Pathfinders of the West Part 14

[Ill.u.s.tration: Beaver Coin of Hudson's Bay Company, melted from Old Tea Chests, one Coin representing one Beaver.]

The furs were quickly transferred to the French ships, and the soldiers were turned loose to loot the fort. The Indians fled, among them Moses Norton's gentle daughter, now in her twenty-second year. She could not revert to the loathsome habits of savage life; she dared not go to the fort filled with lawless foreign soldiers; and she perished of starvation outside the walls. Matonabbee had been absent when the French came. He returned to find the fort where he had spent his life in ruins. The English whom he thought invincible were defeated and prisoners of war. Hearne, whom the dauntless old chief had led through untold perils, was a captive. Matonabbee's proud spirit was broken.

The grief was greater than he could bear. All that living stood for had been lost. Drawing off from observation, Matonabbee blew his brains out.

[1] I have purposely avoided bringing up the dispute as to a mistake of some few degrees made by Hearne in his calculations--the point really being finical.

[2] I am sorry to say that in pioneer border warfares I have heard of white men acting in a precisely similar beastly manner after some brutal conflict. To be frank, I know of one case in the early days of Minnesota fur trade, where the irate fur trader killed and devoured his weak companion, not from famine, but sheer frenzy of brutalized pa.s.sion. Such naked light does wilderness life shed over our drawing-room philosophies of the triumphantly strong being the highest type of manhood.

[3] Again the wilderness plunges us back to the primordial: if man be but the supreme beast of prey, whence this consciousness of blood guilt in these unschooled children of the wilds?

PART IV

1780-1793

FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES--HOW MACKENZIE CROSSED THE NORTHERN ROCKIES AND LEWIS AND CLARK WERE FIRST TO CROSS FROM MISSOURI TO COLUMBIA

CHAPTER X

1780-1793

FIRST ACROSS THE ROCKIES

How Mackenzie found the Great River named after him and then pushed across the Mountains to the Pacific, forever settling the question of a Northwest Pa.s.sage

There is an old saying that if a man has the right mettle in him, you may stick him a thousand leagues in the wilderness on a barren rock and he will plant pennies and grow dollar bills. In other words, no matter where or how, success will succeed. No cla.s.s ill.u.s.trates this better than a type that has almost pa.s.sed away--the old fur traders who were lords of the wilderness. Cut off from all comfort, from all encouragement, from all restraint, what set of men ever had fewer incentives to go up, more temptations to go down? Yet from the fur traders sprang the pioneer heroes of America. When young Donald Smith came out--a raw lad--to America, he was packed off to eighteen years'

exile on the desert coast of Labrador. Donald Smith came out of the wilderness to become the Lord Strathcona of to-day. Sir Alexander Mackenzie's life presents even more dramatic contrasts. A clerk in a counting-house at Montreal one year, the next finds him at Detroit setting out for the backwoods of Michigan to barter with Indians for furs. Then he is off with a fleet of canoes forty strong for the Upper Country of forest and wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, where he fights such a desperate battle with rivals that one of his companions is murdered, a second lamed, a third wounded. In all this Alexander Mackenzie was successful while still in the prime of his manhood,--not more than thirty years of age; and the reward of his success was to be exiled to the sub-arctics of the Athabasca, six weeks' travel from another fur post,--not a likely field to play the hero. Yet Mackenzie emerged from the polar wilderness bearing a name that ranks with Columbus and Carrier and La Salle.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Alexander Mackenzie, from a Painting of the Explorer.]

Far north of the Missouri beyond the borderlands flows the Saskatchewan. As far north again, beyond the Saskatchewan, flows another great river, the Athabasca, into Athabasca Lake, on whose blue sh.o.r.es to the north lies a little white-washed fort of some twenty log houses, large barn-like stores, a Catholic chapel, an Episcopal mission, and a biggish residence of pretence for the chief trader.

This is Fort Chipewyan. At certain seasons Indian tepees dot the surrounding plains; and bronze-faced savages, clad in the ill-fitting garments of white people, shamble about the stores, or sit haunched round the shady sides of the log houses, smoking long-stemmed pipes.

These are the Chipewyans come in from their hunting-grounds; but for the most part the fort seems chiefly populated by regiments of husky dogs, s.h.a.ggy-coated, with the sharp nose of the fox, which spend the long winters in harness coasting the white wilderness, and pa.s.s the summers basking lazily all day long except when the bell rings for fish time, when half a hundred huskies scramble wildly for the first meat thrown.

A century ago Chipewyan was much the same as to-day, except that it lay on the south side of the lake. Mails came only once in two years instead of monthly, and rival traders were engaged in the merry game of slitting each other's throats. All together, it wasn't exactly the place for ambition to dream; but ambition was there in the person of Alexander Mackenzie, the young fur trader, dreaming what he hardly dared hope. Business men fight shy of dreamers; so Mackenzie told his dreams to no one but his cousin Roderick, whom he pledged to secrecy.

For fifty years the British government had offered a reward of 20,000 pounds to any one who should discover a Northwest Pa.s.sage between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The hope of such a pa.s.sageway had led many navigators on bootless voyages; and here was Mackenzie with the same bee in his bonnet. To the north of Chipewyan he saw a mighty river, more than a mile wide in places, walled in by great ramparts, and flowing to unknown seas. To the west he saw another river rolling through the far mountains. Where did this river come from, and where did both rivers go? Mackenzie was not the man to leave vital questions unanswered. He determined to find out; but difficulties lay in the way. He couldn't leave the Athabascan posts. That was overcome by getting his cousin Roderick to take charge. The Northwest Fur Company, which had succeeded the French fur traders of Quebec and Montreal when Canada pa.s.sed from the hands of the French to the English, wouldn't a.s.sume any cost or risk for exploring unknown seas. This was more n.i.g.g.ardly than the Hudson's Bay Company, which had paid all cost of outlay for its explorers; but Mackenzie a.s.sumed risk and cost himself.

Then the Indians hesitated to act as guides; so Mackenzie hired guides when he could, seized them by compulsion when he couldn't hire them, and went ahead without guides when they escaped.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for the Value of Three Beaver Skins.]

May--the frog moon--and June--the bird's egg moon--were the festive seasons at Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca. Indian hunters came tramping in from the Barren Lands with toboggan loads of pelts drawn by half-wild husky dogs. Woody Crees and Slaves and Chipewyans paddled across the lake in canoes laden to the gunwales with furs. A world of white skin tepees sprang up like mushrooms round the fur post. By June the traders had collected the furs, sorted and shipped them in flotillas of keel boat, barge, and canoe, east to Lake Superior and Montreal. On the evening of June 2, 1789, Alexander Mackenzie, chief trader, had finished the year's trade and sent the furs to the Eastern warehouses of the Northwest Company, on Lake Superior, at Fort William, not far from where Radisson had first explored, and La Verendrye followed. Indians lingered round the fort of the Northern lake engaged in mad _boissons_, or drinking matches, that used up a winter's earnings in the spree of a single week. Along the sh.o.r.e lay upturned canoes, keels red against the blue of the lake, and everywhere in the dark burned the red fires of the boatmen melting resin to gum the seams of the canoes; for the canoes were to be launched on a long voyage the next day. Mackenzie was going to float down with the current of the Athabasca or Grand River, and find out where that great river emptied in the North.

The crew must have spent the night in a last wild spree; for it was nine in the morning before all hands were ready to embark. In Mackenzie's large birch canoe went four Canadian _voyageurs_, their Indian wives, and a German. In other canoes were the Indian hunters and interpreters, led by "English Chief," who had often been to Hudson Bay. Few provisions were taken. The men were to hunt, the women to cook and keep the _voyageurs_ supplied with moccasins, which wore out at the rate of one pair a day for each man. Traders bound for Slave Lake followed behind. Only fifty miles were made the first day.

Henceforth Mackenzie embarked his men at three and four in the morning.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Quill and Bead Work on Buckskin, Mackenzie River Indians.]

The mouth of Peace River was pa.s.sed a mile broad as it pours down from the west, and the boatmen _portaged_ six rapids the third day, one of the canoes, steered by a squaw more intent on her sewing than the paddles, going over the falls with a smash that shivered the bark to kindling-wood. The woman escaped, as the current caught the canoe, by leaping into the water and swimming ash.o.r.e with the aid of a line. Ice four feet thick clung to the walls of the rampart sh.o.r.es, and this increased the danger of landing for a _portage_, the Indians whining out their complaints in exactly the tone of the wailing north wind that had cradled their lives--"Eduiy, eduiy!--It is hard, white man, it is hard!" And harder the way became. For nine nights fog lay so heavily on the river that not a star was seen. This was followed by driving rain and wind. Mackenzie hoisted a three-foot sail and cut over the water before the wind with the hiss of a boiling kettle. Though the sail did the work of the paddles, it gave the _voyageurs_ no respite.

Cramped and rain-soaked, they had to bail out water to keep the canoe afloat. In this fashion the boats entered Slave Lake, a large body of water with one horn pointing west, the other east. Out of both horns led unknown rivers. Which way should Mackenzie go? Low-lying marshlands--beaver meadows where the wattled houses of the beaver had stopped up the current of streams till moss overgrew the swamps and the land became quaking muskeg--lay along the sh.o.r.es of the lake. There were islands in deep water, where caribou had taken refuge, travelling over ice in winter for the calves to be safe in summer from wolf pack and bear. Mackenzie hired a guide from the Slave Indians to pilot the canoes over the lake; but the man proved useless. Days were wasted poking through mist and rushes trying to find an outlet to the Grand River of the North. Finally, English Chief lost his temper and threatened to kill the Slave Indian unless he succeeded in taking the canoes out of the lake. The waters presently narrowed to half a mile; the current began to race with a hiss; sails were hoisted on fishing-poles; and Mackenzie found himself out of the rushes on the Grand River to the west of Slave Lake.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior.]

Here pause was made at a camp of Dog Ribs, who took the bottom from the courage of Mackenzie's comrades by gruesome predictions that old age would come upon the _voyageurs_ before they reached salt water. There were impa.s.sable falls ahead. The river flowed through a land of famine peopled by a monstrous race of hostiles who ma.s.sacred all Indians from the South. The effect of these cheerful prophecies was that the Slave Lake guide refused to go on. English Chief bodily put the recalcitrant into a canoe and forced him ahead at the end of a paddle. Snow-capped mountains loomed to the west. The river from Bear Lake was pa.s.sed, greenish of hue like the sea, and the Slave Lake guide now feigned such illness that watch was kept day and night to prevent his escape. The river now began to wind, with lofty ramparts on each side; and once, at a sharp bend in the current, Mackenzie looked back to see Slave Lake Indians following to aid the guide in escaping. After that one of the white men slept with the fellow each night to prevent desertion; but during the confusion of a terrific thunder-storm, when tents and cooking utensils were hurled about their heads, the Slave succeeded in giving his watchers the slip. Mackenzie promptly stopped at an encampment of strange Indians, and failing to obtain another guide by persuasion, seized and hoisted a protesting savage into the big canoe, and signalled the unwilling captive to point the way. The Indians of the river were indifferent, if not friendly; but once Mackenzie discovered a band hiding their women and children as soon as the boatmen came in view. The unwilling guide was forced ash.o.r.e, as interpreter, and gifts pacified all fear. But the incident left its impression on Mackenzie's comrades. They had now been away from Chipewyan for forty days. If it took much longer to go back, ice would imprison them in the polar wilderness. Snow lay drifted in the valleys, and scarcely any game was seen but fox and grouse. The river was widening almost to the dimensions of a lake, and when this was whipped by a north wind the canoes were in peril enough. The four Canadians besought Mackenzie to return. To return Mackenzie had not the slightest intention; but he would not tempt mutiny. He promised that if he did not find the sea within seven days, he would go back.

That night the sun hung so high above the southern horizon that the men rose by mistake to embark at twelve o'clock. They did not realize that they were in the region of midnight sun; but Mackenzie knew and rejoiced, for he must be near the sea. The next day he was not surprised to find a deserted Eskimo village. At that sight the enthusiasm of the others took fire. They were keen to reach the sea, and imagined that they smelt salt water. In spite of the lakelike expanse of the river, the current was swift, and the canoes went ahead at the rate of sixty and seventy miles a day--if it could be called day when there was no night. Between the 13th and 14th of July the _voyageurs_ suddenly awakened to find themselves and their baggage floating in rising water. What had happened to the lake? Their hearts took a leap; for it was no lake. It was the tide. They had found the sea.

How hilariously jubilant were Mackenzie's men, one may guess from the fact that they chased whales all the next day in their canoes. The whales dived below, fortunately; for one blow of a finback or sulphur bottom would have played skittles with the canoes. Coming back from the whale hunt, triumphant as if they had caught a dozen finbacks, the men erected a post, engraving on it the date, July 14, 1789, and the names of all present.

It had taken six weeks to reach the Arctic. It took eight to return to Chipewyan, for the course was against stream, in many places tracking the canoes by a tow-line. The beaver meadows along the sh.o.r.e impeded the march. Many a time the quaking moss gave way, and the men sank to mid-waist in water. While skirting close ash.o.r.e, Mackenzie discovered the banks of the river to be on fire. The fire was a natural tar bed, which the Indians said had been burning for centuries and which burns to-day as when Mackenzie found it. On September 12, with a high sail up and a driving wind, the canoes cut across Lake Athabasca and reached the beach of Chipewyan at three in the afternoon, after one hundred and two days' absence. Mackenzie had not found the Northwest Pa.s.sage. He had proved there was no Northwest Pa.s.sage, and discovered the Mississippi of the north--Mackenzie River.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River.]

Mackenzie spent the long winter at Fort Chipewyan; but just as soon as the rivers cleared of ice, he took pa.s.sage in the east-bound canoes and hurried down to the Grand Portage or Fort William on Lake Superior, the headquarters of the Northwest Company, where he reported his discovery of Mackenzie River. His report was received with utter indifference.

The company had other matters to think about. It was girding itself for the life-and-death struggle with its rival, the Hudson's Bay Company. "My expedition was hardly spoken of, but that is what I expected," he writes to his cousin. But chagrin did not deter purpose.

He asked the directors' permission to explore that other broad stream--Peace River--rolling down from the mountains. His request was granted. Winter saw him on furlough in England, studying astronomy and surveying for the next expedition. Here he heard much of the Western Sea--the Pacific--that fired his eagerness. The voyages of Cook and Hanna and Meares were on everybody's lips. Spain and England and Russia were each pushing for first possession of the northwest coast.

Mackenzie hurried back to his Company's fort on the banks of Peace River, where he spent a restless winter waiting for navigation to open.

Doubts of his own ambitions began to trouble him. What if Peace River did not lead to the west coast at all? What if he were behind some other discoverer sent out by the Spaniards or the Russians? "I have been so vexed of late that I cannot sit down to anything steadily," he confesses in a letter to his cousin. Such a tissue-paper wall separates the aims of the real hero from those of the fool, that almost every ambitious man must pa.s.s through these periods of self-doubt before reaching the goal of his hopes. But despondency did not benumb Mackenzie into apathy, as it has weaker men.

By April he had shipped the year's furs from the forks of Peace River to Chipewyan. By May his season's work was done. He was ready to go up Peace River. A birch canoe thirty feet long, lined with lightest of cedar, was built. In this were stored pemmican and powder. Alexander Mackay, a clerk of the company, was chosen as first a.s.sistant. Six Canadian _voyageurs_--two of whom had accompanied Mackenzie to the Arctic--and two Indian hunters made up the party of ten who stepped into the canoes at seven in the evening of May 9, 1793.

Peace River tore down from the mountains flooded with spring thaw. The crew soon realized that paddles must be bent against the current of a veritable mill-race; but it was safer going against, than with, such a current, for unknown dangers could be seen from below instead of above, where suction would whirl a canoe on the rocks. Keen air foretold the nearing mountains. In less than a week snow-capped peaks had crowded the canoe in a narrow canon below a tumbling cascade where the river was one wild sheet of tossing foam as far as eye could see. The difficulty was to land; for precipices rose on each side in a wall, down which rolled enormous boulders and land-slides of loose earth. To _portage_ goods up these walls was impossible. Fastening an eighty-foot tow-line to the bow, Mackenzie leaped to the declivity, axe in hand, cut foothold along the face of the steep cliff to a place where he could jump to level rock, and then, turning, signalled through the roar of the rapids for his men to come on. The _voyageurs_ were paralyzed with fear. They stripped themselves ready to swim if they missed the jump, then one by one vaulted from foothold to foothold where Mackenzie had cut till they came to the final jump across water.

Here Mackenzie caught each on his shoulders as the _voyageurs_ leaped.

The tow-line was then pa.s.sed round trees growing on the edge of the precipice, and the canoe tracked up the raging cascade. The waves almost lashed the frail craft to pieces. Once a wave caught her sideways; the tow-line snapped like a pistol shot, for just one instant the canoe hung poised, and then the back-wash of an enormous boulder drove her bow foremost ash.o.r.e, where the _voyageurs_ regained the tow-line.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Slave Lake Indians.]

The men had not bargained on this kind of work. They bluntly declared that it was absurd trying to go up canons with such cascades.

Mackenzie paid no heed to the murmurings. He got his crew to the top of the hill, spread out the best of a regale--including tea sweetened with sugar--and while the men were stimulating courage by a feast, he went ahead to reconnoitre the gorge. Windfalls of enormous spruce trees, with a thickness twice the height of a man, lay on a steep declivity of sliding rock. Up this climbed Mackenzie, clothes torn to tatters by devil's club (a thorn bush with spines like needles), boots hacked to pieces by the sharp rocks, and feet gashed with cuts. The prospect was not bright. As far as he could see the river was one succession of cataracts fifty feet wide walled in by stupendous precipices, down which rolled great boulders, shattering to pebbles as they fell. The men were right. No canoe could go up that stream.

Mackenzie came back, set his men to repairing the canoe and making axe handles, to avoid the idleness that breeds mutiny, and sent Mackay ahead to see how far the rapids extended. Mackay reported that the _portage_ would be nine miles over the mountain.

Leading the way, axe in hand, Mackenzie began felling trees so that the trunks formed an outer railing to prevent a fall down the precipice.

Up this trail they warped the canoe by pulling the tow-line round stumps, five men going in advance to cut the way, five hauling and pushing the canoe. In one day progress was three miles. By five in the afternoon the men were so exhausted that they went to bed--if bare ground with sky overhead could be called bed. One thing alone encouraged them: as they rose higher up the mountain side, they saw that the green edges of the glaciers and the eternal snows projected over the precipices. They were nearing the summit--they must surely soon cross the Divide. The air grew colder. For three days the choppers worked in their blanket coats. When they finally got the canoe down to the river-bed, it was to see another range of impa.s.sable mountains barring the way westward. All that kept Mackenzie's men from turning back was that awful _portage_ of nine miles. Nothing ahead could be worse than what lay behind; so they embarked, following the south branch where the river forked. The stream was swift as a cascade. Half the crew walked to lighten the canoe and prevent grazing on the rocky bottoms.

Once, at dusk, when walkers and paddlers happened to have camped on opposite sh.o.r.es, the marchers came dashing across stream, wading neck-high, with news that they had heard the firearms of Indian raiders. Fires were put out, muskets loaded, and each man took his station at the foot of a tree, where all pa.s.sed a sleepless night. No hostiles appeared. The noise was probably falling avalanches. And once when Mackenzie and Mackay had gone ahead with the Indian interpreters, they came back to find that the canoe had disappeared.

In vain they kindled fires, fired guns, set branches adrift on the swift current as a signal--no response came from the _voyageurs_. The boatmen evidently did not wish to be found. What Mackenzie's suspicions were one may guess. It would be easier for the crew to float back down Peace River than pull against this terrific current with more _portages_ over mountains. The Indians became so alarmed that they wanted to build a raft forthwith and float back to Chipewyan.

The abandoned party had not tasted a bite of food for twenty-four hours. They had not even seen a grouse, and in their powder horns were only a few rounds of ammunition. Separating, Mackenzie and his Indian went up-stream, Mackay and his went down-stream, each agreeing to signal the other by gunshots if either found the canoe. Barefooted and drenched in a terrific thunderstorm, Mackenzie wandered on till darkness shrouded the forest. He had just lain down on a soaking couch of spruce boughs when the ricochetting echo of a gun set the boulders crashing down the precipices. Hurrying down-stream, he found Mackay at the canoe. The crew pretended that a leakage about the keel had caused delay; but the canoe did not substantiate the excuse. Mackenzie said nothing; but he never again allowed the crew out of his sight on the east side of the mountains.

So far there had been no sign of Indians among the mountains; and now the canoe was gliding along calm waters when savages suddenly sprang out of a thicket, brandishing spears. The crew became panic-stricken; but Mackenzie stepped fearlessly ash.o.r.e, offered the hostiles presents, shook hands, and made his camp with them. The savages told him that he was nearing a _portage_ across the Divide. One of them went with Mackenzie the next day as guide. The river narrowed to a small tarn--the source of Peace River; and a short _portage_ over rocky ground brought the canoe to a second tarn emptying into a river that, to Mackenzie's disappointment, did not flow west, but south. He had crossed the Divide, the first white man to cross the continent in the North; but how could he know whether to follow this stream? It might lead east to the Saskatchewan. As a matter of fact, he was on the sources of the Fraser, that winds for countless leagues south through the mountains before turning westward for the Pacific.

Full of doubt and misgivings, uncertain whether he had crossed the Divide at all, Mackenzie ordered the canoe down this river. Snowy peaks were on every side. Glaciers lay along the mountain tarns, icy green from the silt of the glacier grinding over rock; and the river was hemmed in by shadowy canons with roaring cascades that compelled frequent _portage_. Mackenzie wanted to walk ahead, in order to lighten the canoe and look out for danger; but fear had got in the marrow of his men. They thought that he was trying to avoid risks to which he was exposing them; and they compelled him to embark, vowing, if they were to perish, he was to perish with them.