There were, perhaps, a dozen white residents in the
place, including the family of the Baptist Missionary and the agent of the
American Fur Company, which had removed its station hither from Mackinaw,
and built its warehouse on this river. But since the world has begun to
talk of the copper mines of Lake Superior, settlers flock into the place;
carpenters are busy in knocking up houses with all haste on the
government lands, and large warehouses have been built upon piles driven
into the shallows of the St. Mary. Five years hence, the primitive
character of the place will be altogether lost, and it will have become a
bustling Yankee town, resembling the other new settlements of the West.
Here the navigation from lake to lake is interrupted by the falls or
rapids of the river St. Mary, from which the place receives its name. The
crystalline waters of Lake Superior on their way through the channel of
this river to Lake Huron, here rush, and foam, and roar, for about three
quarters of a mile, over rocks and large stones.
Close to the rapids, with birchen-canoes moored in little inlets, is a
village of the Indians, consisting of log-cabins and round wigwams, on a
shrubby level, reserved to them by the government. The morning after our
arrival, we went through this village in search of a canoe and a couple of
Indians, to make the descent of the rapids, which is one of the first
things that a visitor to the Sault must think of. In the first wigwam that
we entered were three men and two women as drunk as men and women could
well be. The squaws were speechless and motionless, too far gone, as it
seemed, to raise either hand or foot; the men though apparently unable to
rise were noisy, and one of them, who called himself a half-breed and
spoke a few words of English, seemed disposed to quarrel. Before the next
door was a woman busy in washing, who spoke a little English. "The old
man out there," she said, in answer to our questions, "can paddle canoe,
but he is very drunk, he can not do it to-day."
"Is there nobody else," we asked, "who will take us down the falls?"
"I don't know; the Indians all drunk to-day."
"Why is that? why are they all drunk to-day?"
"Oh, the whisky," answered the woman, giving us to understand, that when
an Indian could get whisky, he got drunk as a matter of course.
By this time the man had come up, and after addressing us with the
customary "_bon jour_" manifested a curiosity to know the nature of our
errand. The woman explained it to him in English.
"Oh, messieurs, je vous servirai," said he, for he spoke Canadian French;
"I go, I go."
We told him that we doubted whether he was quite sober enough.
"Oh, messieurs, je suis parfaitement capable - first rate, first rate."
We shook him off as soon as we could, but not till after he had time to
propose that we should wait till the next day, and to utter the maxim,
"Whisky, good - too much whisky, no good."
In a log-cabin, which some half-breeds were engaged in building, we found
two men who were easily persuaded to leave their work and pilot us over
the rapids. They took one of the canoes which lay in a little inlet close
at hand, and entering it, pushed it with their long poles up the stream in
the edge of the rapids. Arriving at the head of the rapids, they took in
our party, which consisted of five, and we began the descent. At each end
of the canoe sat a half-breed, with a paddle, to guide it while the
current drew us rapidly down among the agitated waters. It was surprising
with what dexterity they kept us in the smoothest part of the water,
seeming to know the way down as well as if it had been a beaten path in
the fields.
At one time we would seem to be directly approaching a rock against which
the waves were dashing, at another to be descending into a hollow of the
waters in which our canoe would be inevitably filled, but a single stroke
of the paddle given by the man at the prow put us safely by the seeming
danger. So rapid was the descent, that almost as soon as we descried the
apparent peril, it was passed. In less than ten minutes, as it seemed to
me, we had left the roar of the rapids behind us, and were gliding over
the smooth water at their foot.
In the afternoon we engaged a half-breed and his brother to take us over
to the Canadian shore. His wife, a slender young woman with a lively
physiognomy, not easily to be distinguished from a French woman of her
class, accompanied us in the canoe with her little boy. The birch-bark
canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect
things of the kind constructed by human art. We were in one of the finest
that float on St. Mary's river, and when I looked at its delicate ribs,
mere shavings of white cedar, yet firm enough for the purpose - the thin
broad laths of the same wood with which these are inclosed, and the broad
sheets of birch-bark, impervious to water, which sheathed the outside, all
firmly sewed together by the tough slender roots of the fir-tree, and when
I considered its extreme lightness and the grace of its form, I could not
but wonder at the ingenuity of those who had invented so beautiful a
combination of ship-building and basket-work.
