Pathfinders of the West / Being the Thrilling Story of the Adventures of the Men Who / Discovered the Great Northwest: Radisson, La Vérendrye, / Lewis and Clark

All that De la Vérendrye had accomplished on this trip was to learn that salt water existed west-southwest. Anxious to know more of the Northwest, he sent his sons to the banks of a great northern river. This was the Saskatchewan. In their search of the Northwest, they constructed two more trading posts, Fort Dauphin near Lake Manitoba, and Bourbon on the Saskatchewan. Winter quarters were built at the forks of the river, which afterwards became the site of Fort Poskoyac. This spring not a canoe load of food came up from Montreal. Papers had been served for the seizure of all De la Vérendrye's forts, goods, property, and chattels to meet the claims of his creditors. Desperate, but not deterred from his quest, De la Vérendrye set out to contest the lawsuits in Montreal.

V

1740-1750

Which way to turn now for the Western Sea that eluded their quest like a will-o'-the-wisp was the question confronting Pierre, François, and Louis de la Vérendrye during the explorer's absence in Montreal. They had followed the great Saskatchewan westward to its forks. No river was found in this region flowing in the direction of the Western Sea. They had been in the country of the Missouri; but neither did any river there flow to a Western Sea. Yet the Mandans told of salt water far to the west. Thither they would turn the baffling search.

The two men left among the Mandans to learn the language had returned to the Assiniboine River with more news of tribes from "the setting sun" who dwelt on salt water. Pierre de la Vérendrye went down to the Missouri with the two interpreters; but the Mandans refused to supply guides that year, and the young Frenchman came back to winter on the Assiniboine. Here he made every preparation for another attempt to find the Western Sea by way of the Missouri. On April 29, 1742, the two brothers, Pierre and François, left the Assiniboine with the two interpreters. Their course led along the trail that for two hundred years was to be a famous highway between the Missouri and Hudson Bay. Heading southwest, they followed the Souris River to the watershed of the Missouri, and in three weeks were once more the guests of the smoky Mandan lodges. Round the inside walls of each circular hut ran berth beds of buffalo skin with trophies of the chase,—hide-shields and weapons of war, fastened to the posts that separated berth from berth. A common fire, with a family meat pot hanging above, occupied the centre of the lodge. In one of these lodges the two brothers and their men were quartered. The summer passed feasting with the Mandans and smoking the calumet of peace; but all was in vain. The Missouri Indians were arrant cowards in the matter of war. The terror of their existence was the Sioux. The Mandans would not venture through Sioux territory to accompany the brothers in the search for the Western Sea. At last two guides were obtained, who promised to conduct the French to a neighboring tribe that might know of the Western Sea.

The party set out on horseback, travelling swiftly southwest and along the valley of the Little Missouri toward the Black Hills. Here their course turned sharply west toward the Powder River country, past the southern bounds of the Yellowstone. For three weeks they saw no sign of human existence. Deer and antelope bounded over the parched alkali uplands. Prairie dogs perched on top of their earth mounds, to watch the lonely riders pass; and all night the far howl of grayish forms on the offing of the starlit prairie told of prowling coyotes. On the 11th of August the brothers camped on the Powder Hills. Mounting to the crest of a cliff, they scanned far and wide for signs of the Indians whom the Mandans knew. The valleys were desolate. Kindling a signal-fire to attract any tribes that might be roaming, they built a hut and waited. A month passed. There was no answering signal. One of the Mandan guides took himself off in fright. On the fifth week a thin line of smoke rose against the distant sky. The remaining Mandans went to reconnoitre and found a camp of Beaux Hommes, or Crows, who received the French well. Obtaining fresh guides from the Crows and dismissing the Mandans, the brothers again headed westward. The Crows guided them to the Horse Indians, who in turn took the French to their next western neighbors, the Bows. The Bows were preparing to war on the Snakes, a mountain tribe to the west. Tepees dotted the valley. Women were pounding the buffalo meat into pemmican for the raiders. The young braves spent the night with war-song and war-dance, to work themselves into a frenzy of bravado. The Bows were to march west; so the French joined the warriors, gradually turning northwest toward what is now Helena.

It was winter. The hills were powdered with snow that obliterated all traces of the fleeing Snakes. The way became more mountainous and dangerous. Iced sloughs gave place to swift torrents and cataracts. On New Year's day, 1743, there rose through the gray haze to the fore the ragged sky-line of the Bighorn Mountains. Women and children were now left in a sheltered valley, the warriors advancing unimpeded. François de la Vérendrye remained at the camp to guard the baggage. Pierre went on with the raiders. In two weeks they were at the foot of the main range of the northern Rockies. Against the sky the snowy heights rose—an impassable barrier between the plains and the Western Sea. What lay beyond—the Beyond that had been luring them on and on, from river to river and land to land, for more than ten years? Surely on the other side of those lofty summits one might look down on the long-sought Western Sea. Never suspecting that another thousand miles of wilderness and mountain fastness lay between him and his quest, young De la Vérendrye wanted to cross the Great Divide. Destiny decreed otherwise. The raid of the Bows against the Snakes ended in a fiasco. No Snakes were to be found at their usual winter hunt. Had they decamped to massacre the Bow women and children left in the valley to the rear? The Bows fled back to their wives in a panic; so De la Vérendrye could not climb the mountains that barred the way to the sea. The retreat was made in the teeth of a howling mountain blizzard, and the warriors reached the rendezvous more dead than alive. No Snake Indians were seen at all. The Bows marched homeward along the valley of the Upper Missouri through the country of the Sioux, with whom they were allied. On the banks of the river the brothers buried a leaden plate with the royal arms of France imprinted. At the end of July, 1743, they were once more back on the Assiniboine River. For thirteen years they had followed a hopeless quest. Instead of a Western Sea, they had found a sea of prairie, a sea of mountains, and two great rivers, the Saskatchewan and the Missouri.

VI

1743-1750

But the explorer, who had done so much to extend French domain in the West, was a ruined man. To the accusations of his creditors were added the jealous calumnies of fur traders eager to exploit the new country. The eldest son, with tireless energy, had gone up the Saskatchewan to Fort Poskoyac when he was recalled to take a position in the army at Montreal. In 1746 De la Vérendrye himself was summoned to Quebec and his command given to M. de Noyelles. The game being played by jealous rivals was plain. De la Vérendrye was to be kept out of the West while tools of the Quebec traders spied out the fur trade of the Assiniboine and the Missouri. Immediately on receiving freedom from military duty, young Chevalier de la Vérendrye set out for Manitoba. On the way he met his father's successor, M. de Noyelles, coming home crestfallen. The supplanter had failed to control the Indians. In one year half the forts of the chain leading to the Western Sea had been destroyed. These Chevalier de la Vérendrye restored as he passed westward.

Governor Beauharnois had always refused to believe the charges of private peculation against M. de la Vérendrye. Governor de la Galissonnière was equally favorable to the explorer; and De la Vérendrye was decorated with the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, and given permission to continue his explorations. The winter of 1749 was passed preparing supplies for the posts of the West; but a life of hardship and disappointment had undermined the constitution of the dauntless pathfinder. On the 6th of December, while busy with plans for his hazardous and thankless quest, he died suddenly at Montreal.

Rival fur traders scrambled for the spoils of the Manitoba and Missouri territory like dogs for a bone. De la Jonquière had become governor. Allied with him was the infamous Bigot, the intendant, and those two saw in the Western fur trade an opportunity to enrich themselves. The rights of De la Vérendrye's sons to succeed their father were entirely disregarded. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was appointed commander of the Western Sea. The very goods forwarded by De la Vérendrye were confiscated.

But Saint-Pierre had enough trouble from his appointment. His lieutenant, M. de Niverville, almost lost his life among hostiles on the way down the Saskatchewan after building Fort Lajonquière at the foothills of the Rockies, where Calgary now stands. Saint-Pierre had headquarters in Manitoba on the Assiniboine, and one afternoon in midwinter, when his men were out hunting, he saw his fort suddenly fill with armed Assiniboines bent on massacre. They jostled him aside, broke into the armory, and helped themselves to weapons. Saint-Pierre had only one recourse. Seizing a firebrand, he tore the cover off a keg of powder and threatened to blow the Indians to perdition. The marauders dashed from the fort, and Saint-Pierre shot the bolts of gate and sally-port. When the white hunters returned, they quickly gathered their possessions together and abandoned Fort de la Reine. Four days later the fort lay in ashes. So ended the dream of enthusiasts to find a way overland to the Western Sea.

[1] The authorities for La Vérendrye's life are, of course, his own reports as found in the State Papers of the Canadian Archives, Pierre Margry's compilation of these reports, and the Rev. Father Jones' collection of the Aulneau Letters.

[2] The Pays d'en Haut or "Up-Country" was the vague name given by the fur traders to the region between the Missouri and the North Pole.

[3] Throughout this volume the word "Sioux" is used as applying to the entire confederacy, and not to the Minnesota Sioux only.

PART III

1769-1782

SEARCH FOR THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE LEADS SAMUEL HEARNE TO THE ARCTIC CIRCLE AND ATHABASCA REGION

CHAPTER IX

1769-1782

SAMUEL HEARNE

The Adventures of Hearne in his Search for the Coppermine River and the Northwest Passage—Hilarious Life of Wassail led by Governor Norton—The Massacre of the Eskimo by Hearne's Indians North of the Arctic Circle—Discovery of the Athabasca Country—Hearne becomes Resident Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, but is captured by the French—Frightful Death of Norton and Suicide of Matonabbee

For a hundred years after receiving its charter to exploit the furs of the North, the Hudson's Bay Company slumbered on the edge of a frozen sea.

Its fur posts were scattered round the desolate shores of the Northern bay like beads on a string; but the languid Company never attempted to penetrate the unknown lands beyond the coast. It was unnecessary. The Indians came to the Company. The company did not need to go to the Indians. Just as surely as spring cleared the rivers of ice and set the unlocked torrents rushing to the sea, there floated down-stream Indian dugout and birch canoe, loaded with wealth of peltries for the fur posts of the English Company. So the English sat snugly secure inside their stockades, lords of the wilderness, and drove a thriving trade with folded hands. For a penny knife, they bought a beaver skin; and the skin sold in Europe for two or three shillings. The trade of the old Company was not brisk; but it paid.

It was the prod of keen French traders that stirred the slumbering giant. In his search for the Western Sea, De la Vérendrye had pushed west by way of the Great Lakes to the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains and the Saskatchewan. Henceforth, not so many furs came down-stream to the English Company on the bay. De la Vérendrye had been followed by hosts of free-lances—coureurs and voyageurs—who spread through the wilderness from the Missouri to the Athabasca, intercepting the fleets of furs that formerly went to Hudson Bay. The English Company rubbed its eyes; and rivals at home began to ask what had been done in return for the charter. France had never ceased seeking the mythical Western Sea that was supposed to lie just beyond the Mississippi; and when French buccaneers destroyed the English Company's forts on the bay, the English ambassador at Paris exacted such an enormous bill of damages that the Hudson Bay traders were enabled to build a stronger fortress up at Prince of Wales on the mouth of Churchill River than the French themselves possessed at Quebec on the St. Lawrence. What—asked the rivals of the Company in London—had been done in return for such national protection? France had discovered and explored a whole new world north of the Missouri. What had the English done? Where did the Western Sea of which Spain had possession in the South lie towards the North? What lay between the Hudson Bay and that Western Sea? Was there a Northwest passage by water through this region to Asia? If not, was there an undiscovered world in the North, like Louisiana in the South? There was talk of revoking the charter. Then the Company awakened from its long sleep with a mighty stir.

The annual boats that came out to Hudson Bay in the summer of 1769 anchored on the offing, six miles from the gray walls of Fort Prince of Wales, and roared out a salute of cannon becoming the importance of ships that bore almost revolutionary commissions. The fort cannon on the walls of Churchill River thundered their answer. A pinnace came scudding over the waves from the ships. A gig boat launched out from the fort to welcome the messengers. Where the two met halfway, packets of letters were handed to Moses Norton, governor at Fort Prince of Wales, commanding him to despatch his most intrepid explorers for the discovery of unknown rivers, strange lands, rumored copper mines, and the mythical Northwest Passage that was supposed to lead directly to China.

The fort lay on a spit of sand running out into the bay at the mouth of Churchill River. It was three hundred yards long by three hundred yards wide, with four bastions, in three of which were stores and wells of water. The fourth bastion contained the powder-magazine. The walls were thirty feet wide at the bottom and twenty feet wide at the top, of hammer-dressed stone, mounted with forty great cannon. A commodious stone house, furnished with all the luxuries of the chase, stood in the centre of the courtyard. This was the residence of the governor. Offices, warehouses, barracks, and hunters' lodges were banked round the inner walls of the fort. The garrison consisted of thirty-nine common soldiers and a few officers. In addition, there hung about the fort the usual habitués of a Northern fur post,—young clerks from England, who had come out for a year's experience in the wilds; underpaid artisans, striving to mend their fortunes by illicit trade; hunters and coureurs and voyageurs, living like Indians but with a strain of white blood that forever distinguished them from their comrades; stately Indian sachems, stalking about the fort with whiffs of contempt from their long calumets for all this white-man luxury; and a ragamuffin brigade,—squaws, youngsters, and beggars,—who subsisted by picking up food from the waste heap of the fort.

The commission to despatch explorers to the inland country proved the sensation of a century at the fort. Round the long mess-room table gathered officers and traders, intent on the birch-bark maps drawn by old Indian chiefs of an unknown interior, where a "Far-Off-Metal River" flowed down to the Northwest Passage. Huge log fires blazed on the stone hearths at each end of the mess room. Smoky lanterns and pine fagots, dipped in tallow and stuck in iron clamps, shed a fitful light from rafters that girded ceiling and walls. On the floor of flagstones lay enormous skins of the chase—polar bear, Arctic wolf, and grizzly. Heads of musk-ox, caribou, and deer decorated the great timber girders. Draped across the walls were Company flags—an English ensign with the letters "H. B. C." painted in white on a red background, or in red on a white background.

At the head of the table sat one of the most remarkable scoundrels known in the annals of the Company, Moses Norton, governor of Fort Prince of Wales, a full-blooded Indian, who had been sent to England for nine years to be educated and had returned to the fort to resume all the vices and none of the virtues of white man and red. Clean-skinned, copper-colored, lithe and wiry as a tiger cat, with the long, lank, oily black hair of his race, Norton bore himself with all the airs of a European princelet and dressed himself in the beaded buckskins of a savage. Before him the Indians cringed as before one of their demon gods, and on the same principle. Bad gods could do the Indians harm. Good gods wouldn't. Therefore, the Indians propitiated the bad gods; and of all Indian demons Norton was the worst. The black arts of mediaeval poisoning were known to him, and he never scrupled to use them against an enemy. The Indians thought him possessed of the power of the evil eye; but his power was that of arsenic or laudanum dropped in the food of an unsuspecting enemy. Two of his wives, with all of whom he was inordinately jealous, had died of poison. Against white men who might offend him he used more open means,—the triangle, the whipping post, the branding iron. Needless to say that a man who wielded such power swelled the Company's profits and stood high in favor with the directors. At his right hand lay an enormous bunch of keys. These he carried with him by day and kept under his pillow by night. They were the keys to the apartments of his many wives, for like all Indians Norton believed in a plurality of wives, and the life of no Indian was safe who refused to contribute a daughter to the harem. The two master passions of the governor were jealousy and tyranny; and while he lived like a Turkish despot himself, he ruled his fort with a rod of iron and left the brand of his wrath on the person of soldier or officer who offered indignity to the Indian race. It was a common thing for Norton to poison an Indian who refused to permit a daughter to join the collection of wives; then to flog the back off a soldier who casually spoke to one of the wives in the courtyard; and in the evening spend the entire supper hour preaching sermons on virtue to his men. By a curious freak, Marie, his daughter, now a child of nine, inherited from her father the gentle qualities of the English life in which he had passed his youth. She shunned the native women and was often to be seen hanging on her father's arm, as officers and governor smoked their pipes over the mess-room table.

Near Norton sat another famous Indian, Matonabbee, the son of a slave woman at the fort, who had grown up to become a great ambassador to the native tribes for the English traders. Measuring more than six feet, straight as a lance, supple as a wrestler, thin, wiry, alert, restless with the instinct of the wild creatures, Matonabbee was now in the prime of his manhood, chief of the Chipewyans at the fort, and master of life and death to all in his tribe. It was Matonabbee whom the English traders sent up the Saskatchewan to invite the tribes of the Athabasca down to the bay. The Athabascans listened to the message of peace with a treacherous smile. At midnight assassins stole to his tent, overpowered his slave, and dragged the captive out. Leaping to his feet, Matonabbee shouted defiance, hurled his assailants aside like so many straws, pursued the raiders to their tents, single-handed released his slave, and marched out unscathed. That was the way Matonabbee had won the Athabascans for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Officers of the garrison, bluff sea-captains, spinning yarns of iceberg and floe, soldiers and traders, made up the rest of the company. Among the white men was one eager face,—that of Samuel Hearne, who was to explore the interior and now scanned the birch-bark drawings to learn the way to the "Far-off-Metal River."

By November 6 all was in readiness for the departure of the explorer. Two Indian guides, who knew the way to the North, were assigned to Hearne; two European servants went with him to look after the provisions; and two Indian hunters joined the company. In the gray mist of Northern dawn, with the stars still pricking through the frosty air, seven salutes of cannon awakened the echoes of the frozen sea. The gates of the fort flung open, creaking with the frost rust, and Hearne came out, followed by his little company, the dog bells of the long toboggan sleighs setting up a merry jingling as the huskies broke from a trot to a gallop over the snow-fields for the North. Heading west-northwest, the band travelled swiftly with all the enthusiasm of untested courage. North winds cut their faces like whip-lashes. The first night out there was not enough snow to make a wind-break of the drifts; so the sleighs were piled on edge to windward, dogs and men lying heterogeneously in their shelter. When morning came, one of the Indian guides had deserted. The way became barer. Frozen swamps across which the storm wind swept with hurricane force were succeeded by high, rocky barrens devoid of game, unsheltered, with barely enough stunted shrubbery for the whittling of chips that cooked the morning and night meals. In a month the travellers had not accomplished ten miles a day. Where deer were found the Indians halted to gorge themselves with feasts. Where game was scarce they lay in camp, depending on the white hunters. Within three weeks rations had dwindled to one partridge a day for the entire company. The Indians seemed to think that Hearne's white servants had secret store of food on the sleighs. The savages refused to hunt. Then Hearne suspected some ulterior design. It was to drive him back to the fort by famine. Henceforth, he noticed on the march that the Indians always preceded the whites and secured any game before his men could fire a shot. One night toward the end of November the savages plundered the sleighs. Hearne awakened in amazement to see the company marching off, laden with guns, ammunition, and hatchets. He called. Their answer was laughter that set the woods ringing. Hearne was now two hundred miles from the fort, without either ammunition or food. There was nothing to do but turn back. The weather was fair. By snaring partridges, the white men obtained enough game to sustain them till they reached the fort on the 11th of December.

The question now was whether to wait till spring or set out in the teeth of midwinter. If Hearne left the fort in spring, he could not possibly reach the Arctic Circle till the following winter; and with the North buried under drifts of snow, he could not learn where lay the Northwest Passage. If he left the fort in winter in order to reach the Arctic in summer, he must expose his guides to the risks of cold and starvation. The Indians told of high, rocky barrens, across which no canoes could be carried. They advised snow-shoe travel. Obtaining three Chipewyans and two Crees as guides, and taking no white servants, Hearne once more set out, on February 23, 1770, for the "Far-Away-Metal River." This time there was no cannonading. The guns were buried under snow-drifts twenty feet deep, and the snow-shoes of the travellers glided over the fort walls to the echoing cheers of soldiers and governor standing on the ramparts. The company travelled light, depending on chance game for food. All wood that could be used for fire lay hidden deep under snow. At wide intervals over the white wastes mushroom cones of snow told where a stunted tree projected the antlered branches of topmost bough through the depths of drift; but for the most part camp was made by digging through the shallowest snow with snow-shoes to the bottom of moss, which served the double purpose of fuel for the night kettle and bed for travellers. In the hollow a wigwam was erected, with the door to the south, away from the north wind. Snared rabbits and partridges supplied the food. The way lay as before—west-northwest—along a chain of frozen lakes and rivers connecting Hudson Bay with the Arctic Ocean. By April the marchers were on the margin of a desolate wilderness—the Indian region of "Little Sticks,"—known to white men as the Barren Lands, where dwarf trees project above the billowing wastes of snow like dismantled masts on the far offing of a lonely sea. Game became scarcer. Neither the round footprint of the hare nor the frost tracery of the northern grouse marked the snowy reaches of unbroken white. Caribou had retreated to the sheltered woods of the interior; and a cleverer hunter than man had scoured the wide wastes of game. Only the wolf pack roamed the Barren Lands. It was unsafe to go on without food. Hearne kept in camp till the coming of the goose month—April—when birds of passage wended their way north. For three days rations consisted of snow water and pipes of tobacco. The Indians endured the privations with stoical indifference, daily marching out on a bootless quest for game. On the third night Hearne was alone in his tent. Twilight deepened to night, night to morning. Still no hunters returned. Had he been deserted? Not a sound broke the waste silence but the baying of the wolf pack. Weak from hunger, Hearne fell asleep. Before daylight he was awakened by a shout; and his Indians shambled over the drifts laden with haunches of half a dozen deer. That relieved want till the coming of the geese. In May Hearne struck across the Barren Lands. By June the rotting snow clogged the snow-shoes. Dog trains drew heavy, and food was again scarce. For a week the travellers found nothing to eat but cranberries. Half the company was ill from hunger when a mangy old musk-ox, shedding his fur and lean as barrel hoops, came scrambling over the rocks, sure of foot as a mountain goat. A single shot brought him down. In spite of the musky odor of which the coarse flesh reeked, every morsel of the ox was instantly devoured. Sometimes during their long fasts they would encounter a solitary Indian wandering over the rocky barren. If he had arms, gun, or arrow, and carried skins of the chase, he was welcomed to camp, no matter how scant the fare. Otherwise he was shunned as an outcast, never to be touched or addressed by a human being; for only one thing could have fed an Indian on the Barren Lands who could show no trophies of the chase, and that was the flesh of some human creature weaker than himself. The outcast was a cannibal, condemned by an unwritten law to wander alone through the wastes.

Snow had barely cleared from the Barren Lands when Hearne witnessed the great traverse of the caribou herds, marching in countless multitudes with a clicking of horns and hoofs from west to east for the summer. Indians from all parts of the North had placed themselves at rivers across the line of march to spear the caribou as they swam; and Hearne was joined by a company of six hundred savages. Summer had dried the moss. That gave abundance of fuel. Caribou were plentiful. That supplied the hunters with pemmican. Hearne decided to pass the following winter with the Indians; but he was one white man among hundreds of savages. Nightly his ammunition was plundered. One of his survey instruments was broken in a wind storm. Others were stolen. It was useless to go on without instruments to take observations of the Arctic Circle; so for a second time Hearne was compelled to turn back to Fort Prince of Wales. Terrible storms impeded the return march. His dog was frozen in the traces. Tent poles were used for fire-wood; and the northern lights served as the only compass. On midday of November 25, 1770, after eight months' absence, in which he had not found the "Far-Off-Metal River," Hearne reached shelter inside the fort walls.

Beating through the gales of sleet and snow on the homeward march, Hearne had careened into a majestic figure half shrouded by the storm. The explorer halted before a fur-muffled form, six feet in its moccasins, erect as a mast pole, haughty as a king; and the gauntleted hand of the Indian chief went up to his forehead in sign of peace. It was Matonabbee, the ambassador of the Hudson's Bay Company to the Athabascans, now returning to Fort Prince of Wales, followed by a long line of slave women driving their dog sleighs. The two travellers hailed each other through the storm like ships at sea. That night they camped together on the lee side of the dog sleighs, piled high as a wind-break; and Matonabbee, the famous courser of the Northern wastes, gave Hearne wise advice. Women should be taken on a long journey, the Indian chief said; for travel must be swift through the deadly cold of the barrens. Men must travel light of hand, trusting to chance game for food. Women were needed to snare rabbits, catch partridges, bring in game shot by the braves, and attend to the camping. And then in a burst of enthusiasm, perhaps warmed by Hearne's fine tobacco, Matonabbee, who had found the way to the Athabasca, offered to conduct the white man to the "Far-Off-Metal River" of the Arctic Circle. The chief was the greatest pathfinder of the Northern tribes. His offer was the chance of a lifetime. Hearne could hardly restrain his eagerness till he reached the fort. Leaving Matonabbee to follow with the slave women, the explorer hurried to Fort Prince of Wales, laid the plan before Governor Norton, and in less than two weeks from the day of his return was ready to depart for the unknown river that was to lead to the Northwest Passage.

The weather was dazzlingly clear, with that burnished brightness of polished steel known only where unbroken sunlight meets unbroken snow glare. On the 7th of December, 1770, Hearne left the fort, led by Matonabbee and followed by the slave Indians with the dog sleighs. One of Matonabbee's wives lay ill; but that did not hinder the iron pathfinder. The woman was wrapped in robes and drawn on a dog sleigh. There was neither pause nor hesitation. If the woman recovered, good. If she died, they would bury her under a cairn of stones as they travelled. Matonabbee struck directly west-northwest for some caches of provisions which he had left hidden on the trail. The place was found; but the caches had been rifled clean of food. That did not stop Matonabbee. Nor did he show the slightest symptoms of anger. He simply hastened their pace the more for their hunger, recognizing the unwritten law of the wilderness—that starving hunters who had rifled the cache had a right to food wherever they found it. Day after day, stoical as men of bronze, the marchers reeled off the long white miles over the snowy wastes, pausing only for night sleep with evening and morning meals. Here nibbled twigs were found; there the stamping ground of a deer shelter; elsewhere the small, cleft foot-mark like the ace of hearts. But the signs were all old. No deer were seen. Even the black marble eye that betrays the white hare on the snow, and the fluffy bird track of the feather-footed northern grouse, grew rarer; and the slave women came in every morning empty-handed from untouched snares. In spite of hunger and cold, Matonabbee remained good-natured, imperturbable, hard as a man of bronze, coursing with the winged speed of snow-shoes from morning till night without pause, going to a bed of rock moss on a meal of snow water and rising eager as an arrow to leave the bow-string for the next day's march. For three days before Christmas the entire company had no food but snow. Christmas was celebrated by starvation. Hearne could not indulge in the despair of the civilized man's self-pity when his faithful guides went on without complaint.

By January the company had entered the Barren Lands. The Barren Lands were bare but for an occasional oasis of trees like an island of refuge in a shelterless sea. In the clumps of dwarf shrubs, the Indians found signs that meant relief from famine—tufts of hair rubbed off on tree trunks, fallen antlers, and countless heart-shaped tracks barely puncturing the snow but for the sharp outer edge. The caribou were on their yearly traverse east to west for the shelter of the inland woods. The Indians at once pitched camp. Scouts went scouring to find which way the caribou herds were coming. Pounds of snares were constructed of shrubs and saplings stuck up in palisades with scarecrows on the pickets round a V-shaped enclosure. The best hunters took their station at the angle of the V, armed with loaded muskets and long, lank, and iron-pointed arrows. Women and children lined the palisades to scare back high jumpers or strays of the caribou herd. Then scouts and dogs beat up the rear of the fleeing herd, driving the caribou straight for the pound. By a curious provision of nature, the male caribou sheds its antlers just as he leaves the Barren Lands for the wooded interior, where the horns would impede flight through brush, and he only leaves the woods for the bare open when the horns are grown enough to fight the annual battle to protect the herd from the wolf pack ravenous with spring hunger. For one caribou caught in the pound by Hearne's Indians, a hundred of the herd escaped; for the caribou crossed the Barrens in tens of thousands, and Matonabbee's braves obtained enough venison for the trip to the "Far-Off-Metal River."

The farther north they travelled the scanter became the growth of pine and poplar and willow. Snow still lay heavy in April; but Matonabbee ordered a halt while there was still large enough wood to construct dugouts to carry provisions down the river. The boats were built large and heavy in front, light behind. This was to resist the ice jam of Northern currents. The caribou hunt had brought other Indians to the Barren Lands. Matonabbee was joined by two hundred warriors. Though the tribes puffed the calumet of peace together, they drew their war hatchets when they saw the smoke of an alien tribe's fire rise against the northern sky. A suspicion that he hardly dared to acknowledge flashed through Hearne's mind. Eleven thousand beaver pelts were yearly brought down to the fort from the unknown river. How did the Chipewyans obtain these pelts from the Eskimo? What was the real reason of the Indian eagerness to conduct the white man to the "Far-Off-Metal River"? The white man was not taken into the confidence of the Indian council; but he could not fail to draw his own conclusions.

Scouts were sent cautiously forward to trail the path of the aliens who had lighted the far moss fire. Women and children were ordered to head about for a rendezvous southwest on Lake Athabasca. Carrying only the lightest supplies, the braves set out swiftly for the North on June 1. Mist and rain hung so heavily over the desolate moors that the travellers could not see twenty feet ahead. In places the rocks were glazed with ice and scored with runnels of water. Half the warriors here lost heart and turned back. The others led by Hearne and Matonabbee crossed the iced precipices on hands and knees, with gun stocks strapped to backs or held in teeth. On the 21st of June the sun did not set. Hearne had crossed the Arctic Circle. The sun hung on the southern horizon all night long. Henceforth the travellers marched without tents. During rain or snow storm, they took refuge under rocks or in caves. Provisions turned mouldy with wet. The moss was too soaked for fire. Snow fell so heavily in drifting storms that Hearne often awakened in the morning to find himself almost immured in the cave where they had sought shelter. Ice lay solid on the lakes in July. Once, clambering up steep, bare heights, the travellers met a herd of a hundred musk-oxen scrambling over the rocks with the agility of squirrels, the spreading, agile hoof giving grip that lifted the hulking forms over all obstacles. Down the bleak, bare heights there poured cataract and mountain torrent, plainly leading to some near river bed; but the thick gray fog lay on the land like a blanket. At last a thunder-storm cleared the air; and Hearne saw bleak moors sloping north, bare of all growth but the trunks of burnt trees, with barren heights of rock and vast, desolate swamps, where the wild-fowl flocked in myriads.

All count of day and night was now lost, for the sun did not set. Sometime between midnight and morning of July 12, 1771, with the sun as bright as noon, the lakes converged to a single river-bed a hundred yards wide, narrowing to a waterfall that roared over the rocks in three cataracts. This, then, was the "Far-Off-Metal River." Plainly, it was a disappointing discovery, this Coppermine River. It did not lead to China. It did not point the way to a Northwest Passage. In his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North America had learned—that the Great Northwest was something more than a bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its own destiny.[1]

But Hearne had no time to brood over disappointment. The conduct of his rascally companions could no longer be misunderstood. Hunters came in with game; but when the hungry slaves would have lighted a moss fire to cook the meat, the forbidding hand of a chief went up. No fires were to be lighted. The Indians advanced with whispers, dodging from stone to stone like raiders in ambush. Spies went forward on tiptoe. Then far down-stream below the cataracts Hearne descried the domed tent-tops of an Eskimo band sound asleep; for it was midnight, though the sun was at high noon. When Hearne looked back to his companions, he found himself deserted. The Indians were already wading the river for the west bank, where the Eskimo had camped. Hearne overtook his guides stripping themselves of everything that might impede flight or give hand-hold to an enemy, and daubing their skin with war-paint. Hearne begged Matonabbee to restrain the murderous warriors. The great chief smiled with silent contempt. He was too true a disciple of a doctrine which Indians' practised hundreds of years before white men had avowed it—the survival of the fit, the extermination of the weak, for any qualms of pity towards a victim whose death would contribute profit. Wearing only moccasins and bucklers of hardened hide, armed with muskets, lances, and tomahawks, the Indians jostled Hearne out of their way, stole forward from stone to stone to within a gun length of the Eskimo, then with a wild war shout flung themselves on the unsuspecting sleepers.

The Eskimo were taken unprepared. They staggered from their tents, still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which they had never before heard. The poor creatures fled in frantic terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt. A young girl fell coiling at Hearne's feet like a wounded snake. A well-aimed lance had pinioned the living form to earth. She caught Hearne round the knees, imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back with jeers. Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put their victim out of pain. The rocks rang with the mockery of the torturers. She was speared to death before Hearne's eyes. On that scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer bear to look. He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a nightmare. Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless as stone was an old, old woman—probably a witch of the tribe—red-eyed as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls. There was a shout from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate; and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack. Odd commentary in our modern philosophies—this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned, weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to jostle the Indian from the face of the New World. Something more than a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak, vacillating Hearne, weeping like a woman.

Horror of the massacre robbed Hearne of all an explorer's exultation. A day afterward, on July 17, he stood on the shores of the Arctic Ocean,—the first white man to reach it overland in America. Ice extended from the mouth of the river as far as eye could see. Not a sign of land broke the endless reaches of cold steel, where the snow lay, and icy green, where pools of the ocean cast their reflection on the sky of the far horizon. At one in the morning, with the sun hanging above the river to the south, Hearne formally took possession of the Arctic regions for the Hudson's Bay Company. The same Company rules those regions to-day. Not an eye had been closed for three days and nights. Throwing themselves down on the wet shore, the entire band now slept for six hours. The hunters awakened to find a musk-ox nosing over the mossed rocks. A shot sent it tumbling over the cliffs. Whether it was that the moss was too wet for fuel to cook the meat, or the massacre had brutalized the men into beasts of prey, the Indians fell on the carcass and devoured it raw.[2]

The retreat from the Arctic was made with all swiftness, keeping close to the Coppermine River. For thirty miles from the sea not a tree was to be seen. The river was sinuous and narrow, hemmed in by walls of solid rock, down which streamed cascades and mountain torrents. On both sides of the high bank extended endless reaches of swamps and barrens. Twenty miles from the sea Hearne found the copper mines from which the Indians made their weapons. His guides were to join their families in the Athabasca country of the southwest, and thither Matonabbee now led the way at such a terrible pace that moccasins were worn to shreds and toe-nails torn from the feet of the marchers; and woe to the man who fell behind, for the wolf pack prowled on the rear.

When the smoke of moss fires told of the wives' camp, the Indians halted to take the sweat bath of purification for the cleansing of all blood guilt from the massacre. Heated stones were thrown into a small pool. In this each Indian bathed himself, invoking his deity for freedom from all punishment for the deaths of the slain.[3] By August the Indians had joined their wives. By October they were on Lake Athabasca, which had already frozen. Here one of the wives, in the last stages of consumption, could go no farther. For a band short of food to halt on the march meant death to all. The Northern wilderness has its grim unwritten law, inexorable and merciless as death. For those who fall by the way there is no pity. A whole tribe may not be exposed to death for the sake of one person. Civilized nations follow the same principle in their quarantine. Giving the squaw food and a tent, the Indians left her to meet her last enemy, whether death came by starvation or cold or the wolf pack. Again and again the abandoned squaw came up with the marchers, weeping and begging their pity, only to fall from weakness. But the wilderness has no pity; and so they left her.

Christmas of 1771 was passed on Athabasca Lake, the northern lights rustling overhead with the crackling of a flag. There was food in plenty; for the Athabasca was rich in buffalo meadows and beaver dams and moose yards. On the lake shore Hearne found a little cabin, in which dwelt a solitary woman of the Dog Rib tribe who for eight months had not seen a soul. Her band had been massacred. She alone escaped and had lived here in hiding for almost a year. In spring the Indians of the lake carried their furs to the forts of Hudson Bay. With the Athabascans went Hearne, reaching Fort Prince of Wales on June 30, 1772, after eighteen months' absence.

He had discovered Coppermine River, the Arctic Ocean, and the Athabasca country,—a region in all as large as half European Russia.

For his achievements Hearne received prompt promotion. Within a year of his return to the fort, Governor Norton, the Indian bully, fell deadly ill. In the agony of death throes, he called for his wives. The great keys to the apartments of the women were taken from his pillow, and the wives were brought in. Norton lay convulsed with pain. One of the younger women began to sob. An officer of the garrison took her hand to comfort her grief. Norton's rolling eyes caught sight of the innocent conference between the officer and the young wife. With a roar the dying bully hurled himself up in bed:—

"I'll burn you alive! I'll burn you alive," he shrieked. With oaths on his lips he fell back dead.