by Merle Massie
Northern historians tend to refer to overland freighting in passing, as part of a general discussion on the problems of northern transportation and development or as one of several options for moving goods from one place to another.8 For provincial north historians of Manitoba and Alberta, water transportation remained an important component, with much of both the north-south Athabasca and Peace Rivers in Alberta, and the extensive large lake system of Manitoba, navigable by steamers. Developers would link rail lines to the most southern navigable point, creating an effective rail-to-water system. Yet the implications of overland freighting deserve greater attention as an early critical transformation link to the modern northern highway system used today. Such attention would also explore questions of seasonality, encompass the shift from horse transport to industrial gasoline and diesel vehicles, and consider weight and the boreal environment as compounding factors. Saskatchewan serves as an exemplary case study, for the natural waterways move east-west rather than north-south. There were few natural (water) or human-made (rail) corridors into or out of its north country. Funnelling goods into and out of the far northern communities in Saskatchewan required road building and the services of overland freighters.
If the lumber industry exploded in the immediate Prince Albert area following completion of the Qu’Appelle, Long Lake, and Saskatchewan rail line in 1890, other industries were also quick to take advantage of this new transportation route. Completion of the railway to Prince Albert dovetailed with several regional interests, in particular those of the Indian Department and the Hudson’s Bay Company. The treaty party that met First Nations bands at the north end of Montreal Lake in 1889 to sign the adhesion to Treaty 6 was lucky. It was winter, and the party sleighed up the rude cart trail past Red Deer Lake (Waskesiu) and then through the bush to Montreal Lake, carrying the traditional gifts that normally accompanied a treaty signing. These gifts included flour, tea, bacon, and tobacco in addition to treaty medals, flags, and money. Goods had been purchased at local trading posts.9
Sledding up in the frozen winter was one thing; delivering yearly treaty payments following the successful adhesion created a host of transportation problems. Treaty payments were much more extensive than treaty gifts and included agricultural implements such as plows, large quantities of food and seed, twine, ammunition, clothing, and miscellaneous goods. The sheer bulk of these items posed a serious logistical problem for the Indian Department. It asked Reverend J.A. Mackay of Prince Albert for advice on how to go about making the payments effectively and efficiently. He suggested that it would be better to ship the goods for the La Ronge band by canoe through Grand Rapids and Cumberland and from there north to the Churchill system following the old fur-trade routes.
For supplies destined for Montreal Lake, Mackay offered a radical idea: “It would be an immense advantage if the cart road were opened to Montreal Lake. This would do away with all difficulties in the way of transport. The road has been commenced and I believe about $200 judiciously spent would complete it.”10 Asking the Indian Department to build a road revealed the costs involved in not only purchasing treaty supplies but also freighting them to their destinations. Treaties changed the relationship between Euro-Canadian newcomers and First Nations: it was no longer primarily a business relationship between two relatively equal partners. Whereas fur-trade companies factored in freight transportation as part of their costs and included the people and infrastructure required, the dominion government had to look to outside contractors to support its new treaty-based relationship with First Nations.
Mackay directed the Indian Department to contact a local trading and supply firm, Stobart and Company, to see if it would freight in the treaty supplies. Hillyard Mitchell, the proprietor, replied with surprising bluntness: the route north from Prince Albert using the cart road to Red Deer Lake (Waskesiu), then by river to Montreal Lake, “would be both risky and expensive, and I would not care to undertake it except at your risk and expense.” The cart trail connected Prince Albert to Red Deer Lake. From there, canoes could travel on the Red Deer River to the south end of Montreal Lake. Brigades went north across the lake to the Montreal River and up that river to Lac La Ronge. The weak link in this route was the water level of the Red Deer River. It was never reliable for navigation, and canoe brigades faced low water levels and several gruelling portages. Low water in the river and the heavy amount of supplies complicated matters, Mitchell said. Canoes could not carry those weights if the water was low. He concurred with Mackay’s suggestion, stating that “the N.W. Government last year expended $150 on a road cutting from Deer Lake toward the South End of Montreal Lake about 15 miles was cut (being about half the distance) the balance could be cut for about the same amount, thereby opening a cart road direct from Prince Albert to Montreal Lake.” From that point, it was a one-day sail or paddle up the lake to the north end, where the treaty had been signed during the winter. “Until this road is cut,” Mitchell went on, “I may say there is no practicable road to Montreal Lake during summer (excepting heavy rain rising the water in Deer River) except via Cumberland and Stanley. This is a long distance round and it would pay your Dept. to at once open the road mentioned.” Freight costs on the portion of the road that was usable were high: Mitchell cited $2.50 to $3.00 per 100 pounds overland; canoe freight was fifty cents per pound cheaper but only on the lakes.11
Map 10. Trails near Prince Albert, c. late 1800s. Note that the Montreal Lake Trail did not reach Montreal Lake.
Source: Atlas of Saskatchewan, 1969, 11. Used with permission.
Considering the lucrative government contract, Mitchell’s letter underscored the precarious nature of industry and transportation through the boreal forest. Mitchell was reluctant at best to take on the logistics of transport and refused to take on the cost and risk except at the Indian Department’s insistence and payment. Unless the department put forward the money to finish the road, he recommended that it freight the supplies to Cumberland House and then north to Stanley Mission on the Churchill River, using the old river transportation route. Or perhaps the department could convince the bands to meet at his post at Red Deer Lake and have them take charge of moving the goods.
Mitchell’s assessment of road conditions and freight rates scared the Indian Department. Hayter Reed, in an uncharacteristic spending spree, ordered the department to find money to finish the road. Costly in the short term, it would save money in the long term. Yearly treaty payments would be made more easily, and the road would help future freight, communication, and survey parties.12 It was commissioned and cut, and most of the treaty supplies were sent in by wagon to the south end of Montreal Lake and then in canoes north in time for the treaty payment in mid-September 1889. The old canoe transportation route through Cumberland House to Stanley Mission, recommended by Mitchell for treaty payments for the La Ronge band, was soon superseded by the new overland route. The completed road to Montreal Lake initiated the overland freighting industry in the Prince Albert region, linking the railway to the northern communities.
The Hudson’s Bay Company immediately grasped the implications of the new trail as a cheaper transportation route to Lac La Ronge and Stanley Mission. The company used the old cart trail to Red Deer Lake to service its post at The Narrows, listed in the McPhillips’ Saskatchewan Directory in 1888. The new trail marked new opportunity. In previous years, the Hudson’s Bay Company had shipped its goods via the Churchill system or the North Saskatchewan by canoe brigade or steamship to Carlton Post. From there, the long-established overland cart road to Green Lake was in constant use. The Green Lake route had its own problems, though. It was a long haul, parts of it impassable in wet weather. At its terminus, it accessed the Beaver River system north to Île-à-la-Crosse, which in dry weather was not navigable. This, of course, was a two-pronged dilemma: too wet and the goods could not be shipped; too dry and the goods could not be shipped. In 1885, Carlton Post was burned by accident during events surrounding the
rebellion, ending its role as a shipping point on the supply chain. Prince Albert took over Carlton’s role, from the HBC post known as Fort Albert.13
As soon as the new cart road all the way to Montreal Lake was finished, the HBC shipped a small portion of its northern supplies to Prince Albert by rail, then overland using this route. Historian Bill Waiser explained that the initial trial must have been a success, because “the following season the Company shipped all of the district’s supplies north from Prince Albert and established a large depot on the southwest shore of Montreal Lake.”14 The HBC also moved its post to Montreal Lake and began operations there, effectively making the post at Red Deer Lake redundant. It was closed by 1893. Within one year of its establishment, the cart road from Prince Albert to the south end of Montreal Lake became a major north-south artery, frequented by freighters serving the HBC, the Indian Department, local traders, First Nations, and lumbermen. Teams of horses, ponies, or oxen could be regularly seen plying this new route.
In many ways, overland freighting north of Prince Albert extended transportation practices common in the western interior of North America. In what became western Canada, freighting was a distinctly Métis industry. Métis supplied inland fur-trade posts (mostly on the prairie) and hauled the meat, hides, and pemmican of the massive yearly buffalo hunt to supply posts on the canoe brigade routes.15 The height of western cart freighting from the 1860s through the 1880s coincided with the development of railways south of the border and to Winnipeg. Goods and messages brought cheaply and quickly to Minnesota or Manitoba were freighted overland to the posts in the interior over the Carlton-Edmonton trail.16 Similar trails were used by “bullwhackers” running large shipments of goods from Fort Benton in Montana north to Fort Macleod, and early settlers followed these trails, establishing farms. The difference in twentieth-century freighting lay in its relation to the ecotone and its new and developing knowledge of the boreal environment.
Overland transportation stitched the prairie south to the boreal north and offered economic opportunities for both First Nations and local homesteaders. Men could take contracts for individual freighting trips, work as contract teamsters for a company, or supply farm produce, hay, and oats either to the freighters or to the wholesalers. Such options appealed to those who were developing forest edge farms. Often these men had stock or families to look after and tended to prefer or require short-term employment or a service role rather than a full winter commitment in a bush logging camp. Freighting developed a co-dependent relationship with local farmers (both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal): when farming was slack in the winter, freighting was a viable opportunity to make some much-needed cash money; in the summer, putting up hay and growing oats for the freighters injected cash into the local economy. A manpower- and horsepower-intense activity, successful freight hauls required freighters, strong teams of horses, sleighs, and large amounts of hay and feed oats. Records of the Department of Indian Affairs and annual reports of the Indian agents indicated that many First Nations men found employment. The Indian Department reported in 1900 that “freighting … enables some to make a comfortable living without assistance from the agency.”17 In 1901, W.B. Goodfellow, the Indian agent at Carlton Agency, reported that in William Twatt’s band (now Sturgeon Lake First Nation) “some are hired by lumbermen; others earn money by freighting or putting up hay.”18
First Nations communities, both along the forest edge and deeper in the boreal forest, participated in overland freighting. In addition to work as teamsters in the winter, First Nations men were often engaged to cut and stack hay for stopping places and barns along the freight trails. In summer, many had employment improving trails, laying corduroy roads, stacking cordwood, and building or fixing barns and shacks. HBC magazine The Beaver noted in its “Stanley Notes” of December 1920 that “there was plenty of work all summer at Stanley Post and vicinity. The Brooks Construction Company was engaged in repairing and making stables, leveling portages, and putting up hay.”19 Men from Little Red River Reserve could commonly be found on the freight trail or helping to operate the stopping place on the reserve. Billy Bear, a noted Cree man from Little Red, engaged several of his neighbours in his freighting business in addition to his farm operations. Through to the First World War, forest fringe bands reported considerable income through freighting. As non-Aboriginal settlers penetrated the forest fringe, occupying cut-over timber berths and commencing farming operations, they began to crowd out the Aboriginal freighters. Details are sketchy and numbers are not available, but both oral and written documentation and photographs seem to show a decline—but never a complete absence—of Aboriginal men in freighting and lumbering after the First World War.
Figure 16. Freighting swing at Prince Albert.
Source: Prince Albert Historical Society (PAHS), T-133.
Seasonality
Overland freighting was never a successful summer activity, despite completion of the cart trail. Boreal forest trails were generally incapable of supporting heavy wagon loads of goods. Indeed, Montreal Lake HBC employee Sydney Keighley recalled a particularly brutal stretch of trail south of the lake on the cart trail where “a wagon entering it immediately sank to the axles. The stretch was corduroyed but the logs were constantly sinking out of sight.” To shore up the road, wagon drivers were forced to improvise, adding road-building to their boreal repertoires. “Axes and hatchets were standard traveling equipment in that area, as there was no possibility of getting a load of any weight at all through the muskeg without building impromptu corduroy roads,” Keeley explained. A corduroy road was made by chopping logs and placing them crossways on the road to form an instant roadbed. All northern roads contained corduroy over soft spots.20 The muskegs, endless sinkholes of water, sedges, and black, tarry ooze, claimed wagon axles and snapped wheels. They were also terrible on animals, which became hopelessly stuck and had to be pulled out by the neck. Black flies and mosquitoes added to the misery of both horse and man.
Freighting on northern boreal trails found its niche as a winter activity and developed into a significant regional winter occupation. The proverbial Canadian winter froze water and muskeg, offering a more efficient roadbed, easing passage over muskeg and creek, and providing wide open highways on frozen lakes. The cart trail became a passable, even good, winter freight trail, and freighters chose slightly deviated routes to take advantage of natural low-lying (and treeless) features of the landscape. Bush trails were heavier going, with deep snow and soft patches as well as rocks and ridges that could overturn a sleigh. Breaking trail with a full load would exhaust the horses.21 Winter trails designed for horses deliberately crossed flat natural landscapes, but even lakes had their drawbacks. Drifts had to be plowed. Freighters usually travelled in “swings” of several sleighs and horse teams, which gave tremendous force to the plow in front of the lead team, shearing through snowbanks and pressure ridges to create a road. Cracks in the ice or slush holes were other hazards, particularly after a storm, when fresh snow would cover open water. Experienced horses would stop at the first sign of water; others plowed ahead and sank. If a team did go through, it was a struggle to retrieve both the horses and the load.22 Even if the horses were pulled out alive, severe hypothermia would claim them if the freighter was unable to get them warm and dry. Through the years, hundreds of horses were lost on the freight trails.23
When possible, freighters tried to have a paying load in both directions—from the railhead heading north, and from the north coming back south. In some cases, they were paid to bring back furs from the major fur-trading companies. Prince Albert remained the centre of the fur industry in Saskatchewan, and most furs funnelled through the Hudson’s Bay Company, its rival Révillon Frères, or smaller merchants such as Stobart and Company, which traded furs for groceries and supplies. These companies usually moved their Saskatchewan fur caches south to the railhead and urban fur market using overland freighters.
Figure 17. Crossing a no
rthern lake with a freight swing. Note the plow in front.
Source: http://www.jkcc.com.
Figure 18. Freight swing with fish boxes.
Source: http://www.jkcc.com.
Freight Economics
Overland freighting became a major component of the Prince Albert commercial enterprise. Contracts to haul supplies north came from the HBC, Révillon Frères, the Canadian government, First Nations reserves, fish and mining camps, stopping places, and private trappers throughout the north. Freighting was a subsidiary enterprise that allowed companies such as lumber and fishing camps to concentrate on their businesses and leave the logistics of supply freighting to others. Overland freighting on northern winter roads provided employment to a wide range of people. Loads varied, and over the years the types of supplies typically hauled by freighters changed. Before the First World War, freight loads tended to favour supplies typical to an HBC post: flour, sugar, tobacco, dry goods and linens, frozen food, blankets, kerosene and lamps, kitchenware, harness and repair items, and occasionally canoes or stoves. As small gasoline engines became more common, outboard motors and drums of gasoline and oil were added to the list, connecting winter freighting opportunities with summer requirements. Supplies specific to certain industries carried their own challenges. For example, lumber companies sometimes requested bulky and heavy sawmill equipment that often had to be taken apart for transport. Commercial fisheries needed nets and boxes as well as food and clothing for the fishermen. As prospectors discovered significant mineral deposits, large mining equipment, drilling rigs, and engines were common loads—and far too heavy and large for York boat, canoe, or barge. Items were sacked and crated in large amounts: bags of flour or sugar weighed 100 pounds each, a drum of gasoline 300 pounds. The freighter and his team carried their own supplies as well, from hay and oats to a grub box, bed roll, basic toolbox, and change of dry clothing. Freighters gauged their loads carefully, depending on the size of the team, the route, and the strength of the sleigh.