Barris - Fire Canoe: Prairie Steamboat Days Revisited

I t was wesukechak, the great spirit and creator, who bestowed upon the Swampy Cree the intricate, almost endless watercourses at the heart of North Americabut to do this he first had to overcome a formidable test. Flood waters had overwhelmed the earth, leaving him and his animal brothers adrift on a raft. For days on end they searched for dry land. Finally, in desperation, Nehkik, the otter, retrieved a small piece of mud from beneath the flood waters. Wesukechak rolled the mud between his hands and blew on it, until the mud became an enormous ball. Putting ashore on the great land mass, Wesukechak set about reshaping the world. He ordered trees and grass to appear. He told Maheekun, the grey wolf, to jump about with his large feet in the soft earth to form hollows for lakes, and to push up piles of mud with his nose for mountains. And then he had Misekenapik, the great snake, cut rivers into the earth. And this is how the Cree world was made.

The Cree story of the great flood encompassed nearly the entire north central plains. In its few thousand years of life, Agassiz wore away at the flesh of the plains, shaping a system of waterways and flatlands which for millennia would determine the migration of animal and man, the way of agriculture, the means of survival, the pattern of settlement, the growth of nations, and the method of transportation.

Locked within the core of the continent by the sprawling Arctic Ocean watershed to the north, by the Hudson Bay and Great Lakes networks to the east, by the Mississippi and Missouri arteries across the south, and by the quick ascent of the Rocky Mountain range on the west, lay the modern descendant of Lake Agassizthe Lake Winnipeg basin.

Lake Winnipeg, dominating the topography of Cree hunting grounds, drew no less than five major watercourses to its centre. Rising in the American territories, the Red River meandered northward through boulder-strewn rapids, overgrown riverbanks, and crooked channels five hundred water miles to the south shore of the lake. Two prairie-born rivers approached Lake Winnipeg from the west: fed by the streams and chain lakes of the open grassland, the QuAppelle (or Calling) River joined the Assiniboine River below her parkland source, and, as the main Assiniboine channel, wound 350 miles to meet the Red River en route to the lake. Also from the west, Lake Manitoba and Lake Winnipegosis, totalling in area nearly four thousand square miles, flowed through the Dauphin River into Lake Winnipeg. The most generous fresh water source, the Saskatchewan River, poured into the lake at its northwestern extremity. Weaving together a dozen principal tributaries, the combined forces of the north and south branches of the Saskatchewan, converging halfway across the plains, deposited silt and glacial runoff from the Rocky Mountain interior into Lake Winnipeg. And in dramatic fashionfalling on an average six feet per mile over its one thousand miles of flow across the prairies, the Saskatchewan thundered through the Grand Rapids cataract, descending nearly a hundred feet inside three miles.

Awesome though they were, the prairie waterways were brotherly spirits to the Cree natives, personalities upon which the Indians depended for fish, game, and travel. And as theirs was a friendship with rivers and lakes, the Cree lived in harmony with the Lake Winnipeg basin. But the fair-skinned newcomers and their gods, their habits, and their experiences were foreign to the basin and to the natives. The newcomers attitude toward prairie watercourses was one of exploration and exploitationan attempt to own the western interior of the continent. The Europeans never considered prairie rivers and lakes as spiritual brothers. For them, entering the western plains was a discovery of profitable resources and a conquest over bothersome adversities.