In late June, 1804, Nelson and his men travelled from Wisconsin to the Grand Portage on the western
shores of Lake Superior, the site of the XY Company’s field headquarters, with their season’s
take of furs. By the time they arrived, rumour had already reached Nelson’s superior, Sir Alexander
Mackenzie (or “the Knight”, as Nelson and the voyageurs often referred to him) of Nelson’s
having taken a native wife, a practice of which he thoroughly disapproved. In his journal, Nelson
described how Mackenzie, who had treated him with paternal kindness prior to his Wisconsin posting,
now “spoke very little to [him], & seldom took any notice of [him], which [he] was very sorry for.”
Nelson stayed at Grand Portage for three weeks, awaiting further orders. In a later reminiscence,
he wrote, “The Knight sent for me, reprimanded me in a true fatherly manner, because he had had time
to examine my ways, & told me to prepare to go in to the North Lake Winnipick [Winnipeg]. I thanked
him as was my duty, & I am sure he saw in my eyes there was not so much blame in me after all.
The word North passed through my Soul like a sword. With all my ambition to encounter dangers,
this word was like a shot. Lake Winnipick too, where all our people suffered so much every year,
where so many had died of hunger in all its most frightful shapes- was not calculated to
re-assure me, I who had suffered so much the year before in that fine country of Riv’ des Sauteaux.
I don’t believe I ever recovered the full sway of my spirits after that.”
Leaving his Ojibwa wife in the care of another man, Nelson and his new crew travelled 360 miles
(580 kilometres) northwest to a post on the Riviere-aux-Morts, or the River of the Dead
(now called Netley Creek), a tributary of the Red River which enters the latter just
upriver from its mouth at the southern end of Lake Winnipeg. In the Sorel Journal, Nelson explained
that the waterway owed its ghoulish name to a massacre that took place there in the mid-1700s,
in which a large party Sioux war party slaughtered a band of Saulteaux Indians.
Although his first season in southern Manitoba did not furnish him with much
in the way of ghost stories, with which one might expect the Riviere-aux-Morts to abound,
it did yield a number of colourful anecdotes. In the Sorel Journal,
for instance, Nelson described an incident in which a rival crew of North West Company voyageurs
gorged themselves on wild mushrooms which quickly proved to be of the hallucinogenic variety.
Later that season, some of his own men, without his knowledge, took revenge on a gang of Swampy
Cree who had attempted to murder them by finding a barrel of rum they had cached in the woods,
quaffing half of its contents themselves, and refilling the barrel with their own urine.
A more important event also took place in the season of 1804-1805:
shortly after Nelson’s transfer, Simon McTavish,
co-founder and chief partner of the North West Company, died in Montreal, prompting Nelson’s
employer, the XY Company, to allow itself to be reabsorbed back into the North West Company.
Thus, Nelson and his men found themselves working for and alongside their former rivals.
Nelson spent the season of 1805-1806 working a post on the southern shore of Lac du Bonnet, about
26 miles (42 kilometres) southeast of Lake Winnipeg, at a place known today as Wendigo Beach.
Although the journal he kept during this time is little more than a chronological account
of the often-mundane tasks required to keep the Lac du Bonnet post running smoothly,
peppered with a few hair-raising adventures, it does make frequent references to
L’Isle du Windigo, or Wendigo Island. This half-kilometre-long spit of land, which sits
near the eastern end of the lake, is named after a dark native legend which we will explore shortly.
The following year, Nelson was transferred to a new post at the mouth of the Dauphin River
about 145 miles (233 kilometres) to the northwest, on the western shores of Lake Winnipeg.
Before his departure, he assisted North West Company partner William McKay with exhuming
skeletons from the cemetery at Bas de la Riviere, not far from the Riviere-aux-Morts. The North West
Company had decided to rebuild the post in that area, called Fort Alexander, and McKay
concluded that the old cemetery was the ideal spot on which to build it. Ever after, mysterious fires
occasionally broke out in the fort’s kitchen, driving one NWC proprietor nearly to despair.
Nelson and company began the journey to the Dauphin River in the early autumn of 1806.
Along the way, they met with a terrible accident
which culminated in Nelson’s first strange experience in Manitoba.
On the morning of September 12th, 1806, Nelson joined his men around a campfire
while the cook prepared their breakfast. Tragically, one of his voyageurs had mistaken
a 50-pound keg of gunpowder for a barrel of sugar and left it sitting by the fire.
An errant spark from the pipe of his interpreter, Francois Richard, touched off the powder keg,
generating a tremendous explosion which hurled Richard 15 feet over a tuft of willows.
Nelson himself was severely burned by the blast and had to be helped out of his clothes.
In a later reminiscence in which he described the accident, Nelson wrote, “While the men were
still busy employed in stripping the remnants of the [shreds] of clothing hanging upon me,
in which they were necessarily very Slow to give me the least possible pain
being so lacerated & excoriated, I turned my head towards Mr. Cameron’s tent
where I heard crying, weeping, lamentations &c. – I saw…! Oh God! A tall black man,
shining like a [Negro], - a large frizzly head, blood shot eyes, a thick yellow Smoke issuing
from his nostrils & mouth, and his tongue red as fire! ‘My God! My God! Have mercy upon me! – this
is certainly the devil come for me for my numerous Sins’!” In fact, the ghastly apparition was poor
Francois Richard, who had survived the explosion; the gunpowder had incinerated most of his clothes
and roasted him from head to toe. Nelson and Richard were doctored
by both the voyageurs and several local Cree who arrived on the scene after hearing the explosion.
Their burns were treated with a larch pine salve and a warm liquid which Nelson
called “Swamp tea”, and were covered with plaster. On the advice of the natives, Nelson forced
himself to vomit in order to purge himself of the sulfur he had swallowed and inhaled.
By the end of October, Nelson was nearly fully recovered from his burns.
Richard, however, developed infected black ulcers above his kidneys and slid into a steep
decline. “The 26th was very stormy,” Nelson wrote, “& the night was unusually dismal.
About 8 o’clock at night we heard a strange, very loud & shrill cry,
it was again repeated. Some thought it was the cry of a loon, tho’ they had long since
returned [south], some a bear, some an owl. Some of the women said it was one of the water deities.
‘What is all this talking about,’ said the poor old man. ‘It is my father who has sent
to warn me to prepare, for I must die!’ The next morning about 8 o’clock he breathed
his last in great agony! May the Almighty God receive his Soul into grace, mercy, & peace.”
George Nelson spent nine years working out of various posts on the western shores of Lake
Winnipeg, marrying a Saulteaux Ojibwa wife, and learning much about the Saulteaux and Cree natives
with whom he conducted business. He documented his Lake Winnipeg adventures in his journal,
and in later reminiscences, mentioning several strange experiences that he could not explain.
On January 25th, 1809, for example, while working at the Dauphin River post,
Nelson and a voyageur named Etienne Charbonneau “heard a Great noise upon the Lake resembling an
extraordinary Clap of thunder…” Later that night, he and his men observed that two celestial bodies,
which he identified as the Evening Star (i.e. the planet Venus) and an adjacent star, not only
seemed to be twice as large and bright as usual, but also appeared to bounce “to & from each other,
as to excite an uncommon degree of curiosity in every one who beheld it.”
Nelson later learned that on the very same night, a Cree hunter encamped on the lake’s northern
shore awoke in the night to feed his campfire and observed that the moon was very high in the sky.
Less than half an hour later, after placing some wood on the fire and smoking his pipe,
the Cree was astonished to find the moon sinking below the horizon.
Another unusual event occurred on the night of February 20th, 1811, at the post on the
Dauphin River. Several hours before dawn, one of Nelson’s voyageurs, named Jean-Baptiste Larocque,
awoke at the same time as his Ojibwa wife to see a mysterious hunched figure
approaching the sleeping form of his comrade, Joseph Bertrand Desrocher. Frightened, Larocque
turned his back on the apparition. The spectre apparently perceived this motion and directed
its attention toward the voyageur and his wife instead, stooping over the cowering couple before
vanishing into thin air. Larocque and his wife were so shaken by the experience that they refused
to leave their bed until a Dutch voyageur named Jean-Baptiste Welles lit a fire in the cabin.
This strange event is rendered all the spookier considering that it occurred during the height of
a virulent epidemic of some mysterious hemorrhagic fever that was sweeping across the country,
causing its sufferers to bleed out of their mouths and eyes.
During this time, the North-West Company developed a ferocious rivalry with the
Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the old English fur trading syndicate which had controlled
the Hudson Bay drainage basin since its 17th Century founding. Nelson abhorred the duplicity
and ruthless aggression which such cutthroat competition required of its participants.
“The Demon of Ambition,” as he put it in one of his aforementioned reminiscences, “followed us,
blinded our better judgement, & sharpned our wits only to oppose, annoy, & injure each other.”
After a brief stint at a small trading post north of Lake Superior, Nelson quit the
industry in 1816, taking his native wife and four daughters with him to his hometown, William Henry.
Financial necessity forced George Nelson to rejoin the North-West Company two years later,
whereupon he was put in charge of a succession of trading posts in what is now northern Manitoba.
His transfers gradually pushed him further east into what is now northern Saskatchewan.
In 1821, when the North-West Company, at the behest of the British Crown,
amalgamated with the Hudson’s Bay Company, Nelson was assigned to Cumberland House,
an HBC post on the Saskatchewan River in what is now east-central Saskatchewan.
In another of his journals, Nelson documented his journey from Fort William to his new post,
Fort William being the old North-West Company’s field headquarters on the western
shore of Lake Superior, located in present-day Thunder Bay, Ontario.
One interesting landmark he encountered along the way was a huge impression of a dog on a hill known
today as Dog Mountain, which was visible from the Grande Portage des Chiens, or the Big Dogs
Portage. This mysterious formation, which modern anthropologists have classified an ‘effigy mound’,
appears in the journals and memoirs of several other fur traders,
always accompanied by different native legends which purport to explain its origin.
According to the version which Nelson learned from a Metis clerk, the depression is the final resting
place of a gigantic dog which the Sioux killed and buried centuries ago. “The place is still
visible,” Nelson wrote on July 25th, 1822, “but far exceeding the size of any animal I ever saw.”