I took on the last of my perishable supplies at a Walmart outside Edmonton. Tortillas, bagels, peanut butter, honey, mandarin oranges, apples, pears, peaches, oatmeal, Snickers bars.
My first stop would be Fort Smith, a little town in the Northwest Territories. It lies on the bank of the Slave River, flowing out of Lake Athabasca, the body of water Mackenzie knew as Lake of the Hills. After dropping in on this first leg of Mackenzie and Awgeenah’s journey, I would drive to Hay River to get my canoe, pick up David, and start the main expedition.
North and west of Edmonton, I shed all accidental and accessory drivers. In Valleyview, American RV-clad tourists made a left turn for Alaska. The oil workers turned off outside Peace River, the loggers hours later. The road north was so monotonous that the few double-length tractor trailers drove in pairs—four loads, two drivers—presumably for safety, to keep each other awake, or assist in an emergency; no cell-phone call out was possible.
On the road out of Edmonton, I finally crossed the height of land into the Mackenzie watershed. For the first time, over the lip of the bowl, the view opened. Expansive, a wide and rolling green country, and as I drove my truck, wave after wave of land crested on my way into the valley and down.
That was it. North no longer felt up. As I crossed this last ridge, it became a down feeling. As if I were flowing into a drain, emptying into the sea. A mammoth force calling me, drawing me in with a magnetic pull, a subconscious voice, vibrating on a frequency only to be felt, too low to hear.
Into the basin, the river said, and down, down, down.
— 13 —
EMBARKATION, JUNE 1789
Mackenzie’s expedition to the Pacific consisted of ten men and four women in three birch-bark canoes, all smaller than the freight canoes typically used in the fur trade but large enough to carry a few months’ worth of pemmican. The men would paddle and hunt and repair boats. The women would paddle and cook and make camp. It was a party built for speed, endurance, and, most important, self-sufficiency.
Two smaller canoes carried the Chipewyan, one for Awgeenah, the other for the two young men—one of whom was Awgeenah’s brother—who served as the party’s hunters. The travel would be nothing to Awgeenah and his people, who told Mackenzie that “in ancient times their ancestors lived till their feet were worn out with walking.”
The largest canoe, by far, was Mackenzie’s; over twenty feet long, it bore eight souls and was crewed by four hired voyageurs. This was a coveted assignment. Among the voyageurs, prowess was measured by geography, and anyone who found the Northwest Passage and lived to tell about it would be held in the highest esteem at the next rendezvous.
Mackenzie hand selected the men the season before. François Barrieau, trusted courier and experienced northman, was his devant, the guide in the front of his canoe. His two milieux, the human paddling engine at the center of the boat, were Pierre de Lorme and Charles Ducette. His gouvernail, the steersman in the back, was Joseph Landry. Barrieau and de Lorme were former New Concern men. Landry and Ducette were longtime North West Company voyageurs, engagés hired by Peter Pond and Cuthbert Grant. They were also cousins from Acadia, the isolated French colony on the Atlantic coast. After the French and Indian War, many Acadians scattered under British rule. Some went to Louisiana and became known as Cajuns; some went inland and joined the fur trade. Landry and Ducette were inseparable.
The last employed member of Mackenzie’s crew was Johann Steinbruck, a Protestant German and former Hessian mercenary who fought for the British during the American Revolution. A few years older than Mackenzie, Steinbruck was born in Thuringia, a long day’s walk from Leipzig. He enlisted at age eighteen and landed in Quebec in September 1778, after the decisive battles of the war. As a grenadier, he was one of the biggest men in his battalion, but he saw mostly garrison duty in northern New York and the St. Lawrence valley, the same barren posts where Alexander’s father served. It was a cold drudgery that prepared him well for his future employment. He deserted the army in the summer of 1783, the war all but over, and, having learned French and a bit of writing, made his way to Quebec to work in the fur trade. Steinbruck was too educated to be a voyageur, too German to be a bourgeois, too poor to start his own trade. So he became a clerk with the North West Company, the same position Roderic considered bondage.
The final two seats in Mackenzie’s canoe were occupied by the voyageurs’ à la façon du pays wives. Landry, in particular, was a devoted husband; soon after he signed on with Peter Pond for a three-year stint in Athabasca, he used his new salary to buy beads and a dozen rings for his wife when passing through Île-à-la-Crosse on the way to that summer’s rendezvous. Awgeenah also brought two of his wives, the three of them in his own smaller canoe. This was the lesson of Matonabbee, that the women performed such valuable services no expedition could succeed without them.
Mackenzie was the least experienced white man on the trip. Awgeenah was a decade older, worldly, and well traveled. But both were businessmen, ambitious, physically courageous; their partnership was one of convenience, but no less shrewd for it.
* * *
————
On the first leg of the journey, to the far side of Slave Lake, Mackenzie’s party would be accompanied by Laurent Leroux, the clerk. Leroux had just snowshoed back from the lake on March 22, with promises from the Red Knives to meet him and Mackenzie that summer. Leroux was well liked by the Red Knives. Several years before, he had persuaded the English Chief to spread the word that he and the North West Company were fair and they should all come to his fort to trade, instead of crossing the barrens to the Hudson’s Bay Company posts. Leroux had laid the groundwork so Mackenzie could perhaps entice a guide to show him the river that flowed from the western shore of Slave Lake, or at least stock up on provisions.
Food occupied the front of Mackenzie’s thoughts, and he restricted their equipment to the basics: pemmican; clothing; crooked knives and a few fathoms of birch bark, about twelve feet total, for canoe repairs; “a proper assortment of the articles of merchandise as present, to ensure a friendly reception among the Indians”; and if that failed, “ammunition and arms requisite for our defense.” Mackenzie knew his own canoe couldn’t carry enough supplies, so he stocked some in Leroux’s; by the time they parted company, they’d have eaten through enough stores in his own boat to make room.
They could never carry enough, though, so the hunters were essential to Mackenzie’s plans. The Chipewyan men carried powder horns and sawed-off rifles, to move easily through the bush, and when pursuing game, they held the half-inch ball ammo in their mouths, to spit down the barrel to reload quick. All in the party wore moose-skin moccasins, with no socks, for ease of drying, and Awgeenah’s wives were dressed in deerskins and necklaces of the umbilical cords of their children, decorated with beads and porcupine quills. Ducette, de Lorme, the women, and the hunters all used short paddles, no taller than their bellies, with thin blades that reduced drag and allowed for a full day’s labor. Barrieau’s paddle was a bit longer, to steer the nose of the canoe around rocks. Landry’s gouvernail stick was nine feet of black ash.
Despite his mockery of Pond’s outlandish plans, Mackenzie did pack a map for Catherine the Great and a few Russian rubles as well. Also a pocket watch and a quadrant, to make observations of latitude using the sun’s height above the horizon at noon, and a compass, with which he could estimate longitude, using his speed and direction of travel. He and Steinbruck would keep detailed notes in a log, measuring each bend in the river.
“I do not posses the science of the naturalist,” Mackenzie wrote, and he had no intention to pretend otherwise. Collecting plant specimens and identifying new animal species were not his objectives. This was a journey of cartography and opportunity; his only spare thoughts would be “anxiously employed in making provision for the day.”
On May 22, 1789, Alexander wrote a letter to the North West Company partners for Roderic to carry to the rendezvous. It hedged, said almost nothing
about his plans. “Should I not be back in time…,” he insinuated. And later, “I intend to pass that way on my voyage.” All vague, no detail, in case the letters were intercepted. His secrecy was complete, and he needed no final words of encouragement or approval. Twelve days after he wrote his final letter, on Wednesday, June 3, 1789, Mackenzie’s little flotilla of four canoes “at 9 oClock embarked Fort Chipewyan.”
* * *
————
They were hungry even as the trip began, winter’s deprivation still lingering: fresh vegetables and tubers long ago chopped into soup, flour stores bare, eating nothing but fish “without even the quickening flavor of salt.” And so, only hours into the trip, the hunters were sent into the bush to bring back dinner. Their first day of travel was abbreviated, only thirty-six miles by Mackenzie’s reckoning, across the western end of the Lake of the Hills and north on a channel that led to the Slave River. They stopped at seven o’clock to make camp, and while Barrieau and the voyageurs applied gum to seal leaks on their canoes, the Chipewyan men shot a goose and two ducks. Mackenzie was delighted, because wildfowl proved “a very gratifying food after such a long privation of flesh-meat.”
The next morning, an early dawn, Barrieau called “Star Levé” to wake the men and get on the river. It was bitter cold, a veneer of ice on every pool of standing water, clouds of hoary breath among the men as they prepared the boats. Although it was early June, the rivers had just broken their winter crusts and were only newly free to navigate. They were in low country, a swampy maze of channels with low banks and thick woods of birch, poplar, willow. This was familiar territory for Awgeenah and the women, Leroux and the voyageurs had crossed it several times themselves, but Mackenzie diligently noted each bend and compass change for his North West Company partners who would never travel so far from the rendezvous.
Soon, the Peace River joined up from the west. In the spring, distant mountains flood the channel with debris torn from the banks of the headwaters. Taking on such a flow as the Peace, the current rose, water accelerating to the north, and in the distance a sound, a great torrent of barrier rapids that defined the Slave River. Mackenzie stopped the party short of the first cataract. Nearly eighty miles they had made, and all day the view had swelled, until Mackenzie thought “the River is near 2 leagues wide here.” A short rest, a hard day’s labor to come.
Over the next sixteen miles lay four major rapids: Cassette, Pelican, Mountain, and then Sault de Noyés, the Rapids of the Drowned. They are the largest and most extensive rapids in the pays d’en haut, not individual cataracts, but systems of whitewater, like nothing Mackenzie had ever encountered. The river was braided, channels between granite islands, passages of froth hidden until the last moment. And on either side of the river, tall hills of sand, dunes formed over thousands of years of floods.
They launched the canoes at three o’clock in the morning, the twilight of dawn on the horizon, and followed a sheltered channel on the eastern shore. In only a few minutes, they were on the portage. Leroux and Awgeenah knew the route, as did Landry and Ducette, who had come this way with Cuthbert Grant in 1786. The Cassette rapids were named for Grant’s lockbox, lost overboard just as Mackenzie’s had been on his way to Athabasca to meet Peter Pond for the first time, only two years before. Back then, Mackenzie’s primary worry was a missing shirt.
The path around the first rapid was frozen, forcing them to haul the canoes over slick rock sheathed in ice: 380 paces. The next carry the men called le portage d’Embarras, for it was “occasioned by Drift wood filling the small channel,” and they hauled the boats over spruce trees tossed like matchsticks, a tangle of ice-encrusted timber: 1,020 paces. Then 350 paces. The canoes barely had time to touch the water before they were out again, carried to another pond or small ancillary stream, anything to avoid the tumble in the meat of the main river. “All dangerous Rapids,” Mackenzie wrote.
Flocks of white pelicans, up to a dozen at a time, skimmed the tops of the black spruce: 335 paces along the portage that bore the bird’s name. A seabird, a sign that the ocean was close? Too much to hope, for the men knew the way and how far they were from the river on Pond’s map.
The next portage was along a steep landing, 820 paces on a narrow ledge wet with spray, so close the path was to the water. “All Hands were for some time handing the loading and Canoe up the Hill,” Mackenzie wrote, “Men and Indians much fatigued.” Awgeenah and his wives lugged their boat, the way slick, half-frozen, water tumbling down the granite in a fall, when, suddenly, a slip, and in only a moment their canoe pinwheeled.
Awgeenah’s wife jumped clear as the boat fell past her. The canoe was dashed on a rock, the birch bark split and cedar frame snapped, her supplies and provisions scattering into the rushing current. The boat was lost, and no time or materials to craft a new one; Awgeenah and his wives and the hunters would have to consolidate.
And then, after a full day of portaging, they were at the last cataract. The Rapids of the Drowned. The voyageurs sang a lament for the lost, for Landry and Ducette were there when the rapids were named, and it was their brethren who succumbed to the rushing water.
Three years before, in 1786, Cuthbert Grant led a party of white men through the rapids for the first time. They survived the Cassette, Pelican, and Mountain Rapids—with only a small loss of equipment—naming each in the process. At the last rapid, the party split. Grant took the most experienced guide, plus Ducette as a milieu and Landry as the gouvernail, and decided to run the rapid. Before they left, they told the other, less practiced men that if they found the way easy, they would stop on the bank and fire a rifle shot, as indication that it was safe to pass. If they heard silence, though, the second set of boats should portage onshore.
Grant and the men pushed off and into the cascade, and they found themselves in a storm of water. The way was tortuous, rooster-tail curls requiring every bit of Landry’s skill. In desperation, the voyageurs had a song for such a moment:
Quand tu seras dans ces rapids,
Très dangereux,
Prends la Vierge pour ton bon guide
Fais-lui des voeux!
Et tu verras couler cette onde,
Avec vitesse.
When you are in the worst rapids
let the Virgin be your guide.
Make your vow to her,
and you will see the waves recede.
The whitewater engulfed them and then, miraculously, spit Grant’s boat out into an eddy at the bottom of the cataract. Providence alone saw the men through. There was no way the second set of canoes could hope to make it, so Grant and the voyageurs sat onshore in silence and waited. Until one of the men did the most careless thing imaginable. He was hungry and shot at a duck with his rifle. Grant, Landry, Ducette, the guide, all ran up the riverbank, shouting, Arrêtez! Ne venez pas! Do not follow! They arrived in time to see the canoes push off the bank and become entangled in the churning hydraulic. The boats floundered, overturned, the water closed over the men’s heads, and every one of them perished.
Two canoes, five voyageurs, and an unknown number of pièces never came out of the river. Brisbois. Derry. Landrieffe. Ledoux. Scavoyard. Poor and unlucky second sons, dead in the water, a thousand leagues from home.
“The Portage is very bad and 535 Paces long,” Mackenzie wrote, as they tried to skirt the Sault de Noyés. Across the river lay the unmarkable graves. They had to launch the canoes. Barrieau called the line, and Landry leaned on that rudder of black ash, the lever bending with the strain of his exertion. And though his comrades had died in those waters only a few seasons before, on this day Landry again guided the boat true.
— 14 —
THE RAPIDS OF THE SLAVE, JUNE 2016
The water towered all around me, and the Virgin was nowhere in sight. The standing waves were thatched and stacked up tight, each white-topped ridge squared to the next as in a log cabin quilt pattern. This is a slalom, I thought, but too late. My kayak broke through the first wave, I clumsily
jerked ninety degrees, pinballed back, knocked into the next wave, and tried to turn, but my edge was hopelessly off, and when I hit the third, the water grabbed my low chine and I tumbled from my boat.
It was cold and dark and I was upside down and everything was loud in my ears. I pushed off, twisted, kicked, hit my head. As if I were a clapper in a bell, the ring of my helmet on my boat in the center of my brain. My hip hit a rock, hard, and then I pulled my feet up, so they couldn’t get trapped on the bottom, and I tried to swim. I was still moving with the current at speed, and I pulled the water and pushed my boat away and I broke the surface and took a breath. My paddle was still in my hand.
“Swim over here,” John called to me, calm as could be.
I did, and reached out for the handle dangling from the tail of his kayak. My vest would keep me safe, I knew, so I consciously tried not to pull too hard on his boat, like a drowning victim dunking a rescuing lifeguard.
“Do you want to ride this one out?” he asked me, only occasionally dipping his paddle in the water to maneuver us around rocks.
“I think that would be best,” I managed. A wave broke over my head, and I took a big long drink of the river.
Once on the granite shore, I cinched down the straps on my vest, tight as a tick, and remounted my kayak.
“Are you cold?” John asked. The sun blazed, but my arms were shaking from the shoulders down.
“No, I think it’s adrenaline,” I said.
“That was Sambuca,” he said, naming the rapid that owned me. “Wanna try Flipper?”
“The next rapid is called Flipper?”
I followed John’s line through a calm pool and to the head of the next whitewater plume. It rose before me in layers, and I felt small beneath it. I got through the first crest, the second, the third. I was through the wave train; I had made it. But then I hit the recirculating water at the bottom of the rapid, eddies on each side meeting as a boil. One eddy fence grabbed my nose, the other my tail, I felt my kayak spinning, and then I was in the cauldron again.
Disappointment River Page 14