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Updated: June 26, 2025
Fur, not glory, was the quest when the dog bells went ringing over the wintry wastes from Saskatchewan to Athabaska, across the Barren Lands, and north to the Arctic.
It was known that vast bodies of fresh water far beyond the basin of the Saskatchewan and the Columbia emptied towards the north. Hearne had revealed the existence of the Great Slave Lake, and the advance of daring fur-traders into the north had brought some knowledge of the great stream called the Peace, which rises far in the mountains of the west, and joins its waters to Lake Athabaska.
Ten thousand landslides take place every spring, contributing their tons of mud to the millions that the river is deporting to the broad catch basins called the Athabaska and Great Slave Lakes. Many a tree has happened to stand on the very crack that is the upmost limit of the slide and has in consequence been ripped in two. Many an island is wiped out and many a one made in these annual floods.
He failed to get provisions down from Rocky Mountain House; and his men, cut off by hostile savages from all help from outside posts, had literally to cut and shovel their way through Athabaska Pass while subsisting on short rations. The men built huts in the pass; some hunted, while others made snow-shoes and sleighs.
Here is a summary of what Alexander Henry, sen., wrote of the Kri or Knistino Indians of Lake Athabaska about 1770: "The men in general tattoo their bodies and arms very much. The women confine this ornamentation to the chin, having three perpendicular lines from the middle of the chin to the lip, and one or more running on each side, nearly parallel with the corner of the mouth.
Here I secured a tall half-breed, Gregoire Daniell, usually known as "Bellalise," to go with me as far as Athabaska Landing. There was no good reason why we should not leave Chipewyan in three hours. But the engineer of my tug had run across an old friend; they wanted to have a jollification, as of course the engine was "hopelessly out of order."
"It seemed to come on after a hard crossing of Lake Athabaska. We had to row all night." I asked one or two more questions, really to hide my puzzlement. "What in the world is it?" I said to myself; "all so fat and puffy." I cudgelled my brain for a clue. As I examined the hand in silence to play for time and conceal my ignorance, he went on: "What I'm afraid of is blood-poisoning.
Elsewhere I have seen great valleys, cliffs, islands, etc., held on good evidence to be the results of such and such powers formerly very active; but here on the Athabaska I saw daily evidence of these powers in full blast, ripping, tearing reconstructing, while we looked on.
Some men, Ben, seem to have the spirit of the wolf right under their skins, a sort of a wild instinct that might have come straight down from the stone age, for all I know. You happen to be one of 'em, the worst I ever saw. Maybe you don't remember, but you took your bull moose before you was thirteen years old." Ben sat dreaming. The Athabaska Rapids was not an empty name to him now.
To the Athabaska warehouses at Fort Chipewyan came the furs of Mackenzie river and the Arctic; to Fort Edmonton came the furs of the Athabaska and of the Rockies; to Fort Pitt came the peltry of the Barren Lands; and all passed down the broad highway of the Saskatchewan to Lake Winnipeg, whence they were sent out to York Factory on Hudson Bay, there to be loaded on ships and taken to the Company's warehouses in London.
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