The Story of the Trapper

APPENDIX

When in Labrador and Newfoundland a few years ago, the writer copied the entries of an old half-breed woman trapper's daily journal of her life. It is fragmentary and incoherent, but gives a glimpse of the Indian mind. It is written in English. She was seventy-five years old when the diary opened in December, 1893. Her name was Lydia Campbell and she lived at Hamilton Inlet. Having related how she shot a deer, skinning it herself, made her snow-shoes and set her rabbit snares, she closes her first entry with:

"Well, as I sed, I can't write much at a time now, for i am getting blind and some mist rises up before me if i sew, read or write a little while."

Lydia Campbell's mother was captured by Eskimo. She ran away when she had grown up, to quote her own terse diary, "crossed a river on drift sticks, wading in shallows, through woods, meeting bears, sleeping under trees—seventy miles flight—saw a French boat—took off skirt and waved it to them—came—took my mother on board—worked for them—with the sealers—camped on the ice.

"As there was no other kind of women to marrie hear, the few English men each took a wife of that sort and they never was sorry that they took them, for they was great workers and so it came to pass that I was one of the youngest of them." [Meaning, of course, that she was the daughter of one of these marriages.]

"Our young man pretended to spark the two daughters of Tomas. He was a one-armed man, for he had shot away one arm firing at a large bird.... He double-loaded his gun in his fright, so the por man lost one of his armes,... he was so smart with his gun that he could bring down a bird flying past him, or a deer running past he would be the first to bring it down."

"They was holden me hand and telling me that I must be his mother now as his own mother is dead and she was a great friend of mine although we could not understand each other's language sometimes, still we could make it out with sins and wonders."

"April 7, 1894.—Since I last wrote on this book, I have been what people call cruising about here. I have been visiting some of my friends, though scattered far apart, with my snow-shoes and axe on my shoulders. The nearest house to this place is about five miles up a beautiful river, and then through woods, what the french calls a portage—it is what I call pretty. Many is the time that I have been going with dogs and komatick 40 or 50 years ago with my husband and family to N. W. River, to the Hon. Donald A. Smith and family to keep N. Year or Easter."

"My dear old sister Hannah Mishlin who is now going on for 80 years old and she is smart yet, she hunts fresh meat and chops holes in the 3 foot ice this very winter and catches trout with her hook, enough for her household, her husband not able to work, he has a bad complaint."

"You must please excuse my writing and spelling for I have never been to school, neither had I a spelling book in my young day—me a native of this country, Labrador, Hamilton's Inlet, Esquimaux Bay—if you wish to know who I am, I am old Lydia Campbell, formerly Lydia Brooks, then Blake, after Blake, now Campbell. So you see ups and downs has been my life all through, and now I am what I am—prais the Lord."

"I have been hunting most every day since Easter, and to some of my rabbit snares and still traps, cat traps and mink traps. I caught 7 rabbits and 1 marten and I got a fix and 4 partridges, about 500 trout besides household duties—never leave out morning and Evening prayers and cooking and baking and washing for 5 people—3 motherless little children—with so much to make for sale out of seal skin and deer skin shoes, bags and pouches and what not.... You can say well done old half-breed woman in Hamilton's Inlet. Good night, God bless us all and send us prosperity.

"Yours ever true,

"Lydia Campbell."

"We are going to have an evening worship, my poor old man is tired, he has been a long way to-day and he shot 2 beautyful white partridges. Our boy heer shot once spruce partridge."

"Caplin so plentiful boats were stopped, whales, walrusses and white bears."

"Muligan River, May 24, 1894.—They say that once upon a time the world was drowned and that all the Esquimaux were drownded but one family and he took his family and dogs and chattels and his seal-skin boat and Kiak and Komaticks and went on the highest hill that they could see, and stayed there till the rain was over and when the water dried up they descended down the river and got down to the plains and when they could not see any more people, they took off the bottoms of their boots and took some little white [seal] pups and sent the poor little things off to sea and they drifted to some islands far away and became white people. Then they done the same as the others did and the people spread all over the world. Such was my poor father's thought.... There is up the main river a large fall, the same that the American and English gentlemen have been up to see. [Referring to Mr. Bryant, of Philadelphia, who visited Grand Falls.] Well there is a large whirlpool or hole at the bottom of the fall. The Indians that frequent the place say that there is three women—Indians—that lives under that place or near to it I am told, and at times they can hear them speaking to each other louder than the roar of the falls." [The Indians always think the mist of a waterfall signifies the presence of ghosts.]

"I have been the cook of that great Sir D. D. Smith that is in Canada at this time. [In the days when Lord Strathcona was chief trader at Hamilton Inlet.] He was then at Rigolet Post, a chief trader only, now what is he so great! He was seen last winter by one of the women that belong to this bay. She went up to Canada ... and he is gray headed and bended, that is Sir D. D. Smith."

"August 1, 1894.—My dear friends, you will please excuse my writing and spelling—the paper sweems by me, my eyesight is dim now——"

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Whom Bradbury and Irving and Chittenden have all conspired to make immortal.

[2] While Lewis and Clark were on the Upper Missouri, the former had reached a safe footing along a narrow pass, when he heard a voice shout, "Good God, captain, what shall I do?" Turning, Lewis saw Windsor had slipped to the verge of a precipice, where he lay with right arm and leg over it, the other arm clinging for dear life to the bluff. With his hunting-knife he cut a hole for his right foot, ripped off his moccasins so that his toes could have the prehensile freedom of a monkey's tail, and thus crawled to safety like a fly on a wall.

[3] Whether they actually reached the shores of the bay on this trip is still a dispute among French-Canadian savants.

[4] 1685-'87; the same Le Moyne d'Iberville who died in Havana after spending his strength trying to colonize the Mississippi for France—one instance which shows how completely the influence of the fur trade connected every part of America, from the Gulf to the pole, as in a network irrespective of flag.

[5] The men employed in mere rafting and barge work in contradistinction to the trappers and voyageurs.

[6] This was probably the real motive of the Hudson's Bay Company sending Hearne to explore the Coppermine in 1769-'71. Hearne, unfortunately, has never reaped the glory for this, owing to his too-ready surrender of Prince of Wales Fort to the French in La Perouse's campaign of 1782.

[7] To the mouth of the MacKenzie River in 1789, across the Rockies in 1793, for which feats he was knighted.

[8] Of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

[9] Either the Nor' Westers or the Mackinaws, for the H. B. C. were not yet so far south.

[10] In it were the two original partners, Clark, the Chouteaus of Missouri fame, Andrew Henry, the first trader to cross the northern continental divide, and others of whom Chittenden gives full particulars.

[11] This on the testimony of a North-West partner, Alexander Henry, a copy of whose diary is in the Parliamentary Library, Ottawa. Both Coues and Chittenden, the American historians, note the corroborative testimony of Henry's journal.

[12] Henceforth known as the South-West Company, in distinction to the North-West.

[13] The modern Winnipeg.

[14] MacKay, MacDougall, and the two Stuarts.

[15] FranchÈre, one of the scribbling clerks whom Thorn so detested, says this man was Weekes, who almost lost his life entering the Columbia. Irving, who drew much of his material from FranchÈre, says Lewis, and may have had special information from Mr. Astor; but all accounts—FranchÈre's, and Ross Cox's, and Alexander Ross's—are from the same source, the Indian interpreter, who, in the confusion of the massacre, sprang overboard into the canoes of the squaws, who spared him on account of his race. FranchÈre became prominent in Montreal, Cox in British Columbia, and Ross in Red River Settlement of Winnipeg, where the story of the fur company conflict became folk-lore to the old settlers. There is scarcely a family but has some ancestor who took part in the contest among the fur companies at the opening of the nineteenth century, and the tale is part of the settlement's traditions.

[16] A partner in trade with Crooks, both of whom lost everything going up the Missouri in Lisa's wake.

[17] Doings in the North-West camp have only become known of late from the daily journals of two North-West partners—MacDonald of Garth, whose papers were made public by a descendant of the MacKenzies, and Alexander Henry, whose account is in the Ottawa Library.

[18] A son of the English officer of the Eighty-fourth Regiment in the American War of Independence.

[19] Jane Barnes, an adventuress from Portsmouth, the first white woman on the Columbia.

[20] In justice to the many descendants of the numerous clan MacTavish in the service of the fur companies, this MacTavish should be distinguished from others of blameless lives.

[21] Some say seventy-four.

[22] The enormous returns made up largely of the Astoria capture. The unusually large guard was no doubt owing to the War of 1812.

[23] An antecedent of the late Sir Roderick Cameron of New York.

[24] More of the voyageurs' romance; named because of a voice heard calling and calling across the lake as voyageurs entered the valley—said to be the spirit of an Indian girl calling her lover, though prosaic sense explains it was the echo of the voyageurs' song among the hills.

[25] Continental soldiers disbanded after the Napoleonic wars.

[26] A law that could not, of course, be enforced, except as to the building of permanent forts, in regions beyond the reach of law's enforcement.

[27] For example, the Deschamps of Red River.

[28] Chittenden.

[29] Larpenteur, who was there, has given even a more circumstantial account of this terrible tragedy.

[30] Radisson and Groseillers, from regions westward of Duluth.

[31] Especially the ChÂteau de Ramezay, where great underground vaults were built for the storing of pelts in case of attack from New Englander and Iroquois. These vaults may still be seen under ChÂteau de Ramezay.

[32] This is no exaggeration. Smith's trappers, who were scattered from Fort Vancouver to Monterey, the Astorians, Major Andrew Henry's party—had all been such wide-ranging foresters.

[33] Fitzpatrick was late in reaching the hunting-ground this year, owing to a disaster with Smith on the way back from Santa FÉ.

[34] By law the Hudson's Bay had no right in this region from the passing of the act forbidding British traders in the United States. But, then, no man had a right to steal half a million of another's furs, which was the record of the Rocky Mountain men.

[35] A death almost similar to that on the shores of Hudson Bay occurred in the forests of the Boundary, west of Lake Superior, a few years ago. In this case eight wolves were found round the body of the dead trapper, and eight holes were empty in his cartridge-belt—which tells its own story.

[36] In further confirmation of Montagnais's bear, the chief factor's daughter, who told me the story, was standing in the fort gate when the Indian came running back with a grisly pelt over his shoulder. When he saw her his hands went up to conceal the price he had paid for the pelt.

[37] This phase of prairie life must not be set down to writer's license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see any time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within field-glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the badgers are running.

[38] Would not such critics think twice before passing judgment if they recalled that General Parker was a full-blood Indian; that if Johnston had not married Wabogish's daughter and if Johnston's daughter had not preferred to marry Schoolcraft instead of going to her relatives of the Irish nobility, Longfellow would have written no Hiawatha? Would they not hesitate before slurring men like Premier Norquay of Manitoba and the famous MacKenzies, those princes of fur trade from St. Louis to the Arctic, and David Thompson, the great explorer? Do they forget that Lord Strathcona, one of the foremost peers of Britain, is related to the proudest race of plain-rangers that ever scoured the West, the Bois-BrÛlÉs? The writer knows the West from only fifteen years of life and travel there; yet with that imperfect knowledge cannot recall a single fur post without some tradition of an unfamed Pocahontas.

[39] The spelling of the name with an apostrophe in the charter seems to be the only reason for the company's name always having the apostrophe, whereas the waters are now known simply as Hudson Bay.

[40] To the Indian mind the hand-to-hand duels between white traders were incomprehensible pieces of folly.

[41] It need hardly be explained that it is the prairie Indian and not the forest Ojibway who places the body on high scaffolding above the ground; hence the woman's dilemma.

[42] The flag was hoisted on Sundays to notify the Indians there would be no trade.

[43] Governor Norton will, of course, be recalled as the most conspicuous for his brutality.

[44] Amisk, the Chippewyan, umisk, the Cree, with much the same sound. A well-known trader told the writer that he considered the variation in Indian language more a matter of dialect than difference in meaning, and that while he could speak only Ojibway he never had any difficulty in understanding and being understood by Cree, Chippewyan, and Assiniboine. For instance, rabbit, "the little white chap," is wahboos on the Upper Ottawa, wapus on the Saskatchewan, wapauce on the MacKenzie.

[45] That is, as far as trappers yet know.

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