The Magnificent Nahanni: The Struggle to Protect a Wild Place
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The Magnificent Nahanni: The Struggle to Protect a Wild Place
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Overview
The Magnificent Nahanni extols the natural wonders of the South Nahanni Valley—its untamed waters, high, glaciated mountains, colourful tufa mounds, great falls, deep canyons, caves and karst, extensive forests, alpine tundra, and diverse wildlife, including Dall’s sheep, caribou, wolf, and grizzly bear. It is also the story of cooperative efforts to conserve the area while enabling Indigenous people to continue to hunt and fish there.
“Just as the Nahanni is an exceptional place, this is no ordinary book. It contains reflections on this remarkable national park landscape by one of the keenest students of parks and protected areas this country has ever produced.” —Harvey Locke
“[A]n exemplary multi-disciplinary approach to land use studies and cooperative approaches to research, planning and land management, especially involving Indigenous and non-governmental groups – in short, this book makes a major contribution to research.”—John S. Marsh, co-editor, Changing Parks
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780889774605 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Regina Press |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2017 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Magnificent Nahanni
The Struggle to Protect a Wild Place
By Gordon Nelson
University of Regina Press
Copyright © 2017 Gordon NelsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-88977-460-5
CHAPTER 1
Envisioning the Magnificent Nahanni
Despite centuries of pressure from trapping, prospecting, mining, big game hunting, and other exploitive activities, the magnificent Nahanni River still runs wild and free in Canada's Far North. More correctly known as the South Nahanni, the river is the stuff of legend and awe-inspiring reality. River rafters see and feel the ghosts of the past: rare cabins left by long-gone prospectors and trappers, with Indigenous people still travelling the lower river. Yet the wild predominates: the river's rush; colourful flowers, butterflies, and birds; caribou and wolf; vast green and yellow spruce, pine, and aspen forests; upland prairie and tundra; waterfalls, cliffs, clefts, canyons, caves, and uneven limestone karst terrain. These unique natural wonders are now protected in the Nahanni National Park Reserve. After decades of struggle, they have eluded "the paw of the ape," imagery evoked by Raymond Patterson, the adventurous traveller who trapped and prospected in the lower valley in the 1920s.
The Nahanni stands out among northern rivers, not because of its size but because of its unique grandeur and rich natural diversity. It begins in the Mackenzie Mountains in Canada's Northwest Territories (Figure 1.1) and flows southeast for about five hundred kilometres before emptying into the Liard River near its junction with the great Arctic-bound Mackenzie. Along its course, the Nahanni passes from steep mountain slopes into a wide gently inclined basin fringed on the south side by the jagged towering glaciated peaks of the Ragged Range. It plunges over the precipitous 130-metre-high Virginia Falls and races through four great canyons before running into a maze of branching channels — the Splits — flowing to the Liard near the small Indigenous village of Nahanni Butte.
Along the way, the Nahanni passes extensive forests, wetlands, and high alpine tundra housing caribou, moose, black and grizzly bears, Dall's sheep, lynx, wolf, and many other animals and plants in a wild ecosystem increasingly rare in much of the North. These natural wonders have been described and briefly explained in books and guides such as Neil Hartling's Nahanni: River of Gold ... River of Dreams (1998), Peter Jowett's Nahanni: The River Guide (1998), Pat and Rosemarie Keough's vividly illustrated The Nahanni Portfolio (1988), Richard Davis's Nahanni Journals: R.M. Patterson's 1927–1929 Journals (2008), and Chuck Blyth's Nahanni Nah? q Dehe: A Selection of Photographic Images of the South Nahanni Watershed (2007–2010) (2011). The Magnificent Nahanni expands on these publications by giving more recent explanations of its outstanding landforms, wildlife, scenery, and human activities. But this book is unique in its focus on the long struggle to conserve the river and its watershed in a national park reserve.
I first became interested in the N ahanni in the early 1970s when the long struggle to protect the river really got underway. But I was not able to actually visit the Nahanni until August 2013, when my good friend, Bill Graham, and I took a raft trip down the river. We flew from Toronto to the long-time mining centre of Yellowknife, staying for two days talking to experienced northerners. We went on to Fort Simpson, the old fur trade settlement at the junction of the Mackenzie and its west branch tributary, the Liard. Just 150 kilometres upstream, the Nahanni enters the Liard at Nahanni Butte. We stayed in Fort Simpson for two days, walking the dusty streets, visiting the small, intriguing museum, the local pub, and the big general store, getting our gear together for the raft trip.
A small float plane took us over a vast panorama of mountains, forests, lakes, bogs, and muskeg to an arcing landing on a pool of relatively quiet water above the steep cliffs of Virginia Falls. We stayed overnight in a small Parks Canada campground, then portaged down to the river. Canoes and rafts rested on the bank amid thin mist, the roar of falling waters, and trembling ground. Our party of about ten was broken into groups of two or three, placed on rafts, and we were on our way.
The run was like a dream, the wide Nahanni flowing at times through turbulent rapids, at times through comparatively gentle reaches where we basked in the sun. Eagle nests, caribou, wolf, and black bear appeared here and there. Mountains loomed large on the horizon. We surged through the four great canyons. The last — or First Canyon upstream from the Laird — is virtually vertical, scarred with caves sometimes leading to long tunnels dissolved in limestone bedrock underlying pitted karst terrain on the bordering Nahanni Plateau. We saw only one other party in the six days before our rendezvous with a big powerboat. It took us swiftly through the Splits, shifting channels carved relentlessly by the river as it erodes its way across the broad lowland sediments leading to the Liard, Nahanni Butte, and the end of a remarkable journey.
We can dig much deeper into the wonders of the Nahanni by turning to the writings of Raymond Patterson, who spent months prospecting and trapping in the lower valley in 1927 and 1928-1929. Patterson was an Englishman in his late twenties at the time of his sojourns in the Nahanni. He had enjoyed natural beauty, hunting, and outdoor life since boyhood. He served in the British Army during the First World War (1914–1918) and was captured and imprisoned by the Germans. Upon his release, he returned to England, worked for awhile for a bank, then left for Canada, seeking new experiences and adventure. He spent several years on ranches, mainly in British Columbia. He homesteaded in Peace River Country, living off the land, before undertaking his adventurous trip to the little-known Nahanni Valley in 1927.
Patterson's interest in the Nahanni seems to have been activated when he encountered stories of the river in the book, The Arctic Forests, by Michael H. Mason. Patterson found this book at Harrod's, the well-known department store in London, while on a trip home from Western Canada in the winter of 1927. The book had physical and ethnographical maps of Alaska, Yukon, and the Mackenzie Valley, then a little-known region that had intrigued Patterson since he was a boy. One map had a large, beige-coloured area, labelled "Nahanni" after the poorly understood people of the region.
According to Patterson, Mason described the Nahanni as "a hearty, virile people, but have suffered much from white influences. They are hostile to strangers and many white pioneers have been done to death by them. The tribe was for many years under the complete domination of one woman, supposed to be partly of European descent." Patterson had had a run of luck lately. He could afford to satisfy his curiosity and visit this exotic place. He proceeded to do so on his return to Western Canada in the spring of 1927. Patterson described his journey in his classic book, The Dangerous River. It was not originally published until 1954 and has been republished numerous times since. The Dangerous River is a somewhat romanticized story written sometime after the fact for popular audiences. Fortunately, in 2008, Richard Davis edited and published Patterson's daily Nahanni River journals prepared while he was on the river in 1927 and 1928–1929. The journals give much more direct observations of his actual experiences and will be relied upon heavily in the following account.
In spring 1927, Patterson travelled about three hundred miles by rail to Waterways, now the oil sands town of Fort McMurray on the Athabasca River. He then went about eight hundred miles downstream by canoe and steamer to Lake Athabasca, then down the Great Slave River, across Great Slave Lake, and on to the mighty Mackenzie River. Patterson ascended this great river to the mouth of its first major west bank tributary, the Liard. He moved by steamer and canoe up this stream to the South Nahanni River, where it enters the Liard after the long run from its source in the Mackenzie Mountains and the Yukon border country to the northwest.
After months of arduous travel, Patterson reached the South Nahanni in late July 1927. A major reason for coming to the valley was to face the challenges of a hostile yet beautiful wildland. He wanted to learn to survive through his own skill and labour in the bush tradition. Patterson poled, dragged, and sometimes paddled his canoe through the snyes and canyons of the lower South Nahanni up to the Flat River, a large tributary from the west. While in Nahanni Butte, he encountered the wildlands traveller, Albert Faille, originally from Minnesota. Faille was a veteran of the U.S. Army in the Great War. After his return home, he eventually found his way to the Lake Athabasca area, where he trapped for a couple of years before going to the Nahanni to trap and prospect. Faille helped Patterson learn the ways of the canoe and the bush. He accompanied Patterson upstream on a very challenging canoe trip through the Nahanni canyons to the vicinity of the towering and majestic Virginia Falls.
Patterson did not go beyond the falls into the middle or upper Nahanni Valley on this or his later 1928-1929 journey to the valley. For the most part, he and Faille travelled separately as Patterson acquired the skills and experience he needed to live on the land. Patterson spent several weeks exploring the Flat River. He found traces of gold and resolved to come back the following year to seek his fortune in the precious metal. He saw this wealth as a means to marry and support a young woman he had left behind in England.
Patterson returned to the Nahanni by another route in March 1928, going by train to Peace River Country. He and an English friend, Gordon Matthews, then journeyed by horse wagon, sled, and boat north along the Rockies and then down the Nelson River to the Liard. They were on the Nahanni by May 1928 and stayed until the end of January 1929. Patterson built a log cabin at Wheat Sheaf Creek in Deadmen Valley, not far downstream from the junction of the Nahanni and the Flat. He used it as a base to explore and trap in the surrounding country. For the most part, the two men spent the winter very much alone. Among rare visitors was a group of Indigenous people who apparently had come over the mountains from the Liard Valley. Patterson gave them hot tea with lots of sugar. When they left, they dumped chunks of moose meat on his cabin roof.
In both his 1927 and 1928-1929 journals, Patterson's descriptions focus on two things: his own experiences and challenges; and the stunning natural qualities of the lower Nahanni and the Flat rivers. He describes the poplar, willow, and other trees, gold, red, and vividly beautiful in the late summer and fall. While on a reach of the Nahanni Valley between the Flat River and Virginia Falls on August 21, 1927, he says he is in an area where no one has stayed for seven years. He implies that this hiatus was due to tales of murder, suicide, and starvation. Patterson later used such stories to dramatize The Dangerous River. Patterson writes often of feasting on blueberries and other wild fruit. He describes struggling up through spruce, tamarack, and alpine fir forests to the treeless tundra of the uplands, hundreds of feet above the Nahanni and the Flat. He sees Dall's sheep on high ground and kills one, saving the horns to ship south as a trophy of his northern hunts and adventures.
His observations of wildlife are numerous and paint a vivid picture of the natural wonders that eventually led to strong interest in creating a national park. For example, while in the Nahanni Valley near "Murder Creek" on August 25, 1927, he was awakened at three a.m. by wolves. Later, he saw tracks of wolf, fisher, marten, and lynx in the sands where he had lunch. Patterson saw, or saw signs of beaver and frequently of moose, especially in the late summer and fall in the favourable habitat along the lower slopes and floodplains of the Nahanni and the Flat.
Moose were a major source of food for Patterson, as well as for Indigenous hunters who seemed to concentrate their efforts in the lower Nahanni closer to the village of Nahanni Butte. Moose and other animals were less common and harder to get in the cold, snow, and quiet of winter. Patterson and Matthews found it difficult to live off the land. Flour, cereal, and other supplies had to be packed in from their downriver caches or Nahanni Butte. Their trapping in the winter of 1928-1929 seems to have been quite successful. They sold marten they had trapped for nearly $2,000, not including what was received for pelts of weasel, fox, mink, coyote, and at least one wolverine. They saw wolf, or signs or sounds of wolf, fairly frequently but do not seem to have trapped or killed many. These animals seemed to fascinate and disturb Patterson, who was impressed with their size. Two timber wolves "about the size of calves" were seen not far from his cabin on November 14, 1928.
On August 21, 1927, while travelling up the Flat, Patterson portrayed the valley as "a dream of peace and beauty." It had its rapids, but there were long and lovely reaches where the trout jumped and little brown waterfowl nested "and always the splendid chocolate, black and golden butterfly and the one of pure gold." At supper he saw a great black bear, possibly a grizzly, and heard the plunging of an otter or beaver in the night. A cow moose appeared at midday on August 22. At 5:30 p.m., as he was poling up a riffle, Patterson heard sounds on the river shingle and saw a great bull moose about two hundred yards away, going to the river to drink. "The moose was not the least afraid and stood looking at me. I took his photo twice ... I said Goodbye and went on my way but he stayed stock still in the water looking after me for a long while." Patterson concluded that these animals do "not seem to know men" and that the river came "out of Eden." At supper that day, he heard marmots "piping amongst the rocks over the river — otherwise no sound but that of water."
Patterson continued up the Flat and was awakened early on the morning of the twenty-third by a squirrel running across his face. He later saw a pair of "whisky jacks" and watched a woodland caribou leave the woods about five hundred yards away. It apparently was the first caribou he had seen: "A very pretty animal — smaller, more graceful and lighter than a moose." This could suggest that caribou were generally rarer than moose and other animals. But we need to be careful about drawing firm conclusions, because today caribou mainly spend summers in the upper Nahanni and its cooler, less mosquito-rich highlands, moving downstream in winter.
Patterson's observations give the impression of a diverse fauna and flora in the lower Nahanni and Flat valleys in the mid- to late 1920s. Overall, animals appear to have been relatively numerous. Patterson's observations were concentrated largely in the lower valley of the Nahanni and along the Flat, where the slopes and floodplains offer favourable habitat for wildlife. His observations also suggest that the animals may have been recovering from heavier hunting, trapping, and prospecting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
His allusions to murder along the valley reflect long-held tales and legends of the river. They suggest that in earlier days, prospectors and trappers may have been numerous enough to come into conflict with one another over gold or the fur-bearers of the country. However, their numbers and effects remain elusive because a few people can range widely in the search for fur or precious metal. Their activities may have been sufficient to threaten yield and create hostilities over territory. Some of the conflict may also have been due to struggles among Indigenous people and newcomers to the valley. Patterson does refer to an old path near Virginia Falls said to have been used by prospectors in the Yukon Gold Rush some twenty to thirty years earlier, around the turn of the twentieth century. He also records finding, in various parts of the valley, abandoned campsites, old cabins, old river scows, and other equipment.
Patterson stresses the endurance and persistence needed to survive on the land. He faced dangers and risks in swinging his canoe across surging currents when going upriver, yet enjoyed the pleasure and swiftness of the return journey. He revels in his surroundings, in baking bannock, hunting, and preparing wild foods. He is proud of his craftsmanship and of the log cabin he built — his friend Matthews not being so good with his hands. It was stories similar to, but older than, his own that helped attract Patterson to the Nahanni. During his years in British Columbia, he undoubtedly heard tales of the northern wilds and Yukon from former trappers and prospectors he encountered not long after their return from the Yukon Gold Rush or trapping in the North. Stories may have spread in these informal as well as more formal ways.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Magnificent Nahanni by Gordon Nelson. Copyright © 2017 Gordon Nelson. Excerpted by permission of University of Regina Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword
The Nahanni: A Special Place on Earth
A Note on Terminology
Making a Case for this Book
Preface
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Nahanni: The Wilderness Ideal
Chapter 2: Creating the Initial Nahanni National Park Reserve
Chapter 3: The Struggle for Expansion: New Ideas and Approaches in the 1980s and 1990s
Chapter 4: The 19th Century Fur Trade: The Early Years
Chapter 5: The 19th Century Fur Trade: The Later Years
Chapter 6: The Mining Era in the 20th Century
Chapter 7: Land Use, Landscape, and Ecosystem Changes in the Nahanni Watershed: A Summing Up
Chapter 8: Challenges and Opportunities
Chapter 9: Analogies with Experiences Elsewhere
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgements
Selected References
Cited Correspondence on Prairie Creek Mine