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September 29, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
Sept. 30, 1813 — The Birth of John Rae
John Rae was born near the wind-swept town of Stromness on the Atlantic coast of the Orkney Islands on the last day of September, 1813. The family home, the Hall of Clestrain, bore the brunt of Atlantic storms - when I stood there on a February afternoon two years ago, I felt as cold as I’d ever felt in the Arctic - and so perhaps it is no surprise that John Rae eventually ended up in the Far North.
But first there was the matter of an education, because Rae had been born into a well-to-do family. He studied in Edinburgh at the Royal College of Surgery, and became a doctor in 1833.
As did so many young men from Orkney, John Rae joined the Hudson’s Bay Company, and served initially as a ship’s surgeon on the company’s vessel, Prince of Wales. On his first voyage, ice prevented the ship from making its return from Hudson Bay to Scotland, and Rae wintered with the ship in James Bay. While there, the company offered him a five year contract as “clerk and surgeon” and so he remained in Rupert’s Land, based at Moose Factory.
There he earned a reputation for his ability as a long-distance walker. On one occasion he walked 105 miles to Fort Albany in two days to treat a patient. Later, returning from an Arctic expedition, Rae walked from Fort Chipewyan to Minnesota - 1,720 miles - in 54 days. “A long day’s march on snowshoes,” he once commented, “is about the finest exercise a man can take.” Rae travelled light, as did the native people he learned from, and lived off the land whenever he could.
Governor George Simpson of the Hudson’s Bay Company suggested that Rae go to the Arctic to survey the uncharted portions of the North American coastline. Rae accepted the suggestion, but first went to Toronto to study surveying.
In all, he made four expeditions to the Arctic. On the second one, a search for John Franklin, missing in the Arctic, Rae and Dr. John Richardson made what is reported to be the fastest canoe trip ever. Leaving Sault Ste. Marie on May 4, 1848, they reached the Mackenzie River delta on Aug. 3. From there they turned east, exploring to the mouth of the Coppermine River. But there was no sign of the lost explorers.
Rae’s final Arctic expedition is his most well-known. After wintering at Repulse Bay, he set off northward in the spring of 1854. From Inuit he heard reports of a large group of white men who had been in the area four years earlier, some dead, some dying. These could only be the crew of the Franklin expedition. From the Inuit, Rae acquired items that proved incontrovertibly that that was the case.
Rae reported the situation tersely to Governor Simpson: “...information has been obtained and articles purchased from the natives, which places the fate of a portion, if not all of the then survivors of Sir John Franklin’s miserable party beyond a doubt - a fate the most deplorable - death from starvation, after having had recourse to cannibalism as a means of prolonging life.”
Rae hurried back to England to break the news that the mystery of the missing expedition had been unravelled. Although the British public, and Lady Franklin in particular, were horrified at the thought that British officers and seamen would resort to cannibalism, Rae nonetheless received the reward that had been offered to whoever would discover the fate of Franklin. That reward was 10,000 pounds, and Rae shared it with the men he had travelled with on that Arctic expedition.
For John Rae, the years of trekking through the Arctic were over. He practiced medicine in Toronto and married there. The marriage was childless. He and his wife returned to Orkney and then, two years later, retired finally to London, where he died in 1893, at the age of 79. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall in Orkney. Inside the cathedral a stunning memorial carved in stone was later erected, depicting Rae asleep on the tundra, still wearing his Arctic clothing, his gun by his side, a blanket tossed over him.
A biographer, C. Stuary Houston, has summed up Rae’s charter thus: “He was intelligent, an accurate observer, a competent writer, and an accomplished doctor. He was pleasant, cheerful, generous, and sensitive. He was frugal, conducting his surveys more economically than anyone before or since. He was sympathetic to the natives and willing to learn their methods of travel, hunting, and building snow houses. And he was candidly honest...”
Rae’s birthplace, the Hall of Clestrain, has not fared well. When I visited it, it had most recently been used as a pig barn. Now designated a historic site, there are plans for it to become one in the chain of small Orkney museums, this one dedicated to the islands’ maritime heritage, with a room devoted to commemorating the life of Orkney’s unsung hero, John Rae.
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
September 22, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
Sept. 24, 1896 - Skookum Jim Stakes His Claim
KENN HARPER
Prospectors were searching for gold in the Yukon long before the famous Gold Rush of 1898. Many of them were Americans, some fleeing desperate lives in the United States, others simply eking out a meagre living in the north while hoping for the find that would make them rich.
On of those was George Washington Carmack. In the 1880s he was working as a packer, transporting supplies over the rugged Chilkoot Pass from the Alaskan coast to northern British Columbia and the Yukon. Carmack formed a partnership with two Indian men, Skookum Jim and Jim’s nephew, Dawson Charlie, also known as Tagish Charlie.
Jim’s native name was Keish and he was the son of a Tlingit father and a Tagish mother. He had been born about 1855 near what would later become Bennett Lake on the British Columbia-Yukon border. He adopted the white name James Mason, but was generally known as Skookum Jim.
“Skookum” was a word from the Chinook jargon, a lingua franca that had developed to facilitate communication between the numerous Indian tribes on the west coast and white traders. It meant “big” or “strong.” In other contexts it could mean, “tough,” “good,” “first rate.”
Together, the three partners worked the pass. But gold fever was in the air and in 1888 they made a prospecting trip on the Yukon River. About this time, Carmack married Jim’s sister, which served to cement the bonds between the men.
In 1889 Carmack and his wife headed north to prospect and did not return. After several years, Skookum Jim decided to go and look for them. He, Charlie, and another nephew known as Patsy Henderson found the couple, now with a three-year-old daughter, living on the Klondike River. The three former partners decided to prospect together again.
In August 1896 they discovered gold on Bonanza Creek, sometimes known as Rabbit Creek. One of the men found a nugget the size of a dime. There has always been controversy over who saw it first. Carmack claimed that he did, but Jim and Charlie always maintained that Jim saw it first. On September 24, Carmack staked the “discovery claim.” Jim staked his own claim on one side of Carmack’s, Charlie on the other.
News of their discovery sparked the Klondike Gold Rush, which lured thousands of men, both gold seekers and camp-following swindlers, to the Yukon. Many never even made it to the gold fields, dying in the Chilkoot and White passes, or on the rugged trails between the passes and the Klondike.
Skookum Jim and his partners persevered. For four years they worked their claims. Between them they took out nearly one million dollars in gold.
Success was not kind to them. Carmack abandoned Jim’s sister, leaving her penniless. Tagish Charlie drank and gambled away his money. He drowned in 1908 when he fell off the railway bridge in Carcross.
Jim, who was married to a Tlingit woman from Alaska, built a large house for his family in Carcross. He spent the winters there, hunting and fishing, but in the spring he would go back to the Klondike. He became a familiar sight on the streets of Dawson, “wearing a tailor-made suit and a white shirt, a heavy nugget watch-chain draped across his vest and a large nugget stickpin in his tie.” Unfortunately, he also became a familiar sight in the numerous bars in that frontier town. Jim became an alcoholic. He and his wife separated many times and she returned permanently to Alaska in 1905.
Perhaps that was Jim’s wake-up call. For whatever reason, that same year he made an unusual decision. He placed what remained of his fortune in a trust so that he wouldn’t squander it on booze or give it away. He made arrangements that some of his money would be used for the support of his sister, his daughter, and his nephew.
Skookum Jim died in Carcross in 1916, aged about 61. Money from the Skookum Jim Indian Fund was to be used “towards furnishing medical attendance, supplying necessities and comforts to Indians in the Yukon Territory and towards assisting needy and deserving Indians...”
In 1965, a portion of the money was used to construct the Skookum Jim Friendship Centre in Whitehorse, a drop-in centre for local Indians and the community as a whole. That centre is still open today. A sign on the door says simply, “Welcome to Skookie’s.”
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
September 15, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
Sept. 19, 1948 — Eskimo Welzl Achieves Perpetual Motion
KENN HARPER
Some years ago, when a Czech woman arrived in Iqaluit, she said to me, “I understand you know a bit about Arctic history. What can you tell me about Eskimo Welzl?” I admit that I was stymied. “Who, or what, is Eskimo Welzl?” was my reply.
She told me that Welzl was a Czech national hero who had traveled throughout the Arctic, had written books about his experiences in the North, was studied in schools in the Czech Republic, and she assumed that everyone in northern Canada would know of him. Alas, I knew nothing.
Some years later, when the ambassador of the Czech Republic was on a tour of northern capitals — Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Whitehorse — he told me that from Whitehorse, he would make a pilgrimage to Dawson City to visit the grave of this Czech hero, for that is where Eskimo Welzl died in 1948.
Jan Welzl was born in what is now the Czech Republic, in 1868. He apprenticed for a short time as a locksmith, but tired of that quickly. In his late teens he wandered eastern Europe for four years, before signing on as a ship’s stoker for a return trip across the Atlantic. Then he headed to Siberia, and the rest, as they say, is history. Or is it?
Back in Europe in the 1920s, Welzl went on a lecture tour, telling his preposterous tales of life in the Arctic. He described how he traveled about the north from his base in the New Siberia Islands. His travels — or his imagination — took him to Nome, numerous places in Siberia, the Mackenzie Delta and the Yukon. Welzl tells that he was elected chief of the local Eskimos, and that he had found a race of pygmy Eskimos who had arrived from Mars on a meteor. He proposed a theory that kangaroos would be better at hauling sleds than dogs.
He became known as Eskimo Welzl, and the public ate up the tall tales he spun. Eventually he came to the attention of two journalists, Bedrich Golombek and Edvard Velanta. They decided that Welzl’s tales would make a great book, and so the old man dictated his stories to them. Welzl had no doubt seen more than his share of scoundrels in the gold-fields of the Arctic, but he could not have been more badly ripped off than he was at home by his two fellow-countrymen. They paid him 2,000 Crowns — at the time about $100 — for all rights to his first book.
That book, Thirty Years in the Golden North, sold modestly in his homeland, but the scoundrels then succeeded in having it published in the United States in 1932 as a Book of the Month Club selection. Astonishingly, it sold 150,000 copies. The book was promoted as fact and a gullible public swallowed it.
In the meantime, Welzl had gone back north. He ended up in Dawson City in the Yukon, a town that had been built during the Klondike Gold Rush. In a community that had always been known for its eccentrics, even among these Welzl was something of a standout.
In his old age there, he busied himself trying to construct a perpetual motion machine. The contraption ended up taking up most of the space in his small shack. Town boys like Pierre Berton would go there to visit the old man and gaze in awe at his obsession-in-progress.
Jan Welzl died in 1948 at the age of eighty. His grave in Dawson’s old cemetery has become a shrine for visitors, not all of them Czech, who pay tribute to the free-spirited old man who wrote, “There is true liberty up North... Whatever you see, you can go after, everything is yours, there is nothing to stop you.” I made my own pilgrimage to his grave in August of this year. It’s an eye-opener, to be sure. Numerous gifts hang from the cross. Someone’s single boot sat atop the grave marker, perhaps a tribute to the wandering life.
But I wasn’t prepared for the Cadbury’s chocolate tin sitting at the foot of the grave. Of course, I had to open it. Inside was, of all things, a guest book! The entries started in 2003. About half were in Czech. One visitor, who signed his entry “with great respect and curiosity,” wrote, “I hope you have found peace... and may heaven imbue you with perpetual motion.”
Two recent books (one not yet published) should be mentioned. A Czech-Canadian author, Peter Sis, wrote a delightful children’s book about Welzl in 2001. Beautifully illustrated, it is titled “A Small Tall Tale from the Far North.” And “Thirty Years in the Golden North” will soon be reissued once again. (It was first reissued in 2004.)
Why, you might ask, would anyone today bother to buy a new issue of Welzl’s tall tales? For the introduction by veteran Arctic story-teller, Lawrence Millman, who puts Welzl’s life and adventures, both physical and imaginative, in hilarious perspective.
Jan Welzl, ripped-off adventurer and teller of tales, lived a life stranger than fiction. It’s not surprising that it ended in Dawson City. Oh, I forgot to mention, the asteroid “15425 Welzl” is also named after him.
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
September 8, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
Sept. 11, 1958 — Far From the Midnight Sun: Remembering Robert Service
KENN HARPER
“There are strange things done ‘neath the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold.
The arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold.
The northern lights have seen queer sights
But the queerest they ever did see,
Was that night on the marge of Lake LeBarge
When I cremated Sam McGee.”
There is a little cabin on Eighth Avenue in Dawson City that was once home to
the world's most famous Yukoner, Robert Service. Though he never owned it,
the cabin was his pride and joy and inspired some of his most famous poems
and a book that became a Hollywood motion picture. He began his career as a
full time author in 1908.
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These are perhaps the most famous words in northern poetry, the immortal verse of Robert Service, Bard of the Yukon.
Robert Service was born to Scottish parents living in England in January of 1874. When he was only 15 he started working for the Commercial Bank of Scotland. At 22, he moved to Canada and spent several years traveling in the Canadian and American west, finding jobs as he went.
In 1903 he went back to the familiar work of banking, in the Bank of Commerce in Vancouver. The following year he transferred to Whitehorse to work in the bank’s branch there. Four years later he transferred again, this time to Dawson City, the town that had been at the heart of the Klondike gold rush less than a decade earlier.
Service himself was not an adventurer. The only moiling for gold that he did was in the vaults of the banks where he worked.
But he was captivated by the beauty of the Yukon and the free and independent spirit of the eccentric people he met there. He listened to the tales of the men who had followed the glint of gold, who had made and lost fortunes, and who had settled down to live out their lives on the northern frontier.
His first book, “Songs of a Sourdough,” dealt primarily with the lure of the Yukon itself. In poems like “The Spell of the Yukon,” and “The Call of the Wild,” he wrote about the Yukon as a stark and savage land, yet a land that was captivating, that held people in its spell. Although it was “a fine land to shun,” it was also a place difficult to leave.
One of Service’s poems is called “The Men That Don’t Fit In.” It’s a short poem that begins:
“There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.”
Service created just such men in many of his most popular poems. Dan McGrew, Sam McGee, Blasphemous Bill, Pious Pete, Clancy of the Mounted Police, Athabaska Dick, One-Eyed Mike and Hard-Luck Henry – these are characters that he created and brought to life on the printed page.
Their very names hint at the lawlessness of the gold rush, the desperation of the down-on-his-luck miner. And they allowed young Robert Service to venture vicariously over the mountain passes and into the goldfields while never leaving the comfort of his log cabin in Dawson.
Service’s poems were wildly popular. After 1909 he lived the rest of his life on the royalties that poured in from his writing.
He left the North in 1912 and moved to Paris. He married the following year. During the first World War, he was an ambulance driver and war correspondent.
He lived the rest of his life in France, except for two periods in Hollywood, the first in the 1920s when he worked on a movie version of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and then again during the second World War.
The man who was sometimes known as “Canada’s Kipling,” who captured the spirit of the Klondike gold rush for future generations to appreciate, died in Lancieux, in Brittany, on Sept.11, 1958.
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
September 1, 2006
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History
Sept. 3, 1925 — Nuqallaq Returns to Pond Inlet
KENN HARPER
CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE
Nuqallaq reunited with his wife, Ataguttiaq, at Pond Inlet in
September of 1925, after he spent two years at Stony
Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba for a manslaughter conviction
in the death of Robert Janes.
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Last week I wrote of the trial of Nuqallaq at Pond Inlet in 1923, and his conviction for manslaughter in the death of Robert Janes. Nuqallaq was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba.
Imprisonment was hard on Nuqallaq. His half-sister, Agatha Tongak, summed it up succinctly, “He worked so hard that he got tuberculosis.” He found solace in his Bible, written in Inuktitut syllabics. He spoke only a little English. He was very much alone.
Less than six months after Nuqallaq’s imprisonment began in Stony Mountain, he received a surprise visitor. It was none other than Captain Munn, a trader who had operated a post near Pond Inlet, in competition to Robert Janes, and whom Nuqallaq knew well. Munn found Nuqallaq much thinner than when he had last seen him in 1922, and he complained that his food was “no good.” Nuqallaq sweated through the whole interview and Munn thought that the heat of the jail was too much for him to bear.
Munn began immediately to press Ottawa to release Nuqallaq early under a Ticket of Leave, and send him back to Pond Inlet to work for the police there. Munn thought Nuqallaq had lost the will to live and was not likely to survive a second year in jail.
This put another series of bureaucratic procedures in place. Munn’s claims had to be investigated and the old trader’s veracity considered. The opinion of the RCMP was solicited, and they were very much against Nuqallaq’s early release, as were most of the bureaucrats at the Department of the Interior.
Then in March of 1924, Nuqallaq’s health suddenly took a turn for the worse. He was admitted to hospital with influenza, and an examination showed tuberculosis bacilli present. His weight had dropped to 146 pounds. The prison doctor thought that “...he will continue to fail very rapidly if still confined in the Penitentiary. Were he living in the open air night and day, he would have a better chance of recovery.”
Finally, in the late spring of 1925, the Governor General granted a Ticket of Leave to allow Nuqallaq to return home on the ship that summer.
Aboard the Arctic, Nuqallaq was housed in one of the whaleboats on deck. The fresh air on the early part of the trip brought a marked improvement to his health. Off Cape Mercy, with the ship in the pack, he even went for a walk on the ice. But by early August he was sick again, with pain in his chest, and coughing. The doctor diagnosed pleurisy. He was given eggs, milk and whiskey as treatment, but soon became impatient for heavier food, and ate ravenously for a number of nights. He despaired of reaching Pond Inlet alive, and convinced himself that the inlet would be full of ice and prevent his return.
Finally, on Sept. 3, the ship reached Pond Inlet. Nuqallaq dressed up in a white man’s suit for his return. He went ashore and was greeted by his young wife, Ataguttiaq. His sole possessions were $3.15, a ring with five stones for his wife, his Ticket of Leave, and his Inuktitut Bible, which he is said to have carried everywhere with him. The government officials aboard the Arctic watched the reunion of Nuqallaq with his people, and reported that “...there was no demonstration when he arrived. He was still considered in the bad books of the white man because of his crime...”
When Nuqallaq was taken away in the fall of 1923, he left behind a young and attractive wife, Ataguttiaq. She began a relationship with a young policeman, Ernie Friel — Makkulaaq — the youngest of four officers stationed at Pond Inlet.
He was an active young man, who learned to drive a dog team and maintained a trap line on Bylot Island. Friel’s relationship with Ataguttiaq was open and known to all in the district. In February, 1925, Ataguttiaq bore Friel’s child, a boy named Arnakallak. He remained with his mother for only the first three days of his life, then was given to his grandparents, Qamaniq and Makpainuk, to be raised. Nuqallaq learned of the existence of this little boy as soon as he arrived. It didn’t matter. He accepted him. The important thing was that he was home.
One of Nuqallaq’s first desires was for a good feed of seal meat. The police provided him a tent, and did what they could to make his quarters comfortable. After his meal, he went to bed and was still there when the ship departed for the south. In fact, he was dying. The ship’s doctor noted, “He was expectorating some blood… The prognosis is grave.”
During the next two months, Nuqallaq hunted seals sporadically. In November he worked for some days for the Hudson’s Bay Company, then left with his wife and others for Arctic Sound to hunt. One day, his hunting partner, Kipumii, fell through the ice. Nuqallaq was unable to reach him, and shouted at the top of his voice for help. Others heard him and saved Kipumii, but Inuit believe that the exertion that his shouting put on his badly damaged lungs worsened his health.
The police visited Nuqallaq at Emerson Island in the middle of November, and found him sick and confined to a damp and cold snowhouse. On December 5, he died. He was buried at a place called Iqaluit in Tay Sound.
Judge Rivet’s sentence had been a death sentence after all.
Taissumani: A Day in Arctic History recounts a specific event of historic interest, whose anniversary is in the coming week. Kenn Harper is a historian, writer and linguist who lives in Iqaluit. Feedback? Send your comments and questions to kennharper@hotmail.com.
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