682 
FOREST AND STREAM 
May 31, 1913 
in those days, and at Grande Portage the pack 
strap took precedence. Men used to load as 
much as three sixty-pound bags of flour on 
their backs and walk across the Grande Portage 
and return with the same weight of furs as late 
as John McLaurin’s day. In the time of the 
Northwest Company, when voyaging was at the 
height of its glory, no doubt the rivalry among 
a thousand men led to feats very much greater 
than that. Seven hundred pounds is an old 
story—for a short distance—while some nar¬ 
rators will go as high as nine and tell you 
exactly how the load was adjusted. Old John 
McLaurin, of Fort William, who used to pack 
over this portage, is very proud of the fact that 
he could put a keg of pork on top of a bag 
of flour and get the barrel up by himself. His 
wife (an Indian woman from the South Shore) 
could carry as much as he could, “but then,” 
says John, “there were men who could walk 
off with me—pack and all.” The Hudson Bay 
Company used to pack in brigades and relays, 
putting down the packs at every i.ooo paces, and 
going back for another load. “We rested walk¬ 
ing back,” says John McLaurin. 
There is a steady up-grade from Lake Su¬ 
perior until about six miles are covered, when 
the land relents and lets the burden bearer gent¬ 
ly down to the valley of the Pigeon. Several 
steep gullies cut across the route, meaning a 
climb of perhaps too feet each time, and in wet 
weather there are at least four brooks, and as 
mail}" swampy beaver meadows. Over this road 
the supplies for the Canadian Northwest and 
the Oregon used to be transported on men’s 
backs. 
Here on this old trail, where Batiste Tru¬ 
deau and his kind toiled and sweated, with the 
glory of accomplishment and a Spanish dollar 
per hundred pounds a trip for his reward, we 
may pass to-day over the same hills and realize 
the exact conditions under which he labored, 
and in doing so we turn back the nineteenth 
century wonder book to the first page and the 
preface. 
When you go to Grande Portage nowadays 
you go Ty palace steamer. You also leave the 
silent “e” out of “Grande” and pronounce “por¬ 
tage” like you do cartage, and no French non¬ 
sense about it. And all is comparatively up-to- 
date, including the Duluth capitalist and the 
majority of the passengers. At 2 o’clock in 
the afternoon the boat noses into a channel, 
with a wooded mountain on the right and a 
wooded island on the left. And between you 
see to the “bottom of a bay which forms an 
amphitheater and is cleared of wood.” Sir 
Alexander Mackenzie describes this place in his 
book, published in 1801. You note “the hill 
three or four hundred feet high in the left 
corner, crowned by others of still greater 
height.” But in place of the fort at the base 
of this hill, as in Mackenzie’s time, surrounded 
by cedar palisades eighteen feet high, you see 
the scattered white log cabins of an Indian vil¬ 
lage, for Grande Portage is now a “reserve” 
in the State of Minnesota. 
The close green forest of spruce and birch 
and pine looks down from mounting tiers of 
terraces upon a shallow harbor. We’d call these 
carpet-spread Laurentians “mountains” in old 
Ontario or in Michigan, but Sir Alexander 
Mackenzie came from the Highlands of Scot¬ 
land and he called them “hills.” They slope 
back from the village, rising to the height of 
about 1,000 feet, thrusting encircling arms out 
into Lake Superior as if to trap the evasive little 
island. 
In the channel near this island the steam¬ 
boat comes to a stop, and you look down from 
the deck at the pebbles on the bottom through 
water as clear as air, yet tinged with green. A 
wherry loaded with people puts out from a 
corner of the island, where you notice a clear¬ 
ing and a little dock. Three men standing at 
the sweeps, facing forward, lean and sway, two 
pushing on the oars amidships, one sculling in 
the stern. They bring up under the fore port 
gangway, throw a U. S. mail bag aboard, and 
one by one a dozen of Indian men, women and 
children clamber up the ladder, followed by a 
few stubble-bearded lumber Jacks. 
Then somebody shouts: “Anybody getting 
off at Grande Portage? Hurry up— we’ve only 
got a minute here.” 
A moment more and you sit under the 
swelling bilge of the steamer and see the rusty 
rivets descend the full curve into the clear green 
water and disappear underneath the hull. You 
have clambered down a six-stepped ladder from 
civilization into the wilderness, from the present 
into the past. 
The steamer glides away and disappears 
from the little forest harbor. You go ashore with 
Pete Gagnon and his men, all silent as smug¬ 
glers. Nobody asks any questions of the 
stranger. The heavy wherry, the great sweeps, 
the hard-lined faces, the swaying jersey-clad 
bodies, the rocks, the clear green water—all 
bear suggestion of the sea and the pictures of 
that great American artist, Howard Pyle. 
At the dock a huge Newfoundland dog, black 
as ebony, comes gravely to meet the passenger, 
followed by a St. Bernard, which, though quite 
an average of its bulky kind, seems dwarfed by 
the giant black fellow with the long straight 
legs and the white foot. 
A fish shed stands at the end of the wharf 
and several Mackinaw boats and dories lie there 
or at their moorings, or beached on the big 
gnarled pebbles of the shore. Half a dozen log 
warehouses or dwellings stand in a clearing, and 
a frame house with a verandah stands back up 
the slope of the point, close to the wall of the 
bush. In this house Peter Gagnon, once of 
Quebec, lives this long since with his wife, an 
Ojibway woman, and Pete does all the business 
now done at Grande Portage. His island is the 
island Mackenzie notes as screening “a pleasant 
bay from all winds save the south.” 
Pete is a character worthy of Robert Louis 
Stevenson. Silent, hard-faced, big of feature, he 
walks with a loose, wide-braced stride, his 
shoulders rounded and loose, his long arms 
hanging as though resting relaxed from a heavy 
lift or a long haul. But that silent man is the 
prevailing personality of the place. He works 
with his brain. He is efficient. Peter originally 
was a fisherman. Now he buys and sells fish. 
At Peter’s house men pay to stop for a meal 
or a night, on the way to and from the camps. 
When on certain days and nights the steamboat 
calls, Peter puts the passengers on or takes 
them off, and always they land on his island. 
Should they desire to go ashore, he sends them to 
the mainland in one of his skiffs by one of his 
men, at fifty cents a head. He handles the United 
States mail also, and keeps a store. Fishermen 
come in from the fog or the storm or the 
calm, as it may be, at any hour of the day or 
night, in dories, in sailboats, in gasoline launches, 
and steam tugs, from that great, cold, grim, 
fresh-water sea they call Lake Superior, with 
fish to go on ice or be packed in brine. And 
they land at Pete’s place and wake him up, if 
necessary, and he buys their fish at about six 
cents a pound—great Superior trout, silver white 
like salmon, or black and spotted gray like huge 
colorless brook trout; whitefish, herring, mullet, 
suckers and sometimes sturgeon. And then 
Pete takes them up to his little store, with it low, 
log-beamed ceiling and its square timber walls, 
and sells the fishermen scantlings of tobacco a 
foot long, indestructible butter at fifty cents 
a pound, potatoes, onions, overalls, gasoline, 
rabbit-skin blankets, pork, flour, matches—any¬ 
thing they want. If ever an artist seeks a study 
for a store of the pioneer days he should go 
to Pete Gagnon’s some night. 
Some night when Dutchy and his partner 
come in from Pine Bay with fish and moose, 
Dutchy of the gaunt frame and the windmill 
arms, he in the tight blue jersey, who used to 
fish the North Sea and off the coast of Maine; 
and when comes Francis, the hawk-nosed half- 
breed, with the ragged mustache, and the thick 
black hair, and the silent, smooth-cheeked Indian 
youth who sails with him; when the “land- 
looker” in the flannel shirt and the shoe packs 
comes across from the Portage, fresh out of the 
Minnesota woods; when the Pigeon River log 
drivers “going out” with their “time” loaf in 
the background; when all these, and a few more, 
including Indian boys and the huge sleigh dogs, 
gather in the little store to buy supplies or look 
on—one lantern on the floor, another on the 
wall to light the weather-beaten laughing faces 
and the lithe, heavy-built forms—then it is one 
sees a picture of Old Times, a picture with 
Peter Gagnon in the center; Pete, the inscrut¬ 
able, behind his narrow little counter—silent, 
watchful, adroit, handing out the right thing 
with the right word, and the practical sugges¬ 
tion, always ready with a clinching argument in 
brief, getting his price, and keeping his person¬ 
ality in some subtle way supreme. And his 
French-Canadian-American clerk, in the khaki 
shirt, bustles and talks and chaffs and gets joshed 
for the two of them, talking Indian (he, too, is 
married to a squaw), French or American, with 
equal indifference. You wonder presehtly when 
it was you lived before and met the Duluth 
capitalist. It is hard to realize that this is but 
the evening of the self-same afternoon. 
Peter Gagnon sleeps on Saturday night. 
The rest of the week he is awake. The down- 
bound coasting steamers call at about midnight 
every night but Saturday, and Pete has to meet 
them out in the channel. When the lighted 
monster appears in the dark little harbor the 
great dogs set up a dull, deep-throated baying, 
and Pete comes forth. Also Pete buys fish to 
sell to the Fish Company and that is a business 
that won’t keep. It requires ice and salt on the 
instant. So Pete is always on the job. He 
makes the least possible fuss, and says what 
he does say with the least possible effort. He 
needs his nervous vitality in his business. He 
wastes none of it. Even his smile is one of 
