THE NEW NORTH
Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic
BY AGNES DEANS CAMERON
A Magnificent Trophy
TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER, JESSIE ANDERSON CAMERON
AND
TO ALL THOSE WHO TRY TO LIVE OUT HER SIMPLE RULE: "WE MUST JUST TRY TO DO THE VERY BEST WE CAN"
PREFACE
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.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I: THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
The Mendicants leave Chicago—The invisible parallel of 49 where the eagle perches and makes amorous eyes at the beaver—Union Jack floats on an ox-cart—A holy baggage-room—Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat-Belt—The trapper and the doctor—Mrs. Humphry Ward speaks—Boy Makers of Empire—The vespers of St. Boniface
CHAPTER II: WINNIPEG TO ATHABASCA LANDING
The 1,000-mile wheat-field—Calgary-in-the-Foothills—Edmonton, the end of steel—The Brains of a Trans-Continental—Browning on the Saskatchewan—East Londoners in tents—Our outfit—A Waldorf-Astoria in the wilderness—The lonely cross of the Galician—Height of Land—Sergeant Anderson, R.N.W.M.P., the sleuth of Lesser Slave
CHAPTER III: ATHABASCA LANDING
Athabasca Landing, the Gateway of the North—English gives place to Cree—Limit of the Dry Martini—Will the rabbits run?—The woman printer—Hymn-books by hand in the Cree syllabic—Baseball even here—Rain and reminiscences—The World's Oldest Trust
CHAPTER IV: DOWN THE ATHABASCA ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE MILES TO GRAND RAPIDS
"Farewell, Nistow!"—The rainy deck of a "sturgeon head" under a tarpaulin—Drifting by starlight—The wild geese overhead—Forty-foot gas-spout at the Pelican—The mosquito makes us blood-brothers—Four days on our Robinson Crusoe Island in the swirling Athabasca—Nomenclature of the North—Sentinels of the Silence
CHAPTER V: NINETY MILES OF RAPIDS
The Go-Quick-Her takes the bit in her mouth—Mallards on the half-shell—We set the Athabascan Thames afire—Sturgeon-head breaks her back on the Big Cascade—Fort McMurray—A stranded argosy, wreckage on the beach—Miss Christine Gordon, the Free Trader—A land flowing with coal and oil and gas and tar, timber and lime
CHAPTER VI: FORT CHIPEWYAN PAST AND PRESENT
Old Fort Chipewyan—In the footsteps of Mackenzie and Sir John Franklin—Sir John turns parson—Grey Nuns and brown babies—Where grew the prize wheat of the Philadelphia Centennial—Militant missionaries fight each other for souls—The strong man Loutit—Wyllie at the forge—An electric watch-maker—Where the Gambel sparrow builds—"Out of old books"
CHAPTER VII: LAKE ATHABASCA AND ITS FOND DU LAC
Farewell to the Mounted Police—Our blankets on the deck—Fern odours by untravelled ways—Typewriting and kodaking in 20 hours of daylight—Navigating Lake Athabasca by the power o' man—A 23-inch trout—First white women at Fond du Lac—Carlyle among the Chipewyans, a Fond du Lac library—The hermit padre and the hermit thrush—Worn north trails of the trapper—Caribou by the hundred thousands—The phalarope and the suffragette
CHAPTER VIII: FOND DU LAC TO FORT SMITH
World's records beaten on the Athabasca—Down the Slave to Smith's Landing—Priests sink in the Rapid of the Drowned—The Mosquito Portage—Fort Smith, the new headquarters—Lady-slippers and night-hawks—Steamer built in the wilderness—Last stand of the wood bison—The grey wolf persists—Fur-trade and the silver-fox—Breeding pelicans.
CHAPTER IX: SLAVE RIVER AND GREAT SLAVE LAKE
"Red lemol-lade" kiddies—Tons of crystal salt—Great Slave Lake and its fertile shores—Yellow-Knife and Dog-Rib, subjects of the Seventh Edward—Hay River and its annual mail—Ploughing with dogs—Bill balked—The Alexandra Falls—Bishop Bompas as a surgeon; amputations while you wait.
CHAPTER X: PROVIDENCE TO SIMPSON, ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILES DOWN THE MACKENZIE
Drowning of De-deed—Fort Simpson, the old headquarters—A mouldy museum—The shrew-mice that were not preserved in rum—The farthest north library—Gold-seekers and grub-staked brides—Bishop Bompas, the Apostle of the North—Owindia, the Weeping One—Fort Simpson in the first year of Victoria the Good.
CHAPTER XI: FORT GOOD HOPE ON THE ARCTIC CIRCLE
Tenny Gouley tells us things—Mackenzie River, past and present—The fringed gentian at Fort Wrigley—The fires Mackenzie saw—The weathered knob of Bear Rock—Great Bear Lake—Orangeman's Day at Norman—The Ramparts of the Mackenzie—Fort Good Hope under the Arctic Circle—Mignonette and Old World courtesy—We meet Hagar once more—Potatoes on the Circle—The Little Church of the Open Door
CHAPTER XII: ARCTIC RED RIVER AND ITS ESKIMO
Arctic Red River—Wilfrid Laurier, the merger—Mrs. Ila-la-Rocko, the danseuse—Marriage as the Oo-vai-oo-aks see it—Orange-blossoms at Su-pi-di-do's—Trading tryst at Barter Island—Floating fathers—By-o Baby Bunting—Wild roses and tame Eskimo—Midnight football with walrus bladder and enthusiasm—Education that makes for manliness
Sir John Franklin's lobsticks at Point Separation—We reach Fort Macpherson on the Peel—Sergeant Fitzgerald, R.N.W.M.P., eulogizes the Eskimo—An Eskimo wife must make boots that are waterproof—She ariseth also while it is yet night and cheweth the boots of her household—Cribbage-boards the link between Dick Swiveller and the Eskimo—Linked sweetness long drawn out—Chauncey Depew of the Kogmollycs
CHAPTER XIV: MORALIZING UNDER THE MIDNIGHT SUN
The Midnight Sun—Our friend the heathen—"We want to go to hell"—Catching fish by prayer—The Eskimo and the Flood—Pink tea at the Pole—Always a balance in the Eskimo Bank—Marriage for better and not for worse—Christmas carols even here
CHAPTER XV: MAINLY CONCERNING FOOD
Jurisprudence on ice—The generous Innuit—Emmie-ray, the Delineator pattern—Weak races are pressed south—Roxi, a re-incarnation of Sir Philip Sidney—Blubbery bon vivants—Eskimo knew the Elephant—We write the last chapter of the story of McClure, the navigator—Cannibalism at the Circle
CHAPTER XVI: THE TALE OF A WHALE
Circumpolar Bowhead makes his last stand—Whales here and elsewhere—The Yankee peddler at Canada's back-door—Thirteen and a half million in whale values—Wind-swept Herschel, the Isle of Whales—One wife for a thousand years—Baleen, Spermaceti, and Ambergris—Save the Whale
CHAPTER XVII: SOUTH FROM THE ARCTIC TO CHIPEWYAN
Lives lost for the sake of a white bead—The stars come back—The Keele party from the Dollarless Divide—"Here and there a grayling"—Across Great Slave Lake—The first white women at Fort Rae—Land of the musk-ox—Tales of 76 below—Two Thursdays in one week—Rabbits on ice
CHAPTER XVIII: TO MC MURRAY AND BACK TO THE PEACE
The nuptials of 'Norine—Ladies round gents and gents don't go—The fossil-gatherers—I give my name to a Cree kiddie—A solid mile of red raspberries—The typewriter an uncanny medicine—The Beetle Fleet leaves for Outside—Shipwrecked on a batture
CHAPTER XIX: UP THE PEACE TO VERMILION
Ho! for the Peace—One break in 900 miles of navigation—A grey wolf—Bear-meat and the Se-weep-i-gons—Ninety-foot spruces—Tom Kerr and his bairns—The fish-seine that never fails—Our lobsticks by Red River—The Chutes of the Peace
CHAPTER XX: VERMILION-ON-THE-PEACE
The farthest north flour-mill—The man who made Vermilion—Wheat at $1.25 a bushel—An Experimental Farm in latitude 58° 30'—An unoccupied kingdom as large as Belgium—Where the steamer Peace River was built—The hospitable home of the Wilsons—Vermilion a Land of Promise Fulfilled—Culture and the Cloister—Thomas of Canterbury on the Stump
CHAPTER XXI: FORT VERMILION TO LESSER SLAVE
Se-li-nah of the happy heart—My premier moose—The rare and resourceful boatmen of the North—Alexander Mackenzie's last camp
CHAPTER XXII: PEACE RIVER CROSSING TO LESSER SLAVE LAKE
Pleasant prairies of the Peace—We tramp a hundred miles—The Angelus at Lesser Slave—Poole coats and Norfolk shooting-jackets—Roast duck galore—Alec Kennedy of the Nile—Louise the Wetigo, she ate nineteen
CHAPTER XXIII: LESSER SLAVE LAKE TO EDMONTON
Jim wins: Allie Brick can't run—100,000,000 acres of wheat-land—Jilly-Loo bird still lacks a rib—100 moose in one month—Peripatetic judges but no prisoners—The best-tattooed man in the Province of Alberta—The-Man-Who-Goes-Around-and-Helps
CHAPTER XXIV: HOMES AMONG THE YELLOW WHEAT
Edmonton again—Wyllie goes out on the Long Journey—Donaldson killed by a walrus—Two drowned in the Athabasca—Steel kings and iron horses—Wheat-plains the melting-pot of a New Nation
ROUTES OF TRAVEL
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- A magnificent trophy
- Map showing the Author's Route
- Sir Wilfred Laurier
- Earl Grey, Governor-General of Canada
- Winnipeg, the Buckle of the Wheat Belt
- The Canadian Women's Press Club
- A section of Edmonton
- The Golden Fleece of Saskatchewan
- Irrigation ditch, Calgary, Alberta
- A Waldorf-Astoria on the prairie's edge
- Athabasca Landing
Map of the Author's Route
CHAPTER I
THE MENDICANTS REACH WINNIPEG
"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
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."