Saga of Carus: Under the Northern Sky

By Yury Vasiliev

Saga of Carus is a journal of a new Canadian who arrived from Europe to New World in the year of 1804 at the dawn of 19th century to get to know country which was to become Canada. He traveled across the continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains, experiencing rough seas, boundless forests, great prairie, great lakes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TOPLINK PUBLISHING, LLC
• Release date: Dec 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781948262897

Yury Vasiliev

Yeremey Vasiliev lives with his parents and siblings in a mining area of the Russian Steppes. He loves the outdoors and relishes Mother Nature. He speaks several languages, and he longs for travel and adventure. At twenty-six, Yeremey jumps at the opportunity to go to Liverpool, England, to study mining. It’s not necessarily the mining that interests him. It’s the opportunity to see new things and meet new people. Later, he sails for the “New World,” arriving in Halifax in 1804 and from there begins a journey that takes him through Cape Breton, Quebec City, Montreal, and the woodlands, Great Lakes, and Great Plains. Along the way, he meets sailors and trappers, innkeepers and chiefs, settlers and shamans. As he works his way into the wilder West, he encounters First Nations tribes, Huron, Ojibwa, Cree, Blackfoot, and Lakota—some more welcoming than others.

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Saga of Carus

Under the Northern Sky

Yury Vasiliev

Copyright © 2017 by Yury Vasiliev.

Paperback: 978-1-948262-88-0

eBook: 978-1-948262-89-7

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1 Hello!

Childhood and my shriWnking world; Archangel; Liverpool and departure to the New World

Chapter 2 Ashore Again

City of Halifax; my landlord and Loyalists; straight talk from labourers

Chapter 3 Who Else?

The Acadians; tale of a Scotsman; off to Cape Breton

Chapter 4 The White Cliffs of Cape Breton

Sydney; travels with Reverend Cossit; mists of Louisbourg; the cliff roads

Chapter 5 Cape Breton’s Big Brother

An island as beautiful as it is large; seal hunt; Saint-Pierre and Miquelon

Chapter 6 Along the Great River

St. Lawrence River; Quebec City; I get stuck in maple syrup

Chapter 7 Meeting New Friends

Back to old Quebec; road to Montreal

Chapter 8 The Preparations

In Montreal; canoes and coureurs des bois; our historic trek; a surprising fellow traveller

Chapter 9 The Trek to the West

The journey begins; stop at Wright’s settlement; Huron village

Chapter 10 Still Going West

Rapids; I am given a new name; Lake Superior; copper; a few words about portages

Chapter 11 Fort Edmonton

A confusing greeting; Fort Edmonton and Fort Augustus; parting ways

Chapter 12 Holding the Fort

Winter pastimes; nuffalo hunt

Chapter 13 Tales of John Rowand

Henday and the others; unexpected visitors

Chapter 14 Off We Go!

Change of accommodations; leaving Fort Edmonton; under attack

Chapter 15 Prairie Indians’ Welcome

Picked up by the Blackfoot; smoking calumet

Chapter 16 Still Water Breeds Vermin

Getting used to my new life on the prairie; running the buffalo; breaking horses

Chapter 17 Still Prairies

On the prairie alone; Sioux; sweat bath and Sun Dance

Chapter 18 Love on the Prairie

Gary Burrell’s story

Chapter 19 Goodbye, Prairie

Farewell to the Sioux; back to Fort William and civilized life

Chapter 20 Hello Again, Great Lakes

Sailing along Lake Huron; tempest and an unplanned landing

Chapter 21 On the Road to York

Tecumseh; John Norton; a short history of the Iroquois people

Chapter 22 York

Getting acquainted with the town; the Americans are coming!

Chapter 23 The Enemy at the Gate

The Battle of York

Chapter 24 Visit in the Night

I am a guest of the Secords

Chapter 25 Ambush

Beaver Dams battle; about John Norton

Chapter 26 Wonder of the World

Niagara Falls; my new friends

Chapter 27 Ontario

Navigation on the lake; future of business here

Chapter 28 Peace

Thousand Islands; back to Nova Scotia; Halifax again; old city, old friends; finally settling down

References

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge my sincere gratitude to all whose works and research inspired and helped me. My cordial thanks go to those who were the first readers, correctors, and editors of the rough manuscript. I also offer my special appreciation to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and the Legislative Library of Nova Scotia as major sources of data and facts contained in this book.

Preface

Today is the first day of July, 1867. Today my home country—by the uniting of the four provinces Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec—was reborn as a new nation. Through confederation, I am now not only an old-timer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but today I have become a Canadian. Nobody knows, but from now on, I will give myself a new nickname in my mind: C aRus .

The name CaRus may call to mind Icarus¹—they sound almost the same. Just as Icarus tried to fly across the sea, I once tried to trek across North America from Atlantic Ocean to Pacific. We both failed, for different reasons of course, but that’s another story. I didn’t pick my nickname for its association with Icarus, nor did I intend to steal the name of a Roman emperor² (not that I would ever be so arrogant as to think of myself as such). These are just coincidences. For me, CaRus means only one thing: that which I am, a proud Canadian of Russian origin.

I arrived in the New World in May 1804 and have lived in and travelled this part of our planet Earth ever since. I have tasted and devoured victory. I have learned to grin and bear defeat. I have been part of historic events. I have met new people, and I have gained knowledge of human nature and of Mother Nature herself. I’ve seen new places, and I have forever burned into my memory images of polar lights, rough seas, boundless forests, great prairies, Great Lakes, and great people.

Please consider that the events described here happened almost seventy years before I started these notes. Also, the reader should not forget that usually by ninety-something years of age, one’s memory deteriorates. I am ninety-three now. I am as old as the hills. Some of the years of my rather long life have been coming to my mind recently, over and over—years when life was difficult but gave me a lot of satisfaction.

I have honestly tried to stick to the facts. But in case of discrepancies in chronology, geography, or other aspects of these notes, I apologize in advance. These are honest mistakes. I have also created conversations for the purpose of my story that I obviously don’t recall word for word all these many years later. The dialogue here is true to the general content and topic of those conversations, but I have filled in with words I have gathered in my research. The reader will find this particularly helpful in my conversations with First Nations friends I met along the way, whose language would be incomprehensible if I could share it the way they spoke it to me then.

I want to express my most profound and sincere gratitude to all the people, parties, and institutions whose valuable advice, experience, annals, and data have helped me recollect details of the real and actual events of my own life.

The art of Biography is different from Geography.

Geography is about maps, but Biography is about chaps.

—E. Bentley

My head will never save my feet.

—Folk wisdom

Chapter I

Hello!

Childhood and my shriWnking world; Archangel; Liverpool and departure to the New World

I was born ninety-three years ago on the Fourth of July, 1776, in a small collier settlement at the foot of the Ural Mountains. As the reader will undoubtedly notice, I was born on the day the United States Declaration of Independence was signed, but at that time, neither I nor my kin knew that America existed or ever w ould.

My father was a foreman at a mine in the Ural Mountains. He was a hereditary miner, born in the nearby village that had always supplied the mine with working hands. He was known for his skill; even the Demidovs,³ the mine owners, knew of him.

My mother came to the Urals from the Volga River. Her family decided to run to Siberia to live a life free of serfdom,⁴ but her parents and older brothers died of spotted fever in their trek wagon not far from our village. She was lucky to survive and was picked up by the neighbours of my grandparents. When she was left an orphan, they adopted her. So my parents knew each other from childhood.

Our family was large: I had three sisters and four brothers. I was the youngest, but you wouldn’t call me a runt; I was bigger and stronger than all of my brothers, as well as a lot of kids my age. My parents loved and pampered me as if I were their only child. My siblings were all busy with home chores or with work on the farm, and later, in the mine. But I was into something else.

I wasn’t lazy, but my interests mostly lay outside of our house and even outside the settlement. I spent days and sometimes weeks roaming the nearby forests and mountains, relishing the beauty of Mother Nature, feeling the breeze in my hair, filling my lungs with fresh air or sitting at night by the bonfire, watching the sparks fly into the starry skies. With a knapsack on my back, I wandered in the steppes where our friends, a family of Bashkir people, grazed their horses. I lived in their yurts, tried to speak their language, shared food, and tasted koumiss,⁵ a fermented milk drink. I learned from them how to herd and break in horses. I don’t want to be immodest, but considering my age, I was very good at both.

Our next-door neighbours were foreigners, invited by the Demidovs to help them in the mining business. The head of that family was Thomas Raymond, an educated Englishman from Liverpool whose business was mine surveying. What struck me first were his glasses, something almost unknown in our settlement. He was a tall man with a red face and strong hands. He spoke slow and had a gloomy manner, but he was very friendly with my father, whom he called his right hand. Mr. Raymond had been married to his Swiss-born wife, Edith, for a long time, and he had fathered twin sons and a daughter. The sons were my age, while the daughter was three years younger.

When I was not away in the forests, mountains, and steppes, I spent a lot of time at the Raymonds’ house, learning their way of life, studying, and playing with the children. I taught them Russian, and they taught me English and French. I liked both languages because they sounded new to me. Nobody in the settlement could understand us when we talked, and of course, young kids love being secretive and exclusive.

I learned fast and started to enjoy Mr. Raymond’s interesting and varied English lessons, and the fairy tales of ogres, ghosts, dwarfs, gnomes, gremlins, and trolls that Mrs. Raymond told us in the evenings in French. The Raymond children and I grew up together, but when they came of age, they were sent to study at the university in Moscow. My first love was the twins’ beautiful sister, Michelle, but she, too, was sent away to continue her studies at the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens⁶ in Saint Petersburg.

I missed my friends a lot. I wasn’t engaged at the mine. Work around the house didn’t take all of my energy. I felt lonely, and my world started to shrink. I rejected three offers of marriage arranged by my parents, because at that time my heart belonged to Michelle. My parents and the Raymonds were sympathetic, and to distract me from my thoughts of her, they decided to send me abroad to study mining in England. By that time, I was almost 26, a strong and virile lad. I didn’t care much about mining, but I wanted to see new places and new people.

I agreed.

So here I was, Yeremey Vasiliev, being sent to Archangel in the year of 1802. My father hugged me; my mother, with our household icon in her hands, kissed and crossed me three times. I kissed the icon in accordance with tradition, and then I boarded the wagon and started my trek to the north. I carried a letter of recommendation from Mr. Raymond to his countryman, somebody by the name of Mr. John Bellingham,⁷ who was in Archangel at the time as an agent for importers and exporters.

It took me a month to reach the city. Our wagon train was slow and stopped in almost every village on our way north. But finally, I was walking along the streets and the waterfront of Archangel. The city was a cluster of different settlements at the mouth of a great river, the Dvina. What impressed me most was the number of boats in the harbour. They were all flying different flags, and their rigging and sails were arranged in many different manners. I thought it might be one of the busiest Russian trade towns.

It didn’t take me long to find the house where Mr. Bellingham lived; this gentleman was well known in merchant circles. Following directions given to me by a port security guard, I squeezed through narrow lanes and alleys between warehouses and soon found myself on a rather broad street paved with wooden boards, which led me uphill. I immediately located the magnificent two-storey log house where dwelled the gentleman in question.

I climbed the two flights of stairs, opened the unlocked and slightly ajar front door, entered, pulled the door closed, and found myself in a murky hallway— facing another door. I knocked three times, and after a while, I heard an inviting reply in almost accent-free Russian. I opened the heavy door and nearly collided with the gentleman who was coming to greet me.

He had a long dull face and weary eyes. He was slim but not weak, and I realized immediately that Mr. Bellingham definitely knew how many beans make five. He started to talk to me in Russian that turned out to be not bad, but not much better that his initial Come in. I presented myself and tried to show off a little with my knowledge of English, suggesting that we speak his mother tongue. He looked at me in surprise but said nothing. For a moment, I thought that it was stupid of me to offer to switch languages, as if I disapproved of his Russian. This was not the first impression I wished to make.

After an awkward hesitation, I handed him my recommendation letter. He read it silently and asked me twice if I was ready to leave with him for Liverpool. He said that if I had changed my mind, he would arrange for my return home. No, I said decisively.

In reply, he stated that I was welcome to join him for a coming sea voyage to the fair city of Liverpool, and then he smiled for the first time. We started to talk, half in Russian and half in English. He suggested that I should lodge in his house until the time for our departure. He said that instead of Yeremey, he’d call me Jerry, which was shorter and would be better understood in English. I nodded in agreement.

His hospitality left nothing to be desired. He offered me a good room. As far as the food was concerned, it was mostly fried or boiled cod, but I was not picky. All my attention was devoted to dreams of going abroad. So I just roamed around the town aimlessly. Because I planned to leave soon, I looked indifferently around me without much concern.

It was a rather hot Indian summer, and I often went to the outskirts of the city to stroll through the beautiful birch groves. I swam with pleasure in the clean, refreshing, but still cold waters of the White Sea, watching the pebbles of white, black, and dark red that lay far below on the bottom. There were a number of seals, but they were far away from the shore; still, they would poke their heads out of the water to gape at me with their big, round, agate eyes.

The day of our departure came sooner than I expected. It was early fall when the schooner Magdalena, with cargo and passengers, sailed from the port of Archangel for Liverpool. The sky was clear, and the sea was welcoming.

Our sea voyage went without incident. I watched the ocean, counted breakers hitting our ship, and envied the sailors arranging the sails, daringly climbing the shrouds, paying no attention to the sway of the boat. Mr. Bellingham was constantly complaining about how bad his business was, and he started to annoy me with that. So I was relieved when we landed in Liverpool, where I was supposed to take up my studies.

Straight from the port, Mr. Bellingham bade me a brisk adieu and headed to his home, while I set out to look for an abode of my own—something I found very soon, as at that time I was well endowed with money thanks to my generous father.

After I had settled down in the city, I visited Mr. Bellingham only once, when I received an invitation to attend his wedding to Miss Mary Neville in 1803. The next time I was passing by his house, I decided to pay him an unexpected visit, but while I was knocking at the door the neighbours told me that he had returned to Archangel with his wife to continue his job there as an export representative. That was my last visit to Mr. Bellingham’s house.

Liverpool and its suburbs overwhelmed me with bustle and turmoil. It was as if everyone was busy with commerce and trade, not only in the port or city offices, which would be understandable, but even in the pubs where seamen and stevedores with their steins of ale in hand went on discussing their work and making plans for tomorrow. Of course, it was not only pubs that I visited at that time. I had enrolled in a college of trade and was reluctantly beginning my studies.

One fine evening in my local alehouse, I met a fellow by the name of Alfie MacLeod—a huge, chubby, bearded fellow with fiery eyes but a soft convincing voice. He portrayed his motherland, the colony of Cape Breton, in such glowing terms that I on the instant decided to sail there, not only to see the beautiful but stern nature of this New World as MacLeod described it but also to meet new people. I cherished the hope that I might find my kismet in this new land.

My father had worked all his life in the mines, and though I had nothing against this vocation, I still thought that such an uneventful life was not for me. I wanted to try another career for myself. Besides, I longed to see new places on the Earth; at that time, I thought the world belonged to me. I put the kibosh on my studies. I had enough money to buy a ticket, and in May of 1804, on the ship Dawn, I arrived at Halifax, the major port of the British colony of Nova Scotia, with the aim of proceeding from there to Cape Breton.

Hospitality sitting with gladness.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Chapter II

Ashore Again

City of Halifax; my landlord and Loyalists; straight talk from labourers

The sun was setting on the horizon when our ship dropped anchor in the harbour of Chebucto. In front of us spread a mile-long waterfront with rows of buildings marching up a gently sloping hill, dominated by an expertly constructed fort of logs and st ones.

We were not expected to leave the ship before sun-up, so most of the passengers who had come to Halifax as settlers gathered on the deck to listen to the captain, Steven McNeal. Apart from being a worthy seaman, he turned out to be a scholar well-educated in local history who was kind enough to tell us newcomers and passengers-immigrants the detailed story of Chebucto Bay and the town of Halifax. Standing on the port side of the ship, he started his narration by telling us that Chebucto had been used by the French for a long time, and longer still by the Aboriginal people of Mi’kmaq. When talking about the Aboriginal population, the captain preferred to use the term First Nations rather than Indians.

Columbus mistook America for India, he snapped. Of course we ought to be thankful that the continent was discovered, but still, it is not India. There is no reason to call people living here before anyone else by a completely wrong name. Of course, I didn’t know the names of local peoples yet, so for a while I thought, First Nations—that’s the right name! It was respectful and new, and I was young and liked being rebellious against standards, even in language.

The captain said that almost sixty years ago, the British Crown had chosen this place to establish a civil government in Nova Scotia forthwith and had given encouragement to settlers by granting them small portions of land without quit rent⁸ or other charge for a number of years.

He continued, as if reading from a book. "So in June 1749, Edward Cornwallis, the English officer in charge of a flotilla of thirteen ship with military and new settlers, arrived at the coast of Nova Scotia. The lead ship, the Sphinx, started to sail back and forth looking for an appropriate harbour until she fell in with a sloop from Boston bound for Louisbourg with a veteran pilot who pointed out the way to Chebucto."

At this point, Captain McNeal was approached by one of the sailors who was asking him about something. He excused himself from us and for a short while disappeared from the deck. When he returned, he continued his story as if nothing had interrupted. "As I said, about three thousand English settlers arrived here headed up by a smart set of army and naval officers. The town which would be named after a British earl—Halifax⁹—was ready to be founded.

The coasts of Chebucto Bay, continued the captain, were fit for the settling. There was land to till, there was timber to build houses, and the harbour itself was full of fish of all kinds. There was no river or major source of fresh water, but there were lakes and a few brooks. There in the woods were hares, partridges, wild pigeons, and geese. Apart from that, most of the new settlers had hogs and cows enough, and they had a lot of different vegetables like carrots and turnips very cheap from the town of Annapolis Royal.

Captain McNeal kept silence for a while and then went on. Actually, he said, "Halifax started as a town on July of the same year when Cornwallis proceeded with the first meeting of his advisors to form a ruling body for the new settlement at the southeastern point of the peninsula. But it was soon realized that a town at the point would be a bad set-up, since ships cannot pull in close due to shoal waters. Thus, a better place was struck upon, midway along the eastern side of the peninsula, with a bold anchorage close to the shore on which Halifax, the city proper, now sits.

And so, on this wild shore, land was cleared and structures of a new community went up: houses, a church, warehouses, wharves. All the available carpenters from Annapolis Royal were employed. Frames and other materials were brought up from Boston. Wharves were constructed in quick order, and within a month the first one was finished for ships of two hundred tons. A new town, the first English town in these parts, steadily came into being. Lots were drawn so that each family could have its own plot of land, being forty feet on the street and sixty feet in depth.

McNeal waved his hand inviting us to starboard, and with obvious fondness for the town in front of us, he continued. A strong fort, fit to contain a garrison of hundreds of men, was erected on the hill overlooking the harbour of Chebucto.

I looked attentively at the town as it started to slowly disappear in the dusk. The lights in the houses and on the streets were not yet on, but the settlement still looked very romantic and even beautiful with the evening haze gathering over the water and covering ships moored at the wharves of Halifax. But I was still listening to the words of our captain as he went on with his story.

If all had depended on those settlers who had come out with Cornwallis, it’s likely that Halifax would have fizzled out. Fortunately, two groups of people came and buttressed the population. First and foremost, of course, was the English garrison that sailed down with their possessions from Louisbourg, that place having been handed over to the French. Also, a number of families—many from New England—arrived and soon became the core of the local population. They were better settlers than those who came with the fleet, most of whom died or left the country during the first three or four years. They left behind the most industrious and respectable among them as permanent residents.

How about local Indians … oh, sorry, First Nations? asked one of the passengers.

The captain puffed his pipe before he answered, looking straight in the eye of the questioner. "There were a few French families on the east side of the bay, about three miles off. They hinted to the new arrivals that the security of newcomers and the frontiers of the neighbouring colonies very much depended on the friendship of the local Mi’kmaq people, to which nothing would be so conducive as bringing them presents. Those presents were sent by the locals in those parts.

The settlers received a promise of friendship and assistance from the Mi’kmaq, their chief having talked with the governor for that purpose. In short, everything was in a very prosperous way. We have no trouble with these people for now. There were some issues before, but they have been resolved. He kept silence for a while, and then added, Not without mistakes, of course …

The captain quickly ended his story, emptied his pipe by knocking it over the rail, and then put it in his pocket and heavily stomped up onto the bridge. Some passengers set off to discuss what they had heard, while others—ladies and the elderly—went down to their quarters. I stayed on the upper deck till darkness had fallen over Halifax, and I started to count lights on the shore. I stopped when I