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Note: Witnesses were George Thomas & Adelaide Morin.
His rifle was donated to the Manitoba Museum of Man & Nature in Winnipeg.
More about Daniel Thomas by H.C. Knox
A Newspaper From the Hudson's Bay Company
The Beaver
The last of the York Boatmen
or
The last of the Old Brigade
Like the last of the York Boats rests on the Shore
(H.C. Knox)
The last ten years have seen striking changes in transportation as in many other things changes which have crushed many although they may have made others. We all know men whose life was the railway who will never touch a throttle or wave a lantern from the rear end again. It will perhaps be a little consolation to these hapless men to know that the West has seen many such changes since the days when the York Boats from the Bay threw out of employment the voyageurs from Fort William. In the same way, more than one decade of the last century has seen the end of the system that served meaning, the end of what had seemed life jobs for many men, who perforce had to spend the rest of their lives putting together a new life when so little could be salvaged from the old.
Such a one is Daniel Thomas - who for thirty five years pulled an oar, carried his two hundred pounds over the portages, and laboriously tracked his boat up the rapids where a stumble might mean a broken leg or a quick death with a wooden cross soon crumbling on some lonely point. Today he lives in a log house on the shore of Traverse Bay, just opposite the mouth of the Winnipeg River where the old fur brigades used to turn to the North to the Saskatchewan. There he will tell you of the hardships of a long life- for the last of the old York Boat Brigades was born 1849 at Lac Du Brochet, over three hundred miles North of The Pas.
There from the age of fourteen until he was fifty, he served the Hudson's Bay Company in the North as did as his father before him, associating mostly with natives, so that even today the Cree of the Chippewyan comes more readily to his tongue than does the English. For those thirty five years his job was the same, year in and year out. In the Spring he helped take the fur laden boats down from Lac Du Brochet to York Factory. Then with new loads of hardware, blankets, guns and ammunition they would make their laborious way back to their home again.
Some of the old brigade journeys were relatively easy, but this was not one of those. The Northern Season was so short and the journey so long and difficult that they would have to start from their northern post while the ice was still on the lakes and by their return that fall the ground would be snow covered. The hardships of that journey so often repeated were still terribly vivid as he described them to me although they had been finished with for over forty years.
He staggered across the floor to show how the weight of 200 lbs would feel on the portages, and scrambled on his knees on the floor so I might know how they must strain when pulling a boat up the rapids. His face grew more lean and haggard as again he felt the stubborn pull of the tracking line around his waist. He rolled up his sleeves and bared his chest and legs to show the lumps on muscles where the tremendous strain had left it's mark.
He would be a tall man except for those badly bowed legs, caused by the weights he had started to bear at the age of 14.The hours were long - from before sunrise until after sunset, the food was rough - for days on end only the inevitable pemmican and flour. On this brigade they had not the usual consolation of tobacco when the day's work was done. There was no room on the heavily loaded boat for anything except essentials and no time on that necessarily hurried trip for anything except work and rest.
It was the custom of the men on this brigade to break their pipes when they stepped on the boats leaving their post. The next smoke was at the end of the trip. The Winters would not be all holidays either. There would be the expresses to go to other posts, and these journeys, often through snow to the hips, would be full of hardship as well. On one well remembered trip from Stanley Mission on the Churchill River to Lac Du Brochet he broke trail for 25 days before his dogs, and for the last 3 of these he had no food for either his animals or himself.
Another year on the same journey towards Spring with the post manager, they had started to go along Reindeer Lake, when to their dismay the snow changed to rain, keeping on steadily for over 36 hours so that on the 2nd morning the whole expanse of the lake was covered with icy water rippling in the sun. They went on through this for over 100 miles , since they had to reach their post although they waded knee deep.
At the age of 50 then, he could consider himself thankful that he had missed the death or rheumatism that had been the reward of so many in that work, and thankful too that in another 5 years he would eligible for the Company pension for long service. Then he could give over his hardships and smoke his pipe in peace, while his wife cooked his venison and his son's worked for the Hudson's Bay. That time, however was never to come. The West at last was being opened up, and the heyday of the York Boat as the only means of transportation on the rivers was done - and with it, a point we are apt to forget - the day of many of the York Boatmen.
The first attempts to get the steamboats on the Saskatchewan failed, but finally in the eighties the Northcote was making it's regular runs from Grand Rapids up past Cumberland House, where the road turned north for Lac Du Brochet, and many of the York Boatmen were finished. There were a few more years for Daniel Thomas, since at first they would not carry powder on the steamers, so he still tracked his boat up the rapids. But the inevitable came at last. York Factory was to gradually become almost deserted, the northern portages along the Hayes were to become grass grown, and eventually even the steamers were to be drawn up on shore - their work done. They however, along with the rail way had done away with the life job of Daniel Thomas. I do not mean that the York Boats were finished.
The last of these was still to be constructed about 1920 to be soon replaced by the gasoline launch, but those old brigades which swept through the North Country on their way to and from the great depot at York Factory were done forever, and with them, many of the men who had manned the boats. So in 1890 this last of the old Brigade was told that he was finished.
In 1936 I suppose we might call it technological unemployment, but by any name, it is a hard thing for the man who suffers from it. To this day his voice takes on a bitter tinge when he tells of that time 45 years ago, when he had to start life over again in a new Country.
Since there was nothing for him in the north he knew, so he went down to Selkirk, to what was really a new world to him. In all his northern life he had never had anything to do with money. It had simply been a matter of credits at the Company's posts. Then too he had no sense of civilized values. He held out to me a small packet of matches and said "that 3 of these would of cost him a bear skin in Lac Du Brochet". An Eskimo had brought in a sled loaded with the best of white fox furs, and for it he had been given a pitifully small package of ammunition. You can understand that the long haul from York Factory meant that everything must be high priced. So then, when he took some of that strange paper of whose value he was so doubtful, into a store at Selkirk, and putting down a two dollar bill asked for bread, he stood back in amazement as they filled up 2 large sacks with forty loaves. Then he wanted some salt that in the North Country had been a great luxury. It was always difficult to keep it dry. For that, then, he put down three dollars and watched them with startled eyes pile up bag after bag on the floor until there was far more than he could carry. Life in that centre of civilization seemed to complicated, so he went to the shore of Balsam Bay overlooking Lake Winnipeg. There he lived for 20 years, trying to adapt himself to a new way of life. Then 25 years ago he went to the shore of Traverse Bay. The lakes and the woods had apparently become a part of his life and he must see them to live.
There he stays, pulling out on his back the wood for his winter use, and every day or so walking into Victoria Beach, five miles away. He will perhaps, carry back a fifty pound sack of flour on the trump line, with only an occasional rest by the way. Those who meet him striding over the trail would never suspect his age, for his beard, though long is but moderately streaked with grey. I wonder how it is that although many of these old Voyageurs toiled so hard that many of them lived so much longer than do their softer "descendants".
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