Mattie Mitchell (17 page)

Mattie was a spiritual man, probably without realizing it.
Most men who spend long times alone in the wonder of the forest
have a spiritual bent, but few will admit to it. There is something
about sitting alone under a star-shot sky with the sheen of a full
moon casting mysterious shadows everywhere, and the crackle
of a small, flickering campfire—the only sound in the world—
that causes a man to wonder where he came from, and especially
where it is he is going.

MATTIE MITCHELL WAS HUNTER
,
TRAPPER
, lumberjack, and
woodsman extraordinaire, as well as an experienced guide and
all-seeing prospector. He employed most of his abilities at the
same time. His employ of one trade involved and sometimes
demanded the skill of the others. Two of his most remarkable
skills would put his name on the lips of miners and prospectors
and the general population around the Newfoundland island
nation. His discovery would become known worldwide. His
name would not.

White trappers and explorers, who spent much time along
the rivers and many tributaries of the Exploits River in central
Newfoundland, marvelled at the immense stands of virgin timber
growing on the island. Untouched mature tracts of black spruce
and balsam fir, majestic groves of towering pine trees, fields full
of glistening, sky-high white birch, and billowing aspens ran the
entire length of Newfoundland's long inland valleys.

The timber stands were endless. All of it was untouched, all of
it theirs for the taking. Always searching for new opportunities,
the industrious trappers and hunters weren't long in talking about
the fortunes of timber available all along the Exploits, which was
ever ready to transport the waiting wealth to market. News of this
bounty soon reached the ears of entrepreneurs and the governing
body of the day. The Exploits River would never be serene again.

On a snowy, blustery January 7, 1905, the government of
Newfoundland, in partnership with the Anglo-Newfoundland
Development Company—or the A. N. D. Company, as it would
become known island-wide for the next one hundred years—
entered into an agreement. Five months of heated discussion led
to its approval, and it passed in the Newfoundland government's
legislature on June 13 of the same year. The agreement gave the
A. N. D. Company an ironclad lease for ninety-nine years, with
a further right for renewal, of an area of 3,000 square miles of
land in the forested heart of the Newfoundland island colony. The
lease included inland water rights, full mineral as well as quarry
rights—an added bonus—falling anywhere within the boundaries
of the document. Of course, it included total timber rights.

The modern pulp and paper mill was built on the site of the
Grand Falls, twenty miles or so upstream from the fledgling town
of Botwood. The deepwater port on the ocean side of the Exploits
estuary was needed for the transport of white paper from the mill
to world markets. The broad, wooded banks of the Exploits River
above the Grand Falls, and the growing town which would bear
their name, would yield from its seemingly inexhaustible supply
of wood fibre for years to come. Opposition members, who had
been against the government's deal in the first place, would never
know that it would take nearly one hundred years of pulp and
paper production before their fears about signing away all rights
to the heartland of the island would become a reality.

ONE OF THE INGREDIENTS REQUIRED FOR
the manufacture
of pulp into newsprint is sulphur. This non-metallic solid is
the thirteenth most common element in the earth's crust. From
sulphur comes sodium bisulphate, a derivative essential in the
papermaking process.

In 1905, the A. N. D. Company hired Mattie Mitchell to
search for sulphur deposits. A significant find of this element
would reduce the costs of importing the material to the island.
Now Mattie's famous powers of observation would really be
put to the test. The company gave him a brief description of
what to look for, and after he made preparations for an extended
journey, he set off from Grand Falls into the wilderness of central
Newfoundland with two fellow A. N. D. Company employees,
William F. Canning and Michael S. Sullivan. Mattie Mitchell,
who was now in his fifties, was about to start just one of the many
chapters of his legend that, sadly, would only be read long after
the man was dead.

They headed upstream, keeping to the shorelines of the
Exploits River. They searched the many ponds and lakes that
flowed into the big river valley on their way. The men knew their
best chance at finding a sulphur deposit lay where the water had
caused erosion. Mattie was their leader. He just seemed to have
a sixth sense for direction. The men would talk by their night fire
and decide on the next day's traverse, and in the morning Mattie
would lead off toward the agreed-upon site without compass or
map.

Mattie seldom followed his people's rule of travel these days.
Though he knew very well the “Red Indian this way, Mi'kmaq
this way” mantra, and still harboured some misgivings, he went
into the forbidden areas anyway when he crossed the invisible
divide. However, he always paused before entering valleys or
before crossing rivers where he knew the Red Indians had been.
Canning and Sullivan simply thought Mattie was studying the
lay of the land and choosing the best route. He appeared to tread
lightly as they approached the eastern end of Red Indian Lake.
Mattie called it “the Red Pond.” Mattie didn't voice his concerns
aloud to his companions, nor did he mention the great sadness
that always shuddered through his body when he knew they had
crossed an old trace of the Beothuk's passing. The signs were
never fresh, only faded and weathered, until only their spirit
remained, felt only by those who believed in such things.

When the three men reached the place where the wide mouth
of the Exploits sucked great volumes of water away from Red
Indian Lake, they crossed over the narrow inlet at the lake's east
end by boat and journeyed west along its northern shore. As they
searched all along that shore and walked upstream a fair distance
to explore every one of the brooks and streams that poured into
the lake, Mattie's companions always felt as though their Indian
guide was impatient to continue travelling.

When they reached the mouth of Sandy River, later to be
named the Buchans River, Mattie seemed to be content and led
his small party steadily upstream. His step seemed to be more
earnest than usual as they journeyed upriver.

The British had left their mark at Red Pond in 1811, nearly
one hundred years before. The Buchans River got its name from
a Royal Navy lieutenant, David Buchan, who was one of the
few Englishmen who had shown some concern for the plight
of the few remaining native Beothuk Indians. In a vain effort to
communicate and establish relations with the elusive Beothuk, he
had headed an expedition to the frozen shores of this Red Indian
Lake.

In the winter of 1811, the ambitious lieutenant indeed made
contact with the Indians, and was so confident he would be
accepted into their trust that he left two of his men to spend the
night in the Beothuk camp. Before noon the following day, they
saw red blotches on the white snow long before they reached the
site. His two men had been beheaded, but not before a brutal fight
for their lives. The campground, and even the frozen lake nearby,
was spattered with the blood of his two soldiers. The Beothuk
had long since disappeared into the silent forest. Buchan was
devastated, as much for his failed contact with the Indians as for
the loss of his men.

Buchan returned to the frozen Red Indian Lake again in 1820.
This time he brought with him the body of a Beothuk woman
her people called Demasduit. The whites called her Mary March,
after the Blessed Virgin, Mary, and for the month in which she
was captured by the whites. Demasduit had died in captivity,
from the white man's terrible lung disease, tuberculosis. Buchan
left Demasduit's body in a hastily built teepee near the river
that would eventually bear his name and retreated back to his
schooner in the Bay of Exploits.

MATTIE LOVED HIS
“
CUPPA TEA
.” He was always the one
who chose the spot for their mug-up. The place he chose to boil
the kettle on the banks of Sandy River on this expedition would
change the history of Newfoundland forever.

On this day he decided to lunch and boil up on a large outcrop
that jutted out of the riverbank and which disappeared into the
rushing water. He usually looked around some before deciding
on a place for their meals. This time he didn't take any time
making that decision. He simply walked below the overhanging
rock, removed his pack, and announced that this was where they
would rest and make tea.

The outcrop upon which he had started a fire close to the
river had a reddish brown stain running through it. In some
places it was grey, and in other places a yellowish green stain
ran out of the cliff. All three men recognized that this geological
formation contained some kind of unusual rock. As it turned out,
the discovery didn't contain sulphur, but sulphides. Mattie led
the others to two more outcrops of the same material in the same
area.

They spent two days carefully choosing the best rock samples
to take back with them. During all this time Mattie didn't appear
surprised or even excited. It was as if he had known where to find
this strange rock. The samples they took back were a thousand
times more valuable than sulphur. What Mattie Mitchell had led
the men to was the biggest sulphide-based metal deposit in the
world. It contained copper, lead, zinc, gold, and silver.

It would take five more years before the first motor-driven
boat would take 1,000 tons of samples of the ore across Red
Indian Lake to the railhead. From the railcar it was loaded on
board a ship at the new port of Botwood, and from there shipped
to Sweden for testing. The A. N. D. Company learned that Mattie's
find was extremely valuable. However, the technology to separate
the various minerals was not known.

The flotation process needed to separate them was not
perfected until 1925, when the American Smelting and Refining
Company (ASARCO), at its metallurgical lab in Flat River,
Missouri, finally solved the problem. Two years more passed,
and on May 19, 1927, ten men arrived at the site that would bear
the name Buchans and started the groundwork for a world-class
mine.

Over its lifespan the Buchans mine would yield out of its
depths 16.2 million tons of some of the richest high-grade ore on
the planet, with a combined value of US $3.6 billion. In 1905,
in thanks for his discovery, Mattie Mitchell received his wage
of $18 per month, plus a bonus of one barrel of flour for his
discovery. The barrel of flour was worth $2.50.

THREE YEARS LATER
,
NOW SIXTY
-
FOUR
years old and still
working for the A. N. D. Company, Mattie Mitchell started out on
yet another adventure that would again make an amazing first for
Canada, and of course for the island of Newfoundland.

This part of Mattie's story really begins with yet another
European's influence on the island as well as Labrador. It started
with his direct involvement with a northern race of native people,
the Innu—formally called Montagnais—as well as the Inuit,
or Eskimo people. Unlike many on the long list of Europeans
who had exploited the native population all around the coasts,
Grenfell's mission was one of mercy.

Dr. Wilfred Thomason Grenfell was an Englishman born
on February 28, 1865, in Parkgate, a small town in the north
of England. He attended medical school in London, where he
received his degree. Grenfell was a very spiritual man, a devout
Christian who would live and practice his beliefs his whole life.
He became a member of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea
Fishermen, an organization involved in the welfare of fishermen
not only in Britain, but throughout the British Commonwealth
and its colonies.

As a member of this group, Dr. Grenfell was sent to
Newfoundland in 1892. His charge was to find out the living
conditions of the fishermen and their families along the northern
coast of the island of Newfoundland and on the north coast of
Labrador. What the good doctor saw as he travelled astounded
him. What affected the man most of all were the terrible living
conditions of the native peoples as well as many of the white
people struggling for existence, both on the tip of the island and
along the coast of Labrador.

The main, overriding challenge among their many problems
was a constant supply of winter food. The huge floes of spring
ice moving south along the Labrador coast always brought with
them millions of harp seals. It was a bounty from the sea and rich
in protein. They caught codfish and stored them from summer
until late fall, but it was never enough.

The long, terrible winters were the bane of Grenfell's medical
skills. The malnourished were the first to succumb to disease.
Grenfell saw more than he could deal with. The distance he had
to cover in order to bring sound medical advice and attention to
these coastal people was considerable. The doctor could hardly
believe that the breadth of this land was so sparsely populated yet
could swallow whole the land of his birth.

Always, wherever he travelled, he preached to what he so
lovingly called “my people” the need for good hygiene and proper
food. He determined the people would benefit immensely from
a constant supply of meat, one for which they would not have
to continuously hunt over long and insurmountable distances.
The mainstay of fresh meat in this area were the huge caribou
herds. One of them, the George River herd in Labrador, was the
largest migrating caribou herd in the world. The other, smaller
herd on the island nation was a species of caribou native to the
island of Newfoundland and had the distinction of being the
most southerly herd of woodland caribou anywhere in the world.
However, they were hunted in excess and the small herds on the
Northern Peninsula dwindled.

Harp seals were readily available along the coast when the
huge ice floes brought the breeding mammals along the coasts
of Labrador and Newfoundland annually. But this was only a
springtime event and far from sustainable. Grenfell thought he
had the answer to at least some of the problem. He would bring
in reindeer from Scandinavia.

The deer of Lapland had been domesticated in that part of the
world for centuries. The reindeer were a tough northern breed of
animal. They were in fact caribou of a different name in northern
Europe.
Qalipu
is their North American Mi'kmaq name, one of
the few native names the Europeans kept, although they changed
the spelling and pronunciation to “caribou.”

Grenfell thought about taming the native caribou, but wisely
decided that the time needed to bring the animals to a controlled
domestic state, as had been done with the reindeer in Europe,
would take generations. The reindeer from northern Europe could
be free-ranged and corralled here and raised for slaughter, much
like the Canadian prairie cattle herds. As an added nutritional
bonus, the reindeer could be milked.

Grenfell knew the Laplanders drank the milk from their herded
animals. He also knew the milk from the reindeer contained
four times as much butterfat as the milk from dairy cows. Fresh
milk was non-existent along these northern shores. Grenfell had
brought midwives with him from England who related to him that
the only source of milk found in homes where they provided their
badly needed services was in the breasts of birthing mothers.

A constant supply of calcium would also go a long way in
controlling the crippling disease of rickets prevalent among
Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. Even the sailor's disease
called scurvy was prevalent, as well as anemia, scrofula, and the
constant presence of tuberculosis, diseases whose presence owed
largely to lack of proper nutrition.

Dr. Grenfell was sure his idea would work. He knew that
reindeer had been “ranched” successfully in Alaska, and he could
see no reason why it wouldn't work here as well.

Money was raised and the great venture began. Grenfell
chose for his experiment the reindeer from Lapland, that area
of northern Europe bordering on the Arctic Ocean that includes
parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, as well as the Kola Peninsula
of Russia. The climate and the terrain were much the same as
those in northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador. Grenfell
studied long and hard before making the final decision. The land
of the reindeer had forests of black spruce and fir and pine, along
with great stands of white birch. The animals fed and grew in
abundance on huge expanses of tundra-like land much the same
as that of this island colony.

There would be no need to buy food for the reindeer. It had
to work. Grenfell was excited, convinced. “The food for them is
inexhaustible, the land unappropriated,” he stated.

This extraordinary man, whose mind was never at rest and
who always acted on his every thought, and who constantly
had the welfare of the northern people foremost in all of his
endeavours, was about to begin yet another of his many ventures.
Without knowing it, his venture would add an amazing, closing
chapter to the story of Mattie Mitchell.

Grenfell would go down in grateful history as one Englishman
who had not exploited this “new world” at all, but one who had
seen a great void and had willingly devoted his entire life to
alleviating that terrible need. He was a missionary and confessor,
a doctor, a surgeon; a policeman, magistrate, and judge; a
teacher and compassionate healer; a businessman, entrepreneur,
adventurer, and scientist. He was an eager pioneer and tireless
explorer, sailor, and cartographer; engineer and sawmiller; a
builder and craftsman. He was dearly loved and a friend to all.

News of the unusual proposed import reached the company
officials at the pulp and paper mill in Grand Falls. Always
looking for a way to cut the high costs of getting logs to their
mill, they saw in Grenfell's project what could very well be a
partial solution to some of their wood-hauling costs. The reindeer
were used not only as a source of meat in Lapland but also as
draft animals. The mill owners did some investigating of their
own. They were very pleased with the results.

One reindeer could pull as much as 450 pounds as far as forty
miles in one day. It could pull a sled with two heavy men riding
on it at eighteen miles an hour. This was very encouraging to
company officials always looking for ways to cut log-harvesting
costs. An added feature, and the most cost effective of all, was
that the animals could eat from the surrounding forests. No more
would costly hay and oats dig into their profits.

They learned that one square mile of barrens with a healthy
growth of caribou moss could support thirty reindeer forever.
Not only that, they could also dine on the yellowish green moss
hanging from so many of the spruce trees—which the loggers
called maw dow—the company was harvesting. Their research
also revealed that the animals loved the tips of birches, alders,
and grasses. The four-chambered stomachs of the cud-chewing
ruminates could digest almost all available food. And all of it
free.

If the venture didn't work out, they could always kill the
reindeer and use the meat to feed their loggers. The company
couldn't lose. The company learned that the Laplanders drank the
reindeer milk, but this was not important to them. Their loggers
didn't drink milk anyway.

The Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company Limited
contacted Dr. Grenfell and asked him to add fifty extra animals
to his order to be landed at their dock in the seaport town of
Lewisporte. Providing, of course, the company could have the
animals delivered at draft horse prices or better. Grenfell agreed,
and the great forced reindeer migration began.

Dr. Grenfell paid an initial price of $8.50 for each of the
reindeer on the hoof in Lapland. The total costs of freight and for
feeding the animals on their transatlantic crossing to St. Anthony
came to $51.49. The owners of the steamship
Anita
charged
$1,750 for the winter cruise, along with an additional $0.50 per
reindeer head to be given to the captain of their vessel, providing
the deer reached Newfoundland in good health.

Sami herders drove the 300 reindeer across much of Lapland
to the Alten Fjord on the north coast. The herdsmen had been hired
not only to deliver the animals to the coast, but to accompany
them across the ocean to Newfoundland. The Sami herders also
brought with them their herd dogs and insisted on taking their
families. They would not leave without them.

Although the Alten Fjord sat well within the Arctic Circle,
December of 1907 brought little snow. Getting the deer to the
ship wasn't a problem, but hauling the more than 500 sledloads
of moss needed to feed them on their North Atlantic voyage
slowed their progress considerably. On December 30, with all
300 reindeer safely aboard the SS
Anita
, each one of them stowed
in its own hastily built “berth,” the steamship gathered way and
headed into the Arctic darkness, down the long, freezing fjord,
and to the open North Atlantic ocean.

For the next twenty days, over half of them bringing violent
storms, the
Anita
sailed westward. Most of the Laplanders became
severely seasick. The reindeer, with their antlers cut to prevent
injury during the crossing, were constantly tossed about, but
their narrow stalls protected them. The human vertigo condition
seemed to have no effect on them at all. The ruminates took each
daily serving of moss in one end and, after passing it through
all four of their stomach chambers, deposited it again, minus all
nutrients, in stinking, braided black buttons from the other end.
Before the
Anita
was hull down in the North Sea, her bilge had
taken on a distinctive earthy odour.

On the twenty-first day at sea, January 20, 1908, the
Anita
hove to off the rugged entrance to St. Anthony, only to discover
the harbour was completely frozen over. The ship sailed eight
miles farther south along the winter coast to the slob ice off
Cremaillere Bay.

Now began a peculiar sight for the people watching from
shore. The ship embedded itself into the pounded ice edge as
far as the captain dared and began discharging its cargo. Two
hundred and fifty of the reindeer walked up and out of the ship's
hold onto shaky wooden ramps and down onto what appeared
to be a frozen white bay. They were reportedly in “splendid”
condition and, looking alert and seemingly curious, they started
to walk ashore.

However, the porous slob ice could not bear up to the weight
of the reindeer and they frequently broke through into the icy
water. In the confusion, many of them swam back to the open sea.
Later they were found miles from land and still swimming in a
northeasterly direction, toward northern Europe! Farther in from
the edge, the ice was sound and many of the reindeer headed for
shore, where they immediately began browsing the tops of green
scrub spruce trees that rose out of the deep snow.

A few locals observed that at least two of the reindeer appeared
to have symptoms resembling human seasickness. They seemed
to sway a bit as they walked, but this was likely the result of
adjusting their four sea legs all at one time. They paused with
heads down, their long necks outstretched, their throat muscles
twitching but discharging nothing. However, their weird, four-legged sailor's gait soon left them and, with the snarling dogs at
their heels carrying out the commands of their human masters,
they followed the rest of the herd to the foreign shoreline.

The Lapland herders, resplendent in their colourful deer hides,
walked behind the curious reindeer. The herders had with them
several dogs trained in the art of keeping the fleet-footed deer
together. Cremaillere, with its half a dozen or so small, unpainted
houses, had more than three dozen sled dogs, all of them wanting
a piece of the new “foreign” dogs out on the harbour ice.

The herdsmen, who had endured and survived their first North
Atlantic crossing in the dead of winter, were Sami, an indigenous
people from Lapland who had domesticated the deer of their
homeland for hundreds of years. They couldn't speak a word
of English. Fortunately, the ever-thoughtful Dr. Grenfell had
provided a person who could manage enough of the Scandinavian
tongue to act as translator. By the time darkness had set in, the
cargo intended for the Grenfell herd, complete with herders, their
families, and their dogs, were safely ashore.