Part 2 (2/2)

Harness and carts repaired and more pemmican bought, the travellers crossed the Qu'Appelle river in a Hudson's Bay scow, paying toll of fifty cents a cart. From the Qu'Appelle westward the journey grew more arduous. The weather became oppressively hot and mosquitoes swarmed from the sloughs. At Carlton and at Fort Pitt the fur-traders' 'string band'--husky-dogs in wolfish packs--surrounded the camp of the Overlanders and stole pemmican from under the tent-flaps. From Fort Pitt westward the trail crossed a rough, wooded country, and there were no more scows to take the ox-carts across the rivers. Eleven days of continuous rain had flooded the sloughs into swamps; and in three days as many as eight corduroy bridges had to be built. Two {61} long trees were felled parallel and light poles were laid across the floating trees. Where the trees swerved to the current, some one would swim out and anchor them with ropes till the hundred carts had pa.s.sed safely to the other side.

It was the 21st of July when the travellers came out on the high banks of the North Saskatchewan, flowing broad and swift, opposite Fort Edmonton. There had been floods and all the company's rafts had been carried away. But the ox-carts were poled across by means of a big York boat; and the travellers were welcomed inside the fort.

The arrival of the Overlanders is remembered at Edmonton by some old-timers even to this day. Salvoes of welcome were fired from the fort cannon by a half-breed shooting his musket into the touch-hole of the big gun. Concerts were given, with bagpipes, concertinas, flutes, drums, and fiddles, in honour of the far-travellers. Pemmican-bags were replenished from the company's stores.

Miners often uttered loud complaints against the charges made by the fur-traders for provisions, forgetting what it cost to pack these provisions in by dog-train and canoe. If the Hudson's Bay officials at Fort Garry and {62} Edmonton had withheld their help, the Overlanders would have perished before they reached the Rockies. Though the miner did everything to destroy the fur trade--started fires which ravaged the hunter's forest haunts, put up saloons which demoralized the Indians, built wagon-roads where aforetime wandered only the shy creatures of the wilds--though the miner heralded the doom of the fur trade--yet with an unvarying courtesy, from Fort Garry to the Rockies, the Hudson's Bay men helped the Overlanders.

The majority of the travellers now changed oxen and carts for pack-horses and _travois_, contrivances consisting of two poles, within which the horses were attached, and a rude sledge. A few continued with oxen, and these oxen were to save their lives in the mountains.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Was.h.i.+ng gold on the Saskatchewan. From a photograph.]

The farther the Overlanders now plunged into the wilderness, the more they were pestered by the husky-dogs that roamed in howling hordes round the outskirts of the forts. The story is told of several prospectors of this time, who slept soundly in their tent after a day's exhausting tramp, and awoke to find that their boots, bacon, rope, and clothes had been devoured by the ravenous dogs. They {63} asked the trader's permission to sleep inside the fort.

'Why?' asked the amused trader. 'Why, now, when the huskies have chewed all you own but your instruments? You are locking the stable door after your horse has been stolen.'

'No,' answered the prospectors. 'If those husky-dogs last night could devour all our camp kit without disturbing us, to-night they might swallow us before we'd waken.'

The next pause was at St Albert, one of Father Lacombe's missions.

What surprised the Overlanders as they advanced was the amazing fertility of the soil. At Fort Garry, at Pitt, at Edmonton, at St Albert, at St Ann, they saw great fields of wheat, barley, and potatoes. Afterwards many who failed in the mines drifted back to the plains and became farmers. The same thing had happened in California, and was repeated at a later day in the rush to the Klondike. Great seams of coal, too, were seen projecting from the banks of the Saskatchewan. Here some of the men began was.h.i.+ng for gold, and, finding yellow specks the size of pin-heads in the fine sand, a number of them knocked up cabins for themselves and remained west of Edmonton {64} to try their luck. Later, when these belated Overlanders decided to follow on to Cariboo, they suffered terrible hards.h.i.+ps.

The Overlanders were to enter the Rockies by the Yellowhead Pa.s.s, which had been discovered long ago by Jasper Hawse, of the Hudson's Bay Company. This section of their trail is visible to the modern traveller from the windows of a Grand Trunk Pacific Railway train, just as the lower sections of the Cariboo Trail in the Fraser Canyon are to be seen from the trains of the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian Northern. First came the fur-trader, seeking adventure through these pa.s.ses, pursuing the little beaver. The miner came next, fevered to delirium, lured by the siren of an elusive yellow G.o.ddess. The settler came third, prosaic and plodding, but dauntless too. And then came the railroad, following the trail which had been beaten hard by the stumbling feet of pioneers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: In the Yellowhead Pa.s.s. From a photograph.]

At St Ann a guide was engaged to lead the long train of pack-horses through the pa.s.s from Jasper House on the east to Yellowhead Lake on the west. Colin Fraser, son of the famous piper for Sir George Simpson of the Hudson's Bay Company, danced a Highland fling at the gate of the fort to speed the {65} departing guests. And to the skirl of the bagpipes the procession wound away westward bound for the mountains.

Instead of the thirty miles a day which they had made farther east, the travellers were now glad to cover ten miles a day. Fallen trees lay across the trail in impa.s.sable ramparts and floods filled the gullies.

Scouts went ahead blazing trees to show the way. Bushwhackers followed, cutting away windfall and throwing logs into sloughs. Horses sank to their withers in seemingly bottomless muskegs,[2] so that packs had to be cut off and the unlucky bronchos pulled out by all hands straining on a rope.

Somewhere between the rivers Pembina and M'Leod the travellers were amazed to see what the wise ones in the party thought a volcano--a continuous and self-fed fire burning on the crown of a hill. Science of a later {66} day p.r.o.nounced this a gas well burning above some subterranean coal seam.

At length the Overlanders were ascending the banks of the M'Leod, whose torrential current warned them of rising ground. Three times in one day windfall and swamp forced the party to ford the stream for pa.s.sage on the opposite side. The oxen swam and the ox-carts floated and the packs came up the bank dripping. For eleven days in August every soul of the company, including Mrs Shubert's babies, travelled wet to the skin. At night great log fires were kindled and the Overlanders sat round trying to dry themselves out. Then the trail lifted to the foothills. And on the evening of the 15th of August there pierced through the clouds the snowy, s.h.i.+ning, serrated peaks of the Rockies.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Upper M'Leod River. From a photograph.]

A cheer broke from the ragged band. Just beyond the s.h.i.+ning mountains lay--Fortune. What cared these argonauts, who had tramped across the width of the continent, that the lofty mountains raised a sheer wall between them and their treasure? Cheer on cheer rang from the encampment. Men with clothes in tatters pitched caps in air, proud that they had proved themselves kings of their own fate. It is, perhaps, well that we have to climb our {67} mountains step by step; else would many turn back. But there were no faint-hearts in the camp that night. Even the Irishwoman's two little children came out and gazed at what they could not understand.

The party now crossed a ravine to the main stream of the Athabaska. It was necessary to camp here for a week. A huge raft was built of pine saplings bound together by withes. To the stern of this was attached a tree, the branch end dipping in the water, as a sweep and rudder to keep the craft to its course. On this the Overlanders were ferried across the Athabaska. And so they entered the Yellowhead Pa.s.s.

[1] See the map in _The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay_ in this Series.

[2] Perhaps the distinction should be made here between the muskeg and the slough. The slough was simply any depression in the ground filled with mud and water. The muskeg was permanent wet ground resting on soft mud, covered over on the top with most deceiving soft green moss which looked solid, but which quaked to every step and gave to the slightest weight. Many muskegs west of Edmonton have been formed by beavers damming the natural drainage of a small river for so many centuries that the silt and humus washed down from the mountains have formed a surface of deep black muck.

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