Charles G. D. Roberts's Use of "Indian Legend" in Four Poems of the Eighteen Eighties and 'Nineties

by D.M.R. Bentley

Although Roberts’s letters contain no information about the writing of "The Departing of Gluskâp" and "The Quelling of the Moose" it is safe to presume from his general practice of offering his poems to periodicals or including them in books soon after they were composed that both were written shortly before their appearance in In Divers Tones (and, perhaps, with the book in mind).¹ This would place them in the same compositional time-frame as "Canada," which was written between Roberts’s return from Ontario to Fredericton in the Fall of 1884 and its first publication as a leaflet at Fredericton in January 1885,² and align them with the increasing interest in local description that is evident in "The Potato Harvest" and other poems that can be said with some certainty to date from the mid-’eighties.³ In addition to being a time of great personal turmoil for Roberts (after his resignation from The Week in February 1884 and a fruitless search for other opportunities in central Canada he had returned to Fredericton to live in his parents’ house), the period between the Fall of 1884 and the publication of In Divers Tones was a time of revitalization and redirection: near the end of November 1884, he told Bliss Carman that he was in the process of emerging from a psychological depression that had lasted "some weeks" and near the end of September 1885 he moved to Windsor, Nova Scotia as Chair of English and French Literature at King’s College (Collected Letters 45, 51). During this period, Roberts also came increasingly to accept that if he was to make his mark as a national poet he would need to embrace Canadian subjects and themes with the historical reach of William Kirby in The Golden Dog (Le Chien d’Or). A Legend of Quebec (1877) and the international success of Louis-Honoré Fréchette in Fleurs boréales (1879) and Oiseaux de neige (1881). With "Canada" Roberts set himself on the trajectory that would take him to the fervent "Canadianism"⁴ of the late ’eighties when, as he told the equally fervent William Douw Lighthall, he was in the process of "freeing [his] work from a certain scholasticism of subject" and had a quantity of "Canadian Nationalistic and aspirational work in mind to do" (Collected Letters 87).

There is a continual demand for the working of this field [that is, Indian legend], and continual surprise that it should be so long unharvested. Both the demand and the surprise are as old as literature in North America, and are likely to grow much older before being satisfied. . . . But the stuff seems almost unavailable for purposes of pure literature. The Indian has left a curse in his bequest, and the prize turns worthless in our grasp. The host of American poems and romances with the Indian as inspiration form, Hiawatha being excepted, a museum of lamentable failures. They are the crowning insult to a decaying race. . . . Only indirectly by association and suggestion, is Indian legend likely, I think, to exert marked influence on our creative literature.                                                                  (Selected 261-62)

Interspersed with Roberts’s largely dismissive remarks about the usability of "Indian legend" in "The Outlook for Literature" are some observations that provide very valuable clues to the manner of his own imminent "harvest[ing]" of the "field": "some of them," he writes of "Indian legends," are "wildly poetic, and vigorous in conception; and they are easily attainable, both from the lips of their hereditary possessors and from such books as Leland’s admirable ‘Legends of the Algonquin Indians’ [that is, Charles Godfrey Leland’s The Algonquin Legends of New England (1884)]. . . .  [T]here is room to do invaluable work in the collection and comparative study of Indian folk-lore and kindred matter, for the results of which there is now a ready appreciation. Leland has left behind him some very good gleaning, owing to the wideness of the field which he has occupied" (Selected 261-62). Not only do these statements bespeak [Page 20] Roberts’s acquaintance—perhaps by way of Bliss Carman^5—with one product of the widespread and growing interest in comparative mythology that had developed on both sides of the Atlantic in the wake of the work of Max Müller and others, but they also reflect his awareness of the use being made by amateur and semi-professional collectors of "Indian folk-lore and kindred matter" such as Leland of oral sources among the Native peoples. A number of the stories related in The Algonquin Legends of New England purport to be transcriptions made by Leland of "verbal Indian narration[s]" and a number of others purport to be based on transcriptions made by other collectors, most notably the "Baptist Missionary among the Micmac Indians at Hantsport, Nova Scotia," Silas Tertius Rand, whose posthumously published Legends of the Micmacs (1894) was available to Leland as a nine-hundred page manuscript entitled "Indian Legends" (ix-x). Nor did Roberts need Leland’s book to know that in the Maritimes "Indian legends" were being "attain[ed] from the lips of their hereditary possessors": in the early eighteen eighties, newspapers in Fredericton and Chatham (where he lived from 1879 to 1882) carried several articles, probably by the Fredericton journalist Edward Jack, recounting stories told to him by a certain Gabriel (or "Gabe"), whom Jack describes as "the distinguished Sachem of the remnant Malicite" who lived on the east side of the Saint John River "opposite the city" ("Indian Legends").⁶ Since Jack evidently furnished Leland with "several Micmac legends and many letters containing folk-lore, all taken by him directly from Indians" (ix), some of his work would certainly have been known to Roberts in one form or another.

                                   All the works
And words and ways of men and beasts became
Evil, and all their thoughts continually
Were but of evil. Then he made a feast.
Upon the shore that is beside the sea
That takes the setting sun, he ordered it, [Page 21]
And called the beasts thereto. Only the men
He called not, seeing them evil utterly.
                       (Roberts, Collected Poems 98)

"Now when the days of men and beasts waxed evil they greatly vexed Glooskap, and at length he could no longer endure them, and he made a rich feast by the shore of the Great Lake Minas. All the beasts came to it. . . ."                         (Leland 67)

"And after they ceased to see him, they still heard his voice as he sang; but the sounds grew fainter and fainter in the distance and at last they wholly died away; and then deep silence fell on them all, and a great marvel came to pass, and the beasts, who had till now spoken but one language, were no longer able to understand each other, and they fled away, each his own way, and never again have they met together in council."                                  (Leland 67)

And when the beasts could see his form no more,
They still heard him, singing as he sailed,
And still they listened, hanging down their heads
In long row, where the thin wave washed and fled.
But when the sound of singing died, and when
They lifted up their voice in grief,
Lo! on the mouth of every beast a strange
New tongue! Then rose they all and fled apart,
Nor met again in council from that day.
                                (Roberts, Collected Poems 98)

He fed the panther’s crafty brood, and filled
The lean wolf’s hunger; from the hollow tree [Page 22]
His honey stayed the bear’s terrific jaws;
And the brown rabbit couched at peace, within
The circling shadow of the eagle’s wings.
                                         (Collected Poems 98)

The matter is not quite so straightforward, however, for the version of the legend provided by Leland is descended both directly and indirectly from another printed version of it that was apparently used by Roberts in the composition of his poem. Probably between the Fall of 1881 and the Summer of 1883, when he was researching and writing his essay on "New Brunswick" for George Monro Grant’s Picturesque Canada: the Country as It Was and Is, which was published in thirty-six instalments and then as a two-volume set in 1882-84, Roberts appears to have read Wilderness Journeys in New Brunswick in 1862-63 (1864) by Arthur Hamilton Gordon, the lieutenant-governor of the province from 1861 to 1866. While preparing "New Brunswick" he probably also read M.F. Sweetser’s The Maritime Provinces: a Guide for Travellers (1875), a volume that, as Leland notes, contains "seven short extracts relative to Glooskap without reference to any book or author" (x), one of these being, in fact, the account of Glooscap’s departure that Leland quotes almost verbatim in The Algonquin Legends of New England and that Roberts quarries so extensively in "The Departing of Gluskâp."⁷ To the extent that, as Thomas C. Parkhill has convincingly argued in Weaving Ourselves into the Land: Charles Godfrey Leland, "Indians," and the Study of Native American Religions, Sweetser relied heavily on Gordon for his version of the legend of Glooscap’s departure, the question of whether Wilderness Journey or The Maritime Provinces or both provided Roberts with the inspiration for his poem seems both pointless and insoluble. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of "The Departure of Gluskâp" that points to Wilderness Journeys as its primary source: when first published in In Divers Tones and as reprinted in the King’s College Record (1886), Songs of the Great Dominion (1889), and Canadian Poems and Lays (1893), Roberts’s poem was entitled "The Departing of Clote Scarp," Clote Scarp being the Melicite name for the Micmacs’ Glooscap and the name used by Gordon in his version of the legend (62-63). It may be that the inciting moment for "The Departing of Clote Scarp" [Page 23] was Gordon’s comment that "the widest, most poetical, and most striking legend" that he heard during his wilderness journeys "is that which relates the final disappearance of Clote Scarp from earth" (62).

Further support for Gordon as the primary source and inspiration for "The Departing of Clote Scarp" can be found in the legendary material included in Roberts’s essay on "New Brunswick" in Picturesque Canada. There the name of the Melicite hero is given as "Clote Scaurp," the "stories of his disappearances" are said to have "differed widely" (780), and the wording of the version chosen for inclusion deviates in notable ways from that in Wilderness Journeys,⁸ but Roberts’s remark that it "reads with the wild, impressive beauty of Celtic tradition" is reminiscent of Gordon, as is the manner in which his version concludes. Here is Gordon:

"And the loons, who had been the hunting dogs of Clote Scarp, go restlessly up and down through the world, seeking vainly for their master, whom they cannot find, and wailing sadly because they find him not."                  (62-63)

"And Clote Scaurp’s hunting dogs go up and down the world in search of him, and men hear them howling after him in the night."                         (781)

A reason for the relative brevity of Roberts’s concluding sentence may lie in the scenario that he uses to introduce the legend of Clote Scarp’s "disappearance." After returning to camp on the Restigouche River with their three Melicite guides,⁹ he and his travelling companions (one of whom was F.B. Schell, the illustrator of the essay),¹⁰ Roberts writes,

We . . . lay with our feet to the fire, smoking, and repeating in low voices certain uncanny legends of these shores. Suddenly a long, tremulous, exceeding sorrowful cry came floating in upon our ears from vaguest distances. We sprang to our feet. Wild and unearthly it swelled, died away, rose again more near and more distant; and it seemed as if we heard in it a note of strange laughter. Shuddering, we turned to our Indians, and saw them sitting attentive, awed, but not afraid. In answer to our mute inquiry the chief guide muttered—"Clote Scaurp’s hunting-dogs! Big storm bime-by, mebbe!" He said they would not come near us. Their howls were often heard at night time in these regions, where they ranged in search of their master, but no man of those now living had ever seen them. Nor could he tell us what manner of beast they were. But, with that voice still in our ears, we straightway pictured them gliding under and parting the low thickets in the desolate, broad, moon-lighted [Page 24] spaces of the wilderness. Then, as the cry was not repeated, we questioned of this Clote Scaurp, and were told quaint fables of him.               (780)

The final points that need to be made about the relationship of "The Departing of Gluskâp" or "Clote Scarp" to Wilderness Journeys flow from the information that Gordon provides about the source of the legends that he recounts and from what has now been discovered about that source. Early in his book, Gordon describes the Native guide whom he employed for some of his journeys, including the one down the Restigouche River that provides the setting for his narration of the Clote Scaurp legends, as "a Melicete Indian from the camp opposite Fredericton, Gabriel by name, [who was] the pet guide and huntsman of the garrison—a clever fellow, speaking good English, which, however, as he had learnt it chiefly from officers, abounded in odd expressions of military slang" (9-10). Probably correctly, Parkhill and Andrea Bear Nicholas identify this Gabriel and the Gabriel or "Gabe" from whom Jack was collecting legends some twenty years later as the same man, namely Gabriel Acquin (circa 1811-1901), a renowned "Maliseet hunter, guide, interpreter, showman, and founder of the St. Mary’s Indian Reserve" near Fredericton (Nicholas 3). It would thus seem that directly or indirectly (and sometimes both), Gordon, Jack, Sweetser, Leland, Roberts, and, of course, others relied ultimately on the same source for their various renditions of the legend of Clote Scarp/ Gluskâp’s departure, that source being, in Nicholas’s words, "a classic case of the colonized striving to imitate the colonizer in language, manners, and preferences," a man who, even as he "participated in the destruction of a way of life, . . . did at least ensure that some record of it would survive"(4).¹¹ Complex and hybrid as is the genealogy of the legend to which Roberts gave poetic expression in "The Departing of Gluskâp," the evidence at least suggests that, so far as he could have been aware, he based his poem through Gordon on a version of it "attain[ed] from the lips of [one of its] hereditary possessors."

We came upon some fine pines during our ascent [of Mount Sagamook]. It was dark long before we returned to camp, and nothing could be more picturesque than its appearances, lighted up by the red flames of a large fire which was itself for the most part concealed from us by the bushes. After devouring our supper of trout, I sat long over the fire listening to Indian legends. Some of these are very picturesque and curious.                                        (56)

Wilderness Journeys contains no version of the legend recounted in "The Quelling of the Moose," however; for this, Roberts apparently drew on some, as yet unidentified, source¹² or/and on The Algonquin Legends of New England, where two of the origin myths recounted by Leland contain the raw materials from which the poem could easily have been elaborated:

Glooskap made all the animals. He made them at first very large. Then he said to Moose, the great Moose who was as tall as Ketawkqu’s ["A giant, high as the tallest pines, or as the clouds" (Leland’s note)], "What would you do should you see an Indian coming?" Moose replied, "I would tear down the trees on him." Then Glooskap saw that the Moose was too strong, and made him smaller, so that the Indians could kill him.                                          (19)

In old times . . . , in the beginning of things, men were as animals and animals as men. . . . Now Glooskap lived on an island . . . , and with him were many Indians with the names and natures of animals and birds. . . . There is another story which says that he was living at the mouth of the Oolastook, at a place called Menogwes [S[ain]t John, N.B.].                                     (32-33)

. . . in those days dwelt Clote Scarp with men.

                         •     •     •

In his wigwam, built by the Oolastook,
Where the ash-trees over the water look,
A voice of trouble the stillness shook

"He rose, and took his bow from the wall,
And listened; he heard his people call
Pierce up from the village one and all.

                         •     •     •

"That terrible forehead, maned with flame,
He smote with his open hand,—and tame
As a dog the raging beast became.

"He smote with his open hand; and lo!
As shrinks in the rains of spring and snow
So shrank the monster beneath that blow,

"Till scarce the bulk of a bull he stood,
And Clote Scarp led him down to the wood,
And gave him the tender shoots for food."
                                                               (107)

This is very weak poetry ("Pierce up from the village one and all" is especially feeble), and it is weakened further by the trite and inappropriate moral that brings the poem to a close: ‘"Understand / How huge a peril will shrink like sand, / When stayed by a prompt and steady hand"’ [108]). At least Roberts had the good judgement not to allow "The Quelling of the Moose" to be reprinted after its appearance in In Divers Tones and Poems of Wild Life (1888).¹³

They came upon the tempest’s midnight wings,
With shock of thunder and the lightning’s slings, [Page 27]
And flame, and hail, and all disastrous things.
                                      (Collected Poems 185)

The site of S[ain]t John was the Menagwes of ancient Micmac tradition, where the divine Glooscap once had his home. Hence, during his absence, his attendants were carried away by a powerful evil magician, who fled with them to Grand Manan, Cape Breton, and Newfoundland, where he was pursued by Glooscap, who rode much of the way on the backs of whales which he called in from the deep sea. Passing through Cape Breton, he at length reached the dark Newfoundland shores, where he assumed such a stature that the clouds rolled about his head. The evil-doing wizard was soon found and put to death and the servants of Glooscap were set free.                             (19)

It is related, that a large war-party of Mohawks made a descent on the upper St. John from Canada, for the purpose of exterminating the Melicetes: They carried their canoes with them, and embarked on the St. John below Edmundston, from which point to the Grand Falls the river is perfectly smooth and deep. Not knowing the navigation, they landed and seized two squaws, whom they compelled to act as their guides down the river. When night fell, the different canoes were tied together so that the warriors might sleep whilst a few only paddled the leading canoes, under direction of the women, whose boats were tied, one on the right, the other on the left, of the flotilla. They neared the falls, and still the women paddled on. The roar of the falling waters rose [Page 29] on the still night air. Those who paddled looked anxious; some few of the sleepers awoke. To lull suspicion, the women spoke of the great stream which here fell into the Walloostook, the Indian name of the St. John; and still they paddled on. When they saw, at length, that the whole mass of canoes in the centre of the river was well entered on the smooth treacherous current, which, looking so calm and gentle, was bearing them irresistibly to the falls, the women leaped into the water, and strove to reach the shore by swimming in the comparatively feeble stream near the banks. Tied inextricably together, the centre canoes drew the others on, and the whole body of the invaders plunged down the cataract, and perished in the foaming waters of the narrow gorge below. I asked eagerly whether the women escaped. It does not speak highly of Indian chivalry that no one knew, or seemed to think it matter worthy of recollection, whether the two squaws had, or had not, sacrificed their own lives in defending those of their tribe.                                           (19-20)

When the invading Mohawks captured the outlying Melicite village of Madawaska they spared two squaws to guide them downstream to the main Melicite town of Medoctec, below Grand Falls. The squaws steered themselves and their captors over the Falls.                                         (Collected Poems 114)

Of Roberts’s familiarity with at least one such variant there can be little, if any, doubt: after describing Grand Falls in terms that may well have helped to shape the description of them in the poem,¹⁴ Sweetser interpolates without attribution a version of the story that is unequivocal about the women’s survival:

It is a tradition of the Micmacs that in a remote age two families of their tribe were on the upper St. John hunting, and were surprised by a war-party of the [Page 30] strange and dreaded Northern Indians. The latter were descending the river to attack the lower Micmac villages, and forced the captured women to pilot them down. A few miles above the falls, they asked the unwilling guides if the stream was all smooth below, and on receiving an affirmative answer, lashed the canoes together into a raft, and went to sleep, exhausted with their march. When near the Grand Falls the women quietly dropped overboard and swam ashore, while the hostile warriors, wrapped in slumber, were swept down into the rapids, only to awaken when escape was impossible. Their bodies were stripped by the Micmacs on the river below, and the brave women were ever afterward held in high honor by the tribe.                              (56)

The fact that another variant of the story appears in Rand’s Legends of the Micmacs, where it is attributed to "Gabriel Thomas, of St. Mary"(341),¹⁵ and yet another in William T. Baird’s Seventy Years of New Brunswick Life (1890), where it is attributed to Joe Sebatis, an unusually "communicative" member of the "Melicite tribe" (114), gives but a small indication of its currency and popularity at the time of the writing and publication of "How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec."¹⁶ Nor did the story lose its appeal in ensuing decades: a poetic version of it appears in James Hannay’s Ballads of Acadia (1909), a prose version derived from Baird in William O. Raymond’s The River St. John (1910), and a French prose version with a strongly poetical cast in Abbé Thomas Albert’s Histoire du Madawaska (1920).¹⁷ Versions of the story also appear in, among many other places, Thomas Lowell and Rex Barton’s In New Brunswick We’ll Find It (1939) and Stuart Trueman’s Tall Tales and True Tales from Down East (1979).

A tremor! The blanched waves leap.
The warriors start from sleep.
Faints in the sudden blare
The cry of their swift despair,

And the captives’ death-chant shrills.
But afar, remote from ills,
Quiet under the quiet skies
The Melicite village lies.
                  (Collected Poems 114-16)

When he wrote and published his first two Glooscap poems in the mid-’eighties, Roberts was teaching at King’s College and assiduously engaged in promoting Canadian literature and himself both within the College (through the Haliburton Society) and beyond its walls (through his contacts with Lampman, Joseph Edmund Collins, and others), an aim reflected as much in his poetic renditions of Native legends as by the patriotic poems and local-colour pieces that he assembled in In Divers Tones (1886) and by the translation of Philip-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé’s Les anciens Canadiens (1864) that he published in 1890 as Canadians of Old. But well before 1890 Roberts became intent on securing a more prestigious and renumerative professorship that would permit him, as he told Edmund Clarence Stedman on February 8, 1888, to exert a greater "influence . . . [on] the political development of th[e] country" away from any possibility of annexation to the United States (Collected Letters 69-70). "I think I could be a strength to the University of Toronto by reason of my general literary reputation thro’ Canada, [and] the reputation which I am striving so hard to win abroad," he told Stedman à propos his bid for a newly created Chair of Political Science at that university, adding that "as a teacher" he was "very successful in inspiring young men to work, [and] in holding them under [his] influence" (70). Less than three months later, on May 7, he told Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of The Century (New York) to whom he had sent "How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec" in March of the previous year, that he had "withdrawn [his] application for the Toronto Pol[itical] Science Chair, in order to concentrate [his] effort on the new Chair of English at Queen’s College, Kingston," but feared "strong opposition" on the grounds that he had "not studied abroad’ and "[s]ome of the Trustees want a young fellow from one of the Old Country universities" (74).¹⁹ "If ‘The Mohawks’ come out in June, that will help," he importuned; "I am anxious in the matter." Roberts’s letters are silent on his Glooscap poems, but the statement regarding "How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec" makes it reasonable to assume that he also regarded them as a means of representing and promoting himself as a Canadian poet and professor. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, Native legends thus became a component of Roberts’s "cultural capital," objectifications of the "Canadianism" that he was seeking to embody, promulgate, and parley into an academic appointment at a central Canadian college or university.

As intimated several times in the course of the preceding discussion, the poems that Roberts generated from Native legends during the eighteen [Page 33] eighties and ’nineties cannot be ranked among his finest works. Nevertheless, "The Departing of Gluskâp," "The Quelling of the Moose," "The Vengeance of Gluskâp," and "How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec" reward examination both individually and collectively for the light that they shed on the ethnographic and economic contexts surrounding Canadian writing during the post-Confederation period. More than Roberts would have wanted, they too belong to the "half-forgotten catalogue of the injuries which the unfortunate Indian has been compelled to endure at the hands of his white oppressor," but their relationship to their sources, their conjugation of contemporary assumptions about the Native peoples and heroism, and their status as indicators of their author’s cultural competence give them considerable interest as a component of Roberts’s oeuvre and as an expression of late nineteenth-century Canadian culture. 

Notes

1. This would certainly accord with the aesthetic of variety that prompted Roberts to diversify the subjects as well as the forms of his poems in the ’eighties. See "Aesthetics: Workmanship and Variety" (Chapter 3) in my "The Confederation Group." [back]

2. Unless otherwise indicated, the dates assigned to Roberts’s poems are those given in his Collected Poems. [back]

3. In addition to "The Potato Harvest," these include "Tides," "Birch and Paddle," and "Frogs." [back]

4. In "A Canadian-American Liaison" (1889), the Montreal journalist and novelist Watson Griffin defines "Canadianism" as "a love of Canada" (138). The earliest occurrence of it cited in the OED is an article in the 1875 volume of The Canadian Monthly and National Review and the earliest occurrence of it in Roberts’s writings is in a letter of November 18, 1888 (see Collected Letters 96, and "Canadianism: 1885-90" in my "The Confederation Group" [Chapter 2]). [back]

5. The November 1884 number of The University Review (Fredericton) contains a highly laudatory review of The Algonquin Legends of New England in which Carman writes: "How careful and jealous we should be of all this Indian mythology and legend, the greatest Past our land can have [,] and how prodigal and Goth-like we have been. . . . Our interest in the Indians, and our own land, should be deepened, and our sympathy strengthened, by reading Mr. Leland’s book. . . . [H]e has come very near the Indian life, as near as we can come, not by imaginative invention, or falsely colored pictures, but simply by working thoroughly, and in a scholarly way, to recover and preserve what still remains of . . . lost and forgotten lore and song. . . ." [back]

6. See also the Fredericton Star of May 25, 1880. While Roberts was living in Chatham, New Brunswick that town’s Star, which was edited by Roberts’s friend Joseph Edmund Collins published "A Visit to Gabe" (September 22, 1880) and "An Indian Pythias" (December 1, 1880). [back]

7. There can be little doubt that Sweetser is the (principal) source for the version of the legend that appears in the essay on "Nova Scotia" by R. Murray and A. Simpson in Picturesque Canada 830. See also The Week (Toronto) for January 23, 1891 for "A Melicite Legend," [Page 34] a poetic rendition of the departure of Glooscap by Charles H. Lugrin and August 14 and November 27, 1891 for "Acadienses: the Indians of Acadia," a two-part article by I. Allen Jack that contains a prose version of the same legend and a prose version of the legend on which Roberts based "How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec" (The Week 8: 122-23, 589-90, and 830-31). [back]

8. For example, Gordon has "Now the ways of beasts and men waxed evil, and they greatly vexed Clote Scarp, and at length he could no longer endure them" (62) and Roberts has "After many years the ways of beasts and men grew bad, and Clote Scaurp talked to them, till at last he was angry, and very sorry; and he could endure them no longer" (780-81). The differences between the two versions may merely be the result of an attempt by Roberts to make his version appear different and authentic. [back]

9. According to a passage earlier in the essay, Roberts and his travelling companions engaged the service of "three trusty Melicites" as guides in "the little village of Andover, some twenty-four miles below Grand Falls" on the Saint John River. . . . One of the guides, by name Frank Solas, spoke English fairly well, French better, Micmac thoroughly, and his native Melicite. He could also write English intelligibly. His companions, Tom and Steve, had not attained quite so wide and varied a culture, but they were quick-witted and receptive; while Steve was almost an encyclopaedia of useful knowledge, and his knowledge he was wont to impart with a laconic terseness which an encyclopaedist might have envied" (769). See Parkhill 38-42 for a Peter Solis as one of Jack’s informants. [back]

10. On August 16, 1882, the Chatham World reported that Roberts and Schell "were in town Monday, having come through the woods from Fredericton. Mr. Schell is making sketches, and Mr. Roberts writing descriptions, of New Brunswick, for ‘Picturesque Canada.’ Mr. Roberts . . . has a book full of notes and a head full of traditions, legends, and memories of men and things." [back]

11. See Parkhill 40-47, 82-83, and 118-30 for Gabriel Acquin as both source and construct and 172 n. 7 for "Gabriel Thomas, of St. Mary," whom Rand cites (341) as the source of a version of the legend upon which Roberts drew for "How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec," as Gabriel Thomah, "a literate Passamaquoddy . . . from the Peter Dana Point community of Maine." In Chiploquorgan (1872), Richard Lewes Dashwood describes Gabriel Acquin as "a well-known hunter at Fredericton, who spoke excellent English, . . . did not use Yankee terms for everything," and "from his earliest youth had been accustomed to go out with officers stationed in the province" (124). "Gabe proved a most amusing companion in camp," adds Dashwood, "[he] sang capital songs, and told excellent hunting stories" (130). [back]

12. In introducing the legend of Glooscap’s departure in "New Brunswick" Roberts alludes briefly to a legend concerning the hero’s diminution of "the moon." When the typographical error is corrected, the allusion is very clearly to a version of the legend that he knew before Leland’s book was published: "In [Clote Scaurp’s] time the moo[se] had been a dreadful beast, greater than a mountain, and fierce; but Clote Scaurp struck it between the eyes with the palm of his hand, and it shrunk to the size we see it now" (780). [back]

13. Some small compensation for the manifest weaknesses of "The Quelling of the Moose" may be found in the matter-of-factness with which it handles "ash-trees" and Glooscap’s weaponry, two elements of the Algonquin origin myths that Leland finds rich in parallels with Scandinavian mythology. Of the portion of a narrative in which Glooscap creates "Man" by taking his "bow and arrows" and shooting at "Ash-trees," Leland writes that "[t]he magic arrows of Glooskap are of course world-wide, and date from the shafts of Abaris and those used among the ancient Jews for divination. But . . . those of the Indian hero are like the ‘Guse arrows,’ described in Oervarodd’s Saga. . . ." "Ash and Elm in the Edda were the Adam and Eve of the human race. . . . It is certain . . . that the ash was the typic tree of all life, . . . Yggdrasil, the tree of existence, or of the world itself" (18-19, 21-24). [back] [Page 35]

14. "The shape of the fall is singular, since the water leaps from the front and from both sides, with minor and detached cascades over the outer edges. Below the cataract the river whirls and whitens . . . through a rugged gorge . . . , whose walls [are] of dark rock. ‘It is a narrow and frightful chasm, lashed by the troubled water, and excavated by boiling eddies and whirlpools always in motion; at last the water plunges in an immense frothy sheet into a basin below, where it becomes tranquil, and the stream resumes its original features’" (56). [back]

15. See note 10, above. Further complexity is added to the legend’s line(s) of descent by the inclusion of a version of it under the title "Another Incident—an Army Destroyed by Two Women" in one of several articles entitled "The Legends of the Micmacs" that Rand published in 1870 and 1871 in the New Dominion Monthly (Montreal), where he notes that it was (also?) "Related to [him] by an intelligent Indian of the Maliseet tribe, who resides at Fredericton, N.B., and he represented the parties to be not Micmacs but Maliseets" (333-34). ("[A]s they are near each other and have for a hundred years and more been on friendly terms," comments Rand, "these two tribes . . . might easily get their war stories mixed up together" [334].) Similarities of wording between the Rand (1871) and Sweetser (1874) versions of the legend (for example, "the warriors lashed their canoes all together so as to form a sort of raft . . . the women quietly slipped into the water and swam ashore" [Rand] and "they . . . lashed the canoes together into a raft . . . the women quietly dropped overboard and swam ashore" [Sweetser]) strongly suggest Sweetser’s version is based on Rand’s. Nothing as certain can be deduced from the fact that both Rand’s version and Roberts’s poem name the river as the Oolastook. [back]

16. In Baird’s version of the legend, there is only one woman and she lives "to make known her thrilling adventure" (115). In Hannay’s, there is again only one woman, now named Malabeam, but she does not survive (see Ballads 2-11 and The Maiden’s Sacrifice passim). It is possible that "How the Mohawks Set Out for Medoctec" was written with knowledge of one or both of these versions of the legend because "The Maiden’s Sacrifice" was first published in the Saint John Telegram in 1873 (Ballads 2) and Baird states that "The Destruction of the Mohawks at Grand Falls" (as he calls the legend) was "[w]ritten by request for The Aboriginal, published in St. John" (but, as yet, unidentified) (113). That Roberts knew at least one version of the legend featuring a single heroine is confirmed by his essay on "New Brunswick," which includes the following paragraph:

    As might be expected, Grand Falls has been the scene of many an awful tragedy. The first bridge over the gorge fell with several teams upon it. Lumbermen— "steam-drivers"—have been sucked down, and, caught probably in the dreadful whirl of the Coffee Mill [i.e., the whirlpool below the falls], never the smallest trace of them has been seen thereafter. One tragic story is a story also of woman’s heroism. In the days when the Melicites were a great nation their unpeaceable enemies were the Mohawks. A Mohawk war party launched its canoes upon the head-waters of the St. John, intending by this new route to surprise the chief village of the Melicits, at Au pak. Before reaching the Falls they captured a small party of Melicites, all of whom they put to death save one young squaw, who was kept to be their guide through the strange waters. As they drifted silently down by night she was put in the foremost canoe, and ordered to take them to a safe landing in the Upper Basin, where they would, next day, make a portage around the cataract. She steered them straight for the vortex. When they started up from their half-slumber, with the hideous menace of that thunder in their ears, it was too late. A few moments of [Page 36] agonizing effort with their useless paddles, then they and their captive were swept into the gulf. Never did another Mohawk invasion vex the Melicites; but the latter have not preserved the name of the girl.                                                      (776-77)

    Roberts’s reference to the death and disappearance of lumbermen may derive from Gordon, who recounts the story of "[t]wo young men in a canoe who found themselves sucked into the current whilst engaged in drawing logs to the shore" and concludes with the observation that "[n]o trace of the canoe, or their bodies, was ever found" (20). [back]

17. Raymond states that the story, which in his version features a single woman who survives but as a "maniac," was "told by the Indians to the early settlers on the river soon after their arrival in the country" and refers his readers to Hannay’s "The Maiden’s Tragedy" in Ballads of Acadia as "another form of the legend" (The River St. John 27-28). Such similarities as the following between the versions of Baird and Raymond suggest that the former was the latter’s principal source (or that both relied on another, as yet unidentified common source): "One canoe alone remained from the wreck, to carry the maniac Indian woman to her home and tribe (Baird 116); "One canoe alone remained from the wreck to carry the woman to her home and friends." She had saved her nation, but was a maniac from that day" (Raymond 28). The version of the legend in the Histoire de Madawska 12-15 features two women, and was translated into English by Raymond in a 1921 review of Albert’s book that was reprinted in 1928. [back]

18. It is more than likely that Roberts’s "The Departing of Gluskâp" and his essay on "New Brunswick" lie in the background of Lampman’s "The Loons," which was first published in Scribner’s Magazine (New York) in September 1887 and then included in Among the Millet, and other Poems (1888). "Wild and unearthly it swelled . . . and it seemed as if we heard in it a note of strange laughter," runs part of Roberts’s description of the cry that the Indians attribute to ‘"Clote Scaurp’s hunting-dogs"’; "[t]heir howls were often heard at night time in these regions, where they ranged in search of their master . . ." (780). "[A]mong the desolate northern meres," run the equivalent lines in "The Loons," "Still must ye search and wander querulously, / Crying for Glooscap, still bemoan the light / With weird entreaties, and in agony / With awful laughter pierce the lonely night" (Poems 119). [back]

Works Cited

Albert, Thomas. Histoire du Madawaska d’après les recherches historiques de Patrick Therriault et les notes manuscrites de Prudent L. Mercure. Québec: Franciscaine Missionaire, 1920.

Baird, William T. Seventy Years of New Brunswick Life. Autobiographical Sketches. St. John, N.B.: Geo. E. Day, 1890.

Bentley, D.M.R. "The Confederation Group of Canadian Poets, 1880-1897." Forthcomingfrom the University of Toronto Press.

Carman, Bliss. Rev. of The Algonquin Legends of New England. By Charles G. Leland. University Monthly (Nov 1884): 28
(and http://www.arts.uwo.ca/canpoetry/confederation/Bliss%20Carman/index.htm).

Dashwood, Richard Lewes. Chiploquorgan; or, Life by the Camp Fire in Dominion of Canada and Newfoundland. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1872. [Page 37]

Gordon, Arthur Hamilton. Wilderness Journeys in New Brunswick, in 1862-63. Saint John, N.B.: J. and A. McMillan, 1864.

Hannay, James. Ballads of Acadia. St. John, N.B.: John A. Bowes, 1909.

——. The Maiden’s Sacrifice. Souvenir Edition. Np, nd.

Hardy, Campbell. Sporting Adventures in the New World; Days and Nights of Moose-hunting in the Pine Forests of Acadia. 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1855.

"Indian Legends of the Saint John River." The Star (Fredericton) 15 May 1880. 3.

Lampman, Archibald. Poems. Ed. Duncan Campbell Scott. Toronto: George N. Morang, 1900.

Leland, Charles G. The Algonquin Legends of New England; or Myths and Folk Lore of the Micmac, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot Tribes. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884.

Murray, R., and A. Simpson. "Nova Scotia." In Picturesque Canada; the Country as It Was and Is. Ed. George Monro Grant. 2 vols. Toronto: Belden Bros., 1882. 789-852.

Nicholas, Andrea Bear. "Gabriel Acquin." Dictionary of Canadian Biography 13: 3-5.

Parkhill, Thomas C. Weaving Ourselves into the Land: Charles Godfrey Leland, "Indians," and the American Study of Native American Religions. Albany: State U of New York P, 1997.

Rand, Silas Tertius. "An Indian Legend." New Dominion Monthly. (Montreal) (April 1871): 219-22.

——. "The Legends of the Micmacs." New Dominion Monthly (Montreal) (May 1871): 262-64; (Jun 1871): 331-34; (Sep 1871): 150-54; (Oct 1871): 211-16.

——. Legends of the Micmacs. New York: Longmans, Green, 1894.

Raymond, William O. Rev. of Histoire du Madawaska. By Thomas Albert. Collections of the New Brunswick Historical Society 12 (1928): 287-91.

——. The River St. John: Its Physical Features, Legends and History from 1604 to 1784. 1910. Ed. J.C. Webster. Sackville, N.B.,: Tribune Press, 1943.

Roberts, Charles G.D. The Canadian Guide-Book: the Tourist’s and Sportsman’s Guide to Eastern Canada and Newfoundland. London: William Heinemann, 1892.

——. Collected Letters. Ed. Laurel Boone. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1989.

——. Collected Poems. Ed. Desmond Pacey. Wolfville: Wombat, 1985.

——. "Literature." In "Review of Literature, Science and Art." The Dominion Annual Register and Review for the Seventeenth Year of the Canadian Union, 1883. Ed. Henry J. Morgan. Toronto: Hunter, Rose, 1884. 206-19.

——. "New Brunswick:" In Picturesque Canada; the Country as It Was and Is. Ed. George Monro Grant. 2 vols. Toronto: Belden Bros., 1882. 741-88.

——. Selected Poems and Critical Prose. Ed. W.J. Keith. Literature of Canada: Poetry and Prose in Reprint. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1974.

Sweetser, M.F. The Maritime Provinces: a Handbook for Travellers. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875.

Thomas, Lowell, and Rex Barton. In New Brunswick We’ll Find It. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century, 1939.

Trueman, Stuart. Tall Tales and True Tales from Down East. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979. [Page 38]