7 Powerful Winds

LILLOOET - The wind announced itself about 3 a.m., shaking me awake with a hail of needles and twigs that exploded against the sides of my tent as if sent to remind me that any search for Simon Fraser meant expecting the unexpected.

Fraser's journal noted the propensity of the canyon through which he was passing to spawn powerful winds - "blowing a hurricane from the south" says one entry - and my weather radio had been forecasting a low pressure front moving inland from the coast.

In fact, the arid winds that consistently sweep through the sunburnt cordillera are one of the reasons that so many first nations had extensive fishing camps along the river.

Families traveled hundreds of kilometres because the combination of heat, low humidity and diminishing fat content in sockeye salmon as they swim upstream creates ideal conditions for drying salmon in preparation for the lean winter months. And people had already begun to gather at their fishing sites when Fraser's expedition passed by on its journey to the Pacific Ocean in the late spring of 1808.

The evening had been dead calm and a bit sultry when I pitched my tent beside the Fraser River 320 kilometres north of Vancouver.

Not far from my campsite, people still wind-dry sockeye on racks as they did in Fraser's day.

Fraser's party was feasted here on fish, roots and berries but I dined alone on military field rations - scalloped potatoes and apple sauce in foil pouches heated by adding water to a catalyst - left over from an earlier trip with the Pacific Rangers. Then, tapping the interactive screen with a metal stylus, I settled in to review notes on my handheld computer, a device that would have been mind-boggling to the man I was writing about.

Somewhere near this same spot, the explorer made his journal entry with a quill pen and India ink that he'd have mixed himself by adding water to powder shaved from a solid block of pigment.

The wooden pencil with graphite "lead" and the straight pen using a steel nib had just been invented, but they wouldn't come into widespread use for years and it seems unlikely that the high technology of 1800 had made its way to a fur trade frontier where most men still hunted with bow and flint-tipped arrow.

The entry for June 15, 1808,  suggests Fraser was assailed by a deepening sense of isolation and menace. His plans to paddle down the river had been defeated by the terrain. He'd been lucky in encountering friends among the Secwepemc but a few days before he'd described the snow-covered mountains through which he was forced to travel on foot as "the most savage that can be imagined" and his first encounter with the St'at'imc or Lillooet Indians had been tense.

The meeting had been peaceful enough. Fraser wrote that the St'at'imc, whom he called the Askettih using a Secwepemc term, "looked manly and had really the appearance of warriors" and he'd personally shaken hands with 137 men.

Still, he was aware of hostility between the two tribes. The St'at'imc observed pointedly that they'd been attacked by a Secwepemc war party the year before. Some even suggested that Fraser and his men were really enemies in disguise. It took some statesmanlike diplomacy by their guide from Soda Creek to calm things down.

Situation critical

The flare-up left Fraser nervous. He made camp and mounted a military-style watch from a defensive position on the opposite side of the river from the village which was itself protected by nine-metre high palisades across from present-day Lillooet.  

"Here we are, in a strange Country, surrounded with dangers and difficulties, among numberless tribes of savages who never saw the face of a white man. Our situation is critical and highly unpleasant; however we shall endeavour to make the best of it; what cannot be cured must be endured," he wrote.

If Fraser felt that he was now well and truly off the map of European knowledge, I discovered that I'd put up my tent in a wireless hotspot. My handheld computer automatically logged itself onto an open network. With the little iPAQ's backlit screen, light from a tiny LED  lantern that runs off a rechargeable AA battery and the swollen Fraser thundering along a few strides away as it had 200 years ago, I was able to pick up my e-mail from home and the office, send a few messages of my own and upload a slew of notes via web mail to my desktop on the other side of the mountains.

Fireless cooking and wireless communications - if things have changed this much in a couple of centuries, I wondered, what will the world be like in 2208?

Still, some things are changeless. By 5 a.m. steady lashings of rain spattered across the fly. The wind was gusting strong enough to pull pegs from the loose, sandy soil and began lifting the tent. Then the fly tore loose and began flapping like a loose spinnaker sail. I decided to break camp, collapsed the tent, rolled a large river boulder onto it while I extracted the poles and then jammed the whole soggy bundle into a stuff bag.

It wasn't the most elegant departure but then Fraser's party wasn't burdened with high-tech conveniences. His men slept in the open and got wet, crawled under their canoes or threw up a quick lean-to from which they simply walked away the next morning.

I could drive into town, get myself a coffee and a croissant and sit in my rented car at Lillooet's Hanging Tree Park, taking a leisurely breakfast while the rain squalls marched down the canyon and across the flooding delta of the Seton River.

The day before, I'd been sitting on a deadfall at Leon Creek where Fraser stowed his canoes and all but the most essential gear. He had surveyed the next rapids and concluded they were so violent "it was impossible for canoes even to approach with safety."

For me, Leon Creek afforded a moment of blissful tranquility, even though the mosquitoes were fierce. The temperature had topped out at 37 degrees Celsius. Even the parched landscape seemed breathless. Sitting in the deep shade from a grove of old growth fir that must have stood when Fraser passed, cooled by mist from the tumbling stream, I found a moment of respite in which to imagine what the explorers must have felt as they contemplated what lay behind and what might lie ahead.

For me, the 70 kilometres of rough forestry road between Leon Creek and Lillooet was an hour's drive at most, even with steep, hair-raising switchbacks on loose gravel and sheer drops into the canyon below. For Fraser, it meant four days of hungry, thirsty bushwhacking burdened by 40-kilogram packs, his men's moccasin-clad feet continually bruised and cut by the sharp stones on a trail that took them almost a kilometre high on the shoulder of the Camelsfoot Range.

At one point, the journal says, the men's thirst reduced Fraser to digging out a seep, letting the hole fill with "a substance something like Borax, which had a saline or sulphurous taste" and then drinking "this nauseous liquid."

High on this same mountainside, Fraser had made first contact with the St'at'imc people he called Askittihs or Askettihs.

Silent as phantoms, they materialized out of nothing.

"All at once, and when we least expected a surprise, seven Askittihs presented themselves before us with their bows and arrows in readiness for attack; they conceived us to be enemies, but upon coming nearer they discovered from our appearance and demeanour their mistake, laid by their weapons, joined us and we shook hands."

Fraser's guide and interpreter from Soda Creek had gone ahead, so he and the St'at'imc warriors were unable to understand each other, but they stayed together. Once they caught up with the Secwepemc chief and the purpose of the expedition was explained, the warriors left, promising to return with provisions for the hungry visitors.

"Soon after our new friends accompanied by our old chief, who had gone ahead to the lodges of these people, joined us, and brought different kinds of Roots, wild onions formed into syrope [syrup], excellent dried salmon, and some berries," Fraser writes.

But there was more to satisfy Fraser than the generous hospitality.

"These Indians say the sea is about ten nights from their village," says his journal. "One of the old men, a very talkative fellow, and we understand a great warrior, had been at the sea; saw great canoes and white men. He observed that the chiefs of the white men were well dressed and very proud, for, continued he, getting up and clapping his hands upon his hips, then strutting about with an air of consequence, 'This is the way they go.'"

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