CHAPTER XIII.
Lake Athabasca.—Northern Lights.—Chipewyan.—The real Workers of the World.
Lake Athabasca.—Northern Lights.—Chipewyan.—The real Workers of the World.
Athabasca,or more correctly “Arabascow,” “The Meeting-place of many Waters,” is a large lake. At this fort of Chipewyan we stand near its western end. Two hundred miles away to the east, its lonely waters still lave against the granite rocks.
Whatever may be the work to which he turns hand or brain, an Indian seldom errs. If he names a lake or fashions a piece of bark to sail its waters, both will fit the work for which they were intended.
“The meeting-place of many waters” tells the story of Athabasca. In its bosom many rivers unite their currents; and from its north-western rim pours the Slave River, the true Mackenzie. Its first English discoverer called it the “Lake of the Hills;” a more appropriate title would have been “The Lake of the Winds,” for fierce and wild the storms sweep over its waves.
Over the Lake Athabasca the Northern Lights hold their highest revels. They flash, and dance, and stream, and intermingle, and wave together their many colours like the shapes and hues of a kaleidoscope. Sometimes the long columns of light seem to rest upon the silent, frozen shores, stretching out their rose-tipped tops to touch the zenith; again the lines of light traverse the sky from east to west as a hand might sweep the chords of some vast harp, and from its touch would flow light instead of music. So quickly run the colours along these shafts, that the ear listens instinctively for sound in the deep stillness of the frozen solitude; but sound I have never heard. Many a time I have listened breathless to catch the faintest whisper of these wondrous lightnings; they were mute as the waste that lay around me.
Figures convey but a poor idea of cold, yet they are the only means we have, and by a comparison of figures some persons, at least, will understand the cold of an Athabascan winter. The citadel of Quebec has the reputation of being a cold winter residence; its mean temperature for the month of January is 11° 7´ Fahr. The mean temperature of the month of January, 1844, at Fort Chipewyan, was 22° 74´, or nearly 30° colder, and during the preceding month of December the wind blew witha total pressure of one thousand one hundred and sixty pounds to the square foot.
It is perhaps needless to say more about the rigour of an Athabascan winter.
As it is the “meeting-place of many waters” so also is it the meeting-place of many systems. Silurian and Devonian approach it from the west. Laurentian still holds five-sixths of its waters in the same grasp as when what is now Athabasca lay a deep fiord along the ancient ocean shore. The old rock caught it to his rough heart then, and when in later ages the fickle waves which so long had kissed his lips left him stern and lonely, he still held the clear, cold lake to his iron bosom.
Athabasca may be said to mark also the limits of some great divisions of the animal kingdom. The reindeer and that most curious relic of an older time, the musk ox, come down near its north-eastern shores, for there that bleak region known as the “Barren Grounds” is but a few miles distant. These animals never pass to the southern end of the lake; the Cariboo, or reindeer of the woods, being a distinct species from that which inhabits the treeless waste. The wood buffalo and the moose are yet numerous on the north-west and south-west shores: but of these things we shall have more to say anon.
All through the summer, from early May to mid-October, the shores of the lake swarm with wild geese, and the twilight midsummer midnight is filled with the harsh sounds of the cries of the snow goose, or the “wavy” flying low over their favourite waters.
In early days Chipewyan was an important centre of the fur trade, and in later times it has been made the starting-point of many of the exploratory parties to the northern coast. From Old Fort Chipewyan Mackenzie set forth to explore the great northern river, and to the same place he returned when first of all men north of the 40th parallel he had crossed in the summers of 1792–93 the continent to the Pacific Ocean.
It was from New Fort Chipewyan that Simpson set out to trace the coast-line of the Arctic Ocean; and earlier than either, it was from Fond du Lac, at the eastern end of Fort Athabasca, that Samuel Hearne wandered forth to reach the Arctic Sea.
To-day it is useful to recall these stray items of adventure from the past in which they lie buried. It has been said by some one that a “nation cannot be saved by a calculation;” neither can she be made by one.
If to-day we are what we are, it is because a thousand men in bygone times did not stop tocount the cost. The decline of a nation differs from that of an individual in the first symptoms of its decay. The heart of the nation goes first, the extremities still remain vigorous. France, with many a gallant soul striking hard for her in the Carnatic or in Canada, sickens in the pomp and luxury of Versailles, and has nothing to offer to her heroes but forgetfulness, debt, or the rack. Her colonial history was one long tissue of ingratitude.
Biencourt, De Chastes, Varrene de la Verendrie, or Lally might fight and toil and die, what cared the selfish heart of old France? The order of St. Louis long denied, and 40,000 livres of debt rewarded the discovery of the Rocky Mountains. Frenchmen gave to France a continent. France thought little of the gift, and fate took it back again. History sometimes repeats itself. There is a younger if not a greater Britain waiting quietly to reap the harvest of her mother’s mistakes.
But to Chipewyan. It is emphatically a lonely spot; in summer the cry of the wild bird keeps time to the lapping of the wave on the rocky shore, or the pine islands rustle in the western breeze; nothing else moves over these 8000 square miles of crystal water. Now and again at long intervals the beautiful canoe of a Chipewyan glides along the bay-indented shores, or crosses some traverse in the open lake.
When Samuel Hearne first looked upon the “Arabascow,” buffalo were very numerous along its southern shore, to-day they are scarce; all else rests as then in untamed desolation. At times this west end of the lake has been the scene of strange excitements. Men came from afar and pitched their tents awhile on these granite shores, ere they struck deeper into the heart of the great north. Mackenzie, Franklin, Back, Richardson, Simpson, Rae, rested here; ere piercing further into unknown wilds, they flew the red-cross flag o’er seas and isles upon whose shores no human foot had pressed a sand-print.
Eight hundred thousand pounds sunk in the Arctic Sea! will exclaim my calculating friend behind the national counter; nearly a million gone for ever! No, head cash-keeper, you are wrong. That million of money will bear interest higher than all your little speculations in times not far remote, and in times lying deep in the misty future. In hours when life and honour lie at different sides of the “to do” or “not to do,” men will go back to times when other men battling with nature or with man, cast their vote on the side of honour, and by the white light thrown into the future from the great dead Past, they will read their roads where many paths commingle.