3 The North West Company's Last Post

FORT ALEXANDRIA - On the remote west side of the Fraser River about 600 kilometres north of Vancouver, I turned in at the humble collection of weathered buildings that marks Alexandria Indian Reserve No. 1.

To get there in my search for Simon Fraser, I'd crossed the river at Quesnel, and turned south on the twisting West Fraser Road, watching the kilometres rattle by while suburbs gave way to acreages, then ranches, as the dense boreal forest gradually yielded to meadows of arid bunch grass.

By the time I arrived, I had left behind the trail into Deserters Creek, where Alexander Mackenzie defused a near mutiny in 1793. In my wake lay the twisting hairpin turns at Narcosli Creek, the alluvial floodplain of Diamond Island and Lieutenant Henry Spencer Palmer's 1863 survey trail from Bella Coola to Fort Alexandria.

The previous day, exploring around Cottonwood Canyon and in the vicinity of Mackenzie's West Road River north of Quesnel, GPS, compass and maps notwithstanding, I had repeatedly been lost in a maze of deactivated logging roads, some of which required a little axe-work on the deadfalls. But in my trade getting lost has its advantages.

In this case, the experience of not being where I thought I was became the richer from wildlife encounters which ranged from a nonchalant grizzly browsing on dandelion flowers to an excitable cinnamon bear with two cubs, an extraordinarily large male black bear, the grey phantom of a lynx, a herd of elk - Red Deer, Fraser would have called them - many mule deer, blacktails, marmots and a fleeting glimpse of what looked like a fisher, the large cousin of the weasel whose pelt was prized by the fur trade.

Still, I wasn't sure what to expect at the site of the old fort.

The last post established by Simon Fraser's North West Company before merging with the Hudson's Bay Company in 1821, Alexandria played a key role in supplying horses for the fur brigades that carried bales of goods overland to Kamloops and transportation down the more navigable Columbia River.

Fort Alexandria had a peripatetic history. Its first post was on the east side of the river, it was later moved, and then moved again to the west side of the river in 1836. I wanted to visit the later site because that's the place where Fraser had landed in 1808.

In the 1830s, it was the metropolis of the Interior with a local population of 747 and a herd of 200 horses with which it supplied the brigades. Its fields produced crops of wheat, hay and oats and vegetables from extensive gardens.

At the reserve, Mary Stump kindly interrupted her preparations for a funeral to give me directions to Stella-yah, the place where Mackenzie took local advice about the impassable rapids ahead and abandoned his journey down what he thought was the Columbia River in 1793.

She was apologetic that she couldn't take time to show me down to the site herself and she'd have referred me to somebody else for guidance, she said, but the only other folks around were her niece, Tanya Sinclair, and granddaughter, Rayna Kobelt.

"It's a bad time here right now," Stump said. "We've had a death in the community. It's a young person. It's been very traumatizing for everyone."

When she pointed, I looked dubiously at a rutted track that appeared less like a road than a couple of dry ditches running side-by-side. It was going to take some fancy driving to avoid high-centreing the foolishly sporty uptown car I was driving. Not the best vehicle for the outback, I guess, but I recalled writer Paul St. Pierre's observation that a real B.C. boy should be able to get just about anywhere worth getting in a standard sedan if he drives it with a little common sense.

"Drive down the rough road and cross the flats," Stump told me. "Watch out for irrigation pipe in the grass, they are watering down there. Leave your car at the graveyard. That cemetery is the old fort cemetery. There's a lot of smallpox victims buried there."

The smallpox epidemic of 1862, the year Simon Fraser died, is still a presence in many native Indian communities. It rent gaping and often irreparable holes in the social and cultural fabric, killing elders who were the custodians of oral history and traditions as well as the children who should have received them.

In its own way it was a catastrophe for the oral record of similar, perhaps greater, magnitude than the destruction of libraries and manuscripts that accompanied the collapse of Rome's western empire.

The B.C. epidemic appears as the worst to us because it's the closest temporally and it occurred in historic times, which for a document-driven culture imbues it with a greater sense of reality.

Yet the 1862 outbreak was only the most recent of a century-long series of dreadful mortalities which undulated through first nations' populations from the 18th century to the 20th. Indeed, Fraser's 1808 journal notes the presence of smallpox in one village that he was the first European to visit, perhaps among the last victims of an epidemic thought to have swept through southern Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands and up the lower Fraser River beginning around 1800.

I thought immediately of a story I'd come across in Quesnel  the day before. It gives some inkling of the magnitude of these events.

Across the river from the present town is an unusual hill popularly known to some as The Sugar Loaf. Its other local name is Mount Belgineau, after a native Indian man from the village at Quesnel described by Fraser.

Belgineau was out hunting in 1862 and on arriving at Fort Alexandria was told of a plague visiting lodges everywhere. When he got home, his village was deserted and the houses burned. All that remained of his life was ashes. Belgineau was the only known survivor.

He left the area but returned in 1882 and lived alone until his death in an abandoned miner's hut at the hill. When he died in 1900, the story goes, he was thought to have died of supernatural causes and his ghost still haunts the woods beneath the hill.

There are still ghosts at Fort Alexandria too.

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