On Canada's Frontier: Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of Western CanadaRalph, Julian
History
On Canada's Frontier: Sketches of History, Sport, and Adventure and of the Indians, Missionaries, Fur-traders, and Newer Settlers of Western Canada
Ralph, Julian
Hudson's Bay Company -- History; Indians of North America -- Canada; Northwest, Canadian -- Description and travel
The Nepigon River is a trout's paradise, it is so full of rapids and
saults. It is not at all a folly to fish there with a fly-rod. There are
records of very large trout at the Hudson Bay post; but you may
actually catch four-pound trout yourself, and what you catch yourself
seems to me better than any one's else records. I have spoken of the
Nepigon River as a roadway. It is one of the great trading trails to and
from the far North. At the mouth of the river, opposite the Hudson Bay
post, you will see a wreck of one of its noblest vehicles--an old York
boat, such as carry the furs and the supplies to and fro. I fancy that
Wolseley used precisely such boats to float his men to where he wanted
them in 1870. Farther along, before you reach the first portage, you
will be apt to see several of the sloops used by the natives for the
Lake Superior fishing. They are distinguished for their ugliness,
capacity, and strength; but the last two qualities are what they are
built to obtain. Of course the prettiest vehicles are the canoes. As the
bark and the labor are easily obtainable, these picturesque vessels are
very numerous; but a change is coming over their shape, and the historic
Ojibaway canoe, in which Hiawatha is supposed to have sailed into
eternity, will soon be a thing found only in pictures.
There is good sport with the rod wherever you please to go in "the
bush," or wilderness, north of the Canadian Pacific Railway, in Ontario
and the western part of Quebec. My first venture in fishing through the
ice in that region was part of a hunting experience, when the conditions
were such that hunting was out of the question, and our party feasted
upon salt pork, tea, and tomatoes during day after day. At first, fried
salt pork, taken three times a day in a hunter's camp, seems not to
deserve the harsh things that have been said and written about it. The
open-air life, the constant and tremendous exercise of hunting or
chopping wood for the fire, the novel surroundings in the forest or the
camp, all tend to make a man say as hearty a grace over salt pork as he
ever did at home before a holiday dinner. Where we were, up the Ottawa
in the Canadian wilderness, the pork was all fat, like whale blubber. At
night the cook used to tilt up a pan of it, and put some twisted
ravellings of a towel in it, and light one end, and thus produce a lamp
that would have turned Alfred the Great green with envy, besides smoking
his palace till it looked as venerable as Westminster Abbey does now. I
ate my share seasoned with the comments of Mr. Frederic Remington, the
artist, who asserted that he was never without it on his hunting trips,
that it was pure carbonaceous food, that it fastened itself to one's
ribs like a true friend, and that no man could freeze to death in the
same country with this astonishing provender. We had canned tomatoes and
baker's bread and plenty of tea, with salt pork as the _pièce de
résistance_ at every meal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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