George Bowyer
Rossbach
Katharine B. Gregg
Professor of Biology, West Virginia Wesleyan College
One of West Virginia's finest botanists,
George Bowyer Rossbach, passed away on January 24, 2002, at
the age of 91. He joined the faculty of West Virginia Wesleyan
College, Buckhannon, West Virginia in 1949 with a B.S. degree
from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
He was the typical biologist of his
era, able to teach almost anything from comparative anatomy
to plant systematics. But his first love was collecting and
identifying plants. Although most of his specimens were from
West Virginia and Maine, he collected from all aound the globe
-- from Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Galapagos,
the Bahamas, the Carolinas, even Labrador as recently as the
summer of 2000! Housing over 30,000 specimens, including many
swaps with other herbaria, Wesleyan's herbarium, listed in
the international registry of herbaria, was named in his honor
the George B. Rossbach Herbarium. George typically collected
three plants per collection, keeping one at Wesleyan (WVW)
and sending others to the herbaria of West Virginia University,
the University of Maine at Orono, the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, or to the Royal Herbarium of Canada
in Ottawa.
George taught at Wesleyan until his
retirment in 1977. After spending several years of his retirement
in Camden, Maine, he returned to Buckhannon for his remaining
years where he continued collecting plants and leading field
trips and ate his meals with students in the campus dining
hall. Always ready to go on a field trip anywhere, anytime,
he cared deeply about conservation of West Virginia's special
places and contributed in an invaluable way to our knowledge
of West Virginia's flora. He will be greatly missed.
PUBLICATIONS
Rossbach, George Bowyer (1940) Erysimum in North
America. Thesis (M.A., Biology ) Stanford University.
---- (1941) Erysimum in North America. Thesis (Ph.D.,
Biology), Stanford University.
Rossbach, George B. (1958) New taxa and new combinations in
the genus Erysimum in North America. Aliso 4: 115-124.
---- (1958) The genus Erysimum (Cruciferae) in North
America -- A key to the species. Madrono 14: 261-267.
---- (1966) By canoe down Thelon River. The Beaver (Autumn
1966): 4-13.
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The following is a transcription Rossbach's article about
canoeing the Thelon River in Canada in 1965. THE BEAVER, MAGAZINE
OF THE NORTH was published quarterly by the Hudson's Bay Company
in Winnipeg Canada. The article contains many photographs
(captions listed at the end of the transcription).
Rossbach, George B. (1966) By canoe
down Thelon River. The Beaver (Autumn 1966): 4-13.
Northern Canada offers many choices
of alluring adventures by canoe. I had hoped long, and finally
planned. I chose the Thelon in the Northwest Territories for
a trip in the summer of 1965. Though the Thelon flows generally
eastward, it presents an ecological effect of going north.
An eastward outlying strip of spruce woods lines its upper
banks above Beverly Lake, and below here there is only tundra.
This change eastward favoured my interest in taxonomic and
geographical botany. On the other hand, the barrens and spruce
forest are rather simple to behold and to get used to, yet
in their simplicity they have a unique beauty. Of all rivers,
the Thelon has as good a representation of larger animals
as any and better than most: migrating herds of caribou, muskoxen
in the Thelon sanctuary, wolves, and up-river, the barrenground
grizzly. Some Eskimos still hunt caribou along its big lakes.
The fishing is largely excellent. There are some good rapids,
yet too few to be a major threat to life or progress even
if one’s canoe is loaded, as it will be if a botanist
or a photographer travels far, carrying food and shelter.
We traveled probably over 400 miles
in two 17-foot Grumman aluminum canoes rented at Yellowknife
by arrangement with the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg.
We paddled most of the way, but used on three-h.p. motor,
towing the second canoe, on parts of the big lakes. This worked
out well, but a shoulder-wrenching labour befell the steersman
in the stern of the second canoe. My company was Henry Briggs,
naturalist, photographer, canoeist, and good cook from Maine;
Wayne Dunbar, Maine guide and canoeist; William Meier, from
New Hampshire, and also Lady, Henry’s fourteen-year-old
collie dog. I baled big bundles of botanical hay in an area
little collected to date; Henry made movies of wildlife, plants,
scenery, Indians, Eskimos, and so on.
We drove from Maine to Winnipeg, Manitoba,
where we took a train to Edmonton, Alberta, then flew north
to Yellowknife on the north shore of Great Slave Lake. We
enjoyed six days in this small, but growing town of varied
people, which has become, since the 1940s, much more than
a Hudson’s Bay Post of about a dozen white men and a
band of Indians. Gold mines did this. I looked out the Old
Stope Hotel window from atop a great cliff to view the lake
and rocky, spruce-tipped horizon, never darkened, for sunset
and sunrise were inseparable. Chained huskies wailed and groaned
at times. Many of our neighbours were Dogrib Indians. In company
with the visiting nurse and a couple studying the native language,
I visited an isolated Dogrib village where people lived in
cabins and smoked netted whitefish and lake trout in tipis.
We went by canoe. The nurse “shot” Indian babies
in Chief Sangris’s cabin. After six days of preparation,
packing, collecting plants, photographing, and eating, we
took off on June 26th, in a chartered Otter plane, with the
canoes strapped on the pontoons. We flew east along the eastern
arm of the 300-mile lake, then northeast over the last major
spruce and jackpine forest, rocky and sandy barrens, myriad
lakes, the bigger ones with ice just beginning to break in
zigzag cracks, then over tundra with sand eskers, flats with
frost polygons and upheavals, and caribou trails, over huge
cliffs, canyons, and falls of the Lockhart and Hanbury Rivers,
to the junction of the Hanbury and the bigger, east-flowing
Thelon, where a fringe of extended spruce braves the arctic
barrens. Here, on the rock and sand of an ice-bulldozed shore
we had tea with our pilot, waved him goodbye, and began our
five weeks of camping and canoeing on a wild and beautiful
river, as voluminous as, and often much broader than the Mississippi,
with five expansive lakes en route.
Our site for a preliminary base camp
was moved to a sand-bar-willow-scrub island populated with
shy, juvenile, moulting Canada geese, inquisitive terns and
herring gulls, and several nesting ducks and plovers. We thus
thought to avoid encroachment by barrenground grizzlies, whose
fresh tracks lined the mainland shore. After we made camp
I found grizzly tracks here, too!
We ascended the turbulent Hanbury on
a scenic over-night detour for about ten miles to 60-foot
Helen Falls. We lined canoes along the bank, or motored where
water was not too swift. Local flocks of cliff swallows wheeled
about their clay-pot nests. I found here the cairn and notes
of the two recent parties who had canoed these river, led
by Eric Morse in 1962, and by Irving Fox in 1964. We sat behind
a flimsy screen of white spruce and twice watched huge grizzlies
poke along the shore, swim the swift, cold river, and sit
on the opposite bank. Both eventually sniffed us, and ran
off over the barrens at an amazing speed – in the other
direction. We heard the whistled songs of Harris’s sparrow,
which nests only at treeline, and songs of tree sparrows,
white-crowned sparrows, grey-cheecked thrushes, at least one
kind of warbler, and even robins. Eastward, on open barrens,
longspurs, snow buntings, and horned larks were some of the
commonest small birds.
We located about thirty-five muskoxen
on the south-easterly side of the Thelon River just below
its junction with the Hanbury River, and above our base camp.
Henry and Wayne went inland in a semi-circle, to approach
the herd with a moving-picture camera and tripod. Bill and
I approached from a point nearer the river. Both pairs of
us managed to get very close to the animals. Bill and I kept
behind a screen of clumped black spruce and approached up-wind.
They never smelt or saw us. They were of various sizes, but
there were no young calves among them. They browsed the willow
bushes and sometimes a lean black spruce swayed as an individual
rubbed its side against it. We noticed the high, massive shoulders,
strikingly shaggy wool, which also draped the spruces, the
short, fuzzy ears, and the down-curved, flare-ended horns.
Often we heard a deep rumbling sound resembling distant thunder.
They mutter to themselves. At times, bands of muskoxen cantered
off over a barren hill, alarmed, it seemed, by the photographers.
They never formed the well-known protective circle. While
Bill and I stood with our backs to the high river-bluffs two
cows plodded along a trail, straight towards us, while I snapped
some head-on photographs until, dubious of muskox psychology,
I waved a hand when he seemed uncomfortably close, yet probably
as much as fifty feet away. The leading cow riveted her brown
eyes upon me for a while, then slowly turned round and plodded
into the muskeg to browse. Far to the northeast, below Grassy
Island, we saw one more muskox, a big bull browsing on willows
by the shore. The wind was in our favour and we paddled very
close before it galumphed wildly off along the shore.
Bill also sighted a third grizzly,
perhaps the one which had left fresh tracks in the sand on
our island where we first camped. It, like the others, was
wary, and ran over the brow of the barren rise above the river.
Even as far east as a point eight miles northwest of Aberdeen
Lake an Eskimo said a grizzly appeared on the tundra behind
our tent before we arose one morning. On the south shore of
Beverly Lake, the uppermost of the big lakes, we again saw
signs of a grizzly. Here there is a prefab cabin built by
wildlife research men. Its interior was in complete disarray.
Parallel gouges of four and five claw-marks scored all walls
and ceiling above a shelf. There was a bashed hole in the
plywood wall, specimen vials were strewn over the floor, the
half-open door was jammed. A bear had evidently gone berserk.
We missed him gladly.
At our first campsite we saw our first
wolf, which trotted easily, but swiftly, in zigzags over shore
and tundra. It seemed to know we were watching across the
river, but it continued to sniff and weave about. The shoulders
and neck were heavy with white winter fur, the flanks and
hind quarters less shaggy and slightly darker. Altogether,
we saw four wolves, one here, one at Hornby Point, another
northeast of Lookout Point, and the fourth just southwest
of Beverly Lake. Tracks were frequent in beach sand. Once
our cache of trout, buried in a snowbank, disappeared. We
never knew where it went, but wolves had visited here earlier.
Wolves were neither bold nor very timid. While I was grubbing
specimens of plants (with my eyes on the ground) Wayne, standing
on a ledge above me said “Wolf”. I looked up to
se a white wolf snaking about among the gnarled dwarf spruces.
It had not seen us, but did soon after Wayne spoke. It gazed
at us briefly, then glided off on the tundra, often stopping
to look back.
White and black spruce form scattering
lines or clumps along the Thelon almost as far as Beverly
Lake. A few stands are of notably big white spruce, usually
occurring at notched drain-offs in the bank. Stumps at Warden’s
Grove have a hundred and more rings. Here stand three log
cabins, two old and crumbling, one very new. Leaning against
an old one was a toboggan. On it was printed: W. H. B. Hoare,
a reminder of earlier men associated with the Thelon Game
Sanctuary through which we were passing. The new cabin has
an ingenious lock easily opened by people but not by wolverines
and bears. It is a chained iron rod in a socket. The rod can
be pulled out, or reinserted with a hammer, which hangs above
the door. Nearby is a cache. Plastic-wrapped goods reside
on a platform atop four poles ringed by the cylinders of gas
drums to inhibit pilfering by wolverines. Here in the heavy
grove familiar robins were singing with the thrushes and sparrows,
but unlike robins southward, these were shy in the presence
of people.
One of the most delightful groves is
one near which we camped northeast of Hornby Point. The big
spruce grow along a cascade brook in a ravine. The nearby
open barrens, as usual in early July, were gaudy with the
bright purplish pink flowers of the dwarf Rhododendron called
Lapland rosebay and the low, white clusters of the small-leaved
arctic Labrador tea, but in and bordering the local woods
I found twinflower, a columbine, and the only patch of red
raspberry and white-flowered currant that I saw on the trip
east of Great Slave Lake. Fragile bladder ferns were unfurling
on a shaded sandstone cliff. It was here we found the winter
droppings of a moose, and just up-river the conspicuous gnawings
of porcupines. Moose have been reported by Eskimos east to
Beverly Lake, but it is said no white man has seen one on
the Thelon. Porcupines are isolated here.
At a high place on the bank called
Lookout Point we had a welcome few days’ stop-over in
bad weather at the new wildlife research cabin occupied by
Ernest Kuyt of Fort Smith. Ernie studies habits of wolves,
and tags their pups in dens! I asked: “And what if mother’s
home?” “Whenever she is, she runs out and worries
at a distance, “ said Ernie. He took us by motored canoe
across the Thelon and up the Finnie, which is lined by the
best and most extensive example of a southerly type of true
forest in this region. The arctic flora was invaded here by
a southern and western Canadian forest flora. For example,
here occur the one-flowered Pyrola (Moneses), and buck-bean
(Menyanthes) local to one boggy pool, and the southerly species
of Labrador tea (Ledum groenlandicum). Then in a boggy area,
with both black and white spruces, bearded with local, long,
black lichen, we saw a strikingly isolated colony of tamarack.
Ernie Kuyt told me that even trembling aspen grew farther
up the Finnie. I had already seen one lone young poplar on
the bank of the Thelon. Balsam poplar has been collected near
here by Dr John Tener, while studying muskoxen. Ernie showed
us the old cuttings of spruce by Eskimos when they still came
here to cut wood for sleds maybe in the 1930s. At the cabin
where Ernie was staying I dried my plants at a stove. We ate
a delicious whitefish chowder concocted by Henry Briggs. Since
whitefish rarely bite a lure, we netted them. We had by now
caught and eaten lake trout, grayling, whitefish, and pike.
Char were the only new fish, yet to be netted at Baker Lake.
Trout were fine, char best, and pike poorest to eat.
Above and below Lookout Point are abrupt
bluffs of sand. High ones are the more attractive with old
white spruces. Here the fluffy, tawny, cute arctic ground
squirrels sat stiffly by their burrows to watch us pass. Lower
sand ridges are more widely extensive along this part of the
Thelon. These are sparsely grown to strand-wheat (Elymus)
grazed by geese before it is tall and too tough.
On down the river were great cliffs
where rough-legged hawks and peregrine falcons nested. On
the southerly, lee sides of banks snow was still deeply drifted,
and on a bar ice pans were stacked higher than our heads.
Camps by spruce clumps were replaced by ones on the vast tundra
barrens. Temperature varied from 27 degrees F to the 60s,
and to 85 degrees F on the sunny sand, but the average was
low, and colder eastward. Occasionally frost silvered the
tundra, dew froze on our tarps, water froze in containers
and sometimes our hands and feet were cold while we were in
the canoes.
Of lemmings and mice we saw only signs,
saw but one arctic hare, though many droppings, and but one
arctic owl eating a trout on a snow-bank. We saw but one family
of arctic foxes, at the entrance to Beverly Lake. Four fuzzy
brown pups peered at us from their den atop the bluff. Hundreds
of geese strained their paddles and wings ahead of us, honking
continually, then when pressed, sinking low, and even diving.
Flocks of them pattered noisily up the sand-beach to hide
in the willow thickets. They eat young grasses and sedge flowers
at this time of year. Occasional geese differed much, an proved
to be white-fronted geese. Some of these nervously herded
goslings ahead of them. Mergansers, other ducks, and occasional
yellow-billed and common loons flew or swam by, a few with
fuzzy chicks. Great whistling swans, always in pairs, took
off from time to time. Flocks of jaegers deftly manoeuvred
over river and barrens, but they did not dive on longspurs
as expected; the nabbed gnats off water or shingle beach.
Arctic terns hovered, heads bent down, and dived for young
fish, but not minnows, there being none. Small fish are young
of large one or nine-spined sticklebacks or little miller’s
thumb sculpins. Herring gulls ogled our fish-cleaning jobs.
Twice we saw pairs of tall brown lesser sandhill cranes stalking
on the tundra. Often a black and white ptarmigan would whir
and soar down by our campsite, to toddle and peer about our
tent, cackling. This usually happened in the dim light of
middle night.
All the way east of herds of thousands
of caribou had just passed, traveling north, before we came
along, leaving their splayed, four-marked hoof-prints, sometimes
accompanied by a pair of wolf tracks by the river, and caribou
had left their clotted hair on the water. We saw straggling
herds from time to time, swimming, or briefly nibbling or
resting, or more often swinging along at an easy, but very
fast trot, all going north or northeast.
Eight miles northwest of Aberdeen Lake
we camped by some hunting Eskimos and a couple of white men
led by Mr Ruttan who were ear-tagging swimming caribou from
motored canoes, aided by Eskimos, in a wildlife research study.
Eskimos here still live on caribou. They dry strips of meat
and split long-bones for marrow, often eating both raw, along
with bannock and tea. They are generally very pleasant people,
and though rather shy, not diffident. Few speak any English.
Most are literate in their own Inuit, using a missionary’s
syllabics.
Here, near the Eskimo camp we awaited
more possible herds of migrating caribou and calmer weather
to allow us to travel. Caribou did swim the river in sight
above us, then stride on northward, but only small herds appeared.
The Eskimos watched for them with binoculars. When Henry and
Wayne were out on the tundra filming a herd, and I was crouched
on the sandy shore collecting my first yellow arctic poppies
and the oddly “displaced” sea-beach chickweed
(Arenaria peploides) I heard three distant shots. I looked
up a the passing caribou I had been watching. A bull at the
rear of the herd staggered in circles, fell, arose, fell for
good. An Eskimo, followed by Henry and Wayne, walked to where
it lay. Later, all three men brought the dressed-out carcass,
including viscera, head and velvet antlers, to camp by canoe.
The Eskimo hunter’s wife showed Henry how she removed
the sinews along the back and split them into thread to sew
skin clothing.
These people often wear caribou skin
boots, mittens, and parkas. The women’s version of the
parka is draped and fringed, and a rear drape includes a big
sack with accommodates a baby. Eskimos also wear Hudson’s
Bay Company woollens and rubber boots. Hoods of parkas either
of skin or cloth, may be trimmed with fur of wolf or wolverine.
Many of the men smoke pipes, most purchased at the Hudson’s
Bay store at Baker Lake, but some home-made with soapstone
bowls. Tobacco is carried in a big pouch slung on the shoulder.
The Eskimo campers’ tents are of canvas, but I am told
that the women often make them by sewing the pieces together.
Accompanying these hunters are their dogs, of which I saw
two types in separate teams, one being wolf-like, i.e. tall,
with straight tails, the other chunkier, with curled tails.
An idle kamutik, a long, narrow sledge, lay on the shore.
Near this camp on a high point stood
a big square wooden box. We learnt it was a grave. On a point
to the west we had seen one open pit grave covered with rotting,
furry skin clothing and mittens. A rusted rifle probably of
a latter 1890s make lay upon a rock above it. We disturbed
nothing.
It was still never dark, yet rarely
comfortably warm. Birds still sang late and early. Swarms
of gnats, a few butterflies, moths, ground beetles, a small
water beetle, stone-flies, ground spiders, and a common earwig-like
beach-crawler were usually active until evening or even later.
Mosquitoes were out in hungry force any time if the temperature
rose above 40 degrees F. They covered us and the tent, whined
monotonously, and followed the canoes in calm weather. I would
sit of an evening on a bluff to observe, listen, contemplate,
and smoke, and watch the lights, shades, and delicate colours
change across the tundra, lichen barrens, rocks, cliffs, or
swirling water, or creaking, mist-covered ice-pack –
but never sitting for long, being driven to the tent by the
hungry horde. I have many blood relations up there now.
Deterrents to progress were wind, usually
north, and dangerous waves. Waves often kept us ashore, as
did endless pack-ice on Aberdeen Lake from July 15 to 26.
Rapids either speeded us by the banks or, occasionally, worried
us with their huge standing waves rising below some boulder
deep under the heaving, gurgling, sucking surface. Wayne and
Henry were able stern-men in rapids, however. One series of
rapids forced a very necessary mile of portage. We waited
a total of over two weeks for wind to abate, or to rise and
blow away the ice. Hold-ups afforded me time to explore afoot,
collect and dry plants, and write diary. I was never idle
for long. I climbed some 640-foot hills with ancient shore-cliffs
lining their flanks above the northeast shore of Aberdeen
Lake, passed old Eskimo hunting camps strewn with cracked
bones, skulls, antlers, and a few discarded utensils. I viewed
the sweep of the lake and river we were to follow when ice
blew out, and I spotted the many promontories with humanoid
Eskimo cairn markers. I grubbed plants until my pant knees
were gone, adding arctic pincushion (Diapensia lapponica)
to my collection. I took colour photos. Finally, on a divide,
I looked northward over the endless barrens and lakes toward
the Back River and towards the Arctic Sea over a hundred miles
beyond the horizon.
On the larger lakes the north wind
and immediately following waves can swamp an unwary or too
bold canoeist, especially if his canoe is heavily loaded.
Water is frigid and wide, allowing little hope for a swimmer.
We were crossing a broad stretch of water on the so-called
“Delta”, a network of channels curving between
islands west of Beverly Lake, when a squall and waves hit
us so quickly I barely had time to lay down my camera and
bend to the paddle to help Wayne head into the breaking crests.
The other canoe scooped in four inches of water, its peril
increased by Henry’s collie dog, Lady. Suddenly and
unusually she misbehaved by leaping upon the high load and
scuttling along the length of the canoe. Both canoes made
it to the sand beach were we waited out the wind and ate.
Just before entering Schultz Lake,
the last big lake west of Baker Lake, we passed, on the north
side of the Thelon, a series of prominent knobs of sandstone,
conglomerate, and a bit of granitic rock, so identified by
a surveying geologist. A few abrupt volcanic faults split
these hills. Such topography was a change. Most of the bed-rock
is the widespread sandstone, though glacial erratics can vary.
Later we passed more granitic rock and greenstone. We camped
on a low, wet, mossy-sedgy shore and meadow below an escarpment
for a well-needed rest. The next day I discovered a thus-far
new flora on the disturbed raw clay of the frost-boils or
solifluction polygons, on a plateau: brilliant yellow and
violet species of Oxytropis being the most conspicuous among
them. I was to see such plants increasingly, on banks and
tundra as well, eastward to Baker Lake. Already, a common
pink Hedysarum, the bright yellow Arnica, and succulent, antiscorbutic
Oxyria had appeared. Heretofore, the white-petaled Dryas had
dominated the frost-boils and disturbed spots. I believe the
change was primarily due to added salts in the less sandy
clay soil. We were now in a rather recent marine subsidence
area. Schultz Lake is one hundred and twenty-five feet above
sea-level. Below this lake in the Halfway Hills I found marine
shells of scallops and another bivalve in the clay of a stream-bank.
It was on this shelving shore that
Wayne and Bill caught the biggest lake trout on the trip.
Wayne’s was hooked on a fly-rod. Though the big fish’s
fin arouse above the shallow water, it was still not within
reach. I thought it would break loose or break the rod. Instead
of playing it for an hour, as ardent fishermen tell of doing,
Wayne managed to manoeuvre this lively heft of dinner in circling
stages to the stern of the beached canoe in ten minutes. I
gaffed it in the gills and dragged it ashore. Though our weighing
scales had been earlier stepped on and demolished, we estimated
the trout weighed about thirty pounds. When Henry had snapped
a picture of the fish we noted that two gawky sandhill cranes
were practically looking over his shoulder.
Northeast of us an aircraft took off.
So did we. Near the western end of Schultz Lake, several hours,
miles, islands, and new plants eastward, and under the abrupt,
snow-rimmed 640-foot bump called Whalebone Hill we met a crew
of three Dominion geologists led by J. A. Donaldson returning
on foot to their tent. They were most hospitable and informative,
but jokingly disgruntled over the breakdown of their reconnaissance
helicopter eight miles inland. They had just walked back to
camp.
After eating and talking with this
group of men, collecting specimens, changing plant driers,
and profiting by a night’s rest, we made use of a most
unusual glassy calm by motoring eastward the length of Schultz
Lake. We passed hills of sandstone, then granitic rock, left
Whalebone and its snow-drifts on the western horizon. All
morning we approached an eastern mirage of rising floating,
and lowering bluffs and snowbanks. We passed myriads of black
gnats of two sizes, standing on the calm water, just emerged
from pupal skins, with occasional long-legged craneflies.
Trout sometimes arose to suck in the gnats. Mosquitoes followed
us in a slowly diminishing mob. We passed rock reefs, terns
and jaegers, a belated, hurried caribou, and finally the cairn-studded
rock islands in the shallow eastern end of Schultz Lake.
Rapids roared ahead. At the sudden
constriction and south bend at the end of the lake we found
ourselves in narrow, tumultuous rapids with fearsome standing
waves. We had to head into the worst of these. We speeded
by high ledges of hard, resistant rock which caused these
rapids, into safe, but fast water. These rapids are not mentioned
in notes of travelers to my knowledge. The well-known and
expected bigger ones are about eight miles below Schultz Lake.
In the latter rapids we met eight caribou-hunting
Eskimos who kindly speeded our portage of a mile to only about
three hours. We paid them and gave them all our fish and bread,
which they immediately relished, but we needed a Galilee stretch
of loaves and fishes for this multitude. During my own three
carries here, I not only nabbed a stack of plants, but hungrily
crunched sea-biscuits, which no one else liked, though I found
them quite delicious.
I always enjoyed eating, whether the
usual freeze-dried variations or daily fish. Ground squirrels
watched us work and eat. Two sat perkily against a sunlit
slab of rock covered with yellow and green lichen above their
burrow. Pink Epilobium, yellow Arnica, and Castilleja grew
on the bank. Wild white rapids dashed and roared. Eskimos
ate supper. We were out of film.
Next day we camped on a meadow by a
flowery cascade brook between the abrupt rocky ridges of the
Halfway Hills. This was to be our last camp, but we didn’t
know this yet. Rains were more frequent from the lakes eastward,
but a drizzling night did not spoil our visit at this beautiful
site, and as always, we left it beautiful. (A word her to
future campers: As urban dwellers increasingly spread, crowd,
and hurry, increasing numbers of people seek experience in
a sadly shrinking wilderness. I hope those who travel these
northern rivers will note that we carried no firearms nor
needed any protection or illegal food, since no animal threatened
us and we carried our own concentrated packets of freeze-dried
foods. We added to our diet by fishing. Though we burnt wood
for cooking when available above the lakes, we always used
dead branches and cut none of the meager forest, alive or
dead, and east of Beverly Lake we cooked solely on a gasoline
Coleman stove. Finally, I believe one would not identify our
campsites by any debris of cans or paper.)
At the last rapids below the Halfway
Hills and eight miles above Baker Lake, and in threatening
weather, on July 29th, a motored canoe-load of Eskimos overtook
us. These excellent navigators lashed our canoes to theirs
and hauled us the last miles to Baker Lake Hudson’s
Bay Store, saving us a slow, wet, cold, windy finale to our
paddling and camping. Splashed, and stiff with cold and cramping,
we were glad to reach the post, even though later we increasingly
missed the open barrens and the simple, but simply beautiful
solitude. That first night at the post I attended church services.
I truly enjoyed the company of the Anglican missionary and
a hundred of the 400 or 500 Eskimos in and out of Baker Lake.
The Eskimos sang very slowly the hymns we best know and like.
They sang in Inuit, I in English. The Reverend and Mrs Whitton
were most kind to us. I dried plants and slept on a bed in
a small house used at times as a Sunday school. Oni its wall
was a painting of a fur-clad Mary and Joseph with Jesus bundled
in skins, receiving furs and carvings from an Eskimo, an Indian,
and a Hudson’s Bay Company man, while a husky dog and
a caribou watched. I replenished my supply of pipe tobacco,
which ran out the day I arrived, ate chocolate-covered cherries,
saw movies, and stuffed food into me at the Department of
Transport with pleasant company of transient government workers,
at $2.50 per meal. I noted how simple, basic things of life
had become most important.
The gorgeous display of pink, purple,
yellow, and white flowers on disturbed foundations, roads,
and beach, or on tundra or ledges deserves special mention.
They were at their brief height this close of July: arctic
fireweed, with gaudy pink flowers, yellow poppy, five-fingers,
Draba, Astragalus and Oxytropis, both loco-weeds, chickweeds,
daisies, a native dandelion, the ever-present, fleshy, clustered
white saxifrage, and lush grasses. The showy pink Lapland
rosebay, a Rhododendron, and ubiquitous white Labrador tea
of the sterile barrens were scarcely present here in this
richer soil.
The heavens turned the tap on and off
most of the time. It was here at Baker Lake, between the scudding,
purple-black clouds on the first of August that I saw my first
star since June the twentieth in Edmonton.
[There is a drawn map on pages 4-5.
The following are the page numbers and captions for photographs
in the article:
p. 6 The abandoned Hoare and Knox cabin at Warden’s
Grove.
p. 7 At Helen Falls film was changed near the cairn of Morse
and Fox. Above, a barrenground grizzly patrols the shore of
the Hanbury, across the river from us.
p. 7 Grassy Island from the air.
p. 8 Looking up the Thelon River from a site about fifteen
miles above Hornby Point.
p. 8 Muskox browsing on willows beside the Thelon.
p. 9 A clump of white spruce at Hornby Point, beneath which
is a wolf den. The tributary to the Thelon with its spruce
wood banks opposite Hornby Point (below) was photographed
at sundown, about 10 p.m.
p. 10 Migrating caribou on the run.
p. 10 One of our canoes passing the usual snow-drift opened
by the north wind on a south-facing bank.
p. 10 A two-month-old wolf on a shingle beach of the Thelon.
p.11 Finnie River, near the mouth, just south of Lookout Point.
The woods are predominantly white spruce.
p. 12 The oldest (56) and ablest Eskimo hunter smokes a home-made
pipe.
p. 12 Wayne Dunbar with the biggest lake trout, caught just
above Schultz Lake.
p. 12 At the Eskimo caribou-hunters’ camp our canoe
was inspected with interest and outside the tent one of the
ladies agreed to let Henry make a tape recording of conversation
and a song in Inuit.
p. 13 One of our riverside camps, with Wayne preparing meal,
Bill Meier contemplating chances of hooking the next feed,
and George Rossbach, as usual, pressing plants.
