A Century on New Brunswick's N.W. Miramichi

By George S. Mumford

This is a journal kept by my father of his first trip with my grandfather to the Northwest Miramichi River of Canadas Central New Brunswick in the summer of 1916.
I love the camps on the Miramichifor the truly beautiful natural environment, for learning to fish, and the excitement and wonder of holding a salmon before releasing it back to the river, for the camaraderie with new and old friends, for a scheduled daily block of free time, for the caring camp staff, and more. I also gained insights about myself as a learner, had the luxury to observe and experience talented guides as remarkable teachers and to have the time an opportunity to reflect upon their teaching and my learning. These days were wonderful experiences and tremendous opportunities for me personallya great vacation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781493120222

George S. Mumford

George S. Mumford is profesor emeritus at Tufts University in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He started as an instructor in the Mathematics Department, moved on through the academic ranks while being Dean of the College of Liberal Arts followed by a stint as Dean of the Grdauate School of Arts and Sciences. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a PhD in Astronomy from the University of Virginia. His research interests involved explosive stars known as novae.

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A CENTURY ON

NEW BRUNSWICK’S

N.W. MIRAMICHI

George S. Mumford

Copyright © 2013 by George S. Mumford.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2013919614

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4931-2021-5

                 Softcover        978-1-4931-2020-8

                 eBook            978-1-4931-2022-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 10/29/2013

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1:   THE FIRST VENTURE

CHAPTER 2:   TOWARD RECENT TIMES

CHAPTER 3:   THE THIRTIES

CHAPTER 4:   THE FORTIES

CHAPTER 5:   THE FIFTIES

CHAPTER 6:   THE SIXTIES

CHAPTER 7:   THE SEVENTIES

CHAPTER 8:   THE EIGHTIES

CHAPTER 9:   THE NINETIES

CHAPTER 10:   A NEW CENTURY

CHAPTER 1

THE FIRST VENTURE

It was to be my first night on a sleeping car on the train from Boston’ s North Station to Newcastle, New Brunswick. I certainly should be able to sleep well as a result of all the nights that I had lain awake thinking about this—the prelude to my introduction to the rivers and forests of eastern Canada. That day, I had risen early. For what must have been the thousandth time, I had unpacked and repacked my gear, certain I had forgotten something. Now, as I settled down on the train, tightly clenching my brand-new Hardy trout rod, the most prized trophy from a series of exciting shopping expeditions, I knew that the happiest moment of my life had come.

They lose bags quite easily around the North Station, I’m told, remarked Father from behind his newspaper. I hope our packs got on the train.

What a terrible thought! Just suppose that we should get off with only our overnight cases and that all the equipment I had spent so many days collecting, so many hours packing, should be left behind. As far as I was concerned, there wasn’t a single dispensable item. Everything was needed. My heart sank. In three minutes, the train would start. I must know the worst at once. Before Father knew what I was about to do, I was off to the baggage car. There, safe and sound, thank goodness, were our three canvas packs looking for all the world like enormous bologna sausages.

I spotted Father looking up and down the platform as I headed back to our car. They’re onboard! I shouted.

We’d better be too, he replied. Thanks for checking.

With a pat on my rump, he pushed me up the steps just as the cars began to move. On regaining my seat, I gave myself up to the joy of looking out of the window as the long train headed north from Boston to Portland, Bangor, and Saint John, New Brunswick, bumping and swaying over the switches as it left the yard.

T HUS BEGINS THE journal kept by my father of his first trip with my grandfather to the Northwest Miramichi River of Canada’s Central New Brunswick in the summer of 1916.

The earliest physical evidence of a Mumford in the watershed of this river is a photograph of Grandpa sitting on a caribou that succumbed to his hunting prowess likely in November 1901, the year he first came to New Brunswick hunting; thus my family has been visiting this area of the province for well over a century.

When Grandpa first came to the forests bordering the Northwest Miramichi, the best days for shooting moose and caribou, especially the latter, were fast passing. The open lands, especially favored by caribou, were reverting to forest. The summer of 1825 had been unusually warm and dry in Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. During July and August, extensive forest fires were reported in all areas. With the coming of fall, the drought continued. By the 6th of October, no measurable rain had yet fallen, and the flaring and blazing of a number of fires in the tinder-dry woods—likely the result of the logger’s habit of leaving his campfire burning when he broke camp—were readily observable from Newcastle, the largest town and tidewater port on the Miramichi.

An eyewitness is quoted as saying,

On the seventh of October the heat increased such a degree, and became so oppressive, that many complained of its enervating effects. About 12 o’clock a pale, sickly mist, lightly tinged with purple, emerged from the forest and settled over it… about three o’clock, the heat became tormentingly sultry. There was not a breath of air; the atmosphere was overloaded; an irresistible lassitude seized the people. A stupefying dullness seemed to pervade every place but the woods, which now trembled, and rustled, and shook with an incessant and thrilling noise of explosions rapidly following each other… A little after four o’clock, an immense pillar of smoke rose… at some distance northwest of Newcastle… at half past five, innumerable large spires of smoke, issuing from different parts of the woods, and illuminated by flames that seemed to pierce them, mounted the sky… About nine o’clock, or shortly after, a succession of loud and appalling roars thundered through the forests.

The river, tortured into violence by the hurricane, foamed with rage, and flung its boiling spray upon the land… For a moment all was still, and a deep and awful silence reigned over everything. All nature appeared to be hushed, when suddenly a lengthened and sullen roar came booming through the forest, driving a thousand massive and devouring flames before it. Then Newcastle and Douglastown and the whole northern side of the river, extending from Bartibog to the Nashwaak, a distance of more that l00 miles in length, became enveloped in an immense sheet of flame that spread over nearly 6,000 square miles. (John S. Springer. Forest Life and Forest Trees [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856])

The fire burned over virtually the entire Miramichi watershed and into the state of Maine. Damage caused by this, the largest such conflagration on the eastern seaboard since the coming of white men to America, was horrendous. It was reported that of 260 houses and stores in Newcastle, all made of wood, only a dozen remained after the fire had run its course.

Today, one can only speculate on the suffering the survivors must have undergone. Barns, fully stocked with food and grain for the coming long winter, were totally destroyed, as were all shelters for man and beast. Estimates of the loss of life ranged upward to more than five hundred persons. In addition, all animals, wild and domesticated, in the path of this firestorm must have been destroyed. Ashes falling into the river poisoned its water with a consequent tremendous toll on the trout and salmon—not the only time that such a disaster would occur in the waters of the Northwest.

In the 1920s, Bill Nolan, then dean of guides on the river, would dwell at length on the Great Miramichi Fire. According to Dad, the embellishment to his stories would increase in proportion to the size of his audience. With particular relish, he would describe the flight of animals before the roaring blaze:

The b’ars and the rabbits and the deer and the moose all stampeded through town with their coats afire. Farm houses burst into flames. Folks threw themselves into the boiling hot river where the ducks and geese were swimming without a feather on them as they’d all been singed off. A scene o’ turmoil! One old lady, she grabbed for the tail of a cow and was dragged to safety on t’other side. A holocaust! Yep, it happened over a hundred years ago, Bill used to relate. I mind it well."

The regeneration of the woodlands some seventy-five years later was forcing the caribou back toward the open grounds of the north, and forest dwellers, such as moose, were returning when Grandpa got started hunting in this country. George S. Mumford Sr. son of George Elihu Mumford and Julia Hill, was born in Rochester, New York, on the 18th of August 1866. A graduate of St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire, which at that time was the only prep school where rowing was carried on as an organized sport (G. S. Mumford,1923), he matriculated at Harvard, where he served as captain of the 1886 crew and was the bow oar. His listed weight was 149 pounds, the lightest, except for the coxswain (96 pounds) of a crew that averaged some 162 pounds and that was allowed one beer a day. He received his bachelor’s degree with the class of 1887. Upon graduation, he spent the next seven years working for the C and C Electric Company before returning to Boston as submanager of the Union Safe Deposit Vaults. Soon after he arrived, he was called upon to help coach the Harvard crew that raced Yale in 1895.

On his return to Boston, Grandpa either began or continued courting Isabella Mason Lee of Chestnut Hill. They were married on December 7, 1895. Bella, as she was known, born September 23, 1869, was a younger sister of Alice Hathaway Lee, who had married Theodore Teddy Roosevelt and later died shortly after the birth of their daughter, Alice, in 1884. I suspect that Grandpa never met his onetime brother-in-law who became president of the United States and that his pursuit of hunting and fishing had more to do with his own interests than being urged into such activities, as others may have been by Teddy’s example.

William Crawford was a New York merchant whose store in that city was a couple of doors from one owned by the Adams family, for whom Camp Adams on the property of the Miramichi Fish and Game Club was named. Jack Adams first introduced William to the river, and Crawford had a camp later named for him built on government land (about eight miles upriver from the falls above the current Adams camp) sometime in the 1880s.

Grandpa graduated from Harvard in 1887 and had gone to New York, only to return to Boston in 1895. Whether or not these two met while he was in New York is not clear. More likely, Grandpa got his start in this area through his acquaintance with Edwin Holmes, who lived in Brookline and hunted with Arthur Pringle.

According to Gerry Parker (Men of the Autumn Woods, 2004, privately published), Arthur Pringle from Stanley, New Brunswick, operated several hunting camps near the headwaters of the Northwest Miramichi. His territory consisted of some several hundred square miles that included Big and Little Bald Mountains, near the headwaters of the Northwest Miramichi River, and was considered in the mid-1890s to be the top caribou hunting land in the province. Exchange Camp, the home base, was located on the North Sevogle River some twenty-five miles along the tote road from Henry Waye’s farm in Trout Brook. From there, the hunters would fan out to any one of a dozen or so outlying camps, their goods being transported by Waye’s horses. Some camps were located near ponds or lakes for early season moose hunting; others were in high country for later moose hunts or near the open land for caribou.

These facilities were generally used by lumbermen, but during the hunting season, sports—as the guest hunters were called—would be in residence. All remnants of the rustic abodes such as Exchange, Holmes, or Waite have long since disappeared. According to Parker, Pringle named many of his camps after persons who first shot and killed a moose or caribou while at the new facility. Dr. Charles Waite, a professor from Knoxville, Tennessee, who first hunted with Pringle in the Northwest Miramichi River watershed in the late 1890s before moving on to the Tobique, won one of these honors. As did the abovementioned Edwin Holmes, who hunted with Pringle in the late 1890s. From the pictures that appear in Parker’s book showing a bear rug before a fireplace in the Holmes’s Brookline residence and at least one moose head and a pair of caribou heads on a wall in the same place, I judge him to have been better able than Grandpa at convincing his wife to display such manly decorations. The only evidence of Grandpa’s prowess that I can recall is the moose head that might have spanned fifty-two inches, which looked out from above the fireplace in the living room of his Squam Lake, New Hampshire, camp and the caribou head that was in his sleeping cabin there. Seems like his wife did not want any such bug-and-vermin-collecting displays in her Chestnut Hill home.

Pringle’s charges speak clearly of another time. According to Gerry Parker, $13 per day provided a single sport with a cook, a guide, and a packhorse for baggage and supplies; two men were charged $18.00 per day; and a party of four men cost the same as two separate parties of two each. Pringle furnished the camps, food, etc. (but no liquor, that was up to the sports as it is today). In addition, parties paid for the team to and from camp.

There is something of a photographic record of Grandpa’s hunting trips. He was there apparently alone in 1901, again by himself in November 1905 and 1907, with neighbors N. C. Nash and G. A. Porter in September 1909, and with businessman Gilmore Dexter the following year. The 1911 shoot is described below. Grandpa was back in 1912; his final hunting expedition was in November 1915. In the summer of the next year, he took his son George (my father) on the first of many fishing expeditions.

Jack Jarvis appears to have been the major guide. Fred is seen occasionally. Arthur Pringle appears in a picture with a packhorse. Sid Thomas plays a major role in Dad’s journal.

Guests on the 1911 hunt included Peter (Francis Lee) Higginson, who was a distant relative of Isabella’s, H. W. (Henry Warren) Bliss, and Robert Bob F. Herrick in the coat, apparently attempting to return rather than remove the fur from the forest. Note his dress in the picture of lunch at Stony. In virtually every outdoors picture of Grandfather Mumford, be it at New London for the boat races, here in Canada, or elsewhere, he is always wearing his trademark floppy hat.

Peter Higginson had captained the 1899 Harvard crew and had been a member of an earlier one coached by Bob Herrick since at that time crews were coached not by professionals but by alumni or even students.

Bob Herrick was born in Medford, Massachusetts, on August 8, 1866, received his law degree from Boston University in 1886, and then matriculated at Harvard, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1890. While at Harvard, he was the stroke for the 1889 crew. He married Alice Taft on September 20, 1892. That union produced four children—a son, Robert, and three daughters: Ruth, Kathryn, and Alice, my mother. He was an overseer of Harvard and was heavily connected with the Harvard crew, including taking one to Henley, England, in 1916 where the Grand Challenge Cup was won for the first time by an American boat. But back to the forest.

This particular hunting party of Herrick, Mumford, Higginson, and Bliss included three persons closely associated with Harvard’s rowing program. There seems to be no direct evidence, but one has to believe that Bliss also had something to do with Harvard crews, otherwise he would be very much on the outside when tall tales of Harvard-Yale boat races on the Thames river at New London, Connecticut, were told around the campfire.

Henry Bliss was born in Cambridge in 1862. He lived on Chestnut Hill Road below Grandfather Mumford’s house. He had fished with grandfather in Rangeley, Maine, where the Bliss family had camps for many years. It seems to me, says his grandson Bill who has been fishing with me on the Miramichi, that I can remember some old oars hanging up in Grandfather’s den. I never knew him as an oarsman, but he could have been one. Thus the connection with other members of the party.

A group picture was taken when they stopped for lunch at Stoney Brook on their way to Exchange and subsequently to Camp Waite. This is the only expedition, I believe, Bob Herrick ever went on with George, though both became members of the Miramichi Fish and Game Club. However, rowing was a continual mutual interest. New London was the gathering point for the Harvard-Yale race, and it takes no great imagination to suspect that George brought his son of the same name to these races while Bob brought his daughter Alice. Thus, a romance was born.

The hunters had reached this point by the same route Dad’s journal describes: the evening train leaving Boston late, numerous stops and starts during the night, the early-morning arrival of Canadian customs boarding the train at Vanceboro, Maine, the breakfast stop at McAdam Junction, New Brunswick. Dad took me and my brother Bob through this drill too.

We walked along the platform toward a monstrous, dark, granite structure built in a style that I have since heard referred to as Canadian Pacific Gothic.

The hunters would not have met the white-throated sparrow, however.

There, listen. And I heard a sharp, piercing, distinctive call something like ah, te-te-te, te. Father translated it for me. That’s a white-throated sparrow. He’s saying, ‘Old Tom Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.’ The guides call him one of them Peabody birds. You sometimes hear them in the spring around home as they migrate north. Once or twice, I’ve heard them in the fall too. But they seem to be quieter when they’re heading south. Anytime I hear them, however, I’m reminded of birch smoke and the smell of spruce. As you will find, they are great companions in the woods.

Then back to the train and on through Saint John to Moncton, which we reached early in the afternoon, in plenty of time to catch the evening train to Newcastle, as well as to roam around town. We pulled our bags off the platform and stowed them in the waiting room under the watchful eye of the station master.

Hey, a voice called, "Mr. Mumford, fancy meeting