The Cariboo Trail by Agnes C. Laut

Author:Agnes C. Laut
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-771510-34-9
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Published: 2013-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

It was the 21st of July when the travellers came out on the high banks of the North Saskatchewan, flowing broad and swift, opposite Fort Edmonton. There had been floods and all the company’s rafts had been carried away. But the ox-carts were poled across by means of a big York boat; and the travellers were welcomed inside the fort.

The arrival of the Overlanders is remembered at Edmonton by some old-timers even to this day. Salvoes of welcome were fired from the fort cannon by a half-breed shooting his musket into the touchhole of the big gun. Concerts were given, with bagpipes, concertinas, flutes, drums, and fiddles, in honour of the far-travellers. Pemmican bags were replenished from the company’s stores.

Miners often uttered loud complaints against the charges made by the fur-traders for provisions, forgetting what it cost to pack these provisions in by dog-train and canoe. If the Hudson’s Bay officials at Fort Garry and Edmonton had withheld their help, the Overlanders would have perished before they reached the Rockies. Though the miner did everything to destroy the fur trade—started fires which ravaged the hunter’s forest haunts, put up saloons which demoralized the Indians, built wagon-roads where aforetime wandered only the shy creatures of the wilds—though the miner heralded the doom of the fur trade—yet with an unvarying courtesy, from Fort Garry to the Rockies, the Hudson’s Bay men helped the Overlanders.

The majority of the travellers now changed oxen and carts for pack-horses and travois, contrivances consisting of two poles, within which the horses were attached, and a rude sledge. A few continued with oxen, and these oxen were to save their lives in the mountains.

The farther the Overlanders now plunged into the wilderness, the more they were pestered by the husky-dogs that roamed in howling hordes round the outskirts of the forts. The story is told of several prospectors of this time, who slept soundly in their tent after a day’s exhausting tramp, and awoke to find that their boots, bacon, rope, and clothes had been devoured by the ravenous dogs. They asked the trader’s permission to sleep inside the fort.

‘Why?’ asked the amused trader. ‘Why, now, when the huskies have chewed all you own but your instruments? You are locking the stable door after your horse has been stolen.’

‘No,’ answered the prospectors. ‘If those husky-dogs last night could devour all our camp kit without disturbing us, to-night they might swallow us before we’d waken.’

The next pause was at St Albert, one of Father Lacombe’s missions. What surprised the Overlanders as they advanced was the amazing fertility of the soil. At Fort Garry, at Pitt, at Edmonton, at St Albert, at St Ann, they saw great fields of wheat, barley, and potatoes. Afterwards many who failed in the mines drifted back to the plains and became farmers. The same thing had happened in California, and was repeated at a later day in the rush to the Klondike. Great seams of coal, too, were seen projecting from the banks of the Saskatchewan.

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