Disappointment River

by Brian Castner

  Awgeenah told Mackenzie he was finished, was abandoning this errand to find the river of the west. Awgeenah refused to help Mackenzie coax fleeing Dogrib or interpret their words. He worried that if Mackenzie got some promising lead on the Pacific, the Scot might wish to set out that very moment, though August was wearing on. Awgeenah said he only wished to return home, collect his debts, winter along Slave Lake. At one camp, the fleeing Slavey and Dogrib had left behind their property, and rather than give chase, Awgeenah and his men began to divide the goods up for themselves. When Mackenzie intervened, “the English Chief was very much displeased that I had reproach’d him, and told me so.” But Mackenzie was ready to fight. “I had waited for such an Opportunity to tell him what I thought of his Behavior to me for some time past, told him that I had more reason to be angry than he.”

  After all, Mackenzie was the one with so much to lose: a business and geographic achievement, the fortune that would go with it, his reputation with the North West Company. He told Awgeenah that he “had come a great way at great Expense to no Purpose.”

  Mackenzie continued to light into Awgeenah, accusing him of dishonesty, laziness, jealousy. Months of frustrations boiled over. But the English Chief then “got into a most violent Passion” and said he would paddle no farther. Though he had no ammunition, he would rather live with the Slavey people on that river than travel with Mackenzie one more moment. “As soon as he was done his harangue he began to cry bitterly, and his Relations help’d him,” Mackenzie wrote. “I did not interrupt them in their Grief for two Hours.”

  That night, when both men had cooled their tempers, Mackenzie invited Awgeenah to his tent, to eat dinner and drink rum alone. “I gave him a Dram or two and we were as good friends as ever.” Awgeenah said that he would not leave after all, that he would continue to act as Mackenzie’s good partner and even continue to trade furs with him. But he “had shed tears,” and in order “to wipe away that disgrace,” he would very soon “go to War after the Crees,” as was the tradition of his people, to regain his stature. “Gave him a little grog to carry to his Tent to drown his chagrine,” Mackenzie said. A flippant act, and a friendly one, but also a final toast.

  Awgeenah had been clear. Mackenzie had his goal, to reach the Pacific, but Awgeenah did not share it. The Chipewyan chief had his own purpose and would pursue it, and soon their paths would diverge.

  There was still a month of hard travel ahead. They survived violent storms on Slave Lake, and then Awgeenah and his wives and hunters took their leave. The remainders pressed on, their provisions spent, their canoes broken and patched, their clothes “almost rotten.” It snowed by the end. Mackenzie was exhausted.

  The party landed at Fort Chipewyan on September 12, 1789, “102 days since we had left this place,” Mackenzie wrote, to end his journal.

  At the next summer’s rendezvous, he caught up on news. George Washington had been inaugurated president, and while Mackenzie sat on Whale Island—Tuesday, July 14, 1789—the French had stormed the Bastille in revolution.

  Conspicuously, though, conversation among the North West Company bourgeois did not surround his journey the year before.

  “My Expedition is hardly spoken of, but this is what I expected,” Alexander wrote to Roderic. But why should it, when it had failed so spectacularly?

  For him, he wrote, it was nothing but a “voyage down the River Disappointment.”

  * * *

  ————

  The Inuvialuit charter boat arrived late in the day and idled well offshore, so as not to ground itself on the sandbars surrounding Garry Island. So Senny and I got soaked one last time, filling our canoe with gear and then walking it into the shallows, to cross load each piece onto the charter’s deck and strap it in place. The canoe went on last, lashed to the top of the cabin as one would use a car’s roof rack.

  Kylik Kisoun’s promise to come get us had fortified many an hour of our trip. And yet on the day in question, he didn’t even pilot the boat. Kylik was busy in Tuktoyaktuk, so his uncle, Gerry Kisoun, fetched us instead. As soon as we got on board, Gerry gave us reindeer dry meat and fresh-baked bannock from his wife; Senny and I ate every crumb. Gerry is of mixed Inuvialuit and Gwich’in heritage, a former park ranger and police officer turned guide, though still a protector of the land. “Right now, you can drink that water,” he said, “you can walk that hill, you can breathe that air. We want to keep it that way.”

  Gerry has a round soft face and thick hands and never stopped speaking in an earnest and clear voice. He’s spent most of his life in the delta, and on our way back to Inuvik told stories in an unceasing stream: how to hunt beluga in small open boats, digging into the permafrost to find solid ice to store game, and the details of their traditional Christmas feast, Anglican ham on the holiday, but muktuk, raw whale, the night before.

  Gerry said that in decades past, he occasionally made the trip to Garry Island, to drop off a man he called “the ice doctor.” Kisoun was talking about J. Ross Mackay, one of the greatest Arctic scientists of his generation, who had died only two years before at the age of ninety-eight. From 1954 to 2011, Mackay spent part of every year, winter and summer, in the western Arctic. He built a field cabin on Garry Island in 1964, covering the area in sensors to measure the temperature belowground. In the winter, via snowmobile, Kisoun would drop off Mackay at the cabin, retrieving him weeks later. Over the summer, Mackay’s research shifted to measuring the speed of the thaw.

  “He would go looking for the permafrost and have trouble finding it,” Kisoun told me. “Mackay used to say, ‘You can put your ear to the ground anywhere in the western Arctic, and if you wait long enough, you’ll hear the earth crack.’ ”

  Garry Island lies one hundred miles from Inuvik, and it took more than five hours for us to navigate the delta back to town. Gerry showed us the old reindeer crossings, the oil-drilling sites that were being reclaimed and cleaned, and had a thousand anecdotes on how the weather was changing. The latest happened only two weeks before. On July 15, 2016, the beach at Tuk boasted the warmest water in Canada. Gerry was so confounded that he told me three times. “Twenty-two point two degrees Celsius!” he said, having committed the exact number to memory. “Can you believe it! The warmest in Canada.”

  It was midnight, the deep orange sun still blazing overhead, by the time Gerry docked in Inuvik. The town is big, over three thousand people, and we got a ride to a modest hotel, a modular prefab box on stilts. I wanted so badly to sleep in a bed, but I was absolutely filthy: put a butter knife to my skin and scrape and you’d pull up a layer of grease thick enough to cook with. So I took a shower, then crawled into the lone double bed, next to Senny.

  It was two or three o’clock in the morning. Outside our hotel window, a softball game raged, the players cheering every run.

  The next morning, Senny and I took a taxi to the barge terminal to drop off the canoe and retrieve my truck, which I had shipped from Hay River seven weeks before. Inuvik is a construction hub, always waiting for the next industry and construction contract. The big work at the time was the laying of the all-weather road to Tuk, linking the village to the Dempster Highway. It would soon be complete, though, and what then? Natural gas and oil prices were down. Pipelines were unpopular. Only the diamond mine ground on.

  In 1961, the great Canadian novelist and professor Hugh MacLennan, upon traveling the Mackenzie River on a barge, declared that “unless there has been a nuclear war,” it did not require a “sense of prophecy to predict that a century from now this river valley will have a large population.” His estimate, for the year 2061: “at least three million people,” with hospitals and schools and “at least two universities.”

  Instead, the population of the valley has remained essentially unchanged since MacLennan took his boat ride and, very likely, since Mackenzie took his.

  But what if the climate had been different when Mackenzie paddled the river? How would history have been different? Mackenzie paddled during the Littl
e Ice Age, a few centuries of below-normal cold. If he had undertaken his trip during average conditions, or at our current global temperatures, he would not have been stopped by ice. If the ocean were free, would the fur trade have followed him down the river to China? Would Canada have its own Mississippi River in the summer Deh Cho? Would settlers have wagoned in, a northern Oregon Trail? How much of Mackenzie’s disappointment was merely a matter of timing?

  When Senny and I got to the barge terminal, bad news awaited us. A what-could-possibly-go-wrong worry, which had nagged me the whole trip, was realized: my truck was not in Inuvik.

  I called the central customer service office in Alberta, and the company representative said they hoped to deliver my truck in a week. The Coast Guard had ordered a hold on their whole fleet, because a major windstorm—the same one that caught Senny and me near the Thunder River, I figured—threw an empty barge on a shoal near Lutselk’e, a community on the eastern shore of Great Slave Lake. They had to divert a tug to rescue it, and everything was delayed.

  “But you guaranteed that my truck would arrive by July,” I said to the poor representative; obviously, I still had an American expectation for timely delivery. He was apologetic, but there was only so much he could do. “It’s not like a plane, where you know when it will land,” he said. “It’s complicated shipping in the Arctic.”

  So I walked down to the dock, where a tug sat idling, and talked to Terry, the foreman. He wanted to know what I thought of the Mackenzie River, having just paddled its length, and I asked the same of him. “It’s where I work,” he said with a shrug.

  Terry will likely be out of a job soon. The shipping company was declaring bankruptcy, and over the years he had heard all the complaints from locals about the unreliability of the barge service. By the end of our conversation, he heard my frustration as well, that my truck wasn’t waiting for me in his cargo yard. He recommended I find a new way home, that if my truck did arrive at all, it would take far more than a week. Then he became philosophical.

  “Welcome to the north,” he said.

  I did not feel welcome. I felt done. I booked a very expensive plane ticket for the next day, to fly me back to Hay River to meet up with my truck there. And a good thing too, because I later learned that the barge that should have delivered my truck didn’t arrive in Inuvik until October. I shipped half my gear through the postal service, and the other half I checked as baggage. “Rifle or paddle?” the airline clerk asked about my long package wrapped in tape.

  I boarded the plane—a standard 737, but with only half the seats, the front modified into cargo space—and sat next to an older woman completing an Inuvialuit crossword puzzle. As we took off, I leaned toward the window, to try to see the broad land that we had paddled through, always hidden behind the wall of the spruce and bush. But the day was overcast, the ceiling low, and as we climbed, the forest was swallowed by cloud and disappeared from view.

  * * *

  ————

  In 1790, London got the bad news. That’s how the report arrived, not as an affirmative, that Mackenzie had solved an Arctic geographic conundrum, but as a pragmatic negative, that Pond’s map was incorrect and the river of the west was still undiscovered. In a later letter to the governor of Canada, Mackenzie summarized it this way: “Tho’ this Expedition did not answer the intended purposes, it proved that Mr. Pond’s Assertion was nothing but conjecture, and that a North West Passage is impracticable.”

  But Mackenzie wouldn’t let the matter sit, and he planned a second voyage. Clearly, his trouble was one of determining longitude, for his measurements on the first journey had vastly overestimated his westward travel. So he decided to go to London to study cartography and to purchase the proper instruments, a sextant and chronometer and appropriate almanacs. But before he left, Alexander begged Roderic to “make all the inquiry possible” with any Indians trading at Fort Chipewyan, on the lands of “the Great River which falls into the Sea to the Westward of River Disappointment.”

  In order to avoid “inconvenience,” but also certainly embarrassment, Mackenzie made himself “but little known during my residence in London the Winter 1791.” When he returned, he was educated and equipped, his letters to Roderic full of references to the orbit of Jupiter’s moons. Back at Fort Chipewyan, he recruited a new crew. Two voyageurs from his first journey, Landry and Ducette, the Acadian cousins, signed on for the second attempt. So too François Beaulieu, the young mixed-blood man from Slave Lake whom Mackenzie and Laurent Leroux knew from the 1789 descent. In the fall of 1792, they struck west from Fort Chipewyan, paddling across the Great Plains, and, after wintering over in a hasty fort, pushed on again that spring.

  They ascended the Peace River in full flood, up the front face of the Rocky Mountains. Portages on sheer cliffs followed, then descents of alpine creeks studded with boulders and whirlpools. They smashed the boats and rebuilt them and then hauled them from watershed to watershed, a maze of narrow rivers. Near the coast, the peaks rose to ten thousand feet, the portage pass at six thousand. But finally, threading their way through one final steep valley, they met Bella Coola Indians who offered to take them to the ocean. “I could perceive the termination of the river,” he wrote, “and its discharge into a narrow arm of the sea.” Deep in a fjord, he had spotted it. The Pacific. The next day, July 20, 1793, his canoe touched salt.

  He had done it, and yet in its own way, this journey was even more disappointing than the first. At least the great river to the Arctic was navigable. No one would follow this path to the Pacific. No one could, the way so grueling. He had found the Pacific but not the commercial route. The river of the west still lay out of sight.

  Mackenzie passed the next winter at Fort Chipewyan. It fell hard on him. “I am full bent on going down” to Montreal, he wrote to Roderic in January 1794. “I am more anxious now than ever. For I think it unpardonable in any man to remain in this country who can afford to leave it. What a pretty Situation I am in this winter, starving and alone.”

  The snow and cold dragged on. He knew that spending so much time so far from civilization always “darkened the human mind.” The lake was dark, the sky, the forest, his soul. Above, the northern green lights flickered; the Slavey people call them the Heart of the Devil.

  Two months later, in March, he wrote to his cousin again, apologizing. He had hoped to provide Roderic his journal of his voyages, for editorial assistance. But it “will require more time than I was aware of, for it is not a quarter finished.” Every day was a struggle. “Last fall I was to begin copying it, but the greatest part of my time was taken up in vain Speculations. I got in such a habit of thinking that I was often lost in thoughts nor could I ever write to the purpose.”

  His thoughts, his words, were circular. “What I was thinking of, would often occur to me instead of that which I ought to do. I never passed so much of my time insignificantly, nor so uneasy.” It was the dreams that plagued him. “I could not close my eyes without finding myself in company with the Dead.”

  That summer, Alexander returned to Montreal. He would never again winter in the backcountry. After ten nearly continuous years in the pays d’en haut—his only break the single trip to London—he was done.

  In 1795, when Aaron Arrowsmith, a leading British cartographer of the day, produced a new map of North America that included the paths of Mackenzie’s two journeys, Alexander wrote an accompanying note that clearly articulated his views. Like Captain Cook, he was the negative discoverer: “It was in the Summer of 1789 that I went this Expedition in hopes of getting into Cook’s River; tho I was disappointed in this it proved without a doubt that there is not a North West passage below this latitude and I believe it will generally be allowed that no passage is practicable in a Higher Latitude, the Sea being eternally covered with ice.”

  In Montreal, Mackenzie rose to managing partner of the North West Company, its agent at the rendezvous, and in this leadership role he badgered the British government to invest in transcontine
ntal trade by forcing the Hudson’s Bay Company, the staunch rival of the Montreal bourgeois, into a monopoly with his firm. He was an eligible bachelor about town, a drinker and carouser, and became famous for his late nights. In New York he bantered with the business titan John Jacob Astor, and he bought a merchant ship in Philadelphia; it was the farthest south he traveled in his life. In all this he clashed with his more wealthy and powerful colleagues and played poorly the game of business intrigue.

  In 1799, his partnership in the North West Company was not renewed by his fellow shareholders. Contemporaries blamed Alexander’s rivalry with Simon McTavish, the most wealthy and powerful trader in Montreal. Mackenzie’s split was “entirely from a fit of ill-humor,” one wrote, “without any fix’d plan or knowing himself what he would be at.” He “went off in a pet,” another said, as “there could not be two Caesars in Rome, one must remove.”

  Alexander had secured a share of the company for Roderic, but when the sundering occurred, Roderic chose McTavish over his cousin and took Alexander’s place. After a series of angry and recriminating letters, the two Mackenzies did not speak for five years.

  Mackenzie started his own fur company and named it after himself. He ran for the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada and won, but quickly grew bored and stopped attending the sessions. He got caught up in a stock sale and land claim deal that turned on him. And always, he drank.

  But still, the need to tell the story of his journeys weighed on him. Mackenzie expressed much “apprehension of presenting myself to the Public in the character of an Author,” he wrote, “being much better calculated to perform the voyages, arduous as they might be, than to write an account of them.”