The Land of Little Sticks

P. G. Downes' book, Sleeping Island , had long captivated both Lynda and I. This book tells of the 1939 canoe trip made by Downes, a school teacher who worked just outside of Boston, and John Albrecht, starting from the small trapping and trading community of Brochet at the north end of Reindeer Lake in northern Manitoba. Their final destination was the Hudson Bay Company post, run by Fred Schweder senior, on Windy River at the north end of Nueltin Lake.

From Brochet, these two seasoned travellers struggled upstream on the Cochrane River, portaging into Downes' so-called"chain of little lakes", and finally into Fort Hall Lake. From here they worked their way through Kasmere, Graves, Sucker, and Nahill Lakes, following a river which flows into the south end of Nueltin Lake. In the confusion so typical of northern travel, this river is, as well, called by many the Thlewiaza. The land this southern Thlewiaza runs through is one of jackpine-covered, high, sand eskers, and long sand beaches. These eskers, running northeast to southwest, mark the paths of glacial rivers which carved their way through the land as the last ice sheets retreated some seven to eight thousand years ago. Looking from the air like sinuous snakes, these ridges are like well goomed parks on top, and most often are covered in caribou moss and dotted with soft yellow-green coloured jackpine trees. They are like northern "highways", and make for excellent walking. It is little wonder the Dene, Inuit, and the caribou used them as such in their travels. On the tops of many can still be found the deeply cut trails of the millions of caribou that walked single file along their length during their seasonal migration.

The beauty of this land is perhaps best expressed in the following dailogue, reportedly between a Dog-Rib Indian and a Catholic priest in Sleeping Island ,"Tell me, Father is (your Heaven) like the land of the little trees when the ice has left the lake? Are the great musk oxen there? Are the hills covered with flowers? There will I see the caribou everywhere I look? Are the lakes blue with the sky of summer? Is every net full of great, fat, whitefish? Is there room for me in this land, like our land, the Barrens? Can I camp anywhere and not find that someone else has camped? Can I feel the wind and be like the wind? Father, if your Heaven is not all these, leave me alone in my land, the land of the little sticks."

The Thlewiaza River is uniquely bound into the Nueltin Lake fur trade history, as it was a route into the area from Churchill via Hudson Bay. Inuit elders in Arviat remember travelling inland on this river, still known to them today as Big River, to trap arctic foxes and hunt caribou. Gerry Dunning's book, When the Foxes Ran, paints a fascinating picture of many of the European trappers who worked their way up "Big" River to gain access to the white fox runs. The Schweder family, the Bucholtz brothers, Cliff Cochrane, Frits Oftedal, George Yandle, Dave Lundie, Jack Hogarth, and others, all trapped the Nueltin Lake country at one time or another, and are all prominently featured in his series of interviews with the old timers of Churchill, Manitoba. Many of these trappers discovered the 'Land of Little Sticks' by travelling north from The Pas, as did Downes. As they moved further and further toward the northeast, into the Nueltin Lake and the Thlewiaza River area, they soon found that they were closer to Churchill than they were to the fur trade psot at Brochet, and thus the coast of Hudson Bay became the base of operation for many of them.

The Thlewiaza River formed a small part of the epic canoe journey undertaken by Ernest Oberholtzer and Billy Magee in 1912. Their 1600 mile trip is recounted by R. H. Cockburn in his January-February 1986 Beaver magazine article entitled, "Voyage to Nutheltin". These two seasoned woodsmen started their canoe trip at The Pas, Manitoba on June 26, 1912. Not until August 27, did they arrive at Seal Hole Lake, at the north end of Nueltin Lake. Fifteen days later, they made it to Hudson Bay, just south of present-day Arviat, where they luckily met an Inuit family who they persuaded to take them the 130 miles to Fort Churchill in their sailboat.

Following a brief stay at Churchill, the two interpid paddlers left on September 22, embarking on a hazardous paddle down the coast of storm-tossed Hudson Bay toward York Factory. Paddling 12 or more hours per day, often through high seas, and with ice forming on their paddles and clothes, they eventually arrived, exhausted and no doubt somewhat jubilant, at York Factory after eleven grueling days. From York Factory, they followed the Hayes River to Oxford House, and then proceeded on to Norway House. A final 250 mile dash down Lake Winnipeg found them at trip's end on November 5, 133 days after they had set out.