Considering what happened that night and the next morning you’d think someone was deliberately trying to torture the poor man. Mr. Byfield had already made himself very unpopular the day before by refusing to give us a store break in Fort McMurray. Seldom, in our opinion, was one more deserved.
We must have broken every record except those set by the real voyageurs 150 years earlier. We had taken a mere day to cross the 14-mile Methye Portage, the longest carry on the entire trans-Canada fur trade route, and only two more to descend the Clearwater to McMurray, a small town on the Athabasca River that still had no road access to the outside world.
Two years earlier a school expedition traveling in the opposite direction had taken six days to complete the same distance. At times, all that kept us going during the final push to reach McMurray were the visions of hamburgers deluxe and milkshakes dancing in our heads. But Mr. Byfield had other ideas. Our inquiries on that late June day in 1966 as to whether we would be able to go into town were met with an ill-humoured:
“You’ve got all summer to go into town. Right now we’re trying to get to the Mackenzie.”
Mr. Byfield wasn’t so much bad-tempered on canoe trips as he was uptight. You never got the feeling he enjoyed being out in the bush, that he was ever really relaxed. He made us feel like we were constantly behind schedule.
I first experienced his approach to canoeing the year before when he led an expedition of Grade 8’s and 9’s from Thunder Bay to Winnipeg via the famous Grand Portage. The day the trip was announced he made it plain that our primary objective was to beat the record set by the previous school expedition.
Across countless crystal-clear lakes, we paddled on hot summer days without stopping so much as once for a swim. With records to be broken there simply wasn’t time. Only when the wind kept us off the water was there an opportunity to spend an hour or two, sometimes a part of a day, relaxing.
And then the next we would pay for it. As the school annual report, 99 Boys and a Year noted, we broke several records that trip including best overall time, best time over the nine-mile Grand Portage, and best time completing the last 180 miles.
We trimmed three days off the previous record for the 800-mile, 55-portage trip by completing it in 20 days. Pat Treacy’s four-man team hauled their 240-pound canoe over the Grand in an astonishing three hours and forty minutes. And the last leg of the trip on the Winnipeg River, around the bottom of Lake Winnipeg, and up the Red to Winnipeg was completed in three days.
There were no records to break on the trip to the MacKenzie River because this was the first time the school had done the route. But there was a schedule to beat. Or so it seemed.
The morning after a night spent in the Fort McMurray Anglican Church hall we glumly re-filled the food boxes with the food shipment that had arrived by rail and then set off down the Athabasca River.
There were 35 of us traveling in five, 22-foot canoes. Mr. Byfield alternated as steersman with me, David Cooper and Dan Raymes steering the West, the Marquette, and the Brebeuf. Mr. McCormack steered the Budd while Mr. Maunder alternated with Don Forfar steering the Peguis.
The West had been named after the first Anglican missionary in Red River; the Marquette after the French Canadian missionary who in 1672 discovered the Mississippi River, Brebeuf after the martyred Jesuit missionary; Budd after a Cree from Norway House who became in 1855 the first Indian priest in Western Canada; and the Peguis after the Saulteaux chief who established an agricultural settlement on the Red River in the 1830s.
The Athabasca River was more than double the size of the Clearwater, its course now a series of long straight stretches interrupted occasionally by islands covered with willow and black-streaked sand. As the account I wrote following the trip recorded:
‘our route was now marked by the official navigational markers used by the tugs and barges which travel up and down the river.’
Here, in the middle of the wilderness, we were on a commercial waterway operated by the Northern Transport Company, something rarely encountered on St. John’s trips. It meant the 650 miles of paddling down the Athabasca and Slave Rivers would be monotonously uneventful. The best way to escape the monotony was to retreat into a world of fantasy and pleasant thoughts.
About mid-afternoon, we were abruptly brought back to reality by the sight of steel girders rising from the forest and the roar of heavy equipment. Up ahead on the bank we could see some kind of industrial complex being built.
As we neared the site Mr. Byfield steered his canoe ashore and motioned for the others to follow. Once on top of the bank, there was devastation as far as the eye could see. For several miles in all directions, the landscape had been stripped of every living thing and the debris was being pushed by bulldozers into enormous piles. We had arrived at the site of the world’s first oil sands extraction plant.
The grand tour we hoped for, especially of the camp cafeteria, didn’t materialize although a supervisor did appear to give us a rundown of the project. Twenty minutes later we were back on the water, half wondering if what just happened was real.
Before setting off Mr. Byfield said that we would be stopping for the night at Fort McKay, 15 miles ahead, where we would be guests of Lee Cormie’s great uncle and aunt who ran the Hudson Bay store.
The news had precisely the effect he intended. Downcast heads were once more erect and the pace picked up noticeably. Surely in his announcement lay the unspoken promise of a store break. This time we were not to be disappointed although the way things unfolded Mr. Byfield definitely came to regret his decision.
The break came first thing after we landed. During supper, Mr. Byfield informed us that tents would not be needed because we would be sleeping in an old warehouse. The two-story building was no longer in use and most of the glass windows were broken. He also said we would be going to bed early so we could get away in good time the next day.
Our arrival had attracted, as it usually did in remote Indigenous communities, a lot of attention, especially from the kids. The youngest ones watched from a distance then ran off if approached.
The older kids were no less curious, but their attention was divided between us and a Honda motorbike that had lost most of its non-essential parts, particularly the muffler. The coming and going of the bike was accompanied by annoying high-pitched revs of its tiny engine.
Fort McKay’s only road – a rough track of sand and gravel – was, unfortunately, only about half a mile long. The moments of quiet in camp that evening were short-lived. And with daylight lasting until after 11 p.m. the prospects for getting to sleep early were not good.
Nonetheless, by 9 p.m. we settled into our sleeping bags spread out over the second floor of the warehouse. The throng of spectators however wasn’t ready for the evening to end. Mr. Byfield began to grow more and more agitated by the motorbike ruckus. Before lying down he asked the smaller kids to ask the bigger ones if they’d mind driving the bike somewhere else. Their only response was to giggle and say a few words in Cree.
There was probably no connection but the next time the bike returned, the driver started doing 360s around the warehouse. They seemed to be spending more time circling us than driving down the road. Darkness finally came and mercifully because the Honda’s light didn’t work the noise stopped.
An hour or so later the light-sleepers among us including Mr. Byfield were woken by a new disturbance, this time courtesy of the settlement’s dog population. A fight had broken out somewhere nearby and every dog in the community seemed to have something to say about it.
“By George, what next,” Mr. Byfield let out as he sprang to his feet to confront the new menace. “This is the last time we ever stay in a town.”
If he held back earlier for fear of offending our hosts, he had no such inhibitions when it came to dealing with the dogs. His enraged bellows out the window caught the attention of the dogs in the immediate vicinity and they moved off. And eventually the barking died down allowing us to fall asleep.
The day did not begin well when Mr. Byfield awoke to discover he had slept in. He immediately began yelling at the mass of bodies lying around him. The response he got was not what he had in mind. He was still bellowing at us to get up as he descended the stairs. Then he discovered the door was locked.
“Who locked the door!” he cried out in exasperation, knowing the guilty party was probably not in our midst. It was one final bit of mischief from our young taunters.
A cook crew member following behind was fortunately able to diffuse the situation before things got worse. He disappeared out through a ground-floor window and then opened the door.
For a few minutes, Mr. Byfield busied himself with the breakfast preparations before realizing that most of us had still not packed up. This time his wishes would not be denied.
“All right you people upstairs,” he yelled through the windows.
“There are three swats waiting for anyone not down here with his pack in one minute.”
The stampede for the door was instantaneous, dressed or not, gear in hand. The whole building began to shake as several dozen pairs of feet pounded across the floor and down the stairs. Robertson made the mistake of cutting up Klik luncheon meat on a plank lying against the wall the warehouse.
When the building began to shake the swallows that had made nests in its eaves fled. Bits of nest began to trickle down, causing Robertson to cast a nervous glance skyward. The rain of debris became a torrent, and then suddenly there was an ominous plop beside him. To his amazement (and amusement) an entire swallow’s nest lay smack in the middle of the bucket into which he had been dropping the slices of Klik.
The predicament might have escaped detection had there not been one very unsympathetic witness. For a split second, Mr. Byfield stood there dumbstruck. Then he blew his fuse.
“Take that stupid smirk off your face,” he sputtered, scarcely containing his rage.
“You think this is funny. Maybe you won’t think it is after paddling all morning on an empty stomach. Get that meat cleaned up and I mean now.
“Boy, oh, boy, oh, boy. What in heaven’s name were you thinking. You just stood there like a jackass with all that stuff while pouring down.
“I don’t know what’s going on around here but if some of you think you can destroy this trip with that kind of stupidity, brother, you’ve got another thing coming.
“By George, I’ve put up with this nonsense long enough. There are too many of you who think you’re on a summer holiday. We’re going to start pulling together whether you like it or not. If that means having to tan someone’s backside, that’s exactly what I’m prepared to do. I want the canoes ready for departure in 20 minutes. Now all of you, get to work.”
In my journal the bare details are recalled:
'One incident which really set the place on fire figuratively occurred when in the course of cutting Klik and putting the pieces in a bucket, a huge swallows nest stuck to the overhanging roof, unstuck, and landed square in the bucket. The scene following in Mr. Byfield's case was indescribable and unprintable.'
The swallow’s nest crisis allowed the stragglers on the second floor enough time to get out of the building without getting spanked. Robertson set to the task of cleaning the soiled sandwich meat, but his efforts met no one’s satisfaction. As a result, the only thing being eaten was the porridge, and not very enthusiastically. Everyone of course still had a cache of candy from the night before to fill up on. This rejection of the Klik did not sit well with Mr. Byfield and he ordered it be transported so it could be served at lunch.
Once we were back on the water Byfield seemed to calm down, no doubt relieved to have seen the last of Fort McKay. By mid-morning he was sufficiently pleased with our progress – we’d done nearly 20 miles – that we landed and he surprised everyone by passing out Tootsie Rolls. Mr. Byfield was famous for doing things that made him hard to dislike for long. All day we made good progress, and by the time we camped we had covered 65 miles, a position that put us only one long day away from Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca.
Fort Chipewyan was established in 1778 and is the oldest European settlement in Alberta. It was the site of the last violent clash between the two big fur trade rivals – the North West Company and the Hudson Bay Company – before they amalgamated on March 26, 1821.
The murder of 21 Hudson Bay Company-sponsored settlers at Red River on June 19, 1816, set off a series of retaliatory clashes at forts all across the West that ended with the capture of North West Company partner Simon McGillivray at Fort Chipewyan in the fall of 1820.
We stopped at a group of cabins called Old Fort on our third day on the Athabasca in hopes of finding someone who could give us directions through the Athabasca delta. Coincidentally, our guide was a French-speaking trapper named Armat who turned out to be a distant relative of classmate Craig Stephens. Stephens’ grandmother was an Armat and often talked about having ancestors who worked as North West Company voyageurs. The trapper’s directions brought us to a point where we faced only four miles of open water on Lake Athabasca to reach Fort Chipewyan. We made the crossing early the following morning and began our descent of the Slave.
There was only one other major incident on the long paddle down the Slave River and across Great Slave Lake and it was nowhere near as entertaining. Mr. Byfield became increasingly annoyed that the Peguis was always 20 minutes behind the others so he ordered a change of crews. My boat, the West, lost two big paddlers and one small paddler and gained only two small paddlers in a swap with the Peguis.
Almost immediately my boat fell behind. He tolerated the lagging for a couple of hours then during a break chastised the crew for a lack of effort. Ron Churchill shot back that he was the cause of the problem for stripping our crew and giving us only two smaller paddlers in return.
Angrily Mr. Byfield ordered my boat ashore to deal with Churchill’s insubordination. Memories differ on whether he was spanked or not but when we resumed I was demoted to a center thwart position in the Marquette and Mr. Byfield took over the West. Needless to say, the West led the pack for the rest of the day. That night Mr. Byfield apologized for undermining my authority and awarded the West with another paddler. He was no bigger than the other two replacements but we were at least able to keep up. And canoes lagging behind ceased to be a problem.
We arrived at the mouth of the MacKenzie River on July 12, just two and half weeks after leaving LaLoche. Great Slave Lake was kind to us although most of the four-day paddle along its southern shore had been during the night when the winds were usually less strong. It was that time of year in the land of the midnight sun when day was almost indistinguishable from night and we slept only when forced ashore by the wind.
Mr. Byfield was clearly pleased. We had tackled one of Canada’s biggest subarctic lakes and won rather easily. We had beaten our schedule by four days. By the end of the trip, we had gone from being one of the school’s “worst” outfits to one of the “best.” Mr. Byfield was famous for his changes of mood and he was prone to overdramatize. For him, there was no such thing as mediocre.
Richard de Candole has been working in British Columbia and Alberta as a reporter and editor for over 40 years. Toughest School in North America is about his five years as a student at St. John’s Cathedral Boys’ School in Selkirk, Manitoba from 1962 to 1968. Richard lives with his wife Wendy in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia.
bedard.com is serializing Toughest School in North America for your reading pleasure. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. If you’d like to preorder a copy of the book, leave a reply below. All replies are moderated.
so, when will we be able to order a copy of the book? Mark
When it’s done :). There are seven or eight chapters left to serialize, and then Richard and I will put it all together.
This was a Ted Byfield-led brigade. Richard captures some very candid moments on this trip.