Volume IV Part 8 (2/2)

The stern and gloomy Saguenay, the largest tributary of the Lower St.

Lawrence, is one of the most remarkable rivers in the world. Its main portion is a tremendous chasm cleft in a nearly straight line for sixty miles in the Laurentian Mountains, through an almost unsettled wilderness. These Laurentides make the northern sh.o.r.e of the St.

Lawrence for hundreds of miles below Quebec, rising into higher peaks and ridges in the interior, and being the most ancient part of America, the geologists telling us the waves of the Silurian Sea washed against this range when only two small islands represented the rest of the continent. Through this vast chasm the Saguenay brings down the waters of Lake St. John and its many tributaries, some of them rising in the remote north, almost up to Hudson Bay. This lower portion of the river goes through an almost uninhabitable desert of gloomy mountains, the tillable land being in the basin of the Upper Saguenay and Lake St. John, the people of that valley living there in almost complete isolation. Logs and huckleberries are the crops produced on this savage river, the only things the spa.r.s.e population can depend upon for a living, and the fine blueberries bring them the scant doles of ready money they ever see. The Saguenay's inky waters have the smell of brine as they break in froth upon the sh.o.r.e, and then the air-bubbles show the real color to be that of brandy. The upper tributaries give this color as they flow out of forests of spruce and hemlock and swamps filled with mosses and highly colored roots and vegetable matter. Almost all the lakes and rivers of the vast wilderness north of the St. Lawrence present a similar appearance, their rapids and waterfalls, seen under the suns.h.i.+ne, seeming like sheets of liquid amber.

The vast acc.u.mulations of waters gathered from the heart of the Laurentides by the tributaries of Lake St. John flow down the rapids below the lake in a stream rivalling those of Niagara. Thus the Saguenay comes into being in the form of l.u.s.ty twins--the Grand Discharge and the Little Discharge--deep and narrow river channels worn in the rocks. For some miles they run separately through rapids and pools, finally joining at the foot of Alma Island, where begin the Gervais Rapids, four miles long. The Grand Discharge is a beautiful stream of rapids, the rippling and roaring currents flowing through a maze of islands, while the Little Discharge is a condensed stream, so powerful and unruly that it actually destroys the logs in its boisterous cataracts, the government having made a ”Slide,” down which the timber is run past the dangerous places. After pa.s.sing Gervais Rapids the Saguenay has a quiet reach of fifteen miles to the Grand Ramous, the most furious cascade of all, and then a few more miles of rapids and falls bring it to Chicoutimi, ending its wild career where it meets the tide above Ha Ha Bay. The first bold Frenchmen who ventured up through the stupendous and forbidding chasm of the Lower Saguenay gave this bay its name, to show their delight at having finally emerged from the gloomy region. At Ha Ha Bay the tide often rises twenty-one feet, and below, the river forces its pa.s.sage with a broad channel through almost perpendicular cliffs out to the St. Lawrence. Its great depth is noteworthy, showing what a fearful chasm has been split open, there being in many places a mile to a mile and a half depth, while the channel throughout averages eight hundred feet depth. For most of the distance the river is a mile or more wide.

The original name given the river by the Montaignais was Chicoutimi, or the ”deep water,” now given the village below the foot of the rapids. The present name is a corruption of the Indian word Saggishsekuss, meaning ”a strait with precipitous banks.” The sad sublimity of the impressive chasm culminates at Eternity Bay, where on either hand rise in stately grandeur to sixteen hundred feet elevation above the water Cape Trinity, with its three summits, and Cape Eternity. Ten miles above is Le Tableau, a cliff one thousand feet high, its vast smooth front like an artist's canvas.

This sombre river, whose bed is much lower than that of the St.

Lawrence, is frozen for almost its whole course during half the year, and snow lies on its bordering mountains until June. It makes a saddening impression upon most visitors. Bayard Taylor compared the Saguenay chasm to the Dead Sea and Jordan Valley, describing everything as ”hard, naked, stern, silent; dark gray cliffs of granitic gneiss rise from the pitch-black water; firs of gloomy green are rooted in their crevices and fringe their summits; loftier ranges of a dull indigo hue show themselves in the background, and over all bends a pale, cold, northern sky.” Another traveller calls it ”a cold, savage, inhuman river, fit to take rank with Styx and Acheron;” and ”Nature's sarcophagus,” compared to which, ”the Dead Sea is blooming;”

and so solitary, dreary and monotonous that it ”seems to want painting, blowing up or draining--anything, in short, to alter its morose, quiet, eternal awe.”

EXPLORING THE SAGUENAY CHASM.

Ha Ha Bay, where the exploring Frenchmen found such relief for their oppressed feelings, is a long strait thrust through the mountains southwest from the Saguenay for several miles, broadening at the head into an oval bay, practically a basin among the crags, with two or three French villages around it, named after various saints. The modest one-story huts of the _habitans_ fringe the lower slopes near the water's edge along the valleys of several small streams, each cl.u.s.ter having its church with the tall spire. The basin is two or three miles across, enclosed by bold cliffs and rounded hills, the wide beaches of sand and pebble showing the great rise and fall of the tide. There is a sawmill or two, and lumber and huckleberries are the products of the district. Chicoutimi village is above the chasm, at a point where the intervale broadens, the savage mountains retiring, leaving a s.p.a.ce for gentle tree-clad slopes and cultivated fields.

Standing high on the western bank are the magnificent Cathedral, the Seminary, a Sailors' Hospital, and the Convent of the Good Shepherd, and not far away a tributary stream pours fifty feet down the Chicoutimi Falls in a rus.h.i.+ng cascade of foam. There are extensive sawmills, and timber s.h.i.+ps come in the summer for cargoes for Europe, and the place has railway connections with Lake St. John and thence southward to Quebec. There is a population of about three thousand.

The universal little one-story, peak-roofed, whitewashed French cottages abound, some having a casing of squared pieces of birch-bark to protect them from the weather, making them look much like stone houses, and peeping inside it is found that the inhabitants usually utilize their old newspapers for wall-paper.

From Chicoutimi down to Tadousac the region of the Saguenay chasm is practically without habitation. There are two or three small villages, chiefly abodes of timber-cutters, but it is otherwise uninhabited; nor do the precipitous cliffs usually leave any place near the river for a dwelling to be put. As the visitor goes along on the steamboat it is a steady and monotonous panorama of dark, dreary, round-topped crags, with stunted firs spa.r.s.ely clinging to their sides and tops where crevices will let them, while the faces of the cliffs are white, gray, brown and black, as their granites change in color. A few frothy but attenuated cascades pour down narrow fissures. The scene, while sublime, is forbidding, and soon becomes so monotonous as to be tiresome. This gaunt and savage landscape culminates in Eternity Bay.

Ponderous b.u.t.tresses here guard the narrow gulf on the southern sh.o.r.e, formed by the outflow of a little river. The western portal, Cape Trinity, as the steamboat approaches from above, appears as a series of huge steps, each five hundred feet high, and the faithful missionaries have climbed up and placed a tall white statue of the Virgin on one of the steps, about seven hundred feet above the river, and a large cross on the next higher step, both being seen from afar.

Pa.s.sing around into the bay, the gaunt eastern face of this enormous promontory is found to be a perpendicular wall of the rawest granite, standing sixteen hundred feet straight up from the water. At the top it grandly rises on the bay side into three huge crown-like domes, which, upon being seen by the original French explorers when they came up the river, made them appropriately name it the Trinity. This is one of the most awe-inspiring promontories human eyes ever beheld, as it rises sheer out of water over half a mile deep. Across the narrow bay, the eastern portal, Cape Eternity, similarly rises in solemn grandeur, with solid unbroken sides and a wooded top fully as high. The entire Saguenay River is of much the same character, repeating these crags and promontories in myriad forms. While not always as high, yet the enclosing mountains elsewhere are almost as impressive and fully as dismal. The steamboat, aided by the swift tide, moves rapidly through the deep canyon, one rounded peak and long ridge being much like the others, with the same monotonous dreariness everywhere, and every rift disclosing only more distant sombre mountains. The chasm throughout its length has no beacons for navigation, the sh.o.r.es being so steep and the waters so deep they are unnecessary. A sense of relief is felt when the open waters at Tadousac and the St. Lawrence are reached, for the journey makes everyone feel much like a writer in the London _Times_, who said of it: ”Unlike Niagara and all other of G.o.d's great works in nature, one does not wish for silence or solitude here.

Companions.h.i.+p becomes doubly necessary in an awful solitude like this.”

THE ANGLING GROUNDS OF LOWER CANADA.

Quebec province, on the Lower St. Lawrence, for hundreds of miles north and east of the river is filled with myriads of lakes and streams that are the haunts of the hunter and angler, and the Government gets considerable revenue from the fishery rentals. As far away as five hundred miles from Quebec, up in Labrador, is the Natashquin River, and eight hundred miles down the St. Lawrence is the Little Esquimau, these being the most distant fishery grounds. Among the noted fis.h.i.+ng streams are the grand Cascapedia, the Metapedia, the Upsalquitch, the Patapedia, the Quatawamkedgewick (usually called, for short, the ”Tom Kedgewick”), and the Restigouche, on the southern side of the Lower St. Lawrence, their waters being described as flowing out to ”the undulating and voluptuous Bay of Chaleurs, full of long folds, of languis.h.i.+ng contours, which the wind caresses with fan-like breath, and whose softened sh.o.r.es receive the flooding of the waves without a murmur.” Around the great Lake St. John there is also a maze of lakes and fishery streams. The most noted Canadian fishery organization is the ”Restigouche Salmon Club,” having its club-house on the Restigouche River, at its junction with the Metapedia, and controlling a large territory. The guides in this region are usually Micmac Indians, who have been described on account of their energy as the ”Scotch-Irish Indians.” This tribe originally inhabited the whole of Lower Canada south of the St. Lawrence, being found there by Cartier, and the French named them the Sourequois or ”Salt-Water Indians,”

because they lived on the seacoast. They were staunch allies of the French, who converted them to Christianity from being sun-wors.h.i.+ppers.

They have a reservation near Campbellton, on the Restigouche, and a populous village surrounding a Catholic church. There are now about seven thousand of them, all told, throughout the provinces. Glooscap was the mythical chief of the Micmacs, whose power and genius were shown throughout all the region from New England to Gaspe. He was of unknown origin, and invincible, and he conquered the ”great Beaver, feared by beasts and men,” on the river Kennebecasis, near St. John.

Glooscap's favorite home and beaver-pond was the Basin of Minas, in Nova Scotia, where afterwards dwelt Longfellow's Evangeline. Micmac traditions describe him as the ”envoy of the Great Spirit,” who lived above in a great wigwam, and was always attended by an aged dame and a beautiful youth. He had the form and habits of humanity, and taught his tribe how to hunt and fish, to build wigwams and canoes, and to heal diseases. He controlled the elements and overthrew all enemies of his people; but the tradition adds that on the approach of the English, the great Glooscap, ”finding that the ways of beasts and men waxed evil,” turned his huge hunting-dogs into stone, and his huntsmen into restless and wailing loons, and then he vanished.

The route to the angling waters of the great Lake St. John is by railway northward from Quebec. It goes up the valley of St. Charles River, past Lorette, where beautiful cascades turn the mill-wheels.

Here are gathered the scanty halfbreed remnant of the Hurons, once the most powerful and ferocious tribe in Canada, who drove out the Iroquois and compelled their migration down to New York State. These Indians are said to have been Wyandots, but when the French saw them, with their hair rising in bristling ridges above their painted foreheads, the astonished beholders exclaimed, ”Quelles hures!” (what boars!) and hence the name of Huron came to them. The railroad goes for two hundred miles past lakes and streams, and through the dense forests of these remote Laurentian mountains, until it finally comes out on the lake sh.o.r.e at the ancient mission town of ”Our Lady of Roberval,” now become, through the popularity of the district, a modern watering-place. This great Lake St. John, so much admired by the Canadian and American anglers, was called by the Indians the Picouagomi, or ”Flat Lake,” and it is in a region shaped much like a saucer, lying in a hollow, with hills rising up into mountains in the background all around. The lake is thirty miles long and about twenty-five miles across, having no less than nineteen large rivers, besides smaller ones flowing into it from the surrounding mountains, the vast acc.u.mulation of waters being carried off by the Saguenay. The immense flow of some of these rivers may be realized when it is known that the Mista.s.sini, coming down from the northward, is three hundred miles long, and the Peribonka four hundred miles long, while the Ouiatchouan from the south, just before reaching the lake, dashes down a grand cascade, two hundred and eighty feet high, making an elongated sheet of perfectly white foam.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, this wonderful lake and its immense tributaries were scarcely known to white men, yet upon its sh.o.r.es stood Notre Dame de Roberval and St. Louis Chambord, two of the oldest Jesuit Indian missions in America. For more than two centuries, until the angler and lumberman began going to this remote wilderness, it was a buried paradise in the distant woods, without inhabitants, excepting a few Montaignais and their priests, and a scattered post or two of the Hudson Bay Company, whose occasional expeditions over to Quebec for supplies were the only communication with the outer world.

The solid graystone church and convent stand in bold relief among the neat little white French cottages at Roberval, there are an immense sawmill and a modern hotel, while in front is the grand sweep of the lake, like a vast inland sea, its opposite sh.o.r.e almost beyond vision, excepting where a far-away mountain spur may loom just above the horizon. Here lives the famous ouananiche of the salmon family, called ”land-locked,” because it is believed he is unable to get out to other waters. He is a gamey and magnificent fish, with dark-blue back and silvery sides, mottled with olive spots, thus literally clothed in purple and fine silver. He has enormous strength, making him the champion finny warrior of the Canadian waters. The chief fishery ground for him is in the swirling rapids of the Grand Discharge. The native Montaignais, or ”mountaineer” Indian of this region, is a most expert angler, seducing the royal fish with an inartistic lump of fat pork on the end of a line from his frail canoe among the rapids, and hooking the game more effectively than the costliest rod and reel in the hands of a ”tenderfoot.” These dusky, consumptive-looking, copper-colored Indians spend the winters in the unexplored wilds of the Mista.s.sini, and wander through all the wilderness as far as Hudson Bay. When the snows are gone, they bring in the pelts of the beaver, otter, fox and bear, to trade at the Company posts, and living in rude birch-bark huts on the bank of the lake, spend the summer in fis.h.i.+ng, and pick up a few dollars as boatmen and guides.

THE ST. LAWRENCE ESTUARY.

Below the mouth of the Saguenay, the St. Lawrence stretches four hundred miles to the ocean, its broad estuary constantly growing wider. On the southern sh.o.r.e, below Cacouna, there is another resort at a little river's mouth, known as Trois Pistoles. It is related that in the olden time a traveller was ferried across this little river, the fisherman doing the service charging him three pistoles (ten franc pieces), equalling about six dollars. The traveller was astonished at the charge, and asked him the name of the river. ”It has no name,” was the reply, ”it will be baptized at a later day.” ”Then,” said the traveller, anxious to get the worth of his money, ”I baptize it Three Pistoles,” a name that has continued ever since. This diminutive village seems rather in luck, for unlike most of the others, it has two churches, each with a tall spire. The Lower St. Lawrence sh.o.r.es maintain communication across the wide estuary by canoe ferries, established at various places. A stout canoe, twenty feet or more long, and having a crew of seven men, usually makes the pa.s.sage. The boat is built with broad, flat keel, shod with iron, moving easily over the ice which for half the year closes the river, not breaking up until late in the spring, and sometimes obstructing the outlet through the Strait of Belle Isle until July. Farther down the southern sh.o.r.e, below Trois Pistoles, is Rimouski, a much larger place, described as the metropolis of the Lower St. Lawrence, and the outlet of the region of the Metapedia. This town has a Bishop and a Cathedral. Beyond are Father Point and Metis, and the land then extends past Cape Chatte into the wilderness of Gaspe. When Jacques Cartier first entered the river in 1534, he landed at Gaspe, taking possession of the whole country in the name of the King of France, and erecting a tall cross adorned with the fleur-de-lys. Very appropriately, Gaspe means the ”Land's End.” They found here the Micmac Indians, who were then reputed to be quite intelligent, knowing the points of the compa.s.s and position of the stars, and having rude maps of their country and a knowledge of the cross. Their tradition, as told to Cartier's sailors, was that in distant ages a pestilence hara.s.sed them, when a venerable man landed on their sh.o.r.e and stayed the progress of the disease by erecting a cross. This mysterious benefactor is supposed to have been a Norseman, or early Spanish adventurer. An old Castilian tale is that gold-hunting Spaniards, after the discovery by Columbus, sailed along these coasts, and finding no precious metals, said in disgust to the Indians, ”Aca nada,” meaning, ”there is nothing here.” This phrase became fixed in the Indian mind, and supposing Cartier's party to be the same people, they endeavored to open conversation by repeating the same words, ”Aca nada! aca nada!” Thus, according to one theory, originated the name of Canada, the Frenchmen supposing they were telling the name of the country. Another authority is that the literal meaning of the Mohawk (Iroquois) word Canada is, ”Where they live,” or ”a village,” and as it was the word Cartier, on his voyages up the river, most frequently heard from the Indians, as applied to the homes of the people, it naturally named the country.

The surface of the southern country behind Cape Chatte, and of Gaspe (Cape Gaspe being a promontory seven hundred feet high), rises into the frowning mountains of Notre Dame, the most lofty in Lower Canada, the chief peak elevated four thousand feet. In 1648 a French explorer wrote of these stately ranges that ”all those who come to New France know well enough the mountains of Notre Dame, because the pilots and sailors, being arrived at that point of the great river which is opposite to these high mountains, baptize, ordinarily for sport, the new pa.s.sengers, if they do not turn aside by some present the inundation of this baptism, which is made to flow plentifully on their heads.” The bold southern sh.o.r.e of the St. Lawrence finally ends beyond Cape Gaspe, where its mouth is ninety-six miles wide in the headland of Cape Rosier, described by dreading mariners as the ”Scylla of the St. Lawrence.”

The northern sh.o.r.e of the great river, beyond the mouth of the Saguenay, is almost uninhabited. There is an occasional fis.h.i.+ng-post, but it is almost an unknown region, though once there were Jesuit missions and trading-places, the Indians having since gone away. The iron-bound coast goes off, past Point de Monts, the Egg Islands and Anticosti, to the Strait of Belle Isle. This strait is named after a barren, treeless and desolate island at its entrance, about nine miles long, which has been most ironically named the Belle Isle, but the early mariners, nevertheless, called it the Isle of Demons. They did this because they heard, when pa.s.sing, ”a great clamor of men's voices, confused and inarticulate, such as you hear from a crowd at a fair or market-place.” This is explained by the almost constant grinding of ice-floes in the neighborhood. The Mingan River, a beautiful stream where speckled trout are caught, comes down out of the northern mountains, opposite Anticosti Island, and is occasionally visited by enthusiastic anglers. This is the boundary of Labrador, which stretches almost indefinitely beyond, comprising the whole northeastern Canadian peninsula, an almost unexplored region of nearly three hundred square miles. It is described as a rocky plateau of Archaean rocks, highest on the northeast side and to the south, more or less wooded, and sloping down to lowlands towards Hudson Bay. It is a vast solitude, the rocks split and blasted by frosts, and the sh.o.r.es washed by the Atlantic waves, where reindeer, bears, wolves and a few Esquimaux wander. Its great scenic attraction is the Grand Falls. To the northward of the headwaters of Mingan River is a much larger stream, the Grand River, draining a mult.i.tude of lakes on the higher Labrador table-land, northeastward through Hamilton Inlet into the Atlantic. In 1861 a venturesome Scot of the Hudson Bay Company, prospecting through the region, first saw this magnificent cataract.

For thirty years the falls were unvisited, but in 1891 an expedition was made to them, and they have been since again visited. The cataract is described as a magnificent spectacle, the river with full flow leaping from a rocky platform into a huge chasm, with a roar that can be heard twenty miles and an immense column of rainbow-illumined spray. The plunge is made after descending rapids for eight hundred feet, and is over a precipice two hundred feet wide, the fall being three hundred and sixteen feet. The water tumbles into a canyon five hundred feet deep and extending between high walls of rock for about twenty-five miles. The distant Labrador coasts on bay and ocean abound in seals and fish, and the adjacent seas are vast producers of codfish and herring. There are few visitors, however, excepting the hardy ”Fishermen,” of whom Whittier sings:

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