Every year, my friend, Dr. Dean Bertram, runs a film festival called MidWest WeirdFest,
which takes place at the Micon Downtown Cinema in the city of Eau Clair, Wisconsin. On its
website, MidWestWeirdFest.com, Dr. Bertram summarizes the flavour of his festival thus:
“I dream of MidWest WeirdFest evoking the awe and chills of the sideshow alley of a
dark carnival, a place filled with terrors, wonders, and forbidden surprises… A film
festival that celebrates not only independent genre cinema- horror, sci-fi, fantasy, action,
thriller- but one that welcomes all types of underground film. A broad, if shadow-filled,
tent for all cinematic creations weird and wonderful.” I’ll let Dean elaborate at
the end of this video. Last month, Dean generously invited me to
submit an animated short to this year’s festival, which takes place from March 5th
to March 7th, and so I decided to put something together on instances of clairvoyance in Northern
Canada, the subject of the first chapter of my book ‘Mysteries of Canada: Volume I’.
I’ll publish that video on my YouTube channel after it premieres at the festival.
Right now, Dean is running a crowdfunding campaign for MidWest WeirdFest 2021 on Indiegogo,
which terminates in less than thirty hours. There are still quite a few perks left for
purchase, including stickers and magnets, face masks, t-shirts, tote bags, and tickets
to the festival itself. If you’d like to help support Dean’s festival and acquire
some of these perks, please check out the link in the description.
In this video, I’m going to talk about some of the strange tales of Canadian extrasensory
perception I’ve come across which failed to make it into the animated short I’ve
submitted to the film festival. I’m putting this video together very quickly, as I want
to give the MidWest WeirdFest crowdfunding campaign a shout-out while it’s still running,
and so I apologize if the quality is sub-par. If these stories interest you, and you’d
like me to put together a more polished video on them in the future, please let me know
in the comments. Without further ado, here are some forgotten tales of ESP in Canada.
Enjoy! Gauche’s Predictions
In the summer of 1843, a tough Scottish Hudson’s Bay Company explorer named Robert Campbell
decided to lead an exploratory expedition down the Pelly River in southeastern Yukon-
one of the many battles comprising his life-long quest to out-compete Russian fur traders in
the Pacific Northwest. Campbell described this voyage in his journal, and included an
interesting anecdote involving a fascinating and mysterious aspect of Dene Indian culture.
In his entry for June 10th, 1843, Campbell wrote:
“A short digression here may not be out of place and may be of some interest. All
Indians I have ever met believe that certain highly favoured individuals can by means of
‘conjuring’ look into the future and foretell events that are to happen; and strange to
say I have known several instances in which the predictions of the conjurer have come
true or very nearly so. In the case I am about to mention, it will be seen how singularly
correct the divination was. “Our Indians wanted to find out what luck
was to attend us on our voyage of discovery, and unknown to me got one of their number
named Gauche (one of my hunters for years and an adept in most things), who was a famous
expert, and implicitly believed in by the others, to conjure for them the evening before
we started. He did so and told what was going to happen on the trip. He described our course,
stated that a certain time we would meet 2 Indians on the right bank of the river, afterwards
we would meet a family of Indians with whom we would smoke and eat; that we would kill
plenty small, but no large game, though we would see plenty on the mountains slopes along
the river; and many minor events he foretold, ending up by saying that at the junction of
2 big rivers, we would fall in with many Indians and talk with them much; after that he could
not see us going any further, but that there was no blood visible, meaning that the strangers
did not quarrel with us. How close Gauche came to the reality will presently be shown.
My attention was drawn to the conjuring which had taken place by hearing the remark constantly
made, ‘That’s what Gauche said,’ whenever anything occurred which appeared to the Indians
to corroborate Gauche’s predictions.” Campbell went on to chronicle the voyage,
and sure enough, each of Gauche’s predictions were fulfilled.
Jerry Potts When the sun-burnt, mosquito-bitten officers
of the North-West Mounted Police- Canada’s first Mounties- rode into Writing-on-Stone
in the fall of 1874, they were disheartened, saddle-weary, and lost. The previous fall,
they had first come together as a unit in Fort Dufferin, Manitoba. That summer, after
months of training, they rode out west bound for the notorious Fort Whoop-Up, determined
to bring law and order to the Canadian Wild West. Unfortunately, some of the Metis guides
they hired had a less than complete knowledge of the western territory’s geography. By
early fall, the Mounties found themselves straddling the Boundary Commission Trail on
the Canadian-American border with no idea where they were in relation to their destination.
The Force’s Assistant Commissioner James Macleod and a handful of officers rode south
to Fort Benton, Montana, in the hopes that they might find some directions. They found
better. Two of the town’s most prominent businessmen hosted the Mounties. During dinner,
the Montanan merchants suggested that Macleod and company hire a short, bowlegged Scots-Blackfoot
frontiersman named Jerry Potts as their guide. Despite learning that the unimposing mustachioed
plainsman was a man of few words who had an enormous appetite for whisky, the commodity
which they hoped to eliminate from the Canadian plains, the Mounties took their suggestion
and hired Jerry Potts as their chief scout. They couldn’t have been happier with their
decision. Jerry Potts returned with Macleod to Writing-on-Stone,
took up a position at the head of the column, and led the bedraggled Mounties northwest
over prairies and coulees. Said Mountie Sam Steele of the quiet, mysterious guide, “he
never talked with others when he was at work. He would ride on ahead by himself, keeping
his mind fixed on the mysterious business of finding the way. He was never able to give
any clear explanation of his method. Some mysterious power, perhaps a heritage from
his Indian ancestors was at work.” In no time, Potts led the Mounted Policemen to Fort
Whoop-Up, on the banks of the Oldman River. Shortly thereafter, he led them upriver to
the location at which they would build Fort Macleod, their first permanent headquarters.
Jerry Potts remained in the Mounties’ employ, performing the functions of scout and interpreter.
Throughout his tenure, he had had several opportunities to demonstrate his supernatural
sense of direction. Perhaps the most dramatic of these took place in the winter of early
1875, when he lead his respective Mountie charges through blinding blizzards on two
separate occasions, during one of which he was rendered snow-blind. Said Sam Steele of
his scouting ability, “he possessed an uncanny sense of locality and direction. Others could
guide travelers through country they had visited before, but this man could take a party from
place to place by the quickest route, through country altogether unknown to him, without
compass and without sight of the stars.” Shonkelli’s Prediction
In 1954, Jean Godsell, the wife of a prominent Canadian fur trader and historian, wrote an
article entitled ‘The Moccasin Telegraph’, in which she described a mysterious case of
Indian clairvoyance which took place at Fort Churchill, in northern Manitoba, in the early
1900s. Ever since the construction of the enormous
Prince of Wales Fort in 1717, the Fort Churchill area, situated at the mouth of the Churchill
River, had served as one of the Hudson Bay Company’s two great ports which lay, as
one disgruntled HBC employee put it, “asleep by the frozen sea.” The sprawling chain
of HBC fur trading outposts, which extended from Hudson Bay west and north across the
continent, relied on huge biannual shipments of goods from England, which were unloaded
at the bayside forts and transported to their respective destinations by York boat and canoe.
According to Jean Godsell, sometime in the early 1900s, one of these ships was long overdue,
causing Fort Churchill’s factor, a fur trader named Ashton Alston, considerable anxiety.
Desperate to learn any news regarding the fate of the missing ship, Alston hired a visiting
medicine man named Shonkelli, who was famed throughout the region for his gift of prophecy,
to employ the arcane arts in which he was versed in the acquisition of such news. Accepting
a pile of tobacco plugs as payment, the shaman retreated to his teepee, where he went into
a trance. He returned at sundown and declared that the ship would arrive the following day.
It was delayed, he maintained, because her crew had decided to rescue a party whose own
ship had foundered in the ice-choked waters of Hudson Strait. After rescuing these men,
the Company men suffered a tragedy of their own: one of their members, a man who wore
clothes like a woman, died and was buried at sea.
The following day, the HBC ship indeed arrived at Fort Churchill, just as the old Indian
had predicted. While heading through the Hudson Strait, the crew had spotted some men marooned
on an ice-floe. They rescued the unfortunates, but were themselves trapped by heavy pack-ice
in the process. When they finally managed to liberate themselves from their icy prison,
one of their members fell overboard and drowned. This man was a black-robed priest bound for
the Mission at Chesterfield Inlet in what is now Nunavut. Shonkelli’s prediction,
it seemed, was fulfilled.
The stories you have just heard are but a few of the many tales of extrasensory perception
which pepper historical Canadian literature. If this subject interests you, please let
me know, and I may make another video on it in the future.
I’m now going to turn things over to my friend, Dr. Dean Bertram, the organizer
of
MidWest WeirdFest 2021. Thanks for watching!