Warburton Pike (1861-1915)

Abstract

... August 1889 found Pike embarking by canoe from Fort Resolution on what he called "an ordinary shooting expedition" north of Great Slave Lake, where he hoped to "penetrate this unknown land, to see the musk-ox, and find out as much as I could about their habits, and the habits of the Indians who go in pursuit of them every year." Thus commenced the 14 months of hard travel, privation, and adventure described so vividly in Pike's classic book The Barren Ground of Northern Canada. For five months he explored and hunted with Beaulieu clan - "the biggest scoundrels I ever had to travel with" - and Yellowknives as far as the Coppermine country north of Lac de Gras. The trip was replete with austere satisfactions of the sort valued by this hardbitten Englishman: brutal weather, near starvation, and the company of half-breeds and Indians whose improvidence and untrustworthiness he despised but whose skills and powers of endurance moved him to admiration; he also relished competing with these men. On this, as on every trip he took, he travelled light and lived off the land, for he held well-provided expeditions in contempt. Pike wintered - not at all passively - at Resolution; then, on 7 May, bound for Back's Great Fish River, he started north again. Only Back himself (1833-1835) and Anderson and Stewart (1855) had been there before him. He was accompanied on this stiff canoe journey by James Mackinlay, the HBC factor at Fort Resolution, Murdo Mackay, a Company servant, and a mixed crew of natives. ... After reaching Aylmer Lake, they descended the Back River as far as Beechey Lake; finding no Eskimos there, and given Pike's plans to head "outside" to British Columbia, they turned south on 25 July, returning by way of the Lockhart River and Pike's Portage. They took out at Resolution on 24 August. Two impatient days later, Pike departed for Quesnel, B.C., some 2700 km away. Mackay went with him. Having ascended the Peace and crossed the Rocky Mountain Portage to Twelve-Foot Davis's trading post, they were waylaid by snow and advised to wait for freeze-up before going farther. ... Fiercely driven by Pike, retreating desperately, frostbitten, starving, feeding on their moccasins, they struggled back down the Parsnip. On 27 December, near death, they "crawled up the steep bank" to Davis's cabin and salvation. The Barren Ground of Northern Canada, substantial, candid, compelling, was popular for many years among men who themselves lived and travelled north of 55. ... Pike's next major outing, which he recounted in Through the Subarctic Forest, began in July 1892. With a Canadian and an Englishman, in an 18' spruce canoe painted light blue, Pike farewelled Fort Wrangel, Alaska, pushed up the Stikine River to Dease Lake in the Cassiar Mountains, ran down the Dease River to the Liard, and spent the winter near Lower Post. ... In the spring of '93, having hauled his outfit some 320 km to Frances Lake, Y.T., he and the men he had now enticed into joining him, three HBC half-breeds from Manitoba, explored a new route across the height of land to a tributary of the Pelly. Paddling through unexplored country until they linked with G.M. Dawson's route of 1887, they then followed the Pelly to the Yukon and ran down it to Russian Mission. From there they portaged to the Kuskovim, which took them to the Bering Sea. "In rags and poverty," Pike and his crew then navigated 480 km of hazardous, weather-swept coastline to Nushugak, where they took out on 18 September. The canoe had been holed once on this journey of some 5600 km. ...