vocal cords are so affected that the sounds he makes are to us absolutely unintelligible, more like the mumblings of an animal than the speech of a man. Between patient and doctor, a third man entered the drama—Mr. Grey, a convalescent. Appointed special nurse to the trapper, Grey studied him as a mother studies her deficient child, and now was able, to our unceasing marvel, to translate these sad mouthings of Carlton into human speech.

Who is this patient? A man without friends or influence, not attractive in appearance, more than distressing to listen to—just one more worker thrown off from the gear of the rapidly-turning wheel of life. The consulting doctors agreed that no skill could perform a cure, could not even arrest the creeping death. Winnipeg is big and busy, and no corner of it more crowded than the General Hospital, no corps more overworked. Dr. Stewart had two men's work to do. He worked all day and was busy well into the night. A doctor's natural tendency is to see in each man that he ministers to merely a case, a manifestation of some disease to be watched and tabulated and ticked off into percentages. But in the Stewart-Carlton-Grey combination, Fate had thrown together three young men in whom the human part, the man element, loomed large.

The doctor guessed that under that brave front the heart of the trapper was eating itself out for the cry of the moose, the smell of wood-smoke by twilight. We are happiest when we create. So he said to Carlton, Did you ever write a story? The head shook answer. Well, why don't you try? You must know a lot, old chap, about out-door things, that nobody else knows. Think some of it out, and then dictate it to Grey here.

The outcome was disappointing. The uncouth sounds, translated by Grey, were bald, bare, and stiff. Soon the stiffness worked off. With half-shut eyes Carlton lived again in the woods. He lifted the dewy branch of a tree and surprised the mother deer making the toilet of her fawn, saw the beaver busied with his home of mud and wattles, heard the coyote scream across the prairie edge. Easily the thought flowed, and the stuff that Grey handed in was a live story that breathed. In that brave heart the joy of the creator stirred, and with it that feeling which makes all endeavour worth while—the thought that somebody cares. A close observer at this stage of the game may read, too, on the face of Grey the kindly look that comes when we forget ourselves long enough to take the trouble to reach out for another man's viewpoint.

Carlton's short stories, submitted to a publisher, were pronounced good, were accepted, and brought a cash return. They struck a new note among the squabblings of the nature-fakers. Favourable comment came from those who read them, who, reading, knew naught of their three authors. Before this Carlton had never written a line for publication; but he had been a true observer. He had felt, and was able to project himself into the minds of those living things he had seen and hunted.

I leave the hospital cot with a strange lump forming in my throat, although every one around me, and the patient most of all, is gay and blithe. I say to Carlton, I wish I could take your knowledge and your eyes with me into the North, there is so much I will miss because of my lack of knowledge. With Grey's kindly interpretation I get my answer, You must take your own mind, your own eyes; you must see for yourself.

During the last day in Winnipeg, while the Kid (like faithful Ariovistus) is looking after the impedimenta, I snatch half an hour to look in at the Royal Alexandra upon the reception which the Women's Canadian Club is tendering to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Rain-bespattered, short-skirted, and anchored with disreputable rubbers gluey with Winnipeg mud, I sit on the fringe of things, fairly intoxicated with the idea that we are off and this North trip no dream. Mrs. Sanford Evans presides with her usual savoir faire and ushers in the guest of the day, beautifully-gowned and gracious.

Like a bolt from the blue came the summons from the president, and I, all muddy, am called to the seats of the mighty. I have never seen a more splendid aggregation of women than the members of the Winnipeg Canadian Club, tall, strong, alert, and full of initiative. To face them is a mental and moral challenge. I try to hide those muddy shoes of mine. The Winnipeg women are indulgent, they make allowance for my unpresentable attire, and shower upon me cheery wishes for the success of my journey. Mrs. Humphry Ward calls attention to the lack of playgrounds in England. She wants to bring more fresh air and space to the crowded people of the Old World. I submit that my wish is the mathematical converse to hers. My great desire is to call attention to the great unoccupied lands of Canada, to induce people from the crowded centres of the Old World to use the fresh air of the New.

The Canadian Women's Press Club

To those who bid us good-bye at the train, the Kid and I yell exultantly, All aboard for the Arctic Ocean and way ports!

A group of Galicians sitting by the curb, two mothers and seven small children, one a baby at the breast, make the last picture we see as the train pulls out. It was the end of their first day in Winnipeg. The fathers of the flock evidently were seeking work and had left their families gazing through the portals of the strange new land. In the half-sad, altogether-brave lines on the young mothers' faces and their tender looks bent on the little ones we read the motive responsible for all migrations—Better conditions for the babies. In the little fellows of seven or eight with their ill-fitting clothes and their dogged looks of determination one sees the makers of empire. Before a decade is past they will be active wheat-growers in their own right, making two grains grow where one grew before and so deserving better of mankind than the whole race of politicians put together. I think it was President Garfield who said, I always feel more respect for a boy than for a man. Who knows what possibilities may be buttoned up under that ragged jacket? It doesn't take long for the foreigners to make good. A young Icelander, Skuli Johnson, of all the thousands of Winnipeg students, this year captured the coveted honor of the academic world—the Rhodes scholarship.

We slip out of Winnipeg as the bells of St. Boniface ring the vespers from their turrets twain. Whittier, who never saw this quaint cathedral, has immortalized it in verse. The story is one of those bits of forgotten history so hard to get hold of in a day when Winnipeg measures its every thought in bushels and bullion.

The settlers who came to Selkirk on the outskirts of present Winnipeg just a hundred years ago were sturdy Scots, weaned on the Psalms of David and the Shorter Catechism. There were English missionaries here and priests of the Church of Rome, but the disciples of John Knox wanted some one to expound Predestination to them. A religious ceremony performed by any man who was not a Presbyterian seemed scarcely binding. One old lady, speaking of the nuptials of her daughter, said, I wudna have Janet marrit by the bishop. She maun wait till we can have a properly-ordained meenister. And he was coming. Even now he was floating in on the Red River with Indian and half-breed boatmen, having reached St. Paul from Scotland via the Atlantic seaboard some weeks before.

When a Scot and an Indian get in a boat together, to use a Will Carleton phrase, they do not teem with conversational grace. Straight from Aberdeen, the young Dominee coming into Winnipeg little dreamed that the Church of Rome had established its Mission on the Red River decades ago. In fact, he knew as little about Canada as he did about Timbuctoo, and in his simplicity thought himself the first that ever burst into that silent sea. When the evening breeze brought to his ears a muffled sound, he was in doubt how to place it.

"Is it the clang of wild-geese?

Is it the Indian's yell,

That lends to the voice of the North-wind

The tones of a far-off bell?"

The Indian boatmen said nothing, but thought deep, like the Irishman's parrot.

"The voyageur smiles as he listens

To the sound that grows apace;

Well he knows the vesper ringing

Of the bells of St. Boniface."

Once the young Scot had reached his flock, he wrote back to a friend in the States telling how he came across on the edge of the wilderness

"The bells of the Roman Mission,

That call from their turrets twain

To the boatmen on the river,

To the hunter on the plain."

That friend was a fellow-townsman of the Quaker Poet. The story was told to Whittier and inspired the lines of The Red River Voyageur.

CHAPTER II

Table of Contents

WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING

Table of Contents

"To the far-flung fenceless prairie

Where the quick cloud-shadows trail,

To our neighbor's barn in the offing

And the line of the new-cut rail;

To the plough in her league-long furrow."

—Rudyard Kipling.

Place a pair of dividers with one leg on Winnipeg and the other leg at Key West, Florida. Then swing the lower leg to the northwest, and it will not reach the limit of good agricultural land.

From Winnipeg to Edmonton, roughly speaking, is a thousand miles, and two railway lines are open to us—the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian Northern. We go by the former route and return in the autumn by the latter.

Pulling out from Winnipeg, we enter a prairie wheat-field one thousand miles long and of unknown width, into which the nations of the world are pouring. The sleeping nation beyond, is what General Sherman in a moment of pique once called Canada. The sleeping giant has awakened. We are on the heels