Читать книгу More Trails, More Tales - Bob Henderson - Страница 14

Finding Cabins:

Stories from the Horton and Nahanni Rivers and

George Douglas’s Northcote Farm

“I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.”

— Stephen Leacock

Claude Lévi-Strauss dismissed travel books as “grocery lists and lost dog stories.” I’m not so big on that one, but I can understand it. He also said, “If lions could speak, we wouldn’t understand them anyway.”[1] I love that one. In many ways, this is a travel book, but more to do with historical places to visit. I do not dwell on the travel but rather on the places. Cabins are central to this. And if some of the inhabitants could talk to us now of their time, we might struggle to understand. That is the challenge and fun in reading Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Raymond Patterson, and George Douglas. There are life lessons in their successful travels and in the places where they waited out a winter or that they called home for a time. The tales from these cabins in the bush showcase learning and comfort, misery and despair.

The Horton River flows north from Horton Lake, northwest of Great Bear Lake, to the Arctic coast six hundred kilometres north. It has a short canyon section midway along, but otherwise gently winds its way deep in an ever-changing charmed valley. Most notable are the crystal clear waters, the abundant wildlife (muskox, grizzles, and caribou in small groupings), and the hiking options at seemingly every bend in the river.

The Nahanni River flows southeast from the Moose Ponds to the Liard River and then to the Mackenzie River. It has four main canyon sections below Virginia Falls and rocks ‘n rolls most of its length in a dramatic river valley. Most notably, this scenery is punctuated by Virginia Falls. For us, there was a general lack of wildlife encounters and select hiking from inflowing rivers and streams. Its waters are generally murky.

Northcote farm was the property of George Douglas (1875–1963). It was later owned by the Gastle family of Lakefield, Ontario, and now is in the hands of Lakefield College. Likely Samuel de Champlain portaged on the property to “Back Bay” en route from Huronia to Lake Ontario. It is on the Trent-Severn waterway just south of Young’s Point and Stoney Lake, a waterway that has seen canoe travel for centuries. Today students at Lakefield College School regularly paddle up to the farm for overnight canoe trips. As a boy at Lakefield, I likely cross-country skied on the property more than a few times.

So, why link these places together here? Well, stories! Travel stories, but not the stuff of grocery lists. And if the characters taking us back into our northern Euro-Canadian history could speak today, one is left to wonder, would we understand them anyway? That is one of the intriguing qualities of travel books about which Lévi-Strauss might be misguided. Stefansson on the Horton, Patterson and Faille on the Nahanni, and Douglas of Coppermine fame at Northcote all move as far beyond “grocery lists and lost dog stories” into the realm of inquiring minds and the zest for exploration.[2] It is a noble challenge to capture some of their passion in one’s present travels.

Joss Haiblen and David Taylor examining Stefansson’s Horton River cabin remains.

On the Horton in 2012, our group sought out Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s cabin and other related stories from the land, both geological and historical. On the Nahanni, family and friends hunted out Raymond Patterson’s and Alberta Faille’s cabins and other related stories. In both cases, the stories were tangible in the recorded history, but the evidence on the land was scant. This combines to make the physical exploration most rewarding. Another reason to link these two rivers, in my mind, from the experiences had on each is the outward lack of adventure. Both these two canoe trips were event-free. That is, if an “event” is an adventure story of a scary grizzly attack, a canoe dumping in big water, or a dynamic weather event influencing the overall mood and flow of the travel. I’m okay with that. I don’t need an adventure. On the Horton River, we had some grizzly encounters and the need for bear bangers, but with no consequence other than a feeling of great privilege to have had the experience. We had some river rapid running decisions and some rainstorm soakings and extreme heat to contend with, but no mishaps. Same for the Nahanni without the grizzlies. Not much to tell folks back home, you might be thinking. Herein lies the rub; when nothing goes wrong and nothing dramatic unfolds, then, for some, the trip might feel “adventureless.” For some, mediocrity might even be the vibe of the trip, shrouding the experience both during and after. When friends back home ask for adventure stories, you feel you are letting them down.

Enter Stefansson to the rescue:

My favourite thesis is that an adventure is a sign of incompetence. Few have disputed the Greek, or whoever it was, that said, “blessed the country whose history is uninteresting,” and no one … will dispute the statement that “blessed is the exploring expedition the story of which is monotonous.” If everything is well managed, if there are no miscalculations or mistakes, then the things that happen are only the things you expected to happen, and in which you are ready and with which you can therefore deal … By keeping steadily in view the two maxims, “Better be safe than sorry” and “Do in Rome as the Romans do,” Dr. Anderson and I managed to conduct for nearly five years a satisfactorily monotonous expedition.[3]

I had read Stefansson for insight about the Horton River. But what I got were gems of philosophy. Here’s to monotonous expeditions. Sorry, few adventure stories on the Horton for me in 2012, just peace and contentment and the joys of travel with good friends.

Usually folks read travel literature for insights into the route to be travelled. Perhaps the traveller is the focus; perhaps the story is the focus. But often the lasting gem is a philosophical insight that catches readers off guard and stays with them through the rest of their own travels. So, to the Horton, to Stefansson’s Horton.

John Lentz describes finding Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Rudolph Anderson’s cabin on Coal Creek about one kilometre off the Horton River — though the more important route for them was the land link to their Langton Bay base on the Arctic Coast. Lentz describes a wooded area just north of Coal Creek. Should be easy to find, we thought. There was even a picture in the Che-Mun issue showing a bit of a slope behind the cabin. A clue.[4]

The Stefansson-Anderson expedition of 1908–1912 had the following intention: to live with the Inuit and with animal life. Stefansson was the ethnologist, Anderson the biologist. When at the Coal Creek cabin, Stefansson was living the dream. He was content to record his Inuit companions’ stories and further develop his language skills. Anderson had no facility with the Inuit language and therefore travelled widely from the Coal Creek cabin.

Our thesis was this: that we were not looking for any waste places, but for land occupied by human beings; if those human beings were there at all, they must be Eskimo supporting themselves by the most primitive implements of the chase; and it seemed clear that if Eskimo could live there, armed as they must be with bows and arrows, and not only live there but bring up their children and take care of their aged, then surely we, armed with modern rifles, would be able to live in that sort of country as long as we pleased and to go about in it as we liked. Of course the thesis was bound to prove out.[5]

This passage certainly highlights the different times of 1911 for Arctic travellers.

Stefansson, in My Life with the Eskimos (1913), describes the cabin, which was “thirty or so miles to Langton Bay”:

… we all put in two days in building a house frame and sodding it over roughly. The sodding was so poorly done that we later on had to do it all over again. The building was a simple affair. There were a pair of vertical posts about twenty feet apart and nine feet high, across the tops of which a ridgepole was laid. An essential feature of the walls was that they were not vertical, but sloped in, so that earth, no matter how carelessly it was thrown against the house, would fit in and not cave away as commonly happens when you try to build vertical walled houses in white men’s fashion.[6]

From the Horton, we discussed the logic of this particular geography and a winter cabin location. André-François Bourbeau was our leader in this discussion. André is an outdoor survival educator. It’s safe to say he sees the land differently than I do at times, and here his insight was invaluable. We discussed a distant hill edge spur that would offer easy access onto the plateau to the north. This would facilitate entry to the hunting grounds on a more “long vista” terrain. The cabin must be close to Coal Creek, must be in a well-wooded area, and must be sheltered from the exposed Horton River corridor yet close to the same for easy travel. Finally, the cabin site should be flat and perhaps close to a wooden downhill lie to drop trees easily.

In the hot sun, it seemed like a long hunt at the end of a full day of canoe tripping. Energy was waning, and the group had divided into two when André and others, staying true to the original assertion, found the cabin remains close to that same dominant spur we had seen from the Horton. The search was made harder by the fact that the Coal Creek watercourse was completely dry and quite braided with troughs in mid-August.

As expected, we first saw marks and axe cuts in what proved to be close proximity to roof remains (five to seven logs lashed together). These markings were covered in lichen, showing their age. There were no walls evident. The sod dominant indented wood walls were not evident. No door, no windows. This was a one-season winter throw-up tilt.

Such a quest is an exciting bonus to any canoe trip. The Horton is not a significant historical travel route given its proximity to the Mackenzie to the west. Stefansson sledded on the Horton River from Dease Bay on Great Bear Lake in December 1910, returning to Coal Creek. He travelled in an interesting circle via boat and sled from Coal Creek: from Langton Bay east to Coronation Gulf onto the Coppermine and then to Great Bear Lake via the Dease River, returning to the coast again on the Horton. And we thought our six hundred kilometres of river tripping was a long route. Visiting Stefansson’s cabin on Coal Creek opened the door to his travels. We had something tangible to connect to. We had some passages from Stefansson on our trip, but I, for one, began reading his book in earnest following our trip. And a piece of the Arctic and another time lingers in one’s mind and remains a little closer to one’s consciousness.

Camped across from Whaleman Lake on an open plateau on the river, one might wonder why this curious name was chosen. Whalemen (men who hunted whales) walked south from Langton Bay on the Arctic coast, just as Stefansson and Anderson had done, to corral caribou for wintering-over food supplies. I had marked the site on my maps where the decayed remains of the corral and the funnelling wooden walls can still be seen. Problem was, I was about two to four kilometres downstream of the correct location. I figured all this out once the trip was over. Sometimes, that’s the way it goes. I even remember, in hindsight, noticing the flattening of the river shore and thinking it was odd for this river. I had noticed the caribou corral site but hadn’t realized it. Earlier we had seen a herd of muskox at a similarly unusual flattish shoreline. Oh well, something exciting for a return trip, perhaps. That imaginative spark of yearly groups of whalemen remains vague in my mind without the tangible evidence on the land that we were to have at Coal Creek in about ten days’ time.

I paddled the Nahanni River in the summer of 2005 with family members and friends Sean Collins and Diane Gribbin. The trip was from Rabbitkettle Lake to Nahanni Butte. We were twenty-four days on the water, offering ample time for hiking.

Heritage on this river is synonymous with Raymond M. Patterson’s 1954 book, The Dangerous River.[7] Patterson tells of his 1929–30 travels. But he also fuels the many stories that have made the Nahanni the dark river of fear. Added to this were sad Klondike Gold Rush stories. Few made it this way to the Yukon gold fields near Dawson in the late 1890s. Prospecting stories in the 1920s, too, seem to end badly, creating place names such as Deadman’s Valley and Headless Creek. I wondered what I could possibly add to Patterson’s rich treatment and descriptive prose of the river.

Then there was the surge of modern travellers gainfully serviced by regular bush flights and commercial operators (mainly Nahanni River Adventures and Black Feather). Books, articles, conservation, and park (and now park extension) initiatives all add to the coverage of this noble and, frankly, not so dark and fearful river. Again, what could I add? But once on the trail, Patterson’s The Dangerous River seemed to sing out to us. Quotes from my spring read in preparation punctuated the geog­raphy of Virginia Falls and the Hot Springs. Song verses rang out as the stories told came alive on the trail, and the chorus was the fast flowing downstream in the mountainous, canyon-filled river. This is a well-travelled river, Headless Creek be damned. More than once I caught myself borrowing the chorus from other river songs as I sang my way down the river: “and we go on and on, watching the river run.”

First off, I’m one of the rats to whom Raymond Patterson’s partner referred. In agreeing to join Patterson, Gordon Matthews is quoted as saying, “Any country, where the Indians were still hostile and you can shoot moose from your bed and mountain sheep with a pistol is well worth seeing before the rats get at it.”[8] I hope Matthews and Patterson might come to accept us modern rats, who fly into the country generally, not to mention flying into the river proper. Toronto to Yellowknife in one day isn’t bad. It took John Franklin and company, in 1818, over a year to cover this distance by canoe. As rats go, I think we canoeists can be okay for the river, particularly if we get involved in current park extension efforts bent on preserving the river’s watershed, not just its cosmetic corridor. When conveying his plan, at the stage when all was maps and geography and dreams, Patterson wrote, “Sometime soon I would do that [explore the South Nahanni, travelling upriver from the Liard River]. Strangely enough, I never doubted that I could, though exactly what I proposed to use in place of experience has since often puzzled me.”[9] Here is a noble learner’s enterprise in keeping with a favourite aphorism for explaining experiential education: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”[10] Patterson is a learner. He describes tracking upriver beaches, tackling a major upstream ferry below Virginia Falls, learning to live and travel through a Nahanni winter, and interpreting the crazy Nahanni chinook-ridden weather. We, as a family, were learners too in this grand country, far removed from our Canadian Shield base. Big water, like the Figure 8 Rapids, conjured up butterflies flying in formation.[11] We only hoped the formation matched the right river run. We too did an upstream ferry below Virginia Falls to enter Fourth Canyon. It was entered with a degree of uncertainty, shared with Patterson. The weather was black clouds and blue sky. The uncertainty was invigorating. Patterson had Albert Faille, a well-established trapper and gold seeker, to literally show him the ropes — the upstream tracking ropes to be exact. We had Patterson.

Quinn Henderson starting up Scow Creek/Nahanni River.

We planned a full-day hike at Scow Creek. From our camp on the river it looked ambitious. It was. Four thousand steady feet up and down with an on-your-knees finale caused the odd family member to experience a meltdown. Later we read Patterson’s tale of Gilroy and Hay carrying heavy loads and the third partner, Angus Hall, travelling light. All had their own meltdowns with upriver paddling work: “they had had enough rivering to do them for quite a while.” The prospecting partners hiked up Scow Creek with plans to ridge walk over to the north and west and descend into the legendary Flat River gold strike (an unproven claim). The lighter-ladened Hall had his second meltdown in frustration with the slow pace of his packhorse partners. He stripped down his gear and headed off with a rifle and a mosquito net. He was never seen again — a stern lesson for the meltdown type. I can almost see him now storming off in a huff along that well-defined ridge as the others, wiser and alive another day, struggle on below with supplies. We returned to our spaghetti dinner, thankful we didn’t have to travel upstream and devote copious amounts of time to hunting. Dessert was a chocolate cake, as I remember. Not that Scow Creek needed more than its own rocky personality to be memorable, but the story does help etch the place in my mind.[12]

An aerial view of the Nahanni River from atop the Scow Creek ridge.

Photo courtesy of Sean Collins.

Patterson shares accounts of building a wintering-over cabin across the river from Prairie Creek. The Wheatsheaf Creek cabin was mostly built by Matthews while Patterson was hunting. It was named by Patterson for a friendly house that lay beyond the seas. He described an area well supplied with game and fine trees for building. The cabin was fourteen feet by thirteen feet, a bit small for two chaps. In his Nahanni Journals, Patterson writes passages such as, “Levelled off the shack floor, set up the stove and cut out the pipe hole … I put in the windows, lit the stove to air and dry the shack, made the door and did various odd jobs. The shack is going to be very warm and light — an excellent refuge.” I can only wonder at the satisfaction experienced in such tasks when one is so removed from the next external heat source. We visited the site with expectations of connecting further with Patterson’s story. Cabin foundation outlines provided difficult to discern, but to our glee we did discover an old wood stove, surely one that warmed the souls of these two northern travellers and dreamers. Such tangible discoveries added a crescendo to our river song. As I remember it, Diane found the stove half buried in the forest floor. The stove was surprisingly set back from the creek and river, I remember thinking, but this was a winter cabin. Shelter was the goal. Diane had been paddled down the Nahanni more than twenty times working as a river guide. It was fitting that she or Sean would find the stove. Later we frantically fought the current above the Splits to visit one of Albert Faille’s cabins. I most enjoyed the bench near the edge of the river, perfectly located for viewing the sunset. While Albert never did find gold over decades of travels on the Liard and Nahanni rivers up from Fort Simpson, few would argue that his experience hadn’t been golden. The riverside bench helped me secure this view. No lost dog stories here. Faille had largely been a teacher to Patterson. But Faille didn’t have the writer’s craft.

Diane Gribbin examining what just might be R.M. Patterson’s stove at Wheatsheaf Creek.

Patterson wrote: “Never in my wildest dreams had I hoped to see anything like this.”[13] First Canyon, he noted, was two days’ travel upstream, days he must have experienced as overwhelming for work and for visual pleasure, not to mention relief from the mosquitoes in the lower river flats. We floated First Canyon, stalling our progress to delight in our passing as much as possible. I imagined Patterson, Faille, and others tracking on the beaches, jumping from one side of the river to the other and then to the next beach. Hmm, what would they do here? No beach, sheer walls, fast current. Imagine the delight of their downriver run at season’s end.

Patterson wrote of his first meeting with the awe-inspiring First Canyon:

That passage through the Lower Canyon was the sort of thing that comes to a man perhaps once in a lifetime if he’s lucky. The scenery is the finest of the Nahanni and the weather was perfect — clear, with cold nights and blazing hot days. And it was all strange and new: rounding a bend was like turning a page in a book of pictures; what would one see, this time and would this next reach hold, perhaps, some insuperable obstacles? But it never did, and always one found some way around by means of some new trick with the line or the pole. We were lucky too, with weather and good company and no obstacles.[14]

I would have changed places with Patterson to spend more time in this canyon and to sing his song of exploration; I think I understand his joy. Critical for this joy is lots of time to move upstream at a pace the river dictates.

So the Nahanni song, and certainly my song here, are both well connected to Patterson’s The Dangerous River. The book provides a lasting testimony to earlier times when Nahanni travels were an up and down full-season affair. Indeed, my favourite part of The Dangerous River is the winter travel section not addressed here.

In reviewing the overall river song now, months later, I am reminded of a lyric by Ian Tamblyn concerning the Yukon River. It fits well. “Gold is gone, gold remains.”[15] Patterson and Matthews, Faille, and perhaps even the lost Angus Hall in the hills above the river, all found little to no gold, but gold remains. Patterson wrote of this gold in flowing pages and Faille’s river-edge bench at his cabin before The Splits sang the gold of countless sunsets and a dream for a good quest and zest for life. We all should be so lucky.

The Horton and the Nahanni were adventureless “monotonous” trips, one might say to link to Stefansson’s thesis. But he and I were looking for different experiences in the remote north. He wanted study and recognition, discovery and enough fame to satisfy sponsors for future trips. I wanted to enjoy the grandeur of the Arctic river, to thrive in the techniques and joys of canoe camping with good friends, and to find enough historical stories to link my “now” with an intriguing “then.” We both had our adventure fulfilled, call it monotonous or not. I think I can understand this guy, and that is a good feeling. As for Patterson and Faille, no problem understanding these guys. The excitement for exploration and for discovery, in the form of new canyons or gold, feels as universal as Stefansson’s excitement for knowledge. It feels comforting to think, “I can know these guys” … sort of. Cabins and stoves and benches by the river edge that remain on the land really help this understanding feel tangible.

The Northcote property near Lakefield, Ontario, on the Trent-Severn waterway may appear incongruous beside the Horton and Nahanni river finds, but not so. It was with the same spirit of inquiry and intrigue that I drove (not paddled) up the grass-rutted lane to the Douglas homestead. Whereas I had expected more at Stefansson’s Coal Creek and Patterson’s Wheatsheaf Creek, this place was in better shape than I had imaged. The large riverbank white house with green roof stood tall and majestic, as did the barn — once full of canoes, now full of winter sleighs. The wraparound veranda of the main house gave a well lived in impression, as did the overall grounds where winter play on the open slopes and lake paddling and sailing used to abound. The two square, timber-log summer cabins are settling into the ground surrounded by brambles and foot-catching dog-strangling vine. They are very rustic and charming in that simple living, sparse needs, and few possessions way. I instantly fell in love with the place. The insides proved that all buildings need work. Indeed, that’s why I was there. Here is history alive and well. The Douglas brothers’ story of Arctic travel told in the 1914 classic Lands Forlorn[16] is a must read, and the characters who visited Northcote read like an early 1900s who’s who of the north: John Hornby, Guy Blanchet, and P.G. Downes are highlights among them. Northcote was a conduit of northern affairs. But it was also a recreational playground for the related Greer and Mackenzie families.

George Douglas’s homestead in Northcote.

Finding cabins, or what’s left of them, doesn’t have to be just an Arctic pursuit. Here, to my mind, is a house/cabin/barn all linked to arctic travel. Those same imaginative feelings grabbed hold as I wondered about George Douglas and all those who loved this grand property. My northern interest led to an invite by Bill Gastle and Kathy Hooke (George is her uncle by marriage). Bill and I, along with Richard Johnson from Lakefield College and Bert Ireland, all sized up the work needed to restore the main house into a liveable space again. The stone foundation needed to be reinforced and the house levelled on the foundation. The insides needed more than a Molly Maid cleaning. The veranda needed to come off to access the foundations, then get rebuilt. The roof must be covered anew. It is doable but expensive. The school envisioned summer programming. I envisioned northern literature and canoeing symposia. It all felt like a dream to me, but not to Bill and Bert, who started talking specifics of refurbishing and actual dollars.

Later that day (my second trip to Northcote), Kathy Hooke, the main Northcote/Douglas researcher, treated Bill and me to a fine lunch and kitchen sit about with her many photo albums of life at Northcote. Kathy and Bill swapped stories of Mrs. Douglas (twenty-three years George’s junior) and George. George must have had fifty canoes. Seems he’d paddle down into Lakefield with one and paddle back with two. Kathy said George was on the water every day somewhere or nowhere in particular. Winter was a special time for family visits. Photo albums reinforce this, as ski and snowshoe outings (along with picnics and family portraits on the veranda) dominate the images of daily life.

I returned home from the Northcote day and went straight to my 1914 copy of Lands Forlorn and read with new vigour. The man behind the study had come to life. It is the same feeling one can get when finding an old stove and logs remaining at a cabin site almost lost to the ground and river flooding. It needn’t be in the north to be about the north. But the Northcote site also sings a song of outdoor living. The photos are not of singing around the piano or dining in the formal dining room. Rather, folks at Northcote picnicked, paddled, hiked, and loved the winter. Later, the Gastle family started an annual sleigh ride, which one year attracted three thousand arrivals down the country lane. Today, the sleigh ride is still a Northcote event, as are school camping outings. History is brought to life in other ways than just northern travel; the school conducts an American Civil War re-enactment on the grounds.[17] I can’t help but think George and Lionel Douglas would have been amused and might have gone canoeing. Yet, this speaks to a new life for Northcote, once a conduit to northern travel, now possibly to be restored to offer new energy and life to the place. This energy will involve lots of canoeing, camping, and winter recreation. It will involve experiential re-enactments, symposia, and a place to ponder Douglas’s time here on the Trent-Severn waterway and on Great Bear Lake to and from the Coppermine. Douglas didn’t write a grocery list travel account (nor did Stefansson nor Patterson), but he was a meticulous list taker who was well organized and, simply put, “got it right” in the North. I was to learn he got it right as a dweller at Northcote too. As for Patterson and Stefansson, it is good to have something tangible along with their travel accounts to help imagine the traveller. With Douglas, there is the added local and family histories alive on the Northcote farm. As Stephen Leacock learned, I hope people come to realize the cabins and houses among the brambles are part of history with these three early 1900s northern travellers. Herein lie histories with much to teach us that will help us reclaim the simple pleasures of outdoor life.