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Peter Pond Trip

Report #1
Montreal, Saskatoon, Missinipe
July 3-5, 2001

Hi, all!

Trip: so far, so good. Monday night I had a lovely visit during a power outage in Bolton, VT with my nephew Andy, his wife Jackie, 2-year-old Justin, and brand-new little Mira. Tuesday I drove to Montreal, where my hosts Raj and Sudesh Singh took me to the far west end of the island of Montreal to the town of Ste.-Anne-de-Bellevue, where we found the church of that name and they used their excellent French to convince someone to come open it for us. Built in 1685, it was an important stop for fur traders and voyageurs. Peter Pond describes himself and others going there and depositing coins with the hope of being protected by the saint on their long canoe voyages into the wild.

The Singhs took me to lunch at a lovely restaurant along some locks by the St. Lawrence. I drove Raj to his office at the U. of Montreal, where he teaches linguistics (I met him in the late 60's when we were both studying at Brown), then headed for the Fur Trade National Historic Site in Lachine. During the fur trade days, goods from England (guns, ammo, iron pots, yard goods, beads, ribbons) and the West Indies (rum) to be traded in the northwest for furs came up the St. Lawrence as far as ships could go -- they were stopped by the Lachine Rapids (now plied by big, flat tourist-trade jetboats, on which our field-tripping 8th graders enjoy being pounded and drenched by the waves). The trade gear was trucked by wagon along the Montreal side of the river, then loaded into canoes at the top of the Lachine rapids, which is where the historic site stands today. The existing stone building was erected in 1803, after Peter Pond's years in the North; but from the time he first started trading in the Detroit area in the 1760's, he set out from the same spot. The exhibit is excellent; colored lights on big wall maps show the posts and routes used by the London-based Hudson's Bay Company and the newer but fast-growing company Peter Pond helped found, the North West Company. After fierce, sometimes bloody competition, the two merged in 1821, keeping the HBC name.

My dinner was the fanciest (four stars!) I've had in decades. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel's Beaver Club Restaurant is named after a club of which Peter Pond was an early (maybe charter?) member. Membership was open only to traders macho enough to have spent a winter in the Northwest, and sociable enough (i.e. able to drink long and hard) to get voted in unanimously by the existing members. Every two weeks during the winter, when ice shut down the trade routes, these guys got together at various places in Montreal to eat and drink. They passed an Indian peace pipe around, made at least the required five toasts, bragged about their adventures, and caroused till the wee hours.

At the entrance to the conservatively elegant restaurant done in dark wood, brass and brocade, there's a case displaying members' plates, a number of Indian peace pipes, and a replica of the membership book. Peter Pond's name is penned right there on the front page.

The meal was splendid -- first they bring you (complimentary) a tiny stemware glass of puried pear garnished with minute melon balls and little crumbs of some kind of smoked meat. Oh, and breads and rolls of five or six kinds arrived, including one that was indistinguishable from chocolate cake. I ordered really rich stuff: warm pat' du canard (duck) on a bed of rhubarb compote with maple caramel (but of course you will wish the [unintelligible] with that, Madame? It is a very sweet light wine and is delicious with the pat']. Sure. Found out later it was $13 Canadian for the glass. Both were wonderful. Then there was a buttery cream of morel soup with chunks of pate de foie gras. Then lamb chops in a thyme sauce over a heap of slender green beans, still with a delicate crunch to them, garnished with a few artistically placed roasted vegetables: garlic cloves, tiny onions, slices of potato. I grew fearful for my stomach's well being, but forged ahead with the merlot as well.

When choosing dessert, I inquired about both a fresh strawberry custard pastry and multi-berry charlotte and settled on the latter. But they (I mean 'they' -- I lost track of the guys scurrying around) brought me both! With the coffee arrives a silver tray with six bowls containing: some sparkly kind of white sugar lumps; brown sugar lumps; gem-like crystals of dark sugar; curls of shaved mild sweet chocolate; cream in a pitcher; and a big mound of WHIPPED cream. I used them all.

This is the sort of place that tempts you to count the various pieces of china and silver delivered and whisked away again. I got into the high twenties and lost track. So -- stuffed. Done. Actually, no -- then arrived a silver pedestal-tray (do not know the proper term) with fourteen different elegant cookies. I ate one -- twin puffs with apricot jam between. And a silver bowl of frosted grapes. So -- quite a feast, and nearly three hours of luxuriating in it. As I staggered out, my main waiter appeared and insisted I choose a chocolate from several basketsful 'made here in the hotel' -- thin milk and dark medallions with La Reine Elizabeth stamped on them, plus chocolate-dipped candied orange peel. I really didn't want any, but of course obliged. He then presented me with a little box of them. (Which I'm just now enjoying on the plane as I type.)

I picked up Raj at an Indian restaurant where he'd been spending time with a friend, and back we went to their house, where I chatted late with Sudesh. What a great start to my trip!

Got a cab at 5 am for my flight, which changed in Toronto. Then -- pleasant surprise I hadn't thought to expect -- we flew just about over the route the fur traders paddled! I didn't realize that until the clouds broke and I could see (I think) the place where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan join. Mackinac Island was a big fur-trade reconnoitering-spot. I could look down and see pretty much the same route that Peter Pond took many a time -- except that (having sent his trading goods by bigger boat through Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Michigan), he arrived at Mackinac by the more direct canoe route from Montreal up the St. Lawrence, up the Ottawa River, portaging across the height of land to a river flowing into Lake Huron's North Bay, then to Mackinac. Our route then passed across the peninsula of northern Michigan, across the lower bay of Lake Superior, that skinny point jutting northeast from Upper Michigan, and the rest of Lake Superior -- over the island near Thunder Bay. The vast turquoise lake was rimmed with white shores and dark forests. I thought about the traders in their 25' canoes -- what great distances they paddled those heavy canoes, sixteen hours a day! -- hugging the long shoreline for safety but sometimes on a calm day tempted to cut across the open water -- and a sudden wild storm would be the end of them.

It clouded up as we flew along the U.S. border and across the Quetico-Superior wilderness, where my friend Helen Smiler and I had canoed for a week in the sixties and where I'd gone fifteen years later with Kathy Shepherd and some of her women relatives and friends. I'd wondered then if my explorer-relative had come through there, and undoubtedly he did on the route from Lake Superior up through Rain Lake and eventually Lake Winnipeg, the South Saskatchewan River, the Sturgeon Weir, over Frog Portage into the Churchill River system and Lake La Ronge, where I'm headed today (Thursday) as I sit in the airport typing.

But back to Wednesday. Saskatoon, pop. about a quarter million, is towards the northern end of Saskatchewan's broad prairie, and from the air you see a wide grid of perfectly straight roads between huge rectangles of dark green and a few bright yellow.

But taking a long cab ride north from town, you come to a silent, broad stretch of natural brown-and-greygreen prairie where sits a beautiful, angular stone-and-brick building -- the Wanaskewan Heritage Park. Along the entrance walk are life-sized bronze statues of galloping buffalo being herded between stone cairns by Cree women and children waving sticks and hides -- this is the way the hunters used to stampede the thundering beasts over cliffs. The exhibit inside showed the details of their nomadic hunting and gathering lives -- tipis made of buffalo skins, bows and backrests and baskets made of willow, stone arrow- and spearheads, wooden flutes and toys, blankets and clothing of hides of buffalo and deer, poplar travois frames dragged by dogs, and later horses, when it came time to move on. Interactive computer screens prompt visitors to choose topics and guess at answers. Above the walls, stuffed buffaloes are about to plunge down a cliff. The little restaurant serves hamburgers as well as buffalo stew. At two, people gathered in the hot dry sun in an amphitheater looking across the prairie and watched a young Cree in full regalia he'd beaded himself demonstrate traditional and modern dances. While he wove and spun and dipped and soared, his eagle feathers tossing, his feet got hot pounding on the board floor which the staff hadn't had time to wet down as they usually do. He said persevering, dancing anyway, was part of his Indian discipline. He was soft-spoken, reverent, proud. After telling a golf joke, of all things, he made a speech against drugs and alcohol, but mainly full of gratitude for each day. He was cool.

I went to talk to a beaming old Cree storyteller who was finished for the day but sat in a white canvas tipi bribing her grandchildren to write stories. She was raised on a reserve where Indian kids were forced to attend boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak Cree. She said she'd heard of Peter Pond; there's a reserve named after him.

Trails meander down into a wash full of willowy shrubs, but I was short on time so just walked around on the prairie a little. There are bird and insect sounds, but since there's nothing for them to bounce against they're soaked up by the universe as though by cotton. It's an awesome feeling.

I bought a book called Sayings of the Elders. Some good ones:

Our people respected the Creator's beings, and as a result, on our long history of dominance on this continent, none of the animals we hunted ever became extinct. (Chief John Snow, Wesley Band, Stoney Nation)

I suppose I am not as American as those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, but we met them at the dock when they landed. (Will Rogers, Cherokee Nation)

(referring to tipis): Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. (Chief Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk), Sioux Nation)

It just seems to a lot of Indians that this continent was a lot better off when we were running it. (Vine Deloria, Jr., Nakota Sioux Nation)

In my experience of Indian decision-making, the important thing is to hear the other guy -- have respect for the way he sees it. (Wilfred Pelletier, Ojibway Nation)

There's too much money today, too many choices, and no thankfulness. (Louise Big Plume, Tsuu T'ina (Sarcee) Nation)

Another long taxi ride through traffic down an unpretty street to a bike shop, where they rented me a terrific 18-speed cheap. Only then did I find the lovely part of the city -- which is most of it. A park with bike paths and benches runs for miles all along the South Saskatchewan River, and the residential streets look southern, like Savannah -- and then I realized why. They're tunnels of deep shade -- thousands of elm trees. Apparently Dutch Elm Disease is only now making its slow, dreaded march from the southern part of the province. The main street of the business/tourist district has blocked-off streets, lots of trees and benches, and tables outside. I found a lovely outdoor spot serving Greek food. The sun was still golden on the turrets and spires of the most elegant hotel at 9:00 when I got in line to buy a maple shake from a popular double-decker bus turned ice cream shop. A young woman was playing a fiddle for tips -- Rankin family songs, contradance tunes. I planned to request Ashokan Farewell, currently my favorite song -- and there it was before I could ask, so lovely, wafting out among lovers and families enjoying the balmy evening. She knows a woman who taught last year up north at La Loche, where Peter Pond and his crew started their long portage over to the Clearwater River. Her friend said the Indians are very poor, and that their houses are just boxes plopped there with no effort to make their surroundings pretty, yet the people do fancy themselves themselves up when they go out.

Biking back to my hotel, I ended up having to find my way through and around a bunch of warehouses and anonymous industrial establishments, but since it was still light at 10 I felt safe enough. Next morning I slept late, the longest sleep in a long time, found a great breakfast place, shopped for books, turned in the bike, and got the plane to La Ronge, a big 10-seater, along with three other passengers. I had my Saskatchewan road map on my lap, so could follow our route up through the end of the cropland and onto the forested Canadian Shield -- a vast slab of granite that stretches all the way from Labrador. The last glacier scoured it clean, and only a thin mantle of soil has built up since. We flew along the edge of St. Albert Provincial Park with silver lakes shimmering in their thick carpet of densely-packed spines of black spruce and arrived at Lake La Ronge, studded with a thousand dark islands.

Theresa Dreidiger, whose husband Ric I'd been e-mailing since last August about this trip, was waiting for me, smiling and comfortable-looking. She and her two blond kids met me and we headed north about 35 miles to their headquarters in Missinipe. We passed exactly zero residences until maybe halfway, when we got off the road and went through the village of Wadin Bay, near the island on which Peter Pond is alleged to have committed his second murder. Theresa wanted to show me a plaque of some sort there, but it was missing from its stone cairn. I took a picture anyway. Along the way I learned a lot about the local Indian bands from Theresa, who among other things is a family therapist. She says the people native to the north forests, mostly woodland Cree, were 'civilized' much earlier than the plains Cree, since white missionaries and then settlers came to the watery northern part in the 1700's after the fur trade got under way. Subsistence is very hard here -- the trapping that once sustained these people has dwindled, largely through the efforts of environmentalists. Which is ironic, since trapping is the only way the Indians can live their traditional lifestyle of 'treading lightly upon the land,' which environmentalists say they advocate. But Theresa says even if they could make good money at it, most Indians who've given up trapping wouldn't go back -- it's too hard a life. Now lots of them favor more logging here so they can finally have jobs -- but the topsoil is extremely thin, and the trees grow very slowly. That explains why the same kinds as in northern Vermont -- black spruce, birch, aspen, tamarack -- have a narrower, denser growing habit here than our do; the branches don't grow as long, and the trunk grows fewer inches each season.

Theresa says the story of the First Nations people here is like that of the Ontario people in the Rupert Ross book I read last winter -- about midcentury, the Canadian government built schools for the 'bands,' as the Indian communities are called, and required people to send their kids -- or the kids would be taken away. So people had to come together in one place and abandon their necessarily farflung trap lines, and live in little houses the government built them close together in rows. After living successfully off the land for thousands of years, they no longer had a way to earn a living, so the government gave them relief checks and brought them TV -- so their lives became suddenly meaningless and they started to drink and their kids copied the trash they saw on television -- even gang violence. Theresa says the biggest division among the Cree around here are between them that drink and them that don't. She says the tragedies in these people's lives are unbelievable.

We got to the little town of Missinipe (Miss - uh - NIP - ee), which is a dirt-road circle with seasonal and permanent homes -- some four hundred people are here in the summers, mostly to fish on Otter Lake, which is lovely and apparently uninhabited except for this village. It was nice to meet Ric after all those emails. He's a sturdy, genial guy, built like a great paddler, with a thick trimmed beard showing only a touch of gray. He's got boundless energy, zipping around from house to office and cabins on a rattly bike. He installed me in a log cabin big enough for four and loaded me with books about the history of the area. They invited me to the barbecue they were giving for a couple who'd been out fishing with one of their guides for three days -- usually you don't get your barbecue till you come back, but I lucked out. I had nothing to share except a box of maple candy, which they loved (no maple trees this far north). Their guide was Kevin, who will be the guide for both the 3-day whitewater clinic starting the next day and the Clearwater Trip next week. Four of us were to get our gear packed by 8:30 the next morning, when we'd be driven to a nearby lake on the Churchill River, then paddle a couple of hours with one short portage and camp two nights on an island. We'd get our lessons on various parts of the river nearby. I walked around town, checked out the lake, and at nearly ten (the village store's open till then) bought eggs to cook for breakfast. While I was packing my stuff in the blue plastic barrel they give you to keep your stuff dry, the sun went down. I stayed up late figuring out what to take (no threat of cold weather -- it's been really hot here!), and I was wired about the clinic, but slept just fine.

* * *

That night was Thursday, July 5. Since then I've been on the 3-day whitewater clinic north of here, where we camped on a lovely island, and then back here at Ric's lazing around and reading, going off by myself by canoe -- a real vacation. Just now getting around to e-mailing Report #1; will write about the clinic next time. I hope you're all well and happy and having a wonderful summer!

Judy