Lands forlorn; a story of an expedition to Hearne's Coppermine River

Introduction

Y cousin, George Mellis Douglas, the leader of the expedition described in this narrative, is an engineer, and has had wide experience of small craft. After years of work in the arid South-west he was naturally seized with an uncontrollable thirst for water, and one day told me of his longing to explore some one of the rivers flowing into the Arctic Sea. Half in jest I undertook to "grubstake" him, if he would report on the copper-bearing rocks of Hearne's Coppermine River. He accepted the challenge. And this book is one of the results. It contains a narrative of travel in arctic Canada by three youths without native guides, who brought back scientific information of great interest and importance. Hearne's Coppermine River, flowing into the Arctic Ocean in Latitude 68° 40/ N., and Longitude 115 32' W., was chosen as offering an exceptionally interesting field for exploration, partly because the results might have a final commercial value.

In his introductory chapter the author describes how rumours and proofs of great copper deposits among the mountains in the far north prompted the earlier explorations of that inhospitable land. The Indian tales of the remote copper mines were as far from accurate as is many a mining report in the prospectus of a modern promoter. Instead of a mountain of copper Hearne found one lump of metal, which he picked up "among a jumble of rocks. " Copper may. once have been more prodigally exposed, but for centuries the croppings had been searched for float metal by the Eskimos and by the Coppermine River Indians, who used it as an article iv flntrobuction

of barter over the whole North-west. It was carried by them eastward to the Hudson Bay and westward to the Pacific. The Eskimos are said still to prefer it for certain uses to iron.

Dr. Sandberg examined and mapped only the section of the Copper Range immediately west of the Coppermine River, but the party followed the same traps to the Dismal Lake and found them strewn on the shores of Great Bear Lake one hundred and fifty miles west of the Coppermine River. Simpson, Hanbury, and others picked up metallic copper on the beach of the islands in Bathurst Inlet. Thus these rocks, with a general north-east and south-west strike, have been traced for some three hundred miles, and if the same rocks really reappear in Victoria Land, where Stef ansson describes the Eskimos as gathering copper, their cross-section must be vastly greater than the corresponding series on Lake Superior. The total area, therefore, within which copper ore may possibly be found, covers nearly ten thousand square miles.

Whether profitable ore occurs anywhere in this district can be determined only by a thorough survey, followed, should favourable indications be found, by exploratory development on an extensive scale. Our three explorers confirmed Sir John Richardson's diagnosis of the identity of these copper-bearing rocks with the melaphyres and conglomerates of the Keeweenaw series of Lake Superior. This was conclusively proved by Graton's petrological examination of the hundred samples of rocks brought out by our explorers. On analysis a large proportion of these rock samples contained traces of metallic copper — two of them were ores of profitable grade. What they did for the first time was to trace and map the succession of beds which compose this interesting — possibly commercially important — group of rocks. In this work they even preceded the Canadian Geological Survey.

The region may become one of the great copper producers of the world. It is now still inaccessible; but the eastermost exposure of these rocks, so far as known, is not more than five hundred miles distant from navigable water in Hudson Bay, over a possible railroad route. And a railroad from the south is already projected to within eight hundred miles of their most flntrofcuction v

westerly exposure. As far back as 1845 Alexander Simpson anticipated that "It is possible that ere this century has passed, an organised system of internal communication such as that which traverses Northern Asia may place this valuable natural deposit within the reach of commerce." He was too sanguine. The climate is severe. But so is that of Lake Superior; and for about twenty-five years after the native copper mines of Michigan were first opened they were shut off from the east by ice from steam communication, for almost half the year.

As to fuel, lignite is plentiful within the arctic circle, and our explorers brought samples from a large bed of it which crops out on the shores of the Great Bear Lake. If copper ores therefore exist in large quantities, and are of a profitable grade, the unfavourable conditions are not sufficiently prohibitive to prevent their being exploited. And the race has happily not yet become so effeminate that men cannot be found willing to exchange the luxuries of civilisation for the novelties and adventures of work in the wilderness, when the inducement is added of winning from Nature the treasures she has hidden away in such inhospitable regions.

James Douglas.

Contents

PAGE

I. — An Historical Summary i

II. — By Scow and Steamer 6