Читать книгу Paddling the Boreal Forest - Stone James Madison - Страница 14

5 Interlude: At Mistissini

IWAKE UP EARLY THE MORNING of August 4, to the steady pitter-patter of rain on the motel roof. “That's a sound we'll have to get used to,” says Jim, who then rolls over and goes back to sleep.

Our little caravan sets off, heading north. The landscape unfurls in a seemingly endless flag of spruce. Road signs announce or point to communities with Cree names: Waswanipi, Ouje-Bougoumou, Chibougamau….

We stop at the general store in Waswanipi for a soft drink, and I hope to find some painkillers for my toothache. Jim, Don and I admire the shelves stocked with wool mitt liners, leather mitt “outers,” woollen shirts, heavy cotton pants, rubber boots, a variety of portable wood stoves and other gear for living in the bush. No trace of “Gore-tex” in this store. We leave the store with good leather mitt “outers” that you can't find in Ottawa any more, but no painkillers. But at a pharmacy in Chibougamau I load up on extra ones and “gum-number” for my toothache. There is a street party going on, and a big fellow in overalls demonstrates how to drill through solid granite. As we drive away from the town, the trees continue to get smaller. From the highway, through gaps in the forest, we can see huge clear-cut areas. It seems that the wall of spruce lining the highway is quite narrow. The pavement finally runs out shortly after Chibougamau. After another dusty hour and a half, in the late afternoon, tired and rattled, we pull into the community of Mistissini.

The HBC trading post at Mistassini in the background in this photograph by A.P. Low in 1884. This person was not identified. Courtesy of LAC photo collection, C034229, A.P. Low.

It has taken us just two days to drive from Ottawa to Mistissini. Getting here was not so easy for A.P. Low in 1884, when he first travelled here to to survey Lake Mistassini. Low left Ottawa by train for Quebec City, and then took a steamboat down the St. Lawrence to Rimouski. Across the river from Rimouski, on the St. Lawrence's north shore, is the village of Bersimis¹ (formerly Betsiamites). Here he hired his Montagnais canoemen, and the expedition started by paddling up the Betsiamites River towards the North. By the end of October, the lakes were frozen and they had to abandon the canoes, set up camp and wait for winter to set in. From here on, travel would be by toboggan and snowshoe. The expedition got underway again before the end of November, and finally arrived at the Hudson's Bay Company post on Lake Mistassini on December 23! Low wrote that for the last week of travel the men were on short rations and temperatures fell to -40 degrees.²

When Low returned to Lake Mistassini in 1892, he took a much easier route, by his standards. He took the train from Ottawa to Quebec City. From there, one could now take the Quebec and Lake St. John Railway to the community of Roberval on Lake St. John.³ This was the end of the line. In 1892, Mr. H.J. Beemer's magnificent summer hotel at Roberval on the shore of Lake St. John had all the “modern conveniences,” including electric light and could accommodate 300 guests!⁴ But from here, all travel was by canoe or on foot. It took another two and a half weeks of hard work to reach the trading post at Lake Mistassini. The route followed the Ashuepmouchouan,⁵ now called the Chamouchuane River, leading over to the height of land separating waters flowing to the St. Lawrence and waters flowing to James Bay. The rivers are swift, with many rapids and waterfalls, and the portages often horrendous. At one portage of 1,600 yards everyone sank to their knees in mud at almost every step. The lakes leading to Mistassini, Chatogoman (the Lake With Many Narrows, now called Obatogamau), Chibougamau and Waconichi (the “Lake with Lichens on the Rocks”), are described by Low's assistant as “much finer than any part of the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence, and would make a most magnificent summer resort.”⁶ In Canada's first published canoe guide, the trip from Lake St. John to Lake Mistassini is described as, “…well-known to the Cree Indians who come down annually for their winter supplies, and is also familiar to many trappers and prospectors, but the outsider would be well advised to secure competent and experienced guides. The trip (300 miles, 42 days) makes a never-to-be-forgotten holiday, as it traverses the Ashuapmuchuan [sic] River, whose waters are as difficult as its name, and many charming mountain lakes and streams before the height of land is crossed…?⁷ Much of this route is still just as beautiful and rugged.

A.P. Low's photograph of the birchbark survey canoe on Lake Mistassini in the summer of 1885. James Macoun, foreground, holds a survey rod with two targets that were used to estimate distances with the Rochon micrometer. Courtesy of Natural Resources Canada, Geological Survey of Canada, photo GSC199578, A.P. Low.

If just getting to Mistissini seems like an incredible adventure for Low and his assistants that few of us would be equal to doing today, wait until we tell you how he got home after his explorations.

There has been an outpost of European civilization here at Mistissini since at least the 1670s, following the explorations of Father Charles Albanel, the first European to travel overland from the St. Lawrence to James Bay.⁸ In 1892, Low followed the same route to Lake Mistassini from Lake St. John. After the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, the North West Company, operated by mainly by Scottish businessmen out of Montreal, established a trading post here in the late 1700s, known as “Canadian House.” After the North West Company amalgamated with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821, the name of the post was first changed to Mistassini,⁹ and more recently to Mistissini, which comes from the Cree word for the name of the lake, and means “big rock,” referring to a large glacial erratic close to the outlet of the Rupert River. This enormous boulder is a landmark in finding the portage that offers a shortcut across a narrow neck of land separating the lake and the Rupert River.

Low's Eastmain supplies were ferried to Mistassini, as shown in this 1892 photo taken at Lake Chibougamau. His last trip to this lake was in 1905. Courtesy of Natural Resources Canada, Geological Survey of Canada, photo GSC199587, A.P. Low.

We drive up and down the wide dusty roads of the town. Jim has a tourist brochure that lists “roofed accommodation” in Mistissini. We ask a young Cree man at the local gas station — “Where's the motel?” The young fellow laughs and points. “See that hole in the ground? That's where your motel will be next year. But if you follow this road down to the lake, you'll find a place where we camp often. Just ask at the last house.”

We follow his directions, and after a few wrong turns, the road finally ends at a poplar grove on a point by a sheltered bay of vast Lake Mistassini. There's a small white house. Somewhat uncertain about what to do next, I knock diffidently on the door. As I look through the window of the door, I can see two children playing in the kitchen, and an elderly woman coming from the kitchen. She opens the door. She looks at me, saying nothing.

“Umm, I was wondering if we could camp here for the night,” I ask, hesitantly.

She points across the lawn to the poplar grove. There are several teepees set up there, and a rectangular structure made of spruce poles with a big blue Canadian Tire tarp pulled over it.

“Down there,” she says, and quietly closes the door and walks back to her kitchen.

While setting up our two tents, we see a man paddling aione in a C2, a type of canoe normally paddled by two persons in marathon canoe races using bent-shaft paddles, and displaying excellent paddling technique as he slips quietly by. As an old “has-been” marathon canoe racer, I notice these details. A few hours later, we were inside the largest tepee, eating our supper of noodle soup and taking shelter from the rain. A Cree man walks down from the house on the hill to talk with us. He is the fellow who had been paddling the racing canoe, and we trade a few names of canoe racers and races we have in common.

“These teepees are for educating our young ones about our traditions,” he tells us, “how to skin and cook geese, fillet fish, story-telling — that kind of thing. You should see this place when we're cooking up a feast of country food. We make a fire just big enough to roast the geese. The geese are skewered on sharpened sticks and we hang them from strings, so they spin and cook just right — close enough to the fire to roast, but not too close to blacken.”

Jim and Don and I are salivating. In this teepee, many geese have been cooked and goose fat had dripped onto the spruce bows on the floor. We can still smell the aroma.

“How do you cook your bannock?” Jim asks, thinking of new tricks for the 70 pounds of bannock mix we have brought with us.

He smiles, obviously thinking of feasts past, “The kids…they like to cook it on pointed sticks. We just shove them into the ground around the fire, and turn the sticks to cook it evenly. Sometimes a dozen sticks going all at once.”

Our visitor then turns and walks back to the house. We don't even know his name. We feel a little deflated. Our boiled noodle supper, even though it's flavoured with Jim's famous Thai curry and powdered coconut mix, seems so inadequate.

The next morning, we take a drive around the town to find the float plane dock and rustle up some breakfast and coffee. Mistissini doesn't look much like it did when A.P. Low was here more than a century ago, when he reported that 25 families were living and trading at the Hudson's Bay Company post. The population today is over 3,000. It looks like any small community with gasoline stations, large modern schools, an arena, soccer fields, a community centre, convenience stores, video rentals, and the Denise Restaurant which serves very fine food. There are rows of neat bungalows with green lawns. Pickup trucks send up clouds of dust along the gravel roads. There is a noticeably large number of baby carriages being pushed along the roads.

Soon we're sipping coffee in the Denise Restaurant in the heart of the village. The chatter from the other customers is neither English nor French. They are speaking Cree. Dark eyes framed by handsome broad cheekbones and shiny straight black hair glance at us hairy guys. There's no doubt about it — we're in “Cree Country.” This is not only an A.P. Low canoe trip, not only a boreal forest canoe trip, but also a canoe trip through the land of the Cree. In fact, we wrote to Chief John Longchap of the Cree Nation of Mistissini asking for his concurrence for our travel through traditional Cree Nation lands.

The Cree of this region have lived here for perhaps 6,000 years, migrating into the area not long after the glaciers retreated. They have always lived close to the land, closer than we can imagine, and still do. The boreal forest and the Cree are interwoven so tightly that one cannot speak of one without speaking of the other. While this area is wilderness to us, to the Cree, it is “the bush,” where food and shelter are provided. It is as familiar to them as our backyard is to us. In fact, it is their backyard.

After our breakfast, we drive down to the dock to wait for our chartered aircraft to arrive. Staring out across the bay at the sharp-pointed spruce trees silhouetted against the bright summer sky, my mind spins back to what I would have seen here long ago. Every Canadian child knows that the bumps on the Canadian Shield are the billion-year-old eroded stumps of ancient mountains, once higher than the Rockies, the bones of our continent. To the east, hidden under the waters of vast Lake Mistassini, the granite and gneiss bedrock is overlain with dark blue limestone, formed from the bed of ancient seas. Back some 9,000 years ago, the vast continental ice sheets that covered most of what is now Canada east of the Rockies, were melting faster than they were being formed. The ice, which may have been up to three kilometres deep in places, squashed the land, pressing it down. The waters of the Atlantic rushed in, filling up what is now Hudson Bay. The shoreline was considerably inland of where it is today and old beaches are found many miles inland from James Bay, several hundred feet above today's sea level.

Not long after that, the ancestors of the Cree moved into the area. With the weight of the ice removed, the land “rebounded,” like a sponge expanding after being squeezed and released, and, by about 2,000 years ago, the shores of James Bay came to rest though they are actually still rebounding. Although the rate may be slowing down, elders can notice a difference along the shore of James Bay from their youth. Here, far from the sea, it's hard to notice the effects of the land rising to where they are today, and the lakes and rivers flowing approximately where they do today.

The Cree are a hunting people. To survive in a frigid land, they spread themselves throughout this vast territory, using a similar strategy for survival as the caribou — keep moving. In spring, they hunted geese along the coast, in summer, they gathered in large groups to fish in the lakes and rivers. In the fall, they would move inland to hunt caribou that migrated south in the winter, until spring brought the geese back again.

The cycle of the seasons, the circle of life, continued for several thousand years, until some short, hairy strangers came. The first mention of Lake Mistassini was recorded by Samuel de Champlain in 1603, when he recorded that groups of paddlers went north from the St. Lawrence up the Saguenay River to Lac Saint-Jean, and then to Lake Mistassini, most likely by the same route that Low himself took in 1892. From there, he was told that salt water (James Bay) could be reached by following the river draining the lake.¹⁰

The first Europeans arrived here in 1663. Three French fur traders from New France, were accompanied by forty-four canoes, and travelled to Lake Mistassini, then down the Rupert to Lake Nemiscau.¹¹ Forty-four canoes! In our travels, we didn't see one other canoe until we had almost reached the coast. This story drives home the notion that the “wilderness” was a much busier place in times past, when people actually lived throughout the boreal forest. Mistassini seems to have been a focal point at that time, probably because of its abundant fish. I wonder what was here, where we are standing now, in those days when those first Europeans arrived.

With the appearance of the Europeans, the French coming north from the St. Lawrence, and the English sailing into James Bay, the cycle of life for the Cree would change fundamentally. As the trade for furs grew, a mutually dependent partnership developed between the Cree and the newcomers. Seasonal migrations now included long trips to trading posts on the coast or inland.

A trading post was built on this lake by the French in the 1670s. From this post, the coureurs de bois would intercept Cree heading to the coast to trade with the English at Rupert House, the post at the mouth of the Rupert River. The post probably was built of upright spruce logs with the bark on. It would not have been very large — maybe about fifteen feet long and twelve feet wide, with a low ceiling and a stone chimney. There have been many posts, in many different locations on Lake Mistassini, now all gone, reclaimed by the boreal forest.

This 1885 summer photo at the HBC post on Lake Mistassini shows the women and children left behind by the men who paddle the trade canoes to James Bay. Courtesy of Natural Resources Canada, Geological Survey of Canada, photo GSC755, A.P. Low

When New France came under English rule in 1763, the operation of fur trade posts became dominated by expatriate Scots, working out of Montreal. In 1818, the Hudson's Bay Company established a post a few miles north of where we are. In 1821, this post was relocated to where we are standing, and was operated continuously as a fur trading post until the mid-1970s. Under HBC central control, the post was supported by Rupert House on James Bay, with trade goods, flour and tobacco being transported inland from there and furs being carried back for transport overseas to England.

When A.P. Low arrived here in 1884, there were about twenty-five Cree families living here and trading with the HBC — a total population of about 125 persons, with the newly introduced European diseases such as measles and tuberculosis running rampant throughout. His description gives a snapshot of the community of the time, and gives an indication of the number of Cree who by then had come to depend on imported food and had geared their summer travel to the needs of the Hudson's Bay Company.¹²

The change to the traditional migration cycles of the Cree as a result of the fur trade demands was clear from Low's description:

As there are no longer any deer [caribou] in the country, and small game such as rabbits and partridges, are scarce; if it were not for the provisions supplied by the Company, these Indians would be unable to live…In the summer, all the able-bodied men descend the Rupert River in large canoes to Rupert House, with the furs taken during the winter, and return with supplies for the ensuing year….¹³

In another report, he adds more descriptive detail:

As nearly all the women and children accompany the large canoes in their own small craft, very few persons remain about the post during the summer, and as a consequence parties from the outside find it impossible to obtain guides or other assistance there during that period. Those who remain live altogether on the fish caught from day to day, as only sufficient provisions are brought in to supply the post during the winter and to provide for the men engaged in transporting the furs to Rupert House.¹⁴

The Rupert House brigade between Rupert House and Lake Mistassini continued its yearly pilgrimage until 1926, when a railway line was completed to Oskelaneo. Canoes now went the much shorter route south to this railway community. However, communities farther inland, such as Neoskweskau and Nichicun, continued to be supplied by canoe until the mid-1940s. During A.P. Low's visits to Mistassini in 1884–85 and in 1892–93, the Rupert House brigades were in full swing. We can imagine the excitement on the day of departure. It is a day of celebration, and also a few tears, for the trip is a long one, the rivers turbulent, and not always did every canoeman return. However, the safety record of these expert canoemen is excellent. Rarely did accidents happen on the river. We found the downstream travel tough enough.

The departure of the Rupert Brigade from Mistissini when Low was at the community would have happened like this:

With the canoes loaded, everyone took their places and paddled away quickly, the boats racing each other to vie for the lead, the paddles rhythmically dipping into the water at a rate of fifty or even sixty strokes each minute. Once out of sight of the post, the head guide would signal a stop, take out the tobacco, and distribute to each man half a plug of the finest Hudson's Bay Imperial twist tobacco. Each canoe-man then filled his clay pipe and lit it, while the chief guide ceremoniously tossed tobacco into the river to placate the River spirits.

A number of wives and children accompanyied the brigade, either travelling in the big canoes, if the loads were not too heavy, or paddling smaller canoes. The women often returned on their own, travelling upstream!¹⁵

The real work began when it was time to head back upstream from Rupert House. The trip from Mistassini would take about ten to twelve days, but the trip back would take more than twice as long. Because the loads on the return trip would be so much heavier, each canoeman would make numerous trips over the portages, by now well-used and cleared, with a load of at least two hundred pounds. The paddling was difficult against the current, and often poles had to be used to make any headway. On Sundays, the canoemen were to sleep in, which means not getting up at four a.m., but awakening around six instead! The river route was well-known to the canoemen and their intimate knowledge of each rapid, portage and campsite made travel fast and efficient.

At the last camp before Mistassini Post, the paddlers dressed up in their best clothes, hoisted the HBC flag, and rounded the final bend at race speed. The old men and women and children who had remained at the post would rush to the waters edge to greet the returning brigade, to see what new goods came, to discover who got married and any other gossip from afar. This was the glue that holds a community, and a people, together. And the cycle continued, year after year.

“Nothing could be more strenuous than freighting on the Rupert River, but it is “…natural work, the very strenuousness of it is decidedly beneficial to his [the Cree canoemen] moral and physical well-being.”¹⁶Now that the brigades are gone, and hunting and trapping no longer as central to their lives, perhaps there is a space that needs to be filled to give meaning, purpose, pride and spiritual sustenance to the people who have made this land their home for over 6,000 years. Perhaps there is a similar lack of these hard-to-define needs for most of us, particularly our youth, growing up and living in our cities, overflowing with material wealth, but sometimes in need of spiritual sustenance.

Loading up the Otter at Lake Mistassini for the long flight to Lake Naococane. Seen from the air, the remoteness of a land untouched by civilization, the vastness of the bogs and burned forests made us wonder whether two 50-year-old civil servants with desk jobs were up to this trip.

When the first short, “hairy” Europeans came here, as noted earlier, they had a profound effect on the yearly rhythms and cycles of life for the Cree. The traders and missionaries brought in material goods, writing and a new brand of religion — profound changes to the indigenous people of the time. But still, the Cree remained a people tied closely to the land and the cycle of seasons. In the 1960s, the federal government, more than the fur traders and missionaries, became the biggest influence on their way of life. Cree children were sent away to school, and some of these children began to lose the Cree ways — language, beliefs and bush skills. But even more profound changes were to come when the next waves of white people came, surveyors and engineers with dreams of harnessing the rivers that tied this land together. But the impact of the “hydrolization” of James Bay County will be discussed later. Our plane has arrived.

We load our gear — the green Hellman 17.5' canoe and the three hard-to-lift canoe packs — onto a bright yellow and red Otter floating on the clear water of Lake Mistassini. Philip Petawabano, the owner and chief pilot for Waasheshkun Air, tells us it is one of the originals Otters made in 1947. He is a muscular man, with big biceps and broad shoulders, dressed in blue jeans and wearing a black T-shirt that reads “Mistassini Band Council.” Philip looks a little doubtfully at the thunderheads looming to the west as we taxi along the lake in front of the town. Don Haines comes with us for the flight. This Otter is a much bigger plane than we need, but the only one available. We have lots of room. “Ready,” says Philip. We give him the thumbs-up, the engine roars, and in a shorter time than we expected, we are airborne.

Our field research on Low's epic canoe journeys is about to begin, at long last. But first, let's look at the least-known aspect of Low's career — his sailing voyages along the coast of Hudson and James bays and an even more unusual field season spent in “Gay Paris.”