27 - John Albrecht: Guide for P. G. Downes

 Journey to Sleeping Island

 

John Albrecht in 1939. Source: Sleeping Island by P. G. Downes, 1943.

John Albrecht made countless, wide-ranging trips throughout northern Saskatchewan from the 1930s to the 1970s, but perhaps the most remarkable is the trip he took with P. G. Downes in the summer of 1939. John served as Downe's guide for an arduous, 22-day canoe expedition from Brochet, Manitoba at the northeast end of Reindeer Lake to the Hudson Bay Company's post at Nueltin Lake on the Windy River, Northwest Territories.

P. G. Downes

Prentice G. Downes was a teacher at a private boy's school on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. An avid outdoorsman, Downes had made the first of his summer trips to northern Canada in 1935. By 1939, he was anxious to travel to a huge lake on the edge of the Barren Lands called Nu-thel-tin-tu-eh or Nueltin Lake, the mystical "Sleeping Island Lake" of the Chipewyans in present-day Nunavut. At the time it was one of Canada's largest unmapped and least known lakes. The first white man to see Neultin Lake was the great explorer Samuel Hearne in 1770. After that, few non-Indigenous people visited the area.

P. G. Downes on a portage in 1940, Source: Sleeping Island, 1943.

Downes was fascinated by the ways and traditions of Canada's Indigenous peoples and travelled with them whenever possible. When he arrived at Brochet, however, he was dismayed to discover that there were very few Indians at the post. John Albrecht, a white trapper from Wollaston Lake, stepped up and offered to go with Downes. "This presented a new problem," Downes writes in his book, Sleeping Island [New York: Coward-McCann Inc., 1943; Ottawa: McGahern Stewart Publishing, 2011 (edited by R. H. Cockburn)]. "John did not know a foot of the way, and indeed had never been north of Brochet in that direction: it would be a case of us both finding the route. ... He could not speak Chipewyan or Cree. ... Furthermore, particularly vexatious, was the matter of an intangible mutual responsibility which I did not relish."  I'm not sure how to interpret this last line, but I think it has to do with the competitive male spirit which did rear its head during the journey.

"A Seasoned and Experienced Man in the North"

Downes acknowledges that there were a number of factors in John's favor as a guide. "His reputation as a canoeman, particularly with a pole, was very well established, not an insignificant thing in a country where criticism is great and judgement is stern and reserved," he writes. "He was known as a good and a tough traveler. He was a seasoned and experienced man in the North. He seemed enthusiastic about the trip."

Downes decided to hire Albrecht as his guide, paying him $300 for the journey. [Source: Bob Lee, The North Called Softly. Unpublished, 1977. Bill Smiley Archives, Prince Albert Historical Society.] He did so under the rather brutal condition that if something bad happened to either of them such as getting lost, the other would make no attempt to look for or save him. Each man had to get back to his main occupation before autumn - Downes to his teaching job in Boston and John to his trapline.

Downes gives us a good description of John's physical appearance. "He was a small man, about my own height, five-feet-seven, with disproportionately long arms, a small head, a very broad chest and back. I never saw him with his cap off, but I believe his hair was dark. His eyes were small and extraordinarily deep-set and divided by a beak-like nose." John wore a black sweater with a thick roll collar, dark patched pants, and moccasins for the trip. 

In a seventeen-foot freighting canoe secured from the Hudson Bay Company, Downes and Albrecht pushed off from the shore at Brochet on July 7, 1939. John paddled stern and Downes paddled bow. "I could feel John digging in with the big, deep strokes you use when you start. Neither of us looked back." 

Downes' map from Sleeping Island, 1943. Note that he labeled the west side of Wollaston Lake as "John's Country." This was the area where John Albrecht had his trapline in the 1930s.

Competition

"As we glided along, we were each, I am sure, making judgement upon the paddling abilities of the other," Downes writes. "A silent acknowledgement passed between us that neither would prove a burden in the canoe." Downes was relieved to note during the first hour of the trip that "John did not display any of the small mannerisms which can make a long association with a fellow paddler torture."

Fred Darbyshire and unknown trapper poling a canoe, likely on the Foster River north of Lac La Ronge, Saskatchewan. The canoe used by Downes and Albrecht did not have a motor on the back. Source

John, having learned to pole a boat as a child in East Prussia, proved to be a master at poling the freighting canoe. The two men had cut tamarack poles sixteen feet long which they used to maneuver up river rapids. Standing up in the canoe, Downes and Albrecht set their poles and thrust the canoe forward. "It is imperative that the thrust with the pole is not with the arms but with the whole body and particularly that the impetus is directed so that the canoe is not forced away from the pole," Downes explains. "The entire procedure is a combination of balance, timing within the face of the swirling, plucking current, the boulders bottom, the ledges and reefs, the submerged rocks, and the instability of a canoe is a great art." At one point near Chipewyan Falls the men were unable to find the bottom with their poles. Downes struggled, but John, "standing firm and immovable in the stern, kept the canoe headed into the current with a silent and intense ferocity."

Here's a video showing the technique for poling a canoe upstream. Source: Youtube, canoepoler, 2019.

Another activity which revealed the competition between Downes and Albrecht was portaging. When encountering an obstacle such as rapids or waterfalls, or in order to get from one waterway to another, canoeists must carry, or portage, their canoe and gear overland. In Sleeping Island, Downes acknowledges that he was competing with Albrecht on their portages. "There is an odd, savage, masochistic joy in finding yourself able to pile on more and more until you can stagger to your feet," he declares. A few trips back and forth were required to complete a portage. "With a savage exultation you dogtrot back over the trail with feverish impatience for the next load and the secret anticipation that if you hurry you can, maybe, catch up with and pass your companion." I wonder if John felt the same compulsion? Perhaps he did, for as Downes concludes, "There are no sweeter words to the man of the North than: 'By God, there is a man that can pack!"

Philip Goodwin's artwork provides a romanticized portrayal of portaging. The man in the front is using a tumpline on his head to carry his gear.

The tense nature of the competition between Downes and Albrecht is further revealed in this description of John's stubbornness. "In his years of solitary trapping and living, he had developed a degree of independence which at times was very amusing," Downes recounts.

The frame and mold of his own judgements was so hardened that he could not bring himself to agree without reservation to anyone else's opinion. If I was sure a certain bay was the correct one to take, I could absolutely count on John's conviction that it was not. The only thing for me to do was to suggest what I thought was the wrong way to go, and John would then stoutly maintain that we should go in the direction I secretly approved. Several times John was quite aware of my subterfuge and yet even then could not bring himself to admit or change his ingrained habit.

I wonder what John would have said about Downes.

John's Eye Injury

One night early in the journey, something lodged itself in John's eye, causing him considerable pain. Both men tried unsuccessfully to remove whatever it was, and John had to resort to tying a handkerchief around his head. "He made a pocket in it and filled it with steeped tea leaves, which thus plastered against the eye seemed to bring some relief," Downes writes. "His piratical-looking bandage did not seem to do any good and he began to have trouble with the other eye." 

John wearing his tea-bag eye patch while preparing lunch. Source: P. G. Downes, Sleeping Island.

Downes began to think that John should go back to Brochet with any Indigenous people they might encounter in order to seek medical attention. "To his great credit, John would not agree to give up yet. He had unshakeable confidence in the tea leaves," continues Downes. "In the meantime we rested, as John found the glare of the water on his good eye coupled with the pain of the bad one almost unbearable."

Discouragement

After a particularly difficult portage in the pouring rain, John suggested to Downes that they stop for a smoke and talk about the trip. "The fear flashed through my mind that if we stopped to talk this trip over we might not go on," Downes recalls, "there was something so weary and so discouraged in his comment." As Downes completed the last run of the portage, he looked back at John. "He was sitting in the canoe, his head bowed in his hands, a thin wisp of smoke trailing above his head," Downes continues. "Even from a distance I could see blood trickling down his face from the blackflies." In a footnote, Downes confirms that John was indeed discouraged. "John had no real stake in the venture; also he was drawn very thin," he writes.

John, who Downes characterized as a rational man (in contrast to himself, a romantic man), was ready to quit the trek more than once. As they approached their destination on Nueltin Lake in the Northwest Territories, for example, they encountered a confusing maze of lakes, islands, bays, and channels. "I dunno," Downes quotes John, "A man get himself caught up in that mess of islands and bays, he could spend a lifetime trying to get out. I dunno if we should try it; you can go on forever, but how about finding your way back?"

End of the Journey

Together, through trial and error, foul weather, and plagues of blackflies and mosquitoes, Downes and Albrecht found their way to Nueltin Lake, the lake of Sleeping Island.

"We were both thin," Downes recalls. "John's naturally deep sunken eyes had retreated further and his cheekbones stuck out in mosquito-scarred bumps." While the twosome remained strong for the rest of their journey, their stock of flour and oatmeal was long gone. "We still had sufficient tea," Downes continues. "The real worry was that the tobacco supply was getting pretty thin."

It was time to return home. Downes went out by plane to Churchill, Manitoba and from there by train to Winnipeg via Flin Flon. John, on the other hand, headed back to Brochet at the north end of Reindeer Lake by canoe, retracing their route over the same rapids and portages. Downes writes that he had agonized over the "ethics of the matter" of John traveling back alone. John - despite his apparent earlier reservations of finding their way back - assured Downes that, after trapping and traveling in the Wollaston Lake country by himself for nine years, there was no reason to worry about him. 

Nevertheless, Downes loaned John the canoe, some maps, and his Mannlicher rifle, all of which John left for Downes to pick up at Brochet.

When John arrived back a Brochet, he learned that Canada was at war with Germany. "He made no comment but packed his outfit, took our faithful canoe which I had managed for him to have and that is the last record we have of him," Downes writes in the epilogue to his book. 

Cover illustration by Roderick MacIvor for Sleeping Island, Heron Dance Press, 2006.

During the war years, John disappeared into Saskatchewan's far north. He had been granted a certificate of naturalization by the Government of Canada on September 9, 1937, but unfortunately it did not reach him. Read what happened HERE. Without the necessary papers, John kept out of sight. He feared being imprisoned again. (Read story of John as a POW here.)

"Oh! - John - I think of him often," Downes wrote. "He was the magnificent traveler of the trip. I will never forget his remark, 'I will never go behind barbed wire again'."

 

NEXT: John's Naturalization to Canada: Click HERE

PREVIOUS: John's Years as a Trapper: Click HERE

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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.

 

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