8 Into the Gates of Hell

TH'EXELIS - The sun beat down like a copper hammer and thermal shimmers rebounded from naked rock in a blast so fierce it seemed to congeal the dry air.

Beneath the ledge on which I stood, the mighty Fraser River churned by, its milky green whirlpools peeling off the turbulent edge of an eddy and then expanding as they pin-wheeled away on the tireless current.  

A bit farther downstream they'd be consumed by the devouring grandmother of all whirlpools, Hemq'elq to the Sto:lo, a guardian at the gates, set there to menace any coastal raiders foolhardy enough to assume the river meant easy passage for their great sea-going war canoes.

Despite the heat, the water was icy, the melt from snow fields and glaciers on a quarter of a million square kilometres of mountains.

Even the breeze from its chill passage offered no relief in the summer furnace that the canyon becomes above Yale, about 175 kilometres upriver from Vancouver.

Place names like Th'exelis and Hemq'elq, I:yem and Aseláw, Lhilheltalets and Sxwóxwiymelh don't appear on conventional maps of British Columbia. Colonizers throughout time have exerted their symbolic sovereignty over newly annexed territory by replacing the names of the old order with the names of the new, in our unimaginative case mostly the names of explorers, settlers, soldiers and politicians.

Yet the old names endure in the mental landscape of the native peoples who were absorbed into a new and inescapable reality and, increasingly, they are reborn on the maps prepared for treaty-making that hopes to shape a new future capable of fully acknowledging the rich and often repressed past from which it springs.  

I'd asked at the Sto:lo tribal administration for directions to this dramatic spot in my search for Simon Fraser because the explorer was brought here in 1808. He was shown the same landmark and stood, I had little doubt, just about where I placed my feet.

And in more human terms, he likely seized the same opportunity that I did, staining his fingers with the juice of the fat, blue-black Saskatoon berries that grow in profusion along the river. I guess that since all the accounts, both native Indian and his own, remark that the berries were ripe when he passed through the country.

To get here, the expedition Fraser was leading to the Pacific had spent the previous eight days struggling down more than 100 tortuous kilometres of near-continuous rapids.

These hardy men had been ejected into white water when their canoes were up-ended or smashed to splinters on the rocks. Miraculously, nobody had drowned but Fraser's tough voyageurs had become so reluctant to use the few dugout canoes they could buy or borrow from the native Indians that Fraser himself had embarked in the bow paddler's key position to lead them down some dangerous rapids.

An alert curiosity

Eventually, he had abandoned the water, leading his men as they clambered along the slippery bluffs above, watching as packs, a valuable kettle and stones displaced by their scrambling feet bounced and bounded into the abyss. Frequently they traversed apparently impossible cliff faces, led over a spindly latticework - it resembled the shrouds of a sailing ship, he wrote - of native Indian ladders and suspension bridges made with poles lashed together and then dangled above the torrent from ropes woven out of rawhide and vegetable fibre.

Sometimes the passage was so precarious that Fraser permitted the nervous men to part with their precious guns, passing their only means of defence hand-to-hand to Nlaka'pamux guides as they edged forward, their arms spread for balance and their faces pressed against the cliff walls.

"A safe and convenient passage to the Natives," Fraser observed wryly, "but we, who had not the advantages of their experience, were often in imminent danger."

Despite these trials, Fraser nevertheless maintained an alert curiosity about everything he saw, filling his journals with observations about the people he met - "very civil" - and their customs, from burial practices to public ceremonies.

Just upstream from where I stood, he described "tombs of a curious construction . . . superior to any thing of the kind I ever saw among the savages. They are about fifteen feet long and of the form of a chest of drawers. Upon the boards and posts are carved beasts and birds, in a curious but rude manner, yet pretty well proportioned."

A little farther on, having crossed a suspension bridge at Siwash Creek, Fraser first encountered Sto:lo people - he called them the Ackinroe nation - "where we were received with as much kindness as if we had been their lost relations. Neat mats were spread for our reception, and plenty of Salmon served in wooden dishes was placed before us.

"They have rugs made from the wool of Aspai, or wild goat, and from Dog's hair, which are equally as good as those found in Canada. We observed that the dogs were lately shorn," he wrote.

He noted their ornamentation, "shells of different kinds, shell beads, brass made into pipes hanging from the neck or across the shoulders, bracelets of large brass wire," their weaving patterns, "stripes of different colors crossing at right angles resembling at a distance a Highland plaid," the construction of their fishing nets, the shape of their hats, "which are made of wattap [the same spruce root used to make bark canoes] had broad rims and diminish gradually to the top" and methods for making canoes, "hollowed with fire and then polished."

Near what's now Yale, he saw "an excellent house 46 feet by 23 feet and constructed like American frame houses. . . On the opposite side of the river there is a considerable village with houses similar to the one upon this side."

It was here, "a little distance above the village where the rapids terminate, the natives informed us, that white people like us came there from below; they shewed us indented marks which the white people made upon the rocks, but which, by the bye, seemed to us to be natural marks."

Albert McHalsie, whose great-great-great grandfather, Sexyel, a famous hunter of grizzly bears, had been there when Fraser was feasted near Siwash Creek and whose grave is at the since-abandoned village site at Aseláw, agreed to guide me to the place.

A few hours earlier, McHalsie - Naxaxalhts'i in his own language, a sí:yá:m or "influential leader" in his own culture, but "Sonny" to just about everyone - had been working in the cool glow of the computer screen in his Sto:lo Research and Resource Management Centre office at Chilliwack. Now, in the unrelenting glare of the sun, he knelt beside the smooth saddle of rock that is one of the important places in Sto:lo cosmology. He pointed to the most obvious of what I later counted as 25 marks on the stone's surface.

"Th'exelis means "gritting his teeth," McHalsie explained. He slipped into the saddle and sat facing the river. His blunt fingertips traced the gouges in the stone, some deep polished grooves, some barely discernible, thin as knife cuts.

"X:áls sat here," he said. "Every time he used his power, he marked the rock where he gripped it. He was gritting his teeth from the effort. That's from his right hand, that's from his left. He threw a thunderbolt from here. You can see where it struck over there."

I looked along his pointing arm. It directed my eye to a jagged streak of quartz in the distant rock. These marks, he said, were left to forever remind the Sto:lo of what he did.

X:áls, McHalsie explained, is a being from the beginning of time, from the age known as sx?xwijoh, "when the world was mixed up," when animals spoke like humans and people could change their shape. So X:áls traveled the world setting things right, giving things the shapes they have today, putting all in its proper place, transforming the deserving for good or ill.

He changed a good and generous man named Xepáy into the cedar tree so that he might continue giving to the people for eternity. Another he transformed into sturgeon so that the people might have food in the winter months when few salmon enter the rivers.

Some he punished, turning them to stone: the three wise sí:yá:ms to whom X:áls taught writing but who kept this knowledge to themselves; a woman who had food and wouldn't share with the hungry; a powerful Indian doctor - on the Great Plains he'd be called a medicine man, an anthropologist might say shaman  - who used his powers to benefit himself instead of his people.

Farther upstream, the transformer was called Kex.xoiem by the Nlaka'pamux. He took the form of Coyote, traveling up the canyons with his assistants and fulfilling the same mythic function, giving good people their places on the land and changing bad people into rocks to remind those left behind of the consequences.

So the "white people" that the Sto:lo told Fraser had traveled upstream and marked the rock were not other European explorers from the coast, but the supernatural transformers who in the ancient past had changed their  world into its present form.

Downriver

For McHalsie, of course, narratives like these are framed within a universe of references and allusions, both conscious and unconscious, spoken and unspoken, of which only fragments are accessible to an audience like me, not being steeped from birth in the cosmologies from which they emerge. So as I listened to his evocative descriptions I was acutely aware that at best I'd be able to offer readers only a pale reflection.

Nevertheless, Fraser was brought to this spot late on the afternoon of June 28, 1808, for reasons that were rooted directly in that world view.

After journeying downstream from Camchin, now Lytton, his party had reached Spuzzum by land the previous day, stopping at a camp of about 60 people and spending the night after being "hospitably entertained" with roasted and boiled salmon, green and dried berries, oil and onions.

Spuzzum, Fraser observed, was a territorial boundary between the Nlaka'pamux and the Sto:lo. Just as the Secwepemc had handed him off to the St'at'imc who had handed him off to the Nlaka'pamux, now he was being handed off to the Sto:lo. All had stories of pale complexioned, blue-eyed supernatural beings who had traveled up the canyon wielding their powers, never to be seen again.

Word of Fraser's journey downriver had preceded him at every stop, as it had since he left Soda Creek. Now, just as native Indian prophets had foretold, a white-skinned transformer had returned. As X:als had done in the mixed up time, this one was once again traveling down the river for mysterious reasons accompanied by helpers who carried sticks capable of hurling thunderbolts.

As I listened to McHalsie, the horn of a diesel locomotive sounded, a thin wail on the far side of the river. Brown boxcars and flatbeds laden with colour-coded shipping containers flicked past in apparent silence, the train's brassy signal mostly subsumed into the roar of white water foaming down chutes around a glistening black outcrop.

We call the outcrop Lady Franklin Rock, named in honour of a brief visit in 1861 by the widow of Sir John Franklin, who disappeared in 1847 while exploring the Arctic.

To Fraser, trying to decipher its story through at least four languages, it was Bad Rock.

To the Sto:lo, McHalsie told me, it is Xéylxelamós, all that remains of that strong but self-serving Indian doctor whom X:als had changed to stone in a fierce battle involving supernatural powers.

"He had a third eye," McHalsie said of the stone sorcerer, whose attributes included the power to summon underwater monsters. "On the back side of that rock is his third eye. We're not allowed to look at it."  Then he pointed abruptly to the large eddy below the rock. "There's an underwater black bear that lives there. That's his home in that little bay."

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