La Vérandrye, the Frenchman who came up the Red River in 1731 and built a fort at Winnipeg, pressed farther on. His route at last was by way of the north Saskatchewan River. The fur trade was his lure, and those low wooded hills lying to the east of the river were called by the Indians the Beaver Hills. La Vérandrye had come a thousand miles over the Prairies, a thousand miles of long undulating beflowered grass, of bleak desert, of snow-filled plain. And then this oasis of rivered green.
The next recorded recognition of a wonderful site came in 1778, when the Nor’-West Company, rivals of the Hudson’s Bay, founded Fort des Prairies. In enormous isolation it stood on the bank of the river and when the union of the two fur companies came to pass, and the Hudson’s Bay took command about 1809 the Fort was renamed Edmonton, after the town immortalized by Cowper in “John Gilpin,” and because of the affection of the trader in charge for his suburban abode on the outskirts of London. [page 181]
The Fort has been likened to some rude baronial stronghold in the feudal ages of the old world, with the Liege’s Hall and retainers’ cottages all safely enclosed by a palisade twenty-feet high made of stout trees split in halves and sunk into the ground. Around this, encompassing the entire Fort, the sentinels’ gallery ran and at the four conrners the peaked roofs of the bastions rose, with cannon mouths filling the port-holes. There was a flour-mill, and carpenter, boat-building blacksmith and harness shops. It was indeed a tiny, walled city. The buildings were much crowded, there being only narrow alleyways between. A Court and yet a Community, it held within its limited area all the elements that make British rule the world over. It was self-contained and splendidly poised on the edge of a world in the making. All around the wooden walls dwelt the great unknown: natural elements vast in power. Indians insistent and inscrutable: herds of buffalo that then seemed numberless.
From the records of those days it will be seen that the first fort of 1796 was built on the lower level of the meadow, home of the present Power Plant of Edmonton. The second fort was built on the high ground where the Parliament Buildings now stand. It was under the command of a Chief Factor who kept up the traditions and wore a cocked hat and bejeweled [page 182] sword. The men who commanded the garrison were usually Scots, and were signed on for service as in the army or navy.
There was a Canadian artist, one Paul Kane, who made the first sketching trip over the prairies in 1847. He spent a winter at Edmonton, which had then become a great food-producing centre. Within the walls [page 183] of the fort the inhabitants then numbered over one hundred and fifty. Kane says they lived in “luxury and fashion.” His diary gives a fascinating account of the times. He is of course deeply interested in the Indians. “Eleven of the most important and war-like tribes,” he says, “were in constant communication with the fort. Crees and Assiniboines lived in the country, while at least twice a year Blackfeet, Sarcees, Piegans and Bloods from southern Alberta, traded at Edmonton their dried meat and fat.”
We hear of a great feast and dance at the Factor’s House in the fort on Christmas night, 1848. To the dance some Indians were invited. The music was made by a violin in combination with the Indian drumsticks. The dance was a medley of Highland reels, strathspeys and hornpipes and the wild pageantry of the Indian ritualistic dances. Among the motley colours and barbaric excitement of the liquor-fed music-mad crowd, the artist, Kane, espied a young Cree so lovely that he afterwards immortalized her on canvas, which is included in the magnificent Kane collection in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.
“Her poetic name was Cun-ne-wa-bum,” says the artist, “it means ‘one who looks at the stars.’ She sat for her likeness with greatest patience, holding her fan which was made of the tip of a swan’s wing, with a [page 184] handle of porcupine quills, in a most coquettish manner.”
Kane tells us also that the sequel to the festivity of this Christmas week was the wedding at New Year’s of John Rowand Jr., in charge of Fort Pitt, and Miss Herriot, the daughter of the Chief Factor. The wedding trip down the ice two hundred miles to Fort Pitt was made by sledge. Three carioles and four sledges with four dogs to each formed the cavalcade. Nine men, including Kane, were the bodyguard. The dogs were decked in bright-coloured saddle cloths, fantastically embroidered, feathered, and covered with innumerable tiny bells. No provisions were taken, for a party went ahead, killed the buffalo and prepared it, made the camp, lit the great fires in the snow and slung the wigwam for the bride and groom. Battles with the wolf-packs, violence, and sudden death and glory of sunbathed untracked spaces—only seventy-five years ago.
The “Life of Father Lacombe” by Katherine Hughes give graphic pictures of those days. The missionary was brought to Fort Edmonton in 1852 by John Rowand and became a force in the community. The very names of his friends and associates, Rowand and Christie, Sir Sandord Fleming, Chief Engineer of the construction of the C.P.R., Sir William Van Horne [page 185] and Lord Strathcona, call up the history and the great enterprises that they so successfully staged.
Stories of the early West contained in the lives of the Factors are not only heroic but splendidly picturesque. There was Chief Factor Christie, for instance, who in 1873 travelled over two thousand miles by dog team from Fort Simpson on the Mackenzie River to attend the first meeting at Fort Garry of the North-West Council, the Government of the Territories. His French half-breed driver made the whole journey with him on snow-shoes. The life of Richard G. Haristy, the next to the last Chief Factor of Edmonton, is also closely associated with the place. The Hardisty family were bound up with the Hudson’s Bay Company. A sister of Richard married Donald Smith, who afterwards became Lord Strathcona, and his wife, greatly beloved in Edmonton, was the daughter of the pioneer missionary, the Rev. George McDougall. For twenty years the hospitality of the Hardistys in the big house in the centre of the quadrangle, was famous the North-West over. The Christies, also, are a living link with the past, and are still connected with the Hudson’s Bay Company.
After the Factors, and following in the wake of the H.B.C., came the independent fur trader, the prospector [page 186] and the boot-legger. The escapades of these gentlemen drew the attention of the Dominion Government to the need of police protection in the West, and so came the formation of the Royal North-West Mounted Police in 1874,—the next step in civilization.
Followed the settler trekking across the plains with his ox-carts—and suddenly, almost miraculously, the modern Edmonton arose. The French and Scotch traders sent for their families, the great hope of the transcontinental railways became a certainty, and the epic of the iron rails began. In 1885, when the Riel rebellion showed the strength and the weakness of [page 187] the half-breed, the little settlement greatly augmented its numbers by an influx of refugees. That same year the Canadian Pacific was completed, and with the dawn of the twentieth century, Edmonton was a town of three thousand people. Three years after a branch line was made to connect her with the great road, she was a city; and when, in 1905, the Province of Alberta was formed, she found herself its capital. In 1921, her population numbered over sixty thousand.
To-day there is a hardy young city of wide streets, splendid houses, hospitals, schools, churches, colleges, shops and warehouses, hotels and parks.
But the painted past lingers, the primal colours are not quite blurred, and when one least expects it comes a vibrant note from the past.
Until recently the old H. B. Fort huddled up against the new Parliament Buildings. Still one may ‘trade’ at the Hudson’s Bay Store—huge, departmental, modern.
Of late, on a summer noon, I was busy there buying French blouses. Along the crowded aisles came many an Indian, civilized and sometimes uncivilized—down from the north country. You feel the presence of the Great North in Edmonton. These people, with their quiet-smiling, quiet-frowning faces, connect one instantly with the stories out of the past that may be deciphered [page 188] from the stained glass windows on the stair-landings, which deal with various aspects of early days.
A pity to destroy such a link with the past as the old wooden building up against the Parliament Buildings! Mrs. Arthur Murphy, the well-known writer, “Janey Canuck,” who is Magistrate Emily Murphy of the Juvenile Court in and for the Province of Alberta as well as the author of books which have depicted the life of the country she loves to many readers, is one of the few Canadians who realize the importance of old landmarks. She has gathered up interesting data regarding the Factors of the days of the Fort.
Pictures of Edmonton to-day call to my mind a panorama of broad flowing river and small glimmering woods, of wide imposing streets, modern shops and houses, ugly scattered shacks, crowds of foreigners, waste spaces and vast impending energies. But always I go back in mind to river banks and hidden loveliness.
I remember an English bungalow with a wonderful view of leafy ravine, tea on a wide verandah, a Japanese servant, Spode cups.
Other pictures. That vast tract of poplar bushland situated only some ten blocks from the centre of the city, vacant and pulseless, though surrounded on four sides by scattered population. A great paved [page 189] roadway, like a crooked smile, runs across the face of it. Along the northern bank is a railway track over which an occasional train may be seen meandering gingerly. Above this again many bleary basements defacing the beautiful bank. The flat itself a thing of gently rolling surface and timbered edge. Here is the golfer in his white flannels. Here is many a cool spot where the grass encroaches on the poplar bluff. Higher up, if one wishes to explore farther afield, there are leafy dells which nevertheless give sight of the busy thoroughfare of the great bridge, that overleaps the valley at its eastern end, with its never ceasing coming and going. Opposite, on the southern bank, stands the nucleus of a great University. And again there is the river vista, this time superb, where the Saskatchewan makes a wide enchanting turn—and there, too, the little whispering woods.
The Edmonton of to-day, many-hued and magnetic, calls to the tribes and peoples of the earth with the sparkling lure of youth and riches. But in the Edmonton of yesterday rang the call that carries an age-old lure. In it there was a note of danger which is the preface to curiosity and adventure. |
Our adventure was not with danger but with the unknown, [page 190] when for the first time we explored a bit of Jasper Park, the great National Reserve which lies two hundred miles west of Edmonton and contains at least five thousand square miles of mountain, stream and valley. It was untraversed wilderness, even for western Canadians, before the coming of the railroad about 1909.
Here lies the Yellowhead Pass, dividing line between Alberta and British Columbia, and the watershed that sends its streams in one direction to the Pacific and in the other to the Arctic ocean. In Canada we have a way of naming places after first comers. Jasper Dawes will go down the ages because he came as early as 1817 and made a friend of the Indians. He was, in fact, in charge of the Hudson’s Bay Trading Post then established in this region, and it is from his shock of yellow hair that the Pass gets its name. The French of it, Tête Jaune, goes to a valley fifty miles beyond the summit, and to an Indian village near which Jasper established a Cache, later to become a construction camp.
We journeyed to this camp, passing the Divide where the Fraser River begins its thousand-mile run to the Pacific, with good-bye to the little Miette, a charming stream that gives a Japanese impression of the deep blue shadows of mountains reflected on its surface. [page 191]
In the vast solitude one mountain peak after another arises. First the Pyramid and Miette Moutains, pale blue with snow. Then as you climb the Divide, with only the low, snowless Rainbow Mountains between, you look for tidings of the white summit, 13,700 feet high, that lies beyond—Mount Robson. Presently it seems to float gently forward, crowned with snow and often hidden by clouds, but, because of a clear June day, gleaming now soft and white above the clouds against an indigo sky.
How wonderful to be alive in this great wilderness! One of the first generation to greet the mightiest peak of the Rockies, and in the vanguard at least of untold peoples. Looking into the distance one can see them, from Europe coming Westward, from the United States north, from the Orient journeying East again—travellers in a playground of giants.
Always to be remembered was the wild effect of rafts filled with logs shooting down the turbulent Fraser, never to return. There was the shadow of Mount Geggie in still water, and Tête Jaune for a background. As we watched the swift river, the barges and the busy little camp were like bits of scaffolding clinging to the framework of a great building, things of the moment. Instinctively one’s mind reached beyond the lapse of time between one generation [page 192] and the next, and the next. Shadows fell as dim as centuries. But there was freedom stored up here for the people of the earth.
And now the people have come.
Near the village of Jasper there is a great Alpine-like Lodge, and many rustic cabins and bungalows. There is a steam heat, and running water and a fine orchestra and the coming and going of tourists.
The new playground is a kingdom as large as some European countries, and part of it is yet unmapped and unexplored. But it is still linked with those who came first, by names perpetuated in mountains, valleys and streams; David Thompson, the young Welsh geographer of the North West Company, looking for a new way to the western sea; David Douglas, Scottish botanist, with his oilcloth pack of seeds; Paul Kane, making sketches of the Indians; Father de Met, missionary to the tribes of the mountains; Sir Sanford Fleming and the first engineers in 1875, pointing out without avail the claims of this northerly route—dim figures, moving farther and farther away through a brilliant frieze of skyland mountains and valleys.
There is a new name for “le Monttagne de la Grande Traverse” near Pyramid Mountain at the point where the pack trains turned west up the Valley of the Whirlpool on the way up the Pass. This great peak with [page 193] the snow covered summit has been called Mount Edith Cavell. Against it, like white wings outspread, lies the Glacier of the Angels. [page 194] |
