8 Into the Gates of Hell

Up the hill and behind us, traffic whizzed by on Highway 97, one world passing through another, oblivious. Here and there, pickup trucks were parked in highway pullouts, intermittent evidence of Sto:lo families making early preparations at ancient fishing sites where they have harvested the summer and fall runs since there have been salmon in the river.

As Fraser had been 200 years earlier, the train and the traffic were a momentary intrusion, visitors passing through the looking glass at one of those strange interfaces where different worlds appear as transparent palimpsests, the ghostly images of one reality superimposed as imprints upon the other.

If the train was a messenger from the present world of science, industry and commerce, a direct descendant from the 18th century enlightenment for which Fraser himself served as an envoy in 1808, it was passing through a far more ancient world of myth and prophecy, miraculous transformations and inexplicable supernatural forces.

It is likely that Fraser, although his journal suggests he was aware of its presence, could no more comprehend the complexity and astonishing depth of the spiritual worlds inhabited by the Secwepemc, St'at'imc, Nlaka'pamux and Sto:lo, to whom he suddenly appeared, than they could comprehend his own.

"I don't think Simon Fraser had the ghost of an idea as to how he was perceived by the nations through which he passed," said Andrea Laforet, the director of ethnology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization and co-author of Spuzzum: Fraser Canyon Histories, 1808-1939, a study of Fraser Canyon oral histories published in 1998.

"There were no other people like him there. There were no other people of that cultural origin for local people to make comparisons. Nor were their actions entirely explicable to the Nlaka'pamux," she said in an interview I conducted over an air-conditioned lunch in Ottawa.

"Nor did they understand, entirely, what they encountered. He would not have dreamed that once he passed through he'd be recast as Coyote and other supernatural beings." One aged informant, reaching for a metaphor that was comprehensible in contemporary terms, even cast Fraser as an analog of Jesus Christ, one more example of alien worlds seeping into one another.

In fact, Laforet said, Fraser's behaviour, skillfully attempting to wheedle, barter, buy and in some cases extort the help he needed to complete his mission, helped reinforce the cultural metaphors by which the Nlaka'pamux attempted to comprehend who he was.

"Fraser's party tried to take some canoes. Well, Coyote was a trickster and quite capable of doing shady things. It was a fixed enough impression that it made it into the oral tradition and persisted over five or six generations," she said.

In another story, recorded by University of Victoria historian Wendy Wickwire in a remarkable paper published more than a decade ago in the Canadian Historical Review, Fraser startled some girls bathing at the river's edge. While they stared at him, naked and dumbfounded, he "sized them all up." Coyote, too, was known to have an eye for women, often when they were somebody else's wife.

Wickwire examined Fraser's journals and compared them for points of congruence with accounts of his first contact with the Nlaka'pamux both in the stories collected by 19th century ethnologist James Teit and in oral histories she acquired from contemporary elders Annie York and Louis Phillips, both of who have since died.

Among the descriptions of Fraser's arrival collected by Teit was one by SEmalitsa, a woman from Stein River, whose grandmother was present as a young girl.

"She saw two canoes with red flags hoisted, come downstream. She ran and told her mother and the people gathered to see the strange sight. Seeing so many people gathered, the canoes put ashore and several men came ashore. Each canoe carried a number of men [perhaps six or seven in each], and many of them wore strange dresses, and everything about them was strange. Some of the men looked like Indians, and others looked like what we call white men. Among them was a Shuswap chief who acted as interpreter. Our people were not afraid of the strangers, nor were they hostile to them. The strangers produced a large pipe, and had a ceremonial smoke with some of our men. After distributing a few presents, they boarded their canoes and went on to Lytton."

Word had reached Lytton before Fraser arrived, too. He was met by 1,200 people, sitting quietly in rows. They had come from far and wide to witness the visit of a supernatural figure appearing in human form. They came on foot and on horseback from up the Botanie Valley, from Spence's Bridge, from Fountain Valley, from the Stein Valley and Siska Creek, from Nikaia and Pooeyelth creeks.

"The principal chief invited us over the river," Fraser wrote on June 19. "We crossed and He received us at the water side, where, assisted by several others, he took me by the arms and conducted me up the hill to the camp where his people were sitting in rows . . . I had to shake hands with all of them."

"Then the Great Chief made a long harangue, in course of which he pointed to the sun, to the four quarters of the world and then to us, and then he introduced his father, who was old and blind, and was carried by another man, who also made a harangue of some length. The old [blind] man was placed near us, and with some emotion, often stretched out both his hands in order to feel ours."

The chief who made the great oration was Tcexe'x and he had run the 15 kilometres from Botanie Valley. When he was pointing at the sun and then at Fraser, he was telling his people that this was the "son of Sun."

He later guided the expedition through the difficult terrain to Sto:lo territory, prompting Fraser to comment that "The chief of the Camshins is the greatest chief we have seen; he behaved towards us uncommonly well. I made him a present of a large silver broach which he immediately fixed on his head, and he was exceedingly well pleased with our attention."

The journal corroborates the Nlaka'pamux oral histories. A woman named Waxtko, a relative of Tcexe'x, told Teit almost a century later: "This chief so pleased Sun, that he gave him a present of a large silver broach, or some other similar ornament, which he had on his person. On several occasions Tcexe'x used this attached to his hair in front, or on the front of his head. When I was a girl, I saw it worn by his sons . . . it was probably buried with the third brother who had it, as it disappeared about the time of his death."

Wickwire's paper quotes Annie York, who says that the old Lytton chief CexpentlEm, another orator [his equally great descendant David Spintlum - born in 1812 and died in 1887 - ended the bloodshed when miners and native Indians fought for control of the Fraser canyon 50 years later], also told his followers that Fraser was "sent by Sun."

In this oral tradition, York reported that "Fraser's captain" - that must have been either John Stuart or Jules Quesnel - warned people not to touch them or they would catch a lethal disease. She said that CexpentlEm reiterated that the party was not to be harmed.

Did Fraser's lieutenant offer such a warning? Or was this a conflation with a later memory from 1864 of William Brewster, a road foreman who made a similar threat about sending smallpox among the Chilcotins and pulled the trigger on a bloody uprising?

Oral histories are not precise in the way the mainstream documentary record purports to be - although it, too, is rife with conflations, misinterpretations and outright error. Often, oral history is rendered as metaphor or parable, and those telling it must cast the story within the framework of their own understanding.

Wickwire, for example, compared two accounts of one of the close calls that afflicted the expedition on its voyage through the worst sections of a canyon that for Fraser had deteriorated beyond Lytton into an almost continuous series of impassable rapids.

Still, in the vicinity of what's been called Jackass Mountain since a pack animal fell to its death there during the Gold Rush, the voyageurs were still game to try and run the white water, a foolhardy project they undertook while Fraser and Stuart were in their tents writing up their logs regarding the amazing events of the previous few days.

In the first cascade attempted, one of the canoes swamped and capsized. The crew made it ashore save for one paddler named D'Alaire who became entangled with the thwarts, finally extricated himself and, with no alternative, rode astride the upturned canoe as it was swept down the boiling chutes.

An anxious Fraser, after finding D'Allaire making his way wearily back to camp, quoted the paddler's own words: "In the second or third cascade (for I cannot remember which) the canoe from a great height plunged into the deep eddy at the foot, and striking with violence against the bottom, splitted in two. Here I lost my recollection, which however, I soon recovered and was surprised to find myself on a smooth easy current with only one half of the canoe in my arms. In this condition I continued through several cascades, until the stream fortunately conducted me into an eddy at the foot of a high and steep rock."

D'Allaire lost his grip but at that moment a large wave deposited him on the shore.

After surveying the rapid, Fraser expressed astonishment at his survival.

The Nlaka'pamux telling of the event as collected by Teit, differs considerably.

"In the middle of the river, a short distance below Lytton, the Moon, who was steersman of the canoe, disappeared with it under the water. The others came out of the water and sat down on a rock close to the river. Then Skwia'xEnEmux [arrow-armed person] fired many lightning arrows, and nmu'ipEm [diver] dived many times into the river. The Sun sat still and smoked; while Coyote, Kokwe'la, and Morning-Star danced. Coyote said, 'Moon will never come up again with the canoe;' but Sun said, 'Yes, in the evening he will appear.' Just after sunset, Moon appeared holding the canoe, and came ashore. All of them embarked, and going down the river, were never seen again."

If the Nlaka'apamux saw events involving Fraser as evidence of supernatural fore-knowledge and power, for the explorer things seemed to be going from bad to worse.

 "I have been for a long period among the Rocky Mountains," Fraser wrote on June 26 as he proceeded downriver following the near-drowning, "but I have never seen anything equal to this country, for I cannot find words to describe our situation at times. We had to pass where no human being should venture."

Having passed safely through the canyons with the help of his Nlaka'pamux and Sto:lo guides, Fraser reached Lhilheltalets, an island just above Hope, where he stayed for two hours for a feast of salmon, oil, roots and fresh raspberries before pushing on.

At the next village, somewhere in the vicinity of Chilliwack, he saw the first real evidence that he might be closing on his goal. The country was opening out, the land was flattening and "the river is more than two miles broad and is interspersed with islands."

More important, as Fraser and his weary men prepared to settle in for the night after being fed sturgeon by their hosts, whose politeness seemed so extreme that he jotted his worries about their sincerity, he saw European trade goods from the sea, "a large copper kettle shaped like a jar, and a large English hatchet stamped Sargaret with the figure of a crown."

His quest for the Pacific was now within days of its objective. Yet, as own my search for Simon Fraser would discover, the greatest threat to his success lay not behind him in the boiling canyons of the great river, but ahead, in the gentler landscape of its vast and fertile floodplain.

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