NOTES

PROLOGUE

John R. Sperry, Igloo Dwellers Were My Church (Calgary: Bayeaux Arts, Inc., 2001), p. 120.

Roger P. Bulliard, Inuk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), pp. 76–77.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 14, 1917.

“Address of C. C. McCaul, K. C., in Opening the Case for the Prosecution of Sinnisiak, an Eskimo Charged with Murder, Before the Hon. Chief Justice Harvey and a Jury, at Edmonton, Alberta,” August 14th, 1917, Alberta Provincial Archives, pp. 4–6; Edmonton court transcript.

Ibid.

CHAPTER ONE

George Whalley, The Legend of John Hornby (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 5–22, 27, 54–55; George Douglas, Lands Forlorn: A Story of an Expedition to Hearne’s Coppermine River (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914), pp. 50–51; Gabriel Breynat, The Flying Bishop: Fifty Years in the Canadian Far North (London: Burns and Oates, 1955), pp. 20, 155; George Whalley, “Coppermine Martyrdom,” Queens Quarterly 66 (winter 1959–60), pp. 591, 593–95, 610. Hornby had gone to Harrow, spoke in a soft scholarly voice, and knew bits of French, German, and Italian. He had first come to Canada from England in 1904, a wandering twenty-three-year-old son of a cotton-spinning family. His father, “Monkey” Hornby, had been an all-England cricketeer. John Hornby was not the first of his tribe to travel far afield; one brother had died in Africa in 1905; another was a veteran of the Boer War. John trained for the diplomatic service in Germany; he learned to ski there, a story went, and just three weeks later reached the finals of the world ski-running championships.

Breynat, pp. 226–27.

Breynat, pp. 61, 107, 155; Whalley, “Martyrdom,” p. 593.

Breynat, 20–21, 154. Mazenod would become beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1975 and canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1995. As he lay dying on May 21, 1861, Mazenod was said to have offered his final wish to his followers: “Practice amongst yourselves charity, charity, charity . . . and zeal for the salvation of souls.”

Breynat, p. 154. By the end of the nineteenth century, missions to the Canadian Arctic were being bled by the limitless spiritual needs of gold prospectors in the Yukon. Yet the church still maintained ten missions to serve northern Indians, mostly along the Mackenzie River corridor and the shores of the region’s big lakes, Athabasca and Great Slave. Of these missions, only four had churches: Fort Resolution and Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake, and Fort Norman and Fort Good Hope on the Mackenzie. Others conducted services in small house chapels. Manning these missions were a dozen priests, a dozen lay brothers, and ten nuns from the Sisters of Charity or the Grey Sisters of Montreal. In 1895, the church had purchased a sixty-foot steamer, the Saint-Alphonse, for “revictualling” the missions; the money came from societies of the Propagation of the Faith and the Holy Childhood. A new steamer, the Sainte Marie, would arrive in 1906.

J. F. Rymer, “The Dream of the North; or, Catholic Work Amongst the Indians,” Catholic Registry, January 11, 1912.

Breynat, pp. 44–45. One old man, known as “Man’s Shadow,” despite being sick, set off from his camp Easter morning and crossed the lake to receive Holy Communion. The following morning, still feverish, he left the mission for a two-hour hike to inspect his fishing nets. As soon as he arrived, he learned that his son Henry had killed a bear and three elk out on the land. Over the protests of his wife, who was herself prostrate with the flu, Man’s Shadow set off to find his son and a recuperative meal. A few days later, in a dismantled encampment, some Indians discovered the man’s body, half burned and partly devoured by his own dogs, who were still in harness.

Breynat, pp. 110, 154–55; R. G. Moyles, British Law and Arctic Men: The Celebrated 1917 Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, First Inuit Tried Under White Man’s Law (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1979), p. 7; Whalley, Hornby, p. 27; Calgary Daily Herald, August 22, 1917.

Breynat, pp. 20, 27, 41. Breynat’s first midnight mass among his new congregation was one he would never forget. Inside the little hall chapel, men packed into one side, women into the other, all of them kneeling or squatting on their heels. The altar was adorned with candles fashioned from caribou grease. The faithful burst forth with the Kyrie, Gloria, and Credo, then sang hymns in the Indian language Montagnais. During communion, the preparation prayers were recited in chorus; then men, women, and children dutifully filed toward the Holy Table, still singing “Behold the Gentle Lamb.” Most of the Indians living near the mission stuck around only until New Year’s Day, when the Hudson’s Bay Company factor presented a giant feast. The Indians, who to the settlers’ incredulity had been living almost exclusively on caribou for six months, received, among other things, a couple of cakes of tobacco, half a pound of tea, a pound or two of flour, and a few lumps of sugar. They then “set off happily for the respective camping grounds, undaunted by the prospect of five or six days afoot and nights in the open,” Breynat wrote. “Blessed Caribou-Eaters, God bless them!”

Breynat, p. 41.

Breynat, pp. 54–57.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimos (New York: Macmillan, 1913, 1927), pp. xiv, 1, 3, 10, 12, 14, 149, 176–79, 180–81, 208–09; Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York: Picador, 1997), p. 191. Stefansson was a Manitoban born to Icelandic parents who by 1911 had already made archaeological trips to Iceland in 1904 and 1905, and to the north coast of Alaska and the mouth of the Mackenzie River in 1906–07. But it was to the east, the very place Father Rouvière would come several years later, that Stefansson wanted to explore. After interviewing Eskimos near the Mackenzie, Stefansson became certain that no natives east of Cape Parry, along the Dolphin and Union Strait, had ever seen a white man. This, he felt sure, was the only such group left on the North American continent. “Finding them,” he wrote, “would be the unbelievable adventure of stepping thousands of years into the past, back into the unknown history of the Stone Age.” Given his years of experience, Stefansson was supremely confident in his ability to survive. “Carrying food to the Arctic,” he observed, “was carrying coals to Newcastle.” In 1908 Stefansson had launched an expedition with the Canadian zoologist Rudolph Martin Anderson to find and live among the Eskimos near Coronation Gulf. In essence, he set out on an anthropologist’s headiest adventure: to discover one of the last of the world’s people to have remained outside the ken of the European world. Stefansson and Anderson decided to travel light, carrying only cameras and film, rudimentary gear, and rifles and shotguns for themselves and to trade to the Eskimos. Years later, Stefansson would write The Lost Franklin Expedition, a polemic critical of the stubborn European habit of ignoring native navigation and survival techniques. Stefansson’s own reaction to the Copper Eskimos bordered on ecstatic.

“These were not such men as Caesar found in Gaul or in Britain,” he wrote.

They were more nearly like the still earlier hunting tribes of Britain and Gaul living contemporaneous to, but oblivious of, the building of the first pyramid in Egypt. Their existence on the same continent with our populous cities was an anachronism of ten thousand years in material development. They gathered their food with the weapons of the Stone Age, they thought their simple, primitive thoughts, and lived their insecure and tense lives—lives that were to me the mirrors of the lives of our far ancestors, whose bones and crude handiwork we now and then discover in river gravels or in prehistoric caves. I had nothing to imagine; I had merely to look and listen; for here were not remains of the Stone Age, but the Stone Age itself, with its men and women, very human, entirely friendly, who welcomed us to their homes and talked with us.

Stefansson, My Life, pp. 75–76, 81–82. When he had begun his expedition in 1908, Stefansson had immediately noticed a pair of dramatic changes among the Mackenzie River Eskimos from his previous visit just two years before. First, they were altering their seasonal hunting habits in order to secure molasses, sugar, and tea from the dozen or more whaling ships that wintered at Herschel Island. As they had become more and more dependent on trade and throw-offs from the whaling ships, the Eskimos had begun to lose their autonomy. Some had became dissolute as a result, causing a number of explorers to consider the degradation of the people to be as much a legacy of European contact as trade. “The net result was that between 1889 and 1906 there had been greater change wrought than the Hudson’s Bay Company has been reponsible for among any of the northern Indians in a hundred years,” Stefansson wrote. “The condition was now serious, for the whaling industry was beginning to show the signs of a gradual breakdown, which has since terminated in a collapse.”

CHAPTER TWO

Samuel Hearne, A Journey from Prince of Wales Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, ed. Richard Glover (Toronto: Macmillan, 1958), pp. 98–100.

George M. Douglas, Lands Forlorn: A Story of an Expedition to Hearne’s Coppermine River (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914), pp. iii, 6–7; George Whalley, The Legend of John Hornby (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), p. 51.

Douglas, pp. 44–47.

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 243.

Whalley, Hornby, p. 1.

Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York: Picador, 1997), p. 189. Some contemporary linguistists argue that “Eskimo” may actually have evolved from a word describing a technique for tying snowshoes.

Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (New York: North Point Press, 2000), p. 111.

Spufford, p. 212; John R. Sperry, Igloo Dwellers Were My Church (Calgary: Bayeaux Arts, Inc., 2001), p. 14.

Gabriel Breynat, The Flying Bishop: Fifty Years in the Canadian Far North (London: Burns and Oates, 1955), pp. 155–56; George Whalley, “Coppermine Martyrdom,” Queens Quarterly 66 (winter 1959–60), pp. 595–96.

Douglas, pp. 52–54.

Whally, Hornby, pp. 56–57; Whalley, “Martyrdom,” pp. 596–97.

Douglas, pp. 66–71.

Whalley, “Martyrdom,” pp. 596–97; Douglas, p. 86.

Douglas, pp. 90, 136–37; Whalley, Hornby, pp. 57–58; Whalley, “Martyrdom,” p. 597.

CHAPTER THREE

Epigraph: John R. Sperry, Igloo Dwellers Were My Church (Calgary: Bayeaux Arts, Inc., 2001), p. 72.

George M. Douglas, Lands Forlorn: A Story of an Expedition to Hearne’s Coppermine River (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914), pp. 93–104.

Douglas, pp. 107–10.

Douglas, pp. 139–40; George Walley, The Legend of John Hornby (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), p. 60.

Gabriel Breynat, The Flying Bishop: Fifty Years in the Canadian Far North (London: Burns and Oates, 1955), pp. 156–58; George Whalley, “Coppermine Martyrdom,” Queens Quarterly 66 (winter 1959–60), pp. 598–99.

CHAPTER FOUR

Epigraph: Daniel Merkur, Powers Which We Do Not Know: The Gods and Spirits of the Inuit (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1991), p. x.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimos (New York: Macmillan, 1913, 1927), p. 37.

Stefansson, My Life, p. 127. Stefansson began his trip east to Coronation Gulf on April 21, 1910. Within a few short weeks, he would make one of his signature, and most controversial, discoveries: a group of people who came to be known as “Blond” Eskimos. Upon encountering people he felt resembled sunburned Europeans (though none were actually blond; Stefansson blamed the term on overly exuberant newspapermen), Stefansson developed a theory that they may have descended from early Nordic explorers, perhaps from companions of the marauder Erik the Red. Banished from Iceland in the tenth century, Erik had sailed for a frozen place he subsequently named Greenland in hopes of attracting settlers. Erik’s son Leif Eriksson sailed in 1000 to visit his father, but went too far south and hit North America. When he finally did make it to Greenland, he brought along a group of missionaries to set up a Christian colony. Just two hundred years later, there was already a bishopric, a monastery, a nunnery, and sixteen churches. Eventually, Stefansson postulated, some of these people either intermarried with Eskimos or gradually migrated west.

Stefansson, My Life, pp. 180–81, 187, 194–96. At one point, Stefansson met an Indian named Jimmy Soldat who offered to take him to John Hornby in exchange for an introduction to Stefansson’s Eskimo companions. Stefansson felt ambivalent about introducing Soldat or anyone else from the south to his new friends. “I did not desire to bring my unspoiled Coronation Gulf people into contact with civilization, with the ravages of which among the Eskimos of Alaska and the Mackenzie I am too familiar,” Stefansson wrote. “But it seemed that this could not be staved off for more than a year or two, in any case, for our having lived with the Eskimos was bound to become well known, and both the traders and missionaries who operate through Fort Norman would be sure to make use of the information.” Stefansson finally agreed to lead Soldat to within a mile of the Eskimo encampment, then went off to ask their permission to bring him into their camp. At first they refused; they had had little contact with Indians, and their ancestors had had little good to say about them. In the end, Stefansson persuaded them to meet Soldat, provided that he leave all weapons behind. Soldat initially rejected this plan, assuming that the Eskimos meant to kill him. When at last the meeting took place, Soldat lost little time handing out colorful religious prints. He asked Stefansson to tell the Eskimos that he was “an ambassador of a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church, and that the bishop said that if they were good men and never killed any more Indians and abjured their heathenish practices, he would come and build a mission among them and would convert them to the true faith.” Stefansson declined. “This speech,” he later wrote, “which meant so much to the Indian, would, of course, have meant nothing to the Eskimos, for they had never heard of the good bishop or of the faith he preaches. I, therefore, did not bother to translate anything, but merely took the pictures, which were the ordinary religious chromos, and gave them to the Eskimos.”

John R. Sperry, Igloo Dwellers Were My Church (Calgary: Bayeaux Arts, Inc., 2001), p. 39; Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos: A Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1918 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), p. 235. In addition to his remarkable ethnographies of the Copper Eskimos, Jenness is credited with discovering the ancient Dorset culture of Baffin Island.

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), p. 201.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 172–81.

Stefansson, My Life, p. 185.

Stefansson, My Life, p. 36.

Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (New York: North Point Press, 2000), pp. 233–35.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 185–88.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 194–95, 200, 211; Richard Condon, with Julia Ogina and the Holman Elders, The Northern Copper Inuit: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), p. 36.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, p. 217.

Brody, Eden, pp. 230–31.

Roger P. Bulliard, Inuk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), pp. 266, 268.

CHAPTER FIVE

George M. Douglas, Lands Forlorn: A Story of an Expedition to Hearne’s Coppermine River (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914), pp. 136–40; George Whalley, “Coppermine Martyrdom,” Queens Quarterly 66 (winter 1959–60), p. 599; Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos: A Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1918 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), pp. 97, 101.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 104–05.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 113–14.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 107–08.

Douglas, pp. 158–59, 162.

Whalley, “Martyrdom,” p. 600; George Whalley, The Legend of John Hornby (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), p. 64.

Douglas, pp. 131–33, 152–53. Lionel had not stopped with house construction. He had also made a strong table, around which he had placed four wooden folding chairs the team had appropriated from the Mackenzie River steamer. Along the wall near the fireplace, he built a makeshift kitchen—a row of shelves bursting with pots and pans and tins and biscuit boxes filled with flour, sugar, rolled oats, beans, and dried apples. Sleeping quarters were arranged with cots for George and Sandburg and a hammock for Lionel.

Meals were simple affairs. Breakfast, served at nine-thirty, typically consisted of oatmeal porridge, sometimes served with bacon and beans, but more often with a caribou or ptarmigan hash, dried potatoes, bannock (a flat, unleavened bread made from oatmeal), and tea. Lunch, served at three-thirty, was typically soup, caribou steaks, stews, or roasted ptarmigan, along with more dried potatoes and bannock and stewed apples. Dinner, at eight, was usually the day’s light meal, just bannock and chocolate. For a weekly treat, Sunday breakfasts were served with coffee instead of tea, and hominy instead of oatmeal.

Labor among the three was laid out as neatly and efficiently as the cabin’s interior. Chores rotated each week between the cook, the woodchopper, and the hunter. As the chef took stock of supplies and prepared meals, the woodchopper would locate and fell dead spruce trees, drag them to a wood pile, and saw and split firewood. The hunter would go out on daily expeditions in search of game. Between the two wandering members of the party, the land surrounding the little cabin had snow-shoe tracks strung over a radius of ten miles. The local wildlife became very familiar neighbors, Douglas wrote, though mostly through the tracks they left in the snow. Occasionally they would catch sight of a wolf or an arctic fox, but these were rare; wolverines were never spotted in the flesh. Herds of caribou were exceedingly scarce during the winter months, but ptarmigan, their next favorite source of meat protein, were abundant. During October and November, the hunter, carrying a .22 rifle, routinely brought home five ptarmigan a day, and by the end of November they had accumulated a stock of fifty frozen birds, all plucked, cleaned, and ready for the pot.

Douglas, pp. 140–43.

Douglas, pp. 146–47; Whalley, “Martyrdom,” p. 599.

Douglas, pp. 160–64, 169; Whalley, “Martyrdom,” pp. 600–01.

Douglas, pp. 179–231; Roger P. Bulliard, Inuk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), p. 227.

Whalley, “Martyrdom,” p. 602; Whalley, Hornby, pp. 81–83; Douglas, pp. 179–231, 284. The Douglases and Hornby had left for the coast back on April 30, taking two toboggans, each pulled by three dogs. They had passed Bloody Falls, where, 141 years before, Samuel Hearne had watched his Indian guides slaughter a community of Eskimos. Sure enough, they had met Eskimos there, but had been treated well. They had been offered musk-ox skins. They had continued to the coast, becoming one of the earliest white expeditions to reach the Arctic Ocean by an overland route from the south. They greeted a family living in a tent by the shore. Douglas snapped a picture of the parents with their four children, all of them dressed in full caribou skins.

On their way south, they stopped for a visit with a cheerful Eskimo family of five: parents with girls aged thirteen and seven, and a ten-year-old boy. Later, they were joined by another woman and her husband, who had been out hunting ptarmigan. George Douglas shot a photograph of a man, his bow stretched tight, standing over a small shrub. Though the family had no news of Stefansson, they did possess several tin cooking pots, which must have come from one of the Arctic expeditions. George Douglas trotted out the French-Eskimo dictionary compiled by Father Petitot, the priest who, driven nearly mad by the darkness forty-four years before, had fled the Arctic in a panic. Douglas tried out a few words. At first the Eskimos were confused, but when Douglas spoke a word they understood, they cheered and crowded around the book “as though they expected to hear something from it.”

The Douglases visited with another group of Eskimos farther south. This group carried a skinless kayak, which made for easy portaging on windy days, and a number of things they wanted to trade to the Indians, including sealskin shoes and parchment made of young sealskin. Though the Douglases declined to take anything, they left the Eskimos with some forks and spoons. One woman was so eager to have a fork that she offered an entire wolfskin in exchange. It wasn’t an eating utensil she fancied; it was a comb. She also desperately wanted Hornby’s fur capote, even putting on a kind of dance to plead for it. George Douglas was bemused, but remained typically circumspect. The Eskimo woman was not “one whit more extravagant in her folly than some ‘civilized’ women I have since seen, whose sense of the fitness of things has been completely obsessed in their infautation over a fashionable craze,” he wrote.

Douglas, p. 252.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” Sessional Papers, 1916, no. 28.

Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimos (New York: Macmillan, 1913, 1927), p. 371; Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (New York: North Point Press, 2000), pp. 40, 190, 282.

Whalley, “Martyrdom,” p. 604; Whalley, Hornby, pp. 87–88; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 210.

Whalley, “Martyrdom,” pp. 604–05. Hornby had never had any trouble getting along with Rouvière. They had spent the entire previous winter sharing a cabin, and this new separation caused him a loneliness he had never before felt in the North. Rouvière, of course, had no choice but to side with his fellow priest, the man with whom he would soon be sharing very close quarters in very trying circumstances. Whether Rouvière ruminated on the fate of the murder-suicide the Douglases had described, he did not say. But the rift between LeRoux and Hornby could not have but deeply soured their relationship. Hornby kept to his own cabin at the head of the Dease River and stopped visiting with the priests, who were now fully moved into the Douglas cabin six miles away. If the situation was irritating to Hornby, in practical terms it meant only fewer chess games and more dinners alone. For the priests, isolation from Hornby was plainly dangerous. Suddenly, Rouvière was the most experienced wilderness traveler at hand, and by far the most tempermentally adapted to the ceaseless challenges of living far from home. If Rouvière had learned anything so far, it was that survival in the Barren Lands meant interdependence and cooperation. Destroying a relationship as useful as the one they had established with Hornby would have been a bad idea in summertime. Destroying it just as the two priests were preparing for the first winter together, and just before setting their sights on mission work on the Arctic coast, was self-destructive. In mid-January, Rouvière decided to accompany Hornby on a trip back to Fort Norman to check in with Father Ducot. Whether Hornby would ever return to his cabin, Rouvière could not tell. Hornby, who had never relished sharing the Barren Lands with other whites, seemed altogether sick of sharing space with Father LeRoux. For the first time since he had arrived in the region in 1908, Hornby was considering walking away from the Barren Lands, at least as long as the priests remained.

Whalley, “Martyrdom,” pp. 606–07.

Edmonton trial transcripts, pp. 32–34; R. G. Moyles, British Law and Arctic Men: The Celebrated 1917 Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, First Inuit Tried Under White Man’s Law (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1979), p. 7; Whalley, “Martyrdom,” p. 607; Whalley, Hornby, pp. 92–93.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 205.

Whalley, Hornby, p. 97.

CHAPTER SIX

Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos: A Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1918 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), pp. 110–11.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 205, 210, 214.

George Whalley, The Legend of John Hornby (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), p. 96.

Gabriel Breynat, The Flying Bishop: Fifty Years in the Canadian Far North (London: Burns and Oates, 1955), pp. 171–74.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” Sessional Papers, 1916, no. 28, p. 206.

George Whalley, “Coppermine Martyrdom,” Queens Quarterly 66 (winter 1959–60), pp. 609–10.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” Sessional Papers, 1916, no. 28, pp. 244, 246–48.

R. G. Moyles, British Law and Arctic Men: The Celebrated 1917 Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, First Inuit Tried Under White Man’s Law (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1979), p. 15.

George Whalley, “Coppermine Martyrdom,” Queens Quarterly 66 (winter 1959–60), p. 610; Gabriel Breynat, The Flying Bishop: Fifty Years in the Canadian Far North (London: Burns and Oates, 1955), p. 168.

Breynat, p. 168; “Report of the Commissioner of the Royal North West Mounted Police,” November 1916, pp. 7, 9, 16–24.

Edmund Kemper Broadus, Saturday and Sunday (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1967), pp. 65–66.

Broadus, p. 76; Moyles, p. 10.

Charles D. LaNauze, “Murder in the Arctic,” a four-part series of articles published in The Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (June-July 1937, August-September 1937, December 1937–January 1938, February-March 1938), Part I, p. 51; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 10, 1917; August 17, 1917.

Moyles, pp. 11–12.

LaNauze, Part I, p. 5; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 190–91.

LaNauze, Part I, pp. 52–53; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 191–93. On August 12, the patrol set out for the treacherous journey across Great Bear Lake to the northeastern shore, where Rouvière, Hornby, and the Douglases had spent their winters. Given the violently unstable weather that routinely moved across the lake, LaNauze could tell the trip across would be one of the most dangerous legs of the entire expedition. The shoreline had never been properly surveyed, and the weather was wild. Within a few days of their departure a howling north-westerly gale blew across the lake, forcing D’Arcy Arden, an expert sailor, to reef the York boat’s sail and limp into a makeshift anchorage. As Rouvière and the Douglases had learned, the wide-open York boat was inadequate for crossing what amounted to an inland sea. Great Bear Lake, at its widest, is nearly 250 miles across. “A thoroughly sea-going craft, such as a 50-foot schooner well decked in and with proper anchors is the only safe way of taking supplies across the lake,” LaNauze wrote. Even a short wave, coming in broadside, can flip a canoe or a York boat in a blink; Great Bear Lake routinely had waves reaching eight or ten feet, with storm surges reaching twice that. Although the patrol managed to avoid weathering so much as a single violent breaker, just holding the tiller against the Arctic wind gradually damaged the structural integrity of the boat, until, with a crack, the rudder broke. There was little to do now but limp to shore and wait out the gale. At night, a watchman had to remain vigilant to be sure the winds didn’t rip the boat from its mooring. At last, in early September, with the York boat creaking and groaning and taking on water, they came across the Douglases’ boat the Jupiter. In the best tradition of the Far North, they scavenged the Jupiter’s rudder and fixed it to their own boat. They arrived at the forested northeastern shore of the lake at the end of the first week of September.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 194.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 194, 227.

LaNauze, Part I, p 53; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 194–95; 227.

LaNauze, Part I, p. 53; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 196–97.

LaNauze, Part II, p. 70. During one particularly nasty stretch of cold weather, a woman went into labor. She lay in her tent, some distance from the patrol’s camp, screaming through the night. Finally, a group of Indians came to LaNauze for help. They were able to follow the woman’s moans all the way to her camp. He arrived at a torn and drafty tepee pitched near the shore of lake. The inside was lit and warmed only by a small fire in the middle. A group of women huddled around the shrieking mother, supporting her on their knees. They had been relieving each other for three days and nights. The woman was delirious, constantly calling out the name of her husband; he, alone in a corner, sat quietly sobbing. LaNauze seemed at a loss. He gave the woman a shot of whiskey and some bovril, with little effect. Her pulse was strong, and her temperature seemed normal. He decided to give her fifteen drops of chlorodyne over six hours, and—because of the medication or not he could not say— she finally gave birth to a healthy girl. Just two weeks later, the father, mother, and baby left the camp for distant hunting grounds.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” Sessional Papers, 1916, no. 28, pp. 248, 279.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 244, 247–48, 266.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 245.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 247.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 270.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 277.

Charles D. LaNauze, “Murder in the Arctic,” a four-part series of articles published in The Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (June-July 1937, August-September 1937, December 1937–January 1938, February-March 1938), Part I, pp. 52–53; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 228–29.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 229.

LaNauze, Part II, pp. 72–73; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 230.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 230.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 232.

LaNauze, Part II, pp. 72–73.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 198.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 205–06.

LaNauze, Part III, pp. 110–12; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 198–99, 234–35.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 208–09, 214.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 209, 215.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 204–08.

Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos: A Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1918 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), pp. 94–96.

LaNauze, Part III, p. 113; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 282.

CHAPTER NINE

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” Sessional Papers, 1916, no. 28, pp. 198–99, 233; Charles D. LaNauze, “Murder in the Arctic,” a four-part series of articles published in The Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (June-July 1937, August-September 1937, December 1937–January 1938, February-March 1938), Part III, pp. 110–12.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 206, 235; LaNauze, Part III, pp. 113, 118.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 207.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 235, 239; LaNauze, Part III, pp. 113, 118.

LaNauze, Part III, pp. 113, 118; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 200.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 204, 215, 235–36; LaNauze, Part III, p. 118.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 204, 215–16.

Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos: A Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1918 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), p. 11.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 213, 218

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 220–26; LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 11–12.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 202, 220–26, 238–39; LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 11–12.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 211–12.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 203–05, 223–26.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 197.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 240. On June 6, a group led by Rudolph Anderson came in from Bathurst Inlet. They said they had met Constable Wight at the mouth of the Coppermine, on his way to investigate the murder site at Bloody Falls. Anderson’s colleague K. C. Chipman had decided to accompany D’Arcy Arden back to Great Bear Lake in hopes of reaching Fort Norman for the first trip of the season aboard the steamer owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company. A week later, George Wilkins of the expedition’s northern party arrived by sled from Victoria Island’s Point Armstrong—across the Prince of Wales Strait, from Banks Island—where Stefansson’s new ship, the Polar Bear, had spent the winter. Wilkins reported that Stefansson planned to use the Polar Bear to explore the northwest coast of the land north of Prince Patrick Island, then pass the summer in the northern islands.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 241. When the fog finally lifted, the Alaska turned around, and once again had to navigate a narrow strait full of enormous fields of ice. Captain Sweeney steered the ship toward shore to try to work through the looser ice, but this proved impossible. He dropped anchor, then had to change his position again and again to avoid being crushed. The crew spent the night watching the antics of innumerable bearded seals.

Finally, on July 22 substantial leads finally opened up in the ice, and Captain Sweeney was able to steer his ship back into open water. The ship pulled into Cape Parry on July 24, then sailed across Franklin Bay, where the crew had a good look at the “Smoking Mountains,” a series of high shale cliffs that had been burning for years. LaNauze saw smoke billowing from fifteen distinct points in the rock. Later that day, the Alaska arrived at its first “civilized” port: Baillie Island, a Hudson’s Bay Company outpost situated on a sand spit near Cape Bathurst, where the ship had wintered in 1914–15. LaNauze took his prisoners ashore here, “so as to break them gradually into western civilization.”

Stepping off the boat, Sinnisiak and Uluksuk once again seemed nervous, and they were hardly reassured when a group of local Eskimo children ran away from them. When LaNauze and his men produced a meal of seal meat and fish, however, the locals seemed to warm to the newcomers. Its compass more reliable here, the Alaska left Baillie Island on the evening of July 26, pointed toward Herschel Island, and was soon out of sight of land. A pair of bowhead whales spouted a quarter mile from the ship. More astonishing still, the ship nearly ran over a polar bear swimming amid the loose ice.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 202, 226–27, 242–43.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” pp. 249–50.

LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 12–13; “Report of the North West Mounted Police,” p. 216.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 8, 1917; August 11, 1917; August 14, 1917.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 8, 1917.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 9, 1917; August 13, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 14, 1917.

CHAPTER TEN

Calgary Daily Herald, August 14, 1917.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 10, 1917; August 11, 1917.

Charles D. LaNauze, “Murder in the Arctic,” a four-part series of articles published in The Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (June-July 1937, August-September 1937, December 1937–January 1938, February-March 1938), Part IV, pp. 12–13; Calgary Daily Herald, August 23, 1917.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 14, 1917.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 15, 1917; Edwin Keedy, “A Remarkable Murder Trial,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 100, no. 1 (October 1951), pp. 51–52.

Calgary Daily Herald, August 15, 1917; August 17, 1917; Edmonton Journal, August 14, 1917.

Edmund Kemper Broadus, Saturday and Sunday (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1967), pp. 74–75.

LaNauze, Part IV, p. 13; Alan Ridge, “C. C. McCaul, Pioneer Lawyer,” Alberta Historical Review, vol. 21, no. 1 (winter 1973).

McCaul, “Notes Written to E. L. Newcombe, K.C., Deputy Minister of Justice, Ottawa, Oct. 31, 1917,” Alberta Provincial Archives; Calgary Daily Herald, August 21, 1917.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 15, 1917.

“Address of C. C. McCaul, K. C., in Opening the Case for the Prosecution of Sinnisiak, an Eskimo Charged with Murder, Before the Hon. Chief Justice Harvey and a Jury, at Edmonton, Alberta, August 14th, 1917,” Alberta Provincial Archives, p. 4.

McCaul, “Address,” pp. 5–6.

McCaul, “Address,” p. 7; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 15, 1917.

McCaul, “Address,” pp. 8–9.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 15, 1917.

McCaul, “Address,” pp. 11–14; McCaul, “Notes.”

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 15, 1917.

McCaul, “Address,” p. 15.

Edmonton trial transcripts.

Edmonton trial transcripts, pp. 22, 38; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 15, 1917; McCaul, “Notes.”

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” Sessional Papers, 1916, no. 28, pp. 272–76; Edmonton trial transcripts, pp. 42–55.

Edmonton trial transcripts, pp. 55–78; Keedy, pp. 52–53; Calgary Daily Herald, August 16, 1917; LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 12–14.

Edmonton Journal, August 18, 1917.

McCaul, “Notes.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 15, 1917; August 16, 1917; Edmonton Journal, August 15, 1917; August 16, 1917.

C. C. McCaul, “Notes Written to E. L. Newcombe, K.C., Deputy Minister of Justice, Ottawa, Oct. 31, 1917,” Alberta Provincial Archives; R. G. Moyles, British Law and Arctic Men: The Celebrated 1917 Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, First Inuit Tried Under White Man’s Law (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1979), pp. 43, 49.

Edmonton trial transcripts; Calgary Daily Herald, August 16, 1917.

Edwin Keedy, “A Remarkable Murder Trial,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 100, no. 1 (October 1951), footnote to pp. 54–55.

Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos: A Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1918 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), pp. 232–33; Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (New York: North Point Press, 2000), pp. 197–98, 203.

Edmonton trial transcripts; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 16, 1917; August 17, 1917; Charles D. LaNauze, “Murder in the Arctic,” a four-part series of articles published in The Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (June-July 1937, August-September 1937, December 1937–January 1938, February-March 1938), Part IV, pp. 13–14; Keedy, p. 55.

Edmonton trial transcripts; Keedy, pp. 58–59; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 18, 1917; Edmonton Journal, August 17, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 16, 1917.

Edmonton trial transcripts, pp. 190–218; Keedy, p. 61; LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 13–14; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 17, 1917.

In the audience, the American law professor Edwin Keedy wrote furiously. Was this kind of ritual cannibalism evidence of a primitive depravity? Back home, he would discover that a man’s liver had in fact been considered the “seat of his soul” in literature written by Babylonians, As-syrians, Hebrews, Chinese, Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans. In the Iliad, Hecuba, the mother of Hector, vows that “she will not rest until she has devoured the liver of Achilles” (Keedy, p. 61).

Edmonton trial transcripts, pp. 222–24; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 18, 1917; Moyles, p. 53.

Edmonton trial transcripts. pp. 224–33; Keedy, pp. 61–62; Edmonton Journal, August 17, 1917.

Edmonton trial transcripts, pp. 234–44; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 18, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 17, 1917; Edmonton Journal, August 17, 1917.

Keedy, pp. 63–64.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 18, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 17, 1917; LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 13–14.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Epigraph: Jean Blodgett, The Coming and Going of the Shaman (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978), p. 27.

C. C. McCaul, “Notes Written to E. L. Newcombe, K.C., Deputy Minister of Justice, Ottawa, Oct. 31, 1917,” Alberta Provincial Archives; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 21, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 20, 1917.

Calgary News-Telegram, August 25, 1917.

Calgary Daily Herald, August 21, 1917.

Calgary News-Telegram, August 25, 1917.

Calgary News-Telegram, August 22, 1917.

Calgary News-Telegram, August 21, 1917; August 22, 1917.

Calgary trial transcripts; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 23, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 22, 1917; August 23, 1917; Calgary News-Telegram, August 21, 1917.

Calgary News-Telegram, August 23, 1917.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 24, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 23, 1917; Calgary News-Telegram, August 23, 1917.

Calgary Daily Herald, August 23, 1917; August 24, 1917; Calgary trial transcripts; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 23, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 22, 1917; Calgary News-Telegram, August 21, 1917; McCaul, “Notes,” p. 7.

Calgary trial transcripts, pp. 50–63; Calgary Daily Herald, August 24, 1917. Here is the transcription of Uluksuk’s statement: “I was at the mouth of the Coppermine river after the lakes froze over,” Uluksuk began.

We were fishing there, Kormik and the two white men Ilogoak and Kuleavik had one camp between them.

Kormik wanted to kill the two white men because they were angry with him as he had put away their rifle, and his wife had put away some of the white man’s food. After the white men left to go up the river, Sinnisiak and I followed their trail. We wanted to get to the people who were left behind. It was three days after the priests had left that we met them on the river.

The tall white man Ilogoak said to me “If you will help us I will give you traps. We want you to go with us as far as the trees.”

On the first day the priests were not angry with us. We camped with them one night and we did not reach the trees, we made a small snow house for the priests. The next day the priests were angry and said “if you will take us to the woods we will give you traps.” We started, I was behind pulling the sled. Sinnisiak was close to the sled and the two white men were behind.

I wanted to speak. Ilogoak put his hand over my mouth. I wanted to talk of my wife sewing clothes for Ilogoak in the fall. Kuleavik [Rouvière] gave Ilogoak a rifle and a knife and Ilogoak pointed the gun at us. I was afraid and I was crying.

Every time I wanted to talk, Ilogoak came and put his hand over my mouth.

We went on and Sinnisiak said to me, “We ought to kill these white men before they kill us,” and I said “They can kill me if they want to, I don’t want to kill any people.” Sinnisiak then said, “I will kill one of them anyway. You had better try and be strong too.” Ilogoak turned round and Sinnisiak stabbed him from behind in the back. Ilogoak then hit me with a stick and I stabbed him twice with a knife and he dropped down.

I took the rifle from on top of the sled and threw it down in the snow. The other white man Kuleavik started to run away and Sinnisiak picked up the rifle and missed him the first shot. The second shot he wounded him and the priest sat down.

Sinnisiak dropped the rifle and took an axe and a knife. I had a knife and we ran after him. When we got up to Kuleavik, Sinnisiak told me to stab him again, I did not want to stab him first, then Sinnisiak told me to stab him and I stabbed him again in the side and the blood came out and he was not yet dead. I did not stab him again and Sinnisiak took the axe and chopped his neck and killed him. Sinnisiak said to me “You had better cut him open.” I did not want to. He told me again and I cut open his belly and we eat a piece of the liver each. We then left Kuleavik on the top of the snow and went back to the other man Ilogoak and I cut him open when Sinnisiak told me to. We eat a small piece of his liver also.

I wanted to throw the rifles away and Sinnisiak said “Take one, and I will take one.”

We took three boxes of cartridges each. We then went back to the mouth of the river where the other people were. We took nothing from the sled except the rifles and the cartridges. We got back to the camp when it was night time; Sinnisiak went to Kormik’s tent, I went to my tent.

I told the people we had killed the two white men and that I did not want to, but Sinnisiak had killed them first.

Kormik and his wife Hoaha and Angebrunna then went to get the priests’ stuff. They came back the same night with the stuff.

The people took the rifles and cartridges from me.

I have no more to speak about.

Calgary trial transcipts.

Calgary trial transcripts.

Calgary trial transcripts; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 24, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 25, 1917; Calgary News-Telegram, August 25, 1917; Charles D. LaNauze, “Murder in the Arctic,” a four-part series of articles published in The Annals of the Propagation of the Faith (June-July 1937, August-September 1937, December 1937–January 1938, February-March 1938), Part IV, pp. 12–13; R. G. Moyles, British Law and Arctic Men: The Celebrated 1917 Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, First Inuit Tried Under White Man’s Law (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1979), pp. 65–66.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 24, 1917; Edmund Kemper Broadus, Saturday and Sunday (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, Inc., 1967), p. 83.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 24, 1917; Edmonton Journal, August 25, 1917; Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 24, 1917; Calgary Daily Herald, August 25, 1917.

Calgary Daily Herald, August 25, 1917.

Calgary News-Telegram, August 29, 1917.

Calgary trial transcripts; LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 12–14.

Edmonton Morning Bulletin, August 29, 1917; August 30, 1917.

LaNauze, Part IV, pp. 12–14.

EPILOGUE

R. G. Moyles, British Law and Arctic Men: The Celebrated 1917 Murder Trials of Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, First Inuit Tried Under White Man’s Law (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1979), p. 85.

Philip H. Godsell, “Arctic Murder: The Crimson Epic of the R.C.M.P.,” in True Detective Mysteries, vol. 18, no. 4 (July 1932), pp. 7–15, 71–73.

C. C. McCaul, “Notes Written to E. L. Newcombe, K.C., Deputy Minister of Justice, Ottawa, Oct. 31, 1917, Alberta Provincial Archives.

Provincia, April 17, 1926.

George Whalley, The Legend of John Hornby (Toronto: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 127, 183, 304, 310, 322.

Diamond Jenness, The Life of the Copper Eskimos: A Report of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, 1913–1918 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), p. 11; John R. Sperry, Igloo Dwellers Were My Church (Calgary: Bayeaux Arts, Inc., 2001), p. 49.

Gabriel Breynat, The Flying Bishop: Fifty Years in the Canadian Far North (London: Burns and Oates, 1955), p. 182.

Breynat, pp. 217–21.

Roger P. Bulliard, Inuk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1951), p. 28.

Breynat, pp. 236–37.

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Bantam Books, 1987), pp. 10, 337.

Jenness, Life of the Copper Eskimos, pp. 241–42, 248–49.

Diamond Jenness, The People of the Twilight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928, 1959), pp. 246–47.

Hugh Brody, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (New York: North Point Press, 2000), pp. 70–74, 86, 237.

Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York: Picador, 1997), pp. 226–27.

Spufford, p. 210.

Bulliard, p. 29.

Sperry, pp. 50, 128–30, 138, 159. Unlike most of his predecessors, Sperry was so proficient in Inuinaqtun that he managed to translate not only the New Testament and Book of Common Prayer, but two hundred Christian hymns as well. His memoir Igloo Dwellers Were My Church is a remarkably honest account of both the contributions and the complications of missionary work.

“Report of the North West Mounted Police,” Sessional Papers, 1916, no. 28, pp. 204, 217, 238–39.