that happen are only the things you expected to happen, and in which you are ready and with which you can therefore deal … By keeping steadily in view the two maxims, “Better be safe than sorry” and “Do in Rome as the Romans do,” Dr. Anderson and I managed to conduct for nearly five years a satisfactorily monotonous expedition.[3]
I had read Stefansson for insight about the Horton River. But what I got were gems of philosophy. Here’s to monotonous expeditions. Sorry, few adventure stories on the Horton for me in 2012, just peace and contentment and the joys of travel with good friends.
Usually folks read travel literature for insights into the route to be travelled. Perhaps the traveller is the focus; perhaps the story is the focus. But often the lasting gem is a philosophical insight that catches readers off guard and stays with them through the rest of their own travels. So, to the Horton, to Stefansson’s Horton.
John Lentz describes finding Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Rudolph Anderson’s cabin on Coal Creek about one kilometre off the Horton River — though the more important route for them was the land link to their Langton Bay base on the Arctic Coast. Lentz describes a wooded area just north of Coal Creek. Should be easy to find, we thought. There was even a picture in the Che-Mun issue showing a bit of a slope behind the cabin. A clue.[4]
The Stefansson-Anderson expedition of 1908–1912 had the following intention: to live with the Inuit and with animal life. Stefansson was the ethnologist, Anderson the biologist. When at the Coal Creek cabin, Stefansson was living the dream. He was content to record his Inuit companions’ stories and further develop his language skills. Anderson had no facility with the Inuit language and therefore travelled widely from the Coal Creek cabin.
Our thesis was this: that we were not looking for any waste places, but for land occupied by human beings; if those human beings were there at all, they must be Eskimo supporting themselves by the most primitive implements of the chase; and it seemed clear that if Eskimo could live there, armed as they must be with bows and arrows, and not only live there but bring up their children and take care of their aged, then surely we, armed with modern rifles, would be able to live in that sort of country as long as we pleased and to go about in it as we liked. Of course the thesis was bound to prove out.[5]
This passage certainly highlights the different times of 1911 for Arctic travellers.
Stefansson, in My Life with the Eskimos (1913), describes the cabin, which was “thirty or so miles to Langton Bay”:
… we all put in two days in building a house frame and sodding it over roughly. The sodding was so poorly done that we later on had to do it all over again. The building was a simple affair. There were a pair of vertical posts about twenty feet apart and nine feet high, across the tops of which a ridgepole was laid. An essential feature of the walls was that they were not vertical, but sloped in, so that earth, no matter how carelessly it was thrown against the house, would fit in and not cave away as commonly happens when you try to build vertical walled houses in white men’s fashion.[6]
From the Horton, we discussed the logic of this particular geography and a winter cabin location. André-François Bourbeau was our leader in this discussion. André is an outdoor survival educator. It’s safe to say he sees the land differently than I do at times, and here his insight was invaluable. We discussed a distant hill edge spur that would offer easy access onto the plateau to the north. This would facilitate entry to the hunting grounds on a more “long vista” terrain. The cabin must be close to Coal Creek, must be in a well-wooded area, and must be sheltered from the exposed Horton River corridor yet close to the same for easy travel. Finally, the cabin site should be flat and perhaps close to a wooden downhill lie to drop trees easily.
In the hot sun, it seemed like a long hunt at the end of a full day of canoe tripping. Energy was waning, and the group had divided into two when André and others, staying true to the original assertion, found the cabin remains close to that same dominant spur we had seen from the Horton. The search was made harder by the fact that the Coal Creek watercourse was completely dry and quite braided with troughs in mid-August.
As expected, we first saw marks and axe cuts in what proved to be close proximity to roof remains (five to seven logs lashed together). These markings were covered in lichen, showing their age. There were no walls evident. The sod dominant indented wood walls were not evident. No door, no windows. This was a one-season winter throw-up tilt.
Such a quest is an exciting bonus to any canoe trip. The Horton is not a significant historical travel route given its proximity to the Mackenzie to the west. Stefansson sledded on the Horton River from Dease Bay on Great Bear Lake in December 1910, returning to Coal Creek. He travelled in an interesting circle via boat and sled from Coal Creek: from Langton Bay east to Coronation Gulf onto the Coppermine and then to Great Bear Lake via the Dease River, returning to the coast again on the Horton. And we thought our six hundred kilometres of river tripping was a long route. Visiting Stefansson’s cabin on Coal Creek opened the door to his travels. We had something tangible to connect to. We had some passages from Stefansson on our trip, but I, for one, began reading his book in earnest following our trip. And a piece of the Arctic and another time lingers in one’s mind and remains a little closer to one’s consciousness.
Camped across from Whaleman Lake on an open plateau on the river, one might wonder why this curious name was chosen. Whalemen (men who hunted whales) walked south from Langton Bay on the Arctic coast, just as Stefansson and Anderson had done, to corral caribou for wintering-over food supplies. I had marked the site on my maps where the decayed remains of the corral and the funnelling wooden walls can still be seen. Problem was, I was about two to four kilometres downstream of the correct location. I figured all this out once the trip was over. Sometimes, that’s the way it goes. I even remember, in hindsight, noticing the flattening of the river shore and thinking it was odd for this river. I had noticed the caribou corral site but hadn’t realized it. Earlier we had seen a herd of muskox at a similarly unusual flattish shoreline. Oh well, something exciting for a return trip, perhaps. That imaginative spark of yearly groups of whalemen remains vague in my mind without the tangible evidence on the land that we were to have at Coal Creek in about ten days’ time.
I paddled the Nahanni River in the summer of 2005 with family members and friends Sean Collins and Diane Gribbin. The trip was from Rabbitkettle Lake to Nahanni Butte. We were twenty-four days on the water, offering ample time for hiking.
Heritage on this river is synonymous with Raymond M. Patterson’s 1954 book, The Dangerous River.[7] Patterson tells of his 1929–30 travels. But he also fuels the many stories that have made the Nahanni the dark river of fear. Added to this were sad Klondike Gold Rush stories. Few made it this way to the Yukon gold fields near Dawson in the late 1890s. Prospecting stories in the 1920s, too, seem to end badly, creating place names such as Deadman’s Valley and Headless Creek. I wondered what I could possibly add to Patterson’s rich treatment and descriptive prose of the river.
Then there was the surge of modern travellers gainfully serviced by regular bush flights and commercial operators (mainly Nahanni River Adventures and Black Feather). Books, articles, conservation, and park (and now park extension) initiatives all add to the coverage of this noble and, frankly, not so dark and fearful river. Again, what could I add? But once on the trail, Patterson’s The Dangerous River seemed to sing out to us. Quotes from my spring read in preparation punctuated the geography of Virginia Falls and the Hot Springs. Song verses rang out as the stories told came alive on the trail, and the chorus was the fast flowing downstream in the mountainous, canyon-filled river. This is a well-travelled river, Headless Creek be damned. More than once I caught myself borrowing the chorus from other river songs as I sang my way down the river: “and we go on and on, watching the river run.”
First off, I’m one of the rats to whom Raymond Patterson’s partner referred. In agreeing to join Patterson, Gordon Matthews is quoted as saying, “Any country, where the Indians
