ALSO BY BRIAN CASTNER
All the Ways We Kill and Die
The Long Walk
Copyright © 2018 by Brian Castner
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Portions of this work first appeared, in different form, in the following publications:
The Atlantic: “A Disappearing Home in a Warming World” (10/12/16)
Motherboard: “The Best Place in the World to Set a Forest Fire” (9/14/16); “I Canoed to the Arctic Ocean, and What Did I Find? A Balmy Beach” (9/16/16); “The People Making Solar Power Where the Sun Doesn’t Set” (9/15/16); “Silt Built This Town—And Melting Ice Will Eventually Destroy It” (9/13/16); “Why I Canoed 1,200 Miles to the Arctic Circle to Report on Climate Change” (9/12/16); and “The $20 Billion Arctic Pipeline That Will Haunt Forever” (10/9/16).
Supplemental travel support provided by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
Map by Jeffrey L. Ward
Cover design by Emily Mahon
Cover images: (top) Alexander Mackenzie by Graham Coton (detail) © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images; (bottom) by David Chrisinger; (background) Map of Mackenzie’s route to North Sea, 1789. Library of Congress, Map Collection.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Castner, Brian, author.
Title: Disappointment River : finding and losing the Northwest Passage / by Brian Castner.
Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017033495 | ISBN 9780385541626 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385541633 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Mackenzie, Alexander, 1764–1820. | Mackenzie River (N.W.T.)—Description and travel. | Northwest Passage—Discovery and exploration. | Northwest Passage—Description and travel.
Classification: LCC G650 1789 .C37 2018 | DDC 971.9/01092 [B]—DC23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033495
Ebook ISBN 9780385541633
v5.2
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Contents
Cover
Also by Brian Castner
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Map
Prologue
1 : The North West Company, 1788
2 : Into the North, 2016
3 : Scotland, 1774
4 : New York, 1775
5 : Montreal, 1778
6 : Detroit, 1784
7 : Into the Pays d’en Haut, Spring 2016
8 : To Grand Portage and the English River, 1785
9 : Matonabbee and Awgeenah
10 : Murder at the Old Establishment, 1787
11 : To the Northwest Passage, 1788
12 : All It Takes Is Time, 2016
13 : Embarkation, June 1789
14 : The Rapids of the Slave, June 2016
15 : Shoot the Messenger, June 1789
16 : Thunderstorms and Raids, June 2016
17 : Into the Mountains, July 1789
18 : The Plagues of the Deh Cho, July 2016
19 : The Dogrib, July 1789
20 : Rapids Without Rapids, July 2016
21 : You Can Starve on Rabbits, July 1789
22 : Fort Good Hope to Tsiigehtchic, July 2016
23 : Satisfy the Curiosity, Tho’ Not the Intent, July 1789
24 : Into the Earth Sponge, July 2016
25 : The Highest Part of the Island, July 1789
26 : A Sea of Ice, Frozen No More, July 2016
27 : Many Returns
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Illustrations
About the Author
For David, Jeremy, Landon, and Senny
I went to Alaska once, you know. I toured the Alaska-Canada road they built there during the war. Fantastic. Not the road, the landscape. The mighty road was just this insignificant little scratch across that landscape. You’ve never seen a world like that. It belongs to the God who was God before the Bible…God before he woke up and saw himself…God who was his own nightmare. There is no forgiveness there. You make one tiny mistake and that landscape grinds you into a bloody smudge, and I do mean right now, sir.
—Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A significant portion of this book concerns the actions of people indigenous to lands now known as North America. The proper names for these people—not to mention their lands and the rivers that run through them—are still a matter of controversy. Preferred titles and spellings have changed over time, generally toward greater cultural sensitivity, but in the written historical record precision is complicated by the paucity of primary indigenous voices; white men almost exclusively do the speaking and use a variety of names and terms now considered offensive.
Today, in the United States, the original inhabitants of the continent are collectively known as Native Americans or American Indians. In Canada, they are the First Nations. The only name consistently used for hundreds of years, and even (perhaps surprisingly) throughout current academic literature today, is still the simple “Indian.” In my travels, I found that term used quite often, especially by Indians themselves. So in this book, I will also use “Indian” when quoting or speaking of the history generally. When writing about the modern day, however, I’ll use the term “indigenous” when a generic word is called for, because it has grown in popular acceptance over the last few decades, “aboriginal” and “native” now trending out of favor.
As often as possible, however, I will use the specific name of the indigenous group, using the historical name when appropriate for the setting. Today we know them as the Inuit and Dene, but when speaking of the eighteenth century, as Alexander Mackenzie knew them, I will write “Esquimaux,” “Dogrib,” “Slavey,” “Hare,” depending on the nation.
In this balance of accuracy and courtesy, any errors are mine alone.
PROLOGUE
The river was liquid glass, a cloud mirror that rolled beneath my canoe and made me dizzy, as if I might stumble and fall down into the heavens, and in the horizon the silvery sky and water fused as one.
We had been paddling for two days, and the river was so wide that the far bank appeared to be little more than a slight film of green. Reeds filled our shore, black ducks and seagulls and a steady succession of bald eagles feeding on both. Behind us, tumbling lake storms, and ahead, just a rumor of current.
This river. The many nations of Dene, the indigenous peoples in the upper and middle basin, know it as the Deh Cho. The Gwichya Gwich’in, of the lower interior bush, as the Nagwichoonjik. The Inuvialuit, the western Inuit at the river’s end in the Arctic, as the Kuukpak. All the names are a variation on the same theme—the Big River—and for good reason. It is the second longest in North America. The island that plugs the river’s upper mouth is larger than five Manhattans. Everything about the Deh Cho is enormous.
And yet I intended to canoe every drop of it, all eleven hundred miles. I am a fairly serious river guide, but never before had I undertaken a self-supported trip of this magnitude, and the scale of the journey weighed heavily. We paddled an eighteen-and-a-half-foot Sea Clipper canoe, wide and steady as the days, designed to track through whitecaps and swallow hundreds of pounds of gear. I had spent half a year researching, purchasing, testing, sorting, packing, and repacking that gear: an Everest-rated tent, solar panels and satellite link, a handcrafted curved splitting ax from Maine
, ninety freeze-dried dinners from Quebec, plus apples, mandarins, bagels, peanut butter, chocolate, oatmeal, tea, chunk honey, and fifteen pounds of pemmican. All that and more, stuffed in waterproof barrels or lashed to the boat so a rogue wave couldn’t end our trip.
That morning, as we broke our first camp on the sandy shore of Great Slave Lake, I felt smothered. By the scale of the job ahead of us, the labor required, the intense summer heat, the size of the river. It had taken two days of travel just to reach the starting line, weeks and weeks yet to go to find the end.
All day, the shore ground by reluctantly. Grueling progress in the hazy shimmer. But then, unexpectedly and with great relief, a breeze stirred behind us—how did a breeze come out of the east?—and the watery mirror shattered as wavelets formed about us.
I unfolded the small sail we had brought for just such an unlikely development, clipped it to a metal bar at the nose of the boat, and when a gust caught us I felt it tug hard against my line and we surged forward, surfing on and over the rising waves, making real headway for the first time.
We paddled with ease, and the wind filled our sail, and the current increased as the river coalesced, and so, by the end of that day, I felt it, for the first time. The optimism, the promise, felt by the men and women who attempted the first recorded descent of this river. In whose path, in fact, I was following.
For centuries, Europeans had been searching for a water route through North America. This mystical passage was known by many names: the Strait of Anián, the River Ouregan, the Mer de l’Ouest. Anyone who found it, mapped it, returned alive to tell the world, would solve the greatest geographic mystery of the day and secure the riches and fame commensurate with such an achievement.
Thousands of sailors and soldiers had tried and failed over the years. But none had explored the Deh Cho, not until a party of fur traders and their indigenous partners launched an expedition in 1789. This river—its channel so wide and flat, the size of a hundred Champs-Élysées—was the last best hope of finding a shipping lane through the continent.
Midnight approached, and the sun was just starting to curve toward the orange horizon. My face flushed in its glow. The wind drove us on, the river pulled us ever west, and I understood then, in that moment, why those explorers really did believe that in the Deh Cho they had finally found a route to China. The fabled Northwest Passage.
— 1 —
THE NORTH WEST COMPANY, 1788
The previous winter had fallen early and hard, deep cold that clapped rivers icy tight, and so the men greeted the summer rendezvous of 1788 with more than the usual share of anticipation and excitement. Like sailors putting into port or whalers tying up ships in a gam, voyageurs thirsted for the rendezvous with a pent-up intensity bordering on lust: part reunion, part respite, part drunken revelry, the highlight of the year.
They descended upon the annual conclave from every direction. Great Lakes traders from Fort Michilimackinac and the Mississippi basin. Mangeurs de lard, the lowliest pork eaters, from the east, carrying in their massive birch-bark canoes a season’s worth of gunpowder and casked rum. And of greatest esteem, the vaunted hommes du nord, the men who had survived the far interior and lived to tell about it. Half-starved, frostbitten, weary; to reach the rendezvous, some had paddled for two or three months, over a thousand miles, from the Slave River, Île-à-la-Crosse, the Old Establishment, through the Rapids of the Drowned and the Rivière Maligne.
These men were human draft horses, known for their bravery, their drinking, their song, their whoring, their cheer, but most of all for their work ethic. For the fur-trading empire of Montreal was powered by the labor of illiterate farm boys from Quebec. At the rendezvous, the hommes du nord exchanged tens of thousands of beaver skins for the mangeurs du lard’s iron trade goods from London, a swap permitted by the bitter snow-driven land only once a year.
Voyageurs tended to be short—there was almost nowhere to put one’s feet in a canoe packed to the gunnel with supplies—but powerful, to work all day and carry heavy pièces on dangerous portages. “If he shall stop growing at about five feet four inches, and be gifted with a good voice, and lungs that never tire, he is considered having been born under a good star,” said one fur trader of the time.
A good voice, for they sang all day. They sang to synchronize their strokes. They sang to pass the time between smoked pipes. They sang to stay awake. The songs were filthy, bawdy versions of old religious hymns and children’s rhymes with popular melodies. Songs of beautiful women, and dances, and work, and crows picking at the flesh of corpses butchered in an Iroquois raid.
Ce sont les voyageurs
Qui sont de bons enfants;
Ah! qui ne mangent guère,
Mais qui boivent souvent!
…
Si les maringouins t’piq’ la tête,
D’leur aiguillon
Et t’étourdissent les oreilles,
De leurs chansons,
Endure-les, et prends patience
Afin d’apprendre
Qu’ainsi le diable te tourmente,
Pour avoir ta pauvre âme!
We are voyageurs
and good fellows. We seldom eat
but we often drink!
If the mosquitoes
sting your head and deafen your ears with their buzzing,
endure them patiently,
for they will show you how
the Devil will torment you
in order to get your poor soul.
The rendezvous was held at a place called Grand Portage, along a small bay on the western lip of Lake Superior, under the gaze of slumbering mounds of rock. For one month each summer, Grand Portage hosted both the headquarters of an international commercial empire and the rowdiest party in a thousand miles. Each was the reflection of the other, could not exist without the other. The facilities at Grand Portage were all related to commerce: warehouses, stables, forges, canoe depots. In truth, the fort constituted only a quasi-town. A communal garden but no church, a watchtower but no government’s soldiers, a factory for a single industry, the hub of every spoke, the gangway to the north.
Via paddle and portage trail, the rendezvous appeared in the distant wilderness like a tiny gnat on a horse’s rump. A palisade fence, shingled roofs, fields of white tents, hundreds of canoes at the fort. All the terms of trade were martial: Groups of canoes were a brigade, and they marched across the water. The Indians were kept on the outside of the picket, in teepees layered with bark. “Fence builders,” the Ojibwa called the whites. They meant it as a pejorative.
The night before they reached Grand Portage, the voyageurs shaved, washed their hair, changed into clean white shirts saved for the occasion. All year, when laboring in the stacked boreal forest, wading through sucking muskeg, dodging Sioux war parties, curled for warmth with their Cree wives, they might dress in rags, filthy and emaciated. But when they arrived at the rendezvous, they intended to make an entrance, deep in song.
And waiting for them, upon disembarkation, a regale, a feast: a four-pound loaf of bread fresh out of the hot brick oven, half a pound of butter, and a bottle of rum; molasses-soaked Brazilian twist tobacco too, and roasts of freshly slaughtered hogs. For those few weeks, the northmen had nothing to do but talk and drink and screw and fight. While sober, they exchanged family news—who died, who was born, who was now married, all back in Quebec—and found clerks to read them long out-of-date newspapers. Then they hit the rum, and in service of their festivities some spent a year’s worth of wages or went into debt, and not a few signed back on for another winter—or two, or three—based upon the depths of those debts. And then, a fortnight later, they headed back north.
The employer of all these voyageurs was a new business venture known as the North West Company. More a cartel than a proper corporation with a sole executive, the partnership was designed as a loose confederation of semiautonomous fur traders who pooled their resources for mutual benefit while always reserving the right to resume com
petition in the future. Borrowing the voyageurs’ French, the shareholders called themselves bourgeois.
The ratio of voyageurs to invested partners was a hundred to one, and only a few dozen bourgeois gathered in the main lodge each day. While the men caroused, their masters feasted in the style of the European gentlemen they aspired to be. All the partners and clerks and trusted interpreters gathered together for a lavish midday meal: bread, pork, beef, hams, venison, butter, peas, corn, potatoes, tea, spirits, wine, and plenty of milk from cows quartered at the fort. The growing season was so short they ate root vegetables from the year prior, but no one seemed to mind. All of the gentlemen’s pants were equipped with gussets so they could be cinched up in winter but, equally important, let out in summer.
But they did more than eat. Only at the rendezvous did so many bourgeois meet in one place. The northern agents and Montreal investors had business to discuss, and it was for that reason that Alexander and Roderic Mackenzie had traveled so far that summer.
Alexander and Roderic were cousins, Scottish refugees virtually alone in the world but for each other. Both were in their late twenties and up-and-comers, finding their way in the fiercely competitive trade. Their similarities were limited to age and acumen alone, though. Alexander was the more ambitious, energetic, direct. His partners thought him “blond, strong and well built.” Where Alexander was fair and square-jawed, Roderic was moon-faced, fleshy, with flat dark hair. The only family feature they shared was a knowing smile.
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