2014/06 Haida Gwaii trip - Fort St James |
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The last leg of our trip was a half hour on the Stuart Highway, heading north through scrubby forest to Fort St James. We were going to stay at Paarten Beach park. I was worried that a beach park might be full on a Saturday night but there was plenty of room. We took a walk along the sandy beach for a view of 40 mile long Stuart Lake and these towering clouds. It was getting dark when we spotted the Stuart Lake monster, what looked like a giant salamander, undulating on the surface. It turned out to be a 
merganser with her raft of ducklings traveling so close together they looked like a single organism.
Sunday July 6th
We had blue sky and sunshine as we drove around the lake and through town to the historic site of Fort St James. The fort was created by Simon Fraser in 1806 for the North West Company before he made his epic journey down the Nechako and Fraser rivers past Hope to the site of present day Vancouver in 1812. He’d thought he was on the Columbia and he was disappointed to come out on the Pacific three degrees of latitude north of that river.
Back then the main business of the fort was trading for pelts and furs with the Dakelh or Carrier nation. The major challenge was to get the goods to the Pacific Ocean so they could be shipped around Cape Horn to Europe and turned into beaver hats and fur coats. The fort was taken over by the Hudson Bay Company, which ran New Caledonia like a country, with its own currency and laws. No colonists were allowed until the colony of British Columbia was created.
Many of the HBC men took local wives, giving rise to generations of mixed-race people, the Metis. The museum included this Metis beaded bag.
The fort survived as a business until the 1950s and the last set of buildings from the 1880s are still there and restored to their 1896 condition. The year was picked as the 
Murray family’s diaries have survived and describe the fort in great detail. In the summer, each of the houses has a costumed interpreter.
After the museum, we began with the fur store, organized so that we could touch the pelts of all the animals of the region, including those that you rarely see, like martens and fishers.
The fish cache was on stilts and contained row upon row of dried salmon. The fort would buy vast quantities of this from the Dakelh and Tsimshian and it was about all the men ate in the winter. They hated “the foul boards” but there was nothing else. The forest back then was so thick that there were no deer or moose in the area; they didn’t arrive until the loggers and railways 
created some open corridors.
The men’s house was appropriately Spartan, but the officer’s house looked livable if you could ignore the stoves and fireplaces in almost every room: necessary when winters are in the -40s and you have no insulation. Sandie was interested in the embroidery and the lace.
The best place for crafts though was the tanning house, primarily showing all the work that goes into cleaning and scraping and stretching and smoking a moose hide to make clothing and bags. The interpreter was a local Dakelh lady and she showed Sandie her family’s beadwork and baskets.
We went to the little shop outside the site to look for birch bark baskets but it was closed. We may not have liked the price anyway. There are a lot of hours of labour 
involved.
We had somehow missed the big sporting event of the day, the chicken racing, but the contestants love running up and down their chutes and they performed for us.
We had lunch in the rather quaint and error-prone café with “Oh no, I forgot the beans” wafting in from the kitchen, and then we were off.