11 The Journey's End

St. ANDREW'S WEST, Ontario - The Riviere des Raisins was a lazy brown curl through a screen of scrubby trees just bursting into vivid green leaf. A light rain drizzled out of the overcast to dimple its muddy surface.

Behind it, sodden farm fields rose to the hedgerows.

I leaned on the time-battered stone wall surrounding the old burial ground and looked at the replica of the first Roman Catholic Church, a tiny six-by-seven-metre structure of hand-hewn logs erected by loyalists fleeing the American Revolutionary War in 1784.

The original was long gone, of course, replaced by a stone church in 1801 that served as a hospital during the War of 1812. It had been built with contributions solicited from the fur traders of the North West Company and bore a startling architectural resemblance to one of the company's fur warehouses. Simon Fraser - he was later married in that church - was one of the contributors.

It, too, although still standing, was replaced in the march of progress, this time by the neo-Gothic structure begun in 1858 and completed in 1864, whose imposing spire rose into the grey sky behind me and from which Fraser, having ended his earthly journey, was dispatched upon his last cosmic expedition into eternity.

I'd come to this tranquil and historic crossroads a few kilometres inland from the mighty St. Lawrence River because this was where his story ended, more than 4,000 kilometres from the great deeds of his youth on the far side of the Rocky Mountains, long after they'd largely been forgotten by all but a few old men and women.

Once this was a stagecoach stop on the main road between Kingston and Montreal; today it is just another sleepy footnote in the sweep of history.

Across the small, neatly trimmed cemetery, the tombstones of people born before the United States invented itself in the chaos and catastrophe of its first civil war tilted this way and that on the uneven ground.

The burial ground is today being restored thanks in part to the efforts of Maureen McAlear, whose farm along the same river frontage shared by Fraser has been in her family for 200 years.

Funds for the restoration were raised by the Cornwall Township Historical Society, grants from the Ontario government, the Hudson's Bay Company History Foundation and Simon Fraser University.

I let myself in and walked among the 60 tombstones whose shapes made a timeline of society's changing tastes in grave markers and I thought of Fraser's own careful observations of the tombs and what they told him about the nations through which he passed in 1808 on his way to the Pacific.

There was an ornate red granite pillar that represented the high Victoriana of the late 19th century. It marked the grave of John Sandfield Macdonald -  tavern keeper at this crossroads and at whose inn Fraser doubtless took a dram now and then - former premier of the Province of Canada and first premier of Ontario, buried in 1872.

Moving backward in time, there was Nancy Munro, born in 1766, died in 1809. Other markers were more austere but no less striking, comprised of weather-stained obelisks, stone cairns, Celtic crosses that signaled Scottish origins and rows of the plain rectangular markers that were indistinguishable from those I'd seen marking the graves of British and American soldiers killed in the Revolutionary War.

The little log church had been erected the same year that Fraser's mother fled the new American republic for Canada to escape the persecutions of loyalists after the revolution - we might call it the political equivalent of ethnic cleansing, today - and the big stone church had gone up two years before he died on Aug. 18, 1862.

And yet, following his death at the age of 86, it was almost another lifetime before the Hudson's Bay Company would put up a monument to mark the humble common grave Fraser shares with his wife, Catherine Macdonell, who died one day later and was interred beside him.

Today, the polished granite block installed in 1921, the 100th anniversary of the merger that absorbed Fraser's North West Company, leans slightly on a weather-worn concrete footing. The terse memorial notes that: "While in the employ of the North West Co. he conducted important exploration and pioneer work principally in the area now known as British Columbia which he helped to secure for the British."

As I bent to trace the chiseled words with my finger tips, I thought how the dry prose was as distant from the dramatic reality of that summer in 1808 as I was from the untamed Fraser River.

His voyage of discovery had ended in disappointment at the edge of the Pacific when he confirmed that the river he was exploring was neither the Columbia nor the navigable waterway the North West Company sought to link New Caledonia to trans-oceanic trade routes.

But if his exploration was finished, the expedition had yet to survive growing hostility among the tribes of the Fraser River and to return more than 800 kilometres through the dangerous canyons and up the thundering rapids.

The hostility of the Musqueams at the mouth of the river may have been triggered by Fraser's abrupt and unannounced appearance at a time of tension and fear caused by raiding parties from the sea. Or it may, as some Musqueams maintain, have resulted because word had preceded him about a serious breach of protocol in which he forced a powerful chief to surrender a canoe, causing him to lose face before his followers.

Whatever the cause was, Fraser and his men were forced to flee through growing darkness, finally camping in exhaustion shortly before midnight, only to then be flooded from their beds by the rising tide a few hours later.

On July 3, returning to the village where he'd been forced by desperation to seize the canoe, he'd found his friendly Indian guide from upriver had been taken prisoner as soon as the expedition was out of sight.

"He informed us that the Indians after our departure had fixed upon our destruction," Fraser wrote. "He himself was pillaged, his hands and feet tied, and they were about to knock him on the head when the Chief of the Ackinroe appeared, released him and secured his escape to this place, where he was now detained as a slave."

This "unpleasant recital" and growing evidence of "insolence and ill nature" convinced Fraser to shelve any plans to return to the sea for more exploration and to get his increasingly frightened men out of danger as swiftly as possible. The extent of their fright is evident from the behaviour of one, whom Fraser identifies only as G.B., as they prepared to embark again.

"The fellow being afraid had fled into the woods and placed himself behind a range of tombs, where he remained during the greatest part of the time we tarried on shore and it was with difficulty we prevailed upon him to embark," says Fraser's journal entry for July 3.

It was not a moment too soon, either. As Fraser's crew struggled upstream against a strong current, they saw that the insulted chief and a flotilla of canoes, "well-manned and armed," was paralleling their course, "singing with unwelcome gestures all the while." When they began to close in with the apparent intention of capsizing the canoe, Fraser startled them into withdrawal with "threats and vehemence of speech and gestures."

His men observed that one of those menacing them wore a large belt suspended from his neck garnished with locks of human hair. The implications can't have been lost on people whose own parents and grandparents had endured the scalpings and ambushes of both the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolutionary War.

He knew now that his main objective was to get back to friendly territory and his men didn't need much incentive to forego the comforts of camp and keep on paddling.

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