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

Notes to Pages 44-45 255Long walk in forest. Hard to realise the vast size of thiscountry ... Trees so I1lOnotonousCompare Vyvyan's field note for 12June.No change ahead, only SOInetitnes a glint of light betweenstems, light that may be sky or waterNo field note provides a basis for this passage.whether Dad could mend some piece of broken equipmentin his forge and, after a while, to see whether Mother wouldoffer a better price for some of their furs or sell some articlesat lower costs than they would have to pay the Hudson'sBay or private traders in Resolution. By the time we had toleave Sawmill Island Mother had established a good reputationas a fur trader and general merchant. (Conibear)Begin to realise how a man Inight go Inad ., , We caIne outsuddenly on the river bank at lastVyvyan's field note for 10 June provides the basis for thispassage, but the exaggeration in the note-"a frantic futilestruggle"-differs from the exaggeration in this revision.an old-tiIner who had once walked 900 Iniles to stake hisclaiIn for gold and 900 Iniles back againCompare Vyvyan's field note for 17 June. Born in Crediton,Devon, England, this old-timer, as the reference to"Conybeare" in the field note for 17 June clarifies, was LewisGilbert Conibear (1869-1941), father of Frank. Lewis was anofficer in the Royal Navy when, in 1899, he, his wife Ada Mary(nee Gribble; 1870-1954), and their two children emigrated toKitchener, Ontario from Devon, not far from Vyvyan's homecounty. Three other children were born to them in Kitchenerand Orrville, Ontario. In I9II, Conibear moved north whenPolson Iron Works of Toronto, which had built a boat for theRoman Catholic missions in the North, received a letter fromBishop Gabriel Breynat asking for a competent engineer to besent to repair and maintain the vessel. Conibear worked as anengineer maintaining the Sainte Marie, the boat used by thevarious Roman Catholic missions on the Mackenzie Riverbefore it was sold to the Northern Trading Company and wasrenamed the Northern Trader. In 1912, Ada Conibear took all fivechildren from Ontario to Sawmill Snye, at the mouth of theSlave River. On this island Breynat had had a house built forthe family near the RC brothers' sawmill, four miles from FortResolution. It proved a fortuitous location for the family:all the Indians who trapped in the lower Slave and theEastern part of Great Slave Lake passed right in front of ourdoor, winter and summer, on their way to and from visits toFort Resolution for Christmas, Easter, and Treaty day. Aswas the custom, they invariably stopped, came inside for acup of tea, and possibly for a change of clothing, and to seeThus did the Conibears become "the first independent whitefamily to settle in the Northwest Territories" (Bevington 386).The Conibears moved to Fort Smith about 1916, when theNorthern Trading Company decided to move its boat operationto Bell Rock, a few miles downstream of the settlement.The "900 miles" walked by Lewis Conibear occurred inconnection with oil. not gold. According to KennethConibear (b. 1907), "the trip he is reported to have gone onwas in fact from Fort Smith to Fort Norman and some fiftymiles or so beyond that to the site of the Norman oil wells. Heand my two brothers, Frank and Jack, made the trip inmidwinter, by dog team, and staked claims over the wells. That,I believe, was in 1921. My father then spent a good portion ofthe following summer in the Outside, trying, without success,to sell the claims."Several sIniling girls, sly-faced and slit-eyed, going hOInefroIn schoolThis refers to children at Hay River residential school. As far asthe women's route is concerned, in the 1920s, Anglicanmissions operated day schools at forts Smith, Simpson, andMcPherson, as well as at Aklavik, and a boarding school at HayRiver. Roman Catholic missions operated day schools at fortsSmith, Simpson, and Good Hope, a summer day-school atWrigley, and boarding schools at Fort Resolution, Providence,and Aklavik. Both churches ran the schools with the aid ofgrants from the federal government's Department of IndianMfairs (Kitto, North West 62).Mixed and interesting crowdApart from the sentence beginning, "Steamer hooted ...," thislong passage is very similar to Vyvyan's field note for 17 June;however, the chapter's re-creation is accorded a greater degreeof ellipSiS and more radical parataxis, which might be expectedin field notes but which cannot actually be found in hers at thispoint.