Crossings
Jeremy Mouat
One of Alberta’s most well-known features is the tar sands outside of Fort McMurray. The controversial resource boom fuelled by the tar sands is not the first to have made outside investors rich. An earlier boom began in the late eighteenth century, when beaver pelts from the region went to distant markets. Anticipating the title of this book, that earlier boom was all about border flows—about the flow of water either side of a continental divide.
For a number of years I lived in Athabasca, Alberta, bordering the river of the same name. The river swings north at the town, flowing up to Fort McMurray and beyond from its source in the Rockies. At Fort McMurray, the Clearwater River joins the Athabasca, coming west from Saskatchewan. The Clearwater was the vital artery that enabled that earlier resource boom.
The river forms part of an Arctic drainage system, a fact that helps to explain its significance. When in 1670 the British king signed a Royal Charter for the Hudson’s Bay Company, he gave the company monopoly trading rights over the lands that drained into Hudson Bay. Once traders entered the Arctic Ocean watershed—once they had crossed that continental divide and reached the Clearwater—the company’s exclusive rights no longer applied.
Fur traders and voyageurs crossing the divide between the Hudson Bay drainage system and the Arctic system did so via a famous portage: the Methye Portage. It had the same sort of status for voyageurs as the equator did for sailors: newbie voyageurs went from being mangeurs de lard (pork eaters) to hommes du nord (men of the north) after crossing it. This new status likely reflected the gruelling work involved: the portage was twenty kilometres in length, over which the voyageurs packed loads of more than eighty kilograms. Of course, once I had moved to Athabasca, I wanted to get to the portage and become a man of the north myself.
The Methye Portage is in northwestern Saskatchewan, pretty much due east of Fort McMurray. It begins—if you’re approaching from the eastern side—on the northwest side of Lac La Loche, well past the nearest road. To get to it, you either paddle across the lake or fly in.
Although it took a dozen years, a colleague and I organized a trip early this century over the Methye. We were both historians with little backcountry experience so we recruited two other friends—a psychologist and a philosopher—as both had done a lot of wilderness canoeing. (It was a group that sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: “What do you get when a . . . .”) With backing from a TV production company, we drove up to Fort McMurray with two canoes, left the truck there, and flew over to Lac La Loche with the canoes strapped onto the pontoons. The TV crew filmed us as we each lugged about fifty-five kilograms over the portage. They left once we’d reached the Clearwater River. We slipped the canoes into the river and headed west. We got to Fort McMurray a few days later, relaxed by the days in the wilderness and the beauty of the river. Our calm did not last long, however; we came out of the bush on September 11, 2001.
Western Canada is home to a series of continental divides, although only one is marked: the one that forms the southern half of the border between Alberta and British Columbia. These days you can cross watersheds without even noticing them. Once I drove from Athabasca down to Montana to attend a conference and later realized that I’d crossed three watersheds along the way, from my home overlooking the Athabasca River flowing up to the Arctic, across the North Saskatchewan River flowing east to Hudson Bay, and then to the Upper Missouri River, which flows south to the Gulf of Mexico. The trip was easily done in a day but you have to pay close attention to figure out where the water changes flow.
Like the changing flow of water, history is illusive in the western Canadian landscape. It’s difficult to see the marks that the past has left on the land. We don’t have the cobblestones and castles of Europe. And those marks that we do see—the straight lines of the surveyors that signify so many borders in western North America—seem so commonplace and so obvious that we don’t question them. We need to pay more attention to the border flows and the history that is hidden from view.