Part 8
With insult and derision Riel and his colleagues had fled from the scene of their triumph and their crimes. On the bare flagstaff in the fort the Union Jack was once more hoisted, and from the battery found in the square a royal salute of twenty-one guns told settler and savage that the man who had been "elevated by the grace of Providence and the suffrages of his fellow-citizens to the highest position in the government of his country," had been ignominiously expelled therefrom. The breakfast in Government House was found untouched, and thus that tempest in the teacup, the revolt of Red River, found a fitting conclusion in the president's untasted tea!
Colonel Wolseley had been given no civil authority, and a wild scene of drunkenness and debauchery among the _voyageurs_ and Indians followed the arrival of the troops; but when the Hon. Mr. Archibald, the Civil Governor, reached Winnipeg, he set matters completely to rest. Before ten days elapsed the regular troops commenced their return journey to Canada. On September 10, Colonel Wolseley also took his leave, and I was left alone in Fort Garry. The Red River expedition was over. My long journey seemed finished; but I was mistaken, for it was only about to begin.
_III.--In the Far North-west_
Early in the second week of October the Hon. Mr. Archibald, Lieutenant-governor of Manitoba, offered me, and I accepted, a mission to the Saskatchewan Valley and through the Indian countries of the West, and on the 24th of that month I quitted Fort Garry and commenced my long journey. My instructions were to inquire into the state of affairs in the territory; to obtain every particular in connection with the rise and spread of the scourge of small-pox, from which thousands of Indians, Esquimaux, and others had lately perished; to distribute medicines suitable for its treatment to every fort, post, clergyman, or intelligent person belonging to the settlements, or outside the Hudson Bay Company's posts.
I made the first stage of 230 miles in five days to Fort Ellice, where we stayed a couple of days to make preparations for the winter journey into the Great Lone Land. It was near the close of the Indian summer, and we travelled at the rate of fifty miles a day, I riding my little game horse Blackie, while the Red River cart, containing the baggage and medicines, was drawn by six horses--three in the shafts for a spell, the other three running free alongside.
Between Fort Ellice and Carlton Fort you pass through the region of the Touchwood Hills, around which are immense plains scored with the tracks of the countless buffaloes which, until a few years ago, roamed in vast herds between the Saskatchewan and Assiniboine. On November 4, and on several successive days thereafter, snowstorms burst upon us, and the whole country around was hidden in the dense mist of driving snowflakes.
On the 7th we emerged upon a hill plateau, and 300 feet below was raging the mighty South Saskatchewan, with great masses of floating, grinding ice. We contrived a raft made from the box of the wagon, but we could not accomplish the passage in it. Later on, hard frost having set in, we were able to cross the river on foot, with the loss of my horse Blackie, and when half a dozen of the twenty miles to Carlton Fort had been covered we met a party from it, including the officer in charge. The first question was, "What of the plague?" And the answer was that it had burned itself out.
On November 14, we set out again on our western journey, and crossed the North Saskatchewan. On account of the snow we had discarded our cart and used sleds. Travelling over hill and dale and frozen lake, we lost the way in the wilderness, but, taking a line by myself, steering by the stars, I came on November 17 to Fort Pitt, after having been fifteen hours on end in the saddle.
Fort Pitt was free of small-pox, but 100 Crees had perished close around its stockades. The unburied dead lay for days, until the wolves came and fought over the decaying bodies. The living remnant had fled in despair six weeks before my arrival. When we renewed our journey on November 20, the weather became comparatively mild, and our course lay through rich, well-watered valleys with groves of spruce and pine. Edmonton, which we reached on November 26, is the headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company's Saskatchewan trade and the residence of a chief factor of the corporation.
My objective after leaving Edmonton on December 1 was Rocky Mountain House, 180 miles distant by horse-trail. Our way led over hills and plains and the great frozen Gull Lake to the Pas-co-pee, or Blind Man's River, where we camped on December 3. At midnight there was a heavy storm of snow. Next morning we rode through the defiles of the Three Medicine Hills, and after midday, at the western termination of the last gorge, there lay before me a sight to be long remembered. The great chain of the Rocky Mountains rose their snow-clad sierras in endless succession and in unclouded glory. The snow had cleared the atmosphere, the sky was coldly bright.
An immense plain stretched from my feet to the mountains--a plain so vast that every object of hill and wood and lake lay dwarfed into one continuous level. And at the back of this level, beyond the pines and lakes and the river courses, rose the giant range, solid, impassable, silent--a mighty barrier rising amidst an immense land, standing sentinel over the plains and prairies of America, over the measureless solitudes of this Great Lone Land.
That night there came a frost, and on the morning of November 5 my thermometer showed 22 degrees below zero. Riding through the foot hills and pine woods we suddenly emerged on the high banks of the Saskatchewan, and in the mid distance of a deep valley was the Mountain House. There was great excitement at my arrival. My journey from the Red River had occupied 41 days, and I had ridden in that time 1,180 miles.
_IV.--On the Dog Trail to Fort Garry_
I said good-bye to my friends at the Mountain House on December 12, and once more turned my footsteps eastward. Without incident we reached Edmonton, and there changed horses and travelled thenceforth, setting out on December 20, with three trains of dogs--one to carry myself, and the others to carry provisions and baggage. In fifty days of dog travel we covered a distance of 1,300 miles, with the cold sometimes 45 degrees below zero. Great as were the hardships and privations, the dog trail had many moments of keen pleasure. It was January 19 when we reached the high ground which looks down upon the forks of the Saskatchewan River.
We now entered the great sub-Arctic pine forest, the most important preserve of those animals whose skins are rated in the markets of Europe at four times their weight in gold. On January 22, 1871, we reached Fort-a-la-Corne, where an old travel-worn Indian came with a mail which contained news of the surrender of Metz, the investment of Paris, the tearing up of the Treaty of Paris by the Prussians; and on being questioned the old man said he had heard at Fort Garry that there was war, and that England was gaining the day!
To cross with celerity the 700 miles lying between me and Fort Garry became the chief object of my life. The next morning, with the lightest of equipment, I started for Cumberland House, the oldest post of the Hudson Bay Company in the interior. There I obtained, at fabulous expense, a train of pure Esquimaux dogs, and started on January 31 through a region of frozen swamp for fully 100 miles. On February 7 we reached Cedar Lake, thence sped on to Lake Winnipegoosis and Shoal Lake, across a belt of forest to Waterhen River, which carries the surplus floods of Lake Winnipegoosis to Lake Manitoba, the whole length of which we traversed, camping at night on the wooded shore, and on February 19 arrived at a mission-house fifty miles from Fort Garry. Not without a feeling of regret was the old work of tree-cutting, fire-making, supper-frying, and dog-feeding gone through for the last time.
My mission was accomplished; but in the after-time, 'midst the smoke and hum of cities, 'midst the prayer of churches, it needs but little cause to recall again to the wanderer the message of the immense meadows where far away at the portals of the setting sun lies the Great Lone Land.
The Wild North Land
_I.--From Civilisation to Savagery_
This was Sir William Francis Butler's second book on the regions and the people of the great Northwest of Canada. The fascination of the wilderness had got a grip upon him, and he conveys something of the same fascination to the reader, whom he allures through the immense and solemn aisles of the great sub-Arctic forest, makes him a joint-hunter after the bison on the Great Prairie, or after the marten and the beaver on the tributary streams to the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine rivers. The reader is carried into the fastnesses of the rapidly-disappearing Red Man in mid-winter, and there are graphic revelations of the daring deeds of the half-breed descendants of the white pioneers of the Hudson Bay Company and the _habitants_ from Lower Canada, who were the great discoverers and exploiters of the vast country between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, and beyond to the Pacific. Sir William's story is restrained and convincing, and his descriptions of his adventures in the Wild North Land and its wonderful scenery charm by their eloquence and poetic beauty.
It was late in the month of September, 1872, when, after a summer of travel in Canada and the United States, I drew near the banks of the Red River of the North. Two years had worked many changes in scene and society. A "city" stood on the spot where, during a former visit, a midnight storm had burst upon me in the then untenanted prairie. Representative institutions had been established in the new province of Manitoba. Civilisation had developed itself in other ways, but amidst these changes of scene and society there was one thing still unchanged on the confines of the Red River. Close to the stream of Frog's Point an old friend met me with many tokens of recognition. It was my Esquimaux dog, Cerf-Vola, who had led my train from Cumberland on the lower Saskatchewan, across the ice of the Great Lakes. To become the owner of this old friend again and of his new companions, Spanker and Pony, was a work of necessity.
In the earliest days of October all phases of civilisation were passed with little regret, and at the Rat Creek, near the southern shore of Lake Manitoba, I bade good-bye to society, pushed on to the Hudson Bay Company's post of Beaver Creek, from which point, with one man, three horses, three dogs, and all the requisites of food, arms and raiment, I started on October 14 for the North-west. I was virtually alone. My only human associate was a worthless half-breed taken at chance. But I had other companions. A good dog is so much more a nobler beast than an indifferent man that one sometimes gladly exchanges the society of the one for that of the other; and Cerf-Vola was that dog.
A long distance of rolling plain, of hills fringed with thickets, of treeless wastes and lakes spreading into unseen declivities, stretches from between the Qu'-Appelle to the Saskatchewan rivers. Through it the great trail to the North lays its long, winding course, and over it broods the loneliness of the untenanted. Alone in the vast waste Mount Spathanaw Watchi lifts his head; a lonely grave at top; around 400 miles of horizon. Reduced thus to its own nakedness, space stands forth with almost terrible grandeur. It was October 25 when I once more drew near the South Saskatchewan, and crossing to the southern shore I turned eastward through a rich undulating land, and made for the Grand Forks of the Saskatchewan, which we reached in the last days of October.
It is difficult to imagine a wilder scene than that presented from the tongue of land which rises over the junction of the North and South Saskatchewan rivers. One river has travelled through 800 miles of rich rolling landscape; the other has run its course of 900 miles through arid solitudes. Both have their sources in mountain summits where the avalanche thundered forth to solitude the tiding of their birth.
_II.--The Twin Dwellers of the Prairie_
At the foot of the high ridge which marks the junction of these two rivers was a winter hut built by two friends who proposed to accompany me part of the long journey I meant to take into the Wild North Land. Our winter stock of meat had first to be gathered in, and we accordingly turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. The snow had begun to fall in many storms, and the landscape was wrapped in its winter mantle. The buffalo were 200 miles distant on the Great Prairie. Only two wild creatures have made this grassy desert their home--the Indian and the bison. Of the origin of the strange, wild hunter, the keen untutored scholar of Nature, who sickens beneath our civilisation, and dies amidst our prosperity, fifty writers have broached various theories; but to me it seems that he is of an older and more remote race than our own--a stock coeval with a shadowy age, a remnant of an earlier creation which has vanished from the earth, preserved in these wilds.
As to the other wild creatures who have made their dwelling on the Great Prairie, the millions and millions of dusky bison, during whose migration from the Far South to the Far North the earth trembled beneath their tramp, and the air was filled with the deep, bellowing of their unnumbered throats, no one can tell their origin. Before the advent of the white man these twin dwellers on the Great Prairie are fast disappearing.
It was mid-November before we reached the buffalo, and it was on December 3, having secured enough animals to make the needful pemmican--a hard mixture of fat and dried buffalo meat pounded down into a solid mass--for our long journey, that, with thin and tired horses, we returned to the Forks of the Saskatchewan. The cold had set in unusually early, and even in mid-November the thermometer had fallen to thirty degrees below zero, and unmittened fingers in handling the rifle became frozen. During the sixteen days in which we traversed the Great Prairie on our return journey we had not seen one human being moving over it. The picture of desolation was complete.
When the year was drawing to its close, two Cree Indians pitched their lodge on the opposite side of the North Saskatchewan and afforded us not a little food for amusement in the long winter evenings. In the Red Man's mental composition there is mixed up much simplicity and cunning, close reasoning, and child-like suspicion, much natural quickness, sense of humour, credulousness, power of observation, faith and fun and selfishness.
Preparations had been made for my contemplated journey to the frozen North. I only waited the arrival of the winter packet which was to be carried 3,000 miles to distant stations of the Hudson Bay Company. A score of different dog teams had handled it; it had camped more than 100 nights in the Great Northern forests; but the Indian postman, with dogs and mail, had disappeared in a water-hole in the Saskatchewan river. On February 3, therefore, I set out with my dog team, but without letters.
Two days afterwards we came to Carlton Fort, where there was a great gathering of "agents" from all the forts of the Hudson Bay Company in the north and west, many of them 2,000 miles distant, and one 4,000 miles. These "agents," or "winterers," as they are sometimes called, have to face for a long season hardship, famine, disease, and a rigorous climate. God knows their lives are hard. They hail generally from the remote isles or highlands of Scotland. The routine of their lives is to travel on foot a thousand miles in winter's darkest time, to live upon the coarsest food, to feel cold such as Englishmen in England cannot even comprehend, often to starve, always to dwell in exile from the great world. Perchance, betimes, the savage scene is lost in a dreamy vision of some lonely Scottish loch, some Druid mound in far-away Lewis, some vista of a fireside, when storm howled and waves ran high on the beach at Stornoway.
_III.--The Frozen Trail_
It was brilliant moonlight on February 11 when we left Fort Carlton, and days of rapid travel carried us far to the north into the great sub-Arctic forest, a line of lakes forming its rampart of defence against the wasting fires of the prairie region. The cold was so intense that, at mid-day with the sun shining, the thermometer stood at 26 degrees below zero. Right in our teeth blew the bitter blast; the dogs, with low-bent heads, tugged steadily onward; the half-breeds and Indians who drove our teams wrapped their blankets round their heads. To run was instantly to freeze one's face; to lie on the sled was to chill through the body to the very marrow. It was impossible to face it long, and over and over again we had to put in to shore amongst the trees, make a fire, and boil some tea. Thus we trudged, until we arrived at the Forks of the Athabasca on the last day of February.
In the small fort at the Forks we camped for four days to enjoy a rest, make up new dog trains--Cerf-Vola never gave out--and partake of the tender steak of the wood-buffalo. For many days I had regularly used snow-shoes, and now I seldom sought the respite of the sled, but tramped behind the dogs. Over marsh and frozen river and portage we lagged till, on March 6, a vast lake opened out upon our gaze, on the rising shore of which were the clustered buildings of a large fort, with a red flag flying above them in the cold north blast. The lake was Athabasca, the clustered buildings Fort Chipewyan, and the flag--well, we all knew it; but it is only when the wanderer's eye meets it in some lone spot like this that he turns to it as the emblem of a home which distance has shrined deeper in his heart.
Athabasca means "the meeting place of many waters." In its bosom many rivers unite their currents, and from its northwestern 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 storms sweep over its waves.
Once more the sleds were packed, once more the untiring Cerf-Vola took his place in the leading harness, and the word "march" was given. On the evening of March 12 I camped alone in the wilderness, for the three Indians and half-breeds who accompanied me were alien in every thought and feeling, and on the fourth day after we were on the banks of the Peace River.
Through 300 miles of mountain the Peace River takes its course. Countless creeks and rivers seek its waters; 200 miles from its source it cleaves the main Rocky Mountain chain through a chasm whose straight, steep cliffs frown down on the black water through 6,000 feet of dizzy verge. Farther on it curves, and for 500 miles flows in a deep, narrow valley, from 700 feet to 800 feet below the level of the surrounding plateau. Then it reaches a lower level, the banks become of moderate elevation, the country is densely wooded, the large river winds in serpentine bends through an alluvial valley; the current, once so strong, becomes sluggish, until at last it pours itself through a delta of low-lying drift into the Slave River, and its long course of 1,100 miles is ended.
For 900 miles there are only two breaks in the even flow of its waters--one at a point 250 miles from its mouth, a fall of eight feet with a short rapid above it; the other is the great mountain cañon on the outer and lower range of the Rocky Mountains, where a portage of twelve miles is necessary. This Peace River was discovered in 1792 by a daring Scotsman named Alexander Mackenzie, who was the first European that ever passed the Rocky Mountains and crossed the northern continent of America. The Peace River is the land of the moose, and, winter and summer, hunter and trader, along the whole length of 900 miles, between the Peace and Athabasca, live upon its delicious venison.
This, too, is the country of the Beaver Indians. It is not uncommon for a single Indian to render from his winter trapping 200 marten skins, and not less than 20,000 beavers are annually killed by the tribe. Towards the end of March the sun had become warm enough to soften the surface snow, and therefore we were compelled to travel during the night, when the frost hardened it, and sleep all day.
On April 1, approaching the fort of Dunvegan, we were steering between two huge walls of sandstone rock which towered up 700 feet above the shore. Right in our onward track stood a large, dusky wolf. My dogs caught sight of him, and in an instant they gave chase. The wolf kept the centre of the river, and the carriole bounded from snow-pack to snow-pack, or shot along the level ice. The wolf, however, sought refuge amidst the rocky shore, and the dogs turned along the trail again. Two hours later we reached Dunvegan, after having travelled incessantly for four-and-twenty hours. Here I rested for three days, and then pushed on to Fort St. John--our last dog march.
_IV.--Through Cañon and Rapid_
The time of winter travel had drawn to its close; the ice-road had done its work. From April 15 the river began to break its ice covering, and on April 20 spring had arrived; and with bud and sun and shower came the first mosquito. I left Fort St. John on April 22, having parted with my dog train, except the faithful, untiring Cerf-Vola; crossed the river on an ice bridge at great risk, and horses and men scrambled up 1,000 feet to the top of the plateau. There we mounted our steeds, and for two days followed the trail through a country the beauty of which it is not easy to exaggerate, and reached Half-way River, which we forded at infinite risk on a roughly constructed raft, the horses being compelled to swim the torrent.
Crossing the Peace River at the fort known as Hudson's Hope in a frail canoe, I narrowly escaped drowning by the craft upsetting, losing gun and revolver, although, wonderful to relate, the gun was recovered next day by my half-breed attendant, who dredged it with a line and fish-hook! From Hudson's Hope we made the portage of ten miles which avoids the great cañon of the Peace River at the farther end of which the river becomes navigable for canoes; and there we waited till April 29, when the ice in the upper part of the river broke up.