Labrador

Preface

It has been said by some one, within recent years, that all the places now unexplored were so miserably bad that no one would care to have anything to do with them. The caribou country or northeastern Labrador may or may not be an exception to this rule. There are worse regions to wander in. Moreover, the people are to be considered. Not every one cares for native races, but most wilderness travelers do. I have myself found the Labrador people well worth while.

The Indian names I have used need some explanation. Assiwaban, the name of the fine stream the George .River people come to the coast by, is pronounced As-si-waw-ban. It means " Waiting place," from a deer pass near the coastal height of land where the Indians camp and wait for the migration to come from north. The river, or brook, as the shore whites call these larger streams, is best known to the bay people as Frank's Brook, from the name of a onetime resident near its mouth. These personal names given to bays and rivers are more or less subject to change, accordingly as the settlers change and succeed one another. One year the river may be Smith's, another year Jones's, and in due time, perhaps, Robinson's. I have taken pleasure in rescuing the names of some of these clear Indian rivers, particularly the Assiwaban, and the N6-ta-qua-n6n, from the ignominy of shifting white nomenclature. Likewise I have used vi Preface

the Eskimo name O-pe-tik Bay for the Merryfield Bay of Low's map, partly because the latter name is not used now, even by the shore people, who have reverted to the ancient designation, never in fact abandoned by them, of Opetik.

Mistastin means, as nearly as our clumsy out-door English permits, " Where the wind blows everything off the ground," that is, moss and trash and Hght soil.

The personal names are mostly explained in the text. Kamoques is pronounced in three syllables. In Ashimaganish the accented a is like a in father. I am sorry to say that the name of old Nijwa is incorrect, although Nijwa is something like it. The meaning of her actual name is Snipe, yellow-leg sinpe. Ah-pe-wat, as well Ah-pe-w6t, means an imbedded pebble, as in puddingstone. " You know the little stones that grow inside a rock? " said old E., my chief source of information in such matters, " They are Ah-pe-wat." As to Pia-shun-a-hwao, who by the way is a worthy son of the great chief at Ungava, old E. explained, " When you shoot anything handy, that's Pi-a-shun-a-hwao." The a in the first and last syllables of P.'s name is long, as in fate ; the other a might be o or uh.

One or two English names I have changed, for reasons which are commonplace. One cannot be wholly unrestrained when writing of living people. The happenings related, however, if not exciting, are at least true. I wish I had felt competent to deal with the subject of Dr. Grenfell's remarkable mission work, as well as that of the Moravians. I owe much to the kindness of both establishments.

The map inserted is rather a sketch. The coast is taken mainly from the sea chart, a poor reliance. In-

Preface vii

land the distances are only estimated, and the courses taken with a small hunting compass, but the longitude 64° 25', at the west end of the portage between the Kanekautsh lakes, should be a pretty good one. It fixes the position of the George River, ten or eleven miles farther west, and a rather important matter. I should not care, however, to insist upon the exactness of even this observation, as it is not easy to keep one's timepieces steady in such rough travel as was involved. Still we had three good watches, carefully rated.

The Montagnias route by the No-ta-quanon is, of course, not drawn to scale. Like all Indian maps, it is made only to travel by. For this purpose, however, their maps are often better than ours. One needs to be used to their method.

I have named the regular Indian height of land crossing at the head of Hawk Lake, the Quackenbush Pass ; the fine trap headland at the west end of Mistastin Lake, Walcott Dyke, and the low but commanding hill at the outlet of Mistinipi, and from which Dr. Howe and I took observations in 1910, Howe Hill.

The larger part of the material presented in this book was issued in my " Northern Labrador," and is here given in revised and amplified form.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface v

I Labrador i

Chapter I

Interior Labrador, if a country of severe winter conditions, and not too easy to travel in at any time, is not quite the desolation generally supposed. Unavailable for most purposes it is, even as regions of its rather high latitudes go, and of course an utter wilderness, but its name is worse than it deserves. The peninsula is seldom cold in summer, and if its rivers were less difficult it would be more widely known as a field of exploring and travel; and also, from its great extent, as a nearly inexhaustible one. The usual summer wanderer at least is not in a way to make much impression upon its spaces. Nor after all does such a country appeal to the many. It is too elemental a land.

The long Atlantic coast of the peninsula, rocky, berg sentineled, and barren, has failed in the eyes of navigators from the first. To hardy Leif Ericson it appeared a " land good for nothing " ; he called it Helluland, " Flat-stone Land," and sailed away. Worse yet was old Jacques Cartier's oft-quoted title, " The land which God gave Cain " ; a sincerity, touched by whatever of temperament, which brooks no counter. He spoke as he saw. But it is to be remembered that

Jacques Cartier was born to sunny France, and saw only the blasted outer shores of the peninsula — perhaps in one of its sunless, harder moods. It is fortunately true that the exposed coasts of the world are not always to be taken as an index of what is to be found within, and the coasts of Cartier's bitter word are faced to polar blasts unbroken.

The trouble with interior Labrador, the great tableland, is less climatic than geological; it has little soil. The last ice-cap, which left the country only a little time since, as such periods go, ground away the rocks, already old, to their hard, unweathering base ; and upon this foundation soil makes but slowly. If there were enough soil almost the whole tableland would be forested high.

Yet climate brought the ice-cap, and climate has played its full part. The present period finds the peninsula surrounded by cold seas, ice locked for many months of the year, never ice free excepting on the very south. The winds from all shores are cold. What the aspect of the country was when the broad interior sea from Hudson's Bay south, the Central Sea, made for warmer currents, none can now say. There has been time and change enough for anything. This long-enduring land, one of the oldest primal faces of the globe, may have been the cradle of the human race. It lies in moderate latitudes, little as this may have counted in the past, for coal and fern fossils are found still farther to the north. England, with its scarce-freezing winters, lies level to the east; the extreme of Scotland is broad off the swirling ice fields of Ungava Bay, as high in latitude, almost, as the farthest northern extension of the peninsula. The northern limit of Labrador's main body is only the parallel of 60°, a parallel which in many places cuts through settled lands, through waving wheatfields often, around the world.

In the earlier ages of the unchanging old peninsula its territorial neighbors were only in the building. Other lands, far and near, were made and unmade, the sea came and the sea went, while this old cornerpost of the continent held its ancient place, not much changed in outline, but wearing, wearing, wearing down through inconceivable time. Wide were the transformations of other areas of the hemisphere, and by comparison rapid, a turmoil of continental forms.

So it is that the actual age of what one now sees in the peninsula is hopelessly beyond reckoning. In valleys eroded far into the older rocks have been found deposits of the more recent Cambrian measures, laid down since the valleys were completed. The valleys had been cut down in previous ages by a process so slow that our minds fail before it. Yet this " recent " Cambrian, laid in after the valleys had reached their depth, has been thought to date back twenty-eight million years.^ Even then the tale is not told. The under rock, the " basement complex " of geology, is believed to have been formed from sediments too; the real foundation is below.

Now the peninsula is mainly an uneven waste of low hills and ridges. The glacial moraines and the terraced drift of the valleys bear trees only sparsely, save to the south and in low valleys near the sea. So recently was the ice-cap over all that the innumerable Indian-known lakes of the plateau have not had time

1 Far more, by latest chronologies.

to drain themselves by cutting down their outlets or to become silted up by material from higher levels. Their life falls almost within the historic old-world period. Not many thousand years, at any rate, a negligible span geologically, may well cover the time since the ice departed. In earlier time, while the glaciers were still moving seaward, the coast was flanked by bergs from its own inland, and the stately procession which now passes from Baffin's Bay along the coast may have been locked in the north, or forced to a distant offing.

Exploitation in the modern sense has found no foothold, save for a few lumber and pulp operations in the outer valleys of the south. Minerals may well appear on the western side, difficult of access now, and there is iron in quantity on the southern slope and in the central north, but the archsean rocks of the main part of the country are not very promising otherwise. In the notheast are recent rocks of more hopeful aspect, occupying an area remarkably described by Reginald Daly, in Dr. Grenfell's " Labrador." Better opportunities for prospecting on the western side will follow the building of the Hudson's Bay railroad from Manitoba.

The ultimate future of the semi-barrens, which stretch away from the middle country to Ungava and the polar north, may be as pasture ground for domesticated reindeer, in the hands of some northern nomadic race — perhaps Lapps or the present Eskimo-white strain of the shores. Meanwhile the one product of the interior, not to be wholly superseded even if minerals are found, is fur, which will not soon fail. This is its only yield to the world. Most other regions of earth left to the hunter races are being fast invaded;

A GAIVIE PASS. BEAR AND CARIBOU PATH AT MISTASTIN HEADLAND they are more amenable to modern purpose, their borders are approachable the year around. But isolated Labrador, avoided to this day in the great westward march of civilization, may yet be known as the " last of the fur countries."

Whatever its economic future, the invitation of the country to the wilderness traveler, the traveler with a taste for unworn places, is unusual. Nowhere are such clear, unfished rivers, mapped and unmapped, large rivers and small ; nowhere are such white-moss hills as those of the semi-barrens, velvet to the feet and fair to the eye. More than all are the lakes. Its lakes are Labrador's glory. Wide over the plateau they spread, along the watersheds and in the higher valleys. Nowhere are such lakes, — from the tiny " flashets " of the Newfoundlanders, their mission only to reflect the sky, to great Michikamau and Mistassini, with their far water horizons. Lake Mistassini, the largest, is a hundred miles long.

Nor is it easy in this day to find the primitive hunter life as unchanged over a large country as in Labrador. Over their great territory the people still wander at will, knowing no alien restraint, no law but their own. The unwritten code of the lodge and open, the ancient beliefs, still prevail.

Not a few districts of Labrador are as yet unexplored. None of them is very large unless in the far Northwest, but particularly in the central area and the northern half of the peninsula generally, there is fresh ground for the seasonal visitor, the minor explorer, for a long time to come. It is true that some of these regions are not easy of access, for the rivers are strong and the distances great, but there remain good regions which are near and accessible. It may be taken that no white man has ever crossed the country from side to side. The journey would be one of near a thousand miles, as one would go. Yet, inaccurately enough, several of us who go into the country are announced to have "crossed Labrador." So with Mrs. Hubbard, and Dillon Wallace, and Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tasker and myself. Corners of it some of us have crossed, but in trips not exceeding half the width of the main peninsula. There is a difference between being two or three hundred miles from a base and five.

Before the time of Low, whose report came out in 1896, it was difficult to get much information about the country, particularly the middle and northern parts. There was not much trouble about the southern slope to a distance east of the Moisie, for the main rivers had been more or less mapped. But the most interesting parts of these rivers, the upper headwaters and lakes of their watersheds, had been left untouched. In the southwest, however, on the Saguenay branches, and on the Outardes and Maniquagan, surveys had reached well to the heights of land.

There had been some other observations by good observers, though lacking instruments of precision. One of the best known of these explorations was by Henry Youle Hind, in the early sixties. He saw the fire-swept country about the head of the Moisie, and was impressed by its desolation. " Words," he wrote, " fail to describe the awful desolation of the Labrador tableland." Hind had imagination beyond most Labrador travelers, and his gatherings about the Indians, who naturally attracted him, show unusual illumination. At that time they were being forced from the ruined plateau to the Gulf shores, to perish untimely from the damp climate and unaccustomed diseases. Hind's book was long the standard upon Labrador, and is still interesting.

The lower Hamilton was visited in 1887 by Mr. R. F. Holmes, who brought away a good sketch map of the river as far as Lake Winikapau. His objective had been the Grand Falls, then assumed to drop sheer from the plateau level of near two thousand feet elevation to the level of the sea. Deficiencies of equipment caused his early return. The falls are really a little more than three hundred feet high.

In 1 89 1 Gary and Cole of Bowdoin College reached the falls, two hunderd and fifty miles above tidewater, and were followed closely by Henry G. Bryant and Arthur Keniston, the first to measure them. While Gary and Cole were away from their boat at the falls it caught fire and burned, and they were left to make their way back by a serious foot-and-raft trip to the coast. Dr. Low happened to be at Northwest River Post when they came out, looking the hard experience they had had. They came swimming across the river, some two miles wide, on a log, in the remnants of their clothes. Low afterward told Stuart Cotter, a Hudson's Bay Company friend, that the unconcerned way in which they took the whole matter was extraordinary.

In the northeast occurred the journeys of John McLean, about 1840. From Fort Chimo, on Ungava Bay, he followed the Indian route to Michikamau, thence descending past the Grand Falls to Hamilton Inlet. In 1838 he made a notable winter walk from Chimo to Northwest River, some six hundred miles, following Northwest River itself for part of its course, and returning by much the same route. The stark lifelessness of the country at times was much the same then as now. — " We saw no game," was his significant remark regarding the return trip. It is unwritten history that fifty miles from Chimo the party gave out and were saved the fate of Hubbard, who in recent years met his end by starvation on the same route, only by the efforts of an Indian, who had strength to force his way to the post and send back relief. The parallel with the case of Hubbard is singularly near, and quite identical as regards the rescue of his companion, Wallace. A white man of each party was saved by the devotion and endurance of an Indian. The occurrences were sixty-seven years apart. As to McLean's discovery of the Grand Falls, there is no reasonable doubt that they were visited some years before his time by David Dixon, or Dickson, a trader. This was told me by his grandson, whose name is Hewitt, and who now lives in Boston.

One more notable journey was made during the later period, that of Father Lacasse, who travelled with Indians in 1875 or 1876 from Northwest River Post to Chimo over substantially the same route, as far as Michikamau, followed by Dillon Wallace in 1905.

These explorers belonged to quite a recent time; their period is the modern one of much writing, of reports and books and magazines ; therefore we all know them. But it would not do to take their part as being more than a small proportion of the white man's wanderings that went on in the peninsula previous to the time of Low. Traders and Jesuit missionaries and their successors the Oblate Fathers, and before all if not through all the old Coureurs des Bois, traveled and drifted with the Indians from the very beginnings of the early French period. Of most of their wanderings, as of their experiences, no record exists. They always traveled with Indians, and the network of Indian routes extends to Ungava and the treeless north.

Little less negligible for present purposes were the voyagings of Hudson's Bay Company people during the long period when inland posts were maintained, for the employees of the company were enjoined to silence about the country, and whatever records they made are not available. Now the only remaining post of the company in the main interior is at Nichicun, near the geographical center and apex of the peninsula, and few, if any, of the Hudson's Bay Company officers at the shores are qualified to undertake inland travel. The title of Inland Man is all but extinct.

Such was the position of exploration to the early nineties. Until then the maps of the main part of the country showed few dependable features. Some of the principal lakes were laid down, usually wrong in place, shape, and size, and often in drainage. Likewise certain of the larger rivers, known by their estuaries at the coasts, were almost an equal credit to the draughtsman's imagination, and a firm range or two of mountains was apt to be thrown in. There was some foundation of report for most of the features shown, but to any one planning to travel in the country the maps would as well have been left blank.

Chiefly in the early nineties came the real surveys of Low, to whose methods of accuracy the main tableland was as a clean page. The wide-spaced gridiron of his travel routes is shown on his well-known map of 1896. His notable journey from Lake St. John to

Chimo by Mistassini, Nichicun, Kaniapishkau, and the Koksoak remains the only diametrical crossing of the country to this time. The pace had to be unremitting, rainy days and Sundays alike, and the expedition only just caught the Hudson's Bay Company steamer in the fall, on its way south. The voyageurs of his principal expeditions were not Indians of the regions visited, but Montagnais from Lake St. John. Transported provisions were depended upon to the high level, where fish netted in the lakes considerably took their place. It is to be noted that in the interminable water courses of the central area local guides were absolutely necessary to his effective progress. As one of his Indians told me in later years, with a ring of appreciation, " We always had a guide!" For the want of one, in a later year. Low had to give up going from Lake Naokokan to Nichicun, only a few miles' distance. He was several days trying to find the outlet of Noakokan, the lake being large and masked by islands, and finally gave up and returned down the Maniquagan which he had just ascended. He was short of provisions, else he would of course have made his way through, a matter only of a little more time. Afterward he learned that the outlet was very close to the inlet by which he had entered the lake. In the matter of supplies a remark of his in Dr. Grenfell's " Labrador " is worth remembering : " A good supply of provisions means good-natured canoe men, willing to go anywhere without a thought of danger, whereas the suspicion of starvation will change the same men into a discontented, mutinous crew."

The most important work done since Low's return is Mrs; Hubbard's exploration of Northwest River, while scarcely less to be appreciated is her good travel map of George River. A later journey made by Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Tasker from Richmond Gulf to Chimo, a distance of nearly five hundred miles, required perhaps as much hardihood as any that could be named, being a single-canoe voyage in a nearly gameless country, the men of the party shadowed, moreover, by responsibility for the safety of the woman passenger. The voyageurs were George Elson and Job Chapies, men to whom much of Mrs. Hubbard's success in 1905 had been due.

After the completion of Low's work it was my fortune to fall upon some of his old voyageurs at Lake St. John, one of whom was John Bastian, a Scotch Montagnais now near Murray Bay. He was one of my two companions, in 1899, during a midwinter walk to Mistassini Lake, on Rupert River, the third member of the party being Robert Richards, a Scotch Cree from Hudson's Bay, and a remarkable man. He has died lately near the Saguenay River. John, the principal guide, spoke little English then, but a good deal of evening talk went on concerning the interior and I came into quite a httle light on the country and people, including the Naskapi of the North, besides getting together a small stock of Montagnais words. The trip was my beginning in the Indian North.

Our falling together as a party, the two Indians and I, was a chance happening, yet if only from events which might be taken as in sequence, and in some sort affecting various lives, the occurrence might well have been ordered and meant to be. That initial trip was favored in all respects, and though others followed in which one or both of these men took part, up many rivers and over many heights of land, we always looked back to our first venture together as in a light of its own. In a sort it was a first experience for us all, white and Indian; we saw with the same eyes, and passed into a relation which none of us had expected. By the time I shifted to fresh ground in the far northeast, and again needed their help, both men had positions as guardians of club territories, and I did not try to unsettle them. Some vicissitudes would have been spared me if I had, and as the world has gone with them their fortunes might have come out much the same. At any rate this narrative, largely that of a good deal of half-solitary wandering, would have had a different face.

W'AITIXG FOR FISH

HAULING A TRAP

Chapter II

The Atlantic Labrador, Labrador North, begins at the Straits of Belle Isle. There are two ways to get there, one by Bay of Islands on the west side of Newfoundland, the other by St. John's on the east side, and either of these points of approach can be reached mainly by rail. A long canoe, however, such as I took in 1903, is an awkward piece of baggage on a broken railroad journey, and not caring to stand by at day and night junctions to keep it from being left, I held to the sea route throughout. I left Boston on the Plant Line Olivette, the 20th of June. There was a change at Halifax to the Red Cross Sylvia, with a day or two of waiting, then a run of some hours to St. John's, and the rest of the voyage to Cape Harrigan, nearly a thousand miles as one goes, fell with the Labrador mailboat.

I had it in mind to see the coast at least, and form an idea of what could be done at some future time in the way of a trip inland. This might be all that was practicable on a first random visit. But what I was really hoping for was to get into touch with Indians of the Northeast, the primitive Naskapi of George River.

My old southern slope men had told of them, with a touch of the superiority those with white blood are apt to feel, as wild and unchanged. Also Low, in his last report, had mentioned them; according to him they hved about the large Indian House Lake on the upper George, depended almost wholly upon the caribou, rarely visited the shore, and were more independent of outside resources than any other Indians of the peninsula. Some of them came to a grown-up age without ever seeing the shores. By Low's account the short, rapid rivers of the eastefn slope were unnavigable, and the Indians came out to the Atlantic only in winter, a few of the young men hauling furs on long, narrow sleds and hastening back with the few articles that they cared to trade for.

Indian House Lake itself had long seemed to me the most promising objective for a summer trip in the whole peninsula. It was unexplored, being indicated on the map only in conjectural dotted lines. It was large, fifty or sixty miles long and a good many wide, and aside from its distinction as a last retreat of the primitive hunter, it lay in the heart of the northeast range of the barren-ground caribou, and well within the borders of the elsewhere inaccessible subarctic barrens. Here the great zone of the barren grounds, the reindeer north, extending from the Atlantic to Behring Straits, can be reached by the convenient Labrador mailboat, which sails fortnightly from St. John's; and the step from ship to shore places one on the very verge of the little-known plateau.

For a good many years previous to the winter of 1903 it had appeared to me likely that a foot trip could be made from the coast to the middle George, but there seemed no way to be sure of this without making a visit to the coast, and the fact that the Indians found the country too hard for summer travel gave my specu-

Newfoimdland 15

lations a real basis of doubt. If, early in 1903, I had not fallen in with Dr. Grenfell in Boston, it is possible that I should never have staked anything like a whole summer vacation on the doubtful chance of getting at the Indians, still less on the finding worth while a mere visit to the coast without seeing them. But to my surprise and extreme interest Dr. Grenfell told me that he had seen Naskapi at Davis Inlet in summer, even treating some of them professionally (" veterinary surgery " he called it, not being able to talk with his patients) and he insisted, against my objections, that they had some habit of coming out in summer, though by what means he knew not. If I would go by the mailboat to Fanny's Harbor at Cape Harrigan, his friend, Tom Spracklin, would put me across to the Hudson's Bay post in Davis Inlet. This was enough; as summer came on I got together enough of an outfit to avoid being helpless after leaving the steamer, and departed for St. John's in time to get the first mailboat of the season. The venture was only a reconnoissance, I had no safe plans beyond getting eyes on the coast.

Halifax — quiet, seafaring, much fortified Halifax — is a comfortable place to wait. The old red-coated British garrison is gone, much regretted, but its works remain. The modern change in warfare is here plain to the eye. The imposing but grass-grown citadel on the hill, enormously costly in its day, is out of the reckoning. At the present time the real defense lies with certain inconspicuous moundy places far down the harbor, with fev/ or no guns in sight. So also with the defenses of Quebec. and its obsolete citadel, which I have been told cost thirty millions sterling. Yet if, however, as an officer once related, it saved Canada to the flag, the account may have balanced. At Halifax I bought an old relic of a greenheart salmon rod, but all the better for the many salmon it had fought, for three dollars.