102 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
IFeb. 9, 1901* J 
Now and Then* 
In the beginning of this new century we are wont to 
review the past history of our country with satisfaction 
and to congratulate ourselves upon the wonderful im- 
provements wrought by our civilization since the time 
when the only Americans were the "noble red men." 
Along some lines, however, it appears that our boasted 
civilization has caused no advancement, and that we have 
deteriorated from rather than improved upon the stand- 
ards established by the aborigines. In support of this 
view I offer as evidence and for comparison the records 
of two separate occurrences, one of the present day and 
the other of more than a century ago. 
In the telegraphic columns of one of the current daily 
newspapers there appeared recently the following item: 
"TOUGH TRAMP IN WOODS. 
"Maine Game Warden Nearly Succumbs to Cold and 
Hunger. 
"Caribou, Me., Jan. 27. — Game Warden has 
just reached here after a terrible journey of two weeks 
in the dense forests of northern Maine. He left here for 
Chamberlain Lake with 2,000 landlocked salmon, and hav- 
ing liberated the small fry went to a lumber camp on the 
Upper Allegash. From there he started through the 
forests for a camp on the St. John River. 
"When twenty-two miles in the woods he was taken 
sick, and he started to return. He lost one of his mit- 
tens, and kept his hands warm by shifting the remain- 
ing one from one hand to the other. For thirty-six hours 
he trudged through the woods without food. Constantly 
growing Aveaker, he was so near to lying down for the 
last time that he began to mark the trees along his trail 
that he might be followed, and thought of making his 
•will on a piece of birch bark. When about to give up he 
came in sight of the lumber camp, and it took him four 
hours to cover the last three miles. He lay in bed three 
days at the camp, and finally reached here Wednesday 
night." 
Now, after the story of this "terrible journey," let me 
refer to an account of a somewhat similar incident which 
is narrated in Hearne's "Journey from Prince of Wales 
Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean," pub- 
lished in London in 1795. Samuel Hearne was the Hud- 
son's Bay Company factor at Fort Prince of Wales near 
the present Churchill Factory, on the west shore of Hud- 
son's Bay, and at the request of the committee of the 
company he undertook a two years' journey, under the 
guidance of the Indians, and without any white com- 
panion, through the Barren Grounds to the Coppermine 
River, which he was the first white man to discover. On 
his return trip he visited the Athabasca country, and 
under the date of January 1772 he makes note of the 
following circumstances: 
"On Jan. 11, as some of my companions were hunt- 
ing, they saw the track of a strange snowshoe, which 
they followed; and at a considerable distance came to 
a little hut, where they discovered a young woman 
sitting alone. As they found that she understood their 
language, they brought her with them to the tents. On 
examination, she proved to be one of the Western Dog- 
ribbed Indians who had been taken prisoner by the 
Athapuscow (Athabasca) Indians in the summer of 1770; 
and in the following summer, when the Indians that took 
her prisoner were near this part, she had eloped from 
them with an intent to return to her own country, but the 
distance being so great, and 'having, after she was 
taken prisoner,' been carried in a canoe the whole way, 
the turnings and windings of the rivers and lakes were 
so numerous that she forgot the track; so she built the 
hut in which we found her, to protect her from the 
weather during the winter, and here she resided from the 
first setting in of the fall. 
"From her account of the moons past since her 
elopement it appeared that she had been near seven 
months without seeing a human face, during all of which 
time she had supported herself very well by snaring 
partridges, rabbits and squirrels; she had also killed two 
or three iDeaver and some porcupines. That she did not 
seem to have been in want is evident, as she had a small 
stock of provisions by her when she was discovered, and 
was in good health and condition, and I think one of 
the finest women of a real Indian that I have seen in 
any part of North America. 
"The methods practiced by this poor creature to pro- 
cure a livelihood were truly admirable, and were the 
great proofs that necessity is the real mother of inven- 
tion. When the few deer sinews that she had an op- 
portunity of taking with her were all expended in making 
snares and sewing her clothing she had nothing to supply 
their place but the sinews of the rabbits' legs and feet; 
these she twisted together for that purpose with great 
dexterity, and success. The rabbits, etc., which she 
caught in those snares not only furnished her with a 
comfortable subsistence, but of the skins she made a suit 
of neat and warm clothing for the winter. It is scarcely 
possible to conceive that a person in her forlorn situation 
could be so composed as to be capable of contriving or 
executing anything that was not absolutely necessary 
to her existence; but there were sufficient proofs that she 
had extended her care much further, as all her clothing, 
besides being calculated for real service, showed great 
taste and exhibited no little variety of ornament. The 
materials, though rude, were very curiously wrought, and 
so judiciously placed as to make the whole of her garb 
have a very pleasing though rather romantic appear- 
ance. Her leisure hours from hunting had been em- 
ployed in twisting the inner rind or bark of willows into 
small lines, like net twine, of which she had some hun- 
dred fathoms by her. With this she intended to make a 
fishing net as "soon as the spring advanvced. It is of 
the inner bark of willows, twisted in this manner, that 
the Dog-ribbed Indians make their fishing nets, and 
they are much preferable to those made by the Northern 
Indians. _ ^ . , , . , 
"Five or six inches of an iron hoop made into a knife 
and the shank of an arrow head of iron, which served as 
an awl, were all the metals this poor woman had with 
her when she eloped; and with these implements she 
had made herself complete snowshoes and several other 
useful articles. 
"The method of making a fire was equally singular and 
curious, having no other materials for that purpose than 
two hard sulphurous stones. These, by long friction and 
hard knocking, produced a few sparks, which at length 
communicated to some touchwood; but as this method 
was attended with great trouble, and not always with 
success, she did not suffer her fire to go out all the 
winter. Hence we may conclude that she had no idea 
of producing fire by fi'iction in the manner practiced by 
the Eskimos and many other uncivilized nations, be- 
cause if she had the above-mentioned precaution would 
have been unnecessary. 
"When the Athapuscow Indians took the above Dog- 
ribbed Indian woman prisoner thej% according to the 
universal custom of those savages, surprised her and her 
party in the night, and killed every soul in the tent ex- 
cept herself and three other young women. Among 
those whom they killed were her father, mother and 
husband. Her young child, four or five months old, she 
concealed in a bundle of clothing and took with her 
undiscovered in the night. But when she arrived at 
the place where the Athapuscow Indians had left their 
wives (which was not far distant) they began to examine 
her bundle, and finding the child, one of the women 
took it from her and killed it on the spot. 
"This last piece of barbarity gave her such a disgust 
to those Indians that, notwithstanding the man who 
took care of her treated her in every respect as his wife, 
and was, she said, remarkably kind to and- even fond of 
her, so far was she from being able to reconcile herself to 
any of the tribe that she rather chose to expose herself 
to misery and want than to live in ease and affluence 
among persons who had so cruelly murdered her infant. 
The poor woman's relation of this shocking story, which 
she delivered in a very afi^ecting manner, only excited 
laughter among the savages of my party. 
"In a conversation with this woman soon afterward 
she told us that her country lies so far to the westward 
that she had never seen iron or any other kind of metal 
till she was taken prisoner. Though her tribe had fre- 
quently heard of the useful materials which the nations 
or tribes to the east of them were supplied with from 
the English, so far were they from drawing nearer to 
be in the way of trading for iron work, etc., that they 
were obliged to retreat further back to avoid the Atha- 
puscow Indians, who made surprising slaughter among 
them both in winter and summer." 
Comparison of the foregoing cases seems to warrant 
the conclusion that when thrown entirely upon their own 
resources in the wilderness the influences of civilization 
have tended to decrease rather than to increase the 
abilitv of its creatures to successfully maintain existence 
and that in this respect the twentieth century civilized 
man is far behind the eighteenth century savage. 
To the sportsman for whom the Northland has any 
fascination this old journal of Hearne's will well repay a 
perusal. It is unfortanately now rather a rare book. If 
some enterprising publisher would issue a modern re- 
print of this interesting and instructive old work it would 
prove a valuable addition to the library of many a 
sportsman. Chauncey P. Williams. 
Albany, N. Y., Jan. 81. 
An Heroic Adventure. 
When we had come to anchor in Trinity Bay and all 
the sails were safely stowed, the Captain of our yacht 
proposed we should go ashore and see the celebrated 
Comeau His. 
Bob, my companion, asked, "Celebrated for what?^ 
"Oh! for several things," replied the Captain. He 
is a most extraordinary man in his many acquirements 
and knowledge. Born and brought up on this coast, he 
has passed all his life here, with the exception of the 
three years his father was able to send him to school, but 
those three years he made use of to lay the foundation 
of a wonderful store of practical knowledge. His school- 
ing, as I have said, was but the foundation; by reading 
and observation he has added to it in a marvelous way. 
"From his early training and the life of every one on 
the coast, it would go without sayin^^ that he knows how 
to shoot, but he is more than a good shot, he is a deadly 
shot. Anything he aims his gun at that is within shoot- 
ing distance is dead. As a salmon fisher, no crack angler 
who visits these rivers can hope to compete with him. 
"As a linguist he can speak, read and write in French. 
English, Latin and Indian; besides this, he can talk 
rapidly in the dumb alphabet. He holds the position of 
telegraph operator at Trinity, also of postmaster and 
fishery overseer, and besides, when anything goes wrong 
with the line for two hundred miles east or west, the 
department immediately wires him to go and fix them up. 
"He has more than a fair knowledge of medicine for 
one who derived all his insight from reading alone. Last 
summer there was an epidemic of measles all along the 
coast among both whites and Indians. Here, with a popu- 
lation of 150, two-thirds of whom were down, Comeau, 
who attended them, did not lose one patient, while at 
Bersimis, where the department sent a full-fledged M. D., 
there were thirty-nine burials out of a population of 450. 
"You may be sure the poor people all along the coast 
^^^So t^'boat was lowered away, and the Captain, Bob 
and I were rowed ashore to see this paragon. From ■ 
the outside look of the place I could see the man was one 
of good taste and orderly. The knock at the door was 
answered by Comeau himself. The Captain was person- 
ally acquainted with him and introduced us before we 
entered. I must say I was disappointed. One always is 
when he has pictured a person in his mmd s eye and finds 
that in reality he is quite a different kind of person. 
I had looked for Comeau to be a large man and a 
boisterous one from his position of superiority over others. 
On the contrary, I found him below the medium, a quiet, 
low-voiced man, reserved almost to shyness. I saw at 
once he was a great observer, one who would make 
deductions froro specks invisible to ordinary, people; or. 
in other words, he could put two and two together and 
dovetail them better than most men. 
We were ushered into a large, clean, airy room, 
in the middle of which sat a very good lookit^g 
lady in a roomy rocker, with a child on each 
knee. If Comeau himself is reserved and not 
inclined to talk, his wife can do enough for both. She 
excused herself for not rising when her husband in- 
troduced us. Nodding down at her babies, she said, 
"You see I am fixed." One could see she is a proud 
mother — they are twins; this she told us before we were 
well seated, and she further informed us that they were 
the only twins on the Labrador. So she is celebrated 
also. 
When we got fairly settled in Comeau's den, the con- 
versation naturally drifted into hunting and fishing. Bob 
made some inquiries about the pools on the Trinity. To 
make his explanations clear, Comeau pulled out a drawer 
of photographic views of the river. In rummaging these 
over, he cast aside a gold medal. "Excuse me," I said, 
reaching over and taking up the medal. On it I read en- 
graved : 
"Presented to N. A. Comeau by the R. H. S. for er.\very 
IN saving life." 
LTpon my asking him to recount the circumstances, he 
blushed and looked quite confused, and said : "Oh ! it was 
nothing worth speaking of, but I suppose people talked 
so much about it that thev gave me that token. It was 
nothing more than any man would have done," and this 
Avas all we could get from him unless we had carried 
persistency to an ungentlemanly degree. 
After having spent a very pleasant hour, we returned 
on board, and the Captain told us the story that the hero 
himself would not: 
Two years before, one day in January, Comeau arrived 
home from the back country to find that two men had 
that day while seal hunting off shore been driven off the 
coast toward the ice pack in the gulf. One of the men 
was Comeau's own brother-in-law, and the other a half- 
breed. In spite of the supplications of his wife and the 
persuasions of the other individuals of the place, Comeau 
set about preparations to follow them out to sea. He 
asked no one to accompany him. 
The wind all the afternoon had been steadily off shore 
and was now moderately calm. He took with him some 
restoratives, provisions, a lantern, a couple of blankets, 
his rifle and ammunition and what else useful he could 
think of in his hurry. The ice pack was then about ten 
miles off the land, and he reasoned the men must be on 
the ice, if large and strong enough, or in among it if in 
small cakes, the latter being much more dangerous. 
From Trinity to Matane in a direct line the distance is 
forty-five miles, and to push out iiji a frail, wooden 
canoe alone and the darkness coming on in the black gulf 
in mid-winter required a brave man with extraordinary 
nerve to dare it, and this Comeau did. 
Three minutes after pushing out from the "beach, canoe 
and man were swallowed up in the darkness. The next 
the people of Trinity heard of him was a telegraphic mes- 
sage on the second day after. It read: "Matane. All 
three alive. Joseph, hands frozen ; Simon, both feet frozen 
badly." 
This message was to his family, but the Matane people 
sent a much longer one to the Government, giving the 
facts, describing the hardships these men had come 
through, and a special train was sent down with the best 
surgeon from Quebec. On the surgeon's arrival at 
Matane a consultation was held with the county practi- 
tioner, when it was decided- that the man Joseph would 
have to lose two fingers on each hand and Simon both 
feet. 
The amputation was successfully carried out next day, 
and shortly after, when Comeau saw both men well on to 
recovery, he started for his home, not, however, by the 
way he had come, but up to Quebec by the south shore 
and down the north shore from Quebec, a distance of 
nearly 700 miles. The last hundred he made on snow- 
shoes. 
The Captain told us that the description of this very 
venturesome trip he had heard from Comeau's own 
brother as the elder one had described it in the heart of 
his own family. He had reached the ice pack, to the 
best of his judgment, about fifteen miles from the land, 
and had remained on his oars and hallooed once or twice 
without receiving an answer. He suddenly bethought 
himself of the lantern. This he lit and lashed to the 
blade of one of his oars, and erected it aloft. Immediately 
a faint cry was heard to the eastward, and he lowered 
his light and pulled away in the direction whence the 
call appeared to come. After rowing for a short time 
the lantern was waved above again, and this time an 
answering shout came from close at hand. 
The two poor fellows were some distance in the pack, 
and had got on the largest cake they could find. They 
were sitting there helpless, holding on each by one hand 
to the rough surface of the ice, and with the other to 
their canoe to keep it from being washed off. 
By the aid of the lantern held aloft, Comeau saw there 
was a much larger cake of ice some distance further in 
the pack. To this they made their way with laborious 
trouble. Pushing one canoe as far ahead among the' ice 
as possible, they would all three get into this, shove the 
other in advance in the same way, and so repeating the 
process till they reached the solid field. Once safely on 
this, for the meantime, secure place, food was partaken 
of and daylight waited for. 
Soon, however, the intense cold began to make itself 
felt, and di«wsiness was fast taking hold of the two men, 
and their great wish was to be left alone and allowed to 
sleep. This Comeau knew if indulged meant death, and 
it took all his efforts to keep them awake and moving 
about. Once while attending to the half-breed, his brother- 
in-law dropped down and was fast asleep in an instant. 
Comeau boxed him, kicked him, without having the de- 
sired effect of rousing him from his stupor. At last he 
bethought him of what an old Indian had done to him 
under somewhat similar circumstances. He caught the 
man's nose between the thumb and finger and tweaked 
it severely. This brought him to his feet and mad to 
fight. 
Day was now breaking, and they could see the south 
shore at a computed distance of ten miles. Comeau also 
saw that the ice pack was drifting steadily east, and this, 
