CHAPTER VI

The Scow Breaks Her Back and FillsThe Scow Breaks Her Back and Fills

At the foot of the rapids, we hurry the boatmen ashore. I want to photograph the next scow as she shoots the fall. We reach a good vantage-point and, getting the coming craft in the finder, I have just time to notice that her passengers are Inspector Pelletier and Dr. Sussex, when a sharp crack rings out like the shot of a pistol. Just as we touch the button, something happens. We wanted a snap-shot, and it was a snap-shot we got. The scow has broken her back and begins to fill.

The blue-and-white jerkin of Isadore Tremblé, the pilot, dances in the sun as he gesticulates and directs his two passengers to crawl to the top of the boat's freight. In less time than it takes to write it, the men from our scow have launched the police canoes and make their way through the boiling water to take off Pelletier and the Doctor. The Inspector says, "Step quick, Doctor, there's no time to waste." The native politeness of Sussex doesn't fail him, even in this crisis, "After you, Inspector." Then Pelletier says, sharply, "Jump, I tell you, jump; there's no time for—Gaston-and-Alphonse business here."

As always, it is impossible to tell who directs affairs, but quickly things happen. Lines are run from the wreck to the shore, other scows discharge their cargo on the bank and push out to take the water-logged goods from the wreck. The lightened craft is pulled ashore. There has been no loss of life, but it is a sorry-looking cargo that piles up on the bank,—five thousand dollars' worth of goods destroyed in three minutes!

A sad procession, we make the boats, and drop downstream toward McMurray. The night is beautiful. The sun sank in a crimson splendour an hour ago. A low-hung moon comes out and is visible and is hidden alternately as we pass on the shore-line high hill and intervening swale. With a blanket thrown over me, as the others sleep, I lie along the gunwale, and the beauty of it sinks into my very soul. Just before we enter McMurray the wraith of a tall oil-derrick tells of the enterprise of some pioneer in the wilderness.

The location of Fort McMurray is ideal. At this point the river breaks into two branches which encircle a high-banked and thickly-wooded island. Some hundreds of yards farther on the Clearwater River makes in; so here we have three streams. The fort has a foundation dating back forty years. This fur outpost will be the terminus of the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway, and one could not well imagine a more beautiful site for a great city. On the broad flat as we enter appear a handful of Indian houses and the little stores of the fur-traders.

Letters from the outside are not as eagerly looked for as one would expect. To the people who live within the North, the North is their world, and to them the news of who is to be appointed to the charge of the next post down the river is of more, importance than the partition of Turkey or a possible redistribution of the thrones of Europe. Mr. Brabant says, "Oh, by the way, Bob, there is a package of letters for you somewhere in the scow. Shall I dig them out for you?" "Never mind," says Bob, "I'll get them to-morrow. Have you got any whiskey?"

It is Sunday the fourteenth of June. On the long beach is strewn the water-soaked cargo of the wrecked scow, the abomination of desolation. Mrs. Harding, although all of her personal belongings and her "special orders" are ruined, smiles bravely. It is a point of honour in the North not to whine, whatever happens. All day we work trying to save some of the wrecked cargo. Bales of goods are unwound and stretched out for hundreds of yards in the sun. Bandanna handkerchiefs flutter on bushes. Toilet soap, boots, and bear-traps are at our feet. The Fire-Ranger of the district, Mr. Biggs, has his barley and rice spread out on sheeting, and, turning it over, says bravely, "I think it will dry." Mathematical and astronomical instruments consigned to a scientist on the Arctic edge are shaken off centre and already have begun to rust, and there are miles and miles of cordage and nets, with braids and sewing silks and Hudson's Bay blankets!

In the midst of his wrecked drugs and cherished personal effects the Doctor is a pitiful sight. By stage and by scow, he has been confiding to us that, in order to save bulk, his medicines have been specially put up for him in highly concentrated form by London chemists. One little pill-box of powder is potent enough to make a dozen quart-bottles of effective medicine. And now all these precious powders have melted together, and appear like Dicken's stew at the Inn of the Jolly Sand-boys "all in one delicious gravy." The Doctor is dazed, and offers to white and brown alike a tin box with "Have a pastile, do." He wanders among the half-breeds, offering plasters for weak backs, which they accept with avidity as combining two things that the red man specially appreciates,—something free and something medicinal. Sad-faced, the Doctor brings to me a glass case holding a dozen lozenge-shaped disks on each of which an infinitesimal piece of wood rests. "Here are some authenticated relics, but unfortunately the water has made them run and I don't know them apart. You see they have the seal of the Carthusian Monastery on the back. One of them is a piece of the true Cross, but I shall never be able to tell which it is." One by one the Doctor digs out from the wreck his water-soaked treasures,—a presentation "Life of the Countess of Munster," also a crucifix from her, and a beautifully-carved holy water stoup of French design which he declares to be "as old as the Conqueror." There is a medal of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers which carries with it the freedom of the City of London. Another order shows the Doctor to be a Knight of the Primrose League; and, fished from under a side of bacon, is a print of "my great-grandfather who discovered a cure for scurvy." A missionary's box of toys for some Christmas tree in Far North fastnesses is opened, and here a native stops work to lead along the sand a pink-and-blue alligator.

Miss Gordon, a Fort McMurray TraderMiss Gordon, a Fort McMurray Trader

Although the wrecked scow has its grotesque features, the sight is a sad one, and we are glad to leave it and pull across the river to Fort McMurray. We call upon Miss Christine Gordon, a young Scottish woman and a free-trader, if you please, in her own right, operating in opposition to the great and only Hudson's Bay Company. The only white woman on a five hundred mile stretch of the Athabasca, she has lived here for years with the Indians for companions, her days being marked out by their migrations and tribal feasts. We question, "Are you not lonely, especially in the winter?" But she smiles and refuses to be regarded as heroic. "Often in the winter a trapper passes through, and the Indians are always coming and going, and they are full of interest."

We have not walked with Miss Gordon for half an hour among the tepees when we discover the secret of her cheeriness and content. Our happiness consists not in our havings but in our attitude of mind. The world is divided sharply into two classes. The classes are not the white and the black, the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, as the orthodox would have us believe. We are all good and bad, not black or white, but varying shades of grey. Neither are we sheep or goats, but moral alpacas, all of us,—something between a sheep and a goat. But no less are we divided into two clear-cut classes. Each of us puts himself of his own volition into the class of the self-centred, or the self-forgetting, and in the act marks himself as happy or unhappy.

As Miss Gordon lifts the tent-flaps, smiles greet her from every home. The baby in the moss-bag is handed up for her inspection, and old blind Paul Cree, the Chief, knows her moccasined step, and rises on his elbow from his couch of spruce-boughs to greet her eagerly and salute any that she may present as friend. The Chief is in his ninety-sixth year and depends upon chance visitors for his companionship and food. Yet an assured air of dignity shows that Paul Cree is aware of the respect due to the Chief of the McMurrays. He addresses us in Cree, which Miss Gordon translates. "I am delighted that ladies have come such a long distance on purpose to see me. The white man is my friend. I think all white women must be good. Their mothers have taught them to be kind to old people. I am sorry I am blind. Be glad that you can see the water, the sky, the birds and flowers and the faces of little children," and the tired old head sinks on the fir-boughs and we are dismissed. "Be glad you are alive, and use that sight while you have it." It is the advice given by that other strong man laid on his back, Carlton in the Winnipeg Hospital.

We are joined by Paul Cree's brother. He has long hair, and wears a pair of pince-nez as an English gallant wears his monocle—merely for effect, for there is nothing the matter with the vision of those sharp eyes. In one tepee a young mother is reading a service book of the Roman Church to her little girl of five. Across the plateau under the shadow of the hill we enter a camp where Miss Gordon has a patient with an injured hand. The cut is ugly and is surrounded by proud flesh, and we find that twice a day Miss Gordon leaves her household work and her little store to go across and dress this wound.

When a schoolboy takes to his bosom afidus Achates, the first thing he does is to offer to show his birds' nests; so Miss Gordon introduces us to her find,—nests of the Gambel sparrow. We take two views, one of a nest of five eggs and another of the nesting mother.

During the past winter Miss Gordon has fed the Indians in families, as they had "made little fur," entertaining them as courteously as you would your special friends at an afternoon of pink tea and pink thoughts. Visiting the sick, trading fur, cultivating her little garden, bringing wolf pups and bear cubs up by hand, thus this plucky woman passes her days. It takes the adaptability and dour determination of a Scot to fit into this niche. Your Irishwoman would last in McMurray just about three days.

A new duty has been taken on by Miss Gordon,—the reading of the rain-gauge just installed by the Canadian Government. Slyly taking a peep into her records, we feel that they will have to be adjusted to the latitude of Ottawa when they get there, for with a true Northern contempt for fractions she has made all the decimals read as full fractions. The outside world which feasts on blue-books is apt in the future to be startled at the generous precipitation accorded Fort McMurray! Miss Gordon's ambitions run in other lines than the mathematical. Holding us by both hands as we bade good-by, she said, "Oh, that I were young again, I would learn, learn, learn. I would learn medicine so that I could help these poor creatures." Her tone of unselfish sincerity we carry with us as we make our way back to the scows, bearing with us, as token of good-will from the Gordon garden, radishes and lettuce for an evening salad.

Next morning we start bird-hunting on our own account, and get a pair of pictures as striking as those we have Miss Gordon to thank for—a Foxsparrow on the nest, then the baby sparrows but one day old. If any one thinks it easy to find and photograph birds' nests in the heart of the ancient wood on Athabascan banks in mosquito time he has "another guess coming." The mosquito here is not a joke, not a theorem, but a stinging entity. During the five days we are at Fort McMurray the potatoes in Miss Gordon's garden have grown as many inches, literally an inch a day. Wood violets, wild roses, false Solomon-seal, and the wild sarsaparilla are everywhere; the air is full of the scent of growing things.

The Steamer GrahameThe SteamerGrahame

Fort McMurray is the parting of the ways where the Hudson's Bay Company's steamerGrahamemeets us, bringing her tale of outward-going passengers from the North. The journey of these people from Fort McMurray to The Landing is going to be a very different thing from the easy floating with the current that we have enjoyed. All northern rivers are navigated against stream by "tacking," that is, towing the boats, weary mile after mile, "by the power o' man," the half-breed boatmen scrambling now on the bank, now in the water, tugging the heavily-laden craft after them. It is a mode of transportation that neither written word nor camera can do justice to. We shake hands with those going out to civilization and take our dunnage aboard the steamer. TheGrahamehas its advantages,—clean beds, white men's meals served in real dishes, and best of all, a bath!

On theGrahamewe meet Mr. Harris, of Fond du Lac, who has come thus far to greet the incoming transport and who goes back again with it. Scholarly and versatile, we are to find in Mr. Harris a very mint of Indian lore and woodland wisdom and the most wonderful memory I have ever encountered. All the vicissitudes of a Northern life have failed to rub out one line of the Virgil and Horace of his schoolboy days, whole chapters of which, without one false quantity, he repeats for us in a resonant voice. He can recite the whole of "Paradise Lost" as faultlessly as Macaulay was credited with being able to do. If Mr. Harris could be induced to write a story of the North it would put to shame all the weak efforts of one-season visitors who of necessity see only the surface and have to guess the depths.

As we pull out, we mentally run our fingers along the parallel of 56° 40' North to find out by comparison, as they say in Chicago, "where we are at." In Europe we would be on the top of Ben Nevis and not so far north as Aberdeen. Our line of latitude run westward will cut Sitka, and the lone Pribilof, "where the little blue fox is bred for his skin and the seals they breed for themselves." Crossing the junction of the Clearwater with the Athabasca, we strike for the first time the trail of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who came in by Portage la Loche, and in 1789 traced to the sea the great river which bears his name. At its confluence with the Clearwater the Athabasca is perhaps three-quarters of a mile wide, and it maintains a steady current with a somewhat contracting channel to the point of its discharge into Lake Athabasca in latitude 58° 36' North.

An Oil Derrick on the AthabascaAn Oil Derrick on the Athabasca

In all Canada there is no more interesting stretch of waterway than that upon which we are entering. An earth-movement here has created a line of fault clearly visible for seventy or eighty miles along the river-bank, out of which oil oozes at frequent intervals. Count von Hammerstein, building derricks from point to point along the stream, has put in much time, toil, and money in oil-development here. Our traverse of those ninety miles of Athabasca Rapids has given us respect for the labor and determination which in this wilderness has erected these giant derricks. Looking at them, we waft a wish that the plucky prospector may reap his reward and abundantly strike oil. The Count tells us of striking one hundred and fifty feet of rock salt while "punching" one of his oil-shafts through the ground. Here are overhanging dykes of limestone; and out of the lime and clay shoot up splendid trees of pine, poplar, and spruce.

Tar Banks on the AthabascaTar Banks on the Athabasca

At Fort McKay, thirty miles below McMurray, a fine seam of coal is exposed on the river-bank. It is bituminous, and can be used for blacksmithing, but probably not for welding. Ochre is found on these banks, with sand of the very best quality for making glass, while extensive sulphur deposits have been discovered on the east side of the river between Fort McMurray and the lake. On the Clearwater are medicinal springs whose output tastes very much like Hunyadi water.

Tar there is, too, in plenty. Out of the over-hanging banks it oozes at every fissure, and into some of the bituminous tar-wells we can poke a twenty foot pole and find no resistance. These tar-sands lithologically may be described as a soft sandstone, the cementing material of which is a bitumen or petroleum. They are estimated to have a distribution of over five hundred square miles. Where it is possible to expose a section, as on a river-bank, the formation extends from one hundred and twenty-five to two hundred feet in depth, the bitumen being distributed through the sands.

Twelve miles below the last exposure of the tar-sands and about two miles above the mouth of Red Earth Creek a copious saline spring bubbles up, and there is an escape of sulphurretted hydrogen whose unmistakable odour follows the boat for half a mile. Kipling was right when he said, "Smells are surer than sounds or sights."

We speak only of what we observe from the deck of a boat as we pass down this wonderful river. What is hidden is a richer story which only the coming of the railroad can bring to light.

"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their humble joys and destiny obscure."

—

Gray's Elegy

At seven in the morning of Sunday, June 21st, we enter Lake Athabasca, and catch our first glimpse of Fort Chipewyan. An acceptance of the invitation, "Come, shake your leg," has kept the men busy half the night over a hot sequence of Red River jigs among "pieces" on the lower deck, and we have this superb sweep almost to ourselves.

The great lake-scape is blue and green and grey and opaline as the sun strikes it and the surface breaks to a south wind. Ours is the one craft on this inland sea, but overhead a whole navy of clouds manœuvres, the ships of the ghostly argosy doubling themselves in the lake. As we draw in, the village takes shape. What haunts us as we look at the white houses, that crescent beach of pinkest sand? We have it! It is a print, an old woodcut of "Russian America" that we used to pore over in the days when one wore "pinnies" of flour-sacking, and "hankies" were made from meal-bags.

At one end of the village are the little smithy of the Hudson's Bay Company and the pretentious buildings of their establishment. At the other gibbous horn of this Athens of the Athabasca rise the steeples and convent-school of the Roman Church, with the free-trading-post of Colin Fraser. Midway between is the little Church of England, and higher up and farther back the Barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. The white-washed homes of the employés of The Company, little match-boxes dazzling in the sun, stretch from one end of the beach to the other. In among the half-breed populace stalk policeman and priest, red jacket keeping the dark-skinned people straight in this world and black robe laying out conditions for the world to come. So is Chipewyan fate chequered with therouge et noirof compulsion and expediency.

Fort Chipewyan, Lake AthabascaFort Chipewyan, Lake Athabasca

Fort Chipewyan is the oldest post in the North, and every boulder of red gneissic rock, if we could interrogate it, has a story to tell. Peter Pond, of the North-West Company, in 1778 built a post on the Athabasca River thirty miles to the south of the lake. The far-seeing Alexander Mackenzie, in the interests of the same company, sent his cousin Roderick ten years later to build Fort Chipewyan on the lake, and for over a century this was the entrepôt and emporium of the whole North. The Hudson's Bay Company meanwhile were maintaining a post, Fort Wedderburne, not far away on Potato Island, and upon the amalgamation of the Companies in 1821 they took possession of the present Fort Chipewyan.

This metropolis is one hundred and twenty years old. Chipewyan was doing business at the same old stand before Toronto was the capital of Upper Canada, while Ottawa was still unheard of, and when of Chicago not even the Fort Dearborn nucleus had been built. 1788! We wonder if the old ox that conveys our "cassette" and "pieces" up to the big gateway of The Company's quadrangle was a drawer of wood and drinker of water at that date. He looks as if he might have been. George III was reigning in England when Fort Chipewyan was built, Arkwright was making his spinning jenny, and Watts experimenting with the steam-engine. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his pictures, Burns, a young man of twenty-nine, was busy with his ballads. In London a little baby saw the light of day, whom the world afterwards hailed as Lord Byron. Three British boys might have been seen with arms thrown over each other's shoulders, "dreaming greatly"—Coleridge aged sixteen, young Walter Scott, seventeen, and Wordsworth just eighteen. Across the Channel the French Revolution was at its height. Shelley and Keats were not yet born. Down on the Atlantic seaboard of America a new people just twelve years before had gone through the birth-throes of nationhood. It is a far call.

Scraping the yellow lichens off the old sun-dial, we adjust our bearings. We are 111° West of Greenwich and in latitude 58° 45' North. Our parallel carried eastward would strike the Orkneyan skerries and pass through Stromness. All untouched by the development of that busy continent to the south which has grown up within its lifetime, Chipewyan is a little pearl of the periwigged days of the early Georges. From its red sands, tamarack swamps, and mossy muskeg one almost expects to see arise the forms of those great of old who outfitted here, making Chipewyan the base of their northward explorations. The ghostly company is a goodly one—Sir Alexander Mackenzie, Sir George Simpson, and Sir John Franklin (their honorary prefixes coming to them in the after days as reward of their labors), Back and Richardson and Rae, and in later days that young stripling curate who was afterwards to be known throughout the world of letters as Bishop Bompas, the "Apostle of the North." Then there is the great unnamed horde who rested tired limbs at Chipewyan on their northward journeys, each on his own mission—fur-traders and hunters of big game, devoted nuns and silent priests, the infrequent scientist, and the hundreds of Klondikers, their hearts hot with the greed for gold. These all through the century have enjoyed as we now enjoy the spontaneous hospitality of this little bit of Britain which floats the Union Jack from its fort walls, and whose people, brown and white, when the belated news of the passing of Victoria the Great reached this her northern outpost, gathered on the beach and bewailed aloud their personal loss. We seem to hear again the far-flung cry "The Queen is dead! The Queen is dead!" from the half-breed runners coming in that Christmas Day across the winter ice.

Mackenzie made Chipewyan his headquarters for eight years. It was from here he started on his voyage to the Arctic Sea in 1789, and three years later on that other history-making journey to the far Pacific. Sir John Franklin outfitted here for his two land-journeys—in July, 1820, with Dr. Richardson, and again in 1825. Chipewyan is a mine of interest. We almost begrudge time given to the dainty meals of our hostess, Mrs. William Johnson, and the hours spent between her lavender-scented sheets.

In the loft above the office of the H.B. Company, in among old flintlock rifles and discarded ox-yokes, we browse through the daily records of The Company, old journals written by the Factors at the close of their day's work through the years and here preserved for our inquisitive eyes. Sitting on the floor, making extracts from these tomes, one has the half-guilty feeling of being caught poking into a tomb.

On this page the ink is thin and one can see the old writer thawing out his frozen ink-pot of stone at the end of a tired day and sitting down to write his simple tale. Here are finger-marks where the blood of a buffalo gives a marginal note. The journalist had been called away from his writing to weigh and pay for some fresh meat. Drops from a tallow candle show the light of other days. A pressed mosquito of the vintage of 1790 is very suggestive. We picture the trivial round and common task of the man who writes, see him exchanging fathoms of tobacco for beaver-pelts in those long, cold winters, and eagerly hunger with him for the signs presaging the going-out of the ice and the coming-in of Spring. We follow out the short Summer with him and revel in its perpetual daylight. With him we make the fall fishery and shoot our winter's supply of waveys and southward-flying cranes. We wonder, as he wondered, what news the next packet will bring from the old folks in the Orkneys or the Hebrides. We study, as he studied, the problem of governing his servants, placating the Indians, and making enough fur to satisfy that inexorable Board of Directors back in London whose motto is "Skin for skin."

It has been a grim enough life as the author of this journal records it. He is far from those who direct his fate, and recognition and reward are slow in coming. Companionship and the gentle arts of "outside" are denied him. He must make his own world and rear within it his dusky brood, that they in honourable service may follow his round of "work done squarely and unwasted days." What made the charm of this life to these men? It is hard to see. The master of the post was also master of the situation, and an autocrat in his community, a little Fur King, a Captain of Industry. A thing was law because he said it. And isn't it Caesar himself who declares, "Better be first in a little Iberian village than second in Rome?"

We get a delightful picture in an entry under the date of Wednesday, 23rd May, 1827, when Sir John Franklin was on his way back to England at the end of his second journey.

"To-day William McGillivary and Katherine Stewart, daughter

of Alexander Stewart, Chief Factor, were joined in holy wedlock

by Captain John Franklin, R.N., Commander of the Land Arctic

Expedition."

Great is the force of example, for five days later appears the entry

"This evening the ceremonial of marriage took place between

Robert McVicar, Esq., and Christy McBeath. Captain Franklin

acted on the occasion as clergyman. The ceremony o'er, the

evening was agreeably spent in a family assembly."

Looking at these records, we are reminded of a not-very-well-known story of international courtesy which connects itself with the third and ill-fated journey of Franklin. Old Sir John, then in his sixtieth year, had sailed from England in an attempt at the Northwest Passage. Years passed and no word came from the explorer, and in 1852 the ice-desert was still mute.

In this year, Sir Edward Belcher in theResoluteheaded one of the many Arctic Relief Expeditions, subsequently abandoning his boat in the ice off Melville Island. Next year the American whalerHenry Georgemet the desertedResolutein sound condition about forty miles from Cape Mercy; she must have drifted through Barrow Strait, Lancaster Sound, and Baffin Bay. She was recovered, the Government of the United States bought her and with international compliments presented her in perfect condition to Queen Victoria in 1856. The old ship was broken up about thirty years ago, and from the soundest of her timbers a solid desk was made by direction of Queen Victoria, who presented it to the then President of the United States. This is the desk which stands in President Taft's reception room to-day, and on it the papers of eight administrations have been written.

There is living as well as buried history in Chipewyan. A stroll from one end of its lacustrine street to the other is lush with interest. We call upon Colin Fraser, whose father was piper to Sir George Simpson. Colin treats us to a skirl of the very pipes which announced the approach of Simpson whenever that little Northern autocrat, during his triumphal progress through a bailiwick as big as Europe, made his way into a new fort.

With the echo of the "Gay Gordons" in our ears we pass into the largest convent in the North country, managed by the Grey Nuns of Montreal. Sister Brunelle came into the North in 1866. Forty-two years in a convent-school of the Northland! It makes one gasp.

These Indian schools, assisted by the Canadian Government, catch the little Indians in the camps and hold their prey on school-benches from the age of four to fourteen. One boy is dumb, another a hunchback. In a corner we came upon a poor old derelict of the camps, a Cree woman, paralysed and mentally deranged, who within these quiet walls has found harbour. The kiddies are taught one clay in French and the next day in English; but when they hide behind their spellers to talk about the white visitors, the whisper is in Chipewyan. What do they learn? Reading, (vertical) writing, arithmetic, hymns, and hoeing potatoes, grammar, sewing and shoemaking, and one more branch, never taught in Southern schools. When the fall fishery comes, the nuns kilt up their skirts, slates are shoved far back into desks, and shepherdess and sheep (young brown moose!) together clean the whitefish which are to furnish meals for a twelve-month to come. If fish be brain food, then should this convent of Chipewyan gather in medals, degrees, and awards, capturing for its black-eyed boys Rhodes scholarshipsad lib.

Three of a KindThree of a Kind

Back of the convent stretches a farm with an historic record. It was from this enclosure, tilled by the priests and their protégés, that the sample of wheat came which at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in competition with the wheats of the world took the bronze medal. This wheat ran sixty-eight pounds to the bushel.

We linger in the convent, looking at the rows of tiny beds neat and immaculate, each covered with its little blue counterpane. Sister Jigot, with the air of divulging a state secret, tells that the pretty bed-covering is flour-sacking, that it is dyed on the premises from a recipe brought out of Chipewyan woods. In the long winter evenings these good step-mothers of savages do all their reading and sewing before six o'clock. The mid-winter sun sinks at four, and two hours of candle-light is all that the frugal exchequer can afford. "What in the world do you do after six?" I venture; for well we know those busy fingers are not content to rest in idle laps. "Oh! we knit, opening the stove-doors to give us light." Many a time are we to throw a glance backward through the years to these devoted souls upon Athabascan shores, trying to graft a new civilisation on an old stock, and in the process economising their candles like Alfred of old.

Both Protestant and Roman missionaries are amateur doctors and we find a stimulating rivalry in bodily and spiritual ministrations. At the Church of England Mission we are shown with triumph a piece of bone salved from the leg of an injured Indian. Afterward we learn that the peripatetic patient accepted the Church of England treatment in the daytime, and in the evening shadows was carried across the rocks to the shrine of Rome. Poor chap, he died in the process! But while he lived he stimulated trade, and his memory lingers to point a moral and adorn a tale. If there had but been a Presbyterian Church within range, he might have comforted himself with the thought that it had all been comfortably fore-ordained.

An interesting family lives next to the English Mission—the Loutits. The father tells of the days when as a young man he served The Company, and "for breakfast on the march they gave you a club and showed you a rabbit-track." There were Loutits in Chipewyan as far back as the old journals reach. The Scottish blood has intermingled with that of Cree and Chipewyan and the resultant in this day's generation is a family of striking young people—the girls good to look at and clever in bead-work and quill-ornamentation, the boys skilled in nemoral arts and holding the strong men's records of the North.

George Loutit without help brought a scow with four thousand pounds from Athabasca Landing to Chipewyan through the ninety miles of rapids. His brother Billy, carrying a special dispatch of the Mounted Police, ran with a hand-sled (and no dogs) from Chipewyan to Fort Smith and back in three days—a distance of two hundred miles at least. Once, when the river rose suddenly in the night, Billy unloaded nine tons from one scow to another, astonishing the owners, who snored while Billy was toiling upward in the night. The rivermen tell of George Loutit's quarreling with a man one afternoon in a saloon at Edmonton and throwing his adversary out of the window. When he heard him slump, George immediately thought of the North as a most desirable place and started hot-foot for Athabasca Landing, a hundred miles away. He arrived there in time for noon luncheon next day.

At the H.B. Co. end of the village we find Pierre Mercredi in charge. A French Bishop once wanted to train him for the priesthood, but it is peltries and not souls that Pierre is after. His forebears were Irish McCarthys, but this name failed to fall trippingly from the tongue of French priests, and became corrupted into the Mercredi as he now signs it.

Throughout the journals of the last forty years we run across such entries as these:—"Wyllie at the forge," "Wyllie making nails," "Wyllie straightening the fowling-pieces," "Wyllie making sled-runners," "This day Wyllie made a coffin for an Indian." We step into the old man's smithy, and he turns to greet us with an outstretched hand and a "Good mornin'," in richest Doric. The date 1863 cut into the wooden foundation of his forge marks the year when Wyllie came to Chipewyan. He was born in the Orkneys, and had never seen a city in the Old World. Coming out to America in a sailing vessel of The Company by way of Hudson Bay, he threaded the inland waterway which brought him to Chipewyan without seeing a city in America. Torontonians think the hub of the universe is their capital on Lake Ontario. A smart young man from Toronto filtered in one day to Chipewyan, and asked the old blacksmith, "Came from the Old Country, didn't you? What did you think of Toronto?" "Naething, I didna see the place."

Mr. Wyllie has never seen an electric light nor a railway train nor a two-story building nor a telegraph wire nor a telephone. In the forty-five years in which he has presided over this forge, the limits of his wanderings have been McMurray on the south, Fort Smith on the north, Fond du Lac on the east, the Chutes of the Peace on the west. To him these are innocuous days of ease, in which we are falling into luxuriousness with all its weakening influence. "It was much better in the old days when we had only dried meat and fish-oil. Nowadays, when we have flour and tinned meats and preserved fruits, all my teeth are coming out!"

No one feels like smiling a smile of superiority in talking with old Mr. Wyllie. He has taught himself the gentle arts of gunsmithing and blacksmithing. The tools that we see all around us are marvels of mechanical skill and would be the joy of a modern Arts and Crafts Exhibition. His sledges and augurs, planes and chisels have been made by the old man out of pig iron which came as ballast in the holds of those old sailing ships which beat their way into Fort Churchill through Hudson Strait. The hand-made tools are set into convenient handles of moose-horn and bone. Clever indeed is the workmanship that Wyllie has done with them. The last triumph from this unique forge was the welding of the broken shaft of the little tugPrimrose. The steamerGrahamewas built at Chipewyan of whipsawn lumber, and much of her steel and ironwork was wrought on Wyllie's forge.

Wyllie left the Scottish Isles when a mere lad, but they are still "Home" to him and he tells us that this autumn he is going back on a visit. It was a prototype of Wyllie's

"From the lone sheiling and the misty island,

Mountains divide us and a waste of seas,

But still the heart, the heart is Highland,

And we indreamsbehold the Hebrides,"

who prayed "O, Lord, we beseech Thee, send down Thy covenanted blessin' on the Muckle Hebrides, the Lesser Hebrides, and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and Ireland." Talking with the old gentleman, you are conscious of the innate moral strength rather than the mechanical skill of the craftsman. Instinctively you feel the splendid power of his presence and come out from his forge murmuring, "Thank God I have seen amanthis day." Wyllie belongs to the age of the old journals, to the days that bred Joe Gargerys and old Adams in whom appeared "the constant service of the antique world."

Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North.Samples of Woman's Work of the Far North.

EXPLANATION OF PLATEA and C—Muski-moots, or bags used by the duck-hunter for his game. Made by Dog-Rib women, ofbabiche, or rawhide of the moose or caribou.B—Velvet leggings richly embroidered in violet-coloured bead-work, made by Mrs. (Archdeacon) Macdonald, a full-blooded Loucheaux woman.D—Wall-pocket of white deerskin embroidered in silk. Made by a Rabbit-Skin woman at Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle.E—Wall-pocket ornamented with porcupine-quill work, made by a Yellow-Knife Indian woman at Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake.F—Fire-bag, or tobacco-pouch, made of two claws of the black bear. The work of a Beaver Indian woman at Vermilion-on-the-Peace.G—Fire-bagof velvet ornamented with silk-work, made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.H—Velvet watch-bag embroidered in silk, made by Slavi Indian woman at Fort Providence, at the head of Mackenzie River.I—Watch-pocket of smoked moose-skin, embroidered in silk-work, made by a Cree girl at Fort McMurray on the Athabasca.J—Armlets ornamented in porcupine quills, made by a half-breed woman on the Liard River (a feeder of the Mackenzie).K—Three hat bands—the first two ornamented with porcupine quills, and the last in silk embroidery—made by Chipewyan woman at Fond du Lac, Lake Athabasca.L—Beautiful belt of porcupine work, made by a half-breed woman at Fort Nelson on the Liard (a feeder of the Mackenzie).M—Armlets of porcupine-quill work, made by half-breed girl at Fort Chipewyan.

Mr. and Mrs. William Johnson, with generous courtesy, have made us their guests while we stay, and their refined home is a clear delight. Mr. Johnson is as clever a man as Mr. Wyllie, but in other lines. Without ever having seen an electric light, he learned by study and research more about electricity than nine men out of ten know who go through Electrical Training Schools. With the knowledge thus gained he constructed and put into working use an electric-light plant at Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie. Far up here on the map, too, the "Judge," as he is lovingly called, taught himself all about watches, and he is now Father Time for the whole Mackenzie District, regulating and mending every timepiece in the country. The corrected watches are carried to their owners by the next obliging person who passes the post, where the owner is notching off the days on a piece of stick while he waits. A watch, the works of which were extracted from three old ones and assembled within one case by this Burbank of Watchdom, found its way down to Chicago. The jeweller into whose hands it fell declared that among all his workmen there was not one who could have duplicated the job.

Chipewyan is a bird paradise; the whole woods are vocal to-day. In the autumn, wonderful hunts are made of the southward-flying cranes, geese, and waveys, thousands of these great birds being killed and salted and put in ice chambers for winter use. If the mosquitoes were not so bad we would spend hours in the woods here with "God's jocund little fowls." These sweet songsters seem to have left far behind them to the south all suspicion of bigger bipeds. We hear the note of the ruby-crowned kinglet (regulus calendula) which some one says sounds like "Chappie, chappie, jackfish." The American red-start comes to our very feet, the yellow warbler, the Tennessee warbler, the red-eyed vireo, and the magnolia warbler, which last, a young Cree tells us, is "High-Chief-of-all-the-small-birds." Rusty blackbirds are here with slate-coloured junco, and we see a pair of purple finches. We are fortunate in getting a picture of the nest of the Gambel sparrow and two of the nesting white-throated, sparrow. They are ferreted out for us by the sharp eyes of a girl who says her Cree name is "A-wandering-bolt-of-night-lightning!" At our feet blossom cinquefoil, immortelles, the dainty flowers of the bed-straw.

It has been a full day, and by the way the "permits" are opening up in the settlement when we come back, promises to be a full night. These men have waited a whole year for a drink, and now the lids can't come off quick enough. "Come, hurry up, Flynn, we're all as dry as wooden gods, we're so dry that we're brittle—we'd break if you hit us." "Well, I'm hurrying; I'm as much in a rush as any of you; I'm so warped the hoops are falling off."

It doesn't take long to polish off the permits proper (or improper). By morning all this liquor, imported for "medicinal purposes," is gone. Whoever in Chipewyan is thoughtless enough to get ill during the next twelve months must fall back on the medicine-chest of the English Mission or of the Grey Nuns. Anything strong will do for the creation of joyousness during the remaining three hundred and sixty-four days of the year—Jamaica ginger, lavender-water, flavouring extracts.

Next morning the bon vivants of Chipewyan are down to essences of lemon, vanilla, and ginger, which have been specially imported as stimulating beverages. We ask if they are any good. "Good? I should say so, and one bottle just makes a drink. Can I offer" (politely) "to exhilarate you ladies with vanilla?" The most jovial of the celebrants tells of his early imbibition of red ink. "I used to get a gallon of red ink with my outfit every year, and it gives you the good feel, but when this new Commissioner comes in he writes, 'I don't see how you can use a gallon of red ink at your post in one year,' and I writes back, 'What we don't use we abuse,' and next year he writes to me, 'It's the abuse we complain of,' and, with regretful reminiscence, "I got no more red ink." The substitution of red tape for the carmine fluid that inebriates is an innovation not appreciated.

The old records fascinate us. We spend every spare moment before the coming of the treaty party in transcribing choice bits from them. There were drinks and drinkers in these old days.

"1830, Friday 1st. January. All hands came as is customary to wish us the compliments of the season, and they were treated with cakes each, a pipe, and two feet tobacco. In the evening they have the use of the hall to dance, and are regaled with a beverage."

"1830, April 30. Poitras, a Chipewyan half-breed, arrived, and delivered 81 made beavers in prime furs, though he says he has been sickly all winter. I therefore presented him with a complete clothing and a Feather."

"1830, May 16th. One of our Indians having been in company with Indians from Isle a la Crosse got married to one of their young women, consequently has followed the father-in-law and taken his hunt away from us."

"1830, August 13th. One Indian,The Rat, passed us on the Portage, he was treated with a dram for 'Old Acquaintance' sake."

On New Year's Eve the old chronicler drops into verse. In tall thin letters in faded ink we read,

Back to Index Next