Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  Once the post opened, Mackenzie’s job was to make the Cree dependent on European goods—metal shot, gunpowder, tools, kettles, food, cloth—to ensure they had to keep returning to his post as often as possible, taking on more and more credit, so that they owed many furs by the time spring came. But he was always on guard to intercept the Cree before they visited Patrick Small or journeyed to Hudson’s Bay for cheaper goods.

  Mackenzie spent the winter handing out sewing needles and liquor, and the Cree spent the year killing. Beaver were the choicest prize, and in the warm months the hunters could use deadfalls, nets, and dogs to corner the animals. In the winter, though, when the beaver coats were thickest, the animals hid in their burrows, to eat the branches they’d stored away. So then the Cree hunters dug into their dams, pulled the slumbering beavers out of their homes with hooked poles, and then clubbed them to death one by one.

  These were the castor gras, the furs Mackenzie wanted. And even better, most valuable of all, were those same furs a year later, after they had been worn for a season in the robes of the Indians. The traders called those furs greasy beaver. After so much use, the unwanted guard hairs were worn off and the remaining pelt softened from human oils.

  Trade was challenging, the two cultures so unlike each other, always grating on the other’s nerves. “They seem to be entirely unacquainted even with the name of gratitude,” said one frustrated English trader. When the Cree visited the trading posts, “there is not a one of them who has not a thousand wants.” Meanwhile, the Indians grumbled about the white men’s lack of etiquette, scaring away game, lacking survival skills, breaking taboos of which animals to hunt and eat at each time of year. In European culture, it was polite to offer food to guests but not ask for it, which would be considered begging; Indian culture considered the exact inverse rude. The mangeurs de lard had very little interaction with the Indians, but the hommes du nord spent their working lives on their land, and still conflict often arose.

  Mackenzie bemoaned the use of alcohol and noted that there had been “a very excellent tendency, but is now unfortunately discontinued, of not selling any spirituous liquor to the natives.” Those days were gone, and he found alcohol essential to woo hunters and secure deals, though he had heard how dangerous it could be. In 1780, after a night of hard drinking and fighting, one trader had given an Indian “a dose of laudanum in a glass of grog, which effectually prevented him from giving further trouble to any one, by setting him asleep for ever,” Mackenzie wrote. In the ensuing fight, the bourgeois and several voyageurs were killed, and the rest abandoned the fort.

  The solution to bond the Cree to the white foreigners was marriage. Mackenzie was expected to marry the daughter of the local chief so that the two men would do business not as buyer and seller but as father and son-in-law. The voyageurs gratefully married à la façon du pays, in the custom of the country, growing large families at the posts they returned to year after year. On the night of the wedding, the tribe and white men would all gather to smoke the calumet pipe, while the women scraped the skin of the bride, removing all grease and hair, so they could dress her as a European in a gown.

  The decorum could devolve at any time, especially when stressed by war, or starvation, or disease. Mackenzie thought that “it requires much less time for a civilized people to deviate into the manner and customs of savage life, than for savages to rise into a state of civilization.” He found the lands of the English River depopulated, writing that the small pox was a “destructive and desolating power, as the fire consumes the dry grass of the fields.” Mackenzie saw the pox eliminate entire nations with its “pestilential breath,” and in the emptied villages “the putrid carcasses, which the wolves, with a furious voracity, dragged forth from the huts, or which were mangled within them by the dogs, whose hunger was satisfied with the disfigured remains of their masters.” Mackenzie had heard that fathers would kill every member of their own family to escape that fate.

  * * *

  ————

  The winter was horrific. Unbreakable cold, drifts of snow above the rooflines, the new unseasoned timbers of the fort walls shrinking to let in the wind. And yet the Indian elders told Mackenzie that when the world was new, the weather was somehow even colder, trees and earth cracking from the ice. Back then, their people lived in comfort, the elders said, without any of the manufactured European goods that they so readily purchased at Mackenzie’s post.

  There was nothing to do besides chop wood, fish the lake, shiver, lie in bed with one’s wife, and wait for the Cree to bring furs for trade. They ate trout and pike and whitefish all winter, pulled from beneath the ice, four per man per day, when they could catch it. Dried provisions, like wild rice and grease, were saved for lean times, or New Year’s Day, when Mackenzie let the men feast on rum and cake made of flour and water. But when they ran out of food, the hommes du nord ate “tallow and dried cherries,” or blueberries pulled out of bear shit.

  To pass the time, the voyageurs whipped their dogs, or drove them ahead of toboggans yelling “mouche,” or shot guns in the air to scare Mackenzie into believing the Cree were attacking, or played other tricks they learned from their à la façon du pays wives, who knew how the spirit of raven undid men’s plans. Mackenzie was isolated as the only native English speaker. He was conversant a bit in French and could have attempted a winter of talk with his voyageurs, but about what? As one of his fellow bourgeois said, “What conversation would an illiterate ignorant Canadian be able to keep up? All of their chat is about Horses, Dogs, Canoes and Women, and strong men who can fight a good battle.” If they were lucky, a man knew how to play the fiddle or beat an Indian drum.

  That year, 1786, winter gripped the land long into April, hard-blown snowstorms that kept the warm southern winds at bay until late in the month, and so it was not until May that John Ross, Mackenzie’s partner in the New Concern, arrived at Île-à-la-Crosse to deliver the bad news.

  All winter, Ross and his North West Company rival, Peter Pond, had been competing for the affections of the Chipewyan, a northern tribe that traveled great distances delivering furs. Ross knew that he was outmatched—fewer clerks, fewer voyageurs, fewer goods—so he made the risky choice to leave the post and travel north on his own, to seek out the leader of these Chipewyan. He planned to lie to them, to say that he was from the Hudson’s Bay Company, and that if they traded with him, he would give the best prices and they could avoid the long journey to the bay.

  With a few individual hunters, this strategy worked, and they believed him. But in all his searches out on the land, Ross never found the true Chipewyan leader, because at that very moment, as Ross sought him in the wilderness, that Chipewyan trading chief was back at the post that Ross had left, delivering a year’s worth of furs to the North West Company.

  All the company’s fortunes could be made or lost from this one Chipewyan man, and when he arrived at the post, at the head of a long party of forty hunters, Peter Pond clothed him in a great red coat, as befitted his prominence and stature.

  To the Cree, this chief was known as Mistapoose. Alexander Mackenzie, for reasons he never explained, would come to call him Nestabeck. Among his own Chipewyan people, he was called Awgeenah. But to decades of European fur traders, from Hudson’s Bay to Montreal, across the barren tundra and boreal and Great Lakes, he was known, with deference, as the English Chief, the most powerful Indian in the northwest.

  — 9 —

  MATONABBEE AND AWGEENAH

  Awgeenah was the trading chief of the Chipewyan, the People of the Barrens, a position he assumed upon the death of one greater, the leader Matonabbee. In his youth, Awgeenah was a follower of Matonabbee’s and traveled with him across the land, even in a war party against the Esquimaux, when Matonabbee led a white man to the Far Off Metal River.

  Matonabbee’s mother was a Chipewyan woman, enslaved by the Cree and taken to Prince of Wales Fort during their annual trading migration to Hudson’s Bay. She was detained at the post by th
e British and given to a Chipewyan man who married her and filled her belly and then died soon after. Thus Matonabbee was adopted by the governor of the fort.

  The Hudson’s Bay Company kept a Home Guard, to defend its factories and hunt its food and provide wives to comfort the lonely Englishmen stationed in that inhospitable place. As a child and member of the guard, Matonabbee learned to speak English and Cree, in service to the business of the trade. As he grew older, he was taken in by his father’s family, and roamed the land, learning to speak Chipewyan and gather furs to sell at the bay. For a hundred years, the members of the HBC felt no need to venture farther inland than to fish a stream for their dinner. Why should they, when the Chipewyan would do the grueling and dangerous work for them? The English called Matonabbee and his people “the great travelers of the known world.”

  In time, Matonabbee grew into a striking figure: six feet tall, copper skin, dark hair, beardless, clear cheeks untouched by his nation’s traditional tattoos. He enjoyed Spanish wines but not brandy or rum, and never to excess. He heard enough of the Christian faith to reject it and all other “belief in any future state.” To the governors of Prince of Wales Fort, he became a trusted guide and mediator between Cree and Chipewyan, negotiating trading deals and the release of prisoners, even with the Copper Indians on far-off Slave Lake. Once, to rescue a stranded Copper Indian and his furs, Matonabbee paddled a canoe alone into a storm-tossed river, stripping naked in case he was thrown out and forced to swim. He had earned the esteem and trust of the HBC men, who said that he possessed “the vivacity of a Frenchman,…the sincerity of an Englishman,…the gravity and nobleness of a Turk.”

  When Matonabbee was a very young man, Moses Norton, the governor of the fort, sent him and another Chipewyan, Idotlyazee, to the north, to report on what they saw and bring back a map of the rivers and lakes and other resources. The two men walked the far north, along the coast of the northern ocean, and surveyed the rim of Slave Lake and all the adjoining drainages of Hudson’s Bay. Their journey lasted five complete turns of the seasons, but when Matonabbee and Idotlyazee returned, they brought with them a map made of deerskin and drawn with charcoal.

  The map showed Slave Lake as the heart of the land, over a dozen rivers reaching out in all directions toward the coasts. The widest river on the map, on the far edge of their trading empire, “which flows from a large lake in ye Athapeskan Country into ye Western Ocan,” Norton ignored. Instead, he focused on a river with “3 Copper mines wch are marked with 3 Red Spots.” Matonabbee had brought back a small chunk of the metal as proof of discovery.

  Norton had heard rumors of such a land—“far to ye Northward where ye sun dont set,” he wrote—passed down over the years, from reports and map fragments. They all stemmed from the curiosity of a previous governor, James Knight, who had become enraptured with a Chipewyan woman named Thanadelthur.

  In 1713, Thanadelthur escaped her Cree captors and fled to York Factory on Hudson’s Bay. Knight was impressed by her beauty and her sharp tongue, and though she was not yet twenty years old, he sent her back west to negotiate trade deals with her people. Though nominally only the interpreter, in reality she led the delegation, and saved her party of HBC men from starvation through force of will.

  Upon returning, Thanadelthur told Knight many tales of her homeland. That there were white giants with beards who guarded bags of gold and mountains of copper. That beyond these hills lay a strait that shifted with the tide and a great sea full of strange ships. She promised Knight her affection, that she would show him these lands, but then she took a fever and died soon after.

  Knight was undeterred. In 1719, he procured two vessels, filled them with sailors and stores, and set out to the upper lip of Hudson’s Bay to find these lands. No one saw him or his men alive ever again.

  Moses Norton would not follow Knight’s fate. But he did want Thanadelthur’s copper, and Matonabbee had found it.

  * * *

  ————

  One winter day, several seasons after delivering the map, Matonabbee was out on the land, accompanied by his wives and a band of Chipewyan hunters, when he came upon a white man leading a party of several Cree. The young Englishman was freezing and half-starved, slogging through the deep snows with no raquettes or toboggan. He said his name was Samuel Hearne and he had spent the last year fruitlessly searching the barrens for “the great Leader” Matonabbee, who could guide him to the Far Off Metal River.

  Hearne was a Hudson’s Bay Company trader but, unlike his companions, full of a restless spirit. Norton had sent him in search of the river of copper, and twice he had struck out north from Prince of Wales Fort, only to be turned back by the hardship of such travel. Hearne’s quadrant was broken, so he could take no navigational readings, and he was dangerously short on supplies. Before finding Matonabbee, over the course of seven days he ate only “a few cranberries, water, scraps of old leather, and burnt bones.” He watched his helpless Cree hunters pick over their clothing to “consider what part could best be spared,” so they could eat a “half rotten deer skin” to alleviate the feelings of extreme hunger.

  Matonabbee took pity on Hearne. He dressed the Englishman in a coat of otter skins, and then showed him a river where small trees grew, so the party could fashion snowshoes and sleds. Hearne was out of rifle ammunition and, desperate to take down game, cut an iron ice chisel into square chunks to create a poor substitute for bullets. But Matonabbee’s hunters easily fed them as they completed the journey back to Prince of Wales Fort.

  As they walked, Matonabbee asked, “Will you attempt another journey for the discovery of the Coppermines?” Hearne said yes, and Matonabbee volunteered to be his guide, on a few conditions. First, that a certain price be met by the governor of the fort. And second, that Matonabbee’s wives accompany them. This was the most important point. It was the lack of women on the expedition that had doomed Hearne, Matonabbee said.

  “For when all the men are heavily laden,” the Chipewyan said, “they can neither hunt nor travel to any considerable distance; and in case they meet with success in hunting, who is to carry the produce of their labor? Women are made for labor. One of them can carry, or haul, as much as two men can do.”

  Hearne readily agreed to Matonabbee’s conditions. It took them another two months of walking to reach the fort.

  * * *

  ————

  Upon arrival, Hearne immediately secured the Chipewyan chief’s official appointment to the expedition. Moses Norton instructed Matonabbee to escort Hearne north, back to the copper mines, taking “a few of his best men,” including Awgeenah. He also assured Hearne that Matonabbee was well supplied for the journey and “has promised to take great care of you.” Their party left Prince of Wales Fort only days later. The white man marked the day as December 7, 1770.

  They struggled north. The snow was deep and game scarce. On Christmas Day, Hearne found himself longing for Europe and the “great variety of delicacies which were then expending in every part of Christendom.” But Matonabbee told him to keep his spirits up, and deer would soon be plentiful.

  A few weeks later, the party happened upon several bands of Matonabbee’s countrymen, settled in for the season along a chain of frozen lakes. They had established corrals into which they drove game, easing their hunting, and allowing them to collect tall piles of pelts. Even in the depth of winter, they were healthy and robust, a far cry from the Home Guard on the bay, and Hearne realized that of the Indians “those who have the least intercourse with the Factories, are by far the happiest.”

  Matonabbee secured dried provisions and supplies to make canoes. He also wished to take more wives, because they “pitch our tents, make and mend our clothing, keep us warm at night; and, in fact, there is no such thing as traveling any considerable distance, or for any length of time, in this country, without their assistance,” he said.

  Matonabbee purchased another wife, giving him eight, and he prided himself on their height and strength; Hear
ne told him that they could make “good grenadiers” in the British army. All of his wives were named for the marten, the weasel of such fine fur: White Marten, Summer Marten, Marten’s Heart. In this way, they shared a kinship with Jumping Marten, who, according to the elders’ stories, once used her owl medicine to escape a group of men who kidnapped her. Jumping Marten gained power over them by sleeping with them, and then made them crazy and sent them into the winter with vacant eyes where they stood in the cold until they died.

  No man could know if his new wife was full of such medicine power.

  The party assembled, Matonabbee wanted to press north, even though one of his wives had just given birth and was miserable with pain. Still, she threw her babe on her back and trudged on. Would she not stay behind? Hearne asked. Matonabbee didn’t see why. “Women, though they do everything, are maintained at a trifling expense,” he said, “for as they always stand cook, the very licking of their fingers in scarce times is sufficient for their subsistence.”

  * * *

  ————

  Spring came on, the ice began to break, and when they arrived at a place called Clowey Lake, they found an even larger encampment of Chipewyan. Again among the main band of his people, Matonabbee had work to do to guarantee the success of their journey to the copper mines. He gave tobacco and gunpowder to every chief he met in exchange for the promise of safe passage, and in doing so established his prominence in the eyes of all that he was leading a band of warriors and women north and that Hearne was under his protection.

  One day, the former husband of one of Matonabbee’s wives arrived at the winter quarters, newly back from the hunt. Matonabbee had acquired some of his wives from their fathers, and some he had won in wrestling matches, pinning their husbands and thus earning the women’s hands. Matonabbee was a jealous defender of these wives, and so, upon seeing a former husband, he felt compelled to act. Matonabbee went to this wife’s possessions, removed her own long box-handled knife, calmly went to the man’s tent, and without a word grabbed him by the throat and stabbed him. The blade entered the man’s back but was turned aside by the bone of the shoulder blade. The man screamed and fell on his face, but Matonabbee raised the knife and stabbed him twice more. Then Matonabbee left, returned to his own tent, asked his wives for water to wash the knife, and smoked his pipe in peace.