C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

Notes to Pages 30-31 249no career interests until he emigrated to western Canada in1904. There he made a living packing for the railway, trapping,and working with surveyors and prospectors. In 1908, he joineda small trading party going north to the Great Bear Lake area,where he remained, trapping, hunting, and trading. Until hisreturn to England at his father's death in the winter of 1925~26,he lived in and travelled throughout the Arctic, from theMackenzie River to Baker Lake, with time out only for the FirstWorld War and for a year guiding in the Rocky Mountains(1922-23). He lived by a combination of trading, trapping,prospecting, and hunting and fishing, with results that rangedfrom starvation to prosperity. In 1926, when he invited hiseighteen~year-old nephew Edgar Christian to return to Canadafrom England with him, he had nearly two decades of experi~ence of northern life, but his way of life was one that made thebest of what came his way, not one guided by focused ambitionor forward planning. In Edmonton, Hornby and Christianwere joined by Harold Adlard, another young Englishman, andset out for the Thelon River, where they intended to build acabin and spend the winter trapping on the Barrens. However,the men missed the caribou migration. Poorly prOvisioned tosurvive the winter, all three died of starvation before the nextsummer. Edgar Christian, the last to die, left a diary of hisexperience which was recovered by RCMP officers Trundle,Williams, and Kirk, who reached the cabin on 5July 1929, after"eighteen months' persistent effort" (Steele 303). Initiallytitled Unflinching, Christian's diary went through several editions(Whalley in Christian, Death 5, 15-,14); it was most recentlyrepublished as Death in the Barren Ground. There have been twobiographies of Hornby (Waldron, Whalley).Fort Fitzgerald was a glooIllY place standing on slippery clayPhilip Godsell described it Similarly, as an "uninviting andsqualid spot" (Arctic 187).we got a little roadster car to take us to Fort SIllith ... Ourdriver, half-Swede half-EskiIllo, had driven buffalo tea IllSover this portage as lately as 19IIIt is doubtful that buffalo were ever used on Smith Portage;from the time of the cutting of the trail in 1882, the HBCfreighted with oxen and Red River carts (Mackinnon 24-5;photo in Cameron, rev. ed. 190). Because these couldcomplete ." about five full trips a week' ," it seems doubtful thatmany trips required four days to complete (King and Weekes164; qtd in Mackinnon 25). However, the ground was quicklyturned to quagmire by spring thaws and summer rains. The"partial shift to teams of horses and wagons" resulted from thedemand exerted suddenly in 1898 by the Klondike gold stampeders.The Ryan brothers introduced four-horse teams, anddiminished these to two ~ horse units when road conditionsdeteriorated (Polyondi 68). In 1923, the American furcompany Lamson and Hubbard brought Linn caterpillar tractorsinto service on the portage (Mackinnon 25, 29). The firstautomobiles were used in 1921 (On the Banks 78).Somewhat surprising in connection with buffalo is Vyvyan'ssilence over the ongoing project at Wood Buffalo NationalPark. Beginning in the previous year and continuing until1928, a total of6,673 plains bison were shipped by rail andsternwheeler north to the park from Wainwright, Alberta tojoin the 1,500 wood bison already in the park (Kitto, North West85, 86). Sherwood Platt recorded "250 live wild buffalo" onthe train he took to Waterways on 6July 1926 (6), so Vyvyanand Dorrien Smith must have been unlucky in the timing oftheir trip. This project was overseen by ColonelJames K."Peace River Jim" Cornwall, who was of the view, novel for thetimes, that '''the commercial prosperity of the country is in thehands of the Indians''' (Fumoleau 235). His name appears inChpt 2 ofVyvyan's book, in Romanet's letter.The confusion over buffalo being used on the portagemight have been deliberate or accidental. The women's driver,identified as McNeil in Vyvyan's field note for 7 June, wasWilliam Georges Andes "Billy" McNeill (1891-1978), fromLabrador, who went north in 19II to help the federal govern~ment conduct its failed experiment with the grazing ofreindeer. Later, he was appointed as the first park warden forWood Buffalo National Park (Swanson). In the opinion ofKenneth Conibear, he was pulling no one's leg when he said hehad driven teams over the Smith portage as late as 19II, "r thinkhe meant reindeer, not buffalo, but the women knew that hewas now a buffalo ranger and thought he meant buffalo. Andpossibly he was jesting. He had a great sense of humour, andwas a delight to have around" (Conibear). OfIrish andpossibly Metis descent, McNeill certainly was not mixed bloodSwedish and Inuit. He operated W.G.A. McNeill Taxi out ofFort Smith from the mid-1920s to 1950. In 1916, he marriedMarie Celestine Squirrel (1904~24), daughter of chief PierreSquirrel and Marguerite Mandeville; in December 1924, hemarried EleonoreJeremie (Swanson).