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Finding Cabins:
Stories from the Horton and Nahanni Rivers and
George Douglas’s Northcote Farm
“I did not realize that the old grave that stood among the brambles at the foot of our farm was history.”
— Stephen Leacock
Claude Lévi-Strauss dismissed travel books as “grocery lists and lost dog stories.” I’m not so big on that one, but I can understand it. He also said, “If lions could speak, we wouldn’t understand them anyway.”[1] I love that one. In many ways, this is a travel book, but more to do with historical places to visit. I do not dwell on the travel but rather on the places. Cabins are central to this. And if some of the inhabitants could talk to us now of their time, we might struggle to understand. That is the challenge and fun in reading Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Raymond Patterson, and George Douglas. There are life lessons in their successful travels and in the places where they waited out a winter or that they called home for a time. The tales from these cabins in the bush showcase learning and comfort, misery and despair.
The Horton River flows north from Horton Lake, northwest of Great Bear Lake, to the Arctic coast six hundred kilometres north. It has a short canyon section midway along, but otherwise gently winds its way deep in an ever-changing charmed valley. Most notable are the crystal clear waters, the abundant wildlife (muskox, grizzles, and caribou in small groupings), and the hiking options at seemingly every bend in the river.
The Nahanni River flows southeast from the Moose Ponds to the Liard River and then to the Mackenzie River. It has four main canyon sections below Virginia Falls and rocks ‘n rolls most of its length in a dramatic river valley. Most notably, this scenery is punctuated by Virginia Falls. For us, there was a general lack of wildlife encounters and select hiking from inflowing rivers and streams. Its waters are generally murky.
Northcote farm was the property of George Douglas (1875–1963). It was later owned by the Gastle family of Lakefield, Ontario, and now is in the hands of Lakefield College. Likely Samuel de Champlain portaged on the property to “Back Bay” en route from Huronia to Lake Ontario. It is on the Trent-Severn waterway just south of Young’s Point and Stoney Lake, a waterway that has seen canoe travel for centuries. Today students at Lakefield College School regularly paddle up to the farm for overnight canoe trips. As a boy at Lakefield, I likely cross-country skied on the property more than a few times.
So, why link these places together here? Well, stories! Travel stories, but not the stuff of grocery lists. And if the characters taking us back into our northern Euro-Canadian history could speak today, one is left to wonder, would we understand them anyway? That is one of the intriguing qualities of travel books about which Lévi-Strauss might be misguided. Stefansson on the Horton, Patterson and Faille on the Nahanni, and Douglas of Coppermine fame at Northcote all move as far beyond “grocery lists and lost dog stories” into the realm of inquiring minds and the zest for exploration.[2] It is a noble challenge to capture some of their passion in one’s present travels.
Joss Haiblen and David Taylor examining Stefansson’s Horton River cabin remains.
On the Horton in 2012, our group sought out Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s cabin and other related stories from the land, both geological and historical. On the Nahanni, family and friends hunted out Raymond Patterson’s and Alberta Faille’s cabins and other related stories. In both cases, the stories were tangible in the recorded history, but the evidence on the land was scant. This combines to make the physical exploration most rewarding. Another reason to link these two rivers, in my mind, from the experiences had on each is the outward lack of adventure. Both these two canoe trips were event-free. That is, if an “event” is an adventure story of a scary grizzly attack, a canoe dumping in big water, or a dynamic weather event influencing the overall mood and flow of the travel. I’m okay with that. I don’t need an adventure. On the Horton River, we had some grizzly encounters and the need for bear bangers, but with no consequence other than a feeling of great privilege to have had the experience. We had some river rapid running decisions and some rainstorm soakings and extreme heat to contend with, but no mishaps. Same for the Nahanni without the grizzlies. Not much to tell folks back home, you might be thinking. Herein lies the rub; when nothing goes wrong and nothing dramatic unfolds, then, for some, the trip might feel “adventureless.” For some, mediocrity might even be the vibe of the trip, shrouding the experience both during and after. When friends back home ask for adventure stories, you feel you are letting them down.
Enter Stefansson to the rescue:
My favourite thesis is that an adventure is a sign of incompetence. Few have disputed the Greek, or whoever it was, that said, “blessed the country whose history is uninteresting,” and no one … will dispute the statement that “blessed is the exploring expedition the story of which is monotonous.” If everything is well managed, if there are no miscalculations or mistakes, then the things 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