"It Cost Me Twenty Dollars,"
Said The Half-Breed, "And I Would Not Take Thirty For It."
We were ferried over the waves where they dance at the foot of the rapids.
At this place large quantities of white-fish, one of the most delicate
kinds known on our continent, are caught by the Indians, in their season,
with scoop-nets.
The whites are about to interfere with this occupation of
the Indians, and I saw the other day a seine of prodigious length
constructing, with which it is intended to sweep nearly half the river at
once. "They will take a hundred barrels a day," said an inhabitant of the
place.
On the British side, the rapids divide themselves into half a dozen noisy
brooks, which roar round little islands, and in the boiling pools of which
the speckled trout is caught with the rod and line. We landed at the
warehouses of the Hudson Bay Company, where the goods intended for the
Indian trade are deposited, and the furs brought from the northwest are
collected. They are surrounded by a massive stockade, within which lives
the agent of the Company, the walks are graveled and well-kept, and the
whole bears the marks of British solidity and precision. A quantity of
furs had been brought in the day before, but they were locked up in the
warehouse, and all was now quiet and silent. The agent was absent; a
half-breed nurse stood at the door with his child, and a Scotch servant,
apparently with nothing to do, was lounging in the court inclosed by the
stockade; in short, there was less bustle about this centre of one of the
most powerful trading-companies in the world, than about one of our
farm-houses.
Crossing the bay, at the bottom of which these buildings stand, we landed
at a Canadian village of half-breeds. Here were one or two wigwams and a
score of log-cabins, some of which we entered. In one of them we were
received with great appearance of deference by a woman of decidedly Indian
features, but light-complexioned, barefoot, with blue embroidered leggings
falling over her ankles and sweeping the floor, the only peculiarity of
Indian costume about her. The house was as clean as scouring could make
it, and her two little children, with little French physiognomies, were
fairer than many children of the European race. These people are descended
from the French voyageurs and settlers on one side; they speak Canadian
French more or less, but generally employ the Chippewa language in their
intercourse with each other.
Near at hand was a burial ground, with graves of the Indians and
half-breeds, which we entered. Some of the graves were covered with a low
roof of cedar-bark, others with a wooden box; over others was placed a
little house like a dog-kennel, except that it had no door, others were
covered with little log-cabins. One of these was of such a size that a
small Indian family would have found it amply large for their
accommodation. It is a practice among the savages to protect the graves of
the dead from the wolves, by stakes driven into the ground and meeting at
the top like the rafters of a roof; and perhaps when the Indian or
half-breed exchanged his wigwam for a log-cabin, his respect for the dead
led him to make the same improvement in the architecture of their narrow
houses. At the head of most of these monuments stood wooden crosses, for
the population here is principally Roman Catholic, some of them inscribed
with the names of the dead, not always accurately spelled.
Not far from the church stands a building, regarded by the half-breeds as
a wonder of architecture, the stone house, _la maison de pierre_, as they
call it, a large mansion built of stone by a former agent of the Northwest
or Hudson Bay Company, who lived here in a kind of grand manorial style,
with his servants and horses and hounds, and gave hospitable dinners in
those days when it was the fashion for the host to do his best to drink
his guests under the table. The old splendor of the place has departed,
its gardens are overgrown with grass, the barn has been blown down, the
kitchen in which so many grand dinners were cooked consumed by fire, and
the mansion, with its broken and patched windows, is now occupied by a
Scotch farmer of the name of Wilson.
We climbed a ridge of hills back of the house to the church of the
Episcopal Mission, built a few years ago as a place of worship for the
Chippewas, who have since been removed by the government. It stands remote
from any habitation, with three or four Indian graves near it, and we
found it filled with hay. The view from its door is uncommonly beautiful;
the broad St. Mary lying below, with its bordering villages and woody
valley, its white rapids and its rocky islands, picturesque with the
pointed summits of the fir-tree. To the northwest the sight followed the
river to the horizon, where it issued from Lake Superior, and I was told
that in clear weather one might discover, from the spot on which I stood,
the promontory of Gros Cap, which guards the outlet of that mighty lake.
The country around was smoking in a dozen places with fires in the woods.
When I returned I asked who kindled them. "It is old Tanner," said one,
"the man who murdered Schoolcraft." There is great fear here of Tanner,
who is thought to be lurking yet in the neighborhood. I was going the
other day to look at a view of the place from an eminence, reached by a
road passing through a swamp, full of larches and firs. "Are you not
afraid of Tanner?" I was asked. Mrs. Schoolcraft, since the assassination
of her husband, has come to live in the fort, which consists of barracks
protected by a high stockade.
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