a pistol is well worth seeing before the rats get at it.”[8] I hope Matthews and Patterson might come to accept us modern rats, who fly into the country generally, not to mention flying into the river proper. Toronto to Yellowknife in one day isn’t bad. It took John Franklin and company, in 1818, over a year to cover this distance by canoe. As rats go, I think we canoeists can be okay for the river, particularly if we get involved in current park extension efforts bent on preserving the river’s watershed, not just its cosmetic corridor. When conveying his plan, at the stage when all was maps and geography and dreams, Patterson wrote, “Sometime soon I would do that [explore the South Nahanni, travelling upriver from the Liard River]. Strangely enough, I never doubted that I could, though exactly what I proposed to use in place of experience has since often puzzled me.”[9] Here is a noble learner’s enterprise in keeping with a favourite aphorism for explaining experiential education: “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”[10] Patterson is a learner. He describes tracking upriver beaches, tackling a major upstream ferry below Virginia Falls, learning to live and travel through a Nahanni winter, and interpreting the crazy Nahanni chinook-ridden weather. We, as a family, were learners too in this grand country, far removed from our Canadian Shield base. Big water, like the Figure 8 Rapids, conjured up butterflies flying in formation.[11] We only hoped the formation matched the right river run. We too did an upstream ferry below Virginia Falls to enter Fourth Canyon. It was entered with a degree of uncertainty, shared with Patterson. The weather was black clouds and blue sky. The uncertainty was invigorating. Patterson had Albert Faille, a well-established trapper and gold seeker, to literally show him the ropes — the upstream tracking ropes to be exact. We had Patterson.
Quinn Henderson starting up Scow Creek/Nahanni River.
We planned a full-day hike at Scow Creek. From our camp on the river it looked ambitious. It was. Four thousand steady feet up and down with an on-your-knees finale caused the odd family member to experience a meltdown. Later we read Patterson’s tale of Gilroy and Hay carrying heavy loads and the third partner, Angus Hall, travelling light. All had their own meltdowns with upriver paddling work: “they had had enough rivering to do them for quite a while.” The prospecting partners hiked up Scow Creek with plans to ridge walk over to the north and west and descend into the legendary Flat River gold strike (an unproven claim). The lighter-ladened Hall had his second meltdown in frustration with the slow pace of his packhorse partners. He stripped down his gear and headed off with a rifle and a mosquito net. He was never seen again — a stern lesson for the meltdown type. I can almost see him now storming off in a huff along that well-defined ridge as the others, wiser and alive another day, struggle on below with supplies. We returned to our spaghetti dinner, thankful we didn’t have to travel upstream and devote copious amounts of time to hunting. Dessert was a chocolate cake, as I remember. Not that Scow Creek needed more than its own rocky personality to be memorable, but the story does help etch the place in my mind.[12]
An aerial view of the Nahanni River from atop the Scow Creek ridge.
Photo courtesy of Sean Collins.
Patterson shares accounts of building a wintering-over cabin across the river from Prairie Creek. The Wheatsheaf Creek cabin was mostly built by Matthews while Patterson was hunting. It was named by Patterson for a friendly house that lay beyond the seas. He described an area well supplied with game and fine trees for building. The cabin was fourteen feet by thirteen feet, a bit small for two chaps. In his Nahanni Journals, Patterson writes passages such as, “Levelled off the shack floor, set up the stove and cut out the pipe hole … I put in the windows, lit the stove to air and dry the shack, made the door and did various odd jobs. The shack is going to be very warm and light — an excellent refuge.” I can only wonder at the satisfaction experienced in such tasks when one is so removed from the next external heat source. We visited the site with expectations of connecting further with Patterson’s story. Cabin foundation outlines provided difficult to discern, but to our glee we did discover an old wood stove, surely one that warmed the souls of these two northern travellers and dreamers. Such tangible discoveries added a crescendo to our river song. As I remember it, Diane found the stove half buried in the forest floor. The stove was surprisingly set back from the creek and river, I remember thinking, but this was a winter cabin. Shelter was the goal. Diane had been paddled down the Nahanni more than twenty times working as a river guide. It was fitting that she or Sean would find the stove. Later we frantically fought the current above the Splits to visit one of Albert Faille’s cabins. I most enjoyed the bench near the edge of the river, perfectly located for viewing the sunset. While Albert never did find gold over decades of travels on the Liard and Nahanni rivers up from Fort Simpson, few would argue that his experience hadn’t been golden. The riverside bench helped me secure this view. No lost dog stories here. Faille had largely been a teacher to Patterson. But Faille didn’t have the writer’s craft.
Diane Gribbin examining what just might be R.M. Patterson’s stove at Wheatsheaf Creek.
Patterson wrote: “Never in my wildest dreams had I hoped to see anything like this.”[13] First Canyon, he noted, was two days’ travel upstream, days he must have experienced as overwhelming for work and for visual pleasure, not to mention relief from the mosquitoes in the lower river flats. We floated First Canyon, stalling our progress to delight in our passing as much as possible. I imagined Patterson, Faille, and others tracking on the beaches, jumping from one side of the river to the other and then to the next beach. Hmm, what would they do here? No beach, sheer walls, fast current. Imagine the delight of their downriver run at season’s end.
Patterson wrote of his first meeting with the awe-inspiring First Canyon:
That passage through the Lower Canyon was the sort of thing that comes to a man perhaps once in a lifetime if he’s lucky. The scenery is the finest of the Nahanni and the weather was perfect — clear, with cold nights and blazing hot days. And it was all strange and new: rounding a bend was like turning a page in a book of pictures; what would one see, this time and would this next reach hold, perhaps, some insuperable obstacles? But it never did, and always one found some way around by means of some new trick with the line or the pole. We were lucky too, with weather and good company and no obstacles.[14]
I would have changed places with Patterson to spend more time in this canyon and to sing his song of exploration; I think I understand his joy. Critical for this joy is lots of time to move upstream at a pace the river dictates.
So the Nahanni song, and certainly my song here, are both well connected to Patterson’s The Dangerous River. The book provides a lasting testimony to earlier times when Nahanni travels were an up and down full-season affair. Indeed, my favourite part of The Dangerous River is the winter travel section not addressed here.
In reviewing the overall river song now, months later, I am reminded of a lyric by Ian Tamblyn concerning the Yukon River. It fits well. “Gold is gone, gold remains.”[15] Patterson and Matthews, Faille, and perhaps even the lost Angus Hall in the hills above the river, all found little to no gold, but gold remains. Patterson wrote of this gold in flowing pages and Faille’s river-edge bench at his cabin before The Splits sang the gold of countless sunsets and a dream for a good quest and zest for life. We all should be so lucky.
The Horton and the Nahanni were adventureless “monotonous” trips, one might say to link to Stefansson’s thesis. But he and I were looking for different experiences in the remote north. He wanted study and recognition, discovery and enough fame to satisfy sponsors for future trips. I wanted to enjoy the grandeur of the Arctic river, to thrive in the techniques and joys of canoe camping with good friends, and to find enough historical stories to link my “now” with an intriguing “then.”
