Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  At the end of the last bay—the forest pushed back to form an “amphitheater,” Alexander thought—at the foot of the Grand Portage, a temporary city the size of Detroit. The rendezvous.

  * * *

  ————

  After more than a decade apart, Alexander and Roderic were finally reunited. They had not seen each other since they were children in Scotland, and now they were up-and-coming businessmen, agents of the same fur company, making their way in the wilderness. Alexander was eager for the opportunity, Roderic less so, complaining that there were so few bunkhouses, “I often made the comptoir [the counter] my pillow.”

  It was Alexander’s first experience with the “licentiousness of manners” of the voyageurs when in full drunken revelry. He thought that they indulged themselves “in extravagance and dissipation during the short space of one month in twelve or fifteen,” and in so doing “generally contrived to squander away all their gains,” as if in those brief rendezvous moments they could balance out what they had been deprived of the rest of the year.

  In 1785, only two dozen or so total bourgeois traded in the north, and the rendezvous was young Alexander’s chance to meet and interact with the businessmen he had only heard about. All except Peter Pond, the American who had famously shipped the first Athabascan furs in 1778. Pond skipped that year’s meeting, traveling all the way back to Montreal, an odd and unexplained choice.

  But Alexander did meet the veteran bourgeois John Ross and Peter Pangman, the partners whom Gregory and MacLeod took on to manage the northern venture. The two men had worked together for years and owned their own storehouse at the rendezvous. Pangman was from New Jersey, forty-one years old, and their most experienced trader. He started at Fort Michilimackinac in 1767, then spent a decade in the country of the Saskatchwine. In 1778, Pangman was one of the traders who helped fund Pond’s journey to Athabasca. Two years later, Pangman partnered with John Ross, who had worked similar low river country, and together they took a share of the fledgling North West Company. But both men knew that fur traders set up temporary partnerships of convenience, and a man on the ins could soon find himself on the outs, and when the North West Company reorganized several years later, they were the latter.

  Gregory, MacLeod, Pangman, Ross, and Mackenzie called themselves the New Concern, and in their competitor, the North West Company, they were facing down a relative giant. That year, under the direction of the Frobisher brothers and using the wealth of Simon McTavish, Montreal’s top investor, their rivals had sent dozens of traders with twenty-five canoes and eight flat-bottomed bateaux boats’ worth of goods to Grand Portage and Detroit. In contrast, the New Concern had only three wintering partners selling from eight canoes.

  Still, they made a plan. Pangman would return to Fort des Prairies, on the Saskatchwine, where he had spent so much time. Ross, as the second most experienced man, would take the toughest assignment, to go all the way to Athabasca and compete directly with Peter Pond. Mackenzie would start geographically between the two, at the Île-à-la-Crosse on the English River.

  Sending Alexander alone was risky. Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher themselves were robbed by the Indians on their first trip north in 1769. But though far from their homeland, the Scots still exhibited a clan loyalty, and MacLeod trusted Mackenzie.

  The members of the New Concern went their separate ways. The primary investing partners, John Gregory and Normand MacLeod, would travel back with the mangeurs du lard and arrive home in Montreal by September. New to the firm, and with little experience as a clerk, Roderic would stay behind at Grand Portage to keep the books as part of the skeleton crew. And Alexander would travel hundreds of miles north, to enter the ranks of the hommes du nord.

  * * *

  ————

  The Grand Portage was just that, an infamous nine-mile climb of backbreaking root steps and slick rock. Every six hours, the voyageurs could lug two pièces of trade goods over the portage and two more pièces of furs back. For this eighteen-mile trip, Alexander Mackenzie paid each man a Spanish silver dollar.

  Waiting for them, on the northern end of the portage, were their canoes. Much smaller than the grand craft the pork eaters had paddled from Montreal, they were canots du nord, crewed by half the men, able to carry two-thirds of the freight. But they fitted the tight rivers of the north, and only two men were required to portage the boat, the rest tumplining the wrapped goods. And on the few stretches of open water they would encounter, they could still make six miles an hour, admirable time.

  But not yet. Grand Portage was just the first obstacle; the carrying work had barely begun. Long portages, thousands of paces long, from lake to lake, awaited them, always to the north and west, in search of the height of land separating the watersheds of Lake Superior and Hudson’s Bay. The carries were all named: Partridge Portage, Carreboeuf Portage, Outard Portage, Elk Portage, Portage de Cerise. On this last, Mackenzie said he marched “in the face of a considerable hill.” The lakes were full of rocks or sucking mud, and only a few miles long in any case; by the time they reloaded the canoes, they were back out of them, carrying again. Twenty-nine total portages had to be traversed before they reached a high rocky ledge, almost a thousand feet above the waters of Lake Superior; to their relief, the rivers then slowly began to run with them again.

  Here the voyageurs pulled Mackenzie aside. As at Pointe au Baptême, they dipped a pine bough in the water and blessed him with it. They made him promise to baptize every other man who went that same way and to never kiss another voyageur’s wife while she waited for her husband to return. Mackenzie agreed, and then the men cheered and shot a barrage of rifles into the air and demanded a glass of rum each as their reward.

  The whole country before them was broken, rocky, mosquito infested, and so thickly forested that the party could see no farther than the end of the next channel. The route was neither lake nor river but rather a combination of the two, rapids in pond narrows and short portages around falls. The devant in the nose of the canoe found each rock with a push of a paddle, steered them aside with one stroke, nodded to the gouvernail in the back to track left or right. It was slow, grueling work, and lonely. One large cliff bore a mash of arrows, fired by the Sioux as a warning, proving the breadth of their war party’s advance. But mostly the land was empty, the Algonquin having been ravaged by disease. On either side of their tiny scratch of water, the wilderness pushed endlessly in all directions.

  Several weeks of toil later, Mackenzie’s brigade reached Rainy Lake, where Mackenzie wrote that “there had been an extensive picketed fort and building possessed by the French; the site of it is at present a beautiful meadow, surrounded by groves of oaks.” Everywhere Mackenzie went, only the slightest physical traces of the French missionaries and fur traders remained. Rotted away, as if they had never been, reclaimed by the forest.

  Finally, though, after Rainy Lake, they were in real current in the one-hundred-mile Lac à la Pluie River. The Algonquin still lived in this area, harvesting wild rice and setting out fishing nets. The canoes cut through the maze of the Lac des Bois, the Lake of the Woods, with so many islands and peninsulas pushing into its surface that the lake somehow seemed more land than water. Hemming them in were thick forests of ironwood and poplar and white birch, used to make the Algonquin boats. Appropriate, Mackenzie thought, because “the country is so broken by lakes and rivers, that people may find their way in canoes in any direction they please.”

  They followed the Rat Portage to the Winnipeg River, which was full of rapids, twenty-six carries required in all; at one point, the portages were so tightly packed together that seven could be seen ahead at one time. The water tumbled in fierce torrents, and at each the voyageurs took off their hats and made the sign of the cross. Along the shore were thick stands of wooden crosses, set by the men to mark their brethren lost in those waters. At each portage site, the Algonquin had laid wreaths of flowers and set out piles of stones of memory, and the voyageurs recited their rosaries and
prayed fervently to the Virgin, for they knew that she and the apostles had appeared to so many men like themselves, on paths such as these, to drive away the Iroquois, or lead them to safety across dark water, or even pull them from the grip of a cataract.

  One waterfall came after another, until the Winnipeg River discharged into a lake of the same name. For the first time since Lake Superior, the view expanded as the last basswood and maple trees fell away. Instead, prairie hugged the shores. Mackenzie marveled at herds of buffalo and saw so many animals, birds, and fish that he declared, “There is not, perhaps, a finer country in the world for the residence of uncivilized man.” Nevertheless, he also found evidence of the pox and noted that among the Algonquin clans “the widows were more numerous than the men.”

  According to Mackenzie’s map, canoe brigades could travel from Lake Winnipeg in many directions. To Hudson’s Bay along the Nelson River, to the Mississippi via the Red. But Mackenzie wanted to go north, the length of the shallow lake. So shallow, only ten or twenty feet deep in many places, that the constant wind formed huge waves, steep chop that tossed canoes. Mackenzie’s voyageurs would put out a sail briefly and then, for fear of capsizing, quickly drop it in storms rolling off the plains. The lake was full of sunken boats and lost pièces. They hugged the coast and prayed for calm, especially when they made the five-mile grande traverse to the western shore.

  Mackenzie noticed that “this lake, in common with those of this country, is bounded on the North with banks of black and grey rock, and on the South by a low, level country.” Lake of the Woods had been the same. There was a rhythm to these portages, Mackenzie saw. As they worked their way north and west out of the Great Lakes, a simple pattern pervaded. Fight a river up the granite, carry over the height of land, follow the rapids down to a mud lake, cross and follow the next stream upriver, until you find the granite again. A water ladder, climbing up and down, to traverse the continent.

  At the north end of the lake they entered the Saskatchwine River. Up that valley Mackenzie’s new partner Peter Pangman would spend the winter at Fort des Prairies, at the same point his former master, James Finlay, had wintered two decades before. Back in Montreal, when Mackenzie was a clerk, the place seemed so impossibly distant. But now he was there, and heading even farther north.

  The Saskatchwine was a muddy river, and over a mile wide, the largest they had encountered since the Great Lakes. A three-mile-long rapid formed its mouth, and flocks of pelicans hung nearby, seeking sturgeon tossed on the rocks by the rushing water. Soon they hit Cedar Lake and Mud Lake, separated by vast quantities of earth and silt discharged by the Saskatchwine, the whole area marshy and full of willows and swamp ash, islands and channels that appeared recently dry. Mackenzie found more fragments of the earlier French settlements, the furrowed rows and wheel ruts from farming implements and carriages, but he also thought that “this river will, in the course of time, convert the whole of the Cedar Lake into a forest.”

  A break in the wilderness was at hand. Along the Saskatchwine, just past Mud Lake, sat an outpost of Europe on a mounded slough of silt. It was Cumberland House, the lone inland outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the largest landholding private enterprise the world had ever seen.

  In the eighteenth century, two centers of power competed for the fur trade: the French, British, Scottish, and American merchants in Montreal, and the monopoly known as the Hudson’s Bay Company. Counterintuitively, the British HBC was founded in 1670 by two French coureurs de bois, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers. They wished to trade in the far north and, after being rebuffed by French authorities, found a rich patron in Prince Rupert, the cousin of the English king. He granted them a royal charter to conduct business in all the lands in that Arctic watershed, and they named the venture the Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson’s Bay.

  Sometimes, the rivalry between Montreal and the HBC mirrored the French and English conflict. In 1686, seventy coureurs de bois led thirty regular French musketeers up the Ottawa River and through the deep forests to attack forts along the bay. The English were so surprised that they offered almost no resistance, and the French only retreated for lack of men to suitably garrison the three seized HBC posts. Most often, though, the competition was simply for profit. The HBC made the Indians come to them, to cross the “starving country” of the barrens, to trade at the bay’s shore. Moving goods via ship, rather than canoe, was so much cheaper, and the business therefore so much more profitable, that for most of its history the HBC could lose half the trade to Montreal without worry.

  Cumberland House was only a decade old, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s first acknowledgment that it needed to adopt Montreal methods and move to where the Indians lived and hunted. “Why they did not do it before is best known to themselves,” Mackenzie wrote.

  The HBC fort hoisted a white flag with the red crest of the company. Relations were not cordial between traders, proper Englishmen versus Scottish and American castoffs. Mackenzie’s brigade moved on.

  The Saskatchwine was the last wide muddy river. After Cumberland, the rivers tightened, the water cleared to crystal in the tumult. The Sturgeon-Weir River was so fraught with cataracts that the solid northmen called it the Rivière Maligne. Mackenzie thought it “an almost continual rapid,” voyageurs climbing granite the color of rust and storm clouds. At the top of that rickety staircase they hit a bizarre waterway, more a series of fragmented lakes than any proper channel. And more strangely, the route was marked with the stretched skin of a frog.

  The frog was a warning to other tribes that they were now entering the land of the Cree, who controlled this country and would hunt beaver on it for sale to the white men in Montreal and Hudson’s Bay. Mackenzie knew the Cree by their French name, the Knisteneaux, and that they were powerful from having acquired rifles from white men long before their rivals. Whatever tribe had previously occupied this land had fled west, ahead of the guns.

  This jagged river, the Cree called it the Missinipi, the Big Waters, but the Montreal traders knew it as the English River. Joseph Frobisher, of the rival North West Company, had penetrated this far in 1774. But a decade later, much progress had been made, and Mackenzie was still almost three hundred miles from his winter post.

  Now that they were laboring in the far interior, the voyageurs’ appetites had expanded commensurate with the work. They could eat eight pounds of meat a day, fish and geese and ducks, four birds a day sometimes, or pemmican when time did not permit a hunt. It was the Cree who first gave the voyageurs the food they named pemmican: the meat of the woolly bison, smashed and ground, and mixed with equal parts fat and, unintentionally, dirt, shit, hair, and gravel. Sometimes they added cranberries for flavor. The voyageurs turned pemmican into a substance called rubbaboo, by boiling it in a pot of water and adding a little flour to thicken it, and then a bit of sugar and a glass of rum to force it down. Mackenzie thought “a little time reconciles it to the palate.”

  The land of the Cree was fractured, an assembly of oddly segmented lakes divided by rapids. Portage des Ecors, Portage du Galet, Portage des Morts, “covered with human bones, the relics of the small pox.” Every waterway was full of the Mamaygwessey, tiny spirit creatures with six fingers that snatched the voyageurs’ paddles and untied their lines and tipped their canoes in rapids. Whitewater like Mackenzie had never seen, including a “silent whirlpool” named rapid qui ne parle point, the rapid that never speaks. They passed a rock in the shape of a bear, its head and snout painted red. A river of grass. A lake named for the serpent. And always, more portages.

  These carrying paths were ancient, as much a natural part of the landscape as any tree or stone. The voyageurs did not make the paths; they were shown them by their Indian guides. But the Algonquin and Cree knew that they had not made the paths either. They were made in the distant past, when the endless winter broke, the ice retreated, and the moose and bear and fallow deer first walked the rivers. The guides knew their people had si
mply found the carrying paths, a gift thousands of years old.

  Mackenzie and his men had crossed a hundred rapids since the muddy banks of Cumberland House and twice that many portages since the grand one after the rendezvous. But finally, at Île-à-la-Crosse, on the bank of the Deep River, Mackenzie spotted a fort on “a low isthmus,” he wrote, “in latitude 55.25 North, and longitude 107.48 West.”

  It was the North West Company post, built by the Frobishers a decade before, now manned by the experienced bourgeois Patrick Small and his clerk Toussaint Lesieur. Mackenzie was in over his head, a fledgling competing with experienced bourgeois. Still, next to that pioneering outpost, he would construct his own sturdy cabin, as much a home as he would have for the next seven months of winter.

  * * *

  ————

  Île-à-la-Crosse was farther from Grand Portage than Grand Portage was from Montreal; civilization, already tenuous along the Great Lakes, was a memory. The lake took its name not from its shape but from “the game of the cross, which forms a principal amusement among the natives,” Mackenzie said, a contest that involved sticks, nets, and much slashing and bloodletting.

  Upon arrival, the voyageurs had no time for sport, though. They immediately got to work felling trees, clearing the land, and raising a wall. The post consisted of only a few connected buildings, the trading area up front, storehouse in back. The voyageur billeting and bourgeois accommodations were co-located in a squat log house fitted together with squared logs, requiring few iron nails, which were hard to come by. They made space for a small garden to grow root vegetables in the spring. The men had paddled for months, but there was no rest; the voyageur life, as one bourgeois said, was to “live hard, lie hard, sleep hard, eat dogs.”