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Updated: June 9, 2025
If you think there is any danger of settlement ever encroaching on the muskegs and barrens, come with me on a trip of some weeks to the south end of this field. We had been pulling against slack water all day, water so slack you could dip your hand down and fail to tell which way the current ran.
Do you want to know about storms that leave the worst Northern trails a summer picnic, and muskegs and tundra that leave you searching for something bigger than miles to measure with, and barren, fly-ridden territory without a leaf or blade of grass and scored every way at once with rifts and water canyons so you can't tell the north from the Desert of Sahara?
The reek of the camp-fires is in its buckskin, of the woods in its birch bark, of the muskegs in its sweet grass, of the open spaces in its peltries, of the evening meal in its coffees and bacons, of the portage trail in the leather of the tump-lines. I am speaking now of the country of which we are to write.
The inland country for some eight or ten miles had been examined by Sergeant Anderson, of the Mounted Police post here, who described it as consisting of wide ridges, or tables, of first-rate soil, divided by shallow muskegs; a good farming locality, with abundance of large, merchantable spruce timber.
We marched westerly 7 miles through fine, dry, jack-pine wood, then, 3 miles through mixed poplar, pine, and spruce, And came to the Slave River opposite Point Gravois. Thence we went a mile or so into similar woods, and after another stretch of muskegs. We camped for lunch at 11.45, having covered 12 miles. At two we set out, and reached Salt River at three, but did not cross there.
Cataracts countless Churchill River is one succession of cataracts; vast rivers; lakes unmapped, links and chains of lakes by which you can go from the Saskatchewan to the Arctic without once lifting your canoe; quaking muskegs areas of amber stagnant water full of what the Indians call mermaid's hair, lined by ridges of moss and sand overgrown with coarse goose grass and "the reed that grows like a tree," muskrat reed, a tasseled corn-like tufted growth sixteen feet high areas of such muskeg mile upon mile.
A little flutter of leaves like a clapping of hands marked land enough to support black poplars, and we rounded a crumbly sand bank just in time to see the seven-banded birch canoe of a little old hunter, Sam Ba'tiste Buck eighty years old he was squatting in the bottom of the birch canoe, ragged almost to nakedness, bare of feet, gray-headed, nearly toothless but happier than an emperor the first living being we had seen for a week in the muskegs.
They give her ten trainloads of stuff a couple of months ago. No good! A bit of moist weather and there she is at it again. Let an engine and two carriages through last night ten o'clock!" "Gracious! Was anybody hurt? What a kind of bog? a quicksand?" "Well," said Yerkes, resuming his dusting, and speaking with polite obstinacy, "muskegs is what they call 'em in these parts.
Small haystacks were scattered along the route, being put up for ponies which haul supplies in winter from Pelican Landing to Wahpoośkow. The country passed through showed good soil wherever we penetrated the hay margin, with, of course, here and there the customary muskegs.
A murmur of careless talk rose from the groups of fashionably dressed women and prosperous men, and he heard a girl's soft laugh. All this struck a note of refined luxury that was strange to Thirlwell, who had spent some years in the wilds, where the small, frost-bitten pines roll across the rocks and muskegs of North Ontario.
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