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

Notes to Page 139 277grass beach, we bagged a black bear. (The meat was delicious; wesmoked some of it and it kept well)" (Murie 277; 2nd ed. 223).La Pierre HouseHBC employee La Pierre, "the man who built and ran the postfor the first few years, was halfIroquois and half French­Canadian. The first post was probably at the junction of what[are] now the Little Bell and the Bell [r]ivers" (Coutts 155).Because, when he descended the Bell to establish Fort Yukonin 1847, Alexander Hunter Murray left his bride at La PierreHouse, Anne Murray became the first woman to maintain thepost (Holmes 541). The site of the post was later moved downriver,five bends below the mouth of the La Chute (formerlythe confusingly named Rat) River.La Pierre House was closed in summer and served a dualpurpose in the fall and winter: as a strategically located pointfrom which to intercept the migration of the Porcupinecaribou herd in order to supply Peel River Post (FortMcPherson) with meat (Krech, "Eastern Kutchin" 222), and"to facilitate the transit of goods and furs across the mountains,although some trading [was] done both with theLoucheux and the Eskimo" (McConnell 121). The extent of thetrading may not have been great, for ;(JIehgwitsal, the name forthe post in Gwich'in, means "small house" (GSCI no. 22;"zzeh Gwutzul" in Gwitchin [LaPierre 30]), but this name alsorefers to the fact that it was smaller than Fort McPherson, thetwo being managed by the same factor. It was not, however,small in terms of food; indeed, it "supplied most of thecaribou needed to provision Peel's River Post [FortMcPherson], as well as its own modest domestic requirements.It was also a fantastic source of fish for both establishments"(Allen Wright 85). When he spent the winter Of1859-60 at LaPierre House, American naturalist Robert Kennicott ate all thecaribou he wished and noted that the daily ration for a dog atthe post (then in the charge of OrkneymanJames Flett) was"half a man's and the same as a wife' s-that is, four pounds offresh meat, one and a half pounds of dry meat, two fresh whitefish, or two pounds of dry fish." Kennicott also reported thateach fall Flett and his men, by erecting willow wicker fencesacross the rivers in the vicinity of the post, caught as many asr6,000 bluefish and whitefish (Kennicott II5-r6, III; qtd inAllen Wright 84,85).In 1862, the establishment of St Barnabas Mission at LaPierre House by PereJean Seguin omi marked the first RomanCatholic enterprise in what became the Yukon Territory(Duchaussois 397). William Kirkby had visited it on behalf ofthe Church of England the year before (Kirkby; Frank Peake,"William" 267). It was abandoned as a fur post by 1890, bywhich time Rampart House could be supplied much moreeconomically by Yukon River sternwheelers. La Pierre Housewas also known by HBC employees as "The Small House," andto Gwitchin as "Koahze" (Little House; Coutts 155).When they canoed over the Rat River route and reached LaPierre House a decade later, on 4 September r936, Bill andSylva Bendy concluded "from various scraps of paper in thecabins ... that it was operated in 1931 and 1932 as a fur tradingpost oftheJackson Brothers from Dawson, who also operated astore in Old Crow. Apparently it has not been occupied sincethen. There are no footprints in the mud on the river bankand nothing at all to indicate that it has been visited this year"(75). One of those scraps of paper was a "Fur Trader's Licensefor the Year 1931," made out to the Jackson Brothers of LaPierre House and signed by A.B. Thornthwaite, the RCMPofficer then at Old Crow (Bendy, after 75). It was never thecase, however, that the area in which the post was situated waswithout people: the oral histories of La Pierre House clarifY asmuch; moreover, they indicate that the Jackson brothers, who,according to Moses Tizya, began operating a winter store at LaPierre house "around 1924," were, according to Mary Kassi,again in operation there from 1937 to 1939 (LaPierre 142, 7,16).Had they done more reading in preparation for their trip,Vyvyan and Dorrien Smith would have been disabused of theillusion that La Pierre House was anything other than abandoned;Fullerton Waldo confirmed its state in his book,published in 1923 (2°9). As well, a photo of it in an abandonedstate appeared in Michael Mason's book, published inLondon in 1924 (facing 76; see above, 140). This book ismentioned by Vyvyan (169), and Mason's name appears in thefield notes (27 July), but it appears that either it was brought tothe travellers' attention only after they had passed La PierreHouse, or Vyvyan chose to suppress her awareness of it in ordernot to undercut her effort to depict the North as empty. Nodoubt, it would have proved vexing to them to find the "liar"perpetuating itself: the name survived in at least one modernatlas (e.g., Castner elal. 45), and into the fourth edition of theCanadian Gazetteer (Canada 1976,27). Only in 1982, in a"Special Edition-Partial Names Update" of the Northwest