The Travel Journals of Tappan Adney, Vol. 2, 1891-1896

By Tappan Adney and Andrea Bear Nicholas

Setting out to visit his friends in Woodstock, New Brunswick, and with all intentions to return to the United States to attend Columbia University in the fall, Tappan Adney, at the age of 18, embarked on a trip that would ultimately set the course of his life. Tappan Adney's writings, illustrations, and photographs were published in Harper's Magazine. This follow-up journal to 2010's first volume, takes us back to a time when wildness was still something easily accessible and wildlife abundant. These experiences, seen through the eyes of a young man from the city and illustrated with his own sketches and remarkably accurate maps, bring readers into this world, allowing them to walk and canoe the roads and rivers with him. The first volume showed us a remarkable young man who fell under the spell of the 19th century New Brunswick wilderness and the Maliseet people. Now, in this second volume of Adney's journals, we meet a man still passionate but wiser, transformed from enthusiastic hunter to reflective woodsman and decades ahead of his time in foreseeing the need for environmental protection. Recounted in the dialect of the day with the added flair of Adney's inimitable humour, and augmented by maps, sketches, and photographs, these journals provide an authentic glimpse into the world before the turn of the 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Release date: Jul 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780864927996

Tappan Adney

Tappan Adney, born in 1868 in Athens, Ohio, was an artist, a writer, and a photographer. He was credited with saving the art of birchbark canoe construction and built more than 100 models of different types. During World War I, he was an engineering officer for the Royal Military College. His book about the Klondike Gold Rush has become a well-loved standard. He worked in Montreal as a consultant on aboriginal lore, then retired to Woodstock, New Brunswick, where his wife, Minnie Bell Sharp, had been born. He died in 1950.

Book preview

The Travel Journals of Tappan Adney

Vol. 2, 1891-1896

Also edited by C. Ted Behne:

The Travel Journals of Tappan Adney, 1887-1890

THE TRAVEL JOURNALS OF

Tappan Adney

Vol. 2, 1891-1896

EDITED BY C. TED BEHNE

Copyright © 2014 by the Estate of C. Ted Behne.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by Katie FitzRandolph.

Cover design by Jaye Haworth and Julie Scriver.

Page design by Jaye Haworth.

Cover illustration by E. Tappan Adney.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Adney, E. Tappan (Edwin Tappan), 1868-1950, author

The travel journals of Tappan Adney. Vol. 2, 1891-1896 / E. Tappan Adney; edited by C. Ted Behne; with contributions by Andrea Bear Nicholas and Daryl Hunter; foreword by Andrea Bear Nicholas.

The first volume was published in 2010.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-86492-449-0 (pbk.). — ISBN 978-0-86492-799-6 (epub)

1. Adney, E. Tappan (Edwin Tappan), 1868-1950 — Travel — New Brunswick.

2. Adney, E. Tappan (Edwin Tappan), 1868-1950 — Travel — Nova Scotia. 3. Adney, E. Tappan (Edwin Tappan), 1868-1950 — Diaries.

4. New Brunswick — Description and travel.

5. Nova Scotia — Description and travel. 6. Malecite Indians.

I. Behne, C. Ted, 1942-2014, editor II. Title.

FC2467.3.A46 2014      917.15’1043      C2013-907611-5

C2013-907612-3

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage and Culture.

Goose Lane Editions

500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

Fredericton, New Brunswick

CANADA E3B 5X4

www.gooselane.com

Contents

Foreword by Andrea Bear Nicholas

Map of Tobique River Area

Introduction

Third Trip to New Brunswick, 1891-1892

The Museum Moose: Fourth Trip to New Brunswick, 1893

Fifth Trip to New Brunswick, 1896

Image credits

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

FOREWORD

It is an enormous honor to have been asked to contribute to editing these journals for a number of very personal reasons, not least is that I first heard about Tappan Adney decades ago from Dr. Peter Paul, who was his last major source of information on Maliseet language, culture, and history.

Once I discovered the microfilm copies of Adney’s voluminous notes in the Harriet Irving Library at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, I was hooked. Adney gave me a direct communication with a grandfather and other ancestors I had never had the opportunity to know. Since the journals reprinted here are new to me, it has been a special honor just to be able to read them, and even more so to be asked to contribute. In short, I am grateful to Ted Behne for this opportunity.

As part of this project, I feel responsible for providing some historical context for the 1800s and Aboriginal People. To be brief, it was an era of empire-building on the world stage, characterized in the United States by an actual policy of Manifest Destiny, which claimed Euro-Americans had a God-ordained right to Indigenous lands and resources. Enacted on a grand scale in the United States, it saw the removal of Cherokees in the 1830s, the bloody conflicts that occurred as settlers and gold prospectors invaded Indian territories in the west, and the brutal military interventions and executions that became the standard response to Indian resistance. It also saw the deliberate slaughter of the buffalo in both Canada and the US as a means of starving First Nations into signing land-cession treaties in return for rations and confinement on reserves. Barely had the last treaty of the 1870s been signed when Canada began acting on its own dream of empire in the construction of a transcontinental railway through the newly ceded territories.

Though treaties had been signed, not all issues had been settled. The Metis were enraged when surveyors and settlers arrived to take their lands, and since Indians had not understood the treaties to have been permanent land surrenders, they, too, were incensed. When huge food shortages also occurred in 1883 and ’84, the unrest boiled over into what is known as the Northwest or Riel Rebellion of 1885, just as the transcontinental railway was being completed. The rebellion was quickly quelled by Canadian troops, and before the year was out, eight leaders of the rebellion, including Louis Riel, were hanged.

Though far from the rebellion, Indians in eastern Canada felt its consequences acutely. Dr. Peter Paul, who was born in 1902, said his grandparents told him that no Indians dared walk the streets of Woodstock, New Brunswick, after the rebellion for fear of their lives. In truth, Maliseets had been dealing for centuries with the kind of thinking that fuelled Manifest Destiny. When Maliseets and others resisted the taking of their lands during the colonial wars, most colonial governments put bounties on their scalps.

In the decades after the wars, Indians throughout the region were unceremoniously dispossessed of virtually all of their lands, in complete violation of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which prohibited the taking of any Indian lands without the formal permission of both the Indians and the Crown. In order for Maliseets to have any land at all, they were required to petition for it from the very governments that had taken it. Even the reserve so granted to Maliseets at Tobique in 1801 suffered for decades from the plundering of its timber resources and from massive squatting by settlers who often drove Indians off their own reserve at the point of a gun. In spite of repeated letters of protest from Tobique Indians, the provincial government simply asked the squatters to pay for the lands they had taken, even though the lands had never been surrendered. By the early 1890s, however, only a few squatters had done so.¹

Beginning in 1851, the provincial government (joined by the federal government after Confederation) passed increasingly restrictive laws to exclude Indians from hunting and fishing. As the Maliseets’ traditional way of life had been based on hunting and fishing, these laws created enormous hardship and greatly harmed the fabric of their lives. The imposition of the Indian Act of 1876, designed as it was to assimilate Indians, made it clear that the oppression was intended to be total.

As if to compound the injury, the New Brunswick Government granted most of the hunting territory of the Maliseets on the Tobique River to the New Brunswick Railway Company in the 1870s as a subsidy for the railways it had built elsewhere in the province. One of these railroads was even built through the Tobique Reserve without asking permission, much less a formal surrender as required by the Indian Act. Finally, in 1892, the growing pressure on Tobique Indians to surrender more than half of their land culminated in an alleged surrender that has recently been deemed to have been illegal and of no validity.

It is remarkable that the Maliseets of Tobique did not protest such encroachments, thefts, and injustices more vigorously and that they did not resort to more active resistance. There is little question, however, that the racism of the 1800s, culminating in the hangings of 1885, had served to keep Indians relatively subservient and exploitable. This also explains the subservient nature of the hunting guides Adney met. The fact that there was no relief from the racism and oppression may also explain at least some of the character traits Adney identified in some of the Indians he met. Severe oppression has a way of distorting the lives it touches.

Also important in appreciating these journals is the social context of the late 1800s. As Bill Parenteau has explained, a growing wilderness cult with a fascination for Native People lay behind the increasingly popular interest in hunting and fishing tourism, especially by elite sportsmen.² This interest had contradictory and ironic threads running through it. The men who travelled so regularly into the wilderness to escape the ugliness of urbanization and industrialization were very often the same wealthy businessmen and politicians who created the conditions they sought to escape. For the most part, they were also the only ones who could afford to do so, since membership in fishing clubs often ran into thousands of dollars.

Ultimately, however, the contacts in the wilderness between Indigenous hunters and fishermen and wealthy sportsmen steeped in Victorian notions of empire, race, and class exposed the contradictions. One was the fascination for Indigenous Peoples and the simultaneous scorn for Indigenous hunting and fishing methods, even though individual sportsmen with their supposedly more genteel methods often killed large numbers of fish or game, and often just for trophies. The fascination with Indigenous culture also contributed to a trend in sportswriting that transformed Native culture into a commodity to be consumed by curious visitors.³

As a child of his times, Adney displays some of these contradictions and Victorian notions of race and class, but these journals also show the seeds of his ultimate rejection of those notions. He eventually dedicated his life not only to studying Maliseet culture, history, and language but also to vigorously defending Native rights.

Interestingly, Tappan Adney’s drawings and writings on Native People are now finding new audiences — without the contradictions and negative consequences of earlier times. That he was able to document with such precision so many aspects of traditional Maliseet material culture before their decline and/or disappearance has made his work especially valuable today. His meticulous work on canoe-making, consisting of intricate canoe models, copious illustrations, and detailed text, has made possible a revival of the ancient art of canoe-building that would not have been possible otherwise. Finally, the publication of these remaining early journals, together with drawings and photos from Adney’s trips, adds richly to the knowledge not only of Maliseet people but also of the natural and non-Indian history of the Tobique River.

I extend heartfelt thanks to Daryl Hunter, who has aided this project enormously from the start; to canoe-maker William Victor Miller III, of Nictau, New Brunswick, for information on Amos Gaunce and others; and most of all, to my husband, Daryl Nicholas, for his patience and generous advice, particularly on Maliseet linguistic matters. From Ted Behne’s meticulous transcription of the Journals to the helpful editing of Katie FitzRandolph at Goose Lane, this has truly been a team project.

Andrea Bear Nicholas

INTRODUCTION

Between 1891 and 1896, the wilderness of New Brunswick, Canada, served as a natural science playground for Tappan Adney, a place where his book knowledge of botany, zoology, geology, and ornithology were tested in real-life adventures in the woods. While he lived and worked in New York, the raw material for his artwork and stories came almost exclusively from excursions to New Brunswick, Long Island, and the New Jersey shore.

He made three trips to New Brunswick between 1891 and 1896, to the forests and waterways flanking the Tobique River, which meanders through the northwest of the province. He explored the area thoroughly with his friend and future brother-in-law Hum Sharp and others, travelling the Serpentine River in search of gold, visiting Trousers Lake and Odell Stream on moose and caribou hunts, fly fishing for trout and salmon, and spending enough time in the woods with trappers to become an expert on that subject as well.

He chronicled each trip in journals, handwritten on the spot, then typed years later so posterity would not have to struggle with his often illegible handwriting. Unfortunately, his typing was also poor. His manuscripts are filled with typos he never bothered to correct and sentences that begin without capitals, end without periods, and are often barely marks on the page. Time’s assault on cheap paper has compounded the problem. Most of those readability problems have been corrected in this book, so that anyone can now tag along with Adney on his woodland adventures.

These were years of discovery and growth for Adney, between the ages of 23 and 28, while he established himself as an illustrator and writer in New York City. His illustrations and articles were published in more than a dozen New York periodicals, including Cosmopolitan, St. Nicholas, Harper’s Weekly, Outing, Forest and Stream, and Our Animal Friends, a monthly publication of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

He spent more than 40 per cent of his time away from the city gathering raw material for his articles. He expanded his limited wilderness experience by absorbing the campfire stories of others who had spent their lives in the woods, hunting, fishing, trapping, and lumbering. Clippings of his published work from this period show that he made his living as a commercial artist first and as a writer second. There are hundreds of examples of his artwork but comparatively few articles, about a ten-to-one ratio. He made a comfortable living for a bachelor, needing to provide only for himself. He noted that he was paid $25 for the drawings to illustrate a particular article, the equivalent of more than $600 in 2012 purchasing power.

His eye was like a camera, able to quickly capture the essence of a subject and to transfer it to paper. Much of his early artwork focused on animals, particularly birds, described in his articles and brought to life in his drawings. A large portion of his early articles, perhaps as much as half, were published in the ASPCA monthly. Many of his friends from the American Museum of Natural History, the Ornithology Union, and the Linnaean Society were also ASPCA members and regular contributors to the publication. It was a natural association for Adney. His father had seen plenty of cruelty to horses during the American Civil War and had schooled Adney to treat animals with compassion and kindness.

His first forays into the woods of New Brunswick were caribou and moose hunts (covered in The Travel Journals of Tappan Adney 1887-1890), filled with the visceral excitement he craved as a young man. Adney, paradoxically, was a reluctant hunter. For many years he was torn between his admiration and respect for the woodsmen he met and his sympathy for the animals they killed. He accepted the killing of animals for food, sustenance for the hunters. But he had a moral dilemma with hunting for sport or cash. Adney never completely resolved the conflict between his aversion to killing animals and his admiration for woodsmen. Right up to his last trip into the woods, he trapped beaver, mink, and sable to sell the pelts for cash.

He summed up his ambivalent views in this journal passage: I have never been a very successful hunter, considering how much time I have been in the woods. Yet I do not think that my loss. The grand wilderness itself is recompense for any amount of trouble and hardship. Health and vigor are better than any game. Hardly anyone pretends that the killing is but a small part of the pleasure of hunting.

The woods of New Brunswick also served as an outdoor classroom for Adney to learn about the Native way of life. From the moment he met Peter Joe in the summer of 1887 until his death in October of 1950, the study of Native culture, history, and language held an abiding fascination. Wherever he went in North America, he always took time to visit the local Native people and especially to document their watercraft. In the years to come, his great admiration for Native people would lead him to become a champion of Native rights and a friend to every Native person who came to him seeking help.

Just six months after his final trip to New Brunswick, he was offered a job as special correspondent for Harper’s Weekly to cover the 1897-98 Klondike gold rush. Just getting there was a hazardous, life-threatening challenge. He stayed for eighteen months, enduring sub-zero temperatures month after month and a near-death illness before being rescued by his cabin mate, LeRoy Pelletier, driving a dog team and sled. There is no doubt that Adney’s wilderness adventures in New Brunswick were a dress rehearsal for the bigger adventure in the Klondike.

In this volume we find him still as a young man, more experienced than during his first two trips to New Brunswick but still curious and passionate about Nature. We can trace his evolution from enthusiastic hunter and trapper to animal-rights activist who disdained killing of animals for any reason other than sustenance for the hunter. We can share in his anger, resentment, and frustration when his considerable efforts to aid in the moose-hunting expedition in Journal Four were denied by the museum representative, who tried to discredit Adney when they returned to New York.

We can also see in the early formation of Adney’s character a deep suspicion and distrust of museum officials, who, Adney learned, are often motivated more by budgetary and hierarchical restraints than by honesty and fairness. It began a pattern of conflicts with museum officials that was to repeat itself several more times in years to come.

In his later years, Adney was infamous for his eccentricities, which included his apparent ability to talk to the animals, including squirrels and birds on his property. He was the sort of odd character that mothers warn their children about. It was easy to simply write him off as a hermit or a nut, unless you knew something about his earlier life. It is that earlier life that comes into sharp focus in these journals to add perspective and insight to one of the most colorful and interesting people to ever live in New Brunswick.

C. Ted Behne

December, 2013

Sketch Map [showing camps at Odell Stream]. (HIL)

CARIBOU HUNT ON THE ODELL STREAM. CHRISTMAS, 1891

How I first came to go onto Tobique came about in this way. A visit to the town of Woodstock on the River St. John, prolonged by the death of a friend at home with whom I had been working in collaboration.¹ It came near Christmas when Humboldt² suggested a caribou hunt up on the Odell Stream of Tobique. Word had been brought down that the caribou were just tearing the woods up and it was really a pity that someone did not go there and stop them before they had the woods all tore down.

Accordingly, Humboldt and I set out with toboggan for that place. Fifty miles by train, then a haul of sixteen with Inman³ on the stage⁴ to Arthurette, a stop at Manzer Giberson’s,⁵ the promise of Manzer to go with us later, the haul up the lumber road on the smooth hard snow, the arrival, puffing and weary, at the small lumber camp of McNairs. The fine bull caribou without horns we hunted for a week, before Manzer joined us, without success, though we saw caribou nearly every day.

When the sturdy backwoodsman arrived we went back on to the barrens in direction of Mirimichi,⁶ and as usual we struck a fresh track and following it up we were going through a bit of hardwoods whither the track led us, expecting by the sign each minute to get sight of the game, when suddenly Hum, who was in front, stopped and said, There is a caribou. We had agreed to shoot together but for my life I could not see the animal, which, according to Hum who was excitedly pointing, was just in front of us. The fact was the caribou was the other side of Hum, so I said to him shoot. Hum raises his rifle, takes aim and fires. There is a crash and I see the form of a large caribou making off about as fast through the trees as the long hind legs of that animal could carry it.

The trees were thick and he was going at a great rate. I saw there would be just once chance and as he passed the opening I fire and the next instant he is gone. It was all like a flash. It never stopped only I thought I saw it go down and then recover but I could not be sure.

Hum was frantic. He had the finest pair of horn I ever saw. We went on mournfully, picking up the trail.

Suddenly, not distant a hundred yards, the trail swung violently to the left and then as we turned to look there, fifty yards out, stood the caribou. Hum, who was in front, gave him another shot. The animal threw his feet into the air and fell, landing on his back, gave two or three gasps and then the cruel knife went into it and it lay over never to stir again.

Now we could see, we observed that it had no horns at all. But it nevertheless was a large bull. We cached the meat and continued on. Soon we came on another band and they led us a long chase until just at dark we came upon them in a thicket of alders. They got our scent and we only heard a great crashing in the bushes as they started. It was out of the question to follow them. We found an old timber road which seemed to lead in the direction of camp and followed it. It was a poor chance for camping out, low spruce land, no dry wood and six inches of snow on the ground.

Lost and Sleeping out in the Snow Storm

We kept on the old road and at length came to an old lumber camp.⁷ It had settled gradually down into the mud until the walls were only a few feet high and the roof had all fallen in.

It had been a small operation and the hovel for the horses was a shed built up against the side of the main camp. The roof of that had fallen too. We were in for all night. None of us knew anything about such an old camp nor had any idea where we were beyond a vague notion that we were on the east side of the Tobique River. To add to our woes, as it always seems to under such circumstances, it began to snow hard and to blow, not an ordinary snow, but a hard, steady downfall.

We saw our best chance was to build a fire in the floor of the hovel, take some old splits off the camp and make a roof overhead, which we did, having for shelter the back and sides of the hovel and a roof five feet in length overhead. When we came to look about for supper we hadn’t a bite. Presumably there were some pieces of lumber camp gingerbread in an unspeakable bag that I carried, but someone had also placed some tobacco therein so when we came to eat our scanty meal we found that tobacco and bread were hopelessly mixed. They were exactly the same color.

It snowed and it piled up in little piles in the corners, it sifted down our necks and into our ears, or if it fell on us the heat of the fire turned it to water. I lay in the middle, Manzer and Hum on each side. Manzer somehow got his coat over his head. I got mine into the waterproof bag, while as for Hum he was a short fellow and he got a wide cedar split and lay on that on his side and then hauled another over him and lay there like a human sandwich. In spite of all, we actually must have slept, for I remember being waked up by a shriek from Hum who had crawled into the remains of the horse trough so as to be nearer the fire, and he came near to being burnt up.

Next morning there was eighteen inches of snow. Hungry and chilled after the most uncomfortable night I ever spent, we took a course by the compass and as luck had it we came into the new lumber works only a short ways from the camp. We hauled out the meat to the camp and then went home. Afterwards Manzer went after it with a horse and sent it down River to us. That meat [became] the immediate cause for a quarrel, far reaching in its consequences.⁸ I had broken the caribou’s hind leg [with my shot] and that was what stopped it.

On the way in to our destination, we stopped at a camp part way in where we found the biggest lumber operation we had yet struck. It was a camp about ten by eighteen, and there were two distinct crews of men in, one of two men, the other having three. One party was getting out spruce logs, the others, bossed by an old man by the name of Wright, was making pin-birch timber. One man cooked for both. He was a dirty fellow, black of visage and ill-favored, frightfully profane. Whenever he chanced to spill a biscuit off the plate he would pick it up from the dirty floor, give it a rub on his pants, then look at it a moment and toss it back on the table, saying, Well, it haint lost nothin’. We were only too glad to go on.

Adventure on the Nackawick⁹, 1892

The snow was all gone and the watercourses were getting down toward summer level. The buds were bursting and it was the time of the year and just the mild weather when every rightly brought up person is taken with the desire to get out by the banks of some brook and fish.

We had never been to Ayers Lake in summer, so Hum and I took the train to the county line and walked over to the lake. There was an old lumber camp where we stayed on the bank of the lake. There was a sort of boat that by dint of much bailing could carry two persons and we went out on the lake and tried for trout. We saw them rising and we knew that only big ones were caught there, but they would not bite. We had only a pole and a worm. Seeing there was no chance there, we went back to the stream, found two or three pools where we took out a good basket full of trout about as long as one’s hand. Hum once before took six or seven dozen out of one hole, but we did not get over four dozen all told.

We Build Raft

We followed the stream down and find some wood that we can build a catamaran out of. It is clear