Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder, and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 - Hardcover

Jenkins, Mckay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375507213 ISBN 13: 9780375507212

Publisher: Random House, 2005

Synopsis

In the winter of 1913, high in the Canadian Arctic, two Catholic priests set out on a dangerous mission to do what no white men had ever attempted: reach a group of utterly isolated Eskimos and convert them. Farther and farther north the priests trudged, through a frigid and bleak country known as the Barren Lands, until they reached the place where the Coppermine River dumps into the Arctic Ocean.

Their fate, and the fate of the people they hoped to teach about God, was about to take a tragic turn. Three days after reaching their destination, the two priests were murdered, their livers removed and eaten. Suddenly, after having survived some ten thousand years with virtually no contact with people outside their remote and forbidding land, the last hunter-gatherers in North America were about to feel the full force of Western justice.

As events unfolded, one of the Arctic’s most tragic stories became one of North America’s strangest and most memorable police investigations and trials. Given the extreme remoteness of the murder site, it took nearly two years for word of the crime to reach civilization. When it did, a remarkable Canadian Mountie named Denny LaNauze led a trio of constables from the Royal Northwest Mounted Police on a three-thousand-mile journey in search of the bodies and the murderers. Simply surviving so long in the Arctic would have given the team a place in history; when they returned to Edmonton with two Eskimos named Sinnisiak and Uluksuk, their work became the stuff of legend.

Newspapers trumpeted the arrival of the Eskimos, touting them as two relics of the Stone Age. During the astonishing trial that followed, the Eskimos were acquitted, despite the seating of an all-white jury. So outraged was the judge that he demanded both a retrial and a change of venue, with himself again presiding. The second time around, predictably, the Eskimos were convicted.

A near perfect parable of late colonialism, as well as a rich exploration of the differences between European Christianity and Eskimo mysticism, Jenkins’s Bloody Falls of the Coppermine possesses the intensity of true crime and the romance of wilderness adventure. Here is a clear-eyed look at what happens when two utterly alien cultures come into violent conflict.

About this title

About the Author:

MCKAY JENKINS holds degrees from Amherst, Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and Princeton, where he received a Ph.D. in English. He is also the author of The Last Ridge and The White Death, and the editor of The Peter Matthiessen Reader. The Tilghman Professor of English and Journalism at the University of Delaware, Jenkins lives with his wife and two children in Baltimore.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1
Very little investigation has been made in Canada of the native races, and what has been done had been under the auspices of foreign institutions. The opportunities for such studies are fast disappearing. Under advancing settlement and rapid development of the country the native is disappearing, or coming under the influence of the white man’s civilization. If the information concerning the native races is ever to be secured and preserved, action must be taken very soon, or it will be too late.
—GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF CANADA, 1908

One morning in early july 1911, an odd little man walked into a saloon on the shore of the mighty Mackenzie River and dipped his filthy fingers in a sugar bowl. John Hornby was just twenty-seven years old, five feet four inches tall, and barely one hundred pounds, but in the north country he was, among white men at least, a legend. Once, it was said, he ran next to a horse for fifty miles, trotting sideways, like a wolf. Another time, on a bet for a bottle of whiskey, he ran one hundred miles in under twenty-four hours. And Hornby was not a drinking man. His instincts most resembled a trapper’s, but he loved animals and hated traps. He never hunted except for food, and often, like the native people with whom he traveled, he went without eating for days at a time. He probably knew the Barren Lands, the country in which he lived, more intimately than any other white man in history.

Hornby had fierce blue eyes that seemed to always be focused on something off in the far distance. Exactly why Hornby decided to explore Canada’s north country has been lost to history. He may have ventured north with vague notions of finding gold, but the Klondike rush had long since dried up. He may have been lured by rumors of vast giveaways of land, which the government had promised in an effort to populate the north. More likely he went north to go north, to see what he could see.

John Hornby did not like darkening the doorways of Fort Norman, the dreary oupost that comprised little more than a Hudson’s Bay Company store, the Anglican Mission of the Holy Trinity, and the Catholic Mission of Saint-Thérèse. Even among the usual rough men who passed through such places, Hornby stood out for his disinterest in the trimmings of civilized society. He didn’t need the company of white men, and he usually did as much as he could to avoid them. He was happiest living among the Barren Land Indians, chopping wood, carrying water, stalking caribou. But the previous summer, Hornby had had a stirring experience. Scouting territory north of Great Bear Lake, he had come upon a group of people he believed to be the last in North America to have remained outside the reach of white explorers. They were not Indians; they were Eskimos who had followed the caribou inland from Coronation Gulf, some 150 miles to the northeast. Hornby had been so excited by his discovery that he had written a letter to the only other permanent European resident of the Barren Lands: the priest in charge of the Mission of Saint-Thérèse. “We have met a party of Eskimos who come every year,” Hornby’s letter said. “The Eskimos come at the end of August and leave when the first snow falls. They seem very intelligent.” The letter then sounded a somber note. “The Eskimos and Indians are frightened of each other and it would be dangerous for Indians to try and meet Eskimos without having a white man with them, because the Eskimos have a bad opinion of the Indians. If you intend sending someone to meet the Eskimos, we shall be pleased to give you all the help we can.”1

Word of Hornby’s letter moved through Canada’s northwest Catholic missions and quickly landed in the hands of Gabriel Breynat, a man so exhuberant about wilderness missionary work that he had been made bishop for all of northwestern Canada by the age of thirty-two. Breynat had made his reputation ministering to Dog Rib, Hare Skin, and Slave Lake Indians, but for nearly a decade he had been praying for the chance to extend his missionary work to the continent’s northernmost people. “No one knows how many they are, or what they are like,” he had written the oblate chapter general seven years before, “but we would like to send a few specimens to Paradise.”

Breynat had also begun to worry that the Catholic Church might be beaten to the region by the Church of England. Just as French and British trappers had battled for territory all over the Canadian west, so did their churches compete, often using the language and strategies of warfare, for their nationals and the natives with whom they traded. They established outposts. They recruited hardy missionaries and sent them out as scouts. In the Canadian hinterlands, Europe’s age-old religious struggle found a new battleground. “We have against us here, a silent, vexatious and persistent opposition on the part of a handful of Protestants, freemasons and materialists, old-fashioned adherents of Darwinian theories who think they are in the vanguard of progress,” a Catholic missionary would write some years later. “Souls cost dear, and they have to be gained one by one.”2

The subtleties of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, of course, were often lost on the Eskimos. They had a hard enough time understanding that these strange men in black robes were holy men and not just another batch of traders.

To say the least, bringing religion to Eskimos would require talents that were not part of the typical seminarian’s training. The territory between the church’s northern outposts and the central Arctic coast were virtually unmapped. Even the survival techniques that missionaries had learned through their work with Indians would be of limited value. There would be no building a log church on the Arctic coast, which sat at least a hundred miles above the tree line. And what would these people think of European religion, when many of them had never even met a European?

Nonetheless, when Bishop Breynat read John Hornby’s letter, he could sense the veil lifting over the northland. Hornby’s letter “had every appearance of an invitation from heaven,” Breynat wrote. And he had just the man for the job.3

Father Jean-Baptiste Rouvière was a small-boned, dark-haired man with melancholic eyes set deeply behind prominent cheekbones. He had a sensitive mouth and an expression that seemed not dour but resigned, as if he had come to terms with the difficult but rewarding life of remote missionary work. Rouvière had been born on November 11, 1881, in Mende, France, to Jean Rouvière and Marie-Anne Cladel. After his traditional studies, he entered the novitiate of Notre-Dame de l’Osier on September 23, 1901, took vows at Liège on August 15, 1903, and was ordained as a priest three years later. In 1907 he transferred to the Northwest Territories, spending his first four years at Fort Providence on Great Slave Lake, then moving to Fort Good Hope, about one hundred river miles north of Fort Norman.

To Breynat, Rouvière seemed to have a number of qualities that would serve him well in the Far North. He was patient. Deliberate. Slow to anger. He had a certain seriousness of purpose that Breynat considered appropriate to a country that for many months of the year was cloaked in darkness. On the other hand, Rouvière was, as Breynat had been upon his own arrival from France, utterly inexperienced. Natives acknowledged that learning the skills needed to survive in their country took a lifetime. Rouvière had arrived in northern Canada as an adult, with few skills and no experience living outside a temperate European climate. The warmest clothing he had was made of wool. He planned to live through winters that would kill a sheep in a day. And though he had been ministering to Indians living near Fort Good Hope, Rouvière had spent little time away from the relative security of a mission in the middle of the Mackenzie River’s busy trading route. Compared to where he would end up, the posts along the Mackenzie were practically crowded.

Yet like all Europeans who came to the Arctic, Rouvière seemed both enamored of and intimidated by the breadth of the land. Vast open spaces of any kind—save the odd belt of mountains running through Switzerland or between Spain and France—had been in exceedingly short supply in Europe for centuries. Dropped into a world where forests blanketed many thousands of square miles—where trees might cover a landmass as large as France—colonists were shaken to their bones. A young priest, in other words, could be forgiven his early trepidation.

Bishop Breynat showed his young priest the letter he had received from John Hornby, and asked Rouvière if he would be willing to take the church’s work into the Barren Lands, and from there to the Arctic coast. Though Rouvière would be on his own, at least initially, Breynat promised to try to find him a companion. “I will do everything I can to send someone to keep you company next year,” he said. In the meantime, Rouvière could at least count on help from Hornby. To Breynat’s delight, Rouvière agreed to the challenge with happiness in his eyes, a smile on his lips, and a quote from Isaiah: Ecce ego, mitte me. Here I am, send me forth.

as a young missionary trying to navigate the people and places of Canada’s vast wilderness, Father Rouvière knew he was standing on the shoulders of some of the church’s most adventurous men. The Oblates of Mary Immaculate had been founded in Provence in 1816 by Eugène de Mazenod, who would later become bishop of Marseilles. They first came to Montreal from France in 1842, and within three years had already placed a missionary at Fort...

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0375507213
• ISBN 13: 9780375507212
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304