Canoe Country by Roy MacGregor

Author:Roy MacGregor [MacGregor, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36143-1
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2015-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Michael Peake, the editor of Che-Mun, has long been a passionate chronicler of Les Voyageurs’ adventures and influence. By Peake’s tally, they undertook eleven major trips, beginning in 1951 with that relatively easy trip down the nearby Gatineau River, which empties into the Ottawa across from Parliament Hill. In 1952 and 1953 they went to Quetico Provincial Park in Northwestern Ontario, where Olson first joined them. They then moved on to increasingly challenging adventures. They took on the incredibly gruelling Grand Portage, a carry of nearly fourteen kilometres, during a trip to the Fort Frances area of Northwestern Ontario. They took on the challenging Churchill River that runs into Hudson Bay. Driven by Morse’s interest in old fur trade routes, they paddled through northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba and deep into the Northwest Territories. Always a new river, always new challenges.

Peake believes it was Les Voyageurs Olson was thinking about when the American naturalist wrote in Reflections from the North Country that “I know now as men accept the timeclock of the wilderness, their lives become entirely different. It is one of the great compensations of primitive experience, and when one finally reaches the point where days are governed by daylight and dark, rather than by schedules, where one eats if hungry and sleeps when tired, and becomes completely immersed in the ancient rhythms, then one begins to live.”

Following the second Quetico trip, Olson had become a permanent member of the group. The others called him “Bourgeois,” the fur trade moniker for the one leading the expedition and, appropriately, their trips invariably retraced routes that the original voyageurs and their bourgeois leaders would have travelled. In 1955, without the use of guides, they reached Cumberland House, the Hudson’s Bay Company post established on the Saskatchewan River by Samuel Hearne in 1774. Olson wrote the story of the trip in The Lonely Land.

Some of their northern trips were costly and, at times, there were complaints about the rising expense, but each summer found a half dozen or so of them setting out in pursuit of something they came to believe had value beyond money. One paddler who occasionally joined them, and who could easily afford any trip, was the young Montreal academic Pierre Trudeau, already well known to the group for his passionate writing on the joys of canoe tripping.

Blair Fraser was rather less poetic but more to the point when, as Les Voyageurs were passing through Edmonton following a northern trek, he was asked by a local newspaperman the most basic of questions: Why?

“Most people might think we are touched,” Fraser answered, “but if you work on a job where tension is the only cause of fatigue, you can’t really relax because your troubles stay with you. But if you’re paddling down some river toward dusk looking for a place to camp after a long day of rapids, portages, and fighting the wind, there is no time to worry about anything else and the tension just works out of you.”

Jean Fraser, Blair’s wife, came to appreciate what her husband meant.

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