Mattie Mitchell Read online

  One reindeer could pull as much as 450 pounds as far as forty miles in one day. It could pull a sled with two heavy men riding on it at eighteen miles an hour. This was very encouraging to company officials always looking for ways to cut log-harvesting costs. An added feature, and the most cost effective of all, was that the animals could eat from the surrounding forests. No more would costly hay and oats dig into their profits.

  They learned that one square mile of barrens with a healthy growth of caribou moss could support thirty reindeer forever. Not only that, they could also dine on the yellowish green moss hanging from so many of the spruce trees—which the loggers called maw dow—the company was harvesting. Their research also revealed that the animals loved the tips of birches, alders, and grasses. The four-chambered stomachs of the cud-chewing ruminates could digest almost all available food. And all of it free.

  If the venture didn’t work out, they could always kill the reindeer and use the meat to feed their loggers. The company couldn’t lose. The company learned that the Laplanders drank the reindeer milk, but this was not important to them. Their loggers didn’t drink milk anyway.

  The Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company Limited contacted Dr. Grenfell and asked him to add fifty extra animals to his order to be landed at their dock in the seaport town of Lewisporte. Providing, of course, the company could have the animals delivered at draft horse prices or better. Grenfell agreed, and the great forced reindeer migration began.

  Dr. Grenfell paid an initial price of $8.50 for each of the reindeer on the hoof in Lapland. The total costs of freight and for feeding the animals on their transatlantic crossing to St. Anthony came to $51.49. The owners of the steamship Anita charged $1,750 for the winter cruise, along with an additional $0.50 per reindeer head to be given to the captain of their vessel, providing the deer reached Newfoundland in good health.

  Sami herders drove the 300 reindeer across much of Lapland to the Alten Fjord on the north coast. The herdsmen had been hired not only to deliver the animals to the coast, but to accompany them across the ocean to Newfoundland. The Sami herders also brought with them their herd dogs and insisted on taking their families. They would not leave without them.

  Although the Alten Fjord sat well within the Arctic Circle, December of 1907 brought little snow. Getting the deer to the ship wasn’t a problem, but hauling the more than 500 sledloads of moss needed to feed them on their North Atlantic voyage slowed their progress considerably. On December 30, with all 300 reindeer safely aboard the SS Anita, each one of them stowed in its own hastily built “berth,” the steamship gathered way and headed into the Arctic darkness, down the long, freezing fjord, and to the open North Atlantic ocean.

  For the next twenty days, over half of them bringing violent storms, the Anita sailed westward. Most of the Laplanders became severely seasick. The reindeer, with their antlers cut to prevent injury during the crossing, were constantly tossed about, but their narrow stalls protected them. The human vertigo condition seemed to have no effect on them at all. The ruminates took each daily serving of moss in one end and, after passing it through all four of their stomach chambers, deposited it again, minus all nutrients, in stinking, braided black buttons from the other end. Before the Anita was hull down in the North Sea, her bilge had taken on a distinctive earthy odour.

  On the twenty-first day at sea, January 20, 1908, the Anita hove to off the rugged entrance to St. Anthony, only to discover the harbour was completely frozen over. The ship sailed eight miles farther south along the winter coast to the slob ice off Cremaillere Bay.

  Now began a peculiar sight for the people watching from shore. The ship embedded itself into the pounded ice edge as far as the captain dared and began discharging its cargo. Two hundred and fifty of the reindeer walked up and out of the ship’s hold onto shaky wooden ramps and down onto what appeared to be a frozen white bay. They were reportedly in “splendid” condition and, looking alert and seemingly curious, they started to walk ashore.

  However, the porous slob ice could not bear up to the weight of the reindeer and they frequently broke through into the icy water. In the confusion, many of them swam back to the open sea. Later they were found miles from land and still swimming in a northeasterly direction, toward northern Europe! Farther in from the edge, the ice was sound and many of the reindeer headed for shore, where they immediately began browsing the tops of green scrub spruce trees that rose out of the deep snow.

  A few locals observed that at least two of the reindeer appeared to have symptoms resembling human seasickness. They seemed to sway a bit as they walked, but this was likely the result of adjusting their four sea legs all at one time. They paused with heads down, their long necks outstretched, their throat muscles twitching but discharging nothing. However, their weird, four-legged sailor’s gait soon left them and, with the snarling dogs at their heels carrying out the commands of their human masters, they followed the rest of the herd to the foreign shoreline.

  The Lapland herders, resplendent in their colourful deer hides, walked behind the curious reindeer. The herders had with them several dogs trained in the art of keeping the fleet-footed deer together. Cremaillere, with its half a dozen or so small, unpainted houses, had more than three dozen sled dogs, all of them wanting a piece of the new “foreign” dogs out on the harbour ice.

  The herdsmen, who had endured and survived their first North Atlantic crossing in the dead of winter, were Sami, an indigenous people from Lapland who had domesticated the deer of their homeland for hundreds of years. They couldn’t speak a word of English. Fortunately, the ever-thoughtful Dr. Grenfell had provided a person who could manage enough of the Scandinavian tongue to act as translator. By the time darkness had set in, the cargo intended for the Grenfell herd, complete with herders, their families, and their dogs, were safely ashore.

  Fifty reindeer remained aboard the ship to be transported farther south along the northeast coast of Newfoundland, where they would be off-loaded at the town of Lewisporte, Notre Dame Bay, at the A. N. D. Company’s dock. One Sami family and four of their herd dogs remained aboard the Anita to accompany the fifty reindeer to their final destination. Just as the ship was building up steam to leave, word came from Grenfell that Notre Dame Bay was frozen solid and there would be no entry from the sea. So the remaining fifty reindeer were off-loaded with the others.

  The fifty reindeer now belonging to the A. N. D. Company— forty of them pregnant females—were slated for work as log-hauling draft animals at the company depot in Millertown on the shores of Red Indian Lake, and if they couldn’t get at least part of the way there by sea, then by God they would walk all the way there by land.

  There was no other way. But who would take on such a task? Not only that, who knew the way through the treacherous, winter-stormy Long Range Mountains? There was only one man who had the knowledge and the ability to carry this daunting feat through. Fortunately for Hugh Cole, the Anglo-Newfoundland Development’s manager, such a man was already in the employ of the company, the sixty-four-year-old Mi’kmaq Mattie Mitchell.

  Hugh Wilding Cole was a young Englishman who had come to work for the A. N. D. Company just two years before and had proven himself to be a valuable asset to the company. He was fearless and strong, both in muscle and will. Cole had arrived in St. Anthony on Christmas morning, 1907, in preparation for the reindeer arrival.

  He had brought with him translator Morris Sundine, a man whose native tongue was Swedish. Cole had no way of knowing when the ship would arrive, so, leaving Sundine to remain in St. Anthony, he left again by the coastal boat Prospero under the command of fifty-three-year-old Abram Kean. The trip south on the Prospero was not a good one. The boat encountered winter storms almost day and night. The ship Prospero, named for Shakespeare’s character in The Tempest, earned its name on this winter’s voyage. The ship finally arrived in the outport of Little Bay in Notre Dame Bay, where Hugh Cole hired a dog team and its musher and finally made it to company headquarters in Gra
nd Falls.

  The company’s decision was to bring the reindeer—for which they had paid good money—to Millertown as planned. Cole was instructed to leave as soon as possible for Norris Point, Bonne Bay, and pick up Mattie Mitchell, who would guide them north to St. Anthony and bring the reindeer back with him overland. Cole took Tom Greening, a company foreman and experienced woodsman, and both men travelled by train as far as Deer Lake, which was as far north as they could get by rail. Cole’s freight car contained a dogsled, five hauling dogs, some camping gear, and enough food for a week or so.

  They arrived in Deer Lake at 9: 30 p.m. on a cold Saturday night, January 25, 1908. By the time they were ready to leave Deer Lake on January 27, three feet of snow covered the frozen ground. By 3: 30 p.m. the temperature had risen and it rained, making the going very difficult. By the time they had stitched together their bed of fir boughs, the rain stopped, the clouds shifted, and they slept fitfully under a mantle of bright stars. They had travelled only four miles northwest from Deer Lake.

  The rain began again sometime before dawn and it continued until midday. With the heavy rain and mild weather, travel was impossible. In true Newfoundland style, the temperature dropped drastically that night, the skies cleared, and Cole and Greening broke camp again. On January 29 they travelled a full twenty miles. They reached Bonne Bay at 3: 00 p.m. on Thursday, January 30.

  They crossed from the bottom of the long eastern arm of the bay to the small village of Norris Point by boat. They arrived late in the cold winter afternoon and Cole knocked on Mattie Mitchell’s door. A shy, black-haired, and very pretty woman answered after his second knock. Opening the door only halfway, she told them her husband wasn’t at home. Cole told her who he was and introduced Tom Greening. Mary Anne relaxed when she learned they were from the A. N. D. Company. She wasn’t used to having strange white men knock on her door late in the evening.

  Mattie’s wife told the two men that she expected her husband home before nightfall, but then cautioned timidly, “My man always bring dark on ’is shoulder.”

  Long after the dark had come, Mattie Mitchell came crunching along the snow-packed gravel road to his door and shortly met with Cole and Greening. He agreed to lead them on the trek to St. Anthony without question. When Cole asked him if he would consider taking on the task of guiding a herd of fifty reindeer from St. Anthony to Millertown, Mattie asked him what reindeer were.

  Cole told him they were really caribou but with a different name. He told him where the animals had come from and explained his company’s experiment and the need to get the animals to their depot in Millertown. Mattie considered for a moment and then agreed to lead them.

  Cole knew that Mattie had guided the geographer H. C. Thompson up over the Great Northern Peninsula in 1904 on an extensive mapping expedition for the Newfoundland government. He asked Mattie if he had a copy of one of the maps that Thompson had compiled. Mattie told him he didn’t have one of the paper maps but that he had the route in his head.

  Another winter storm blew in from the sea and snow lashed with northwest winds, stranding them in Norris Point until February 3, when they finally left for St. Anthony. They reached Lobster Cove just north of Rocky Harbour that night.

  And then, quite suddenly, Mattie Mitchell became ill. Red blotches appeared on his face and legs and gave him considerable pain accompanied by fever. Mattie had erysipelas.

  The expedition made it as far as Gulls Marsh the next day, when Mattie’s resistance and great strength gave out. They didn’t make a decent camp and huddled around their campfire in misery.

  They stayed there for two days until Mattie appeared to have improved. The big Indian refused to let the others carry or let the dogs haul his load. On the late evening of February 7, when they walked into the tiny settlement Parson’s Pond with snow drifting all around them, he collapsed. His illness had overtaken him. They waited for three days, without any medicine, for their guide to heal.

  The morning of February 11 dawned cold and sunny, and still the water of the nearby Gulf of St. Lawrence was “stark calm.” Mattie told Cole his sickness had passed and that he was ready for the trail again. They crossed the mouth of the river at Parson’s Pond using a local fisherman’s boat and followed a good, snow-packed trail until they reached Portland Creek by dusk of that day. That night the three men set up their tent and made a good camp.

  Before leaving the next day, Cole bought a new, harness-broken sled dog, and two hours after dark that night they mushed into River of Ponds. They had made twenty-six hard miles that day. The next day Greening became ill with “la grippe” and slowed them to walking only six miles, after which they made camp at Trappers Cove on February 13, just south of the entrance to Hawke’s Bay.

  They crossed the end of that frozen bay the next day and prepared to cross over from the east side of the Northern Peninsula to the west side. Here in Hawke’s Bay, Mattie was assisted by William Uland, who knew of a trail that would take them across. Following his advice, the team made the journey across the peninsula.

  They encountered another mild day that turned cold at night, forming a thin crust on the snow which made for hard going. However, on Monday, February 18, after making their way twenty-four miles down the Cloudy Brook Valley, they made it to Dr. Grenfell’s sawmill. After walking across the ice in Hare Bay on February 20, they took shelter from a blizzard in an abandoned home in Island Bight. From there they pressed on until they finally made it to St. Anthony on Friday, February 21, with Mattie Mitchell leading the way.

  The men made preparations over the next several days for the trip south. They obtained heavy tents complete with small funnel holes in their slanted roofs, along with small portable wood-burning stoves and sleeping robes, which they hoped would keep them warm in the winter nights. Finally, they bought food for all of the party as well as for the dogs.

  Winter gales with snow, mild days with rain and dense fog, and temperatures dropping to five degrees below zero hampered their goal of cutting the A. N. D. Company reindeer from the rest of Grenfell’s herd. At long last, on March 4, the herd and the humans all came together at Locks Cove. The reindeer trek with the Mi’kmaq Mattie Mitchell walking proudly in point position, stood ready to add another historical, adventurous first to the varied pages of Newfoundland lore.

  Cole had with him a Lapland herder, sixty-five-year-old Aslic Sombie, and his wife of thirty-six years, their thirty-year-old son, Pere, and their daughter Maretta, who was thirty-two and could neither speak nor hear. Cole’s interpreter, Morris Sundine, Thomas Greening, and Mattie Mitchell made up the eight people who would do what had never been done before.

  The original plan was to follow the winter sea ice as far as possible, maybe to the bottom of White Bay, and from there cut overland to Millertown. However, by this late date the huge Arctic ice floes had shifted south in their ceaseless spring migration. Cape Bauld had been dividing and checking the mighty white floes for weeks, sending massive sheets of ice south in swiftly moving streams along the land toward the warm waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The island of Newfoundland now had a white bridge to the mainland of Canada.

  On the Atlantic side of the Great Northern Peninsula, as far as the eye could see, the shifting icefields had come and filled every cove and bay as they poured along by the land and silenced the surrounding sea. Great blue swatches of open water could be seen everywhere when the men viewed the sea from high points of land. These open areas of water would close and open without warning as the wind shifted or as the tide ebbed and flowed. A decision was reached to follow the shore ice as far as possible to the western end, and possibly the southern end, of Hare Bay, and then abandon the ocean crossing in favour of the longer but much safer route overland.

  Somewhere in the mysterious time of pre-dawn, a leviathan had reached up and leaned in from the changing sea behind it to take a huge, jagged bite out of the Northern Peninsula, almost severing its defenceless head. This five-mile-wide stretch of water at the mouth of
Hare Bay, penetrating eighteen miles inland, was where the reindeer drive really began.

  The exposed vertebrae along the spine of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula is not for the timid or the faint of heart on the warmest of summer days. With the grip of late winter still firm upon the land, the very idea of travelling, on foot, the entire length of that winter-bound peninsula—let alone nursing along a herd of semi-wild animals—seemed ludicrous. Many of the local trappers who knew the immediate area better than Mattie Mitchell doubted that it could be done. Though Hugh Cole figured the route would be a challenge for anyone—especially after the trip up from Deer Lake—he had such dependence in Mitchell’s wilderness lore and incredible sense of direction that he entrusted him with the task of guiding his party the entire unmapped route.

  With his easygoing, carefree manner, Mattie didn’t see the trip as anything more than a prolonged walk “on the country.”

  CHAPTER 14

  HOWEVER, THE EASY, TIME-SAVING way across the frozen Hare Bay was not possible. Due to the recent rain and subsequent freezing, the bay had turned into a black, icy sheet. The reindeer would not be able to keep their footing on such a slippery surface, so Cole made the decision to walk around the bay, increasing their trek by forty miles.

  Leaving the sea behind them, the group set out for the distant Long Range Mountains, the northernmost link of the huge Appalachian chain that began far south on the North American continent. Mattie Mitchell, with his tireless, long-legged stride, was the vanguard of the group. He walked on leather-tied snowshoes of his own design and making.

  The small party of nomad-like travellers were a sight to behold, with an Indian stepping boldly out in front, constantly breaking trail through the deep, snow-clogged valleys and sparse scrublands and deep forests alike. Following behind him came the smooth-stepping deer, their flaring black nostrils forcing grey, plumed mists into the frigid air that hung like wreaths above them as they moved along. Next came the endlessly barking dogs, running along the sides and sometimes behind the reindeer in response to their foreign master’s yelling. And then came the Sami herder and his family, all dressed resplendently from head to feet in the skins of the animals they had come to herd. Inside their nearly knee-high reindeer skin boots, their feet were wrapped in dried grasses.