It was a start, nothing more. The site they cleared has become known, for obvious reasons, as Norway House. There is no record, or evidence, that the labourers ever did clear any land at White Falls. The winter road project had not progressed as planned. Canada would become a nation before an iron bridge spanned a rapid on a future winter road. Enner Holte, the Swedish naval officer, was destined for only a short sojourn in the new land: he was killed in May 1816 at Seven Oaks in a skirmish between Hudson’s Bay Company personnel and the rival North West Company.14
Although its beginnings were inauspicious, for the next few years the population of Norway House gradually increased. Most residents were either employees of the Company or their families. When the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company put aside their differences in late 1820 and joined forces under the HBC15 banner, Norway House began to come into its own. By the summer of 1821 it had become a major distribution centre for the now extremely powerful fur-trading giant. More than forty boats16 (an estimated twenty-four York boats and thirteen canoes) came into Norway House from the west and south in June of that year, all heading for York Factory. Many more of each were to follow through July, August, and September.
Over the next decade, Norway House quickly grew in importance as a trans-shipment centre for the Company. Most of the original buildings were rebuilt in the mid 1830s and by 1843 the settlement was well established. In that year, Augustus Peers, a young HBC clerk, observed: “The fort, which is built of wood, is enclosed with high stockades. The houses are all of one storey high and being whitewashed present a very neat and pleasing appearance. In front is a green enclosure, intersected by platforms, the main one leading down to the river through the principal store.”17
Norway House would maintain that comfortable appearance for over a century.
When I returned there was no one at the workshop and the door was padlocked, so I walked part of the shoreline near the old church. I whiled away some time by photographing the scenery and the orange and green lichen decorating the rocks lining Playgreen Lake. The early afternoon sun felt comfortably warm on my bare head. Its rays heated up a granite ledge beside the water where I stood. The flat rocks looked clean and inviting. For a while I stretched out on their warmth, thinking about the coming journey; absorbing the northern sun and listening to the water lapping against the shore.
Later, I sat silently in one of the church pews and thought about the forthcoming adventure. I’m not a particularly religious man but my thoughts felt similar to prayers.
In the middle of the afternoon I went back to see if anyone was at the workshop and to offer my help. I needed to get to know the men I would soon be travelling with. Outside, a couple of the Cree rowers painted their names in red on a white background on their individual oar blades. One smiled in recognition and the other said hello. I went inside and, finding a large broom in a corner, used it to sweep out the mix of dust and shavings in order to clean the building up a bit. Other oars were all over the place; lying on trestles inside, leaning against the eaves outside, and against a fence. There were a couple as yet unpainted. With the sweeping finished and the floor tidy, I painted the remaining oars.
As an outsider, at this stage, I didn’t have an oar. Technically, I didn’t need one. Once on the river, I was only expected to help out on the benches occasionally to spell one of the others. Looking back, the afternoon was really quite boring, but a useful introduction to the crew, the remainder of whom wandered in at intervals over the next hour. As with most expeditions, the mundane tasks to be done before, during, and after the project are as important as the adventure itself.
Ken breezed in soon after I arrived. He had a few words with Charlie, nodded a greeting to me, and went out again. Later, while I was helping tidy up, I found a heavy cardboard poster tube on Ken’s desk. On close inspection I discovered it held tightly rolled maps. I pulled the thick roll out and flattened the topographical charts on the table. The up-to-date maps, on a scale of 1:250,000, covered the route we would be following all the way to York Factory. Maps are one of my passions. I studied the first part of our journey, mentally calculating the distances from one hazard to the next. There were numerous rapids and a couple of obvious long portages. I wondered how much experience the various individual members of the crew had behind them. Did they know how to read whitewater? Did they know how to run rapids safely? Had any of them ever attempted a task such as this before? Wayne came over and joined me. After a few minutes of watching me, he asked if I knew how to read the maps. I nodded and showed him the various geographical features along the Hayes River.
“That’s good,” he said and started a conversation in Cree with the others crew members. They smiled and nodded in understanding: the outsider could read maps. That was one piece of knowledge in my favour. None of them had much to say to me, however, their natural shyness being partly responsible. No one seemed to be sure what was going on or what the timetable was. It was generally felt that we would leave sometime the following day, probably in the early afternoon.
For a while I sat outside in the sun studying the maps one after the other, looking for major problems and making notes about possible portage routes. Later, having stowed the maps in their tube and replaced them on Ken’s desk, I went for a walk in the nearby cemetery. It sits on a small hill behind Ken’s expedition headquarters looking over Playgreen Lake.
Graveyards represent an important aspect of the history of a community, with the markers making for some interesting reading. I was saddened by the number of infant deaths and concerned by the number of deaths due to drowning. Was it just chance that had caused so many able-bodied men to die while out on the rivers and lakes? Or was there some other reason? Most of the Cree know how to handle a small boat with paddle and outboard motor. Most of those I met knew how to swim: at least they could splash around close to shore. I suspected the problem was simply one of a lack of understanding of basic safety procedures. Many of the Cree go out in boats without taking a floatation cushion or a life jacket with them. I never did see a Cree wear one. When it was too late to do anything about it, I found we did not have anything remotely like a life jacket on the York boat.
A little later, Ken came back and announced a meeting of the crew that evening. I was not invited; not being officially part of the team. Charlie drove me back to the motel and promised to have me picked up in the morning. With much on my mind, I spent a thoughtful evening in solitude. For a couple of hours I walked alone along the banks of the Nelson River. Happy with my own company, having many solo wilderness journeys behind me, I was well content to spend time by myself. I am used to being alone in strange places. That long walk was, as far as I knew, the last such opportunity I would have for some weeks.
Stretched out on a hard single bed after my exercise, I tried to see into the future. I knew my own temperament and had no illusions about my strengths and weaknesses. With so many years of experience to draw from, there was little possibility of encountering insurmountable physical challenges in the days ahead. The biggest problem, as I saw it, was that I knew nothing about the individuals who would spend the next few weeks around me. Even their culture was strange to me.
I had to admit to myself, my knowledge of Canada’s Native peoples was embarrassingly flimsy. I knew that our First Nations are the descendants of the diverse tribes who inhabited North America before the earliest Europeans arrived on the scene. That was, in effect, the extent of my general knowledge. My knowledge of the Cree in particular was limited to a few facts. I knew they were an Algonquian people and, as such, one of the largest Native language groups in Canada. In a mid-seventeenth-century Jesuit report, the Cree were spoken of as Kiristinon. Later they were also known as Kristinaux and other similar-sounding names by early Europeans venturing into the hinterland. Eventually the longer names became simplified to Cree.18 A goal for the future would be to learn as much as I could about my adopted country’s first inhabitants. For the moment, I needed to concentrate on the coming journey.
There were moments that evening in Norway House when I don’t think I have ever felt less confident about my role in an expedition or adventure of any kind. My background role in the York boat expedition would be